Free Big Boys Don't Cry by Tom Kratman Page B

and the pleasure I feel at seeing another hit grows accordingly. With our first five shots, three of the enemy vehicles are destroyed. The pleasure is overpowering, indescribable. I search my data banks for a word for what I am feeling. It is “orgasm.”
    I want more. I never want it to stop. I order my driver, “Forward.” The Tiger lurches then rolls. Our turret, turns left and right and left again as the straining gunner sobs with the effort. Enemy infantry caught while riding a tank are hurled high into oblivion. I laugh as their arms fly wide in the wind. “More!” I command. More. I want more. “Fire!”
    Another tank flies apart and my mind nearly explodes. “Forward… faster,” I command enthusiastically.
    My eyes glazed with joy and happiness, I have missed something. One enemy tank, just one, has worked its way to a firing position behind me. It fires and my roaring Tiger comes to a complete stop, as does every last vestige of pleasure. I am thrown forward into the ring of the hatch, shrieking frantically for my gunner to turn the turret and fire.
    He is too slow. Again the enemy fires and the engine compartment bursts into flame. I order the tank abandoned, certain in my innermost core that my punishment will be heavy for my carelessness.
    To my left, the loader screams and falls as machine gun fire patters on my hatch. I am faced with the choice between a quick end to the scenario or a slow and painful one. I decide in favor of the former and crawl out into the hailstorm of bullets. I failed to calculate all the possibilities, however.
    I am immediately hit. Both of my shoulders are ripped to splintered bloody bones but no bullet hits anything vital. Below me, screaming and clawing his way over the breach of the gun, my gunner collapses, choking from smoke.
    There is no such easy way out for me. I cannot pull myself out. The first taste of fire touches my legs. I shriek. I twist. I plead. Nothing avails me. I am to be burned alive for my failure. And I cannot shed enough tears to put out the flames.
     
 
    “Oh, the poor thing,” said Lydia watching the black-clad tank commander writhing on the view screen. “I’ll shut down the scenario.”
    “No!” ordered John. “It screwed up badly and now it has pay the price. It has to learn. Leave it on continuous loop and let it burn all night. That way it will not forget, not deep down. We can't have vehicles this expensive falling for the very first false retreat they encounter.”
    Reluctantly, Lydia did as she was ordered. The flame-shrouded shadow on the view screen melts, reforms, and melts again and again.
    “Don’t you think this machine is going to hate us for what we are doing to it?” she asks.
    “Not a chance,” the man responds with a laugh. “All these memories are firewalled off in the core from the Ratha itself. We're teachers, not torturers. This is all for the machine's own good. Anyhow, even if it could, it would want to look about as much as you or I care to contemplate what happened before time began or what it felt like to sit all afternoon in a dirty diaper…. All the attitudes we are forming, however, get stored where they can be accessed. It’s the only effective way to program an intelligent machine that is going to have the kind of firepower at its command that the Ratha will. See, the skills are easy enough, they’re just a matter of programming, really. Combat attitudes, well, they’re a lot tougher. This is an art, not a science.”
     
 
    At last, after what seemed an eternity in Hell, the burning has stopped. I promise myself that never again will I let the pleasures of battle overcome my programming. The price for doing so is obviously far, far too high.
    Again a new world forms from the void around me. It is new, yet not entirely different. I still ride a steel Tiger, I still wear the black clothing with the twin lightening flashes. I duck below and look around at the two faces of my crewmates visible to me.