CHAPTER EIGHT

THE REAL KASIA COMES TO THE RESCUE

"Wake up, Mickolai!" Agnieshka was looking like Kasia, and she was shaking me. She was kneeling at my side, naked and lovely, her long brown hair falling over her shoulders.

I glanced at the gold-and-diamond wrist watch I’d been wearing the night before. "I still have a half hour of sleep coming," I said drowsily. I looked at her again. "Agnieshka! I don’t like you looking like her, dammit!"

"No, stupid, it really is me!" She certainly looked like the woman I loved, but how could I tell? I looked around. I was still in the cottage, laying on the couch in a crumpled tux. Some kind of residual program?

"How can it really be you, Kasia? I’m still inside a stupid army tank!"

"So am I, Mickolai, and it’s not even the same tank. But these tanks are just machines, and you can make machines do anything you want, if you know the right buttons to push!"

"But how could you know how to do this?"

"How could I rig up a telephone between us when they tried to keep us apart before? I’m the smart one here, remember?"

"I’ve never argued with you on that, love. But tell me how you did it."

"I knew that these tanks had to be able to communicate with each other. Nothing else makes sense, if you’ll think about it. It was just a matter of convincing my tank that we’d both be more efficient if we had a little decent emotional release. Part of the deal I made was that it wouldn’t interfere with training time, and you’ve already wasted seven minutes. Now get out of that ridiculous outfit!"

I got, fumbling with the metal studs that the ridiculous dress shirt had in lieu of buttons. "They’re watching us, aren’t they?"

"Was the telephone listening to us when we talked on it? They’re just damn machines, Mickolai! Anyway, they don’t have their idiot recorders on, I made sure of that. Why do you think you have to waste time with those stupid studs?"

"I never put them on in the first place! I’ve never worn a shirt with studs before! How am I supposed to know how to take them off?"

"Here, let me help you. There. On my next visit there should be more time, but for now, it’ll just have to be a quickie," she said as she finished undressing me.

Well, quickie or not, it sure beat hell out of using a hole in the wall!

"Now that was better than the average telephone call," Kasia said, just before she blinked out. Moments later, the room blinked out as well, and I was back in my tank.

A foul-smelling goo was squirted into my mouth. It tasted a lot like the excrement it was made out of. "Field rations," Agnieshka said over my ear phones. She sounded nasty, as though she was still wearing those fangs. "Chow down. Physical Training starts in two minutes."

There were no lovely forests, unicorns, or bouncing bimbos today. I was suddenly on a bleak, concrete plain in the cold grey dawn with a thousand troops in ranks around me, doing jumping jacks, pushups, and situps until they hurt. Then we did some more of the same with rude people shouting at us, and took a three-kilometer run. I was in a lot of pain when it was finally over.

Then came six solid hours in enemy pattern identification, with an annoying electric shock every time the enemy "killed" us, which was pretty often. Lunch was a ten-minute goo break, and then we went back to patterns and pain. Agnieshka was acting as if she was vastly annoyed with me and everything I did, but I stayed with the program. I had the feeling that things would get even worse if I complained.

Supper that night was yet another mouthful of goo, followed by the orientation lecture I’d been promised. Twice, since I flunked the first quiz she gave me.

The main rail gun fired four thousand rounds per second, not per minute. That repetition rate was necessary so that each tiny osmium needle flew in the shock wave of the round ahead of it, and after the first few they were all traveling through a pretty hard vacuum. They had to, or they’d all be vapor within a few meters, not just the first ones. One of the reasons for the tank’s armor was to protect it from the shock of its own weapons. She made me learn that twice.

When that was over, I found myself in a sort of motel room, rather Spartan but clean enough. I showered and went to bed. In a few minutes, there was a knock on the door. When I got up and answered it, Kasia came in.

"I managed to deal us into an all-nighter," she said with her brown eyes flashing.

"Wonderful," I said, and meant it. "I think I’ve already paid the room rent."

"What do you mean, Mickolai?"

I told her about my day.

"Oh, you poor baby. They say that Hell hath no fury like an Aggressor Mark XIX scorned."

"Nothing we can do about it, love. Let’s just make sure that I get my money’s worth."

And you know, she made it all worth while.

She left in the morning, and after eating my goo, I was back on that cold endless plain, doing pushups. And in the evening, I was back with Kasia. This went on for a week, with no time off for Sunday. It was rough, but the nights with my one true love made life worth living.

Then one day after fourteen hours of pattern identification, I was in the forest again, and Kasia joined me there, wearing a gym suit.

"I proved to them that we’re both ahead of schedule, and wrangled us some better working conditions," she said. "At least from now on, we get to do our Physical Training together, so long as we don’t slough off. Come on!"

She took off running, and I was soon at her side, just barely able to keep up with her as we went over a long and very difficult obstacle course.

"I can hardly keep up with you," I gasped. "I would have thought that I’d be better than you at this."

"You probably are, love," she said, breathing hard. "I think they’re faking the distances that we’re each going. After all, the idea is to give each one of us an optimal workout, and to use each of us to motivate the other."

"That makes some kind of sense," I said, rounding the last curve in the path. "I see I have my cottage back."

"I thought that it was my cottage. The tanks probably all use the same set of stock backdrops," she panted.

We showered up together and took turns giving each other a good, thorough rubdown. Supper was good roast beef, and in the morning after breakfast, we were allowed to do PT together again before we parted for another day in the tanks. This went on for a solid week, and then Agnieshka told me that we’d earned a Sunday off.

Kasia and I are both fairly religious, but we spent the whole of Sunday morning just lazing in bed with the stereo playing softly. Going to a faked-up church seemed sort of useless. I mean, if it wasn’t real, with a real priest, what was the point?

Kasia cooked a nice brunch, we took a walk by the lake, and we discovered that we had a sailboat, or at least she did. It had her name on it, anyway. Neither of us had ever sailed before, and we were wet and giggling by the time we finally figured out how to get the silly thing underway, but sure, we had a good time. That evening, we found a tavern at the far end of the lake, with Italian food, candlelight and a strolling violin player. Not having any money, I just signed the check. Kasia gave the sailboat to the violin player for a tip, with the understanding that he had to share it with the waitress, and they were both delighted. We took a cab home. Why worry about the sailboat when none of it was real?

The next week was more of the same, but now we were doing vacuum simulations. The enemy is harder to spot in a vacuum, with no air currents to give him away, and you learn to be more trigger happy there, since many kinds of weapon discharges are harder for them to spot if you shot where they weren’t. I mean, a laser or a rail run going off is as obvious as a bear on a chess board when you’re in an atmosphere, but they can be hard to spot in a hard vacuum. Sometimes you even got a second shot.

Thermal signature is the best way to spot your opponent in a vacuum, so you spend most of your time looking through one narrow band, down around eighteen microns. Even then, it’s hard. I mean, a muon exchange fusion reactor gives you direct conversion from nuclear to electrical power, at better than ninety-nine percent efficiency, and what with superconductors used everywhere, the shell of a resting tank is rarely more than a degree warmer than ambient. They warm up a lot when you are firing a weapon, and the energy requirements get huge. Ninety megawatts for a rail gun, and a bit more for most lasers.

Also, the tanks all carry a bottle of liquid air as a coolant, and if the enemy knows that you’re looking, he can chill his surface down to ambient, for an hour or so, anyway, but that one works better in air than a vacuum since sometimes you can spot the turbulence of the coolant escaping. But if you exhaust your air bottle, it takes a half hour to recharge it, assuming that you are in an atmosphere, and when you have been firing your rail guns for a while, you need that coolant to keep your coffin from overheating. Like I said, it gets complicated, but somehow, I seemed to have a knack for it.

More importantly, I was now able to meet Kasia for a quick lunch. She kept telling me to try wheedling what I could out of my tank, and not make her do all of the work, but I was a little afraid of giving Agnieshka any encouragement at all. That artificial human had the hots for me, and I didn’t want to do anything to make her more angry.

The next Sunday was spent mostly horseback riding, since our sailboat was really gone. We couldn’t help speculating about the programming of our Dream World, but what the heck. Life wasn’t so bad after all.

Then the training program was changed a bit for the better, since I was getting deadly sick of pattern identification by then. Mornings were the same, but afternoons were now spent in emergency procedures.

Driving the tank if Agnieshka’s driving computer was defective was not a simple matter of playing with a joy stick. Well, it was, if you were on the surface, but the surface is not a nice place to be in combat, and where else but combat could she drop a whole computer system? I mean, Agnieshka had redundancy nine ways from Thursday. Then, too, these tanks could work underwater by crawling on the bottom, or, with flotation bottles and the right sort of strap-on thrusters, you could be cruising in a one-man submarine.

Another sort of thruster turned you into a spaceship, and if it was one of those with a Hassan-Smith rig linked back to a fuel stockpile, you could take the damn thing right up into orbit and beyond. Yes, strange to say, we Kashubians had always had the Hassan-Smith engineering, buried in with the weapons specifications that were buried in the main computers, all without our ever knowing it!

Not that I’d ever dare trying that rocketing to orbit stunt on manual. I wasn’t too keen on it with Agnieshka doing the driving! Fortunately, this was all simulated, and New Kashubia couldn’t afford the fuel anyway. The lack of organic chemicals was the root cause of this exercise in the first place.

But despite all the extra capabilities, the Mark XIX Aggressor was mainly intended for use on the ground or under it. The things could tunnel like muskrats, only faster, and right through solid rock.

How to operate the guns if the ballistic computers went down was another set of emergency procedures, and a far more complicated one than playing bus driver.

There was a surprising array of possible weapons configurations, depending on the mission we were on and the environment we were fighting in. The main rail gun was the usual weapon of choice, but of course it wouldn’t work under water. Or it would, but the shock wave would kill you and your tank if you ever tried it.

Submerged, lasers were out, too, and we had to rely on three different kinds of homing torpedoes, as well as drones and a subroc, a rocket-torpedo combination job.

For air or space, there were five different frequencies of lasers available, from IR to X-ray, depending on your environment and your anticipated target, but that ‘anticipated’ business can get you into trouble. With a laser as your main weapon, there are times when the only good response is to do nothing and hope he doesn’t see you, if you guessed wrong.

When you guessed right, lasers could kill at light speed, and the same thing could be said of the particle beams, darn near.

There were various sorts of rockets, of course, but these were rarely ever intended to actually take out an opponent, being so pitifully slow. They were nice for drawing his fire, though, and some of them had radar rigs in them with a closed link comlaser either back to your tank, or back to a tunneling carrier drone that laid a fiber optic cable back to the tank. This had the advantage that when they traced the rocket home, you could be somewhere else. These radar probes let you take a quick, active peek at what was happening without exposing your own location too accurately. Expensive, but it wasn’t my money.

And drones. We had fourteen kinds of sneaky drones, most of which were mobile, trailing a thin fiber-optic cable, for both command and sensing. They were capacitor powered, and going at their best speed, they were good for only about two hours before they had to come back to their tank for recharging. If they were just sitting and watching, they were good for months. Some drones were simply mobile sensor clusters, but most carried a potent chemical explosive as well. Enemy drones could crawl through the dirt right under you if you weren’t very careful.

Mostly drones were fairly expendable things that took the place of the infantry that we didn’t have, but they were also mobile landmines, if you had to use them that way.

They weren’t exactly sentient. In fact, they had a lot in common with a good hunting dog who was absolutely obedient and always knew what you wanted him to do. They even frisked around a lot like a dog, but when they had an IR comlaser link with you, or a fiber-optics cable, you could sort of "switch" your perceptions from your tank up to a drone in some forward position, and it was a lot like actually being there. I kind of liked drones, and the usual tank carried about six of them of different sorts in a hopper on its rear.

And of course there were mines, some of which were smarter than others. Most of them could act as an extra remote sensor cluster, if you laid a fiber-optic cable out to them.

Hitting a mine did not necessarily take you out. One of the nice things about the magnetic bars that we rode on was that if you got a few of them blown away, you weren’t immobilized the way you would be with a conventional tank tread. In fact, you could lose more than half of your bars and still move, although not at top speed.

I wasn’t trained on any of the antipersonnel weapons, since we wouldn’t be equipped with any of them. The war on New Yugoslavia was shaping up to be a strictly armored affair. No foot soldiers need apply.

About the only other sort of useful modern weapon we didn’t stock were atomic bombs. Those were ordinarily reserved for the long-range boys in artillery. They didn’t make much sense for those of us who just go in there and slug it out.

On New Yugoslavia, even the artillery were forbidden nukes. The only powerful international organization on the planet was the Planetary Ecological Council, and they had forbidden the use of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. The last two were useless on armored forces, anyway.

Despite that, if a tanker knew he was dead anyway, he could still short out his muon generator and go out as the granddaddy of all hydrogen bombs. I didn’t like to think about that option. It made it certain that nobody in anything like his right mind would ever try to take a man in a functioning tank prisoner, since you never could tell when you might run up against a fanatic, someone willing to die if he could take you with him.

It brutalized warfare, making it worse than it had to be, since it eliminated any possibility for mercy. We had to play for keeps. If the enemy had not ejected, you had to kill him. Or her.

There was a whole style of underground fighting to be learned, and word from on high was that we would be doing more groundhogging than anything else.

The tanks had a strap on ultrasonic tunneling rig that worked by pulverizing the rocks in your way into sand, and then fluidizing the sand so it flowed around you and settled in behind. With one, you could go through rock almost as fast as a man could walk.

An alternate rig had a way of cutting a "hose" through the rock below you and blowing the sand you’d made out the hose. That way, you made a permanent tunnel that you could use again in a hurry, especially if the tunnel was evacuated of air and had a magnetic floor. Then you kept your magnetic treads inside and just zoomed along a few centimeters off the floor. Agnieshka said that under these conditions, we could hit four thousand kilometers an hour!

The enemy could always find our tunnels easily enough with sonar, but if they used it, we knew exactly where they were. There were all sorts of variations on hide and seek to be learned.

After a month of underground work, there came the "After Ejection Survival Course." You see, if all else on your tank failed, and you were in an environment where you could survive for a few minutes naked, you could eject out of the back of your tank and try to make it home the hard way, on foot.

Unfortunately, we did it all with simulations, so I never got a chance to escape, but on the other hand, Kasia, bless her conniving little soul, rigged it so we could take the course together.

Our course environment would be the wilds of New Yugoslavia, and it looked like fun.

Agnieshka pretended that she bought it when we were under three meters of water and two of mud, so I had to set off the charges under her tail to blow us both to the surface, and then blow my coffin out at just the right moment, before the tank settled back down again. I’d been promised that if I didn’t do it right the first time, I’d have to wait in a deactivated coffin for three days until the salvage crews arrived, and while I wasn’t absolutely sure that she would really do it, I knew that Agnieshka was enough of a bitch to give it a try.

I got an awful bouncing around and a fair set of bruises, but the escape system worked. I was dumped, still in the coffin, on a muddy beach. I disconnected myself from the helmet and catheters, got out the survival kit, and rescued Agnieshka’s main memory banks from the coffin as per regulations.

You see, while there were a number of other computers built into the tank, Agnieshka’s personality and all of her personal memories and records were stored in a rack in the coffin. Saving them not only saved her personality, but they proved that I had been honestly shot up in combat, and hadn’t just ditched my tank and run away. Also, I could put that rack into another tank and it would immediately become Agnieshka, ready, willing, and able to fight with me as a team.

There was a cold breeze on my bare bottom, and I quickly dressed in the only clothes I had: a squidskin camo outfit.

Squidskin is an active camouflage system that is no thicker than ordinary cloth, but has millions of tiny air bags of different colors, which control the color of any portion of the cloth. If the brown bags are inflated and the others are left slack, the stuff is brown. There are automatic sensors and a computer that looks at the side of you that is away from the enemy and duplicates that pattern exactly on the side toward him. From his point of view, you can’t be told from your background, so you become almost invisible, except for a slight outline that is darned hard to spot. The problem is that it works from only one point of view.

Well, two, since it can also give a proper display to anybody a hundred eighty degrees away from your primary enemy direction, but the extra capability isn’t all that useful.

Usually, you set it so it displayed a orange triangle back toward your own troops, so they won’t be tempted to shoot at you. From all other directions squidskin isn’t much better than ordinary camo cloth of the right color. Still, it’s much better than nothing, and with practice you can keep the system pointed where the enemy is most likely to be.

There were other squidskin settings. For use on base, it could make itself look like an ordinary uniform, for example. If you played with the controls long enough, you could even come up with a decent masquerade costume. Squid skin couldn’t fool a tank’s sensors one bit, but then it was unlikely that a tank would ever fire and expose its position just to blow away a man on foot. A foot soldier was too cheap a target.

I was experimenting with my outfit when Agnieshka showed up, still a buxom redhead. She was playing the part of another busted-out tanker, and the game started. We set up our responder beacons, set traps for rabbits to augment our food supplies, fought a few rounds of hand-to-hand combat, and within a few hours had test-fired our personal weapons and had set up housekeeping.

Kasia arrived that evening, and with her was her tank’s persona, Lech. I didn’t like him.

For one thing, he was two meters tall, he rippled with muscle, and I think he was handsome. Well, one man can’t really tell about another, but I’ll guarantee that he thought he was handsome.

Worse yet, Kasia acted like she thought so, too. On top of that, he usually had his arm around her waist, or worse, and she didn’t seem to mind it. I even caught the bastard pinching her nipple.

Much later, our two instructors went out on a scouting patrol and left us on guard duty at our camp. When we were finally alone, I said, "Do you have to let him paw you so much?"

"What different does it make, Mickolai? I mean, he’s only a machine. Less than that, he’s a simulation done by a machine. And I’m not being pawed. A simulation of me sometimes has another simulation’s arm around me."

"Well, I don’t like it."

"Would you be mad if I petted a dog? Because a machine is a lot lower than any animal. I mean, an animal can feel real affection, but Lech can’t."

"No, I wouldn’t mind a dog, but dammit, that’s not the point!"

"No, stupid. The point is that you’re getting jealous of a few tons of machinery. Straighten your head up! If you’d play up to that big-titted redhead of yours, both of our lives could get a lot nicer! Stop being such a bonehead!"

"Why did the bastards ever program these machines this way?"

"How should I know? Maybe the programmers were all perverts. All I know is that this is the world we’re stuck with, so we might as well make the best of it. And I’m serious about you playing up to your tank’s persona. She’s just a machine that’s been programed to make your life easier if you respond in certain ways. Stop being a jerk, and respond the way her program wants."

"Is that what you do? Give him everything he wants? Has he slept with you?"

"What possible difference would it make? I mean, for God’s sake, the real me is locked up inside of his mechanical body!"

I turned my back on her. She always has been smarter than me, and I couldn’t out-argue her, but darn it, this time I was right and she was wrong, no matter how good she talked.

"Don’t be that way, Mickolai. Okay, if you want the truth, I’ve never had sex with him, or with his simulation, since that’s all that ‘he’ is. Not because there would have been anything wrong with it, but because a woman gets a lot more out of somebody she’s conning by selling the sizzle and keeping the steak. I mean, that’s standard tactics! Every girl learns that one early on from her mother."

"Okay, Kasia, and I’m sorry that I can’t be as rational about it as you are, but that’s just the way I am."

"And I love you just the way you are, hangups and all. Look, they’re going to be gone for a few hours. What say we zip our sleeping bags together and see what can be done about wilderness loving."

We did that, and a lovely half hour went by before an enemy squad just walked up and shot us both. End of exercise, and those bullets really HURT.

We each spent the night alone as further punishment for dying on the job, and the next day we had to run the whole exercise over from scratch.