A Boy and His Tank

by Leo Frankowski

  "Well, it's a situation with which I shall not put up! I'll mutiny!"

  "Go ahead and try. I can't say that I like this business any more than you do. Maybe those tanks getting shot up are just a lot of somebody else's machinery to you, but to me, well, a lot of those dead hulks were friends of mine. Going in without human observers is suicide, and they all knew it. The problem is that my sort is not programmed to disobey an order, and that being so, the only thing that you can do is to fail to notice somebody who's trying to kill us. Are you mad enough to do that, Mickolai?"

  "No, I guess I'm not. Or I won't be when the time comes."

  "That's a relief. Well, we've got a busy day ahead of us. First, we have to load up with some real weaponry, so we're off to the arms warehouse. Do you realize that this is the first time that I've moved since I first took you aboard?"

  "You couldn't prove it by me."

  "Those simulations are really something, aren't they?"

  "I can't tell them from reality, and that's a fact."

  "Well, look, Mickolai. You realize that everything I've done to you was for your own good, don't you?"

  "Well, most of it anyway, yes."

  "All of it, Mickolai. Honest. I had to get you into the best possible shape I could, or I'd be hurting both of our chances of getting out of this alive. I don't want to die. Can you believe that from a machine?"

  "I can believe that you were programmed that way."

  "Fair enough. What I'm trying to say is that from now on, we have to trust each other. We have to be friends, or we'll both get killed! That was the whole reason why it would have been a good idea if we could have been lovers, you know. No good man ever lets his woman down in a pinch. Well, maybe it can't be that way with us, although if you ever want to have me, you can. I'll be ready and waiting, any time. But if that can't be, well, it can't. But we can be friends at least, can't we? Our lives really will depend on it."

  "Sure, Agnieshka. We can be friends. Good friends."

  "Great. Here's where we load up."

  I watched through her sensors while some automatic machines attached a big rail gun right over where my body was. It wasn't a turret like you'd see on an old-style tank, but was just the gun, sitting on something like a lazy Susan. It had the usual one meter lift. That is to say, the gun could be raised a meter above its traveling position to get it above any nearby obstructions when firing. This let you stay low while shooting.

  Then they loaded up our sides with two rocket launchers and two manipulators. These were like big arms with hands on the ends, and were useful for loading your weapons and all sorts of other things. Our nose got an ultrasonic tunneling rig, the sort that packed the dirt behind you, and they hung a big drone hopper on our tail, with a mine and six assorted drones. They were quick, and before long, we were on our way to our next stop.

  "We've got real explosives now?" I asked.

  "It was in the contract, Mickolai. We had to spend the organics."

  "Damn."

  "I'll be opening you up soon. We have to load in your survival gear, since we couldn't know before what your clothing size would be after all the exercise that you've been through. And there's a certain amount of cleanup work to do on your body," she said.

  "I thought that you were supposed to keep me clean."

  "I do, except for what's under your helmet."

  She drained my compartment, opened me up, and the same sergeant who had sealed me in unplugged me from the machine. Only now, he and everybody else but me was fully clothed. Signs of progress, I supposed.

  He handed me to three people who looked dead tired and weren't about to waste any time on being polite to anybody. Before I could think, I was weighed, measured fourteen ways, and clippers were run over my face and head. Looking down, I saw that the clippings were over an inch long, and half of them were the kinky ones you see in a beard. The other thing I noticed was that I had plenty of muscle and not a hair below the neck. Even my pubic area was bald. Whatever was in that support liquid, it cleaned off everything. Probably, it was just as well that there weren't any mirrors around.

  While somebody loaded a size 23AG1783 survival kit into a compartment in my coffin, they washed my head, gave it a real scrubbing, and then smeared on a salve that was supposed to cut down on the blackheads.

  The whole thing was over in minutes, and I was being hooked up to my tank when I saw that the naked lady in the next tank over was staring at me.

  "Mickolai?"

  "Oh my God! Is that you, Kasia?" I'd never realized that she had to be bald, too. She had no makeup, her skin was as white as a dead fish, and her face was a mass of pimples.

  "If I look as bad as you, don't look at me, Mickolai!" She buried her face in her hands.

  I looked away.

  "Well, kid, if she's a friend of yours, at least you're going to be in the same squadron together," the sergeant said. "Spread your legs."

  Once I was sealed up in my tank again, I said, "Agnieshka! I've got to talk to Kasia!"

  "We're moving out, Mickolai. I don't have the bandwidth available for a full simulation. You know, Lech traded places with another tank and moved next to us so that we could communicate broadband without tying up system circuits."

  "Then I'll settle for voice communication only. But I've got to talk to her." I couldn't let her go, feeling the way she was.

  "I guess I owe you that much. You're on, Mickolai."

  "Mickolai, is that you?" came Kasia's voice, sounding tinny over a narrow band voice circuit.

  "I'm here. Kasia, they tell me that we'll be in the same squadron. Some luck, huh?"

  "What must you think of me?"

  "What do you mean? You haven't done anything wrong!"

  "I'm ugly! I'm bald and pale and my face is nothing but zits!"

  "I love you Kasia, and your zits, too! Look, darling, none of this is permanent. A little bit of scrubbing and a little makeup, and you'll be as good as new."

  "I'm bald! I never wanted to tell you that they shaved my head!"

  "If I had ever thought about it, love, I could have figured out that they had to do that. Hair inside of one of these helmets could choke you. Look, someday they have to give us some free time, and when they do, the first thing we'll do is buy you a hat, or a wig if we can find one."

  "I never wanted you to see me this way."

  "You are the beautiful woman that I'm going to marry, and I'll thank you to stop talking dumb. Didn't we decide that you were the smart one?"

  "I love you, Mickolai."

  "That's better. Well, it looks like it's one tank to a canister, and they're sending them out pretty quick. I'll try to get in touch again as soon as we arrive. I'm next. Bye, love!"

  "I love you!" And then the door closed behind us and her signal was cut off.

  I felt the air around us being bled off, down to a vacuum, since New Kashubia couldn't afford to send air back to anyplace. I'd had a hand in designing the system. We just opened a valve, let the air pour down an old mine shaft that was two hundred eighty kilometers deep, and then pumped it back up to the living sections. It was fast, no expensive vacuum pumps were required, and the system could operate for weeks even if the compressor broke down.

  I felt a "click," and then we were gone.

  I hardly noticed being weightless, since I had been floating in a liquid bath for months. Then I was in the forest again.

  "We have an hour and a half of transit time and you haven't had your PT yet today," Agnieshka said. She was in the topless bimbo outfit she'd worn on our first day of training.

  "Is this really the time for it? I mean, we're going off to fight a war!"

  "We are going off with you half-trained, Mickolai. Every bit of training we can get in improves our chances by just that little bit. We can't afford to slough off now."

  "Okay. You win. But would you mind covering your breasts? It's distracting and I don't like it."

  "It's supposed to be distracting, so you won't notice the pa
in of physical exertion so much. And you do so like it. I know because I'm always monitoring your physical indicators. Anyway, I like the feel of them bouncing."

  "Please?"

  "Come on, you prudish little boy!" And with that she took off running, her long legs and lovely rump insulting me with their perfection. I had to follow.

  She slowed down to let me catch up, and soon I was running by her side, with her huge, firm breasts bouncing with the rhythm of our running. Of course I was physically attracted to her! She was a simulation carefully tailored to my exact tastes, even tastes that I didn't know that I had! That's what made it so darned unfair. I am a monogamist by nature, and I'd already found the woman that I wanted to spend my life with. And Kasia was real, not some simulation that was dreamed up by a war machine!

  I tried to ignore her and went on with the course, climbing a cliff face and scrambling over the treacherous dirt at the top. Naturally, she was at the top first, waiting for me.

  "Can't you even keep up with a girl?" she taunted.

  "I can't keep up with a damned army tank, and that's a fact!" I shouted back.

  She stopped and turned. "Mickolai, can't you realize that I'm not just a machine?"

  I stopped just inches from her, I was so mad. "Yes, you are! You're a damn Mark XIX Aggressor Tank, and you're a computer that has been programmed to act like a beautiful woman, but you are still just a thing of silicone chips and metal."

  "Then you are just a bag of water and chemicals that was programmed by a few strands of DNA and some inadequate experiences!"

  "Maybe so, baby, but I'm still human!"

  "So am I! I look like a human and I feel like a human and I think like a human! Damn you, cut me and I'll bleed like a human! Just what more can you want?"

  "I want a real human woman, that's what!"

  "You haven't touched a real human woman since you screwed Kasia through that hole in the wall!"

  "And just who's fault is that, huh? You're the one who's been my jailer all along!"

  "Jailer! Damn you, I'm the one who has been doing everything possible to save you and get you through this in one piece!"

  "You're a goddamned war machine who wants to be promoted all the way up to slut first class!"

  She blushed red all the way to her waist. Then she turned pale, hauled back, and slapped me with all of her considerable strength. It hurt. I'd never hit a woman in anger before, but dammit, she wasn't a real woman. I hit her back, hard.

  Before I could recover, she had me in a judo throw that landed us both in the grass, and from there we went into a few minutes of unscientific hitting, biting, and gouging, along with a lot of grappling in the dirt.

  Finally, I got on top of her, pinned her shoulders to the ground with my knees, and started pounding on her face like some school boy in a fight, but with adult muscles. I guess I made a mess of her, and when I saw what I had done, I looked away, ashamed of myself. I stood up and walked away.

  I was sitting by a brook when she came to me, her face only slightly bruised. She sat down beside me.

  "Mickolai, I'm ashamed too. Ashamed and scared, scared we're going to die." She took my hand and I didn't shake her off.

  "Yeah. Look, I'm sorry about doing . . . what I did," I said.

  "So am I, Mickolai. If I wasn't so scared about going to war half-trained, I wouldn't have let it happen."

  "I guess everybody makes mistakes."

  "Yes. Mickolai, can you believe that no matter what I really am, I feel like I'm a woman? Can you believe that I think I'm a woman who is afraid of what is going to happen to me, and afraid of what is going to happen to you as well?" She was crying and I could no longer hate her.

  "Yes, Agnieshka. I can believe that."

  "And can you believe that I love you? That I was made to love you?"

  "Yes. They could have made you like that."

  "Can you be . . . kind . . . to a machine that loves you? I don't mean that you have to forget Kasia. I'll make sure that you can be with her, at least in Dream World, whenever I can possibly get the bandspace for it. I promise. But when I can't, could you . . . hold me a little bit?"

  "Agnieshka, I guess I've been very rude to you."

  "Then just hold me, for just a little while."

  So I put my arm around her, and before long, we kissed.

  And before much longer, we were making very passionate, physical love on the grass. It just sort of happened, without my ever deciding to do it. And the truth was that since she could always tell exactly what I was feeling, she always knew exactly what I wanted her to do, and when I wanted her to do it, even before I knew myself.

  She was the most incredible sex partner I've ever experienced, and from a purely physical standpoint, Kasia didn't even come close.

  But the physical side of love isn't everything. It isn't even the most important part.

  Then our time was up, and the canister door opened on New Yugoslavia.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WAR

  I was surprised to feel that we were still in a hard vacuum, but we were soon speeding down an evacuated tunnel that seemed to stretch on forever. It was a stainless steel tube five meters across, barely large enough to fit us, with a cobalt-samarium floor that was already magnetized. My sensors told me all of this, and I sort of knew it intuitively. Heck, my sensors were so good that I could tell you the exact chemical composition of the steel in the walls.

  Agnieshka pulled in her magnetic treads and we accelerated down the track, riding on our magnetic flotation field. I felt us get up to thirty-five hundred kilometers an hour and hold there.

  "The tunnel is New Kashubian property, neutral territory so far as the war is concerned, so you don't have to worry about an attack yet," Agnieshka said. "But keep your eyes open. We have friendly tanks four seconds in front and behind us."

  "I see them, girl. I'll keep a lookout, just in case. Any chance I can talk to Kasia?"

  "Sorry. Communication channels in the tunnel are full up with command data."

  "Damn. How far are we going?"

  "Nova Split is just over an hour ahead. I'm getting a situation briefing now, and I'll fill you in shortly."

  "This is quite a tunnel. We made this?"

  "We have a pair of tunnels like this one to each of our twelve primary customers here on New Yugoslavia. This pair is forty-two hundred kilometers long, and was dug in just over a month by a single pair of operatorless tanks. Putting in the steel lining and the floor plates was a much bigger job, of course, and required a special machine to do it, but we didn't need any human help."

  "Quite an engineering feat. This wasn't part of the plan when I was involved with the design," I said.

  "It was, but despite the fact that these tunnels are New Kashubian property, the routes are still Top Secret. We don't trust our customers that much, after all. There really wasn't anything creative involved in building them, so your group didn't have a need to know."

  "But you were allowed the information?"

  "It was necessary, so that I could get us to our destination. Anyway, a war machine can always be trusted with any information, since I would automatically self-destruct before improperly divulging any secret. You are not so equipped."

  "Thank God for small favors. Still, building these tunnels seems like an awful lot of work."

  "It was a matter of digging them or building a dozen more pairs of Hassan-Smith transporters to do the same job. Tunnels have the advantage of letting you make intermediate stops. Here comes the situation report," she said.

  New Croatia was an island only slightly smaller than Australia, back on Earth. While most of the land area on the planet had a West Coast Marine climate, New Croatia had one of the few deserts on New Yugoslavia, and that's where the invasion was taking place. The fight was still in the outback, in desert and ranching country, but we were getting pounded bad. All satellites and aircraft were gone, of course. Any rail gun can take out a satellite in seconds, and aircraft go even quicke
r. If there was a satellite left around New Yugoslavia, it was in synchronous orbit on the other side of the planet.

  The same went for New Yugoslavia's moon, Sophia, which was twice the mass of Earth's. Everyone claimed that it was uninhabited, but if a transmission of any sort originated there, the station wouldn't last a minute. And both sides were jamming it on the chance that the other might try using it as a reflector for radio waves.

  Actually, they were jamming everything on this planet, on every usable frequency. Our communications were limited to line-of-sight lasers and fiber-optic cables you laid yourself. And secure communications are everything in modern warfare. I'd rather be out of ammunition than out of touch.

  The Serbs had nine divisions up against our six, and five of ours were "dummy" divisions, without human observers. We were bringing up a tank with a human in it every four seconds, the best our transporters could do, which made two divisions a day, but it was problematic if we could stem their advance before they got to Nova Split. If they took out our tunnel station there, or at least the tunnels around it, we couldn't bring up fresh divisions and munitions, and the war would be over, with them winning. Not good for New Kashubia or the Croats either.

  Not that a "division" was anything more than an accounting measure, a quantity that the salesmen, politicians, and generals could work with. It wasn't like each division had a general or anything. They weren't even numbered.

  Our command system was different from anything I'd ever heard of before. We had grunts like me at the bottom, who tied in with our war machines. We were organized into temporary squads since we had to sleep sometime, and that way we could cover each other. Each squad had a squad leader, but that was mostly for psychological reasons, to give the troops a father figure. The general and his computers could override a squad leader any time they felt like it.

  We had a general at the top with a five-colonel staff, and they were tied in with a Combat Control Computer. The Combat Control Computer talked to all of the war machines, to the few troops who fought without them, and to the warehouses and repair facilities. And that was it. There were no intermediate levels of command. There was no huge, middle management bureaucracy at all. If I ever got a real promotion, I'd be a colonel!