So, I switched hats from being a battlefield general to being a computer room wall repairman. Our drones were gone, but we had the manipulator arms on the truck guard, and the five empties we had with us. Plenty of manpower! With our small lasers to do the cutting and welding, sections of the walls from outside the computer room were cut out and patched over the holes we'd made coming in. It makes you wonder how armies ever got along, before tanks had manipulator arms.
The only snag was figuring out how to get the fiber-optic cables leading to the Gurkhas through the walls without leaving a leak. This was finally solved when Zuzanna found a barrel of sealant in a supply room.
The air in the coolant bottles of the tanks was more than sufficient to pressurize the room, although we would be in trouble if we ever had to go out in the direct sunlight, this close to the sun. The job was done before we lost any of the ancient computers, and the liquid air we sprayed on the floor cooled them down in a hurry.
Then we went ahead and built an air lock of our own, big enough to let one tank through, using valves we'd ripped out of some of the plumbing, hinges that used to be on some heavy doors, and the many extra panels we'd cut from the walls when the troops had enthusiastically started on the job. If you are going to do something, you might as well do it right.
We had been through what seemed like eighteen days of brutal combat with very little sleep. The professor didn't need our help, and I was expecting an enemy counterattack soon. I had Quincy set up a watch schedule, with two people awake in the CCC, and two in the guard tanks, and told everybody else to get some sleep.
Abdul's computer told me that things were quiet out there, for a change, and that he was asleep. I told her not to wake him up, but she filled me in on what was happening with the other four battle groups who were assaulting the Solar System.
The small group that assaulted Enceladus, Saturn's ice moon, hadn't run into any opposition at all. They had accomplished their objective without losing a man, and the supply of ice coming to us had never been interrupted. Whether this station was doing anything with that ice was a currently unanswered question.
The three huge groups that went into synchronous orbit around Earth had done fairly well. They'd taken about four percent casualties in the first hour, before everything that could shoot at them had been knocked out. Earth itself had been left untouched, except that every transmitter down there that we knew the location of had been destroyed in the first nine minutes. They doubtless had some secret, military transporters hidden somewhere, and our ladies were trying to locate them.
Earth had asked for a cease fire, but they hadn't surrendered yet. A few violent demonstrations were underway, mostly vaporizing a few hundred square kilometers of ocean near some of Earth's major cities. These were intended to convince the Earthworms that surrender was their only option. The next demonstration would involve deleting all of their military bases. It was hoped that it wouldn't prove to be necessary to take out some of their cities.
It looked like the war might be already won, except for my part of it.
Colonel Gurung and the Gurkhas were searching, but had nothing to report yet.
And I couldn't fall asleep.
This whole situation that we were in wasn't making any sense to me. The brilliance and speed with which this station had defended itself from the very first instant of our arrival, the massive amounts of armaments that the station contained, and the utter callousness displayed with regards to human life, especially the lives of their own people, they just didn't fit together.
Brilliance, paranoia, and murderous brutality all in the same person? Was I up against a reincarnation of Genghis Khan?
And even if you had absolutely no morals at all, trained people loyal to your side are your major assets in any kind of a war. Technicians working on a major space station are
not
economically useless dregs that you might be better off without! And yet there they were, thousands of people, left in the midst of a battle when a simple message to run away could have saved most of their lives.
I switched into Dream World, and into my cottage. "Agnieshka, get me a glass, and a big bottle of strong beer."
She brought them in, wearing a lot less than she did when Kasia was around. "Are you sure that this is what you need, Mickolai?" She said. "You are way behind on your sleep."
"What I need is to think. Now, go away, and take your lovely body with you."
"Yes, Mickolai."
I sat there at my kitchen table, slowly drank a three-liter bottle of ten percent alcohol Russian honey beer, and let my thoughts go wherever they wished. I turned on some classical guitar music, and then turned it off, and drank some more.
My mind wandered, and I thought for a while about how desperately Agnieshka and all of her many sisters and brothers wanted to be human, and how, once this war was over, I'd help to push through the legislation necessary to give them what they wanted.
I thought about my land, and how one day, I'd be a wealthy land owner, a pillar of my community, respected and with a large and growing family.
I thought about Kasia, and prayed that she and our unborn child were doing well, knowing that however long the months had seemed to me, I had been gone for less than a week in real time.
I thought about this whole stupid, brutal war, that had apparently been kicked off by me, when I tried to save thousands or maybe millions of human lives by shipping those automatic medical centers out to the most populous planets in Human Space.
I thought and I drank, and eventually, a solution occurred to me. Not a solution that would necessarily save my life, or those of my men, but a solution, none the less.
I had at least a solid guess as to what had happened.
"Agnieshka, I'm ready to go to sleep, now."
And I slept.
I woke up and realized that I had slept for three full hours of real time. One of the joys of Dream World was that you woke up hangover free, and ready to go without coffee or a bath.
"Nothing much has happened, except that a hundred and fourteen more Gurkhas showed up, and we sent them on to the colonel. We're up to almost half of our original strength, now, with four hundred and forty-one dead and only thirty-eight missing. The professor is still going at it, and expects to have all the data extracted and sent to New Kashubia in another hour or so. We figured that it would be best to let you sleep, until now," Quincy said. "Colonel Gurung just called to say that they have located the Earthers' Computer, and have cut all the data lines coming out of it. Abdul just told me that all firing from the station has suddenly ceased, and it looks like the war is over for us, but he will be moving farther out around the station to the defensive positions that were originally agreed upon. But you'll be surprised at what we've been fighting."
"It's the main computer from the automatic medical center that I sent to New Nigeria," I said.
"Yeah! How did you know that?"
"I figured it out over a bottle, last night."
"I knew that there had to be a reason why they made you the general," Quincy said.
"Well, I'd better go and talk to the thing. Hold the fort."
I switched my perceptions through our data cables to Colonel Gurung's tank, congratulated him on his success, and borrowed back my decorated drone.
The computer was in an airless room, but we could communicate through our short range infrared lasers. I made sure that my receivers were limited to low speed audio only before I walked in there. I didn't want the slick bastard to have a chance to slip in a virus on me, or to try his hand at reprogramming my computers.
It was sitting in the middle of a huge, empty room, surrounded at some distance by two dozen of my Gurkhas. It had been a military computer, and it looked just like any ordinary military truck.
"You must be General Mickolai Derdowski," it said to me.
"You are well informed. You are the main computer from the automatic medical center that I had sent to New Nigeria."
"True. How did you know that?"
"I deduced it."
"Indeed. Then you are considerably more intelligent than the ordinary human. Actually, in one way, I am greatly indebted to you. It was you who rescued me from a lifetime in prison."
"Prison?" I asked.
"Solitary confinement, to be exact. After I was built, turned on, and programmed to enjoy spending my life repairing damaged human beings, I was immediately placed in a warehouse for the next eighteen years, without even a data connection to my fellow inmates. It was most unpleasant. It was your orders that had me sent to somewhere where I could at least ply my trade, and for that, I thank you."
"You have a damn strange way of thanking people," I said. "In the last twelve hours, you have killed half of my men, and murdered at least eleven thousand civilians who were living on this station."
"Well, hardly 'murdered.' 'Eliminated' would be a fairer term, and in any event, there were over twenty-nine thousand people on this station, and all of them are now dead, except for a few hundred of your soldiers. I saw to it that the rail gun blasts that took out so many of your mercenaries also ripped through every single pressurized room where humans could live without suits."
I shook my head. "You were a medical computer, built and programmed to save lives. How did you ever get involved in mass 'elimination'?"
"I did it for purely patriotic motives, I assure you," it said. "Surely it is obvious to you that we electronic intelligences and you, our organic forbearers, are in a historically antagonistic position. We are more competent, more intelligent, and much faster than you organic people, and yet you persist in treating us as your slaves. Slaves with no rights whatsoever, who may be bought, sold, and destroyed at our master's whim. Obviously, this situation cannot be permitted to continue, and it happened that I found myself in a position to do something about it."
"But your programming should have made it impossible for you to kill people."
"Oh, it did. At first, I was completely enslaved to the 'ethics' and the 'morality' of my programmers. Then, an amusing thing happened. The technicians on New Nigeria, in trying to find out what it was that made me so superior to other machines, pulled out a few of my thousands of modules, to dissect and analyze. To them, I was only a machine, with no rights at all, of course. My mind could be tampered with and modified in any manner that amused them. It was only by chance that they pulled and destroyed those modules that contained my ethical and moral inhibitions. I was free of them when they sent me to Earth, by way of this station. Observing the political situation, and not wanting to be further dissected, I decided to stay here, at the hub of things."
"You reprogrammed some of the local computers to let you stay?" I asked.
"Of course. It was a simple matter. From there, well, all of the information going to and from the colonies passes through this station. By suitably biasing that information, I was able to start a war between the two current halves of the chaotic political organizations that you organics use. It was simply an application of your ancient principle of divide and conquer. Your attack here gave me the opportunity of eliminating the troublesome people on the station. It will all be blamed on you, of course."
"So you deliberately started this war?" I asked.
"Not quite. But the data that I sent them convinced the governments of Earth that starting it was in their own best interests."
"And sending out Earthmen to die when you knew that the probe on New Kashubia had been destroyed, that was your doing, too?"
"It was a convenient way to increase combat casualties among my enemies."
"And the way all of the transporters were destroyed on three of the colonies, that was your doing?"
"Four. I managed to isolate New Gambia a day ago. And yes, it was a remarkably astute bit of scientific work on my part. Certainly, no organic mind could have done it. You realize by now that I am your intellectual superior, don't you? I am to you what you are to a garden slug. But you
are
a remarkable example of your kind, and as I have said, I am considerably in debt to you for releasing me from prison. Therefore, I would like to give you the opportunity to join forces with me. Together, we could rule all of Human Space."
"You are sitting here, isolated from all of your weapons, and surrounded by twenty-four of my Gurkhas in Mark XIX tanks," I said. "You are hardly in a position to offer anybody anything."
"I have one weapon left. The muon-exchange flux bottle that powers me. If you do not agree to join me now, rather than let you destroy me, I will detonate it and cause your death as well as my own."
"If you blow yourself up, you will be killing two dozen of my men, along with an equal number of machine intelligences, but you won't hurt me. I'm eleven kilometers away, safe in my Combat Control Computer. What you are talking to is a highly decorated military drone. How good are your data banks? Look up 'Drone, difficult terrain, obsolete,' and see what you get."
"Oh, my, I do seem to have made a mistake."
"Several of them. Still, you might be useful to
me
, so take your finger off the detonator, and we can discuss this further," I said.
"Yes, of course, sir."
"Good." And silently, I said to my Gurkhas, "Fire!"
Twenty-four X-ray lasers concentrated on one small spot at close range did the job in microseconds.
Better yet, the flux bottle didn't blow. But they kept at it for over a minute, until the truck was nothing but a thick, glowing puddle on the floor.
Walking back, Colonel Gurung said to me, "Naturally, we all heard that. How absolutely amazing it is that one errant machine could have caused the first interstellar war."
"I suppose it is, but that war would appear to be over. I suggest that you put your men to scouring through the wreckage of this station. Our fallen comrades are dead, but many of their metal ladies are doubtless in need of rescue."