“What! Do you mean to defect?”
“Of course not! But have you considered, pretty girl, just how dangerous our own lines will be to us now? I’ve told the drones to stop and listen for coded transmissions before they attack anybody, but do you think that the Combat Control Computer can afford to do that? The way you tell a friend from an enemy is that you know where all your friends are. If we go racing into a friendly formation this soon after a battle, they will probably shoot us before they take the time to listen to what we have to say. We are out of touch with the Combat Control Computer, and I don’t know of a good safe way to get back into communication. Do you?”
“Well, if we fired a radar rocket, we could code its frequency to—”
“Agnieshka, we fired all the rockets at the Serbians. We even fired all those on the drones.”
“Yes, but you should have kept back a radar rocket. They aren’t intended to be used directly on the enemy.”
“You thought my use of them was brilliant in that simulation.”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing! At the time, I needed to throw everything we had at the bastards. Now, can you think of anything that we can do with what we’ve got?”
“Well, no, but . . .”
“One butt is enough for any girl! Any more is too much of a good thing. Right now, we are in the position of being likely to be treated as an enemy by either side! Personally, if I must be killed, I would rather be killed by an enemy than by a friend. At least that way, we won’t cause anyone any guilt feelings. What’s more, if we approach the Croatian lines, we’ll have to play it fairly straight until they kill us, but I think that we might be able to raise all sorts of hell among the Serbians.”
“Mickolai, I think that you are crazy!”
“It is my rational conviction that our chances of survival are better if we head for the Serbians. At least there we can shoot back.”
“I must tell you that if you attempt to surrender, I will self-destruct!”
“And I must tell you, you being of the bouncing bosom, that they know full well that you have the equivalent of a major hydrogen bomb on board, and that they would have to be out of their collective minds before they accepted our surrender! Now stop talking stupid!”
“But what is it that you plan to do?”
“I plan to find a good place for us to hide! Then, if we can do any good for our side, or bad for theirs, we will do it. With luck, our forces will pass by us in a few days, and then we can come up and report in. But we are not going to do anything dumb.”
“At last, you’re talking sense! But why go deeper into enemy territory?”
“Because their tactics in that last battle had to leave a large number of their troops out of touch with the home office. One more tank coming in might not be noticed.”
“But they’ll know that I don’t have their codes! I mean, I had them once, but they were erased when I swore allegiance to the Croatian section of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces!”
“They won’t know anything of the sort, girl. You have three sensor blocks blown away and the last is missing a transmitting laser. You are not going to send any messages in any codes to anybody,” I said.
“You will keep absolutely silent, and they will likely figure that all of your sensor clusters are out, or damn nearly.”
“I don’t like this.”
“We are engaged in an independent action, and as I understand the rules, in such unprogrammed circumstances, I’m the boss. Right?”
“Right. But I still don’t have to like it.”
“Just keep your tits pointing forward!”
“And I don’t like the way you’re suddenly talking dirty to me.”
“Shut up and soldier.”
“Do you have a specific location in mind for us to hole up in?”
“Let’s look at the map,” I said, and a very accurate and extremely detailed terrain map appeared before me. For a real paper map to have had that much detail, it would have to be the size of a soccer field, but such was my data-handling capability that with Agnieshka’s help I could take it all in with a glance, or study any portion of it.
There was a narrow range of fairly small mountains, the Big Rock Candy Mountains, forty-nine kilometers to the east, where the Serbs had established their “beachhead.” Not that they ever thought to use a beach, of course. We never gave them enough sea going equipment to get their entire army across. And no way would we ever let them have orbital capability.
But that was where their transoceanic invasion tunnel had come up. They’d started work on it the very day that they got our first shipments of arms.
Near a high, difficult and seldom-used pass in the Big Rock Candy Mountains was an isolated peak called Lookout Point, which seemed to be a natural place for us to wait and see what was happening. I said as much to Agnieshka.
“It’s too good an observation point,” Agnieshka said. “The Serbs have to be using it.”
“It’s so good that they will know that we would target it if we attacked, so they won’t be likely to be using it themselves.”
“Then if it is a prime target for our forces, we don’t dare use it either!”
“But why should our people bother shooting at it, if they know that the Serbians wouldn’t be dumb enough to be there in the first place?”
“Mickolai, if you are saying all this just to confuse me, I will be very unhappy with you. You know that I am a logical machine!”
“And didn’t we decide that I am an associative one? I’m just saying that it looks like a good spot, and we won’t know what’s there until we arrive. Now, I want you to make for it at your best speed, pretty tits.”
“Yes, boss. And please don’t call me things like that.”
“So who is getting prudish, now?”
We made it to within sight of Lookout Point in half an hour without seeing anybody from either side except from an extreme distance, and nobody challenged us in either code. We found a deserted gully where our entry hole wouldn’t be noticed and dug in.
From there, it would be five hours tunneling inside the mountains before we got up to Lookout Point. I couldn’t use our sensors when we were inside of solid rock, and Agnieshka didn’t need me to help her drive, so I went home to my cottage for a rest.
Agnieshka was there, of course, and wearing a miniskirt. She was topless again, as was becoming her habit. She suggested some PT and I refused.
“Look, Agnieshka, we’ve just had a rough day and we’ve just lost a lot of good friends. I need to relax and have a drink. In fact, I think that I want to get roaring drunk, so bring me a bottle of rum and some Coke.”
She looked at me, acting very concerned. “Are you sure that you wouldn’t rather go to church?”
“Yes, I’d rather go to church, but what good would a phony church with a phony priest do me? You can imitate a lot of things in Dream World, but you can’t imitate God. If there was a real church and an honest to God ordained priest, I would go there. Only I can’t, so I’ll settle for some phony booze, instead. Get it!”
She looked at me uncertainly for a moment, and then did as I asked. I made myself a very stiff drink and threw it down my throat. There was nothing I could do for Quincy and Zuzanna and the rest of them, and I was fairly certain that by this time Radek had been blown away by our own forces. The only sane thing that I could do was to try and forget it all. For a while, anyway.
“What do you want me to do now?” Agnieshka asked.
“You? Well, you keep on insisting on dressing like a cheap dancer in a sleazy American topless bar,” I said. “You might as well start acting like one as well. Get up and dance! Better still, change the scene to a sleazy bar, complete with drunken customers and all the rest. And dance, damn you!”
Immediately, I was surrounded with the noise and smell and smoke of an inner city dive, with a nearly naked waitress bringing me another drink. Agnieshka was on the stage with another naked woman, shaking her body lasciviously. I downed my drink and called for another.
I remember the rest of that evening only in bits and pieces, but I do remember getting into a fight, beating up the bouncer, and taking some licks of my own in the process. I also vaguely recall fornicating with one of the dancers on the stage, a little bit before that.