The War With Earth (25 page)

"Why would nature do such a thing?" Quincy asked.

"It beats me," Kasia said. "But it happens. Living in an all-female barracks in New Kashubia in the bad old days, without enough water to take a proper bath, things got very hairy for a few days every month. I think that our computers should be able to figure out when their periods happen, by checking the records for minor infractions of discipline, among other things. But when an all-female outfit has PMS, they should get the rottenest jobs possible."

"That is so
truly
wicked! I love it!" Quincy giggled.

But in the end, more dirty, rotten tricks were thought up and put into practice by a single individual human, with the eager help of our tanks' computers, than came out of us working as a group. Some things were just too embarrassing to talk about in public.

Quincy latched on to the Earthworm's commander, one General Burnsides, and did everything his devious mind could come up with to make a laughingstock of the man. Orders were twisted, or sent to the wrong outfit, or made deliberately insulting. And always, there it was on his notepad computer, as though he himself had done it. The man was screaming at everyone around him within a day, and they had all decided that he was either going insane, or was secretly on drugs.

About every twenty minutes somebody in the enemy army, usually a career sergeant, would get a notice that since he had been busted back to private for various serious infractions of duty over eight months ago, and had continued drawing sergeant's pay since that time, all payments to him and his dependents would cease until the overdraw was paid back.

And about once every ten minutes some private with a record of drunken binges would be notified that his promotion to tech sergeant had been approved over a year ago, and receive a check for the back pay due him.

Both of these things would be always be traceable directly to General Burnsides.

After a while, I saw a certain pattern emerge.

Most of my little jokes were of a physical nature.

Radio doesn't work very well inside of all-metal tunnels that are occasionally interrupted with metal air locks. Communications have to be mostly by land lines, usually fiber-optic cables.

To disrupt communications, I simply had the computer not use certain lines,
for a while
, cutting off whole companies and battalions. From the outside world, it looked like the line had been cut, but when the increasingly harassed repairmen got there, it would be functioning properly, and had been for the last five minutes.

Usually, we managed to call the person out of bed after twenty minutes of sleep to fix the thing, and she had to report that no trouble was found. She would go back to sleep, and twenty minutes later she would be called back to repair the same line, and this time get it right, dammit!

I found that if you do this to a person, especially a woman with PMS, thirty-five times in a forty-eight hour period, you can get her to shoot her boss.

As I noted earlier, many of the enemy weapons were chemically powered. This at first struck me as being a ridiculously obsolete way of doing things, but when you consider that most of their troops were infantry, who might have to fight when there wasn't a suitable power supply available, it did make a certain amount of sense. Chemically powered bullets are much more portable than fusion bottles.

Just because a weapon is old-fashioned doesn't mean that it is no longer useful. Most soldiers will still carry a knife, for example, and next to a rock or a sharp stick, that's about as ancient as a weapon can get.

Chemically powered projectiles are expended rapidly in combat, so the Powers That Be on Earth had provided their troops with a machine that automatically reloaded the brass casings they still used. This machine was controlled by what was now our computer.

It took me two days in Dream World, but I finally got the thing to fill one casing in five hundred, not with the usual slow-burning smokeless powder, but with a high-speed plastic explosive that generally blew the gun in half.

When they checked the ammunition, it looked okay, so they blamed the problem on manufacturing defects in the weapons. Strange theories about metal fatigue being caused by interspatial transfer were going around.

And if they had found one of the booby trapped bullets, the serial number on the package would have proved that the ammo had been manufactured on Earth, and must have been caused by sabotage there.

Not only did my stunt cause a lot of direct casualties, but men got to distrusting their weapons, and hesitating before they used them. Hesitation in combat is often fatal.

Quincy was having fun twisting orders. The Earthers still used over twenty languages among themselves, and this meant that they were largely dependent on their computer to translate as well as to transmit orders. Since some words have many different meanings, things can get confusing enough even when everybody is speaking the same language.

When you have someone deliberately trying to confuse things, and have a lot of languages to play with, the results can be horrendous. Eventually, Quincy managed to get three open gun battles going at the same time, between different Earth factions.

Kasia discovered that most of the food for Earth's forces was delivered dried and in bulk, to be prepared and packaged by an automated factory, carefully programmed for each soldier's dietary needs. This was necessary because of the wide range of ethnic groups that made up the invading army.

Soon, Hindus were being fed beef stew, Moslems were getting roast pork, and everybody was getting violently ill when they found out what they'd been eating.

If you hated asparagus, you got it for every meal. Everyone with an allergy got exactly what he was allergic to.

And whenever anyone complained, the food processing technicians could always prove that people were being fed precisely what they had ordered.

Eventually, men were actually taken off the battle lines so they could be given lectures on how to fill out computerized forms properly.

Once, Kasia did let it get blamed on a machine. For one nine-hour period, every meal produced contained an overdose of habanero peppers, which meant that for nine hours most of the Earthers were unable to eat the meals sent to them. She let the problem be tracked down to a single solenoid driver, and didn't do it again once the problem was "fixed." By then, she was out of habanero peppers, anyway.

Then she discovered that medicines were being handled in the same way. They were shipped to New Kashubia in bulk, and automatically put in single-dose packages as needed. This let them have large enough supplies of everything on hand in the event of an epidemic, or whatever.

When I found that my sweet and loving wife, too tenderhearted to shoot a deer, was putting potassium chloride into syringes labeled "morphine," I thought that she was going just too far, and I said so.

"What you are doing means that any guy who gets wounded is going to get a dose of poison that will kill him immediately. That's not nice."

"So? I mean, did we invite those bastards to come here in the first place? They invaded us! They've killed a lot of our people. I still don't know how my family is doing, or whether they're dead or alive. And killing the enemy is what we're in the army for, dammit!"

Rudyard Kipling had it all figured out hundreds of years ago. The female of the species is far deadlier than the male.

Quincy came in on my side, in a left-handed way.

"Kasia, you really don't want to kill a wounded man. If you do, they'll just leave his body there until they have time to get rid of it, and get back to the fight. But if he's badly wounded, they have to take care of him, or risk a riot among their own troops. It takes three men to carry away and treat one wounded man. The arithmetic is very simple. You kill an enemy, and you take one man out of combat. You wound an enemy, and you've taken four men out of combat."

"I hadn't thought of it that way before."

"True. Now, what you should be doing is turning minor ailments into major ones. For example, Syrup of ipecac is used when someone has eaten poison. One spoonful will give a man a vomiting fit that will last for an hour. Feed him the same stuff in the 'medicine' you give him, and you'll keep him weak for days. Get enough of that stuff into the enemy, and their military effectiveness will be seriously reduced. Or find something that looks like aspirin, but gives people the symptoms of bubonic plague, or Ebola virus, or some such. Cholera might be nice, if you can manage it. There is nothing like cholera to break an army's morale. There's tons of runny shit all over the place! It's not as though you'll have to fool scientists who have tons of equipment and years to spend on a problem. I doubt if the Earthworms brought a microscope with them. They have combat medics with them here, guys who are used to treating problems that are pretty obvious, like people with holes in them. If it looks like cholera, they'll call it cholera, and not look for the bacteria. Historically, far more combatants have died of diseases than from enemy action, and the Earther generals know it. If you handle it right, you'll scare the pants off them!"

"Thanks, Quincy. I'll get working on it."

She had that gleam in her eye again, and it made me kind of glad that I wasn't fighting on the other side.

About every six minutes, someone in the enemy army got a notification that his medical records were lost, or that they showed that he had not been given the proper shots, or some such, and that he was ordered to report to the hospital immediately to correct the problem. One of the shots he was always given was supposed to immunize him against cholera, and since that "medicine" always gave him all of the symptoms of the disease, he stayed in the hospital from that time onwards.

The searchlight from our local star was due to hit us in two standard hours, our hidey-hole had been done for days, and had had sufficient time to cool down, and we still hadn't heard from the other half of our squad.

"There's nothing for it," I said. "We just have to hope that they have dug themselves a safe place to hide. Leave one of the mice out there with a single fiber-optic strand, and bring the rest back, fast. Pull in the other drones, and send them to the tunnel. We're pulling out ASAP."

I felt strangely guilty about leaving one of the mice out there, since there wasn't much chance that it would survive. It was only a very stupid little machine, but it had served us well, and it hurt to abandon it. But we needed it out there, sending and receiving information for as long as possible.

As it turned out, later, we lost contact with the mouse we'd left out there within seconds of the time the Search Light hit.

C'est la guerre. 
 

"Should we keep the rail guns shooting?" Quincy asked.

"Why not? We might as well get as much out of them as we can. The Earthers seemed to think that they can survive the radiation bath they're going to get, since they're permanently mounted, and if they don't, well, we didn't pay for them."

As soon as the mice were in our hoppers, and the cables were rewound, we took off, and went through the back entrance of the tunnel with a standard hour to spare.

The tunnel was five meters in diameter, on the average, and four hundred meters long. Agnieshka had picked a good spot.

Forty standard minutes later, we heard Zuzanna yelling, "Make room! We're coming in!"

She was towing Conan's tank behind her, dragging it along on its belly. His long manipulator arms were gripping her charging bars, and Maria's tank was pushing him from behind. We moved forward so they could be centered in the tunnel.

"Some day, somebody has got to redesign the drive coils on these things," Conan said by way of an explanation.

"You guys were cutting it pretty thin," I said.

"He lost his drive coils at the worst possible time," Zuzanna said. "We were about as far from here as we were from the emergency hole we'd dug near the other shaft, so I figured that we might as well just push on as best as we could."

"I guess Murphy's Law is functioning normally. I'm just glad that you didn't abandon him," I said.

"Me too!" Conan shouted.

"We considered blasting him a hole to hide in, and coming back for him later, but he couldn't have crawled into it by himself, and when you consider the time that we would have had to wait around for the hole to cool down, well, this was our best option. Especially since we didn't have enough ammunition left to dig a hole big enough for all three of us."

"You did well, Zuzanna. Come on over. There is absolutely nothing that we can do to bother the enemy, and they can't do a blessed thing to us, so we might as well have some fun. We'll throw a searchlight party over at my place."

"Nope. This one's on me, Mickolai. My faithful servants await your pleasure at the Dark Tower. Just be careful getting past the Moat Monsters."

So, we spent the next six standard hours, a week in Dream World, in my valley at what amounted to a costume party held in the castle that I had sold to Quincy and Zuzanna.

It had been modified, of course, to include knights in armor, evil wizards, and a few dragons.

The twelve of us, garbed in gorgeous medieval finery, feasted and reveled like the lords and ladies of ancient times should have, but probably didn't. Everything was clean, beautiful, and good tasting, for one thing, and my fly had a zipper on it.

We held a tournament with our nasty rivals from the golden castle, fighting a daylong round-robin, jousting with them as individuals, and then the full dozen of us fought a grand melee with twelve of their best fighters, and trounced them properly!

Another day was spent hunting a family of dragons who had been devouring our peasant girls out of season, and bagging more than the legal limit.

I even killed a dragon myself, the huge warlord of his clan, with my trusty lance. I was protected from his dragon fire by my magic shield, while riding my invincible war horse Anna.

I asked the Lady Agnieshka to figure out a way to mount the dragon's head on the wall in my den, back home.