Immediately, I was surrounded with the noise and smell and smoke of an inner city dive, with a nearly naked waitress bringing me another drink. Agnieshka was on the stage with another naked woman, shaking her body lasciviously. I downed my drink and called for another.
I remember the rest of that evening only in bits and pieces, but I do remember getting into a fight, beating up the bouncer, and taking some licks of my own in the process. I also vaguely recall fornicating with one of the dancers on the stage, a little bit before that.
I woke up in a dirty hotel room with a splitting headache and two days' growth on my face. One of my eyes was swollen shut and a few of my teeth were loose. Incredibly thirsty, I stumbled to the bathroom and drew a glass of water, which came out reddish brown from the rusty iron pipes.
I looked at it, but decided not to drink the filthy stuff.
"Agnieshka, you are taking this too damn far! Put me back in my cottage!"
"Yes, sir," she said, and I was there. She was wearing a conservative blouse and skirt, and looked a little shamefaced.
"Good. Now you can get rid of my hangover, my wounds, and my two-day beard. Better," I said, since now my clothes were as clean and as fit as my body. "Now, get me some breakfast, and Agnieshka, I like your outfit."
We ate a silent meal, but when we finished, she said, "Mickolai, I don't think that I like you as much when you're drunk."
"Sometimes, I don't like me very much, either. Just be glad that I don't do it very often. Look, how is the digging coming?"
"We just got into position. There are no indications of enemy activity. I can put up what's left of the sensor cluster at any time."
"Good. Let's do it."
The top of a sensor cluster has a small ultrasonic rig like the big one in front of the tank. It went through the three meters of solid rock that separated us from the world outside in a few seconds.
I looked around from my mountaintop in the morning sunshine, surprised that it was still so early.
A real drunk would have taken at least two days to do it and recover afterward, but such are the advantages of Dream World.
The pass below us looked as if it had never been used, at least not by any heavy military equipment. Far to the west, I could see the flashes of a firefight on the horizon, but from that direction there were no military units of any flavor in view.
Give 'em hell, gang, I thought to them.
The surprise came from the southeast. There looked to be a whole division down there in a valley, sitting quietly in nice neat rows!
I had Agnieshka count them, computers being better at that sort of thing than us watery types, and she came up with ten thousand tanks. Ten thousand exactly.
There were exactly two thousand artillery pieces and exactly twenty-six hundred ammunition trucks, the usual divisional compliment. And everything was all shiny and new.
"Well, whoever they are, they've never seen combat, and that's a fact," I said.
"They can't be ours, Mickolai. I know for certain that we had no uncommitted units. We were fighting without any reserves at all!"
"But as hard as we were pressing the Serbians, would it make sense for them to keep an entire division out of action? Another thing: those lines are awfully neat. They look like something done by an old-style military academy."
"Or by machines in a factory. I see what you are saying. Neatness is not stressed in our human training procedures. It makes for a mind set that likes straight lines, square corners and other things easy to spot and target," she said.
"All of which makes me wonder if we are looking at a completely empty division. What if the Serbians couldn't get enough volunteers to man all the stuff they took from us, and they didn't hit on the trick of mixing empty and full tanks the way we did. What if they brought their spares over here planning to use them as replacements, or hoping to get more volunteers once the war was in full swing?"
"Maybe. Except that our intelligence team was absolutely positive that the Serbs had committed their entire ten divisions to the battle. They were going for broke! They didn't have any reserves either, not even on their own continent. We know that they were running low on artillery ammunition, at least. Otherwise, they could have smeared us after we cleared the field of the drones in our second battle. Yet from the way that those ammunition trucks are sitting, I'm sure that they are all full."
"Well, there are ten other warring countries on this poor, abused planet," I said. "Can it be that they are from some other outfit that is planning to come in on one side or the other?"
"If they were on our side, I don't see how they could possibly have gotten here. They couldn't have tunneled in this close to the Serbian beach head without being detected. The Serbs have that place very well instrumented and guarded, I can assure you. It wouldn't still exist if it wasn't. We would have taken it out by now. But if they were fighting for the Serbs, they would be fighting right now. They wouldn't be just sitting there doing nothing. There is a major battle still going on, and I think the Serbs are getting plastered."
"It's a puzzlement. Let's sit and watch it for a while."
We watched and waited, and nothing moved, nothing happened. After a while, I got to looking very carefully at the tracks left in the dirt by the division when it had arrived.
Weather on New Yugoslavia is almost always pleasant, and severe storms are rare. But those tracks looked awfully sharp and new.
I said, "You know, I think that they got here very recently. I wish it was still night, so I could see the heat signatures better, but I would swear that they have been here for only a few hours. What if those greedy bastard politicians we have back in New Kashubia got offered more money for another division than they would have wanted to refuse?"
"Wouldn't that be treason? But you know them better than I do, Mickolai."
"I'm even related to some of them, and yes, if you offered Uncle Wlodzimierz enough, he could talk himself into believing that one more little division couldn't do that much harm."
"So what do we do, boss?"
"We get back to our lines and report this to the general. Our people had better know about it. Agnieshka, go back down the way we came. Going through the sand we made will be a lot faster than cutting through rock. Then we drive right back home like we know what we are doing, and trust to our luck. Maybe we can figure some way to make them not blow us away."
The sensor cluster retracted and I felt us starting to go down.
It occurred to me that some time in the distant future, someone would find the tunnel filled with sand that we had carved into the mountain, circling and climbing all the way up to the peak, and that someone would blow out the sand, put up a sign, and make a profitable venture out of driving tourists up to Lookout Point. Who knows? Maybe I would do it myself!
But soon, the dumb idea evaporated, and I got to thinking about the problem at hand. I pondered the whole way down, and by the time we broke back into the open air, I was pretty sure of what to do.
"Agnieshka, it's simple! I don't know why I didn't think of it before, or why you didn't either, for that matter.
"We have a drone with us! He still has over two hundred kilometers of optical fiber on him and he has a range of over a hundred. We can dig in way back from our lines and send the drone in to do the explaining! And then, if they'll hook up to our cable, we can explain it to them ourselves."
"Well, I think that they would be more likely to shoot at a drone than at a tank. Most likely, it will be taken out by another drone without anybody noticing. Did you talk to the last drone that came at you out of the east?"
"Ouch," I said. "Still, I think it's a chance worth taking."
"I hope so."
That was when we hit the land mine.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LAND MINES
We were doing more than a hundred and thirty when, without any warning at all, the front of the tank bucked up with brutal force.
If I hadn't been floating in a liquid with t
he same average density of my body tissues, I certainly would have been killed. As it was, the local differences in the density of my tissues came near to tearing me apart. I could feel my bones being yanked downward, while my lungs rammed painfully into my ribcage. My skull bashed down into my helmet while it jerked upward, and my intestines tried to pull themselves up out of my body.
Every joint I owned was wrenched, and I was too shaken up to think clearly.
If I'd had my wits about me, and if my reflexes had been quick enough, I would have hit the ejection button right then and there. Only I didn't and they weren't so I stayed aboard.
I never lost consciousness, but for a time I wished that I had. I could feel us fly tumbling through the air, to make almost half a flip and to come in upside down with our tail burying itself in the sand. There were a few more bumps, and then all was silent, all was darkness, and I was alone.
I stayed quiet for a while, catching my breath and letting my body draw itself back together. I was completely in the dark, I could see nothing at all and I could hear nothing but my own breathing and heart beat. I was in pain, and only fact that I could breathe told me that all was not absolutely lost.
"Agnieshka?"
There was no answer, and a cold icicle of fear went through me. I was encased in an armored coffin and nothing seemed to work!
"Agnieshka. Come in, please. I need you, pretty girl."
Still nothing. Think. Think, man!
I was far behind the Serbian lines. The odds of somebody coming to help me were so small that they weren't worth thinking about. If I was going to live through this one, I'd have to do it myself.
Well. The tank was upside down and laying on its tail at perhaps a twenty-degree angle, judging from how low my head felt. The coffin slide motor was entirely too small to move the entire tank, so that was out.
The emergency ejection mechanism used a chemical charge to blow the coffin out. If the coffin was buried and couldn't move, the energy in that explosive had to go somewhere, and my body was the likely dumping ground. I obviously couldn't even think of ejecting until the rear of the tank was clear of the ground, and just then it was sitting in the worst possible position.
Fortunately, the designers of the tank had foreseen this possible dilemma, and had made provisions for solving it. There were eight explosive charges built into the hull that could safely flip the tank, or even blow it six meters into the air.
I'd used the system before in simulations. I flipped open the protective lid that covered the controls, braced myself for another brutal shock, and pressed the button that would blow the upper left rear charge.
Nothing happened.
When I started breathing again, I tried the upper right rear charge, since it would work equally well, only it didn't work either. Neither did the top front charges. Or any combination of the above. The emergency orientation system was out.
I tried the manual drive controls near my right hand. After all, for all I knew, the tank could be balanced on something, needing only the slightest motion to topple it. I fumbled for the controls, I moved them and they felt dead. Nothing happened at all! Everything couldn't be out! I was still breathing, wasn't I?
I tried the weapons, and they were gone, too. Well, I didn't really expect the rockets to do anything. I'd used them up last night. But the rail gun did nothing, and the drone did not respond.
I slipped my hands into the control gloves of the manipulator arms, and while the right one was out, I could feel the left one move! Something! I had something! I wouldn't have to lay here on my face until I died!
I tried to use the arm to push the tank upright, but it didn't have nearly the required strength. I quickly stopped trying.
It was likely that tank was on capacitor power only, and I suspected that I had very little of that. I had to conserve power. And think!
The mine. I had a land mine in the drone hopper that I hadn't used. If I could set it off under one side of the tank, maybe I could flip myself back upright! At least it was worth a try, especially since I couldn't think of anything else that could save my life. Land mines were normally set off electronically through Agnieshka, but the design was a very old one—face it, there isn't much creative that you can design into a new land mine—and it still had manual controls on it. The tactile feedback on the manipulator arms was fairly good, and I felt my way back along the hull to the drone hopper.
I soon discovered that the hopper was buried in the desert sand. Well, at least it wasn't rock. I started to dig, wondering just how long my air would hold out.
My oxygen was supplied by the microorganisms in the bio-tank, but they were kept alive by a growing light powered by the main reactor. I was pretty sure that the reactor was out, or other things would be powered up that weren't. I didn't know how long an algae would keep working without imitation sunlight, but I was sure that it wasn't long. I might not have time to dig out! Oh, there was a makeup cylinder that compensated for system leaks or other losses, but it was pretty small. I might even be running on it now.
The coolant bottle! I had a big cylinder of liquid air on board, and there had been plenty of time since the battle for it to recharge completely. It was usually used to cool the observer when the tank was putting out a lot of power, or to cool the hull when there was danger of the warmth of the hull being observed. But it made sense that the designers of this tank would make it available to the observer if something went wrong and the bio-tank was screwed up. But how? I had manual controls for almost everything, but I had never finished my formal training, and this was a subject that hadn't been covered yet.
If Agnieshka was here, she could have displayed the tank's complete schematics to me, but then if she was here, I wouldn't need to see them. Damn. Okay. Nothing left but trial and error.
There was a small, calculator-sized keyboard above my right shoulder that I had never used. I felt for it and found the thing. For all I knew, I might be shutting off the blower that was supplying me with increasingly stale air, but to do nothing was to die anyway. With a prayer to my patron saint, I pressed the first button. Nothing happened that I could notice. So I tried the next one. And the next.
On the sixth button on the top row, the screen in my helmet lit up, displaying a menu. I read it, and pressed 4) Life Support. Or rather I pressed the fourth button from the left, and it turned out that I guessed right. The menu changed, and I pressed 1) Air Supply, and then 2) Aux. Air from Coolant Cyl. A glorious little hiss started sounding in my ear, and the screen stated that I had fourteen hours of air at standard usage. I would stay alive for at least half a day!
I went back to the opening menu to see if I could find anything that I didn't know about when it came to righting an inverted tank, but no such luck. If I had a magic tank inverter, it wasn't on the menu. I did have the capability of firing the eight hull charges, but the charges didn't go off this time either. And the rail gun still wouldn't move.
Going through all the menus that the tiny emergency brain had in its memory, I was able to verify that the main reactor was shut down and would not start up, and that almost all of the other systems aboard did not function either. That included the remaining sensor cluster.
I went back to digging out the mine with my left manipulator arm. It was slow, and I was working blind, but in two hours I had dug my way down to the hopper. I had also exhausted almost half of my battery power.
I couldn't get the lid off the hopper, since the whole weight of the tank was on it, but the middle finger of the manipulator had a sharp, tungsten carbide fingernail, and the hopper was only made of steel. Still, I was an hour cutting my way through and some frantic time was spent finding the mine.
For a while I was afraid that it was gone. Things had bounced around in there a lot, and I pulled out Eva's module and the drone before I found the mine. The drone was in three pieces, and that left me without much hope for poor Eva. Still, I put her as far away from the upcoming explosion as possible, since you never know.
Then there was the problem of the explosion itself. Considering the way I was sitting, the place to put the mine to best flip me right side up was near the lower left corner of the tank. That was about a meter from my head, and my mine was probably as powerful as the one that had done all the damage in the first place. If I placed it wrong, it might turn out to be a classic case of "The operation was a complete success, but the patient died." That is to say, the tank would be sitting nicely upright, with my dead body in it!
But if I put it too far away, it might not turn me all the way over, and I only had the one shot. Then I would still be dead, only it would happen slower.
The mine had a shaped charge that blew a hypersonic beam of vaporized metal into whatever it was destroying, and that was an effect that I didn't want happening to me. I only wanted the kick of the thing, so I set it upside down, near the edge of the vehicle where there wasn't much above it except for the drive magnets. Let the dirt get a deep, ugly hole in it, but not me!
I was trying to set the timer by touch, but I must have done something wrong, because it went off in my hand.
The bouncing around I got was at least as bad as the one I'd gotten in the wreck, but God must look out after sinners, the way a banker looks out for people who owe him money.
I was now lying on my back, upright!
My manipulator arm no longer was functional, but I didn't mind. I didn't need it anymore. I flipped the protective cover off the controls, gritted my teeth and pressed the eject button near my right hand, expecting to come flying out, but nothing happened!
I was still trapped!
After all this work, I had exhausted ninety percent of my battery power, my manipulator arm was gone, my only explosive was gone, my air wouldn't last forever and I was still trapped inside of an armored coffin!
I wanted to cry, and since nobody was watching, I went ahead and did so.
After a while, I got ahold of myself, shook the tears out of my eyes, and felt for the keyboard. I turned on the master menu that I had shut down to save a tiny bit of power and worked my way through five subordinate menus until I came to 3) Extend Life Support Module. I'd always called it a coffin, and so did everybody else, but here it was a life support module.
A Boy and His Tank Page 15