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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.

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.

 

 

 

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