I never made it home, except in Dream World.
We were called up that night, and were off New Yugoslavia ten hours after that.
There was a time when it took weeks or even months to get a battalion ready for combat, but the Mark XIX Main Battle Tanks are so entirely self-contained that they are always ready to move out at a moment's notice. Even if a soldier had been on leave, and on the other side of the planet, our communications and the Loway system could get him to the assembly point in hours.
Our first stop, as usual, was the arming center, where every man in the battalion received four additional antipersonnel drones, a full set of antipersonnel weapons, and an X-ray laser for his main weapon. The advantage to the X-ray laser was that it put its energy deep into an enemy machine, killing the observer and destroying anything electronic, without doing too much damage to the structure itself. Also, since it was aimed electronically, with a phase array system, it could get on target much faster than a rail gun could, which had to mechanically point at its target. The downside was that once on target, it took much longer to do serious dirt to your opponent. Whole seconds, sometimes.
These weapons were besides the humanoid drones and the huge tank swords, which my men had already been issued. None of my men got rail guns. We got no mines, rockets, or other heavy explosives.
We did each get a small rocket engine strapped to the back of the tanks and trucks. This was not the forty-G unit that was supplied with fuel by transmitters from a supply dump, but a one-G maneuvering rocket with three big fuel tanks, one for hydrazine and two for nitrogen tetroxide. Once you used up your fuel, it was gone. There had not been time enough to build enough fuel transporters for every tank in the army.
I knew right then what our mission in this battle would be. We were going to capture the solar powered factory that was orbiting closer to the sun than Mercury. The one that had most of the Solar System's transmitters, and was supplying Earth's entire war effort. It was also supplying the entire expansion of Human Space.
My Gurkhas were naturals at close-in fighting. The job was made for them.
Once we were transmitted to Combat Station Four, and there was no longer any danger of a security leak, I was given the complete battle plan. Actually, it turned out to be pretty similar to the one that my team had submitted in the first place.
As General Nathan Bedford Forrest, of American Civil War fame said nonetheless, "The way to win battles is to get there the firstest with the mostest."
If we were going to successfully attack Earth, we would have to send in very large numbers of tanks and men, and do it very quickly.
Sending in our forces over a period of weeks or months was a sure recipe for disaster. It was what Earth had been doing to our planets, and they hadn't been very successful at it, even though none of our planets had more than three percent of Earth's population, or more than one percent of its industrial strength, barring New Kashubia.
Earth was by far the biggest kid on the block.
The places that you can send personnel and machines in Human Space is limited by where you have Hassan-Smith transmitters and receivers. The
amount
of stuff that you can send there in a given period of time is largely limited not by the transmitters and receivers themselves, which are quite fast, but by the accelerators that give what you are sending the proper speed and direction.
The accelerators are not only the slowest part of the system, they are also the most complicated and expensive part of it. To build enough accelerators to do the job properly, we would have to spend all of the industrial capacity of New Kashubia on nothing else for the next three years.
Very obviously, from the way the war was going, Earth was not going to give us the time to do that.
Quincy was the one who thought up a way around our problem. His solution was to put a few receivers, and a lot of transmitters, but no accelerators at all at some arbitrary point in deep space, well away from everything else, but where a receiver already existed.
His plan was to send a collapsible receiver through the existing one, and accelerate it with conventional rockets to exactly the speed and direction that our target would have on D-day. Then, over the next few weeks or months, all of our available forces and a sufficient number of transmitters would be sent to join that first receiver.
When the time came to roll, we would all rush through the transmitters in a hurry, to receivers that we had set up in the Solar System.
The plan required that first receiver in deep space, and additional receivers near each of our targets in the Solar System, receivers that we knew the coordinates of well enough to transmit to them.
Fortunately, the KEF had established a spy network on Earth over five years ago. There were many people there whose sympathies were with the outer planets, or who weren't averse to taking our money, or quite often both. How our people had managed to set this up, and keep in touch with the network was something I was never told about. I didn't have the need to know. But we never could have even considered the attack on Earth without the information we got from that network.
The truly hairy part of the whole plan came when you realized that everything in the Earth's solar system is in orbit around the sun. The speed, relative to the sun, might not change much, but the direction was constantly changing, through a full three hundred and sixty degrees every local year, which was different for every body in orbit.
This meant that we had to plan the exact instant of every step of the invasion to less than a second, and we had to do it months in advance. Accomplishing it would be no mean feat, when you consider that hundreds of thousands of men and machines would be involved. The timing on everything had to be absolutely perfect. Anything or anyone that wasn't ready to go at the proper instant would have to be abandoned, and hope to be picked up later, assuming that we won the war.
If we lost it, and if Earth was deliberately throwing away their own soldiers the way it looked like they were doing, it wasn't likely that they would make any effort to save our stranded troops, if we couldn't do the job ourselves.
Those troops would spend a long time in very deep space, dying all alone.
But as I said, we got the full battle plan as soon as we emerged at Combat Station Four, which turned out to be in Earth's solar system itself, sort of.
Around a hundred and fifty years ago, an attempt had been made to mine the Oort Cloud, where the comets come from, way past the orbit of Pluto. It turned out to be a financial disaster, but a robot scientific observation station was still being operated there. Subverting enemy computers was something that our girls were particularly good at, and the station was ours now, without Earth being any the wiser about it.
From the receiver in the Oort Cloud Station, a total of five rocket-powered collapsible receivers were sent out, one for each of the five assault groups.
The group at Combat Station Five was the smallest of the bunch. Their job was to take the ice-mining site on Enceladus, an ice moon of Saturn just outside of the "E" Ring, which provided the raw material for the fuel being sent to the thousands of exploration ships on the outer edge of Human Space. It was also the least important objective, since in a pinch, if they failed in their mission, the raw materials to keep the Solar Station operating, supplying the expansion of Human Space, could be sent from Freya, another ice moon in the New Yugoslavian system.
The group at Combat Station Four consisted of my Gurkhas as the main assault force, plus a much larger, ten thousand troop division of mostly rail gun equipped tanks who were there to defend us from an external counter attack. They were also there to destroy the solar factory if we failed in our mission. This would probably set back the exploration of space by at least fifty years, but The Powers That Be felt that the delay would be preferable to having all of the existing colonies invaded and trashed by Earth.
Combat Stations One, Two, and Three were the big ones. The men and machines there were going into geosynchronous orbit around Earth itself, a hundred and twenty degrees apart. Their job was to take out anything that could shoot back, and to generally intimidate the hell out of the Earthworms.
That done, we would try to talk some sense into the idiots.
We didn't really want to trash the entire home planet. We did, however, have the firepower with us to do just that. After all, they
had
attacked us first, without warning, and without a declaration of war.
All told, three quarters of the KEF was collecting itself at the combat stations, leaving only a skinny, scattered force for home defense. This was an all or nothing operation. It had to be, since if Earth committed itself to total war production, they could outproduce us ten to one, easy.
In a short war, the critical factors needed for success are stockpiled weapons, previous training, and fighting spirit. In a long one, the important things are population size, natural resources, and industrial capacity. Like the South in the American Civil War, or Japan in WWII, the outer planets had to win soon, or we couldn't win at all.
We had four standard days to train for the battle. Plenty of time, four months in Dream World for my men in their tanks. Six months for those of us in the CCC.
The first step was to build, in Dream World, a model of the solar factory we had to take.
It was
huge
. It was over nine hundred kilometers long, three hundred kilometers wide, and well over a kilometer thick in some places.
We had plans for it that were probably as accurate as anything that existed on Earth, but this was a very old installation.
The first sections of it had been built over two hundred years ago, before the first ships pushed out for the stars, before the muon exchange fusion power supply was perfected, and solar power was the only practical way to go. Designed with expansion in mind, it contained some of the first self-duplicating automatic factories ever built.
Mostly, these factories built components to build more of the interstellar ships that sought out new stars, the probe ships that examined each solar system they came across, and to continuously enlarge the station to keep those additional ships supplied. The technology they employed was now obsolete, but being completely automatic, it didn't cost anything to keep the system running. Redesigning them would have been expensive.
Anyway, it worked, so why mess with it?
There were two big problems with the information we had on our target. The first was that, being so old, there were probably thousands of modifications that had been made over the years that had been forgotten, or that had never been recorded in the first place. We were certainly in for a lot of unexpected things, once we got there.
The second was that our plans showed absolutely no defensive weapons at all, and none of us were willing to believe that.
The professor dug out the original treaties on the Solar Station from his seemingly infinite memory banks, and read a synopsis of them to us. These had been made back in the days when Earth's nations were often at war, and provided for the design, funding and manning of the solar factory.
"These documents emphatically state that the station will have absolutely no offensive or defensive capability," he said. "It looks like they have kept with that agreement."
"Do you really believe that?" I asked.
"Certainly, General, because I said that it
looks like
the place was never armed. Any and all weapons there are carefully hidden. Now, had you had asked if I thought the place was actually armed to the teeth, then my answer would still be '
certainly.
' That station contains ninety-eight percent of the transporter capability in Earth's Solar System. Much of the food and most of the wealth that flows into the old planet goes through that station. Earth's rulers may be wicked bastards, but they are not
stupid
wicked bastards. With something that critical, of course they are prepared to defend it! Anyway, at the very least, something that big and unmaneuverable would have to be protected from meteorites. Rail guns could do that quite nicely, but there's not a one of them on the plans."
Mirko said, "I too am sure that they have every possible kind of weapon ever made hidden away in that huge place. We must also consider that it has several types of powerful weapons that are not usually considered weapons, but that can kill us all dead, anyway."
"Would you care to elaborate on that?" I asked.
"That station has two hundred and seventy thousand square kilometers of solar collectors. Each panel is servo controlled, to orient it properly toward the sun, and, using the collectors as solar sails, to help keep the station itself oriented properly. The front surfaces are flat and shiny. They reflect nine percent of the light hitting them. If they chose to focus the reflected light from those panels on a small area, anything in that area would be plasma, and there is nothing that we could do to take out something that big."
"An interesting point. Obviously, our attack must come from the dark side, away from the sun," Quincy said.
"That's both good and bad," Maria said. "Keeping our men and tanks cool for any extended period of time in the light so close to the sun would be a difficult problem, whereas heating them in the shade of the station isn't. But the back side of the station has over four thousand stabilizing cables that will present us with something of an obstacle course, going in. If something is longer than it is wide and thick, gravitational forces try to align it with one end in and one end out. That's just the opposite of what you want with a solar panel. So the old engineers added a lot of very long cables that stretch out behind the station, with big weights made out of industrial slag on the end of them, to keep each section oriented properly. The system also gives the station a bit of tidal gravity, about a hundredth of a G, which helps keep things from floating around. Those cables are thin, and in the dark, not all that visible, but we have to make it through them, somehow."