Free A Boy and His Tank by Leo Frankowski Page B

away, and you learn to be more trigger happy there, since many kinds of weapon discharges are harder for them to spot if you shot where they weren't. I mean, a laser or a rail run going off is as obvious as a bear on a chess board when you're in an atmosphere, but they can be hard to spot in a hard vacuum. Sometimes you even got a second shot.
    Thermal signature is the best way to spot your opponent in a vacuum, so you spend most of your time looking through one narrow band, down around eighteen microns. Even then, it's hard. I mean, a muon exchange fusion reactor gives you direct conversion from nuclear to electrical power, at better than ninety-nine percent efficiency, and what with superconductors used everywhere, the shell of a resting tank is rarely more than a degree warmer than ambient. They warm up a lot when you are firing a weapon, and the energy requirements get huge. Ninety megawatts for a rail gun, and a bit more for most lasers.
    Also, the tanks all carry a bottle of liquid air as a coolant, and if the enemy knows that you're looking, he can chill his surface down to ambient, for an hour or so, anyway, but that one works better in air than a vacuum since sometimes you can spot the turbulence of the coolant escaping. But if you exhaust your air bottle, it takes a half hour to recharge it, assuming that you are in an atmosphere, and when you have been firing your rail guns for a while, you need that coolant to keep your coffin from overheating. Like I said, it gets complicated, but somehow, I seemed to have a knack for it.
    More importantly, I was now able to meet Kasia for a quick lunch. She kept telling me to try wheedling what I could out of my tank, and not make her do all of the work, but I was a little afraid of giving Agnieshka any encouragement at all. That artificial human had the hots for me, and I didn't want to do anything to make her more angry.
    The next Sunday was spent mostly horseback riding, since our sailboat was really gone. We couldn't help speculating about the programming of our Dream World, but what the heck. Life wasn't so bad after all.
    Then the training program was changed a bit for the better, since I was getting deadly sick of pattern identification by then. Mornings were the same, but afternoons were now spent in emergency procedures.
    Driving the tank if Agnieshka's driving computer was defective was not a simple matter of playing with a joy stick. Well, it was, if you were on the surface, but the surface is not a nice place to be in combat, and where else but combat could she drop a whole computer system? I mean, Agnieshka had redundancy nine ways from Thursday. Then, too, these tanks could work underwater by crawling on the bottom, or, with flotation bottles and the right sort of strap-on thrusters, you could be cruising in a one-man submarine.
    Another sort of thruster turned you into a spaceship, and if it was one of those with a Hassan-Smith rig linked back to a fuel stockpile, you could take the damn thing right up into orbit and beyond. Yes, strange to say, we Kashubians had always had the Hassan-Smith engineering, buried in with the weapons specifications that were buried in the main computers, all without our ever knowing it!
    Not that I'd ever dare trying that rocketing to orbit stunt on manual. I wasn't too keen on it with Agnieshka doing the driving! Fortunately, this was all simulated, and New Kashubia couldn't afford the fuel anyway. The lack of organic chemicals was the root cause of this exercise in the first place.
    But despite all the extra capabilities, the Mark XIX Aggressor was mainly intended for use on the ground or under it. The things could tunnel like muskrats, only faster, and right through solid rock.
    How to operate the guns if the ballistic computers went down was another set of emergency procedures, and a far more complicated one than playing bus driver.
    There was a surprising array of possible weapons configurations, depending on the mission we were