[b]Hrazdan, Armenia[/b]

	He felt like an outsider, but one always did when they were around veteran tank crews. Jon stood in faded brown coveralls, smoking a cigarette awkwardly while a tank commander of the Gyumri Garrison’s reserve unit listed off tasks that they would be performing that day. In his left arm, cradled underneath his shoulder, was a leather tanker helmet with a blue stripe painted down the middle: a company evaluator. The tank crew, six of them, were there to put the newest Amrots Landship, numbered 788, through its paces on the Tsaghkadzor factory’s proving grounds. This was cheap, regular, and effective training for the reservist units who often found themselves crewing the heavy tanks on the frontlines in the west, but also provided valuable quality assurance for the heavy industry plant under contract to refurbish them. Better something go wrong in the hills of Hrazdan than in the plains of Karin. Jon, being involved with the program, was offered a spot on one of the test runs to get an appreciation for the beasts.

	The Hrazdan Proving Grounds were located to the northwest of the city, conveniently west of the Hrazdan Garrison and north of its industrial neighborhood. This tract of land dipped in and out of hills, through fields, and across trickling streams. A well-worn dirt path ran through several emplaced obstacles and events, culminating in a firing range at the western end of the preserve. It almost looked like a standard rifle range, except the range was stretched to a kilometer and a half long with the hulls of other tanks scattered around to provide targets. Many of them were landships that failed their evaluation: “It’s kind of like when a race horse breaks a leg and you have to shoot it,” was Mister Bagruntsian’s joke to Jon when he was showing him around. The manager sat in a nearby jeep with an officer from Hrazdan, taking swigs of a flask and talking about the dancers at a local club.

	“So company evaluators are always in this awkward position because we only have the seats for us crewmen,” the tank commander explained as he clambered up the track, gripping the top of the hull and pulling himself up. With a swing of the leg, he pushed his hips up and rotated his body to the top and got back onto his feet. Jon tried the same, jumping up and grabbing onto the edge of the hull that was above his head. He boosted himself up on a road wheel and awkwardly swung his leg over to the top, pushing himself up to the hull as well. The tank commander climbed up to the new turret of the landship and opened up a hatch, looking down into the body of the tank. “We do have some space in the back where we let you guys sit, usually. It’s on top of this battery box and you have this, well it looks like it is, but it’s a support beam to hang onto.”

	Jon looked down into the cramped, metal space. He had done the summer military reservist trainings that all conscripts were required to attend, but they were mostly quick affairs that required students show up for a weekend to qualify on a rifle and relearn soldiering tasks before being released. He had never been in the inside of a tank before, but he quickly realized why they earned their reputations as coffins. Tanks of the Great War especially were crowded, with six crewmen manning weapons and controls inside of a box armored with thick steel walls and complex systems. Despite the upgrades and refurbishment, such as improved ventilation and a newer engine, the landships remained cramped and noisy spaces with discomforts largely eliminated by modern designs. Jon lowered himself into the body of the tank, his helmeted head hitting a valve on the way down. With a thud, his worn black boots hit the metal floor and he maneuvered himself to the back through what seemed like a forest of pipes and valves, like a kid navigating a playground.

	The rest of the tank crew, largely apathetic to him, entered through a wide variety of hatches on top. There were six crewmen in an Amrots: a gunner for the main 120mm main cannon, which happened to be the largest tank gun in service in the region; a loader for said shells, a tank commander who managed the crew, a driver who sat down in the hull, and two hull gunners manning side gun positions. The settled into their positions and plugged into the tank intercom system: an aux cord to the helmet led to a headset not unlike those of a bomber crew’s. Everyone in the tank, save for Jon, could talk to each other and coordinate. The tank commander also had space carved out a boxy, vacuum-tube two-way radio to communicate with higher and an additional field phone had been wired into the back of the hull so that infantry could talk to tankers without exposing themselves: an improvised solution to a problem, learned the hard way in the Artsakh. These systems were the first thing tested, a chorus of voices all sounding off into their mics.

	“Okay, the intercom works at least,” the tank commander called out to Jon, who marked it down on his clipboard. “Let’s go!”

	The driver pushed an ancient-looking lever forward, starting the massive engine. It roared to life right beside Jon’s head, thrumming and pushing power to the treads of the machine. The driver pushed forward another set of levers in a complicated procedure, and the hull shifted forward. With a jolt, they were on the move, crawling over the gravel parking area towards the start of the track that would lead them through the proving ground’s course. The tank crew were unbuttoned out of their hatches, heads sticking out into the summer air, enjoying the breeze like dogs in a car. The tank drove out to its first event, a straightaway about two hundred meters long of paved road, followed by another straightaway of dirt road. This would be to test the speed of the landship: it was evaluated to be, on average, forty kilometers-per-hour on flat paved roads and slightly less on unimproved ones. The speed would suffer on various types of terrain, already computed by testing. These speeds were supplied to military planners who would use them to train tankers and plan their operations, but did not need to be tested again.

	The landship accelerated, its controlling jeep following close behind. The tank’s engine roared and released foul-smelling gasoline fumes as it hit its maximum rotations-per-minute, upon which the design of the engine encountered a mechanical phenomenon known as “torque peak”: the engine would keep accelerating past its redline limit, but the internal combustion engine would start to drop power and therefore speed. The driver hit his engine’s redline limit and called out the number on his gauge: thirty-nine kilometers-per-hour. Jon wrote it down on his clipboard as the tank bumped off the paved road and onto the dirt straightaway, the entire time listening to irregularities in the engine. The stress test was successful, and the tank turned off down a hill to test its climbing performance. This consisted of a simple series of hills at measured grades. The crew went down the first dip, controlling the handling carefully lest the machine slip in the mud and turn off the track. They gunned it at the bottom of the slope to provide inertia for the trip up, repeating this as necessary for a few more grades.

	The tank commander clambered his way to Jon’s seat, poking his head out of a hatch and towards the evaluator. With a smile on his face, he shouted: “Having fun over there?”

	“It’s cramped and it smells awful back here!” Jon replied, his voice muffled by the scarf he held up to his face and nose. His eyes watered from the fumes. The tank commander laughed again, shook his head, told Jon that it would get better, and disappeared as quickly as he appeared. Confused, Jon looked back towards the main compartment of the tank where he was giving orders for a fording site. The tank, suddenly, dipped into the water. A river intersected the trail, dug out to be deep enough to ford through but not flood the tank. Jon looked back for any evidence of water leakage, which could quickly flood the engine and cause trouble for a crew locked in a tight, confined space. Luckily, the landship emerged from the riverbed dry, and drove off to the next set of obstacles. This one was a trench-crossing exercise, with a simulated wide trench set up in the middle of the road.

	While landships, owing to their long hulls, could cross narrow trenches with ease, longer trenches required the use of steel bridging girders. These were straight, tread-width steel beams located just above the treads that were ten meters long. In the Great War, these would be emplaced by infantry or the crew by hand: this brought them under fire, and a solution was devised after the war by Armenian engineers. One of the features of the landship’s new electrical system were two small motors in the front of the landship: these were activated by the tank commander, which then actuated a lever system that brought the bridging girders to the ground in front of the tank. It was a judgement call for the commander, however: if he let them down too soon, they would simply drop into the trench with no way to recover them. Luckily, this reservist unit was familiar with the course and dropped the bridging beams with no issue. The electrical motors whirred, followed by a clunking sound, and then whirred back into place. The tank moved to the other side of the trench and took a few minutes to dismount and hoist the beams back into their holders.

	The final leg of the testing circuit was dedicated to the weaponry. Armenian landships were armed primarily with a 120mm cannon. It sported a coaxially mounted heavy machine gun for infantry, but this was not used often with the sluggish turret speeds. More often than not, the top hatch sported a loader’s machinegun, which could traverse more easily. On both sides were heavy machine guns in lateral gun positions, used to defend the flanks of the beast. Some models added an additional flamethrower to these positions, a tank of pressurized fuel for it being retrofitted disturbingly close to the gunner’s head and prone to explosion from spall or shrapnel. This tank, however, just had its guns: Tsaghkadzor was keen on not destroying its proving ground, they already kept the Hrazdan fire department busy enough with range fires caused by bullets hitting into dry grasses or, sometimes, hot brass setting brush aflame: a flamethrower would be too much for them to handle.

	The point of the proving grounds’ range wasn’t to evaluate the competency of the crew, they had gunnery tables for that, but to test the functionality of the weapon. The commander ordered the gunner to first conduct a full rotation of the turret, swiveling entirely around the hull and raising the turret elevation up and down. Once the mechanical reliability of the turret’s hydraulics system was proven, the commander ordered them to take aim at the first of five targets. With the metallic groan of grinding machinery, the gunner spun the turret onto the rusted hulk of another landship. The proving grounds had scattered old, deficient tanks on the target hill almost like a cruel joke: fail the testing and wind up another target for cannons. Practically, the large size of the landships offered a sizeable target to see where the rounds ended up. The commander called out the ammunition: “High explosive! Three charges!”

	The loader now, hearing this, reached into the ammunition rack to withdraw a copper-plated tank shell. He swapped it around in his hands to face the other direction and slammed it forward into the open breech. A metal box next to him held bags of primer: each one offered more explosive power to propel the round farther, much like conventional artillery pieces. He took three bags and stuffed them in behind the round, flattening them out so they were evenly spread across the backplate of the projectile. “High explosive! Three charges!” he repeated, before closing the breech door and locking it into place with a level. The gunner adjusted his aim, peering through the optics of his scope and spinning the aiming wheel into the proper position. “Ready to fire,” he announced, face still pressed into the optics.

	“Fire!” shouted the commander as he peered into his periscope optic. With a massive concussive blast shaking the inside of the hull, the charges exploded and shot the projectile the distance to its target. It sailed through the air for a few seconds, rotating in flight from the rifled barrel, before impacting just shy of the target. The round exploded into a storm of dirt, smoke, and flame, a dull thud in the distance. The tank gunner opened the breech, smoke pouring out of the barrel, and removed the shell’s casing with gloved hands. Above him was his hatch, which he opened with one hand before tossing the shell out with the other. Smoke from the gun filled the cabin, the ventilation system struggling to vent it out. Jon went into a fit of coughing, his arm over his eyes to keep the smoke out. He had heard stories of Great War tankers passing out from the toxic fumes: the new tanks, despite the upgrades, were not much better. The crew were under strict instructions to keep the tank “buttoned up” for at least two shots, however. After they could open up the hatches to air it out.

	Four more times, the steel frame of the tank was rattled by fire. Each time, mechanically and robotically, the loader would slam home a shell and prepare the breech for firing, before the gunner pulled back his lever to send it flying off to another steel target. Each time, Jon breathed in more of the smoke and carbon, before finally having enough: he scrambled for the hatch above him, pushing it open and crawling his way to the top in a coughing fit. His clammy hands fought to unbuckle the strap of his helmet, which he threw down into the tank before leaning over the edge and vomiting over the side skirt armor and the tracks. Another fit of coughing followed, as he dry heaved again and spat out his saliva. “Fuck,” was all he managed to get out. The student-turned-tank-evaluator breathed in deeply, coughing again, and wiped the sweat out of his matted-down hair. A grimace came across his face and he slumped back down into the hull of the tank where the commander was smiling at him.

	The tank tossed its final shell out of the loader’s hatch and spun around on its treads. Hatches still open to air out the smoke, they began their drive home. A few minutes of maneuvering led them right around the track and back to where they started, where Mister Bagruntsian had already parked his jeep with the reserve officer and was leaning on its hood. Behind dark sunglasses, he watched the tank crew park and dismount, dropping down onto the gravel and taking off their helmets. Cigarettes were passed around and lit, while Jon stumbled his way over.

	“You’re rather pale,” Mister Bagruntsian commented, moving his hand outwards to grab Jon’s clipboard. He looked through it. “And it looks like 788 here passed with flying colors. She’ll go right off to the front.”

	Mister Bagruntsian peeked around Jon’s shoulder to the tank. “Maybe once they clean the vomit off of it,” he added with a smile and a slap on the back.

	“Nobody ever told me it gets so smoky in there,” Jon protested. The manager chuckled again, withdrawing a pack of cigarettes of his own. He lit one and offered another to Jon with a devilish grin, who stepped back and shook his hand in front of him.

	“You might have smoked enough for one day in there. Anyways, thanks for coming out today. Now you’ve got an appreciation for how these things work. What do you do in the reserves, Jon?”

	“Besides my student deferment, sir?” Jon asked. “Just the basic conscript stuff. Nothing like this.”

	“Then it’s a solid experience for you,” Mister Bagruntsian said. “You think you might put in for a reclassification to this?”

	“Fuck no!”

	“Alright, well now you’re going to oversee a delivery of these to Karin sometime soon. I have the details in my office.” The manager finished his cigarette in a few long drags before crushing it out underneath his shoes. He started along back to the factory after waving goodbye to the tank crew. “Come along, now,” he called to Jon, “we’ll get you shipped off in no time.”