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CHAPTER THREE

The Gurkha Heaven
New Yugoslavia, 2205 a.d. 

My part of New Yugoslavia had been deeded to the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces as part payment for a war we had fought for New Croatia. The local terrain consisted of a kilometer-high plateau to the southwest and a large plains area to the northeast. The plateau was deeply indented with a number of large box canyons that opened onto the plain.

It had been uninhabitable desert when we got here, but we had irrigated it using equipment from the automatic factories of our home planet, New Kashubia, and the productive capacity of the thousands of intelligent fighting machines that made up half of our army. The other half of our army was made up of the human beings who spent much of their time living inside those machines.

Our tanks had been designed to tunnel through solid rock. They made short work out of carving out apartments, roads, and everything that a city needs into the granite walls of my valley.

They had done a class job of it, building for a design life of five thousand years. All of the exposed surfaces had a heavy coating of what had once been precious metals, but now were fairly common. The walls were studded with jewels, and the windows were "glassed" with sheets of single crystals of diamond.

I woke the next morning to find Kasia at my side. After a few hours, we made it to breakfast.

"Well," I said, to break the silence. "I trust that all of the problems have been solved?"

"Yes," Kasia said. "The Gurkhas will be moving out and building their own place."

"Indeed? And where are they doing this?"

"Next door. I've helped them buy the canyon to the southeast of us."

"Quincy and Zuzanna's place?"

"No, the box canyon in between us. It was originally purchased by a consortium of troops who couldn't agree on what to do with it. They finally made a decent profit selling it to the Gurkhas. Look, the Gurkhas have their own culture, and they are happy with it. They have no intention of being assimilated into somebody else's world if they can help it. At the same time, they like being members of our army, and they especially like our pay rates. So, their tanks are working with them, designing their own particular version of heaven."

"Well, our metal ladies are first rate engineers, artists, and architects. They have done it before, so they won't have problems doing it again. I imagine that what with all the stone cutting, that valley will be a cloud of dust for a few months."

"True, but in three months your troops will be able to start moving in. I think that Gurkhas are environmentalists at heart. They want natural rock, and not the gold and platinum plating that you used on this valley. They don't want all of the jewels, but they are getting the diamond windows. And their apartments and homes are only a quarter of the size of what you have built here."

"Whatever they want, they'll get, as far as I'm concerned. After the way they fought for us in the Battle of the Solar Station, we owe them a lot."

"That was my thought too, lover."

 

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Framed