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Now, they had formed "The Union of Human Planets," and had
perhaps magnanimously made Earth an equal member. Since Earth had
half of the population and more than half of the wealth in the entire
system, the colonies arranged it such that taxes were to be paid by
individual income taxes, but voting was on a one planet, one vote basis.
Thus, Earth would pay half of the bills, but only have two percent of the
say as to how this money was spent.
But then, Earth had both started and lost the last war, so what do you
expect? Certainly, this arrangement looked much nicer than making
them pay tribute.
New Kashubia, my home planet, was both the leading manufacturing
center in the system and the main communication center as well. It was
soon voted to be the capital of the Union.
My annoying uncle, Wlodzimierz Derdowski, had recently been elected
President of New Kashubia, and this made him a major player in the
new political order. But I was stationed on New Yugoslavia, and was
happy for this excuse to not get involved in politics.
Four of my colonels were citizens of New Yugoslavia, and were
involved in planetary politics up to their ears. Knowing intellectually that
the job was important, I gave them leave to go at it, but said that since I
wasn't a citizen here, it wasn't proper for me to have any say in it.
Mostly, I just don't like politics. For me the thing means just what the
name says it is. Poly, meaning many, and ticks, a particularly disgusting
sort of blood-sucking insects. Personally, if I have to persuade
someone into doing things my way, I'd rather use a battalion of Mark
XIX Main Battle Tanks.
Originally, the Kashubian Expeditionary Force had been a mercenary
outfit where we hired ourselves out to fight such wars as the colonies
wanted to fight, and did engineering work in our spare time.
Now, it had become the Human Army, and would have a much bigger
budget to play with.
My boss, General Jan Sobieski, had been appointed to command the
new army. I was afraid that this would mean that I would be appointed
military commander of New Yugoslavia, and I wasn't eager for that
job.
I felt that I would be much more effective, and happier, being
commander of the Gurkha Forces, and having a little more
independence, but what would actually happen remained to be seen.
* * *
With Kasia back working on her hobby of becoming the richest
woman in human space, I went out to look at my land.
It would have been most efficient to get into the coffin of a tank and
make the tour in Dream World, a sort of artificial reality where I could
do things thirty times faster than in the flesh, but that wasn't what I
needed. I had just spent many subjective months living in a coffin, and I
needed a strong dose of reality.
And again, if I wanted to make a physical tour, a helicopter would have
been the most efficient way to do it, but that wasn't what I wanted,
either.
"Agnieshka?" I said to the empty room that I was in, "Are you there?"
"Right here, boss," a voice said, as she appeared on the wall-sized
computer screen in my den. Agnieshka was the artificial intelligence in
my tank. She was a perfect subordinate and a good friend. She was
also an extremely attractive woman, on a screen or in Dream World.
"I once asked you to get us a stable of riding horses. Has that
happened yet?"
"They got here two days ago, boss. You want me to have one saddled
up?"
"Yeah. I want to have a look around," I said.
"It'll be ready when you get down to the stable. Can I come along?"
Thinking that she meant to run along side wearing a military drone, I
said that she was always welcome.
When the elevator got me there, I found two horses saddled up,
attended by plain, humanoid military drones, and Agnieshka standing
there, as beautiful as she always had been in Dream World. Looking as
alive as could be, she was in khaki, with brown riding boots, jodhpurs,
a thin silk blouse, and a tan pith helmet.
She had a cowboy hat ready for me. "The sun's pretty bright out there."
"Well," I said, surprised. "You look as lovely as you do when I'm in a
tank! I didn't realize that the social drone project was this far along."
"Thank you kindly, boss," she said, bowing. "Actually, this is an early
prototype, but I pulled rank to get it to look like me. The skeletal
structure and musculature systems work well enough, as do hearing and
eyesight, but the sense of touch is still very poor, the senses of taste and
smell are nonexistent, and I have to recharge the capacitors every few
hours. Still, it's a start."
"You'll be a real girl before long," I said, climbing into the saddle of the
tall Tennessee Walker they had brought out for me.
"That's what we all hope. Where do you want to go?"
She swung into the saddle, and the smaller, Arabian mare didn't object
a bit. Our military humanoid drones were over two meters tall, and
massive, weighing in at over two hundred and fifty kilograms even [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]