The War With Earth Read Online Free

military disaster to get your promotion through."
    "That still puts me in range of being a colonel, doesn't it?"
    "I'm afraid not. Being a good leader is different from being a good subordinate. The skills required of a good colonel are different from the skills required of a good general. In the category of being a staff officer, you don't even come close. Your wife is a fine colonel, Mickolai, but you are not. With our computer-controlled command structure, the dozens of layers of middle managers in the usual military structure are done away with. There is only one general, five staff officers, and a lot of fighting men and machines."
    "So I'm still a tanker." I put my head down on my arms.
    "Yes, though you're a Tanker First Class. One of the very best."
    "And all of that schooling was for nothing."
    "You made cum laude but not summa cum laude . After graduation, you managed to totally defeat the enemy, but the man who is our current commanding general accomplished much the same thing as you did without losing a single man, and without killing a single enemy soldier or civilian. Furthermore, he captured all of their equipment without having to destroy any of it. I can get you a recording of what he did if you want to see it."
    "Huh. Maybe later. So who was this guy, anyway?" I said, getting a bit interested.
    "You haven't met him, though perhaps I can get you an introduction to do so. He is a Pole with a bit of Kashubian blood in him. His name is Jan Sobieski."
    "Not the ancient King Jan Sobieski, of course," I said. "Again, maybe later. So, what happened to my classmates, my supposed colonels? Besides Kasia, I mean. They were real, weren't they?"
    "They were all biological humans, and they all have made tanker first. In the unlikely event that you ever do get promoted to general, they will make colonel."
    "Yeah, best to keep the team together. But aside from Kasia, all of them were Croatians, not Kashubians. How did that happen?"
    "They really were captured by the Serbians, during the first attack of the war. The Serbians really did load them involuntarily into Serbian tanks. Once we took command of both sides, we were going to repatriate them, but your colonels were among those who volunteered to stay in the army. The timing was right and their qualifications were good, so their training was incorporated into your training program."
    "Huh. One other thing. What really happened to Neto Kondo? I never did buy that crap about his 'emotional unsuitability.' Neto was a fine, intelligent, and stable man."
    "He went permanently insane, Mickolai. His tank's computer crashed when he was tunneling a road under the biggest ocean on New Yugoslavia. It was a week before he could be retrieved, and while his tank's subsystems kept him physically alive, he was done in by a combination of claustrophobia and stimulus deprivation. An unfortunate accident."
    "Tunneling a road underneath an ocean? What the hell for?"
    "That's what we've really been doing here on New Yugoslavia. We've been working on an engineering project. After all, while you were lying in my coffin being trained, it was only reasonable that the tank should be put to one of its many other uses."
    "An engineering project. Shit. Neto was a good man. All that character, brilliance, and schooling gone to waste," I said.
    "True. Even a construction project is not without its casualties. Still, wasn't the school enjoyable for its own sake?"
    "I suppose it was, and what the heck, it was only two months, in the real world."
    "I'm afraid not, Mickolai. You see, you spent the time in me, not in a real Combat Control Computer. I don't have the capability of keeping you in Dream World at combat speed, running at fifty times normal speed."
    "You're telling me that eight years has gone by?"
    "No. I was upgraded a few months ago with the diamond semiconductors that are now available. I can now handle Dream World about thirty times faster than I could before."
    So the breakthrough in