Chapter 3

We had it! The R&D people had come through with a robot and explosive charge combination that one person could carry and operate. Not only that, they had come up with a folding shield that would protect the robot from the fish's machine gun bullets. No more stalemate, we were back on top!

We rushed the system into production and were ready to try it out almost immediately, thanks to the wonders of time travel. Several humans had jumped to the future and trained with the system so that they were ready to use it on the next raid.

We decided to test the robot on a single planet before committing to a complete full scale conversion of tactics. There was a planet, Zifron, which was ideal for the test. This was a purely strategic outpost which had no native population to worry about. Zifron was strictly a guard station for the fish's FTL trade routes. Since there was no native population to be controlled, the fish had only one residence on the planet. If it were not for the testing considerations, we would have ignored Zifron completely.

We estimated that there would be only one fish and the standard complement of grokin soldiers. The whole Retro Team wanted to go on the raid, mostly because we were nearly overcome with boredom. Still, we needed to see what a squad of regular troops could do, so we went along as observers, instead of combatants. That didn't mean that we went unarmed, we just didn't expect to do much or any fighting. Between the tourists and the fighters, we had a group of 12 humans and 4 grokins.

We took care of the single remotely controlled machine gun at the door. With 16 people shooting at it, the controller didn't know where to shoot back. I know, I know, we Retro Team members weren't supposed to do anything but observe, but we just couldn't resist the opportunity to shoot at something.

After a sound dressing down by the squad leader for interfering, we all marched into the residence with the Retro Team taking up the rear. Once we were all inside, the squad split up into its pairs to investigate the various corridors.

In only a few minutes, a pillbox was found and we were all called to its vicinity. The trained operator quickly set up the robot with its charge and shield. The shield was a cone with a very shallow slope so that it would deflect most bullets that hit it. A shot would have to come in from nearly overhead to hit the shell at 90 degrees. The whole thing was quite small, only 4 feet in diameter when the shield was fully extended. I thought it looked like a Chinese coolie hat on tracks!

The robot was driven toward the pillbox and it received innumerable hits from the machine gun bullets. The sound was almost musical. Nothing slowed down the robot and it quickly reached the pillbox. The trigger button was pushed and there was a big flash and an explosion which ripped the pillbox into small pieces. With nothing to stop us, we walked up to the site of the explosion and stopped to examine the results.

We were amazed to find that the shield had survived the adventure unharmed. It was spring-loaded and set to fly off just before the explosion. The consensus was, what the hell, let's use it again on the next robot. Maybe we could save some effort if we could reuse the shield, we sure were not going to be able to reuse the robot!

Julia spotted a problem, though. This pillbox was armored with only relatively light sheet metal. Our charge was too far away to be effective if the armor had been a thick, reinforced concrete shell. Eventually, the fish were going to recognize this design defect and improve the armor. She suggested that we mount the demolition charge on a telescoping stick that could push the charge up against the shield. A shaped charge could be used under these circumstances and could demolish a much thicker barrier than the same simple charge could do. We would bring up the idea to R&D as soon as we got back to headquarters.

Meanwhile, we still had a residence to capture. The squad broke into pairs, again, and started searching the corridors for the next pillbox. It was found and destroyed just as the first one had been. We were happy to note that this was settling into a comfortable routine, already. This time, the shield was bent and we could not salvage it. Oh, well, we couldn't win them all!

We had only gone a little way farther when we heard the sound of shooting by small arms. We hurried in the direction of the sound as fast as we safely could. As we got closer to the apparent source, the sound of the shooting died off, and it was completely gone by the time we got there. Instead, there was a pandemonium of celebration going on. The grokins had been released from slavery much sooner than we had expected.

We had released the entire complement of grokin troops as we had marched down the hall. The shooting had come about because there appeared to be a wave-front of release as we got closer, so that the grokins closest to us were released first, and the grokins still controlled by the fish had shot at them under orders from the fish. Finally, we had gotten close enough that all had been released and the shooting stopped. Unfortunately, some of the grokins had been killed before we were close enough to free all of them.

This phenomenon excited me and I started to get some wild ideas. I asked the grokins not to kill the fish when we stunned it, because we needed a live fish to study under laboratory conditions. They reluctantly agreed, and some went to turn off the shielding field while others led us to the fish tank where we stunned it for capture.

I transported back to headquarters and called for a meeting with the big brains in R&D. I had an inkling of a glimmer of a faint stirring of an idea that needed some expert help to push it along. I wondered if the shielding effect of humans could, somehow, be additive. It seemed to me that our range at shielding from the mind control of the fish was greater this time than it had been previously in our attacks on the residences.

We had been having 4 humans in a squad, but this time we had 12 humans together. I was sure that our effect reached out farther than it ever had before with 4 humans. The original attack on us on Earth had shown an effect reaching even farther, where we had hundreds of humans together. If this additive effect were real, maybe we could make use of it.