A Boy and His Tank

by Leo Frankowski

  A BOY & HIS TANK

  Leo Frankowski

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright (c) 1999 by Leo A. Frankowski

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  ISBN: 0-671-57850-2

  Cover art by Gary Ruddell

  First paperback printing, February 2000

  Library of Congress Catalog Number 98-51933

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  I'd like to dedicate this book to Owen Lock, who was for many years my editor at Del Rey. He's a VP at Random House these days, and no longer directly concerned with science fiction. Thus, I can now thank him for his long years of patience, sound advice, and friendship without it looking like I'm kissing ass. For many things, Owen, thank you.

  —Leo Frankowski

  TANKS A LOT!

  One of the tanks pulled itself out of the line and drove up in front of us. It was a big slab of a thing, fully ten meters long and four wide. The machine was absolutely silent. The huge monster could have snuck up on a mouse, if there had been any such creature on New Kashubia.

  "Number 04056239, you are hereby inducted into the service of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces, and into the Croatian branch of that service, to which you will give all of your loyalty. Do you now swear loyalty to the Kashubian Armed Forces?" The sergeant recited it like a fixed formula.

  "I SO SWEAR," the tank answered.

  "Welcome into the service. Open up."

  The tank did an about-face in front of us, and this big coffin-looking thing slid out of the rear of it.

  "Get in there, kid," the sergeant said, "and I'll hook you up."

  "You are swearing in the tank, but not me?" I said, amazed.

  "Kid, if your tank is loyal, you don't have to be. Get in."

  BAEN BOOKS by LEO FRANKOWSKI

  A Boy and His Tank

  The Fata Morgana

  Acknowledgements

  This book was a long time in the writing, and a lot of people generously lent me a hand in getting it done. So many, in fact, that I don't see how I can properly thank all of them. But if I don't try, I'll end up offending everybody I know instead of just most of them. So.

  To Debbie Haberland for proofreading an earlier version of this and several other books. To L. Warren Douglas for the encouragement, the support and the beer. To Alan Greenberg, Gilbert Parker, Jane Devlin, Mike Hubble, Joe Ainu, and others for proofreading, encouragement, and friendship. To Halina Harding for keeping me alive the entire time. To Tom Devlin for giving my aging computer CPR when it died, several times and at the worst possible moments, and with the aid of various spells and potions restoring it to life. To Gene Wolfe for permission to repeat a conversation I overheard in a bar. To Harry Turtledove for clearing up an annoying historical point. To Glen Horning, for aid when it really counted. And to Toni Weisskopf and Jim Baen for buying the thing and getting it out to you. To all of you, my very sincere thanks.

  Very special thanks are owed to Sgt. James Coop, Co. C Task Force, 1-32 Armor, First Cavalry Division, for proofreading an earlier version of this book while sitting in the desert waiting for Desert Storm to happen. Some twenty of his friends wrote up their comments as well, and included them with the manuscript when they mailed it back to me. The Post Office managed to demolish the package and all of their valuable comments were lost. All I got back was bits and pieces of the brown paper cover held together by forty yards of clear tape, and the computer printout of the manuscript. By the time it got back to me and my letter got back to them, the war was over, and the men were scattered. The advice of the real professionals was lost to me, and I'm sure that this book suffers because of it.

  Then I compounded the tragedy by personally managing to lose the list of the names of the soldiers who had tried to help. I'm sorry, guys. It's all my fault.

  Finally, no thanks at all are owed to the SOB of a Physicist from the Warren Tank Plant who borrowed a copy of the manuscript from me at Tudor's Tavern last year. He never was seen again, nor was my manuscript. If some of my ideas start showing up on the latest tanks, well, you'll know where they swiped them from.

  Leo Frankowski

  Sterling Heights

  November 21, 1998

  Author's Note for A Boy and His Tank

  This book was a long time coming.

  I've never met two authors who used the same technique in getting things written. Personally, I use something akin to Method Acting, or maybe it's a form of benign schizophrenia, but I sort of become my narrator and the other main characters in the book. This imposes certain limitations on my work. For one thing, I'm largely limited to first person writing. For another, I have to be careful of my characters, since I often forget and stay in character when I get up from my desk. If my protagonist was a real mental case, I just might end up in jail.

  In the late eighties, I became impressed with David Drake's Hammer's Slammers, and I wanted to write something where my mercenary heroes went around blowing up the countryside in super tanks.

  In return for nothing more than money, a mercenary volunteers to kill people who haven't done much to harm him or his family, and to take his chances of being on the receiving end of pain, disfigurement, and death while dishing the same out.

  A person accepting such a job might be so poor that his immediate family is at risk of starving to death. Faced with his wife and children dying, a man would likely be willing to do what he has to in order to keep his people alive.

  Or he might be someone who really enjoys butchering people and thinks that getting paid for it besides is just wonderful. That is to say, he is simply out of his mind, and in a most unpleasant way.

  Since it is illegal to starve to death in America, only the second group is available to man the few American mercenary outfits that exist. I have met such people. You wouldn't want one living on your street. They are scary.

  (Understand that I am not talking about soldiers, people who serve in the regular armed forces of their country. Such individuals are often among the best that our race produces.)

  Needless to say, I couldn't write about such group two mercenaries and still be fit (or even safe) company. My heroes would have to come from group one.

  This left me with the problem of, if my heroes were so damn poor, how could they afford all those multimillion-dollar super tanks? This got me into the long and strange history of the Wealthy Nations Group and the New Kashubians.

  Then there was the question of whose territory I was going to have these sterling troops desecrate.

  Well, back in the late eighties, it was obvious to anyone not in the government that Yugoslavia was an explosion impatiently waiting to happen. I mean, most countries have a minority group or two, but Yugoslavia had so many mutually belligerent minority groups that they didn't have enough people left over to form a majority group. This made them an ideal candidate for starting any number of territorial wars. Also, having Kashubian Poles, Serbians, and Croatians in the same book would give me lots of opportunities to display the various aspects of the Slavic character.

  Thus prepared, I went about my trade of making esthetically pleasing marks on clean, white paper. I had the book about ninety percent done when those unspeakable
Yugos, completely without my permission, went and started their war two hundred years early and on the wrong damn planet, besides.

  Please understand that historical and technical accuracy is supremely important to me. Unless my own disbelief is completely suspended, I can't write at all. With a war going on, all bets on the future history of Yugoslavia were off. If the Serbs, say, were wiped out, the character of Yugoslavia would be totally altered. Hell, I couldn't be sure that there would even be a Yugoslavia two hundred years hence.

  Fruitless months went by when nothing useful appeared on my computer screen. Finally, I set the book aside, and went to work on The Fata Morgana. This book, too, was approaching completion when it too had to be delayed. I had some medical problems and was generally unable to sit at my computer, let alone push the buttons in any meaningful manner.

  Years later, my health started to return about the same time as my bank account was running dry and the landlord was getting uppity. I did the obvious thing, completely rewrote A Boy and His Tank, and at long last you have it in your hands.

  Enjoy.

  Leo Frankowski

  August 1, 1998

  Sterling Heights

  CHAPTER ONE

  How I Volunteered for the Army

  ca. 2162 A.D.

  They sentenced me to death and then told me that I had my choice of either being rendered down so that my body's chemicals could fertilize the hydroponic vats, or joining the army.

  I picked the army, but I soon learned that I had screwed up again.

  Within an hour, they had given me a bath and shaved my head, and I found myself walking naked down a chilly tunnel up in the high gravity of the palladium layer. Twenty meters in diameter to match the bore of the huge Japanese ore drilling machines, the floor had been leveled by an equally bodacious milling robot, and the shiny metallic walls seemed to stretch on to infinity. Filling this tunnel with air must have cost a bundle.

  The guards left me with a sergeant who was standing in front of a long row of military tanks. I could tell he was a sergeant because there were a lot of stripes on his armband. Aside from the armband and his sandals, he was as naked as I was. New Kashubia wasn't wealthy enough to afford clothes for most people.

  I figured that I'd better try and get on the guy's good side as soon as possible, so I saluted him.

  He looked at me and said, "Don't salute until you know how to do it. Anyway, you don't salute a sergeant."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And you don't call an NCO `sir.' " He looked at his clipboard. "You're Mickolai Derdowski?"

  "Yes."

  "Then put your right thumbprint here."

  When I'd done as he'd asked, he checked his clipboard again.

  "Number 04056239!" He shouted, "It's your turn! Front and center!"

  One of the tanks pulled itself out of the line and drove up in front of us. It was a big slab of a thing, fully ten meters long and four wide. It was maybe a meter thick, and rode about twenty centimeters off the floor on treads that were nothing but unconnected bars that floated out of two slots in the front of the tank. They placed themselves in front of the machine as it floated over them, then lifted off the floor and went back into slots in the back of the tank once it had passed by. They didn't seem to be connected to anything at all! Some kind of magnetic trick, I guessed.

  The tank was completely flat on the bottom and top, with absolutely nothing but one little bump on the left front corner to break the flat expanse of highly polished metal. The four sides sloped inwards at forty-five degree angles, and they were as bright and featureless as the rest of the vehicle. My uncle had once told me that these tanks had interchangeable weaponry. They could attach any combination of guns and whatnot that the mission required, so the lack of visible weapons didn't surprise me. What I couldn't figure out was where the driver sat, and how he could see out of the thing.

  The machine was absolutely silent. I tell you that the huge monster could have snuck up on a mouse, if there had been any such creature on New Kashubia.

  "Number 04056239, you are hereby inducted into the service of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces, and into the Croatian branch of that service, to which you will give all of your loyalty. Your combat data code will be number 58294, and you will now permanently erase all other codes from your memory. Do you now swear loyalty to the Kashubian Armed Forces?" The sergeant recited it like a fixed formula.

  "I SO SWEAR," the tank answered in a small, tinny voice.

  "Welcome into the service. Open up."

  The tank did an about-face in front of us, and this big coffin-looking thing slid out of the rear of it.

  "Get in there, kid," the sergeant said, "And I'll hook you up."

  "You are swearing in the tank, but not me?" I said, amazed.

  "Kid, if your tank is loyal, you don't have to be. Get in."

  "I don't like the looks of this."

  "Nobody does, at first. Eventually, you'll learn to love it. Think of it as a womb with a view."

  "I'll bet you tell that to all the boys," I said, stalling for time.

  "Right, but then I don't get to hook up the girls who volunteer, more's the pity. Look, kid, get in there. It's that or the hydroponic vats."

  Considering the alternatives, I got in, and laid down on the pleasantly warm metal surface. That surprised me. I'd expected it to be cold.

  "First, we got to hook up these catheters to your privy members. Spread your legs. Relax! Just remember that I'm not enjoying this any more than you are."

  There was a long hose with a complicated-looking rubber thing on the end which he proceeded to smear with some sort of grease and fit into my penis and tail pipe. I didn't like it.

  "Shouldn't you tell me about how I work this thing?"

  "Kid, did you ever have a personal computer?"

  "Yes, three years ago, back on Earth."

  "Then you know that the first thing it did was to teach you how to operate it. Well, the computer in this tank has your old toy computer beat all hollow. It really is sentient, or so close to it that you'll never know the difference. It'll teach you everything that you need to know. Sit up." I guess I already knew that, but I wasn't thinking so good just then.

  I sat, and he glued a wide strip of something flexible to the top of my head, over the back of my neck, and down the middle of my back.

  "This is an electrical induction pickup that will be your major means of communication with the on-board computer. It doesn't come off, and in time, it will grow itself right through your skin. It won't even leave a scar. The old models have to be inserted surgically, but you lucked out. This baby is right off the production line."

  "Do you mind if I don't feel grateful?" I said.

  "Not in the least. After today, I'll never see you again, if I'm lucky."

  He pulled a sort of helmet out of a nearby rack. It was solid metal all over, and covered the whole head and face. It didn't have any eyeslits or even a way to breathe, from the looks of it. Just a complicated connector on the left side.

  "You look to be a size fourteen L, but we'll make sure," he said as he attached a hose and cable connector from the tank to the helmet. He put it on my head, and a sort of collar in the bottom of the helmet inflated snug to my neck, which was scary. There were some kind of viewing screens right in front of my eyes. I found myself watching him adjusting the thing to my head, from the perspective of some camera that I hadn't noticed on the top of the tank. After a bit, I inhaled and found that I could breathe, which was a major relief. Fortunately, claustrophobia was never one of my problems. People with that particular hangup don't last very long in the tunnels of New Kashubia.

  THE FIT IS PROPER, SERGEANT, said a tinny computer voice in my ear.

  "Very good," I heard the sergeant say. "Lie back down, kid. You can button it up, lady, and fill his compartment."

  I watched myself going feet-first into the back of the machine, feeling like a human suppository. Once I was completely inside, I felt the box I was
in being filled with a warm fluid. Claustrophobia or no claustrophobia, I didn't like this one bit!

  "Can I change my mind about going to the hydroponic vats?" I shouted into the helmet.

  "Forget it, kid." I heard the sergeant say. Through the tank's cameras, I watched him walk away. Then he turned and said, "One last thing. If you get along with your computer, things can get very nice for you, believe me. But if you fight her, you will live your life in a very special part of hell! Good-bye, and good luck, soldier!"

  "Good-bye, go to the devil and I hope he shoots you!" I shouted back. He didn't turn around, and I found out later that the tank's computer had censored my parting comment to him. Maybe it was just as well.

  The coffin I was in finished filling with the warm liquid, and I found myself floating comfortably. Or it would have been comfortable if I didn't know that I was submerged in water and sealed inside of I-didn't-know-how- many centimeters of armor. If the machine ever quit working, I'd smother to death in a minute! They were gambling my one and only life on somebody else's engineering, and I did not in any way approve of this practice!

  Through the camera, I could see that the tank had put itself back into line with the others, and the sergeant was getting a thumbprint from the next "volunteer."

  Then the scene changed and I was watching this very attractive woman on some kind of recording. I could tell that she wasn't a New Kashubian, since she was wearing clothes, Earth-style clothes of ten years ago. I listened to her, since it sure beat thinking about my currently unsolvable predicament.

  "Welcome to your new Mark XIX Main Battle Tank, the Aggressor," she said with a bright, artificial smile. "You are one of an elite corps of warriors privileged to operate the finest fighting machine . . ."