I never did find out just who those guys were, or what they were doing suited up. Surely, no one sane would attack a Mark XIX tank with infantry!
Silly things, spacesuits, anyway. I'll take a drone, any day.
When my CCC touched down with a cluster of tanks around us, we dropped our rocket packages, a simple matter of turning off the electro-magnets that held them on. Inside the station, they wouldn't be needed, and our fuel was nearly exhausted anyway. Most of the station had been built of astroidal nickel-iron, and it was magnetic enough for us to use our usual methods of locomotion. The tidal gravity here was only a hundredth of a G, in any event.
We left IR transponders on the surface to keep in touch with what was left of our troops, and left a trail of fiber-optic cables and the new miniature transponders behind us to keep in touch, as did each of our tanks.
The object of this exercise was to capture the station. This meant that we had to get to the central computer that was controlling it, and to destroy it, if we couldn't subvert it to our side. Subversion wouldn't be difficult, if it was of the older, slower, silicon-based variety that the Earthworms normally used. Our mechanical ladies had often proved themselves to be most adept at this task. But the speed and the intelligence that our enemy had displayed thus far in the battle had given me some very bad feelings about our ability to do this here and now.
I gave up trying to hide, and had Zuzanna and her eight subordinates abandon protecting our two remaining trucks in order to guard the CCC. We formed up a convoy, with the two real trucks near the front, to act as targets, since they didn't have humans aboard, or really intelligent computers. We wouldn't need their cargos for at least a week, at which time the battle would be long over, one way or another. We also had five of the empty personal tanks "owned" by those of us in the CCC, including Agnieshka. Marysia, Quincy's tank, had been lost on the way in, but there was another one of her in the CCC.
Together, surrounded by a halo of drones of all sorts, we entered through the huge hole ripped into the station when two hundred and eighty-eight of their rockets had detonated in place.
Our maps showed that there were nine major, high-speed MagLev tracks running about the station. The first six of my Gurkhas who tried using them died within three seconds. There were mines hidden in the flooring, hidden guns in the walls, and sensors all over the place.
This whole, huge station had been converted into a death trap.
We were in it and we had no place else to go.
We had deliberately attacked the section of the station where the plans showed the central computer to be. The CCC had come down less than six kilometers from that computer's position, and most of my men were within ten kilometers of it. But ten kilometers had suddenly become a very great distance.
Lesser roads and corridors also proved to be as dangerous as the MagLev tracks. The first man to go down one ran onto a concealed land mine that detonated his flux bottle, which took out the two tanks behind him as well as a major chunk of the station.
Finally, Quincy said, "Then the only way from here to there is through the walls."
And that's what we started to do. Three or four tanks would select a section of the station's bulkhead, and simultaneously chop a five-meter hole in the wall. A few grenades would be thrown in, quickly followed by a few drones. Usually, the room was airless. Usually, it was not booby-trapped. Sometimes, we found a rail gun waiting for us. Sometimes, it was someone's living quarters, and a few times a whole family died in the vacuum we had just created.
We all hated that, but the station's defenders simply didn't leave us any other way through. And we had to get through, or die ourselves.
But why hadn't these civilians been evacuated? Whoever was running this show had to know where we were, and in which direction we were coming from.
Without exception, what we were up against were fixed defenses. We never ran into an enemy tank, or an enemy drone, or an enemy soldier, except for those who were killed by accident, when their air exploded out into space.
It was a slow, dangerous, horrible way of fighting, that had a lot in common with the hedgerows of Normandy during the Second World War.
The maps and plans we had been issued were completely inadequate. Over the years, hundreds, perhaps thousands of changes had been made and never properly logged. Defenses of all sorts were deliberately not shown on the drawings, and most of them were hidden in devilishly clever ways. You never knew what you would be facing beyond the next wall. A factory, someone's home, or a dozen rail guns.
Sometimes, a column would be moving through an apparently safe, cleared out area when a rail gun mounted three rooms to your right, or above you, or below you, would let loose and shoot right through the intervening walls, ceilings, and floors. Sometimes they would kill the men and machine intelligences in a dozen or more tanks.
Also, any rail gun fired within the station made major holes all the way through it, and out into space, evacuating huge sections, and killing anyone who happened to be in them. This was the reason why my forces weren't equipped with them. But the enemy didn't seem to care about either his station or his own people.
My battalion had entered the station through a hundred holes in the outer skin. As the hours dragged on, these small teams started to coalesce into larger groups. It was much easier, faster, and safer to follow someone else, than it was to go it alone.
Even in some of the living quarters, the floors were often mined, though I can't imagine that the people living there had been informed of it.
Some of my men soon found that the safest way to move was not magnetically on the steel floors or even the walls. The best way was to use your tank's manipulator arms, and brachiate through like a gibbon or an orangutan. This wouldn't have been possible under normal gravity, but with only a hundredth of a G of tidal force, it was fairly easy, provided you sheathed your huge sword first. The CCC computed the statistical safety factors of all methods of locomotion and transmitted the information to the troops.
In some of the big factory rooms, such as the probe assembly area we went through, seeing forty of my tanks swarm through was quite a sight. Martial artists and gymnasts, they took to swinging their tanks around the massive machinery with particular glee, forgetting for a few moments the deadliness that was all about them.
All the while as we advanced, we were constantly on the lookout for data cables, tapping into them, and tracing them back to the central computer. We had to make sure that we were really heading in the right direction. Then we cut the cables. Anything that you can do to disrupt your enemy's communications is good.
After nine hours of real time, eighteen days at combat speed, we finally got word that one of our columns had reached the control center. What they found surprised us. It wasn't a single computer at all. It was thirty-six thousand nearly independent small ones. Converting a single computer to our side was possible. Doing that thirty-six thousand times might take years. Years that we most certainly didn't have.
By this time, I was in contact with only two hundred and eighteen of my Gurkhas. More than half of the rest of them were known to be dead. The others were listed as missing.
The headquarters column, now consisting of fifty-three tanks, one truck, a diminishing number of drones, and one CCC, made it to the control room twenty minutes later. We had lost a lot of men, tanks, and drones, but even more had found us and linked up. All nine of my truck guards were still alive. They were taking the same risks that the rest of us were, but those guys seemed to be living charmed lives.
There had been seventy-one people in the control room when our first column broke in. They were programmers and technicians, from the look of them. Certainly, they hadn't been soldiers. There wasn't a uniform or a weapon among them. They had all died when the room's air blew out of the hole we'd made getting in.
My troops, encased in their tanks, didn't need an atmosphere, and when your enemy is booby-trapping all of the air locks, there is nothing else that you can do, except feel rotten about it.
Maybe we should have brought some air locks with us, but this whole horrible scenario just hadn't occurred to us. Who could have imagined such a thing?
Despite all of the fighting that we had been doing, and despite all the sensors that had doubtless seen us before we burned them out, no one had warned these people that we were coming!
That level of callousness was simply beyond my imagination to comprehend. It was like the way that they had continued sending troops to New Kashubia, when they had to have known that we had knocked out the probe that they were sending them through. They just didn't care about their own people!
Moments after we arrived, Lieutenant Colonel Parta Sing Gurung, the former commander of the Gurkha battalion, cut through the wall opposite us, with one hundred and eighty-eight tanks behind him.
"I observe that we have arrived somewhat late, sir," he said in his sing-song accent.
"I observe that you and your men are still alive," I returned. "We had you all listed among the missing. Welcome back!"
"Our lines of communications were cut, and after having fifteen of my men killed trying to reestablish them, I judged it best to press on as an independent unit."
"I'm sure that you did the right thing. Get your men and tanks in here. We need their help converting these enemy computers to our side."
Professor Cee said to me privately, "If I may make a suggestion, breaking into enemy computers is something that I am far more qualified to do than any number of mere tanks. Also, my dear boy, please look about you. Are these obsolete machines the intelligence that we have been fighting against for the last nine and a half hours?"
He was right, despite the "dear boy" shit. We had been slugging it out with a military genius. These dead civilians and old machines just didn't measure up.
I said, "Then this might be the center controlling the human expansion into space, but it is not the being that we have to knock out to take control of this station. Okay. We're moving out!"
"I would advise against that," Professor Cee said. "It is imperative that the data in these primitive computers be saved. Losing a battalion of combat troops would be inconsequential, compared to losing the expansion of human technical civilization. These computers must know the exact position, direction and velocity of every one of the twelve-thousand-odd exploratory ships that are expanding the area of known Human Space, and of the probe ships that have been dropped at every star that they've passed. If we had that information, we could send the necessary fuel, ships, and equipment out to them from some other site, New Kashubia, perhaps, so that our expansion can continue. Without it, we will have to recreate the entire system anew, and Human expansion will stop for at least fifty years. Furthermore, it is possible that in fifty years, the political will to continue might not be there any longer. The data in this room must be saved, and I am the most qualified entity to do it. I resolutely urge you to send your forces out against the enemy, but under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Gurung. The CCC, with you perforce in it, has another job to do here!"
"Send my men out without me, and without a Combat Control Computer? I don't see how I can do that."
"But you have to do it anyway, boss. He's right," Conan said.
"It's what we've got to do," Quincy said. "This thing is more important than we are. Anyway, the colonel is a pretty good soldier. He'll do a good job."
"Face it," Mirko said. "We have been beaten down to less than half of our original size, and Abdul isn't doing much better. If the Earthers can come up with any kind of a counteroffensive at all, he will be forced to trash this whole station, even if what's left of us are still in it. The data in these computers must be saved. The CCC can do that, and using its capability of sending those micro memory cubes back home, it can save the information, even if we don't survive this mess. Send out Colonel Gurung, with all of the Gurkhas. We'll stay here with the truck guard to protect us, and try to get the job done."
Lloyd and Maria agreed with the others.
"So, six ayes, and one nay. If I was Abraham Lincoln, I'd say that the nays have it. But I'm not. Okay. We'll give Colonel Gurung an independent command, and tell him to find and destroy whatever or whoever is defending this station."
"Very good, my General," Professor Cee said.
I explained the situation to Colonel Gurung. "So I want you to take all of my command, except for the nine tanks in the truck guard. You are to find whoever or whatever we are really fighting here. You are to destroy him if necessary, but if you can disable him without losing any of your men, that would be better. I, for one, would like to talk to the bastard before we slag him. Work hard at keeping our lines of communication open. It is possible that we will be able to give you some sort of help, if you need it, but it is more likely that we will end up begging for help from you."
"I am honored by your confidence in me, sir. If I might ask, though, could we also have the drones that your tanks carry? Most of ours have been destroyed."
"Certainly. You can even have my own, personal drone as a loan." I had Agnieshka walk the highly decorated thing over to the colonel's tank.
"It is a magnificent piece of workmanship, sir! I shall endeavor to bring it back to you intact!"
"Just do your best to get the job done, and keep in touch. Carry on, Colonel Gurung."
As the last of the Gurkha tanks left, taking the enemy dead with them to help clean the place up, the professor said, "General, these primitive computers are overheating. They were designed to be air cooled, and with the air in this room exhausted, they will all be inoperative long before they can be reprogrammed."
"We'll get on it," I said. "You keep working on reprogramming them."