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 an 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 difference 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 programmed 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.
CHAPTER NINE
I GO TO WAR
Training went on for another month, and now there was a lot more skull work. Many hours were spent on strategy and tactics, with extra PT if I blew a test.
There was a lot of hand-to-hand combat as well, and it was entirely too realistic! Since the whole thing was simulated, we could go ahead and break bones, gouge eyeballs, and rip off testicles without actually ruining anybody, physically, at least.
But it hurt just like being actually bashed up, and emotionally, well, I had problems with it. I mean, I had a lot of trouble hitting something that looked like a beautiful woman, let alone sticking a knife into one. It took me a screaming fit and a sit-down strike before I was able to get Agnieshka to put on Lech’s body and persona when we were on the judo mats. Killing Lech didn’t bother me in the least!
Training went on and on, for fourteen hours a day and six days a week, and none of it involved polishing shoes or marching in parades. But now it was starting to get interesting.
Agnieshka was telling me one morning that I was halfway through the course when word came to her that things were not going at all well on New Yugoslavia. Our training period was being cut short, and we were shipping out to the front that very day.