Chapter 2

A lot of effort had gone into educating the humans we had rescued from the "devil dogs" in what their new home was like and how to live happily in it. Some of the people had trouble acclimatizing, but most were able to adapt without too much anguish. Those with adaptation difficulties were given extensive counseling, and they finally came around. We now had the core of an army intent on defeating the fish monsters.

So far, we were batting 1.000 against the fish, but that was only two battles, so we tried not to get overconfident. Unfortunately, we did make a serious mistake on our next strike.

We had been so successful with our attack on Paradise, that we thought we'd try an experiment with our next effort. This was a situation similar to Paradise, where the fish had occupied only a limited number of locations on the planet and exercised their control from these citadels. The natives of this planet, Holorin, looked like the koalas of Earth, even to their size. They were arboreal, and had little physical skills. However, the Holorins were consummate computer programmers. They had developed a computer language which was similar to Lisp which could process scripts so fast that the user thought that he was dealing with a compiled system. The Holorins never bothered with number crunching programs; this type of program was considered to be too trivial to be interesting.

The fish had adopted the Holorin computer language to control their FTL spaceships, and were forcing them to adapt their computer language to control other complex machines. It was this boring repetitive work that was driving the Holorins to intellectual extinction. We were sure that the Holorins would gladly welcome our intervention in their slavery.

Our surgeons had been working as fast as they could to install the communicators in the brains of all the humans in the new army. This now gave us a pool of recruits for our shock troops. Training had gone so well that it was decided to try this attack without using any of the original Retro Team members. We Retro Team members were unhappy about being left out of the game, but realized that it had to happen sometime; there were just not enough of us to make a large striking force.

The attack on Holorin was going to take a larger force than we had used on the previous attack. There were 23 citadels which we needed to attack all at once, so 24 squads of 8 members were organized and trained with new squad leaders. We Retro Team members simply supervised the training while keeping our hands off, otherwise.

The fish surely had to have taken some precautions to protect themselves since our previous attack, so we didn't expect a cake walk, but we did expect cooperation from the natives. This was our key mistake!

Our combat squads were transported in and approached each of the citadels through the freight docks. Uh-oh! First lesson: NEVER DO THE SAME THING TWICE IN A ROW! Our troops were met with withering machine gun fire. Some people from every one of the attacking squads were wounded and a few were killed.

Lynx's squad lost two wounded and one killed in their first approach. The machine guns were remotely controlled, possibly by AI. Lynx knew that the controllers, if sentients, couldn't be the natives, simply because they were not attuned to that type of mental activity. If they were controlled by sentients, the controllers were out of range of the humans' shielding effect. The remaining humans spread out to diffuse the target presented to the machine guns and to try for a better firing angle for their grenade launchers. The battle lasted nearly 30 minutes before the last machine gun was destroyed. The killed and wounded were moved to the original jump point and transported back to headquarters, and replacements were sent in.

Lynx moved her squad back through the loading dock, but they were a lot more careful about how they advanced down the corridor toward the center of the building. Each member of the squad had a heads-up-display, HUD, which could show a map of the previous residences. We didn't have a lot of hope that this map would be of much value, but it was worth a try and didn't cost the squad members anything but a little RAM in their onboard computer.

The squad quickly found that the map was, indeed, useless, so they were back to trying to find their way by sheer guesswork. The only clue they had that they were making any progress was that they would occasionally meet a machine gun pillbox which they had to take out. These pillboxes did no damage to the humans, but they were a damned nuisance.

A member of Lynx's squad came up with the idea that they split up into 2-man details who would look for the next pillbox. The internal communicators still worked fine inside the citadel, so they could call for help when they found a pillbox or anything else interesting. That way, they could cover 4 times the real estate they were working, now. Lynx agreed, so that was what they did.

This was when the fish blundered! It decided to ambush the invaders by having some of its troops hide in an alcove and shoot the humans as they passed by. As soon as the humans got close enough, the fish's hold on its defenders vanished. The defenders dropped their weapons and called out to the humans.

The defenders turned out to be grokins! These grokins were a treasure trove of information. The rest of the squad was called to their location where they reformed and the grokins retrieved their weapons. Lynx now had guides who showed the humans where to find the fish tank and where to watch out for pillboxes.

With the guides help, Lynx's squad was able to sneak up to the location of the fire control station for the machine guns and release the grokins manning those controls. They then advanced rapidly to the location of the fish's tank and shot it with a blast from the stun gun. Lynx looked the other way while her new friends killed the hated fish monster.

One of her new recruits ran to turn off the shield and Lynx reported her success to headquarters. She gave us a complete rundown on her activities during the invasion and we sent in more people to insure that the situation was stabilized.

Amy had a brainstorm! She suggested that we transport in another person to each citadel with all of the information that Lynx had acquired and have him cross through the shield to transfer the information to the squad inside the building. The courier could do this easily since the HUD and computer already had the necessary hardware and software. This idea worked out so well that it became an important part of our standard operating procedure, SOP.

The other squads had been having as much trouble as had Lynx's, but the new information was all they needed to wrap up their part of the operation fairly quickly. However, strangely enough, not a single fish survived.

The Holorins were ecstatic to be rid of the fish monsters and offered to do everything they could to upgrade our computer systems to help fight the fish. They were even willing to do the trivial programming we needed!

We were still batting 1.000, but not without loss this time. A big ceremony was held to memorialize the fallen comrades and to thank the wounded for their gallant efforts. Medals and promotions were handed out, as appropriate, and a cathartic time was had by all.

The next day we began planning our next operation. We felt that we were still inexperienced enough that we should stick to the small unit operations for now and avoid a full scale war. However, we now had enough soldiers committed to our cause that we could hit more than one planet at a time. In fact, the fish held such a wide sway through the galaxy that we were going to have to hit in more than one place at a time to be able to make any headway against them.

We decided to hit three different planets at the same time because we wanted to keep the fish guessing what we would do next. We also needed to keep pressure on them so that they couldn't mount a full scale attack on us. Thankfully, they were lousy generals, so we had a fighting chance.

We found three planets only loosely held by the fish in that they did not have a large presence on the planets. The planet Arwin was mostly grassland with a dominant species of ruminants which reminded me of the story of the minotaur from ancient Greece. These people did not have a particular specialty that the fish used; rather, these people were just general laborers.

Minwow was a general mixture of topography much like the Earth. Its attraction was its mineral wealth of all types. It was loaded with standard stuff, such as iron, aluminum, and cobalt. The locals, who were generally humanoid, except for 4 arms, were very adept at mining and refining the ore. Therefore, there was constant export traffic of heavy manufactured goods, including FTL spaceships. Knocking off Minwow would put a serious dent in the fish economy.

The third target was a race of intellectuals and dreamers. Bollywog was a planet of unbelievable beauty, if you were an earthworm, which the Bollywogites were. The average adult was about 3 feet long and 4 inches in diameter. The attraction of Bollywog for the fish was that the natives could dream up the best fish pornographic stories imaginable. An assignment as a supervisor to Bollywog was a real plum, sought after by every fish of high enough rank.