A Boy and His Tank

by Leo Frankowski

  More importantly, I was now able to meet Kasia for a quick lunch. She kept telling me to try wheedling what I could out of my tank, and not make her do all of the work, but I was a little afraid of giving Agnieshka any encouragement at all. That artificial human had the hots for me, and I didn't want to do anything to make her more angry.

  The next Sunday was spent mostly horseback riding, since our sailboat was really gone. We couldn't help speculating about the programming of our Dream World, but what the heck. Life wasn't so bad after all.

  Then the training program was changed a bit for the better, since I was getting deadly sick of pattern identification by then. Mornings were the same, but afternoons were now spent in emergency procedures.

  Driving the tank if Agnieshka's driving computer was defective was not a simple matter of playing with a joy stick. Well, it was, if you were on the surface, but the surface is not a nice place to be in combat, and where else but combat could she drop a whole computer system? I mean, Agnieshka had redundancy nine ways from Thursday. Then, too, these tanks could work underwater by crawling on the bottom, or, with flotation bottles and the right sort of strap-on thrusters, you could be cruising in a one-man submarine.

  Another sort of thruster turned you into a spaceship, and if it was one of those with a Hassan-Smith rig linked back to a fuel stockpile, you could take the damn thing right up into orbit and beyond. Yes, strange to say, we Kashubians had always had the Hassan-Smith engineering, buried in with the weapons specifications that were buried in the main computers, all without our ever knowing it!

  Not that I'd ever dare trying that rocketing to orbit stunt on manual. I wasn't too keen on it with Agnieshka doing the driving! Fortunately, this was all simulated, and New Kashubia couldn't afford the fuel anyway. The lack of organic chemicals was the root cause of this exercise in the first place.

  But despite all the extra capabilities, the Mark XIX Aggressor was mainly intended for use on the ground or under it. The things could tunnel like muskrats, only faster, and right through solid rock.

  How to operate the guns if the ballistic computers went down was another set of emergency procedures, and a far more complicated one than playing bus driver.

  There was a surprising array of possible weapons configurations, depending on the mission we were on and the environment we were fighting in. The main rail gun was the usual weapon of choice, but of course it wouldn't work under water. Or it would, but the shock wave would kill you and your tank if you ever tried it.

  Submerged, lasers were out, too, and we had to rely on three different kinds of homing torpedoes, as well as drones and a subroc, a rocket-torpedo combination job.

  For air or space, there were five different frequencies of lasers available, from IR to X-ray, depending on your environment and your anticipated target, but that `anticipated' business can get you into trouble. With a laser as your main weapon, there are times when the only good response is to do nothing and hope he doesn't see you, if you guessed wrong.

  When you guessed right, lasers could kill at light speed, and the same thing could be said of the particle beams, darn near.

  There were various sorts of rockets, of course, but these were rarely ever intended to actually take out an opponent, being so pitifully slow. They were nice for drawing his fire, though, and some of them had radar rigs in them with a closed link comlaser either back to your tank, or back to a tunneling carrier drone that laid a fiber optic cable back to the tank. This had the advantage that when they traced the rocket home, you could be somewhere else. These radar probes let you take a quick, active peek at what was happening without exposing your own location too accurately. Expensive, but it wasn't my money.

  And drones. We had fourteen kinds of sneaky drones, most of which were mobile, trailing a thin fiber-optic cable, for both command and sensing. They were capacitor powered, and going at their best speed, they were good for only about two hours before they had to come back to their tank for recharging. If they were just sitting and watching, they were good for months. Some drones were simply mobile sensor clusters, but most carried a potent chemical explosive as well. Enemy drones could crawl through the dirt right under you if you weren't very careful.

  Mostly drones were fairly expendable things that took the place of the infantry that we didn't have, but they were also mobile landmines, if you had to use them that way.

  They weren't exactly sentient. In fact, they had a lot in common with a good hunting dog who was absolutely obedient and always knew what you wanted him to do. They even frisked around a lot like a dog, but when they had an IR comlaser link with you, or a fiber-optics cable, you could sort of "switch" your perceptions from your tank up to a drone in some forward position, and it was a lot like actually being there. I kind of liked drones, and the usual tank carried about six of them of different sorts in a hopper on its rear.

  And of course there were mines, some of which were smarter than others. Most of them could act as an extra remote sensor cluster, if you laid a fiber-optic cable out to them.

  Hitting a mine did not necessarily take you out. One of the nice things about the magnetic bars that we rode on was that if you got a few of them blown away, you weren't immobilized the way you would be with a conventional tank tread. In fact, you could lose more than half of your bars and still move, although not at top speed.

  I wasn't trained on any of the antipersonnel weapons, since we wouldn't be equipped with any of them. The war on New Yugoslavia was shaping up to be a strictly armored affair. No foot soldiers need apply.

  About the only other sort of useful modern weapon we didn't stock were atomic bombs. Those were ordinarily reserved for the long-range boys in artillery. They didn't make much sense for those of us who just go in there and slug it out.

  On New Yugoslavia, even the artillery were forbidden nukes. The only powerful international organization on the planet was the Planetary Ecological Council, and they had forbidden the use of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. The last two were useless on armored forces, anyway.

  Despite that, if a tanker knew he was dead anyway, he could still short out his muon generator and go out as the granddaddy of all hydrogen bombs. I didn't like to think about that option. It made it certain that nobody in anything like his right mind would ever try to take a man in a functioning tank prisoner, since you never could tell when you might run up against a fanatic, someone willing to die if he could take you with him.

  It brutalized warfare, making it worse than it had to be, since it eliminated any possibility for mercy. We had to play for keeps. If the enemy had not ejected, you had to kill him. Or her.

  There was a whole style of underground fighting to be learned, and word from on high was that we would be doing more groundhogging than anything else.

  The tanks had a strap-on ultrasonic tunneling rig that worked by pulverizing the rocks in your way into sand, and then fluidizing the sand so it flowed around you and settled in behind. With one, you could go through rock almost as fast as a man could walk.

  An alternate rig had a way of cutting a "hose" through the rock below you and blowing the sand you'd made out the hose. That way, you made a permanent tunnel that you could use again in a hurry, especially if the tunnel was evacuated of air and had a magnetic floor. Then you kept your magnetic treads inside and just zoomed along a few centimeters off the floor. Agnieshka said that under these conditions, we could hit four thousand kilometers an hour!

  The enemy could always find our tunnels easily enough with sonar, but if they used it, we knew exactly where they were. There were all sorts of variations on hide and seek to be learned.

  After a month of underground work, there came the "After Ejection Survival Course." You see, if all else on your tank failed, and you were in an environment where you could survive for a few minutes naked, you could eject out of the back of your tank and try to make it home the hard way, on foot.

  Unfortunately, we did it all with simulations, so I never got a
chance to escape, but on the other hand, Kasia, bless her conniving little soul, rigged it so we could take the course together.

  Our course environment would be the wilds of New Yugoslavia, and it looked like fun.

  Agnieshka pretended that she bought it when we were under three meters of water and two of mud, so I had to set off the charges under her tail to blow us both to the surface, and then blow my coffin out at just the right moment, before the tank settled back down again. I'd been promised that if I didn't do it right the first time, I'd have to wait in a deactivated coffin for three days until the salvage crews arrived, and while I wasn't absolutely sure that she would really do it, I knew that Agnieshka was enough of a bitch to give it a try.

  I got an awful bouncing around and a fair set of bruises, but the escape system worked. I was dumped, still in the coffin, on a muddy beach. I disconnected myself from the helmet and catheters, got out the survival kit, and rescued Agnieshka's main memory banks from the coffin as per regulations.

  You see, while there were a number of other computers built into the tank, Agnieshka's personality and all of her personal memories and records were stored in a rack in the coffin. Saving them not only saved her personality, but they proved that I had been honestly shot up in combat, and hadn't just ditched my tank and run away. Also, I could put that rack into another tank and it would immediately become Agnieshka, ready, willing, and able to fight with me as a team.

  There was a cold breeze on my bare bottom, and I quickly dressed in the only clothes I had: a squidskin camo outfit.

  Squidskin is an active camouflage system that is no thicker than ordinary cloth, but has millions of tiny air bags of different colors, which control the color of any portion of the cloth. If the brown bags are inflated and the others are left slack, the stuff is brown. There are automatic sensors and a computer that looks at the side of you that is away from the enemy and duplicates that pattern exactly on the side toward him. From his point of view, you can't be told from your background, so you become almost invisible, except for a slight outline that is darned hard to spot. The problem is that it works from only one point of view.

  Well, two, since it can also give a proper display to anybody a hundred eighty degrees away from your primary enemy direction, but the extra capability isn't all that useful.

  Usually, you set it so it displayed an orange triangle back toward your own troops, so they won't be tempted to shoot at you. From all other directions squidskin isn't much better than ordinary camo cloth of the right color. Still, it's much better than nothing, and with practice you can keep the system pointed where the enemy is most likely to be.

  There were other squidskin settings. For use on base, it could make itself look like an ordinary uniform, for example. If you played with the controls long enough, you could even come up with a decent masquerade costume. Squid skin couldn't fool a tank's sensors one bit, but then it was unlikely that a tank would ever fire and expose its position just to blow away a man on foot. A foot soldier was too cheap a target.

  I was experimenting with my outfit when Agnieshka showed up, still a buxom redhead. She was playing the part of another busted-out tanker, and the game started. We set up our responder beacons, set traps for rabbits to augment our food supplies, fought a few rounds of hand-to-hand combat, and within a few hours had test-fired our personal weapons and had set up housekeeping.

  Kasia arrived that evening, and with her was her tank's persona, Lech. I didn't like him.

  For one thing, he was two meters tall, he rippled with muscle, and I think he was handsome. Well, one man can't really tell about another, but I'll guarantee that he thought he was handsome.

  Worse yet, Kasia acted like she thought so, too. On top of that, he usually had his arm around her waist, or worse, and she didn't seem to mind it. I even caught the bastard pinching her nipple.

  Much later, our two instructors went out on a scouting patrol and left us on guard duty at our camp. When we were finally alone, I said, "Do you have to let him paw you so much?"

  "What difference does it make, Mickolai? I mean, he's only a machine. Less than that, he's a simulation done by a machine. And I'm not being pawed. A simulation of me sometimes has another simulation's arm around me."

  "Well, I don't like it."

  "Would you be mad if I petted a dog? Because a machine is a lot lower than any animal. I mean, an animal can feel real affection, but Lech can't."

  "No, I wouldn't mind a dog, but dammit, that's not the point!"

  "No, stupid. The point is that you're getting jealous of a few tons of machinery. Straighten your head up! If you'd play up to that big-titted redhead of yours, both of our lives could get a lot nicer! Stop being such a bonehead!"

  "Why did the bastards ever program these machines this way?"

  "How should I know? Maybe the programmers were all perverts. All I know is that this is the world we're stuck with, so we might as well make the best of it. And I'm serious about you playing up to your tank's persona. She's just a machine that's been programmed to make your life easier if you respond in certain ways. Stop being a jerk, and respond the way her program wants."

  "Is that what you do? Give him everything he wants? Has he slept with you?"

  "What possible difference would it make? I mean, for God's sake, the real me is locked up inside of his mechanical body!"

  I turned my back on her. She always has been smarter than me, and I couldn't out-argue her, but darn it, this time I was right and she was wrong, no matter how good she talked.

  "Don't be that way, Mickolai. Okay, if you want the truth, I've never had sex with him, or with his simulation, since that's all that `he' is. Not because there would have been anything wrong with it, but because a woman gets a lot more out of somebody she's conning by selling the sizzle and keeping the steak. I mean, that's standard tactics! Every girl learns that one early on from her mother."

  "Okay, Kasia, and I'm sorry that I can't be as rational about it as you are, but that's just the way I am."

  "And I love you just the way you are, hangups and all. Look, they're going to be gone for a few hours. What say we zip our sleeping bags together and see what can be done about wilderness loving."

  We did that, and a lovely half hour went by before an enemy squad just walked up and shot us both. End of exercise, and those bullets really HURT.

  We each spent the night alone as further punishment for dying on the job, and the next day we had to run the whole exercise over from scratch.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I GO TO WAR

  Training went on for another month, and now there was a lot more skull work. Many hours were spent on strategy and tactics, with extra PT if I blew a test.

  There was a lot of hand-to-hand combat as well, and it was entirely too realistic! Since the whole thing was simulated, we could go ahead and break bones, gouge eyeballs, and rip off testicles without actually ruining anybody, physically, at least.

  But it hurt just like being actually bashed up, and emotionally, well, I had problems with it. I mean, I had a lot of trouble hitting something that looked like a beautiful woman, let alone sticking a knife into one. It took me a screaming fit and a sit-down strike before I was able to get Agnieshka to put on Lech's body and persona when we were on the judo mats. Killing Lech didn't bother me in the least!

  Training went on and on, for fourteen hours a day and six days a week, and none of it involved polishing shoes or marching in parades. But now it was starting to get interesting.

  Agnieshka was telling me one morning that I was halfway through the course when word came to her that things were not going at all well on New Yugoslavia. Our training period was being cut short, and we were shipping out to the front that very day.

  "I don't get this, Agnieshka. How can things be going badly on the battlefront? I mean, we're fighting on both sides, for God's sake. When I was still a civilian, the plan was to milk the war for years with stalemates and silly seesaw battles. Nobody would have be
en dumb enough to change that!"

  "Nobody would have been dumb enough to pay us to do it, either. Look, doctrine is that a trainee isn't supposed to be bothered with the news, but you're not really a trainee any longer, and I think you have a right to know. The fact is that we reneged on our contract with the Serbians. We never did get enough raw troops to fill our contract, let alone trained ones. They foreclosed, took their cash advances back in the form of military hardware, and have started training their own men. Now they've put half-trained men into the field, and they're ripping the hell out of our forces."

  "But how can they do that, if we started training our men earlier? Surely, we should be better than they are," I said.

  "We probably would be, loverboy, if we had any humans fighting on our side, but we don't! Our general in New Croatia has been faking it with tanks going around without human observers, while our real army has been back here training. They called our bluff, and our observerless tanks have been losing at the rate of nine to one! That rate will get even worse as the Serbian observers become more experienced. Despite our huge stockpiles, we can't take casualties like that for long, not even if we had the transporter capacity to make good our losses, which we don't. We've been screwed again, and the enemy is four days from the Croatian capital city of Nova Split!"

  "Good Lord! Does that mean that we'll have to fight a real war?" I said.

  "That or the Kashubians will have to go back to eight hundred fifty calories a day. What do you think we'll be ordered to do?"