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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Something Wicked This Way Comes
New Kashubia, 2205 a.d. 

There were six generals waiting in the meeting room, and each of us had five colonels and seven electronic people with us. We were all in class A uniforms, except for the professors, who wore their inevitable tweeds. Our insignia was traditional. Generals wore a star, colonels an eagle, majors an oak leaf, captains, two silver bars.

Being in Dream World, the room was exactly the size that it needed to be. Every one of us had the ability to stop the action and discuss matters privately with anyone we wanted to, for however long we wanted, without disturbing the others at the meeting.

In so many ways, Dream World was a very convenient way to do business.

I never used the stop action option, at first because I wanted Sobieski to get on with it, and then because everything he said scared the shit out of me!

General Sobieski stepped up to the podium.

"I want to cover some lesser matters first before we get on to the main subject of discussion," he said.

Three hours of accounting procedures before he gets around to mentioning that we are at war! I thought to myself.

"There are some lessons to be learned from the last war," Sobieski continued. "The biggest one is that it does you little good to have overwhelming firepower if you cannot get that firepower to the battlefield. In the War with Earth, we were able to overcome that difficulty with a stratagem developed by Colonel Quincy Tsenovi here."

He stopped to give Quincy a round of applause from all present. Quincy smiled and nodded to their approval. Then Sobieski continued, "But doing that made it a hairy operation. It required absolutely precise timing by hundreds of thousands of units. Any one of a thousand things could have gone wrong, and lost us the war. We were lucky, even though many things did go wrong, costing us many good men and machines.

"But in the future, we will see to it that we have a sufficient number of Hassan-Smith transporters to get our army to wherever they are needed very quickly. This will take some years to accomplish, but it will be done. New production lines here in New Kashubia have already been designed and funded, and construction has already begun.

"Next, during the assault on Earth's Solar Station, the enemy wisely targeted General Derdowski's CCC. He had seven supply trucks with him that looked identical to his CCC, and the enemy managed to knock out six of them without hitting the CCC. Each of those trucks had a guard, and the enemy ignored them to hit the trucks.

"Again, we were very lucky, because without Derdowski and his CCC, we could have either lost the entire war, or we could have lost touch with the thousands of robot ships that are continuing the exploration of space, and the expansion of Human Space. That would have stunted our growth for fifty years.

"Besides adding more trucks as targets, and guarding them better, we will adopt a practice of always sending at least two CCCs on each mission. Other suggestions are welcome.

"Also, our streamlined command structure, which can have a hundred thousand men and fighting machines reporting to a single CCC is a bit extreme. In the future, there will be typically ten thousand tanks per CCC, and every fighting unit will have several CCCs that it can report to, should its primary one be knocked out. This will involve vastly expanding our officer corps, but there is a lot of good talent out there.

"Lastly, the army itself will be vastly expanded. New Kashubia will soon be passing a law requiring universal military service for all full citizens. You don't have to join the army, but if you don't, you can't vote. It is likely that most of the other planets will soon be following suit.

"You might reasonably ask why all of this huge expenditure of wealth and manpower is necessary. The answer is simple. Humanity now faces the worst enemy that could possibly be. They are very ancient, with histories that go back for almost seven million years. They are incredibly numerous, with at least sixty-eight thousand planets that have populations of perhaps a hundred and fifty billion people on each of them. And they are unspeakably evil. When they take a new planet, they eradicate absolutely all life on it, usually using thousands of neutron bombs in low orbit, in addition to totally poisoning all life in its oceans. That, and they regularly eat their own children. In fact, they don't seem to eat anything else.

"There are only two things that give us any possible hope of defeating them. The first is that despite their great age, they have never developed computers to the extent that we have. They have nothing like our electronic people. The second is that they have never developed anything like our Hassan-Smith transporters. They are limited strictly to the speed of light. And since their domain is some six thousand light-years across, we will never have to face more than a small percentage of them at any one time.

"On the other hand, they have several technologies that we, at present, can't begin to understand. They can, for example, accelerate and decelerate from almost light speed instantaneously. And they have some sort of a shield that can deflect rail gun needles, among other things.

"We have one of their ships. In time, we will learn more about them, and their technology. Because they are limited to light speed, it is likely that they do not yet know that we exist, and this gives us time to prepare.

"But, the indications are that they have already scouted all or most of Human Space, and have been doing so for hundreds—or even thousands—of years. Their attack may come sooner than we think. We may have five years, we may have fifty. But when it happens, we'd better be ready.

"This afternoon, we will be going over the taking of that alien ship, and explaining what little we know about it.

"That's all for now. Dismissed."

Mickolai found himself wishing that he was still at last night's party.

 

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