"Again, that too is also good and bad," Quincy said. "They might slow us down, but they'll make life rough on the enemy gunners that are going to be trying to take us out."
"But the enemy will know more about the location of those cables than we will," I said. "What's more, they will be operating from fixed positions, most likely, which makes their job easier. It will be dangerous for our men to come in at a fast, shallow angle. We might be forced to come straight in against fixed installations, like a torpedo bomber during the Second World War. From a gunner's point of view, someone coming straight at you is a stationary target, and easy pickings. Some of those old squadrons lost every single plane in their first real attack. This will not be a simple battle to plan."
"The solar arrays are not their only unusual weapon," Mirko said. "They have over fifteen thousand accelerators on that station. Most of them are used for sending kilogram-sized fuel shipments to the robot fleet of exploratory ships, but some of those things are capable of accelerating probe ships massing over a hundred thousand tons. All of them can send things out at very close to light speed. All they have to do is have it pointed at where we might be, and then when they want to fire, to
not
turn on the Hassan-Smith transporter the next time the object gets to the end of the accelerator."
Conan said, "Our rail guns accelerate bits of metal weighing a tenth of a gram to a quarter of light speed. Of course, they do that quickly, and often."
"True," Mirko said. "It sometimes takes more than a year to get a new robot ship up to speed, so we might as well consider that each of their big accelerators is a single shot weapon. But they have sixteen times as many accelerators as we have tanks attacking them."
Lloyd said, "Those accelerators are steerable, but slowly. Their tactic will be to have them up to speed, and pointed in some arbitrary direction. Then, when something looks like it will be in the right place at the right time, to fire. That means that our doctrine will have to be to not shoot back. Once they've fired, each accelerator won't be able to get off another shot again, not before the battle is over, one way or another. And even it could, you wouldn't still be in the right place for it to hurt you."
"That will have to be our program," I said. "It's not going to be an easy doctrine to follow. But, the purpose of this exercise is to capture the damn place, not to destroy it."
"Right," Conan said. "Not to worry. We'll have a whole division of tanks right behind us to do that for us."
I was sitting on top of the CCC, wearing a decorated drone that I'd brought along for no really good reason, except that maybe it reminded me of home. The KEF had provided humanoid drones for the men in the tanks, but not for my colonels and me, so I had simply provided them myself, except for Quincy and Zuzanna, who had brought along their own.
To hell with bureaucrats, anyway.
I hadn't received any orders regarding our personal tanks, either, so we'd brought them along as well, empty. You never can tell when a few extra Mark XIX tanks might come in handy.
I was in the middle of the starry void, surrounded by a cluster of almost twelve thousand tanks, trucks, and transporters. Their colored, blinking pilot lights showed them drifting slowly, getting themselves oriented for transport.
It had taken me a while to get used to living inside a CCC. When I was linked up to it, in combat mode, I had a vast, computerized intelligence as part of my own mind. Computers are much better than people at some things, like data storage and retrieval, math, and simply counting things.
Unaugmented, when I looked at the stars about me, I saw a vast number of points of light, and my human mind could only call them "many."
Linked up, I knew the exact number of them, neatly sorted as to magnitude and spectral type. I could look at any one of them, and tell you its name and/or number, its size, its age, and how far away it was. I knew which of those stars had inhabited planets, and what sort of people lived there. I knew their political, economic, and religious persuasions, and even a good deal of public information about each of their citizens.
When my unaided senses saw a tank floating by, I only knew it to be one of ours. Aided by the CCC, I knew that the left forward MagLev sensors needed repair, but that they wouldn't affect its combat readiness for this mission. I knew that the observer was Jemadar Tanker First Class Gunta, that his tank's name was Suki, and that he had a wife and three children back on Earth, and all of their names. I even knew how they'd been doing in school when last he'd seen them, and the name of his native village, where they lived.
In simulated combat, I knew at every instant what each of my men was doing, what their location was, and what difficulties they were having, be they mechanical, physical, or psychological. I knew the precise number of them who were ready to fight, and what their effectiveness would be.
When they were successful, I felt their joy.
And when they died, I felt their deaths. I knew because one man had already died, of an aneurysm that his tank couldn't do anything about.
It gave me an incredible feeling of power, but it was not at all pleasant.
I looked about me.
Old Sol was the nearest star, but it was so far away that without Agnieshka or the professor to point it out, I wouldn't have noticed it.
I felt lonely, and being without Kasia made things much worse. I couldn't even send her a message. We finally had a military interstellar communication system. The CCC had just been equipped with a new miniature transceiver that could transmit microscopic memory cubes to anywhere in Human Space, but we were under a security blackout, and the professor wouldn't let me or anyone else use it.
Being in a CCC gave me instantaneous communications with everyone in my battalion, with or without their knowing about it. Not that I would ever eavesdrop on anyone. But socially, well, the Gurkhas were good people and fine soldiers, but they weren't Kashubians. There was a cultural barrier between us that was reinforced by my supposed rank, and we worked together on a very formal basis. Social contacts with them were difficult for all concerned.
My colonels were all old friends, of course, and during the attack on Baden-Baden Island, I'd gotten to know the eight men in my guard pretty well. "Personal Guard" had seemed a bit grandiose, so we had changed it to just the "Truck Guard." But even with old friends and comrades, the barrier of rank was still there.
I'd always heard about the isolation of command, and now I was finding out that it was very real. These fine people were ready to go to their deaths, if need be, but I was the one who would have to order them there.
I had been expecting an invitation for a courtesy call on the general who was commanding the division of rail gun equipped tanks that was our backup on this mission. Our orders had been issued separately, and we each had our own job to do, but as the commander of the larger force, he was senior to me. There was also the fact that he was a real general while I was still a lowly tanker first.
But after more than a month went by in Dream World, I decided to hell with protocol. I felt that I really should get to know this guy, if we were going to fight the Earthworms efficiently. I sent him a voice-only message, identifying myself by name and the fact that I commanded the Gurkha Battalion, but not actually mentioning my rank.
"This is Abdul Nasser Hussein, commanding the Eighth New Syrian Armored Division," he said, politely not mentioning his rank, either. "Mickolai, your request for an interview is denied."
That knocked me back about four steps. I said, "May I ask why?"
"Certainly. My orders are to protect the station from a possible counterattack. But if I am unable to keep it from being retaken, I am to destroy it. I will follow those orders, whether you and your men are able to get out of there in time or not. Given the choice, I would rather not have to kill a friend. Therefore, I do not wish to befriend you. We shall meet later, if we both live through this fight. Good luck in the forthcoming battle. May God be with you. Out."
Well, that gave the old adage of "Conquer or Die!" a whole new meaning. It wasn't a pleasant prospect.
After one hundred and ninety-eight subjective days of almost nonstop training, my Gurkha battalion was as ready as it was ever going to be. In simulations, we had tried dozens of possible attacks, from transporting directly into the station to attacking from the sunny side, and none of them were really very good. The attack mode we'd finally settled on was statistically the most effective one, with the lowest casualty rate for the good guys. But there were still many, many things that could go wrong, and most of them were completely beyond our control.
The absolutely precise time when our speed and direction would be identical to that of our target receiver was upon us.
The station we were attacking was so large that repair, construction, and emergency crews usually used transmitters and receivers to get around rather than passageways, for the most part. It was through one of their external receivers on the dark side of the station that we would be launching our attack.
Rather than risk the possibility of the enemy shutting down their equipment when we started to come out, the only thing we were sending through their receiver was a single rocket powered receiver of our own. On arrival, it would blast away from the station, and immediately start spitting out other, identical receivers, at a rate of one per second, in different directions. These in turn dropped more, identical receivers at precisely controlled angles, until, ten seconds into the attack, more than five hundred receivers would be flying away from the huge station.
Then, in the next twenty-four seconds, almost eleven thousand tanks and trucks would be placed in the precise positions that the battle plan required.
We needed only thirty-four seconds to move the entire battle group into position. Our fervent prayer was that the enemy's reaction time would be slower than that. If our receivers were shot up before our tanks went through, those tanks, and the men in them, were lost.
"It is time to take the war back to the enemy!" I said to my troops when everything was ready to go, "You have trained hard for this day, and I am proud of you! You are the finest, the best equipped, and the best trained battalion in Human Space! You are hereditary warriors, and the eyes of your illustrious ancestors are upon you! Go forth, and make
them
proud of you!"
They let loose with a cheer, and a bewildering variety of battle cries. I got the feeling that they were a whole lot more confident than I was. But I wasn't about to let them know how scared I was, and they were likely doing the same thing for me.
My CCC was the second package in a very straight line, one of five hundred such, pointing vaguely toward the Big Dipper. There were twenty-two tanks from the New Syrian division behind us, each holding on to the one in front with its manipulator arms. Zuzanna's tank was in front of us, holding on to the CCC, since trucks weren't equipped with arms. Ahead of her was a rocket-boosted transmitter, poised to scoop us up and send us to the Solar Station.
My colonels were unusually silent as we waited. They must have been as nervous as I was. I would have been chewing my nails if it hadn't have been for my helmet.
Some of the other lines had as many as ten rocket-boosted receivers ahead of the first tank, and their transmitters boosted long seconds before ours did. Very long seconds, since we were all at combat speed.
Our transmitter gave a short boost, and came toward us at twelve meters per second. I saw Zuzanna disappear into its mouth, and a second later we were in transit. After a few seconds, we emerged into chaos!
The receiver we came out of exploded behind us, torn apart by a rail gun burst from the station! The twenty-two New Syrian tanks who had been in line behind me were gone.
I immediately started sending an all-frequency broadcast, in clear, uncoded Earth English,
"Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Stop shooting! Stop shooting! Mayday!"
The other tanks and trucks of the assault force were shouting the same thing, as the battle plan required. Call it a legitimate ruse of war. The hope was that we could give ourselves a few more precious seconds to complete our deployment.
What made us a little less convincing was the way Zuzanna was already taking out the gun that had hit our receiver, frying its brains out with her X-ray laser. Then again, maybe that gun had intended that I should be its next target.
I didn't scold her.
Only a few of our tanks actually fired on the enemy, but they all made careful note of where those guns were. Staying with the doctrine showed remarkable fortitude on the part of my men, I thought.
In less than two seconds, the enemy stopped shooting at us.
"Who are you and what is this all about?" someone or something in the station asked us. They were speaking at combat speed, which troubled me. It was as if they had been waiting for us. And shooting at the receivers rather than the more formidable looking tanks showed more intelligence than the Earthers usually displayed.
It was very troubling.
I let the "Mayday" message run for three more full seconds of real time, trying to squeeze out every bit of deployment time that I could. Then I said, broadcasting slowly in real time, "We are reinforcements, you trigger-happy fool! You were informed of our arrival a long time ago! Now you have slaughtered hundreds of us! Some heads will roll over this monumental act of stupidity, I promise you! Now, shut down your guns, open up your outer doors, and turn off the idiot computer who opened fire on us! At least it better have been a computer, because if I find out that it was a human who ordered this murderous attack, I will personally shove the bastard who did it naked out of an air lock on the sunny side of the station and see if the Sun bakes him before the vacuum boils him! And if it was a computer, I will
find
the man who programmed it, and then . . ."