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.