A Boy and His Tank (20 page)

Nothing happened.

When I started breathing again, I tried the upper right rear charge, since it would work equally well, only it didn't work either. Neither did the top front charges. Or any combination of the above. The emergency orientation system was out.

I tried the manual drive controls near my right hand. After all, for all I knew, the tank could be balanced on something, needing only the slightest motion to topple it. I fumbled for the controls, I moved them and they felt dead. Nothing happened at all! Everything couldn't be out! I was still breathing, wasn't I?

I tried the weapons, and they were gone, too. Well, I didn't really expect the rockets to do anything. I'd used them up last night. But the rail gun did nothing, and the drone did not respond.

I slipped my hands into the control gloves of the manipulator arms, and while the right one was out, I could feel the left one move! Something! I had something! I wouldn't have to lay here on my face until I died!

I tried to use the arm to push the tank upright, but it didn't have nearly the required strength. I quickly stopped trying.

It was likely that tank was on capacitor power only, and I suspected that I had very little of that. I had to conserve power. And think!

The mine. I had a land mine in the drone hopper that I hadn't used. If I could set it off under one side of the tank, maybe I could flip myself back upright! At least it was worth a try, especially since I couldn't think of anything else that could save my life. Land mines were normally set off electronically through Agnieshka, but the design was a very old one—face it, there isn't much creative that you can design into a new land mine—and it still had manual controls on it. The tactile feedback on the manipulator arms was fairly good, and I felt my way back along the hull to the drone hopper.

I soon discovered that the hopper was buried in the desert sand. Well, at least it wasn't rock. I started to dig, wondering just how long my air would hold out.

My oxygen was supplied by the microorganisms in the bio-tank, but they were kept alive by a growing light powered by the main reactor. I was pretty sure that the reactor was out, or other things would be powered up that weren't. I didn't know how long an algae would keep working without imitation sunlight, but I was sure that it wasn't long. I might not have time to dig out! Oh, there was a makeup cylinder that compensated for system leaks or other losses, but it was pretty small. I might even be running on it now.

The coolant bottle! I had a big cylinder of liquid air on board, and there had been plenty of time since the battle for it to recharge completely. It was usually used to cool the observer when the tank was putting out a lot of power, or to cool the hull when there was danger of the warmth of the hull being observed. But it made sense that the designers of this tank would make it available to the observer if something went wrong and the bio-tank was screwed up. But how? I had manual controls for almost everything, but I had never finished my formal training, and this was a subject that hadn't been covered yet.

If Agnieshka was here, she could have displayed the tank's complete schematics to me, but then if she was here, I wouldn't need to see them. Damn. Okay. Nothing left but trial and error.

There was a small, calculator-sized keyboard above my right shoulder that I had never used. I felt for it and found the thing. For all I knew, I might be shutting off the blower that was supplying me with increasingly stale air, but to do nothing was to die anyway. With a prayer to my patron saint, I pressed the first button. Nothing happened that I could notice. So I tried the next one. And the next.

On the sixth button on the top row, the screen in my helmet lit up, displaying a menu. I read it, and pressed 4) Life Support. Or rather I pressed the fourth button from the left, and it turned out that I guessed right. The menu changed, and I pressed 1) Air Supply, and then 2) Aux. Air from Coolant Cyl. A glorious little hiss started sounding in my ear, and the screen stated that I had fourteen hours of air at standard usage. I would stay alive for at least half a day!

I went back to the opening menu to see if I could find anything that I didn't know about when it came to righting an inverted tank, but no such luck. If I had a magic tank inverter, it wasn't on the menu. I did have the capability of firing the eight hull charges, but the charges didn't go off this time either. And the rail gun still wouldn't move.

Going through all the menus that the tiny emergency brain had in its memory, I was able to verify that the main reactor was shut down and would not start up, and that almost all of the other systems aboard did not function either. That included the remaining sensor cluster.

I went back to digging out the mine with my left manipulator arm. It was slow, and I was working blind, but in two hours I had dug my way down to the hopper. I had also exhausted almost half of my battery power.

I couldn't get the lid off the hopper, since the whole weight of the tank was on it, but the middle finger of the manipulator had a sharp, tungsten carbide fingernail, and the hopper was only made of steel. Still, I was an hour cutting my way through and some frantic time was spent finding the mine.

For a while I was afraid that it was gone. Things had bounced around in there a lot, and I pulled out Eva's module and the drone before I found the mine. The drone was in three pieces, and that left me without much hope for poor Eva. Still, I put her as far away from the upcoming explosion as possible, since you never know.

Then there was the problem of the explosion itself. Considering the way I was sitting, the place to put the mine to best flip me right side up was near the lower left corner of the tank. That was about a meter from my head, and my mine was probably as powerful as the one that had done all the damage in the first place. If I placed it wrong, it might turn out to be a classic case of "The operation was a complete success, but the patient died." That is to say, the tank would be sitting nicely upright, with my dead body in it!

But if I put it too far away, it might not turn me all the way over, and I only had the one shot. Then I would still be dead, only it would happen slower.

The mine had a shaped charge that blew a hypersonic beam of vaporized metal into whatever it was destroying, and that was an effect that I didn't want happening to me. I only wanted the kick of the thing, so I set it upside down, near the edge of the vehicle where there wasn't much above it except for the drive magnets. Let the dirt get a deep, ugly hole in it, but not me!

I was trying to set the timer by touch, but I must have done something wrong, because it went off in my hand.

The bouncing around I got was at least as bad as the one I'd gotten in the wreck, but God must look out after sinners, the way a banker looks out for people who owe him money.

I was now lying on my back, upright!

My manipulator arm no longer was functional, but I didn't mind. I didn't need it anymore. I flipped the protective cover off the controls, gritted my teeth and pressed the eject button near my right hand, expecting to come flying out, but nothing happened!

I was still trapped!

After all this work, I had exhausted ninety percent of my battery power, my manipulator arm was gone, my only explosive was gone, my air wouldn't last forever and I was still trapped inside of an armored coffin!

I wanted to cry, and since nobody was watching, I went ahead and did so.

After a while, I got ahold of myself, shook the tears out of my eyes, and felt for the keyboard. I turned on the master menu that I had shut down to save a tiny bit of power and worked my way through five subordinate menus until I came to 3) Extend Life Support Module. I'd always called it a coffin, and so did everybody else, but here it was a life support module.

At least I hoped it was. Nothing else listed came close.

I pressed button three and came sliding out smoothly into the sunlight.

At least I could see the sunlight once I sat up and got my helmet off. I was sitting naked, waist deep in a bathtub hung on the end of a ruined tank, and I was wondrously, gloriously alive!

I was also pretty bashed up. I wasn't bleeding, but there were dozens of deep red bruises welling up all over on my ghastly pale skin, and I knew that tomorrow, there'd be more of me that was purple than was white. Shaking, I took off the catheter, got out of the coffin, and looked around at the rocks, mountains, and desert.

I was about a hundred and sixty kilometers from my lines, and I wasn't even in good enough shape to go the five that I was from the strange enemy division.

I decided that I had best to spend the day resting.

I got out the survival kit, inflated the floor and the structural ribs of the tent, and threw everything else into it. There didn't seem to be any point in hiding. If the Serbs hadn't heard two major explosions, they wouldn't be likely to find me now.

And if they did, well, maybe being a POW wouldn't be so bad. It had to beat being a free citizen on New Kashubia, and I had survived that.

I took another look around, knowing that I couldn't stay out long before my skin got sunburned, but I didn't want to miss any bets, either. I limped around the tank, surveying the damage.

Maybe the salvage crews could find something worth saving on it, but more likely not. There was a hole in the front clean through to the ground that was big enough to put my arm in. It was right where the main reactor had been. Likely, the blast had ripped up the control fibers, and that was why almost nothing on the tank worked.

The rail gun was a twisted wreck and the left manipulator arm was simply gone. There wasn't a scrap of it left! Yet there was Eve's module, right where I'd left it. It was scratched up, but still apparently intact. Maybe she was still alive in there.

I picked her up and put her next to Agnieshka's module in the tent. I ate some colored pills and a food bar from the survival kit, and soon went into a blissful, dreamless sleep.

It was night when I woke, and the wrist watch in the kit said that it was three in the morning. There was a big full moon that was bright enough to read by, and it was time to get moving unless I wanted to walk to the strange division in the sunlight.

You see, my subconscious had been working overtime while I slept. There was no way that I could make it on foot all the way back to the Croatian lines. There was a hundred and sixty kilometers of desert between me and my people.

What I needed was another tank, and there were ten thousand of them just sitting there only five kilometers away. Even as bashed up as I was, I was pretty sure that I could make five kilometers.

After that, well, I was descended on both sides from a man who had conned the Wealthy Nations Group out of billions of tons of gold and other nice things. The least I could do was to promote one measly little Aggressor Mark XIX army tank. Maybe even two of them.

It hurt to move, but there were a collection of different-colored pills in the survival kit, and I washed down a few more of them than the warnings said I should.

I got out a plastic mirror and checked myself out. My hair was about a centimeter long, and it would probably pass for an ordinary haircut. The beard would have to go, though, if I was to convince anyone that I was a factory rep.

The kit didn't have a razor, but I made do with the big survival knife and the tiny bar of soap, using the watery supporting fluid still in the coffin. Agnieshka had once claimed that the stuff was safe to drink, but I would have to be a lot thirstier before I tried drinking it. The catheters had fallen back into it and anyway, I had a full canteen.

I spent some time scrubbing and popping zits before I rubbed some tan skin dye on my face and hands. A dead pale skin shouted "soldier" real loud. I worked it into my hair and scalp, since Serbians tend to be a little darker than Kashubians. The writing on the tube said that the stuff was a good suntan lotion, too, and I didn't have a hat, aside from a squidskin hood and face mask thing, which looked too military.

I got into the squidskin outfit and set it for what I hoped would pass as desert gear for a civilian. The boots looked military, but there was nothing I could do about them.

With the shoulder straps removed, the bag that the survival kit came in might pass for a tool kit, and I filled it with the memory modules, my helmet, food, and the canteen. After some internal debate, I strapped the knife to my hip, but left the rifle and ammo behind in the tent with the camping gear.

If I had any chance of accomplishing anything, it would be with my wits, not with a gun. I doubted that the enemy had anything that I could kill with a slug thrower anyway. This war was strictly armor.

By then, the little colored pills I had downed were working
real good.
I took a deep drink of water and ate another food bar as I started walking toward the enemy camp.

The spirit of Great-Grandpa Dzerzdzon descended on me as I marched forward, feeling a good deal more confident than I looked.

Being both bigger and closer than Earth's moon, New Yugoslavia's moon looks twice the size of the one I was used to, and since it has a much higher albedo, it is brighter than size alone would make it. The result was that it seemed almost as bright out as a cloudy day would be on Earth, although the sky was black, of course.

The funny-colored pills made the march a short one, and the sun was just coming up as I rounded the mountain to enter the valley where the division was.

"HALT!" said a mechanical voice in Yugoslavian. Not that I speak Serbo-Croatian myself, but the guard tank's meaning was pretty obvious. He was positioned where I couldn't have seen him from Lookout Point so he had probably been there all along. But mostly I noticed that he was pointing a rail gun, two rockets, and a Gatling-type machine gun at me. I'd never seen a machine gun on a tank before. This fellow was armed with antipersonnel operations in mind.

"Hi there!" I said in English, and smiled while I was walking toward the tank. "It's good to see somebody friendly at last!"