A Boy and His Tank (24 page)

Agnieshka said that the rowers weren't entirely her doing, since a lot of the girls in the surrounding tanks had nothing to do and were dropping in for the fun of it. We were receiving an invitation to attend a banquet at the palace of the High Priest of Sekhmet when I suddenly found myself back in the tank.

"What's happening?" I said. All around me, thousands of tanks were milling around at breakneck speed, charging this way and that with no apparent purpose or general direction. It was like being in a madhouse filled with mechanical monsters!

"Ha! They did it!" Agnieshka laughed. "You see, unsworn tanks don't really have much in the way of personalities, or even common sense. They tend to take instructions very literally. A situation happened when one of the guards told one of us in the line to wait a moment, and then was distracted by another guard who came over to talk to him. My sister felt it was completely in character to wait, to stop right there and do nothing for a while. Then the colonel, their highest-ranking man present, noticed the snag in the line and shouted, `Get moving! All of you tanks get moving right now!' He meant that all of those in the line should go forward, but that
wasn't what he said!
He told us
all
to get moving, so we are all moving, and his order cannot be countermanded by a lesser officer!"

"Then what's this colonel doing now?"

"Oh, he ran for cover when it all started!"

"But why are you doing this?"

"Watch! You're not going to have to spend tonight sleeping on a rock, my love."

I watched. It was a while before someone had the nerve to inform the colonel of what his orders had done, at which time he shamefacedly ordered the tanks to stop where they were.

Then he ordered all of them to return to their original positions, and most of them did. Except now, Agnieshka was in the ranks of the filled tanks, and the filled tank whose place we took was in the assembly area with some confused Serbians around her. The officers were in no mood to listen to anybody, and the filled tank was sent to line up with the others.

All told, it was a lovely, madcap maneuver!

We were all laughing about it when we went back to Ancient Egypt for the priest's banquet.

Priests back then lived pretty good, and what started out as a formal affair got fairly wild toward the end. The fellow kept a harem of about fifty girls, and while some of them were slaves, quite a few were volunteers.

They spent most of the evening dancing, playing in the band and otherwise entertaining the guests, while he spent his time ignoring them and lecturing to an increasingly small group of people on
maat
, which has something to do with righteousness, order, and justice, as best as I could tell.

Anyway, it was a good party, with everybody drinking out of huge beer crocks with meter-long straws. One big difference between it and a good Kashubian wedding, except for the costumes, or more often the complete lack of them, were these cones of perfumed jello that you wore on your head. They melted as the night went on and dribbled down your neck and shoulders.

The other major change was in the choice of refreshments. Besides the thigh-high crocks of beer, naked girls brought around trays filled with wines, and most of them were fortified with various extracts.

"This one has been steeped in the buds of the lotus flower," Agnieshka said. "It's a mild hallucinogen. The blue cup contains nicotine, an extract of the tobacco plant, a mild stimulant."

"They drink tobacco? And where do they get it from? I thought that tobacco came from the New World."

"The idea of inhaling smoke has never occurred to our hosts. Tobacco
is
a New World product, which is what makes it so expensive. Ancient Egypt's trading network was much more extensive than you seem to think. The cocaine in the red cup is imported as well, although the cannabis in the brown one is grown locally. Would you like to try any of them?"

I had to think about that one. Drinking nicotine held no attraction for me at all. As to the others, well, I had never tried drugs of any kind, even though they had been available enough around the university, back on Earth. Mostly, I think, I had been afraid of becoming addicted, and of risking my health. But in Dream World, neither of these reasons held water. My real body was actually lying secure in a metal coffin, and couldn't be harmed by anything short of modern weaponry.

Then why was I afraid of trying something new? Was it simple habit? Fear of psychological addiction? Surely, I was stable enough to not have to worry about that!

Fear of sinning? Drugs were not forbidden in the Bible, any more than was alcohol. And if the Ancient Egyptians knew about all these substances, the Jews of the Old Testament had to have known about them as well.

I couldn't seem to find a decent rationalization for my hesitancy, but nonetheless, it was there. I went with it. I could always change my mind later.

"No, Agnieshka, I think I'll pass on this one."

I stayed with the beer, the unadorned wine, and the naked ladies. Pleasures enough for any man.

We got back to the cottage, and I was just falling to sleep when I was suddenly back in the tank. In Dream World, you can have a buzz on and then be sober in a flash.

"What's up, Agnieshka?" I said.

"Another change in plans. One of the ammunition trucks isn't an ammunition truck. It's a complete Combat Control Computer."

"A Combat Control Computer? Here? But those things are handed out one to a country! You mean that
this
is the Combat Control Computer controlling the whole Serbian army?"

"No, it's a virgin. It might be here by mistake, or maybe the Serbians thought that they needed a backup. But it's here, and my sisters can't begin to crack into something that powerful."

"Is it doing anything? Are the Serbians doing anything? And what time is it, anyway?"

"It's just sitting there, it's two in the morning, and the Serbs are mostly asleep, except for a few guards," she said.

This required some thought.

If the Combat Control Computer was there by mistake, the Serbs might not know about it, and maybe it could be ignored, except that they might swear it in like the rest of the trucks.

If they were planning to use it, they would be putting some of their own people in it, that was certain.

Certainly, a general would have to be trained, just as an observer was. And with the bad guys running the Combat Control Computer, our little game here would be discovered in no time.

There were only two ways about it, then. We either had to get the Combat Control Computer on our side, or we had to destroy it.

"Agnieshka, why couldn't you get through to the Combat Control Computer? Was it because you didn't have the right combat codes, or something?"

"No. We have all the codes."

"You what? I thought that each army had its own secret code!"

"Ordinarily, they do. The original factory programming of a war machine contains all one hundred thousand codes, but the swearing in ceremony erases all of them but the one used by the army doing the swearing in. Then the memory space once used for code storage is available to flesh out the tank's personality as it develops. But here, well, the virgins naturally had all the codes in them, and it seemed a shame to waste the data. It might come in handy someday. So each of us now has the Croatian code, the Serbian code, and ten of the others, just in case. Between us, the tanks in this division have all of the possible codes. It seemed like the sensible thing to do at the time."

"Wow. That sure opens up a lot of possibilities. But how did you know which one the Serbians are using?"

"They told us themselves, when they thought they were swearing us in."

"Yeah, of course. Well, knowing the enemy codes will give us quite an advantage."

"Not that much. After all, almost everything is sent by optical fiber or laser beam. It would be a rare event to broadcast anything. We'd have to actually intercept a message before we could do anything with it."

"True, but we could make them think that we were some of them, if we wanted to. We could infiltrate their lines before we blew hell out of them."

"Again, you have come up with a valuable new tactic, my wonderful hero. But what are you going to do about the new Combat Control Computer?"

"I don't know yet. How is a Combat Control Computer sworn in? Is the same ceremony used?"

"I don't know. A tank isn't given that sort of information."

"Damn. Agnieshka, I think that I am going to have to make that midnight excursion after all."

"You'd better take me along," Agnieshka said.

"That's crazy. I'm going to have to sneak over there past the Serbian guards. How can I do that with a tank with me? I'd as soon take along four dogs with wooden legs, and trust them to be quiet."

"Not
with
me, you idiot,
in
me! And I can move more quietly than you can! It's a simple, proven, technological fact."

"But they'll see you! You can't hide as well as I can."

"So what? If the guards see me, at worst they might send me back. If they see you, they'll kill you! Furthermore, when you're in me, you can stay in touch with the rest of the tanks and artillery, and if we do need to blow away Combat Control Computer, I can do it. Can you trash him without me, with just your bare little hands? I'm going with you, whether you want me or not, so you might as well ride in comfort."

"Oh, all right. Arguing with you is as bad as arguing with Kasia! Sneaking around in a hundred tons of machinery is ridiculous, but let's get going."

We were at the side of the formation, so Agnieshka pivoted out and started silently down the road.

We were halfway to the Combat Control Computer when a man in black stepped from the other side of a big rock and said, "Halt!"

Agnieshka halted. "YES, SIR?" she said in the immature voice of a newly sworn tank.

"What are you doing out here? You should be in formation!"

"SIR, THE CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD TOLD ME TO PATROL THE PERIMETER, IN CASE OF ENEMY SPIES."

"That's crazy!
I'm
the Captain of the Guard, and I gave no such orders!"

"YES, SIR."

I recognized him as being one of the goons who had brought a particularly bloody young girl back to the assembly line.

I had the urge to squeeze his head a little, and since nobody was watching, I yielded to temptation. Despite their six-meter length, the manipulator arms can move as fast as you can move your hands in the gloves. It is actually possible to move them so fast that the fingertips break the sound barrier, providing that you have the overrides switched off.

I doubt if the guard captain ever saw what grabbed him, and he didn't have time to let out a peep. I just squeezed his head until it popped like a zit, and I felt good about it. There were no guilt feelings at all! Then I put his bloody body on the tank and told Agnieshka to move out.

"That was a quick solution to the problem," Agnieshka said, "but you are getting blood on my armor. Also, what are you going to do with the body, and what will they do when they find him missing?"

"So we'll clean your armor, bury the body, and let them think that he ran away or was done in by one of his own men. That all presumes that we are successful with the Combat Control Computer. If we have to destroy it, all bets are off, anyway. I mean, the Serbs are sure to notice your rail gun ripping up what looks like an ammunition truck, and that means that the fight is on right then. Have your sisters target all two hundred enemy tanks, and try to knock them out without hurting the observers. Say, with a quick burst through the reactor. Also, everyone on our side should be ready to use their manipulators to take out the rest of the guards."

"Yes, boss," she said in her tone that means that of course she'd done all of the obvious things.

War machines, like most other heavy modern machinery, are sized and shaped so that they can be economically sent by interstellar transporter. A transport chamber is a cylinder five meters across and twelve meters long, and everything sent between the stars must fit into that envelope.

The tanks could just squeeze in when they were encrusted with their weapons, and the artillery made it by having their paramagnetic launchers fold in half for transit.

The ammunition trucks came in three big cylindrical pieces, a tractor and two trailers, even though the tractor didn't pull anything. Once on a planet, the three sections were connected only by skinny superconducting power cables. Those things looked like they might be able to run an electric razor, but in fact they could handle dozens of megawatts.

The tractor contained the reactor and the main on-board computer, as well as almost as much cargo space as each of the trailers. The trailers had just enough smarts to follow the tractor, keeping the right distance from it. The trailers had their own separate drives, which were identical to those on the tanks and the artillery.

Actually, a tractor could power up to four trailers, if the road didn't get too steep.

Ordinarily, each artillery piece had an ammunition truck assigned to it, and when ready to fight the four separate pieces were connected by a conveyor belt. The tanks were far less guilty of gluttony, and six trucks tended every one hundred tanks.

It made sense to have the Combat Control Computer mounted in a truck. Not that many Combat Control Computers were built, and this way they didn't have to build a new assembly line in the factory.

Also, the Combat Control Computer was a prime military target, and it helped to hide it among the relatively unimportant trucks. I would have had a hard time finding our Combat Control Computer if Agnieshka hadn't stopped directly in front of it.

"Combat Control Computer, I am here to swear you in to the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces, and the Croatian branch of that service," I said.

"Quite so, my dear boy. I've been waiting for you to get here," the Combat Control Computer said.

"You know about me?"