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That last wasn't a standard military order, but everybody knew what I meant. The drones came back as
fast as they could, the girls dropped back to cover us, and the four of us humans went up to the new rear
where it was relatively safe, or at least less dangerous. We all faced to our old rear, which is much of the
reason why I'm still alive today.
A few drones who were closest were soon busy stringing fiber optic-cables between us, and I was
quickly giving the Combat Control Computer and the artillery our present location. The global positioning
satellites were long gone, but our own internal inertial guidance system always tells us exactly where we
are, right down to the nearest centimeter.
I saw the units on both of our flanks imitate our maneuver, so the Combat Control Computer apparently
approved of what I did. His circuits must have been busy giving the word to the whole assault force,
because he was a full minute getting back to me.
I felt him come on-line, but I never heard what he had to say.
The first enemy tank to break the surface came spewing up from the ground over a kilometer away from
us, and his first act was not to fire at us, but while he was still in the air, he sent a slash of almost
relativistic osmium needles across the ground that cut all of our optical fibers. A second tank came up
within milliseconds after him to knock out our IR repeaters. Our lines of communication had been cut!
A bare kilometer to our rear, virtually on top of us by the standards of modern combat, a total of
seventy-two Serbian tanks erupted from the ground, coming up fast at such a steep angle that I was sure
that they must have been hundreds of meters down when we went over them. They must have really
gunned it for the last few meters, because they overrode their ultrasonic tunnelers and they came flying
out of the ground in a spray of sand.
I said "DO IT THUS," as I got Eva to work, blinding as many of them as possible with her X-ray laser.
But there were so many of the bastards that she and I were more than five whole seconds doing the job,
and in that horribly long time, they chopped us up into tin cans and dog food!
In coming up so fast and so steeply, they had exposed their relatively poorly armored bellies to us for
almost two seconds. I think that they had planned to catch us from the rear, and blow us all away before
we had time to rotate our guns or even think. But since we were already facing in the right direction, in
those brief moments my squad killed almost thirty of them!
That helped, but it was not nearly enough to insure our survival. We were still outnumbered by more
than three to one, and they all had observers!
Yet even as Eva and I had told the girls where the enemy was, the Serbs were obvious enough that even
an empty tank could spot them. And of course, once the enemy opened fire, the girls would have had no
problems knowing where they were, even if they'd been hiding. To a certain extent, the enemy's bad
tactics had offset their overwhelming advantage in observers.
They did nothing to offset our disadvantage in numbers, and we bled. Despite the fact that half the
enemy was blind, all around me, I saw my friends and trusting subordinates die.
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We all fired all of our rockets to give the enemy something to shoot at besides us, and were surprised
when two of them actually got through and took out a couple of the Serbian tanks. They tried the same
stunt on us, but I ordered the others to ignore the rockets and concentrate on the tanks, while for a few
moments Eva and I worked on the incoming rockets with her laser. We got most of them, but nothing
that my team could do could offset the enemy's godawful numerical superiority.
Zuzanna and her Kazimierz were cut in half right down the middle by a burst of rail gun fire. Radek and
Boom-Boom spun halfway around, trying to run away, I think, and then suddenly their entire front half
was gone, and the rest of it did a double flip in the air. All nine of the girls with rail guns were killed, one
after another, and Quincy's tank went silent. In a few seconds, Agnieshka, Eva, and I were alone with
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