Lloyd finally arrived about then. He got frowned at for being late, and for not having his communicator with him when he went out.
I asked the rest of the group if there were any changes that they thought should be made in the program. Nobody could think of anything, so I told Agnieshka to ship it to my uncle, and to make sure that he knew what I had been paid for the last show we had sent to the networks.
The conversation changed to the military problems at hand.
It took us two days of standard time, almost two months in Dream World, before we were all satisfied with the plans to clean the Earthworms off New Yugoslavia, and to attack Earth.
Finally, Agnieshka shipped it all off to General Sobieski. He asked to see the lot of us immediately.
After the greetings and introductions were made, he said, "You hear stories about how great minds think alike, but this one has to be a record setter. A prototype of the rocket propelled, supersonic flying submarine tank you propose using is being strapped together right now. It's due to be tested in a few hours. Most of the parts for it already exist, but they've never been used in quite this way before. I'd thought that it was a brilliant, original idea of my own, and here you guys came up with the same darned thing, and without a hint from me! At the same time, it's good to know that it is not a completely harebrained idea. At least, somebody else had it, too."
"We're glad that you agree with it, sir."
"It's a little hard to do otherwise, since it's my idea. I
did
think of it first, you know, over a standard week ago. But I'm not sure if I like the way you people are insisting on leading the main attack yourselves. Being in the first wave of a frontal attack is risky business, and I don't want to lose any of you."
"Sir, this is so unorthodox that we decided that we wouldn't feel right about sending somebody else out to try out our ideas. And if things don't go perfectly right, we know more about the alternative options than anybody else does."
"Humph. Let me think about it. Another thing. I've incorporated most of your plans for the invasion of the Solar System into my own proposals. We should be hearing what the KEF council has to say about it in a few days."
"Only 'most of them,' sir? What didn't you like?" Quincy asked.
"It wasn't a matter of not liking anything. It's just that there were a few things that you couldn't have known about. Not everything our spies tell us is for public consumption. We'll discuss it later. I'll get back to you people within four hours, standard."
He blinked out, and I found myself back in my den.
Kasia came in.
She said, "You know, I'm beginning to think that we were really stupid, insisting on leading the attack ourselves."
"Yeah. I'm a little scared, too. But we did it, so that's that. You'd better get your financial empire ready to do without you for a while, because he's going to tell us that our request has been granted. I'm sure of it."
"Well, it will give Agnieshka the material to make another movie. Did I tell you? We finally got paid for that first movie they made about you. Even I was surprised by the figure our lawyers got."
"Well, tell Quincy, Zuzanna, and my other colonels about their good fortune. Then put our share of it into the charity account of that KEF Fund of yours."
"I'll do that, lover. That's very good politics. It will make all the newspapers. Of course,
we
decide what constitutes a charity. But darling, I've got scads of things to do right now. I'll see you later."
Sometimes, I think that my wife doesn't understand me at all.
Well, the amphibious attack on Baden-Baden Island worked like a charm.
After sneaking up from the nearest Loway terminal, we went crawling on the ocean bottom for a standard week, completely out of touch with the rest of the world. We were operating under radio silence, and the transporter system doesn't lend itself to military communications very easily.
An H-S receiver is a fairly small, simple device, while an H-S transmitter is large, energy hungry, expensive, and generally restricted to fixed installations. Fuel and oxygen were sent to us in small allotments, not continuously. Memory cubes could have been sent, but that would have required a third receiver and a much more complicated, large, and expensive transmitter, and such a system would have been too slow for most military communications, anyway.
Communications between planets were another matter entirely. Every planet in the smuggling network had a small transmitter and receiver, connected to New Kashubia, capable of sending memory cubes out every few seconds. These were automatically sorted and forwarded to the proper destination for a small fee. Once at the proper planet, the message was e-mailed to the recipient.
Fully developed solar systems like Earth's had hundreds of such units, connecting the various satellites, since they could operate far faster than the speed of light.
Earth had forbidden the use of such communicators between itself and the other planets, on the theory that good communications leads to bad domination. Memory cubes to and from Earth went slowly, packed in standard, full-sized canisters.
At the proper instant, we came streaking out of the water at supersonic speed, just as a time-on-target rolling artillery barrage was taking up all of the Earthworms' attention.
Our first wave, led by yours truly, hit them with eighteen very fast moving tanks, caught them with their pants way down, and pretty much wiped them out.
The two hundred tanks which followed on our tails had the entire island under control within a standard hour. My three squads together lost only two men, one dead and the other seriously, but not permanently, injured. They were both new kids, members of Lloyd's and Mirko's squads, and not old friends.
All told, we had been very lucky.
Our forces had hit all six islands at the same time, of course, but three of them had been only lightly defended, even though they each contained a transporter receiver, which we trashed.
The last two were still completely empty, to the frustration of the men and tanks attacking them. They had gotten themselves psyched up to kill the enemy, and then had found that their efforts were completely wasted.
Such is war.
I did manage to find eight enemy tanks whose operators had been permitted to surrender, taking their tank's personalities with them. I commandeered the tanks, and got away with it because everybody thought that I was a real general. This gave new bodies to all but six of the damaged tanks in my valley.
I arranged for them to be sent back. Along with the fifteen troops I had left, I fired up my rocket and flew to the nearest entrance to the Loways.
At Kasia's urging, Agnieshka turned out a full-length feature movie called
The Attack on Baden-Baden Island
. I was the hero again, but this time, my metal lady had time to collect up data from all of the other men and tanks who were in the fight, so we had a cast of thousands.
This was probably the first war in history where everything that every single combatant did was automatically recorded, on our side, at least. The historians would have a hard time arguing with each other over facts, once it was over. They would just have to find something else to argue about.
As usual, Agimieshka wasn't always absolutely factual. Among other things, she took the footage we had of that strange, aboriginal, vodka-swilling blue crab I'd found on our honeymoon island, and had it wreaking havoc among the Earthworms. It cut neat, circular holes in much of their equipment, and drank most of their booze.
My wife sold the movie for half again more than we'd gotten for any of Agnieshka's productions to date. The profits had to be divided up among a lot of people, but our share went into the charity account, anyway.
So did Agnieshka's.
I was told that our movies were important to the war effort. They cheered people up, and gave them confidence in our armed forces. As the war progressed, people needed that more and more.
Over the next two months, the Earthworms hit us on Soul City, New Israel, New Palestine, and New Erie. There was no pattern to their advance, but the reality of a universe connected by Hassan-Smith transporters was that one place was pretty much as close as any other. The old concepts of geography didn't apply any more.
At first, it seemed like the Earthworms just wanted to fight, and to expend their men. The fighting on Soul City was far more protracted, and far more bloody, for us, than New Kashubia and New Yugoslavia had been. The enemy was learning, but in the end we won.
Then, within a month, we lost contact with New Israel, New Palestine, and New Erie.
Earth had somehow found and knocked out all of the transporters on those planets. Not only the few that Earth had installed, but those built by the smuggling network as well. They had either developed some new technology beyond the understanding of our scientists, or they had a well-coordinated organization of saboteurs in place that our military intelligence couldn't find.
How the war was going on those planets, and if indeed it was still going on at all, we didn't know. But we couldn't send them any reinforcements, for fear that the receivers were out as well, and the enemy could presumably keep sending in men and machines.
How they had done this was beyond us.
Personally, I doubted the sabotage theory. My guess was that Earth's science had always been superior to our own, out here on the frontier, and that they had somehow figured out a way to detect the exact location of each of our transporters, and perhaps our receivers as well.
Then they had sent each of them a very deadly present.
In actual combat, man for man, we seemed to be generally better than they were, since our computers were so much faster than theirs. But they were using something that we didn't understand to cut us up into little pieces that could no longer help each other.
Things started to look very grim.
There was nothing that I could do to help. I just heard about the battles on all those other planets in the news, and watched them on the movies that everybody seemed to be making, now.
My new job was something very different.
The Gurkhas had insisted, as a requirement for their enlistment, that I be given command of their battalion, nine hundred and thirty-six hereditary warriors.
I was given that command, despite the fact that I was officially only a tanker first class.
It's not like I needed a general's pay, and everybody except the army's upper brass still thought that I was a real general. Nonetheless, it irked me. Sobieski just told me to relax. Everything would work out, soon.
He reminded me of the case of the American, General Chuck Yeager, who had been an ace fighter pilot during World War II, a test pilot who had been the first human being to fly faster than sound, and who had received several citations for running the most efficient squadron in that country's war in Vietnam, but who was actually only a sergeant on the books of the U.S. Air Force.
I asked him why this was supposed to make me feel better.
He didn't answer.
Kasia wasn't much interested in anything but her growing financial empire, and I let her follow her wishes. The Gurkhas weren't comfortable with women in command, anyway.
My four Croatian "colonels" had gotten deeply involved in the politics of revamping the military situation in New Croatia, and indeed in rewriting their entire national constitution. If they were successful in getting a system of universal military service going in their country, I knew that all of the other countries on New Yugoslavia would have to follow suit, out of self defense, if nothing else.
It was an important job, and I encouraged them to get it done.
And Zuzanna was living in her Dream World castle, when she wasn't living in the real castle I'd sold her. She threw some great Dream World parties, which General Sobieski and a few hundred of his friends enjoyed immensely. But she was not being useful for much else. Since she was usually more trouble than she was worth, I let her go her own way.
Mostly, Quincy and I got the Gurkhas under control, and integrated into the KEF.
My battalion had been transported to New Yugoslavia, mostly because, having been part of the army that had that had invaded New Kashubia, they weren't really welcome there. I found them, undergoing a prolonged basic training, secure in their new Mark XIX tanks. We had no artillery, which was probably just as well. Long-range fighting just wasn't the Gurkha's style.
They were stored in an area that was destined to become a food processing center, for the manufacture of chicken soup. Throughout Human Space, commercial projects were being delayed while military production was booming. The chickens had gotten a reprieve.
I had the Gurkhas sent to my valley, and placed in the lowest level of the underground parking lot of the cathedral there. My electronic architects had decided that this parking lot should be big enough so that even if the huge cathedral was filled to capacity, and everybody arrived in their own separate car, there would be room enough for everybody to park. A bit of overkill, I thought.
As soon as his training schedule permitted, Quincy and I had a long talk with Lieutenant Colonel Parta Sing Gurung, who commanded the Gurkhas. There were problems that we had to resolve.
He agreed that the pay was generous. A tanker first class in our army made twice what he had been making as a colonel, and our retirement benefits were better than anything the Gurkhas had ever seen before in their long history.
He liked the financial options available to him and his men, as well, and had recommended to his men that they each invest eighty percent of their pay into the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces Fund.
He understood that it would be impossible to transport their dependants to New Yugoslavia while the war was going on. He was glad that somehow, through our spy network, we had been able to inform those people that their men were safe, and was pleased to hear that as soon as it was possible, we would get them here at army expense.