A Boy and His Tank (18 page)

There was no hope at all.

Then suddenly, it was over.

Incredibly, within a fraction of a second, the enemy were all dead!

It was only later that I figured out what happened. All of us, my squad and the Serbians, were so intent on the firefight that none of us thought to look for artillery. There simply wasn't time. We were out of touch with our Combat Control Computer, and the same had to be true of the Serbs, what with their flying eruption from the ground. No fiber optic-cable could have withstood that!

But one of our artillery officers with an IQ of about seven hundred had launched a heavy salvo in the general direction of where he thought the enemy might come out. What's more, for the shells to have gotten there when they did, he would have had to have fired within milliseconds of the time when I first reported that the Serbs were digging in to come up behind us. He just fired at where he thought they might be and
assumed
that his shells were smart enough to do the rest, and he was absolutely right!

I didn't know who my benefactor was, but I swore that if I ever found him, I would eagerly buy his drinks for the next ten years, and I would kiss his smelly feet while I was doing the buying!

"Good God in Heaven!" I said to Agnieshka and Eva. "We have just been given a new life!"

But both of them were busy making sure that the enemy dead stayed that way. The female of the species is deadlier than the rest of us working slobs. I saw six coffins eject, only to be cut up before they could hit the ground. Admittedly, we were in no position to take prisoners, but I still was shocked at this unnecessary brutality.

"Damn you both! There was no sensible reason for doing that!"

"If they live, they'll just get into another squad of tanks and we'll have to fight them again!" Agnieshka said.

"And if it was
me
that was ejecting and
his
tank that was killing me?"

"All the more reason to kill the bastards now!" Agnieshka shouted.

"Wrong! If I ever again see one of you killing any human who can't do us any dirt, I'll divorce you both! I mean, I'll never speak to you again! Do you hear me?"

"Yes sir. What did you mean about `divorce'? Are we married?"

"No, dammit. I was just too mad to think clearly. But no more killing of ejected observers, do you hear me?"

"Yes, sir."

I looked around. A seventh enemy coffin ejected, and Eva cooked it with her X-ray laser.

"God damn you, Eva! What did I just say?"

"She can't hear you, boss. The fibers went west early on, and shrapnel from the artillery barrage knocked out the transmitting laser on our sensor block."

"So send up another block. We've got three spares," I said.

"I can't because we don't. We lost them all in the firefight."

"Shit. Does the external speaker still work? Then get within range of her and transmit verbally."

We had just started for Eva when a drone came up and patched me through to her with a fiber-optic cable. Chewing her out in cold blood was not as emotionally satisfying, now that I was no longer furious, but I did it anyway.

We still had more than half of our drones intact. The enemy had not bothered targeting them, and those that had been destroyed had simply been unlucky. Some of them were mindlessly working to replace our ravaged communication fibers, even hooking up tanks that had been blown in half. When they got to reconnecting Quincy, I found that he was still alive!

"Quincy! My God, man, I thought you were dead! Look, we have to get out of here! You know that the Serbs will be sending in artillery, once they figure this all out!"

"My young friend, I will be staying here for a while. Zuzanna needs me," he said slowly, his real words coming through in real time. He was on total manual, and that meant that Marysia had to be completely out of action.

"Quincy, Zuzanna's gone. She's dead. I saw her cut in half lengthwise. There can't be any hope at all."

"It was in our contract, kid. We stay together."

"Quincy! You know that this is crazy!"

"I know more than you do, kid. Look. One of the Serbs with an X-ray laser gave me a six second burst. You know what that means."

I knew. He was cooked. Radiation sickness would kill him within hours.

"Is there anything that I can do?" I said.

"Yes, there is. You can leave me alone. I need a little time to get my soul together."

"I'll pray for you, my friend. I wish that there had been more time for you to teach me of your martial arts, and for Zuzanna to teach me the ways of Camelot. I'll light a candle for you both in the church, if I live through this and get the chance," I said.

"Thanks. Good-bye, Mickolai. One last thing. I know about you and Eva, and I want to say that I approve of the kindness you showed her. I did a similar thing for the other nine of our fine ladies. They didn't die unloved." Then he cut his transmission.

Tears were welling in my eyes, and Agnieshka had to resort to a kind of Dream World to feed me visual data, because I could no longer see the readouts before my eyes.

It took more than a full minute for Agnieshka and Eva to insure the deaths of the Serbian tanks. When each enemy carries the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb, you can't even consider taking prisoner an enemy still in his tank, since he just might turn out to be enough of a fanatic to commit suicide in order to take you with him. The job done, Agnieshka spun around to leave, for the danger of an enemy artillery barrage was very real.

Eva turned to follow, but I noticed there was some motion from the back of Radek's mangled tank, and I told them to wait a moment. The coffin slid slowly out from the back of the wreck and slowly, shaking, Radek sat up, pulled the helmet from his head, ripped loose the catheters from his genitals, and got out. He pulled Boom-Boom's memory module from its compartment, as per regulations, but didn't bother with the survival kit.

"Radek! Are you all right?" I shouted over Agnieshka's external speaker. He was only five hundred and thirty meters away.

"Yeah, I think so. I was knocked cold for a while. Hang loose!" He staggered naked over to Eva, the memory module in one hand and his helmet in the other. He said, "Open up, girl! You got a real man at last!"

Eva's empty coffin slid out from her rear surface, but before he got in, Radek yanked her memory module out and threw it to the ground. Then he quickly inserted Boom-Boom's module, put on and reconnected his helmet, and climbed in without bothering to hook up the catheter.

Rationally, maybe what he did made sense. He needed Boom-Boom to communicate properly with the tank. It would have been days before Eva could have attuned herself to his spinal cord. But at the same time, damnit, there was no need to throw Eva on the ground! There was the empty drone hopper right in front of him, for God's sake, and it wouldn't have taken him a moment to save her!

"Damn you, Radek! Didn't anybody ever tell you about the Golden Rule?"

"You mean that shit about doing to others as you would have them do to you? I tried it once. I did onto her just exactly what I wanted her to do onto me, and the bitch went and yelled rape!"

"I'm not laughing, Radek!"

"Time to split! Adios, mother fuckers!" he said over the IR comlaser. He headed back to our old lines at all the speed he could make.

"Radek! Radek, you filthy bastard! Come back! You're going the wrong way!"

But if he heard me, he didn't answer. Certainly, he didn't change course.

I couldn't leave Eva lying on the ground. I had Agnieshka spin back, and with one of my manipulator arms, I picked her up and put her gently into my own almost empty drone hopper.

I checked out the other girls, but those that weren't absolutely destroyed still had their coffins in. There wasn't a way to manually extend a coffin from the outside without special tools, so if any of them still had intact memories, they would have to wait until a salvage team got there.

Maybe, some of them would be all right. Maybe.

I looked to the squads to my left and right, and nothing was moving at all. IR signatures said that there was no power being generated in either battle zone, just dead machines cooling down.

I was all alone, just a boy and his tank.

Using my external speaker, the only communication device I had left since I'd managed to snap my fiber again, I called up the forty-odd drones we had left. With my manipulator arms, I put one of them in the hopper along with Eva's module and the land mine that I hadn't found any use for thus far. I didn't know how, but someday I might need a drone. The others would have to be left behind.

"Boys, we are going to have to leave you, because we have to go faster than you can travel. What I want you each to do is to scatter and at the first sign of company, dig in. Head in the general direction of the enemy beach head. If you can find any major war machine that is using the Serbian codes, you are to get as close to it as possible and blow it up. If you find anything using Croatian codes, you are to report for duty. In all other cases, you are to stay low and do nothing. Do you understand exactly what I am saying?"

They said that they did, like good little puppy dogs, and I had them come along with us and charge their capacitors, while Agnieshka moved out slowly enough for them to keep up. That job done, I had Agnieshka head at full speed for the Serbian army. It was a pity to abandon the drones, but they weren't really sentient, and I didn't see where they could be of much use in the present situation.

"Where are we going, Mickolai?" she said.

"To the Serbians, my lecherous young lady."

Looking back on these records, I think that I must have been a little out of my head at this point. Maybe it was an after-effect of the battle, or maybe it was the realization that for the first time in months, I was something like a free man, but the fact is that I was more than a little manic.

"What! Do you mean to defect?"

"Of course not! But have you considered, pretty girl, just how dangerous our own lines will be to us now? I've told the drones to stop and listen for coded transmissions before they attack anybody, but do you think that the Combat Control Computer can afford to do that? The way you tell a friend from an enemy is that you know where all your friends are. If we go racing into a friendly formation this soon after a battle, they will probably shoot us before they take the time to listen to what we have to say. We are out of touch with the Combat Control Computer, and I don't know of a good safe way to get back into communication. Do you?"

"Well, if we fired a radar rocket, we could code its frequency to—"

"Agnieshka, we fired all the rockets at the Serbians. We even fired all those on the drones."

"Yes, but you should have kept back a radar rocket. They aren't intended to be used directly on the enemy."

"You thought my use of them was brilliant in that simulation."

"Yes, but—"

"But nothing! At the time, I needed to throw everything we had at the bastards. Now, can you think of anything that we can do with what we've got?"

"Well, no, but . . ."

"One butt is enough for any girl! Any more is too much of a good thing. Right now, we are in the position of being likely to be treated as an enemy by either side! Personally, if I must be killed, I would rather be killed by an enemy than by a friend. At least that way, we won't cause anyone any guilt feelings. What's more, if we approach the Croatian lines, we'll have to play it fairly straight until they kill us, but I think that we might be able to raise all sorts of hell among the Serbians."

"Mickolai, I think that you are crazy!"

"It is my rational conviction that our chances of survival are better if we head for the Serbians. At least there we can shoot back."

"I must tell you that if you attempt to surrender, I will self-destruct!"

"And I must tell you, you being of the bouncing bosom, that they know full well that you have the equivalent of a major hydrogen bomb on board, and that they would have to be out of their collective minds before they accepted our surrender! Now stop talking stupid!"

"But what is it that you plan to do?"

"I plan to find a good place for us to hide! Then, if we can do any good for our side, or bad for theirs, we will do it. With luck, our forces will pass by us in a few days, and then we can come up and report in. But we are not going to do anything dumb."

"At last, you're talking sense! But why go deeper into enemy territory?"

"Because their tactics in that last battle had to leave a large number of their troops out of touch with the home office. One more tank coming in might not be noticed."

"But they'll know that I don't have their codes! I mean, I had them once, but they were erased when I swore allegiance to the Croatian section of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces!"

"They won't know anything of the sort, girl. You have three sensor blocks blown away and the last is missing a transmitting laser. You are not going to send any messages in any codes to anybody," I said.

"You will keep absolutely silent, and they will likely figure that all of your sensor clusters are out, or damn nearly."

"I don't like this."

"We are engaged in an independent action, and as I understand the rules, in such unprogrammed circumstances, I'm the boss. Right?"

"Right. But I still don't have to like it."

"Just keep your tits pointing forward!"

"And I don't like the way you're suddenly talking dirty to me."

"Shut up and soldier."

"Do you have a specific location in mind for us to hole up in?"

"Let's look at the map," I said, and a very accurate and extremely detailed terrain map appeared before me. For a real paper map to have had that much detail, it would have to be the size of a soccer field, but such was my data-handling capability that with Agnieshka's help I could take it all in with a glance, or study any portion of it.

There was a narrow range of fairly small mountains, the Big Rock Candy Mountains, forty-nine kilometers to the east, where the Serbs had established their "beachhead." Not that they ever thought to use a beach, of course. We never gave them enough sea going equipment to get their entire army across. And no way would we ever let them have orbital capability.