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elected to decant Wolczynski myself.
"General Wolczynski, I have a great big surprise for you!" I said as his coffin slid out of the back of the
tank. "I really am that Mickolai Derdowski fellow that you heard so much about, andyou are busted !
Take him away, officers!"
They read him his rights, handcuffed him, and searched him. They found his copies of the Articles of
Surrender, which they kept as evidence.
The rest of my squad took turns, decanting and enlightening the other eleven traitors, and had a good
time doing it.
From the jail, we had to work our way back through the old enemy control room, which nobody had yet
started to clean up, into the small tunnel, and eventually up to the surface. I took all of the tanks with us,
since I had a use for those we'd liberated, and I didn't want them commandeered by some other unit.
Conan was just fine, and eager to hear all the news. The quickest way to fill him in was to simply let him
watch Agnieshka's documentary.
We got him out of the tunnel in exactly the same manner as he'd gotten in there, with Zuzanna pulling and
Maria pushing, while Agnieshka rode herd on our bunch of brainless tanks.
We had to drag him all the way back down to the gold layer before there was enough air around so that
when we opened his damaged tank, he didn't die on us.
We had to go through the wrecked control room yet another time, and I had us travel another kilometer
besides, just to get away from the carnage of that place.
When we got Yvette, Conan's tank's computer, plugged into the liberated tank we'd gotten for them, she
complained about the slow, silicon computers that she had to interface with.
"Mickolai, I can handle them, after a fashion, but in a combat situation, I might end up letting you down.
It can't take all that long to replace all five of the silicon things here with the perfectly good diamond
computers from my old body. Please, let's do that."
Actually, it took us three hours, in real time, to do the job. Some of those computers were in very hard
to get at places, and we had to shut down both muon exchange fusion bottles before we dared
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disconnect the computers that controlled them. We also took the time to move the Squid Skin tank cover
over to her new body, since she didn't like the silly paint job somebody had given it. But it was better to
have the team in good shape, and the victory celebration was long over by now, anyway.
When we got back to the populated areas, we found that the communication channels were all again
working.
There was a recorded message waiting for us, from General Sobieski.
It said, "Nice job, Mickolai! You and your squad have earned a chest full of medals each, and probably
a lot more, besides. You have won us a major battle, but you have not won the war, at least not yet.
Earth's Forces have invaded New Yugoslavia. Come home at once."
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Homecoming
We again had priority at the transmitter to New Yugoslavia, courtesy of our general, and the whole trip
only took an hour in real time. I spent the day in Dream World in the sack with Kasia, except when
actually in transit, where we were perforce separated, and that time I spent sleeping.
Warfare sure takes it out of a guy, even when you win.
It can't be the physical strain, since I had spent the whole time physically on my back, floating in the belly
of a tank. It has to be the mental effort of trying to figure out what you are going to do next, and the
anxiety of wondering if you and your people will survive it.
There were a few hundred letters of congratulations waiting for me when we arrived at New Yugoslavia,
but there weren't any more messages from Sobieski, or any orders from anyone. I told Agnieshka to
send all of them a polite reply, and to take us home.
"But shouldn't we report in?" She said.
"Why? General Sobieski knows where we are. The last order I heard was to go home, so that's where
I'm going. He'll call me when he wants me. Anyway, we've got some errands to do before we get
involved with the rest of this war."
"What kind of errands?"
"Like doing something with these tanks we liberated, for one thing," I said.
"Do you plan on keeping them? Wouldn't that be illegal? I mean, they are armed and everything!"
"I don't care. Call them war trophies, if you want to. They're not on the books anywhere, so who will
know about it?"
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"Everybody in Human Space? They were in the documentary I did, remember?"
"Knowing about something, and having it on some bureaucrat's books are two quite different things. As
it is, they'll all assume that somebody else did something about the tanks," I said.
"What do you want with them, anyway?"
"There are well over two dozen damaged tanks around my property with perfectly good computers in
them. We can do some switching around, like we did with Yvette, and make thirteen of those girls well
again. Then, we can take the old damaged tanks and use them for emergency power supplies, since they
will only have silicon electronics, and no real brains to speak of, but they must have working fusion
bottles."
That had to be, since if the fusion bottles had blown, there wouldn't have been anything left of those
tanks in the first place.
"Oh, that's brilliant, boss! We love you for it! But how do we pick who gets a new body?"
"Hold a raffle, I guess, or maybe take the thirteen who have been crippled the longest. That might be the
fairest way to do it."
"I'll set it up. The rest of the squad has come through to New Yugoslavia. Should I tell them to go home,
too?"
"Some rest and recuperation are definitely in order, I'd say. Just tell them to keep in touch, in case we
get some orders."
"Right, sir. We'll be sending the refurbished tanks back to the army?"
"If they ask for them, yes. If not, well, you never can tell when thirteen more main battle tanks might
come in handy. Anyway, those disabled tanks are all taking care of some of our nut cases, aren't they?"
"Boss! Please? Psychiatric patients?"
"Danes?"
"Ah! Now Iknow that you are not serious!"
"Have it your own way. If the army, by which I mean General Sobieski, wants to transfer those patients
to some other coffins, and put those thirteen tanks into combat, he has a perfect right to do so. Until that
time, let it be. Next, I want you to contact some of your coworkers, the ones with engineering talent. I
want a backpack full of power capacitors designed for the humanoid drones to carry, and then see about
getting it into production. It should be simple enough to do. They don't have nearly enough power
available to them, at present."
"Good idea, boss."
"Next, I want the communications improved between the drones and the tanks controlling them. Some
combination of IR, fiber optics, and radio frequency transponders might do the trick. I want something
small and cheap, so that a drone can carry a lot of them, and leave them behind him."
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"Okay."
"Lastly, the tanks themselves need some work. This was the first time that they have actually been used
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