Leo Frankowski & Dave Grossman - The War With Earth.pdf - Leo Frankowski - margozap

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

Leo Frankowski & Dave Grossman - The War With Earth.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: