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"I want to come along when you attack Duke Tendi! I enjoy a good fight."
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"Your aid would be most welcome! Okay, we have a deal, but we'd better not put this one in writing!"
"Excellent! Now, let's finish off this party snack. The poor thing must be feeling very neglected," Kern
said.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Weapons of War
New Yugoslavia, 2214 a.d.
Things progressed, but the important thing that happened this year was that my loving wife, Kasia, gave
birth to a magnificent baby boy, our fifth. She also said that enough was enough, and that if I couldn't give
her at least one girl, she was going to give up on it.
I said that I would have loved to have had a little girl, but I didn't have much say in the matter. She was
just going to have to take it up with God.
She said that she would do just that, and until He answered, she was going on the pill.
Well, I loved her, and five really was a houseful.
* * *
Another of our lost planets had been found. New Palestine. Our ship got there to find everyone, both on
our side and theirs, dead. Somebody had made a deadly virus and let it loose. Our intelligent machines
were working on resurrecting the planet, but until the virus was eliminated, people dared not return, nor
could we permit the electronic people to return to us. Repopulating the planet was being debated.
* * *
The basic weapon of the Human Army was the tank. This was essentially a well-armored box that
contained a muon-exchange fusion power supply, a series of computers, one of which was intelligent
enough to pass for a human being, and was smarter in some ways. It had a coffin that contained a real
human, together with a life-support system capable of keeping him or her alive indefinitely. The human
floated in an aqueous liquid that protected him from shocks and accelerations of up to fifty Gs.
This observer was linked through cranial and spinal inductors to the tank's computers, which could keep
him in Dream World, living at thirty times the speed that he could live at in the world outside.
There was also a combat mode, where he became essentially a single entity with his tank, and lived at
typically fifty-five times as fast as normal, depending on the individual.
On a planet surface, the tank used a track-laying MagLev system that laid magnetic bars before it,
floated over them, and then pulled them in to lay them in front again. On a metallic surface, it could
magnetize the metal under it, dispense with the bars, and travel much faster. On a real MagLev track, and
in a vacuum, it could hit three thousand kilometers an hour.
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A wide variety of weapon and propulsion systems could be magnetically bonded to the tank, depending
on the mission. A tank could function as a land weapon, a machine for tunneling beneath the earth, an
aircraft, a submarine, or a space ship.
As I saw it, the next war, or at least the early phases of it, would be fought in space. Some new
strap-ons were in order.
Up until now, traveling in space in a tank involved using a hydrogen-oxygen rocket capable of giving you
a thrust of forty Gs. It was fed through a pair of Hassan-Smith transporters from a fuel dump somewhere
nearby. The transmitters were expensive, which means that you couldn't have very many of them. Also,
the rockets were very bright and very noticable.
The captured Mitchegai ship had taught us a few things about ion drives, and New Kashubia had a
major surplus of cesium available, a metal that was easily ionized, and very massive.
The new engines required less than three percent of the fuel of the old ones, and a single transmitter
could keep thirty-five of them fed.
The old tanks had only speed-of-light communications available. An expensive microtransceiver that sent
tiny memory chips had been invented, and I resolved that every one of my tanks would have one. I had a
production line of our own built to insure this, and damn the bureaucrats in New Kashubia. Now, every
single fighting unit could communicate with headquarters.
Our main weapon, the rail gun, had proved to be completely ineffective against the Mitchegai. Our
secondary weapon, the X-ray laser, had worked, but only when used in mass firings. We now had the
Disappearing Gun, a gift from the Tellefontu, and I planned to have ninety percent of my people equipped
with it. Eight percent would have X-ray lasers, and the rest, rail guns. You never can tell.
And there was a wide variety of rockets, drones, mines, and antipersonnel weapons that we had in
stock that might prove useful.
Everything military now was deep below the ground. Using the Hassan-Smith transporters, we could get
to any point in Human Space in a hurry, but they'd have a hell of a time getting to us.
When the Mitchegai came, I hoped that we would be ready.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
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2000 YEARS EARLIER
A Cunning Scheme
The next morning, Duke Dennon mentioned that he had been able to purchase six more armored, but
defective, space suits, and bemoaned the fact that there were so few of them on the market.
"Well then, why don't you make your own?" Kren asked.
"Make a space suit? Do you realize the level of technology that requires?"
"A space suit, yes. But allyou need is a suit of armor! It doesn't have to be airtight. It doesn't have to
provide the wearer with air to breathe. It doesn't have to be heated to bear the cold of dark space, or
cooled to take the heat of the naked sun. All it has to do is to keep your soldiers from being cut by your
enemy's weapons! Look, you already have a perfect pattern for what you need. You have some old
space suits. Take one of them apart, give the three dozen or so pieces to some of your excellent
engineers . . ."
"There are six dozen major pieces in a space suit, not counting the fasteners, Kren."
"Whatever! That means that they will have to make up six dozen sets of stamping dies, at a few thousand
Ke each, unless they decide that they can do it themselves. Then, you buy a few stamping presses, and
have your soldiers operate them. You'll have enough armor for your whole army in a dozen weeks or
so." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]