“That’s good, sir. We’ve driven them back for now, but I’m down to just the one healthy mentalist for the next week or so. Any chance of another one or two being sent this way?” Silence as he listened to the answer. “Right. And the Kiwis don’t have any?” Silence as he listened. “Well, that can’t be helped. The news about the Indos is good, though, sir.” Another short pause as the person on the other end of the line responded to that comment. “Very good, sir. We’ll try and hold.”

He got off the phone and nodded at Andrew. “You’re my main man until Greaves is out of her hospital bed. Think you can handle it?”

“I have so far, sir. They appear to have many more mentalists than we do, sir, but many of them aren’t that strong, comparatively speaking. At least not the ones I’ve run into.”

“Read your report from training school. You are the strongest of the mentalist trainees in that batch. The others have all been deployed on either the northern front or the northeastern one. This is understandable as they have been sharing one not very strong mentalist between them. The Kiwi convoy is about to leave Wellington, so they should be here in a week or two, although it hasn’t been decided where they’ll unload. Unfortunately, while they have people with the talent, none have had any training, as such talents were frowned upon in Kiwi-land.” He gave his head a little shake. “Much like they were here up until a decade ago.”

He paused for a moment, perhaps reviewing the past, but then he continued. “The good news is the Indos are sending an expeditionary force that will have half a dozen strong mentalists. Although how strong theirs are compared to the Jap ones is anybody’s guess. They might think they’re strong and then find they’re woefully underdone, like our first group.” Then he grinned. “Finally, the tide is turning. Ammunition production is up, and we’re about to introduce the Japs to thirtieth-century warfare with our new drones.”

“Is that what was filling up the helipad area at the hospital?” Andrew asked, forgetting for a moment that he was a private in the office of a Lieutenant Colonel.

“Spotted them, did you? Yes. Both we and the Japs have been using quite a few drones but mostly for surveillance and artillery spotting. All the traditional drone roles. Our strategists have found it interesting that the Japs don’t seem to regard them as weapons in their own right. We haven’t been subject to mass attacks by kamikaze drones so far. There have been some used on apparently choice targets, but generally, they haven’t attacked infrastructure or the population. When you think about it, what with them being Jeps and all, it is kind of odd.” He shook his head in puzzlement.

“Of course, our air defenses are quite good and have had a fair bit of practical experience in recent years, which they discovered very rapidly as we shot down several hundred drones in the first few days. Not that we don’t have the same problems. Their cyborg lasers are more than capable of taking down drones at a low altitude, and the chips in the cyborg’s heads mean they have no trouble competing the angles and how much to lead the target on the fly in the field without the computer set up that we have on our defense systems.”