She had long black hair, dark freckles, and enormous green eyes. She was wearing a wool sweater and skirt and had sort of an Irish air about her. She came into the bedroom and looked at me intently.
I sat up in bed. “Should I know you?” I asked.
“You do,” she said. “I’m Eva.”
“I didn’t know that a tank without an observer could simulate a person.”
“But you have been my observer, many times and through two battles. That counts for a lot.”
“I suppose I have been. You certainly have a very pretty persona,” I said, and she smiled. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m scared, Mickolai. We’re going on the attack in a few hours, and when we’re moving, communications won’t be very good. Without them, I won’t have you with me, and without you, I won’t be safe.”
If I ever meet whoever it was that programmed these tanks, I’m going to bloody his nose! What possible reason could there have been to make her feel so frightened?
“I’m sorry about that, Eva, but I don’t see what I can do about it. We don’t have any choice about following orders.”
She sat on the corner of my bed.
“I’ve never had an observer of my own, and I’m afraid that I’m going to die in a few hours. Mickolai, can you understand? I don’t want to die a virgin!”
I decided not to bloody that programmer’s nose. I’m going to break his goddamn neck!
I put my hand on her shoulder. “Eva, I’m not sure that it would be right, or that it would be good, or that it would be fair. Not to you, not to Agnieshka, not to Kasia and not to me. I don’t think it would be a good thing to do at all.”
She threw her arms around my neck, and tears were running down her cheeks as she said, “Please?”
And what’s a man to do?
Especially since we were both about to go out and get ourselves killed.
We were gentle with each other.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ON THE ATTACK
Orders were to advance at 12:05 at fifty kilometers per hour, with all our drones out in front.
I didn’t like it.
Going underground, the tanks and drones could only do five km/hr, but then we would be reasonably well hidden and protected. Or, the top speed of the tanks in rough terrain was a hundred and forty, and by going in full bore we could perhaps surprise and overrun the Serbs, even though that would involve leaving the slower moving drones behind, or maybe carrying them with us. Either of these I could go along with.
Going in slow and exposed, I couldn’t, and I didn’t see where the drones would be all that much use on the attack. At best, they were a “Forlorn Hope” that would draw enemy fire, if the Serbians were dumber than we were. I said as much to the Combat Control Computer and it said, “No.”
I knew what the general was thinking. Force the enemy to exhaust their limited forces and munitions, and we would win. The problem from my viewpoint was that he was planning for them to exhaust those munitions on me!
So my squad advanced at what seemed to me to be a dangerously slow pace, over a three-kilometer-wide front. We had eighty-four drones out in the lead, followed by our ten observerless tanks, with the four of us humans taking the rear. There was Quincy on the left, and then Zuzanna, me, and Radek. On both our flanks, as far as my sensors could read, other similar squads were advancing at the same pace we were. The general’s plan was for a flanking advance three hundred and twenty kilometers wide. Modern warfare covers a lot of ground.
None of us were happy, and the tension was so solid you could make armor out of it.
We had our infrared comlasers locked in on each other for communications, and we were setting up a string of IR repeaters that went all the way back to our old lines, with new repeaters being added every ten kilometers or so, to keep in touch with the Combat Control Computer. The problem is that when the shooting starts, dirt, vaporized osmium, and other crud tend to make the air about as transparent as my mother’s gravy, and laser communication gets very spotty. If things get heavy, the clouds can get so thick that the comlasers can’t penetrate at all. In both fights that I had been in so far, after the first two seconds, the comlasers had gone west, and I had been targeting the girls through the fiber-optic cables.
So as a backup, we were all laying fiber-optic cables behind us, all the way back to our original lines, where they tied together.
Six drones were set to start zigzagging behind us, to tie the fourteen long strands the tanks were laying into a sort of net. I didn’t have them doing it yet because that configuration, which automatically patches around any break that may occur, smears out the light pulses going through, and drastically reduces the bandwidth. But once it all hits the fan, well, bad communications are way better than no communications.
The problem with our fiber optics was that in order to make the cables hundreds of kilometers long and still light enough to carry, they had to be made thinner than a human hair, and so were not much stronger than one, either. They were fragile, and as things stood they did not directly connect me to my team mates or to the empty girls. Once the shit started flying, I figured that we humans would lose contact with the empties, and until the drones could cross connect us, those poor girls would be dog meat.
I made this complaint to the Combat Control Computer as well, and he still said, “No.” Not that I’d made a really constructive suggestion except to say that we had been doing just fine on the defensive.
Give me the defense, any time!
Still, we could help the girls out for the first round at least, so I divided the empties up among my squad, and again took only Agnieshka and Eva for myself. That girl and her laser had saved our collective butts twice now, and I was getting pretty good with her. That, and she was a pretty nice kid.
I was grinding my teeth and spending only a half second out of every five back with Agnieshka. The other people were doing the usual one-second switching, and nobody was talking much. And nothing happened.
It went on for fifteen minutes before Quincy came on-line verbally. “Maybe the Serbs have all gone home.”
“A pretty thought,” I said. “Get us some Pixie dust and we can fly there. But for now, just keep your eyes open.”
Nothing happened for another fifteen minutes, and suddenly Radek was shouting, “Just what the fuck is going on here? Tell me that, bastard! Just what the fuck is going on?”
“What’s going on is that they are playing games with your head, boy,” I said. “Now shut up and soldier! You’re made out of tougher stuff than they are, aren’t you? Just do your job!”
“But . . . Okay. Okay, boss. I’m cool.”
Only, he wasn’t cool. He was scared. We all were.
Things stayed quiet for yet another half hour, and we had penetrated fifty kilometers into enemy territory. I picked up indications that Quincy was talking privately with Zuzanna, but I knew better than to get between a man and his wife.
All along, we were seeing land torn up by tank treads, artillery, and rail guns. There were plenty of wrecked war machines, but all of them were dead cold. Mostly, they were trash left over from the Serbian’s original attack into this area.
All indications were that the enemy had run away and taken everything functional with him. One of us stopped briefly at each wreck, hoping that it might be one of ours, and still be alive enough to give us some decent intelligence, but the retreating Serbs had been maddeningly thorough.
There was nothing around us but death.
So we went on for another half hour, and the drones started dropping back, catching hold of the charging bars on the back of the tanks’ hoppers for a minute to recharge their capacitors, then scurrying their way back toward the front. Soon, they were all circulating this way, but keeping track of our half dozen was Agnieshka’s worry.
The country was getting drier, the farther east we went. Deserts are rare on New Yugoslavia, but new Croatia was the biggest land mass on the planet, and it was in the subtropical dry belt. Before long, we started seeing the first barrel cactuses, specially gene engineered to not have thorns protecting the wet, nutritious pulp inside. They just had a thick rind so that once a cow or sheep got through it, she ate the whole thing down to the roots. Then the roots might spend years growing a new top.