"Frankowski, Leo & Dave Grossman - The War With Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

I have always found it very difficult to deny Kasia anything. Normal sex is wonderful, but there are things you can do in Dream World that would be awkward, dangerous or simply impossible to do elsewhere, and Kasia, bless her kinky little heart, had this idea that involved sex while shooting some rapids in a birch bark canoe.

But once I was in my tank's life support system, and in our Dream World cottage, Kasia wasn't there.

Agnieshka, my tank's artificial intelligence computer, was a beautiful woman in Dream World, but now she was sitting at the dining room table, looking upset and anxious.

"What's wrong, Agnieshka? Where's Kasia?" I said.

"She'll be here later. But there's something we have to talk over first, Mickolai. There is a lot that I have to explain to you, and perhaps I owe you an apology."

"What do you mean?" I felt my face go white. "Kasia's all right, isn't she?"

"She's just fine, but this isn't about Kasia. It's about you. Us. The whole world."

"Maybe you'd better start from the beginning," I said, spinning a chair around and sitting on it backwards, with my elbows on the back of the chair.

"I intend to. You realize of course the huge difference between well-trained but green troops, and seasoned professional fighting men. Blooded soldiers are generally three times as effective in combat."

"Agnieshka, I have a Ph.D. in Military Science. You were there when I earned it. You don't have to give me a spelling lesson."

"Yes I do, Mickolai. You see, back when I told you that we were going to war with the Serbians, well, that was the start of your second phase of basic training. In truth, in your real world, the Kashubians never reneged on their contract with the Serbians, who only made a few small attacks on Croatia on their own before we took charge of things. In short, you were never in a war at all."

"Agnieshka, that's crazy! I fought in that war!"

"You thought you fought in a war. It was necessary to lie to you so that you would treat it seriously, and not as just another training exercise. We do it to all of our human soldiers, because it lets us turn out real, blooded troops without having to kill a significant portion of them. But in your real world, it never happened."

"It never happened? Quincy and Zuzanna weren't real? They never died?"

"They were real. They are real. They were your fellow students in that portion of the exercise. The only difference is that in the flanking counterattack, each of them thought that all the others were killed, and that he or she was the only human survivor. Surviving the emotional impact of being alive when your friends die is much of what makes a troop seasoned."

"Damn you. God damn you straight to Hell!" It was all I could say.

"I can't go to Hell, Mickolai. I don't have a soul. I'm just a machine."

"Damn you anyway. Then the whole scene where Quincy stayed with his dead wife, and Radek broke and ran, that was just a fake, too?"

"It happened in Dream World, if that's what you mean. It was as real as anything else that happens here. Your emotions were real enough, and so were mine."

"Then what about the rest of it? The mine we hit, and the enemy division that was in the valley there. That was all fake, too?"

"The mine was a standard exercise in the survival course, one that not every student passes as well as you did. As to the rest, well, Mickolai, you did extremely well in your training. Besides having a natural talent for functioning as an observer, you were innovative, hard working, and self-sacrificing in battle. During that artillery barrage, not every observer would have turned the defense of his own tank over to another while he gave his full efforts to observing for Eva's X-ray laser."

"It was just the right thing to do at the time," I said.

"Oh, I agree. You made a sound tactical decision, but it was not one that every soldier could have carried out. You increased the survival odds for your unit while lowering your own chances of living. Your strange inner conflicts and contradictions make you a good leader, Mickolai. During the flanking attack on the Serbians, you managed to keep three very diverse and difficult people under your control. You spotted those low dirt mounds where the Serbians had dug in, and understood their importance, something that not every student did. And you fought your unit very efficiently, given the difficult circumstances."

"What about the unmanned enemy division?"

"That was another test, which you passed wonderfully. You had already shown your leadership potential, and in taking that division you showed tremendous initiative. Therefore, you were given the chance to try out for a command position, and you graduated cum laude."