I woke up in a dirty hotel room with a splitting headache and two days’ growth on my face. One of my eyes was swollen shut and a few of my teeth were loose. Incredibly thirsty, I stumbled to the bathroom and drew a glass of water, which came out reddish brown from the rusty iron pipes.
I looked at it, but decided not to drink the filthy stuff.
“Agnieshka, you are taking this too damn far! Put me back in my cottage!”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and I was there. She was wearing a conservative blouse and skirt, and looked a little shamefaced.
“Good. Now you can get rid of my hangover, my wounds, and my two-day beard. Better,” I said, since now my clothes were as clean and as fit as my body. “Now, get me some breakfast, and Agnieshka, I like your outfit.”
We ate a silent meal, but when we finished, she said, “Mickolai, I don’t think that I like you as much when you’re drunk.”
“Sometimes, I don’t like me very much, either. Just be glad that I don’t do it very often. Look, how is the digging coming?”
“We just got into position. There are no indications of enemy activity. I can put up what’s left of the sensor cluster at any time.”
“Good. Let’s do it.”
The top of a sensor cluster has a small ultrasonic rig like the big one in front of the tank. It went through the three meters of solid rock that separated us from the world outside in a few seconds.
I looked around from my mountaintop in the morning sunshine, surprised that it was still so early.
A real drunk would have taken at least two days to do it and recover afterward, but such are the advantages of Dream World.
The pass below us looked as if it had never been used, at least not by any heavy military equipment. Far to the west, I could see the flashes of a firefight on the horizon, but from that direction there were no military units of any flavor in view.
Give ’em hell, gang, I thought to them.
The surprise came from the southeast. There looked to be a whole division down there in a valley, sitting quietly in nice neat rows!
I had Agnieshka count them, computers being better at that sort of thing than us watery types, and she came up with ten thousand tanks. Ten thousand exactly.
There were exactly two thousand artillery pieces and exactly twenty-six hundred ammunition trucks, the usual divisional compliment. And everything was all shiny and new.
“Well, whoever they are, they’ve never seen combat, and that’s a fact,” I said.
“They can’t be ours, Mickolai. I know for certain that we had no uncommitted units. We were fighting without any reserves at all!”
“But as hard as we were pressing the Serbians, would it make sense for them to keep an entire division out of action? Another thing: those lines are awfully neat. They look like something done by an old-style military academy.”
“Or by machines in a factory. I see what you are saying. Neatness is not stressed in our human training procedures. It makes for a mind set that likes straight lines, square corners and other things easy to spot and target,” she said.
“All of which makes me wonder if we are looking at a completely empty division. What if the Serbians couldn’t get enough volunteers to man all the stuff they took from us, and they didn’t hit on the trick of mixing empty and full tanks the way we did. What if they brought their spares over here planning to use them as replacements, or hoping to get more volunteers once the war was in full swing?”
“Maybe. Except that our intelligence team was absolutely positive that the Serbs had committed their entire ten divisions to the battle. They were going for broke! They didn’t have any reserves either, not even on their own continent. We know that they were running low on artillery ammunition, at least. Otherwise, they could have smeared us after we cleared the field of the drones in our second battle. Yet from the way that those ammunition trucks are sitting, I’m sure that they are all full.”
“Well, there are ten other warring countries on this poor, abused planet,” I said. “Can it be that they are from some other outfit that is planning to come in on one side or the other?”
“If they were on our side, I don’t see how they could possibly have gotten here. They couldn’t have tunneled in this close to the Serbian beach head without being detected. The Serbs have that place very well instrumented and guarded, I can assure you. It wouldn’t still exist if it wasn’t. We would have taken it out by now. But if they were fighting for the Serbs, they would be fighting right now. They wouldn’t be just sitting there doing nothing. There is a major battle still going on, and I think the Serbs are getting plastered.”
“It’s a puzzlement. Let’s sit and watch it for a while.”
We watched and waited, and nothing moved, nothing happened. After a while, I got to looking very carefully at the tracks left in the dirt by the division when it had arrived.
Weather on New Yugoslavia is almost always pleasant, and severe storms are rare. But those tracks looked awfully sharp and new.
I said, “You know, I think that they got here very recently. I wish it was still night, so I could see the heat signatures better, but I would swear that they have been here for only a few hours. What if those greedy bastard politicians we have back in New Kashubia got offered more money for another division than they would have wanted to refuse?”
“Wouldn’t that be treason? But you know them better than I do, Mickolai.”
“I’m even related to some of them, and yes, if you offered Uncle Wlodzimierz enough, he could talk himself into believing that one more little division couldn’t do that much harm.”
“So what do we do, boss?”
“We get back to our lines and report this to the general. Our people had better know about it. Agnieshka, go back down the way we came. Going through the sand we made will be a lot faster than cutting through rock. Then we drive right back home like we know what we are doing, and trust to our luck. Maybe we can figure some way to make them not blow us away.”
The sensor cluster retracted and I felt us starting to go down.
It occurred to me that some time in the distant future, someone would find the tunnel filled with sand that we had carved into the mountain, circling and climbing all the way up to the peak, and that someone would blow out the sand, put up a sign, and make a profitable venture out of driving tourists up to Lookout Point. Who knows? Maybe I would do it myself!
But soon, the dumb idea evaporated, and I got to thinking about the problem at hand. I pondered the whole way down, and by the time we broke back into the open air, I was pretty sure of what to do.
“Agnieshka, it’s simple! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, or why you didn’t either, for that matter.
“We have a drone with us! He still has over two hundred kilometers of optical fiber on him and he has a range of over a hundred. We can dig in way back from our lines and send the drone in to do the explaining! And then, if they’ll hook up to our cable, we can explain it to them ourselves.”
“Well, I think that they would be more likely to shoot at a drone than at a tank. Most likely, it will be taken out by another drone without anybody noticing. Did you talk to the last drone that came at you out of the east?”
“Ouch,” I said. “Still, I think it’s a chance worth taking.”
“I hope so.”
That was when we hit the land mine.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LAND MINES
We were doing more than a hundred and thirty when, without any warning at all, the front of the tank bucked up with brutal force.
If I hadn’t been floating in a liquid with the same average density of my body tissues, I certainly would have been killed. As it was, the local differences in the density of my tissues came near to tearing me apart. I could feel my bones being yanked downward, while my lungs rammed painfully into my ribcage. My skull bashed down into my helmet while it jerked upward, and my intestines tried to pull themselves up out of my body.
Every joint I owned was wrenched, and I was too shaken up to think clearly.