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"That would be purely physical, without the mental coordination that you also need."
"Follow orders, dammit!"
"Yes, sir."
I woke up a hundred meters from the top of the shaft, at combat speed. Conan and Maria, on the
opposite side of the "cork," were already moving the truck from the center to a position over themselves.
We went over the lip, and bloomed like a flower, spreading outward exactly the way we had in the last
simulation.
What wasn't like the simulation was the pile of debris we found around us.
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All of our maps of the surface had been made by the first probe to get to this system, a hundred years
ago. Very few people had been on the surface since then, and those few hadn't done any mapping. Why
bother? What changes on an airless planet?
When the Japanese had dug the shaft, they had apparently taken the debris that their machines had
removed and used a linear accelerator to blast it up and out of the hole. This debris had settled around
the hole like a pile of volcanic ash. It even looked like a volcano, from the outside.
From the inside, it looked like we were in a huge funnel, with a hole in the bottom that went down
forever. I felt Agnieshka firing two of the charges that were normally used to right a tank that had been
turned over. This had the effect of giving us enough spin to make a complete flip before we came down,
hard on our bottom, on the funnel of debris. Over the years, the metallic debris had vacuum welded itself
into a solid mass that was more than a bit slippery.
Almost any metal will weld itself to just about any other metal that it is placed in contact with. This
doesn't happen on planets like Earth because in an atmosphere, metals are coated with a thin layer of air,
which keeps them from actually touching each other. On an airless world like New Kashubia, metals lack
that coating, and they weld up solid.
The other tanks also fired charges, while the drones just did the best they could.
I saw two of the wheeled models slide back down into the shaft, gone forever, the poor little devils.
The truck had no such charges, and wouldn't have had the brains to use them if it did. It came down on
its back, and its thin skin just split open, scattering ammo boxes all over the slope. Conan managed to get
one of his manipulator hands stuck deep into the debris for traction, and to grab the truck with the other
before it followed some of the ammo boxes into the hole.
I looked around, and saw that we were all alive and upright. We still had most of the ammo and most of
the drones, including all of the humanoid ones. The tiny mice all survived by biting into the slope with their
carbide teeth, and then waiting for rescue.
We were still in business.
"I intend to write avery stern letter to my travel agent," Maria said. "This isnot my idea of a fun
vacation!"
The truck was beyond repair, with one tread completely broken off. We switched off its little brain to
make it stop running its remaining tread. Then we started to collect up our scattered property.
I fired my X-ray laser at the debris, and found that I could melt a step of sorts into it. Kasia and Quincy
soon joined me, and before too long we had cut ourselves a stairway out of the funnel, and a path all the
way around the shaft leading up to it.
"It's a shame that we have to let the Earthers know that we were here," Kasia said.
Quincy said, "If they can climb up that shaft after us, maybe they deserve to find us."
We set up a bucket brigade to get the ammo boxes and most of the remaining drones to the top of the
cone. The humanoid drones didn't need any help. In fact, they could get around better than the tanks
could, and did most of the collecting for us. The human shape is indeed very good for getting through
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rough terrain.
When the truck was emptied out, we threw it down the shaft. If somebody was actually trying to follow
us, the falling truck would probably take them out. Anyway, there was no point in leaving another sign
that said "Derdowski was here."
Once we got to the top, we just pulled in our treads and slid down the volcano, with Conan muttering
about surfing in a Mark XIX Main Battle Tank. Zuzanna, a historian by trade, began singing something
that she claimed was an ancient surfing song, originally done by the Beach Bums of California.
Everybody thinks of New Kashubia as being a smooth metal ball, but that is not the case. It shrank a lot
in cooling, and from space it resembles a surface that has been painted with a crinkle finish paint, the sort
that you sometimes see on ancient electronic gear. When you are on the surface, it looks like you are
surrounded by huge, black sand dunes, except that the dunes are made of solid tungsten.
The sky was black, and filled with unfamiliar constellations. The tiny sun was little more than a bright
star, and to human senses it would seem very dark even at high noon. But we were seeing through a
tank's sensors, where starlight alone is plenty of illumination.
Nobody in New Kashubia lived on the outside of the planet, because twice a local year it passed
through the searchlight beams of radiation coming from its neutron sun. When that happened, you'd better
have at least twenty meters of metal overhead. We had eight Earth-standard days before the next
radiation bath, so we weren't particularly worried about it.
We had plenty of time to get killed some other way first.
While our sun wasn't much to look at, the searchlight beams it radiated were, and we were looking at
them almost edge on. It was a spectacular view, with two great spiraling arms swinging past and out to
forever. There wasn't much dust in this system, but even the smallest particles were heated white-hot in
those beams.
But we were not here to enjoy the view. We were here to shoot it up.
I'd hoped to get well away from the shaft, in case we were followed, but carrying the extra ammo
without the aid of the truck would have meant that we had to make three trips, there and back,
everywhere we went. We climbed over one dune, and decided that the east west valley there was good
enough.
We went to the bottom of the valley. Zuzanna, Conan, and Maria raised their rail guns, aimed, and
opened fire. I sent the drones out to set up a perimeter defense, and the other three of us went back for
more ammo.
They couldn't see the probe they were shooting at, even with a tank's sensors. That would have taken a
twenty-meter telescope and a bit of luck. But we did know exactly where it was, and that was good
enough for the computers in our tanks.
In an atmosphere, a blast from a rail gun looks like a blinding white ray that lights up the planet out to the
horizon. It is so loud that it can cause permanent deafness at five hundred meters. The first needle fired in
a rail gun burst never gets to the end of the rails. It is vaporized first. But it knocks a hole in the air for the
second needle to travel in, which makes it a few meters farther, and before too long a stream of needles
is moving along at a quarter of light speed, each riding in the hard vacuum wake of the one in front of it. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]