In Another World With my Tank

Chapter the First

In Another World With my Tank.

Chapter 1

Ob’s stürmt oder schneit,

Ob die Sonne uns lacht,

In the year AD 2044, in the month of June, during the startling conclusion of NATO’s long awaited, long dreaded summer offensive towards the enticingly so-close-yet-so-far-way Baku oilfields in Azerbaijan, Staff Sergeant Mike Norman finds himself and his tank-intelligence ‘Alice’ shit-out-of-luck on the vast steppes of Eurasia. A deliberate attack, centred on the 555^th Integrated Combat Command, a composite armoured division, composed of stitched together bits and pieces of several previously destroyed divisions belonging to multiple NATO member-states, striking forth from winter cantonments on the right-bank of the Dnieper, has turned into a bloody disaster and rout, only barely across the river. And lucky Mike, with a young wife back home at the mercy of the commissars, has volunteered.

Volunteered to turn his cybertank around and lead a forlorn hope, showing good faith to their employers, lest Crowe’s Cavaliers, Mike’s home regiment of rezie mercs, find themselves broke and unemployable. War fighting, either as disposable draftees or if lucky, as professional contractors, is the only work left for poor rural white boys on the unvaxed biological reservist rolls, and when you can’t do that anymore, it’s to the reservation welfare camps with you and your dependants, and to the tender mercies of the camp gangs. Die in service with the company however, and your dependants would be looked after, kept on the rolls as supernumerary bodies. That was the deal.

SSG Michael ‘Iron Mike’ Norman and Alice-3752 lead their platoon of four tanks, operators and tank-intelligences alike, into hull down positions covering the retreat of their outfit’s clients in the triple-nickle and, much more importantly, their brothers in Colonel Crowe’s Cavaliers, Bozeman Originals. His volunteer unit of four 80-tonne monsters fought advancing Black Guards and Wagnerite Musicians for two hours. No offer of surrender was made, nor was one demanded, neither would an offer have been accepted. It was that kind of war.

Mike was sure he would have felt the same way if he had been lucky enough to have been born on the other side of the fence. Nothing personal, no one on the allied side could be bothered to give a fuck and return the hatred given, it was well understood; after all, no one really wanted to die for this shit, for some fat-cat back home’s spreadsheet, to make the big line of stonks go up, but it was what it was. In the end, Mike never even felt the high velocity guided missile penetration that killed him.

He just closed his eyes on the killing fields of cursed blood and mud one moment.

And opened them on primeval forest the next.

SSG Michael ‘Iron Mike’ Norman blinked rapidly, his strained, bloodshot eyes, tired from days with little sleep and lots of stimulants, finally teared up. Mike wiped away the muddy wet from his face and looked again through his smart glass enhanced multi-function-display and scope. He cycled through the various modes available to him, emotions at war within him as each mode; active infra-red, passive thermal, active ultra-violet, passive low-light, lidar, radar, EM passive, magnetic resonance, stuff that was so classified it was just called ‘mode A’ and ‘mode B’.

All images reported back the same thing to Mike’s unbelieving eyes. Forest, nothing but forest as far as the eye could see. Was he alive? Or dead? Where the fuck are we? How screwed are we now? Finally, Mike popped his hatch seal and stuck his head out into daylight, and blinked, eyes tearing up again at the strange light or lights in the sky, stunned at the ancient forest of gently swaying tall trees, of a type he did not recognise. Finally he gave up and hit the push-to-talk, ‘maybe it’s me, maybe I’ve lost it, better cross check with the tank-intelligence.’

‘Alice, contact report!’ Demanded Mike.

‘Negative contact on thermal or magscan, Staff Sergeant, nothing on EM,’ replied Alice.

‘Well ain’t that just peachy, I must be dead.’

‘Negative Sarn’t, your vitals are are in the green, although your blood pressure is a bit high, you really should stop smoking, you know.’

‘Shut up Alice.’ Mike lit one up just on general principles.

‘Shutting up Mike,’ Alice said, simulated hurt in the synthesized voice sounding all too real.

It was drilled into them all through training. Your tank is not a person, it’s not real. Just algorithms and large language models and petabytes of training data. But, you also must, must, must treat it as precious to you as a lover, closer than wife or girlfriend, or whatever floats your boat, that is, if you want to live. An impossible circle to square. Tanker’s delusion they called it. Pygmalion syndrome. If you lived long enough to name your ride, you ended up treating it like a person, talked to it like a child or a girlfriend or a pet.

Mike sighed and rubbed his face again, suddenly very, very, very tired.

‘Sorry Alice, what’s our status?’

‘Fuel, 75%. APFSDS, 10. HEAT, 12. HECS, 17. HE, 9. COAX 52%. PD turret, 4%. Reactive Armor, yellow to red in all sectors. AI embodied. Penetration of upper glacis detected.’

‘Hold up Alice, what do you mean ‘embodied?’’