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the manipulator had a sharp, tungsten carbide fingernail, and the hopper was only made of steel. Still, I
was an hour cutting my way through and some frantic time was spent finding the mine.
For a while I was afraid that it was gone. Things had bounced around in there a lot, and I pulled out
Eva's module and the drone before I found the mine. The drone was in three pieces, and that left me
without much hope for poor Eva. Still, I put her as far away from the upcoming explosion as possible,
since you never know.
Then there was the problem of the explosion itself. Considering the way I was sitting, the place to put the
mine to best flip me right side up was near the lower left corner of the tank. That was about a meter from
my head, and my mine was probably as powerful as the one that had done all the damage in the first
place. If I placed it wrong, it might turn out to be a classic case of "The operation was a complete
success, but the patient died." That is to say, the tank would be sitting nicely upright, with my dead body
in it!
But if I put it too far away, it might not turn me all the way over, and I only had the one shot. Then I
would still be dead, only it would happen slower.
The mine had a shaped charge that blew a hypersonic beam of vaporized metal into whatever it was
destroying, and that was an effect that I didn't want happening to me. I only wanted the kick of the thing,
so I set it upside down, near the edge of the vehicle where there wasn't much above it except for the
drive magnets. Let the dirt get a deep, ugly hole in it, but not me!
I was trying to set the timer by touch, but I must have done something wrong, because it went off in my
hand.
The bouncing around I got was at least as bad as the one I'd gotten in the wreck, but God must look out
after sinners, the way a banker looks out for people who owe him money.
I was now lying on my back, upright!
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My manipulator arm no longer was functional, but I didn't mind. I didn't need it anymore. I flipped the
protective cover off the controls, gritted my teeth and pressed the eject button near my right hand,
expecting to come flying out, but nothing happened!
I was still trapped!
After all this work, I had exhausted ninety percent of my battery power, my manipulator arm was gone,
my only explosive was gone, my air wouldn't last forever and I was still trapped inside of an armored
coffin!
I wanted to cry, and since nobody was watching, I went ahead and did so.
After a while, I got ahold of myself, shook the tears out of my eyes, and felt for the keyboard. I turned
on the master menu that I had shut down to save a tiny bit of power and worked my way through five
subordinate menus until I came to 3) Extend Life Support Module. I'd always called it a coffin, and so
did everybody else, but here it was a life support module.
At least I hoped it was. Nothing else listed came close.
I pressed button three and came sliding out smoothly into the sunlight.
At least I could see the sunlight once I sat up and got my helmet off. I was sitting naked, waist deep in a
bathtub hung on the end of a ruined tank, and I was wondrously, gloriously alive!
I was also pretty bashed up. I wasn't bleeding, but there were dozens of deep red bruises welling up all
over on my ghastly pale skin, and I knew that tomorrow, there'd be more of me that was purple than was
white. Shaking, I took off the catheter, got out of the coffin, and looked around at the rocks, mountains,
and desert.
I was about a hundred and sixty kilometers from my lines, and I wasn't even in good enough shape to go
the five that I was from the strange enemy division.
I decided that I had best to spend the day resting.
I got out the survival kit, inflated the floor and the structural ribs of the tent, and threw everything else
into it. There didn't seem to be any point in hiding. If the Serbs hadn't heard two major explosions, they
wouldn't be likely to find me now.
And if they did, well, maybe being a POW wouldn't be so bad. It had to beat being a free citizen on
New Kashubia, and I had survived that.
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