A Boy and His Tank (8 page)

After eating a very full meal, she suggested that we put off dessert for a while and go to a show.

"I thought that I had to spend the evening watching that orientation lecture again, Agnieshka."

"Tomorrow. You've been a good boy today, and all good boys deserve favor. You speak English. Do you like Shaw?"

"GBS? Sure. A fine writer."

"Good, because I have tickets to the theater."

The cottage had a garage now, and the garage had a big new Hunyadi in it. We drove only a mile to town and saw a fine play from the front row, center balcony. We had the best seats in the house because all the rest of the seats were there just to give the proper atmosphere. Not that I could tell that anything was phony.

There didn't seem to be any limitation to what she could fake up. At one point during intermission when she was in the women's room, I hit up a conversation with one of the engineers from Soul City that I'd met when we were getting the power plant installed on Freya, and I swear I couldn't tell him from the genuine article.

The play was
Man and Superman
, and well performed, though I'd seen it once before. Driving back to the cottage, Agnieshka sleepily rested her head on my shoulder. It was all so real that I couldn't help being more than a little attracted to her.

Back inside, she got us some champagne and said, "Dessert, boss? You got your choice of Big Boy fresh strawberry pie or New York cheese cake." Now she was sort of American, but still with red hair and freckles. Her skirt was much longer, but the top of her dress was about as low at the law allows.

"Make it the cheese cake. Why are you still changing your appearance?"

"Just doing some more calibration, boss. I'm monitoring your blood pressure and pupil diameter with each of my body and clothing changes, zooming in on what you want in a woman." She came next to me on the couch, sitting much too close.

"Can't we just be good friends? You know that I've already found the woman I want, and I'm going to marry her as soon as I can be done with this army business. Can't you understand that I don't want to get involved with another woman right now?"

"Especially one who's really a computer in a war machine, Mickolai? Your physiological reactions will tell me what they will tell me, so don't you worry about it."

"Okay, I won't," I said, getting angry. I mean, forcing me to go through a training program was one thing. Forcing me to have a love affair with a goddamn army tank was quite another! It was not only illegal but downright immoral on top of it! Suddenly, the cheese cake stopped tasting good. "Hey, wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me that you have feelings?"

"Me? Of course not! I'm just a
goddamn army tank!
But I'm programed to
act
like I've got emotions, so you'd better
watch your step, buster!
" She was still an American girl, but now her canine teeth were about a centimeter longer and she wasn't pretty anymore.

"All I said was . . ."

"I know what you said! I know what you thought, too, asshole! You sure know how to wreck a nice evening."

"But . . ."

"Go to sleep, Mickolai."

I slept.

"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.