Leo Frankowski & Dave Grossman - The War With Earth

The War With Earth

Leo Frankowski

and

Dave Grossman

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is

purely coincidental.

thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-3615-6

Cover art by Mark Hennessey-Barrett

First printing, July 2003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Frankowski, Leo, 1943-

The war with Earth / Leo Frankowski & Dave Grossman.

p. cm.

"A Baen Books original."

ISBN 0-7434-3615-6

1. Mines and mineral resources—Fiction. 2. Life on other

planets—Fiction.

3. Space warfare—Fiction. I. Grossman, Dave. II. Title.

PS3556.R347W37 2003

813'.54—dc21

2003006199

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my lovely wife, Marina, my beautiful daughter,

Katia, and to the Ancient City of Tver, Russia, the "City of Beautiful

Women," where I am building my castle, and have made my home.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Edward Dunnigan and Jackie Britton for their

suggestions and their proofreading of this manuscript, and my remarkable

partner, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, for always being at my side,

even though we live half a world from each other.

Baen Books by Leo Frankowski

A Boy and His Tank

The War With Earth (with Dave Grossman)

The Fata Morgana

Conrad's Time Machine

PROLOGUE

An Amphibious Attack

on Baden-Baden Island

Rail guns and X-ray lasers being what they are, military doctrine is that if you can see

it, you can kill it. If they can see you, you are dead.

The art of war has become the art of not being seen.

Thus it was that I was in my tank, crawling along the bottom of the ocean, leading

three squads of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces against the invaders from Earth.

They had picked the most isolated spot on the planet for their beachhead, a group of six

uninhabited islands under the jurisdiction of the smallest nation on New Yugoslavia, the

German Enclave.

New Yugoslavia's turbulent seas protected us from both enemy sonar and almost

everything in the electromagnetic spectrum. Oh, a deep-scan radar might have found us,

if it was looking down from low orbit, but rail guns from both sides had taken out

everything in orbit long ago.

Anyone using a high-flying aircraft in wartime is simply suicidal.

We had been down here for seven of the planet's short, twenty-hour days, and we had

been having a fine enough time of it. The fiber-optic communication cables we trailed

behind us were finer than a human hair, and needed constant patching in these seas. We

had lost contact with our main forces three hours after we left, as expected, but we were

in touch with each other. Keeping us connected was the job of three semisentient aquatic

drones, and not my worry. Connected, we had the bandwidth we needed to live together

in Dream World, a sort of virtual reality.

Since all of our tanks had the diamond semiconductor upgrade, they could keep us in

Dream World at thirty times normal speed. To us, the week had seemed like almost six

standard months. Having one's lifespan effectively expanded by a factor of thirty was one

of the fringe benefits of the job.

A dozen of my people had been raw recruits when we started, and this gave them the

time they needed to get through basic training, and then to see a good deal of simulated

combat.

Of course, they weren't told that it was simulated. Dream World was convincing

enough to make them think that they were really fighting, and that their friends were

dying around them. It was rough on them psychologically, but it let us turn out seasoned

troops without having to kill any of them.

After all, they did it to me, and I turned out okay.

I spent most of my time at the University of Oxbridge, working on my B.S. in

Agriculture. I already had a Bachelors degree in engineering and a Ph.D. in Military

Science, but I also had a major tract of land on New Yugoslavia, and when this war was

over, I wanted to be able to manage it properly.

My wife, Kasia, was in her own tank, a hundred meters to my left. She was studying

economics, and fuming about not being able to keep in touch with what her stocks were

doing on the market. She'd made a fortune at it during our last leave.

One of my subordinate squad leaders, Mirko, spent his spare time in Dream World,

working his small farm with two draft horses, the same thing he had just done in the flesh

during his last leave. An odd fellow, but a good man to have on your side when things got

complicated. He had a knack for asking the right simple question which then made

everything else fall into place.

The other squad leader, Lloyd Tomlinson, was also attending the university, working

on his law degree, and dating half the girls in the local town.

Maria and Conan seemed to be spending most of their spare time in the sack together.

They said that they were too much in love to risk spoiling it by getting married.

Quincy and Zuzanna had been comfortably married for fifty years. He spent much of

his time teaching the martial arts and The Way Of The Warrior to the recruits, and

anybody else who was interested, including me. Zuzanna usually lived in a sort of

pseudo-medieval world filled with castles, knights, and dragons, where magic worked

and she was a great warlock.

Dream World could be pretty much whatever you wanted it to be, provided you

obeyed orders.

We old hands got together fairly often, socially, and when we did, the intelligent

computers in our tanks were always invited. Mine was named Agnieshka. She was a

beautiful woman in Dream World, and a good friend of my wife. Kasia's tank was Eva, a

slender Irish girl with huge green eyes. She was equipped with a rail gun for this mission,

rather than her usual X-ray laser. When their training schedules permitted, the recruits

and their tanks were invited along as well.

Of course, I saw to it that we spent enough time preparing for the upcoming battle,

and making sure that everyone knew what our objectives were. They all knew precisely

what to do, for at least the first few seconds, at which time I privately expected the battle

plan to go west.

They always do.

After that, well, you improvise a lot.

We were now five kilometers from shore, three hundred meters below the surface,

nicely lined up, and at a dead stop.

The general rules also state that when you can no longer stay hidden, you should stay

quick.

We were well equipped for this. Magnetically strapped to the back of each tank was a

thruster unit normally used for space flight. Each unit had a gimbal-mounted hydrogen-

oxygen rocket capable of accelerating the tank at forty Gs, which we humans could

survive because we were each floating in a liquid bath with the same average density as

our bodies.

The unit also contained a pair of Hassan-Smith receivers spatially connected through

four other dimensions to some major fuel tanks somewhere on the planet. Thus, we could

continue accelerating indefinitely, since we didn't have to carry our fuel along with us.

This was the trick that let us get to the stars in the first place.

It was a pity that the transporters didn't conveniently lend themselves for use as a

battlefield communication device.

A Mark XIX Main Battle Tank does not have a good hydrodynamic form. It's mostly

an armored fusion power supply with some computers and a human being inside.

It moved itself around using a MagLev track-laying system, laying magnetic bars in

front of itself, gliding over them, and picking them up as it left. When traveling over a

ferro-magnetic surface, it could keep the bars inside itself, magnetize the surface and then

move much faster over it. And when you put one on a real MagLev track, it could really

move out, hitting three thousand kilometers an hour, in a vacuum.

Weapons and other useful things are strapped on the outside, pretty much wherever

they'll fit. However, for this mission, there was a way around this unstreamlined shape.

Attached to the front of each tank was a long pole tipped with something that looked

a lot like an arrowhead from an ancient crossbow bolt. When pushed hard enough

through the water, and with air injected just behind the arrowhead, a cavity formed

behind it that was big enough for the tank to ride inside. Once we were moving fast

enough, the air was no longer needed, and we were moving in something close to a hard

vacuum. This permitted us to reach supersonic speeds, under water. At least it worked

fine on rocket-powered torpedoes, and we had even tested it, once, on an empty tank,

which was good enough for a Kashubian veteran.

When Agnieshka told me that everybody was ready, and the moment had come when

our orders said we should attack, I said, "Ladies and gentlemen! It's time to see to the

Earthworms' proper education! We must teach them that it is not nice to invade

somebody else's planet. I'll see you again when we're airborne! Let's move!"

But actually, it was Agnieshka who gave the firing signal. Timing on this one was

very important.

Dream World vanished and I was working at combat speed, which is as fast as the

human brain can operate without damage. For me, that was fifty-five times normal.

Soldiers in combat often feel a natural form of this, where it seems that the world slows

down around them. What we used was machine augmented, and vastly accelerated.

It is difficult, or perhaps impossible to describe fighting at combat speed in a tank.

You and your tank's computers become a single entity. All of its sensors become your

senses, and you can see everything from thirty cycles per second up to and including hard

X-rays. Only it isn't exactly seeing. You are touching and hearing and smelling as well,

all at the same time. You can taste the chemical makeup of everything around you, and

feel every vibration. The tank is your body, and you know exactly what every part of it is

doing. When you give your tank an order, you don't work any controls or exactly say

anything. You just know what should be done, she knows what you want, and she does it.

So when I try to describe something, it's not what really happened. It's just the closest

that I can come to explaining what was going on.

The thruster let loose and slammed us forward. We never hit anything like forty Gs,

not with the water slowing us down, but it was still a rough ride. The hair-thin fiber-optic

cable parted immediately, and the drones were left far behind. With any luck, they'd show

up later. For a while, Agnieshka and I were all alone, and I could see nothing but the

bubble around us.

I could feel her injecting liquid air from our coolant bottle into the vents just behind

the arrowhead, mixing in enough hydrogen tapped from the thruster to warm it up to a

level just below what might damage our sensors, and igniting the mixture. The vibrations

got worse until we were entirely inside the bubble. Then it got smoother while the

acceleration got higher. Agnieshka cut the air off, because we didn't need it any more.

We broke the surface a hundred meters from the beach, long before any of our

bubbles reached the surface behind us to give us away. Hitting the air actually slowed us

down a bit. The long pole and arrowhead were jettisoned, no longer needed.

The Mark XIX doesn't have a good aerodynamic shape, either, but if you put enough

power behind it, you can fly a lead brick.

We were traveling at fifteen hundred kilometers per hour, but because we were

mentally at combat speed, it seemed to me that we were only going at a leisurely twenty-

seven kilometers per hour, with plenty of time to look around and pick out our targets.

Once out of the water, I was in communication with my team again by laser, and all

of my sensors were operating once more.

A quick look around told me that my seventeen subordinates were flying parallel to

me a half meter above the waves, in a line two kilometers wide. Our sonic shock waves

were kicking up huge rooster tails behind us.

A glance up told me that the artillery was not letting us down. Six thousand

launchers, scattered up to eight thousand kilometers away, were each firing fifteen rounds

in a time-on-target barrage, mostly to keep our opponents from noticing us too soon.

I was surprised to see that quite a few of the self-targeting smart shells were getting

through, and not being hit by enemy counterfire. The Earthworms were definitely not on

the ball. Having a stupid enemy is one of the things that every soldier dreams about, but

never believes can actually happen to him.

But to make proper use of an artillery barrage, you have to be willing to risk a few

casualties. You must hit the enemy while the last of your rounds are still incoming,

before he has a chance to look around and notice who is really killing him. Thus, to have

a fair number of our shells not be shot out of the sky was not entirely wonderful, but there

was nothing for it but to press on regardless. Maybe our shells were smart enough to tell

the good guys from the bad ones.

One could always hope.

I heard Lloyd yell "Tally Ho!" and open up with his rail gun before I spotted any of

the enemy myself. Then I saw that they were dug into some low dunes just past the

beach. The beach defenses were not shooting at our artillery shells, having apparently

been ordered to keep on the lookout for somebody exactly like yours truly. But the

temptation to keep your weapon pointed up, so that you could take out a shell that might

be coming straight at you was just too strong for those boys. Their muzzles were all

straight up, and not trained at us at all.

That was their fatal mistake.

My rail gun put a swarm of osmium needles, traveling at a quarter of light speed with

only three meters between them, across two hundred meters of the dunes, a split second

before Kasia on my left and Zuzanna on my right did the same. I saw a dozen Earth tanks

peel open like so many flowers blooming on a television nature program. They never got

a burst off at us, being too busy looking up at the incoming artillery, I suppose.

We went up and over the dunes, cutting a two-kilometer-wide swath through the

length of an island that was only four kilometers wide. General Sobieski hadn't been

much interested in capturing prisoners. He just wanted them gone from our planet. This

made things a lot easier.

Off to my right, one of the new recruits under Mirko went down in a spray of sand

and vegetation. He'd been a safecracker from Nova Split that everybody called Frenchy,

and I'd rather liked the kid, but there was no stopping for him, not now. As best as I could

tell, he'd been hit by one of our own artillery shells. It didn't explode, so its little brain

had probably been fried out by an enemy X-ray laser.

Just damned rotten luck.

A rolling artillery barrage preceded us as we cut through the island, but now, since

the dangerous period of breaking through their shore defenses was over, the exploding

shells stayed ahead of us by more than three hundred meters.

Five kilometers in, we came across a fair-sized base. Intelligence hadn't mentioned

anything like this! There looked to be thousands of troops running madly about. Infantry?

Why in hell would anybody bring infantry into a war zone?

Hundreds of tank turrets and artillery pieces were spinning toward us, and not a few

shoulder-held rockets were being brought up. There wasn't anything that we could do but

open up on them. We either had to take out their heavy weapons or get killed ourselves.

"Rip 'em up!" I yelled.

An unprotected human body within two hundred meters of a rail gun blast is dead.

That was the main reason why our tanks were so heavily armored, to protect us from our

own weapons. There wasn't any armor that could protect us from a direct hit by an enemy

rail gun.

The Earthworms never had a chance. We were flying two meters above the ground at

supersonic speed, in tanks with the aerodynamic qualities of a brick. The shock waves we

were generating in the air alone would have killed most of those guys, and when you add

the rail guns into the equation, it was a total massacre, bloody and simple.

They did get off a few rounds. I saw a tank on my left flank explode in the air as its

fusion bottle blew, and bits of his armor tore into the earth.

That was a rare thing. Usually, dozens of fail-safes stopped your power supply from

turning into a medium-sized thermonuclear bomb, but anything that can go wrong,

sometimes does.

There was no hope for our trooper, whoever he was. Nor for anyone unprotected

within two kilometers of the explosion. As it was, the blast knocked me a hundred meters

off course, and damn nearly knocked my wife into the dirt, but we didn't lose anybody

else. We closed up the gaps, and we were all soon back on course.

The rest of the fifteen-kilometer island went fairly smoothly, although my troops

were taking out anything that looked as if it ever once might have wanted to be alive.

Losing a few of your own does that to people.

In real time, we went the length of the island in thirty-six seconds. At combat speed,

it felt like it was over half an hour, plenty of time to not miss anything.

Then, having taken out both ends and the center of the enemy-held island, I split what

remained of my team in half. We made a U-turn over the ocean and came back at them.

We worked over both edges of the island that we had skipped on the way in, taking them

on the flank.

The time-on-target rolling artillery barrage was still just ahead of us. Those guys, or

rather their computers, were really on the ball. We were picking our rail gun targets, and

then shooting them up through the exploding artillery. It was pretty effective.

There wasn't much resistance. Most of the enemy had abandoned their positions and

run for it. Just where they were planning to run to was beyond me, but as a military force,

they were done.

Our second wave was already arriving, crawling out of the ocean. The two hundred

tanks were equipped with antipersonnel drones, semi-intelligent, expendable robots that

could round up the survivors and clean up any small pockets of resistance.

My three squads headed for the beach, not wanting to look at the carnage we had

created inland.

We landed around the tank that had taken one of our own artillery shells, and formed

a defensive circle. Mirko got out of his tank and walked naked over to the bent and

wrecked machine that held the body of one of his men. It was the kind of thing that he

had to do by himself.

Then, to the wonderment of us all, the coffin slowly emerged from the back of the

wreck! Frenchy, shaken but still alive, sat up, took off his helmet, and pulled out the

computer that held his tank's personality.

The rest of us gave him an enthusiastic cheer, over the comm lasers and out our

external speakers, too! Most of us waved to him with our manipulator arms.

He waved back to us, but he was unable to go any farther.

Mirko shouted, "Both of his legs are broken! Somebody call for an ambulance!"

There are limits to what armor and fluid suspension can protect you from. But

without it, well, in the old days, when a combat plane drilled in, the pilot was driven into

his boots so hard that they exploded.

Mirko stood there next to Frenchy, and we waited for help to arrive.

The recruit who had been killed was Bogdan Miskovich. I'd liked him, too.

Actually, our losses were far lower than I had expected them to be, when I had been

given this mission. They used to call the first wave on a frontal attack The Forlorn Hope.

We had been very lucky.

Leo Frankowski & Dave Grossman - The War With Earth

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