If I’d had my wits about me, and if my reflexes had been quick enough, I would have hit the ejection button right then and there. Only I didn’t and they weren’t so I stayed aboard.
I never lost consciousness, but for a time I wished that I had. I could feel us fly tumbling through the air, to make almost half a flip and to come in upside down with our tail burying itself in the sand. There were a few more bumps, and then all was silent, all was darkness, and I was alone.
I stayed quiet for a while, catching my breath and letting my body draw itself back together. I was completely in the dark, I could see nothing at all and I could hear nothing but my own breathing and heart beat. I was in pain, and only fact that I could breathe told me that all was not absolutely lost.
“Agnieshka?”
There was no answer, and a cold icicle of fear went through me. I was encased in an armored coffin and nothing seemed to work!
“Agnieshka. Come in, please. I need you, pretty girl.”
Still nothing. Think. Think, man!
I was far behind the Serbian lines. The odds of somebody coming to help me were so small that they weren’t worth thinking about. If I was going to live through this one, I’d have to do it myself.
Well. The tank was upside down and laying on its tail at perhaps a twenty-degree angle, judging from how low my head felt. The coffin slide motor was entirely too small to move the entire tank, so that was out.
The emergency ejection mechanism used a chemical charge to blow the coffin out. If the coffin was buried and couldn’t move, the energy in that explosive had to go somewhere, and my body was the likely dumping ground. I obviously couldn’t even think of ejecting until the rear of the tank was clear of the ground, and just then it was sitting in the worst possible position.
Fortunately, the designers of the tank had foreseen this possible dilemma, and had made provisions for solving it. There were eight explosive charges built into the hull that could safely flip the tank, or even blow it six meters into the air.
I’d used the system before in simulations. I flipped open the protective lid that covered the controls, braced myself for another brutal shock, and pressed the button that would blow the upper left rear charge.
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!