"Frankowski, Leo - A Boy and His Tank" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

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."