A Boy and His Tank

by Leo Frankowski

  While the Serbs maintained their Greek Orthodoxy, they were soon willing to serve loyally in the army. This estranged them from the Croatians, since the army was occasionally used against the Croats themselves when they were in revolt.

  The South Slavs stayed under the thumb of the Turks for many centuries, and mutual hate grew.

  When the Turks were finally driven out, the Yugoslavs were soon inducted into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their condition was somewhat better than before. But it still wasn't freedom, and a bomb thrown by a South Slav in Bosnia proved to be the spark that touched off the first World War.

  This bloody affair was followed by a short period of internal disorder, and after that the Russian Communists exercised overt control, through World War II (where the Croatians fought on the side of the Germans, until the Serbs eventually threw the Nazis out). They stayed under the Communist thumb until the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' state withered away (although not quite in the manner that Karl Marx had predicted).

  And after another short, bloody interval, the Europeans under NATO invaded Yugoslavia, for their own good, of course.

  Time and time again, throughout history, with never a chance to decently recover, they were invaded, plundered, and conquered. And every time, one or more of their subgroups went to the side of the conquerors for status, for safety, and for profit.

  And with equal regularity, every time over the ages they had a bit of freedom, they used it to fight, not so much their former oppressors, but rather those of their own people who had supported their last invader.

  It ended for a while with the War of Serbian Reunification, which pretty much obliterated the Islamic portion of their population, and drastically decimated the others. Cleansing, they called it.

  Perhaps, outsiders thought, perhaps they had finally learned. But all that they had learned was that they no longer needed an outside conqueror. Over the centuries, they had learned to do it all for themselves.

  Not a good ending, but it seemed to be an ending, nonetheless.

  Or everyone hoped the sad tale would end there, but trouble was starting to bubble up yet again when the Wealthy Nations Group gave them their very own planet, far, far away.

  Which was where we poor Kashubians came into the bloody picture.

  All told, it was a depressing history, and one that didn't seem to have a resolution, except perhaps for the total obliteration of everyone concerned.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SPACE WARS AND SHEEPSKINS

  With regards to our stay at Oxbridge, about the only thing that happened that was really weird started one Saturday in our third year.

  I was in a loincloth and a very deep suntan, playing the Zulu King Cetshwayo at the Battle of Isandhlwana. Neto was playing Chelmsford, my British opponent, and the other staff members were acting as officers on one side or the another.

  It was beginning to look like the Zulus would win this time when suddenly we were fighting in a totally different battle!

  We were blasting off at twenty gees from the surface of a planet in modern tanks equipped with rocket thrusters of the sort that had a Hassan-Smith transporter connecting back to a fuel supply dump on the planet, which was New Yugoslavia, from the look of it.

  Agnieshka was my tank again instead of being my servant, I only had command of five subordinates, a small squad, and the battle wasn't over in a day or so the way they usually were. The damned thing went on for three weeks straight!

  Agnieshka couldn't tell me a thing about why the study program had been so disrupted, the professor couldn't be reached, and I was operating under the command of an uncommunicative Combat Control Computer that I hadn't met before.

  The battle went on and on until we eventually got scattered out over so much sky that I had trouble communicating with my own people. Not only were there problems like radio static and poor signal-to-noise ratios on our lasers, but the time lag caused by the speed of light often got to be over two and a half hours! What's more, they kept it realistic to the point that we couldn't even meet together in Dream World. I got to missing Kasia real bad, although not quite to the point of making love with Agnieshka.

  The good guys finally won, but in doing so we had exhausted the fuel stores in the supply dumps, and such fuel that was being manufactured had to go to bringing in the rest of the army from the far reaches of the local solar system.

  For my squad, the final act of the battle involved a dead stick landing from orbit that burned the rockets and most of our weapons right off us. We splashed down without parachutes into a shallow ocean and had to crawl our way underwater to the shore.

  Hairy!

  Eventually, the exercise was over, with our squad losing only Neto.

  He had had the bad luck to ram an enemy tank early in the battle. I mean really ram it. He was in an equatorial orbit around a moon of the gas giant Woden while his unfortunate opponent was in a polar one. Not even a Mark XIX Main Battle Tank could withstand that kind of a collision!

  When we were back in class again, we found somebody new sitting behind Neto's desk. The professor sadly announced that he had been forced to wash Neto out for psychological reasons.

  We were all at first shocked and then furious about this!

  Neto was as stable as a man could be and his grades were the best in the class, next to mine. He was a good friend and a member of the team, and now we weren't even permitted to wish him good-bye!

  But the professor was adamant and wouldn't budge a centimeter. The Combat Control Computer was in complete charge until our training was completed, Neto was out, and that was that. I was so mad that I stormed out of class and the rest followed me, except for the new kid.

  It wasn't until the next day that somebody asked about the purpose of the long training battle.

  "It was simply that you students were getting in a rut. You were getting so that you were all worrying more about next Sunday's entertainment than about the task at hand. You are studying the Art of War, and warfare happens when it does, not when you feel like fitting it into your precious schedules!"

  He said this even when he was the one who set up the schedule in the first place!

  Well, maybe he was right about us getting a little lax, but dropping Neto was absolutely stupid, and everybody knew it.

  The new guy, a Croatian with the improbable name of Lloyd Tomlinson, had started out in artillery. He wasn't a bad sort, but he was three years behind the rest of us, and while we were in school he never did catch up, academically or socially.

  I mean, in class, it seemed to him that he was studying with the rest of us, as we were during the earlier stage of our course. Talking to him about it during our weekends, when we met with each other in battle or socially, we decided that he was mostly seeing recordings of us, from Neto's viewpoint. Mostly, but not exactly. A few times, what he remembered simply never happened, as far as the rest of us were concerned. But the slip-ups were few, and somehow the computer made it all work.

  Still and all, our team was never quite the same again.

  During all this time, the Serbs never caught on to what was happening to their prized division. Occasionally, patrols came around, looked things over, and then went away. They always heard exactly what they wanted to hear, because that's what we told them.

  Eventually, Kasia and I graduated cum laude, the only ones in the group to do so.

  Along with our diplomas, we also received commissions in the forces of New Croatia. I made general and the others, except for Lloyd, who had yet to graduate, were made colonels.

  I asked the professor how we could be commissioned without the knowledge of the New Croatian government.

  "My boy, that could be a bit of a problem, I admit. On the one hand, it is traditional to commission you as I have done, if you were not already officers in your country's military. The government should simply confirm your commissions once they are properly informed of the circumstances."

  "And if they don't?"


  "In that unlikely circumstance, I would imagine that you would be the de facto owner and leader of a very powerful independent mercenary company. I don't think that the government would want that to happen. Acknowledging your commissions and paying you your salaries would be so much cheaper than any of the possible alternatives that I simply can't imagine them not doing it."

  "I don't think that I'd want to be a mercenary."

  "Are you really sure of that? Among other things, since you've obtained your forces at no cost other than a bit of time, the profit potential is enormous. Also, it could be a great deal of fun."

  "Your definition of fun must be much different from mine, professor. But as you say, the whole situation would be most improbable."

  After graduation, Kasia and I took a month's vacation still in our coffins but in real time. The group had decided that the troops could use another month's training, and Lloyd needed to finish his course. Neither Kasia nor I wanted to wait another four years before settling the Serbians' hash, and getting on with our plans for a ranch, a marriage, and a family.

  Lloyd stayed in school to complete the course, studying alongside of electronic copies of the other five of us, just as we were for the last five years in school. It was weird to think of him studying with me, but me not in there studying with him.

  The poor kid was living in a totally faked environment. The professor said that he would learn better that way, so that's how they did it.

  I can't help wondering what would have happened if he'd done something that couldn't be fit in with everybody else's reality. What if he developed an affair with Maria, for example, and she enthusiastically went along with it? What would Conan think about the whole thing?

  But apparently, no such thing happened, so it doesn't matter.

  Or did it happen, but nobody knew about it?

  If a tree falls in the forest, and . . . Oh, to hell with it!

  Conan and Maria elected to stay in school and pick up multiple doctorates. They rarely saw Lloyd there.

  For reasons of his own, which I never asked about, Mirko opted for real time in Dream World the same way that Kasia and I did.

  Our timing was fortunate, because two days before we had figured to declare the initial training period to be at an end, and to start planning to head out to war on our own, orders came from the Serbian Grand Command to the people that we were impersonating. We were to report immediately to the staging area at Beach Head.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  PRELUDE TO BATTLE

  I called an immediate meeting of the general staff, that is to say, the professor, my five schoolmates, and me. We met where we always did every Saturday before battle—in our "war room." It was a big place with intelligent wall screens, smart communications gear, and more three-dimensional graphics than any six old-time science-fiction movies you've ever seen, all grouped around a huge round table.

  Anything there could and would change just by thinking of what you wanted different, or by itself, to display whatever it thought you might want. I mean, if you were talking about World War II fighter planes, there would suddenly be a precise model of a Spitfire Mark IX on the table in front of you, and a combat ready ME-109 all set to climb into and fly, right behind you.

  The rules there were such that while in it, anyone could make any change he or she wanted, even to other people in the room. This required a certain amount of discipline on the part of the group, and by general consent, practical jokes were definitely out.

  At present, there was an accurate model of the enemy camp at Beach Head on the table, and maps of our valley and the intervening terrain on two of the screens. The rest of the walls were done up with stands of ancient armor, mounted weapons, and battle flags, just to give the place a martial flair.

  After what had been to us more than eight years of preparation, we all had an incredibly electric feeling of this is it!

  We were all so excited that the professor insisted that we go back to Combat Speed to give us time to cool down.

  The wall screens began to show our division moving out of the desert valley where we had stayed for so long, moving with incredible slowness.

  Professor Cee then had a waiter in full Scottish regalia give us each a stiff glass of scotch while a platoon of Scots pipers filed in.

  "Confusion to the enemy!" he shouted, and threw his glass into a fireplace that appeared just in time to catch the shards.

  "Damn their eyes!" "Their parents were brothers!" and "But I don't like scotch!" came from the rest of us, along with a half dozen more flying glasses.

  Then, as we sat back down, the platoon of pipers let loose, and we stood it for at least thirty-five seconds before I decided that I had better take control of the proceedings.

  "Cut!" I shouted above the din, and things suddenly got quiet. "Better. Now delete the bartender, the fireplace, and the Black Watch."

  All of which promptly blinked out.

  I looked about me. Kasia and Mirko were nodding to me, signaling that I was doing the right thing, but the others looked disappointed that the party was ending before it had had time to get off the ground.

  "Four nays, two ayes, and since I'm the general, the ayes have it," I said.

  I had us all blink from casual clothes into class-A uniforms, simple, dark green outfits devoid of decorations except for insignia of rank—a silver star for me and gold eagles for everybody else—to help get them all in the right mindset.

  "Professor, I think it's time for you to give us a situation report," I said. "I won't ask you why you thought this was an appropriate occasion for a beer bust."

  "Scotch, my dear boy. Scotch," he said, looking awkward without his usual tweeds. "And you're right. Beer would have been totally inappropriate. I did it simply because you all were entirely too excited to pay proper attention to any report I might make, because we have already made all the physical preparations that we possibly can, and because we have days of subjective time to rationally decide what to do. There's no point in rushing things."

  "Well, I think that there is," I said. "None of us, including you, has ever managed a real war before, and I want all the time I can get. For starters, I want you to bring the rest of us up to speed with regards to what has been happening in the real world."

  The professor outwardly accepted my authority without further question, but I could tell that his heart wasn't in it. He had been top dog around here for over eight years, and stepping down wasn't easy for him. He stood stiffly and started briefing us.

  While we had been studying, the Combat Control Computer, using the persona of the dead Serbian general, had been getting regular updates on the course of the war. He said he hadn't told us about it because he felt that such information would only detract from our studies. Now, however, it would be appropriate to give us an update on what was happening.

  This "the boss man knows what's best for all his loving children" attitude annoyed the hell out of me. I was in command of this division, and I would be damned if I was going to let some machine decide what I should or should not know!

  "Damnit! Professor, or Combat Control Computer, or whatever you want to be called, there was no excuse for keeping us in the dark, at least for the last real time month, anyway. It is about time that we settled up just who is in charge around here. Now, I am a human and a general, these people are my colonels, and you are just a machine that was designed to assist me in commanding my forces! Have you got that?"

  "Why, of course, sir. You are in complete command, and have been since your course of training ended. How could it possibly be otherwise?"

  "Then where do you get off by keeping information about the war from me and my colonels?"

  "But I wasn't, sir. In fact, I just offered to provide you with that information."

  "You should have told us sooner."

  "But you gave me no such orders, sir. To have volunteered it sooner would have accomplished nothing but spoiling your vacation."

  I fumed a
bit, mostly because he was right. I hadn't ordered anybody to do anything, a habit I would have to change.

  I thought about having the computer create another, more subordinate character, and of using him in the place of Professor Cee, but decided against it. I wasn't sure what it would do to the old man's persona program. Would the machine simply rewrite his old program? Would that mean that the old persona would die? And anyway, despite it all, I had become very fond of the pompous bastard.

  Still, if I was going to effectively run our division, I had to make sure that there wasn't any doubt in anyone's mind who was boss around here. I couldn't let the professor off scot free.

  "Spoiling a vacation is a trivial excuse for losing a war! Now give me the military situation, and keep me completely updated from now on!"

  "Yes, sir."

  According to the professor, the war was stalemated, or at least at a temporary lull, and much of the Serbian army was standing down.

  At Beach Head, they had two divisions of modern armor from New Kashubia, but one of them was empty, with the troops home on leave.

  Nearby, there was a concentration camp containing over eleven thousand displaced civilians, mostly Croatians, with a sprinkling of ten other minority groups.

  There were nine divisions of Serbian infantry there as well, intended to function as occupation troops once their victory was assured, but it was Saturday night, they thought that there was no enemy within four hundred kilometers, and most of the troops were drunk. The Serbian Combat Control Computer wasn't even manned! The Serbian generals were actually throwing a party to which the six of us had been invited!

  My staff and I exchanged incredulous grins. Such incompetence on the part of the enemy was surely too good to be true.

  In the course of getting the locations of where we were to station our division, our computer had managed to get the precise position of every single enemy unit.