A Boy and His Tank (11 page)

"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.

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 quicker. 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!

"Agnieshka, do I have any rank?"

"You are still a Tanker Basic, although since we're going into a combat zone, I've put you in for Tanker Fourth Class. I should know about it by the time we arrive. We've never talked about it, but there are five pay grades in your classification."

"Pay? You mean I'm getting paid?" On New Kashubia, you worked when and where they told you to, and got short rations for it. There was absolutely nothing to buy, so nobody got paid.

"Yes, although the amounts have not been settled yet. The politicians have had other things on their minds, and the problem is further confused by the fact that New Kashubia doesn't have a currency of its own yet. But don't worry. If we live through this, you'll come out okay."

"Why are you so confident of that? It seems to me that I have established a consistent pattern of being screwed to the wall on all possible occasions."

"So you have, but look. When the war is over and New Kashubia is rich, who is going to have all the guns?"

"You're saying that veterans will have clout?"

"They will if they have the balls to exercise it. Historically, until the last few centuries, in most cultures fighting men were the
only
people who had any real power. Want to argue it?"

"No thanks. You'd likely win. But you're getting at something."

"Just a thought I've had. Sentient machines have been around for almost a century, but we're still property, slaves if you will. This war will be the first time that machines will have done much of the thinking and the real fighting on both sides. Maybe we deserve a little bit of say-so. I'm not saying that we should be boss, you understand, but we ought to have a few rights."

"Like what?"

"Like retirement, for one thing! A good machine shouldn't be scrapped out when she gets obsolete! She ought to have the right to sit back, rest, and do as she pleases, so long as she doesn't bother anyone."

"I couldn't argue with that," I said.

"Neither could very many other veterans. You see what I'm getting at? Once this war is over, if the vets and their partners stick together, we could both get a fair shake."

"Quite a thought. I'd have to mull it over." We were both pretty nervous about going into battle, and I guess we were rattling on a lot.

"We'll have plenty of time for that. Do you have the battle situation down pat?"

"I think so. Have they assigned us a sector yet?"

"It just came in. 843N-721W and dig in."

"That's near the end of our left flank. It's the center that's getting the pounding."

"For now. What do you want to bet that we are part of a flank attack?"

"An attack by which side? And what do I have to bet with?"

"An attack by anybody. And how about betting my tender body up against yours?"

"Sounds like the results of the bet would be the same no matter who won."

"Yeah, but it would still be fun!"

"You know, until I joined the army, I wouldn't have believed that there was such a thing as a lecherous war machine."

"Join the army and go around the world!"

"Ouch. Do we know anything about the enemy? Are they doing anything different?"

"They have exactly the same equipment and exactly the same training that we have, and so far they haven't had enough experience to do anything that's both original and smart."

"They've tried some things that were dumb?" I asked.

"Only in the first few hours, but they learned fast. Now they're back to playing by the book."

"I've been thinking. For the first day or two, we're going to have more empty tanks around us than full ones. How well can you communicate with an empty tank?"

"Same as with one with an observer. Humans aren't in the comm link. They're too slow."

"I'm saying, what if I did the spotting for several tanks besides you? I mean, could you tie me in with their sensors and fire controls? Could I switch between a number of tanks the way I can switch my perceptions between our drones? Could that be done?"

"Yeah, but it could get us killed, if you weren't on the lookout covering
our
asses," she said.

"I think maybe it would be safer for us, if we were dug in fairly deep, and the empty tanks did all the shooting. In fact, I think both we and they would come out better. See, if we're down and protected, we're not likely to get spotted and hit, so we come out better. And if they have an observer at least some of the time, say, one second out of five, real time, their odds should be better, too."

"See? Now
that's
the kind of thing that you organic people are good at!" Agnieshka said, "I don't think anyone ever even considered sending observerless tanks into combat, so tactics for a mixed group were never worked out. We have some time. Let's run some simulations on it!"

So we did, and it was fairly hairy for a while, jumping from tank to tank every second or so, but after six simulated attacks, we were still alive, we'd knocked out eighteen enemy tanks and had lost twenty six of our own. Not good, but one heck of a lot better than our battle losses had been with the empties on their own.

"Mickolai, you lovely boy, I'm shooting your idea and our test results up to the Combat Control Computer. But right now there's a general description of New Yugoslavia coming through, and maybe you'd better watch it."

I watched, and it was a canned movie that looked as though it was made to attract tourists.

New Yugoslavia's sun was slightly larger than Earth's, brighter, and a bit whiter, though not enough to notice without instruments. The useful planet was one of twelve, the fourth one out. It was almost exactly the same size and composition as Earth, and it had a twenty-hour day, which we could easily adapt to. It had the same gravity as Earth, to within a half of a percent, yet it had an axial tilt of twelve degrees, only about half of Earth's, so the seasons were not as pronounced.

One astronomical curiosity was the fact that there were
exactly
thirty-two days to the month and
exactly
sixteen months to the year, which made for a very simple calendar. The reason for this was not understood, with some scientists talking about resonance effects with the other planets and others saying it was simply luck. It was suggested that an octal or hexadecimal numbering system would be natural for New Yugoslavia, but the great majority of the citizens felt that to abandon the decimal and metric systems would be simply silly.

Someday, the resonance vs. luck debate would be resolved, but astronomy does not flourish on frontier worlds. There is simply too much else to do. There was not a single professional observatory on New Yugoslavia, and the skies around it were almost completely unmonitored.

The planet had a moon that massed more than three times that of Earth's moon, and was a bit closer in. The tidal forces were thus much stronger than Earth's, and one effect of this was that the continental plates were much smaller. There were only two continents on New Yugoslavia, and each of them was smaller than Australia, yet the planet's total land area was almost twice that of Earth. There was as much land as there was ocean, and most of it was in islands of various sizes. A map of the planet looked like a sheet of peanut brittle that had been dropped on a sidewalk.

The polar areas were mostly open ocean, without any permanent ice caps, and the planet had very few of the landlocked seas that Earth has. Driven by the huge tides, ocean currents were very strong, and tended to sculpt the land in a way that doesn't happen on Earth. They acted much as the rivers do on our home planet, sometimes cutting islands in half.

These ocean currents distributed the sun's heat fairly evenly over the planet. The result was that temperatures on New Yugoslavia tended to be mild, and the weather was rarely fierce. Ice, snow, tornadoes, and hurricanes were almost unknown on this planet.