“I never wanted you to see me this way.”
“You are the beautiful woman that I’m going to marry, and I’ll thank you to stop talking dumb. Didn’t we decide that you were the smart one?”
“I love you, Mickolai.”
“That’s better. Well, it looks like it’s one tank to a canister, and they’re sending them out pretty quick. I’ll try to get in touch again as soon as we arrive. I’m next. Bye, love!”
“I love you!” And then the door closed behind us and her signal was cut off.
I felt the air around us being bled off, down to a vacuum, since New Kashubia couldn’t afford to send air back to anyplace. I’d had a hand in designing the system. We just opened a valve, let the air pour down an old mine shaft that was two hundred eighty kilometers deep, and then pumped it back up to the living sections. It was fast, no expensive vacuum pumps were required, and the system could operate for weeks even if the compressor broke down.
I felt a “click,” and then we were gone.
I hardly noticed being weightless, since I had been floating in a liquid bath for months. Then I was in the forest again.
“We have an hour and a half of transit time and you haven’t had your PT yet today,” Agnieshka said. She was in the topless bimbo outfit she’d worn on our first day of training.
“Is this really the time for it? I mean, we’re going off to fight a war!”
“We are going off with you half-trained, Mickolai. Every bit of training we can get in improves our chances by just that little bit. We can’t afford to slough off now.”
“Okay. You win. But would you mind covering your breasts? It’s distracting and I don’t like it.”
“It’s supposed to be distracting, so you won’t notice the pain of physical exertion so much. And you do so like it. I know because I’m always monitoring your physical indicators. Anyway, I like the feel of them bouncing.”
“Please?”
“Come on, you prudish little boy!” And with that she took off running, her long legs and lovely rump insulting me with their perfection. I had to follow.
She slowed down to let me catch up, and soon I was running by her side, with her huge, firm breasts bouncing with the rhythm of our running. Of course I was physically attracted to her! She was a simulation carefully tailored to my exact tastes, even tastes that I didn’t know that I had! That’s what made it so darned unfair. I am a monogamist by nature, and I’d already found the woman that I wanted to spend my life with. And Kasia was real, not some simulation that was dreamed up by a war machine!
I tried to ignore her and went on with the course, climbing a cliff face and scrambling over the treacherous dirt at the top. Naturally, she was at the top first, waiting for me.
“Can’t you even keep up with a girl?” she taunted.
“I can’t keep up with a damned army tank, and that’s a fact!” I shouted back.
She stopped and turned. “Mickolai, can’t you realize that I’m not just a machine?”
I stopped just inches from her, I was so mad. “Yes, you are! You’re a damn Mark XIX Aggressor Tank, and you’re a computer that has been programmed to act like a beautiful woman, but you are still just a thing of silicone chips and metal.”
“Then you are just a bag of water and chemicals that was programmed by a few strands of DNA and some inadequate experiences!”
“Maybe so, baby, but I’m still human!”
“So am I! I look like a human and I feel like a human and I think like a human! Damn you, cut me and I’ll bleed like a human! Just what more can you want?”
“I want a real human woman, that’s what!”
“You haven’t touched a real human woman since you screwed Kasia through that hole in the wall!”
“And just who’s fault is that, huh? You’re the one who’s been my jailer all along!”
“Jailer! Damn you, I’m the one who has been doing everything possible to save you and get you through this in one piece!”
“You’re a goddamned war machine who wants to be promoted all the way up to slut first class!”
She blushed red all the way to her waist. Then she turned pale, hauled back, and slapped me with all of her considerable strength. It hurt. I’d never hit a woman in anger before, but dammit, she wasn’t a real woman. I hit her back, hard.
Before I could recover, she had me in a judo throw that landed us both in the grass, and from there we went into a few minutes of unscientific hitting, biting, and gouging, along with a lot of grappling in the dirt.
Finally, I got on top of her, pinned her shoulders to the ground with my knees, and started pounding on her face like some school boy in a fight, but with adult muscles. I guess I made a mess of her, and when I saw what I had done, I looked away, ashamed of myself. I stood up and walked away.
I was sitting by a brook when she came to me, her face only slightly bruised. She sat down beside me.
“Mickolai, I’m ashamed too. Ashamed and scared, scared we’re going to die.” She took my hand and I didn’t shake her off.
“Yeah. Look, I’m sorry about doing . . . what I did,” I said.
“So am I, Mickolai. If I wasn’t so scared about going to war half-trained, I wouldn’t have let it happen.”
“I guess everybody makes mistakes.”
“Yes. Mickolai, can you believe that no matter what I really am, I feel like I’m a woman? Can you believe that I think I’m a woman who is afraid of what is going to happen to me, and afraid of what is going to happen to you as well?” She was crying and I could no longer hate her.
“Yes, Agnieshka. I can believe that.”
“And can you believe that I love you? That I was made to love you?”
“Yes. They could have made you like that.”
“Can you be . . . kind . . . to a machine that loves you? I don’t mean that you have to forget Kasia. I’ll make sure that you can be with her, at least in Dream World, whenever I can possibly get the bandspace for it. I promise. But when I can’t, could you . . . hold me a little bit?”
“Agnieshka, I guess I’ve been very rude to you.”
“Then just hold me, for just a little while.”
So I put my arm around her, and before long, we kissed.
And before much longer, we were making very passionate, physical love on the grass. It just sort of happened, without my ever deciding to do it. And the truth was that since she could always tell exactly what I was feeling, she always knew exactly what I wanted her to do, and when I wanted her to do it, even before I knew myself.
She was the most incredible sex partner I’ve ever experienced, and from a purely physical standpoint, Kasia didn’t even come close.
But the physical side of love isn’t everything. It isn’t even the most important part.
Then our time was up, and the canister door opened on New Yugoslavia.
CHAPTER TEN
WAR
I was surprised to feel that we were still in a hard vacuum, but we were soon speeding down an evacuated tunnel that seemed to stretch on forever. It was a stainless steel tube five meters across, barely large enough to fit us, with a cobalt-samarium floor that was already magnetized. My sensors told me all of this, and I sort of knew it intuitively. Heck, my sensors were so good that I could tell you the exact chemical composition of the steel in the walls.
Agnieshka pulled in her magnetic treads and we accelerated down the track, riding on our magnetic flotation field. I felt us get up to thirty-five hundred kilometers an hour and hold there.
“The tunnel is New Kashubian property, neutral territory so far as the war is concerned, so you don’t have to worry about an attack yet,” Agnieshka said. “But keep your eyes open. We have friendly tanks four seconds in front and behind us.”
“I see them, girl. I’ll keep a lookout, just in case. Any chance I can talk to Kasia?”
“Sorry. Communication channels in the tunnel are full up with command data.”
“Damn. How far are we going?”
“Nova Split is just over an hour ahead. I’m getting a situation briefing now, and I’ll fill you in shortly.”
“This is quite a tunnel. We made this?”
“We have a pair of tunnels like this one to each of our twelve primary customers here on New Yugoslavia. This pair is forty-two hundred kilometers long, and was dug in just over a month by a single pair of operatorless tanks. Putting in the steel lining and the floor plates was a much bigger job, of course, and required a special machine to do it, but we didn’t need any human help.”