Even then, I wondered if he was as messy in reality. The thought of food paste dribbling out of his mouth, filling up his helmet, and polluting the liquid that his body was floating in wasn't very pleasant either.

"Well, you seem to be well enough fed now, at any rate, so the problem has solved itself. All I'm concerned about is that you do your job and guard my flank."

"Hey, no worry about that, boss. I'm good at my job! Ask Boom-Boom. I only wish that I could get that damn foreman and the fucking judge in my sights, instead of these shitfaced Serbians. I mean for real. I don't know how many times I killed them bitches in Dream World. Burned 'em, mostly, like at the stake!"

He said with his eyes blazing.

"I see your point, but just now it's the Serbians who are trying to kill us, for even less reason than your judge had. Look, it's getting late, and I wanted to talk to Quincy and Zuzanna before we saddle up," I said.

"Yeah, I'm through here anyway," he said as he wiped his greasy hands on his shirt. "Say, that girl of yours is a looker. Maybe I shoulda brought Boom-Boom along, so's you could see her. What say we get together sometime and party down? Boom-Boom's a boss fuck!"

"Sometime. Sometime later."

"Yeah. Later." And he blinked out.

"Sometimevery much later," I said. "Agnieshka, have you ever met such a disgusting person before?"

"Well, I've met Boom-Boom."

"They're two of a kind, are they?"

"She naturally adapted her persona to suit his personality, if that's what you mean. She wears an incredible amount of makeup, her hair looks like an antenna array, she has a dozen sexually suggestive tattoos, there are large black iron rings in her nipples and-"

"Enough! Suffice it to say that I don't want to meet Boom-Boom under any but business circumstances.

Or Radek, either, for that matter."

"Yes boss. You wanted to see Quincy and Zuzanna?"

"No, I was just making excuses to get rid of that annoying person. Anyway, Zuzanna is on duty, and I don't feel like having Quincy kill me today. I'm going to lay down for a while. Get me to the war on time."

"You really should get some PT in, you know."

"No, I don't know. The Combat Control Computer gave us specific orders to get plenty of rest, and an obedient young soldier like me wouldn't think of disobeying a direct order."

"Boss, you are a lazy bum. Okay, let's go to bed," she said.

"Perhaps I'm lazy, but you are still a lecherous young lady."

Later, I was just starting to drift off to sleep when there was a knock at the door. Agnieshka got up to answer it, and let in a small and slender young woman with very pale skin.

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.

Not that I'd seen an animal of any description on this planet yet. The domestic herds had been removed when the fighting started, months ago. The native animals had been gone for many years, not because they had been deliberately slaughtered, but because Earth-type plants had gone feral and crowded out most of the more primitive native plants with astounding speed. Native animals, finding Earth-type plants to be calorie free, died.

We went on for yet another half hour more, and I thought that my nerves would fray to shreds. The others were getting pretty testy as well, and I don't know how many times I told them to shut up and watch for the Serbians. We had gone fully a hundred kilometers without seeing anything but a few dozen wrecked war machines, and almost half that number of decaying human bodies.

It was unreal! Could the enemy have actually turned around and gone home without our noticing it?

Surely, that was impossible! Yet we hadn't even hit a land mine! IfI were retreating, I certainly would have left something behind to at least slow the bastards down!

It had to be a trap, but who ever heard of giving up a forty thousand square kilometers of territory just to pull off an ambush? Yet all we saw were the tracks of tanks, guns and drones racing for the horizon.

Then we came to a long line of very suspicious little hills, and I switched up to the forward drones. When a tank goes underground, the first dirt that it displaces gets piled up behind it, until it has made enough of a tunnel for the dirt to be used filling that tunnel up. There were over six hundred of those little piles on the desert floor in front of us, and the shape and direction of the piles said that they had gone where we had just been. They had to be behind us!

"All stop!" I shouted over the comlasers, and fed the information fast back to the Combat Control Computer. "They're behind us! Put the wagons in a circle!"

That last wasn't a standard military order, but everybody knew what I meant. The drones came back as fast as they could, the girls dropped back to cover us, and the four of us humans went up to the new rear where it was relatively safe, or at least less dangerous. We all faced to our old rear, which is much of the reason why I'm still alive today.

A few drones who were closest were soon busy stringing fiber optic-cables between us, and I was quickly giving the Combat Control Computer and the artillery our present location. The global positioning satellites were long gone, but our own internal inertial guidance system always tells us exactly where we are, right down to the nearest centimeter.

I saw the units on both of our flanks imitate our maneuver, so the Combat Control Computer apparently approved of what I did. His circuits must have been busy giving the word to the whole assault force, because he was a full minute getting back to me.

I felt him come on-line, but I never heard what he had to say.

The first enemy tank to break the surface came spewing up from the ground over a kilometer away from us, and his first act was not to fire at us, but while he was still in the air, he sent a slash of almost relativistic osmium needles across the ground that cut all of our optical fibers. A second tank came up within milliseconds after him to knock out our IR repeaters. Our lines of communication had been cut!

A bare kilometer to our rear, virtually on top of us by the standards of modern combat, a total of seventy-two Serbian tanks erupted from the ground, coming up fast at such a steep angle that I was sure that they must have been hundreds of meters down when we went over them. They must have really gunned it for the last few meters, because they overrode their ultrasonic tunnelers and they came flying out of the ground in a spray of sand.

I said "DO IT THUS," as I got Eva to work, blinding as many of them as possible with her X-ray laser.

But there were so many of the bastards that she and I were more than five whole seconds doing the job, and in that horribly long time, they chopped us up into tin cans and dog food!

In coming up so fast and so steeply, they had exposed their relatively poorly armored bellies to us for almost two seconds. I think that they had planned to catch us from the rear, and blow us all away before we had time to rotate our guns or even think. But since we were already facing in the right direction, in those brief moments my squad killed almost thirty of them!

That helped, but it was not nearly enough to insure our survival. We were still outnumbered by more than three to one, and they all had observers!

Yet even as Eva and I had told the girls where the enemy was, the Serbs were obvious enough that even an empty tank could spot them. And of course, once the enemy opened fire, the girls would have had no problems knowing where they were, even if they'd been hiding. To a certain extent, the enemy's bad tactics had offset their overwhelming advantage in observers.

They did nothing to offset our disadvantage in numbers, and we bled. Despite the fact that half the enemy was blind, all around me, I saw my friends and trusting subordinates die.

We all fired all of our rockets to give the enemy something to shoot at besides us, and were surprised when two of them actually got through and took out a couple of the Serbian tanks. They tried the same stunt on us, but I ordered the others to ignore the rockets and concentrate on the tanks, while for a few moments Eva and I worked on the incoming rockets with her laser. We got most of them, but nothing that my team could do could offset the enemy's godawful numerical superiority.

Zuzanna and her Kazimierz were cut in half right down the middle by a burst of rail gun fire. Radek and Boom-Boom spun halfway around, trying to run away, I think, and then suddenly their entire front half was gone, and the rest of it did a double flip in the air. All nine of the girls with rail guns were killed, one after another, and Quincy's tank went silent. In a few seconds, Agnieshka, Eva, and I were alone with twenty enemy tanks still alive and shooting. I knew then that I was a dead man.

There was no hope at all.

Then suddenly, it was over.

Incredibly, within a fraction of a second, the enemy were all dead!

It was only later that I figured out what happened. All of us, my squad and the Serbians, were so intent on the firefight that none of us thought to look for artillery. There simply wasn't time. We were out of touch with our Combat Control Computer, and the same had to be true of the Serbs, what with their flying eruption from the ground. No fiber optic-cable could have withstood that!

But one of our artillery officers with an IQ of about seven hundred had launched a heavy salvo in the general direction of where he thought the enemy might come out. What's more, for the shells to have gotten there when they did, he would have had to have fired within milliseconds of the time when I first reported that the Serbs were digging in to come up behind us. He just fired at where he thought they might be andassumed that his shells were smart enough to do the rest, and he was absolutely right!

I didn't know who my benefactor was, but I swore that if I ever found him, I would eagerly buy his drinks for the next ten years, and I would kiss his smelly feet while I was doing the buying!

"Good God in Heaven!" I said to Agnieshka and Eva. "We have just been given a new life!"