A Boy and His Tank (19 page)

But that was where their transoceanic invasion tunnel had come up. They'd started work on it the very day that they got our first shipments of arms.

Near a high, difficult and seldom-used pass in the Big Rock Candy Mountains was an isolated peak called Lookout Point, which seemed to be a natural place for us to wait and see what was happening. I said as much to Agnieshka.

"It's too good an observation point," Agnieshka said. "The Serbs have to be using it."

"It's so good that they will know that we would target it if we attacked, so they won't be likely to be using it themselves."

"Then if it is a prime target for our forces, we don't dare use it either!"

"But why should our people bother shooting at it, if they know that the Serbians wouldn't be dumb enough to be there in the first place?"

"Mickolai, if you are saying all this just to confuse me, I will be very unhappy with you. You know that I am a logical machine!"

"And didn't we decide that I am an associative one? I'm just saying that it looks like a good spot, and we won't know what's there until we arrive. Now, I want you to make for it at your best speed, pretty tits."

"Yes, boss. And please don't call me things like that."

"So who is getting prudish, now?"

We made it to within sight of Lookout Point in half an hour without seeing anybody from either side except from an extreme distance, and nobody challenged us in either code. We found a deserted gully where our entry hole wouldn't be noticed and dug in.

From there, it would be five hours tunneling inside the mountains before we got up to Lookout Point. I couldn't use our sensors when we were inside of solid rock, and Agnieshka didn't need me to help her drive, so I went home to my cottage for a rest.

Agnieshka was there, of course, and wearing a miniskirt. She was topless again, as was becoming her habit. She suggested some PT and I refused.

"Look, Agnieshka, we've just had a rough day and we've just lost a lot of good friends. I need to relax and have a drink. In fact, I think that I want to get roaring drunk, so bring me a bottle of rum and some Coke."

She looked at me, acting very concerned. "Are you sure that you wouldn't rather go to church?"

"Yes, I'd rather go to church, but what good would a phony church with a phony priest do me? You can imitate a lot of things in Dream World, but you can't imitate God. If there was a real church and an honest to God ordained priest, I would go there. Only I can't, so I'll settle for some phony booze, instead. Get it!"

She looked at me uncertainly for a moment, and then did as I asked. I made myself a very stiff drink and threw it down my throat. There was nothing I could do for Quincy and Zuzanna and the rest of them, and I was fairly certain that by this time Radek had been blown away by our own forces. The only sane thing that I could do was to try and forget it all. For a while, anyway.

"What do you want me to do now?" Agnieshka asked.

"You? Well, you keep on insisting on dressing like a cheap dancer in a sleazy American topless bar," I said. "You might as well start acting like one as well. Get up and dance! Better still, change the scene to a sleazy bar, complete with drunken customers and all the rest. And dance, damn you!"

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.

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 the 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.