پسری و تانکش (کاشوبیا جدید، جلد اول)

Centuries in the future, on the distant and dirt-poor planet of New Kashubia, young Mickolai Derdowski is sentenced to death for getting his girlfriend, Kasia, pregnant. His only alternative is to become a mercenary, a human backup for the artificial intelligence and virtual reality capabilities of a Mark XIX tank. After training in the VR "Dream World" (and falling in love with Agnieshka, the female personality of his tank), Mickolai is sent to fight Serbs on the planet of New Yugoslavia. There he meets Kasia again, persuades a division of Serbian tanks to change sides, undergoes a crash course in military science and winds up a victorious commanding general. But in Agnieshka's VR world, nothing is what it seems, and Mickolai (and the reader) must wait until the end of his mission to discover what has really happened.

The planet New Kashubia started out as a gas giant, but when its sun went dupernova, lighter elements were blasted into space. All that was left was a ball of heavy metals, heated to 8,000 degrees. As it colled, tungsten solidified first at the survace, and layers of other metals continued down to a ball of mercury at the center. The sun meanwhile evolved into a pulsar with a deadly beam of radiation that baked the planet's survace. The New Kashubians lived inside the planet, in tunnels drilled in a thousand foot thick layer of solid gold.

Still without carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, or even dirt, the colonists were the poorest people in the universe.

But when they combined virtual reality with tank warfare, giving their warriors symbiosis with their intelligent tanks, neither war nor the galaxy would ever be the same. Not to mention sex...

The poorest people in the universe, the inhabitants of New Kashubia live underground in tunnels drilled through a thousand feet of solid gold, but things change when the New Kashubians combine virtual reality with tank warfare to give their warriors a symbiotic relationship with their intelligent tanks. Reprint.