A Boy and His Tank

by Leo Frankowski

"It's strange," Kasia said as we watched the speech on the display screen in the war room. The computer was translating it into Kashubian subtitles for our benefit. "Intellectually, I know that that's Conan out there, but what I see is a stranger, an old man who is talking in a language that I don't understand."

  "I think that we've been spoiled by Dream World, love. It makes me worry if we will have much trouble getting used to the real world again."

  "Well, if it slows down your worrying about the present situation, it's all for the better. We'll make it."

  "You always were the smart one."

  At six, I found that the Serbian infantry was thirty-five kilometers from the base. I ordered them to bivouac there, and automatic trucks delivered enough supplies to last them the night. They still thought that they were getting orders from their own officers, relayed to their earphones from the dozen tanks we had accompanying them.

  Most of the command group had to stay in the Combat Control Computer, to handle any emergencies that might come up. We'd seen what happened to the Serbians when they'd left their computer unattended.

  Maria had gone out to reacquaint herself with Conan, I suppose to see if they still liked each other in their real bodies. She was pleasantly surprised to find that she was in much better shape now than when she had first climbed into her tank. Her face still looked forty, but her body was outstanding, almost as nice as the one she wore in Dream World. Three months of scientifically optimized physical training had worked wonders on her.

  But if we couldn't do the actual work of tanking the new volunteers, we now had twelve thousand trained troops and war machines to do the grunt work for us. Soon, they were talking the people from the concentration camp into going along with our program, reprogramming the memories of the Serbian tanks, and getting the people installed in them. The job was done by midnight, by resorting to making another twelve thousand Agnieshkas and Evas. It would have taken the Combat Control Computer a week to rewrite our new division back to virgins, and sitting here for an entire week would have been pushing our luck.

  In the end, only a few hundred of the former inmates insisted on being foolish enough to try to make it out in the manually operated trucks and busses that we'd found in the back of the truck park. It was just as well, since the concentration camp had contained over three hundred and fifty Croatian children who were too small to be fitted with the available helmets, and somebody had to take care of them.

  It had been a long day, and a longer night before. Everyone who wasn't on guard duty sacked out until eight in the morning.

  By the time we awoke, the Serbian infantry was marching through the sand again, trying to get to the trucks that held their breakfast.

  The lunch trucks would be fifteen kilometers even farther south, and soon the black shirts would be so far out into the desert that even if they discovered that they had been lied to and swindled, they would be too far from the base to walk back without the supplies that we wouldn't be giving them.

  The Serbian armored division filled with trained soldiers was another matter entirely. Ten thousand tanks and two thousand guns was enough to spoil anybody's day, if they were mad at you.

  So we ordered them home, in groups of five hundred, for Rest and Recuperation for the men, and some minor reprogramming for the machines.

  We were all ready for them when they drove in. Away from anything that would show the drastic changes that had been going on, five hundred groups of six people each were all set to shave, groom, and dress the returning heroes.

  And a thousand of our tanks were ready to blow hell out of any of them who turned out to be too intelligent.

  We had the Serbian tanks come in parade order, doing everything by the numbers. None of them objected to this nonsense, so the glorious Serbian command must have liked parades.

  On the professor's order, five hundred coffins slid out of five hundred tanks, five hundred Croatians pulled the memories out of said coffins, and five hundred Serbians were marched naked at gunpoint to the concentration camp.

  It all went with remarkable smoothness, with only a few fist fights, and nobody getting shot.

  The memory modules had been reprogrammed and reinstalled before the next band of five hundred drove in the gate.

  We went on playing the game all day, and that night, when we were through, we had a total of three divisions of war machines loyal to us.

  We teamed each machine from our old division with two or three like machines from our recent acquisitions, since only half of the new ones had an observer, and none of those were trained.

  We had to leave a dozen tanks from our first division herding the Serbian infantry around, and two hundred more guarding the concentration camp and the base itself. All of our guards were back in their tanks, and ordered to stay in there.

  They were prepared to destroy the base if necessary, but it might prove useful to the Croatians, once they got back here, and it was on Croatian soil anyway.

  Since the air waves were jammed, and the communication satellites were long gone, the only communications between Beach Head and New Serbia were by optical cables strung through the tunnel. These were all patched through the professor, and he faked all their routine communications such that they never realized what was going on.

  Serbian personnel and vehicles coming in were simply interned for the duration. Those who should have returned were "delayed" for one reason or another. The professor was sure that he could keep up the game for at least two weeks, before the opposition sent in a reconnaissance in force.

  We left enough supplies in the automatic warehouses to feed the infantry, the inhabitants of the local town, and the new inmates of the concentration camp for three months, and loaded everything else onto all the trucks we could find, leaving only enough to handle local transportation. For the safety of the guards we were leaving behind, we left behind absolutely no munitions that could hurt a modern tank.

  We destroyed all the vehicles we could find in the town, but otherwise left it alone. They couldn't hurt us and they couldn't communicate with New Serbia, so they couldn't do much but wait around until the situation clarified itself. Almost everyone there was a Serbian anyway.

  We planted a fair-sized bomb a few miles into the tunnel to Serbia, but we did not detonate it. Who knows? Maybe someday we would need a nice tunnel to New Serbia, or maybe they would try and launch another invasion through it, and we could take out that force at the same time as the tunnel.

  One sour point was that we decided that we could not take the children and those refugees who wouldn't get into a tank with us back to New Croatia. The only vehicles that they could travel in were thin-skinned trucks and busses. Such things could not survive even a minor firefight, and we were going to have to battle our way through the rest of the Serbian army.

  Some of them threatened to follow us, and I had to threaten to blow the first bus away if they tried it. What the adults did was up to them, if it was only themselves at stake, but they were responsible for the children, and had to keep them safe.

  Before the argument was over, a few hundred of the newly inducted troops, mostly the children's relatives, decanted themselves so as to take care of the kids. I gave my permission for it. Untrained, they wouldn't have been worth much in combat, anyway.

  Early in the morning, we headed west, with three divisions under us, until we passed the first chain of mountains. About then, Kasia made a wonderful discovery.

  Among the people whom we had rescued from the concentration camp, and had talked into enlisting in our army, was a genuine Catholic priest!

  His tank was promptly ordered back to drive adjacent to the Combat Control Computer, and Kasia, Maria, and a half dozen servants were soon getting a Dream World wedding organized.

  The wedding itself had to take place in real time, since the priest's tank wasn't capable of handling Dream World at Combat Speed, but this meant that we could invite both divisions of people and their machines as well!

 
The priest, Father Thomas, was willing to perform the ceremony with the understanding that this was essentially a marriage by proxy, that Dream World was simply a mechanical contrivance that took the place of the telephone or radio link that had often been used before when it wasn't possible for the participants to be physically together. He would have very much preferred to stop the divisions in the desert, have everybody get out, and do the whole thing properly, but I had to veto the suggestion. We were still behind enemy lines, after all, and the Serbians had just shown us what can happen when your Combat Control Computer is empty of command personnel.

  That, and missing the wedding would have broken Agnieshka's heart.

  Still, while Communion wasn't possible in Dream World, Confession certainly was, and Kasia and I both had over eight years of sins to get rid of. It took time, real time, but it had to be done.

  The wedding itself was magnificent, and held in a cathedral that was bigger than anything that ever existed in the real world. It had to be, with twenty-two thousand real people attending, not to mention an additional thirty-six thousand sentient machines!

  The reception afterwards was equally bodacious, with hundreds of whole cows roasting over the fires, along with I don't know how many megatons of other good things. Only in Dream World.

  By the time it was all over, Kasia and I had to cut our honeymoon down to four days, and that at Combat Speed, because we were within range of the battle lines, and it was time to get back to work.

  Contacting our superiors was a simple matter of sending up a series of coded radar rockets, explaining things to the Powers That Be on the Croatian side, and working out a strategy with them for taking out the Serbian units on the line.

  Naturally, we saw to it that all of the Croatian units had the Serbian battle codes.

  When all was ready, we advanced on the rear of the enemy battle line. The Serbs hadn't heard a word about our victory, and their loss of three armored divisions. They apparently thought that their base at Beach Head with its tunnel was still there under their control. What information they got was from our Combat Control Computer, which they thought was still their own.

  With the Serbs surrounded front and back with units they couldn't tell from their own, and with their tanks and artillery blindly believing our Combat Control Computer, it wasn't a battle at all.

  It was simply murder.

  Indeed, we were able to get over half of the enemy equipment to surrender undamaged, after having convinced them that their observers had become traitors.

  When the final accounting was made, we had retaken all occupied Croatian territory, freed forty-two thousand Croatian internees and POWs, and enriched the Croatian section of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces by over five and a half divisions!

  Then we drove home to the victory party!

  The war wasn't over, of course, but from now on, it would be fought on Serbian turf, not Croatian!

  My colonels and I were fêted at a dozen banquets, loaded down with medals, and even permitted to retain the ranks that we had assumed.

  We were given considerable sums of money, honorary (and tax-free!) Croatian citizenship, and some major tracts of good land to go with it. Together, Kasia and I got eleven square kilometers of land as our private estate, and most of it was good for farming.

  And at the urging of all concerned, Kasia and I repeated our vows, got married again, this time in the flesh.

  The wedding went on for a week, with all of our relatives brought over from New Kashubia, and even Uncle Wlodzimierz was there to kiss the bride. He told me that our salesmen had just sold six divisions of empty armor to the Serbians at a price that would put them in debt for fifty years!

  They even made a movie about my life.

  EPILOGUE

  THE RIGELLIAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHEOLOGY, 3783 A.D.

  "That was quite a story, Rupert. It's easy to see why Dream World was made so illegal, throughout civilized space. To think that a man could spend more than four years of his life living a lie! How horrible!"

  Author's Note

  A SPECIAL NOTE TO THOSE DECENT, HEROIC, AND TRULY NOBLE FANS WHO, BESIDES BUYING THIS PAPERBACK EDITION, ALSO SHELLED OUT THE $21.00 TO BUY THE HARDCOVER:

  THANK YOU!

  Now, you will probably have noticed that something is different here, namely that I have changed the ending. It happened this way:

  I had originally planned to have the book end, as it does in this paperback, in a fairly upbeat way. After all, that's the basic formula for an enjoyable adventure story. You drop your hero (a decent person that your reader can identify with) into a large crock of shit, and by dint of hard work, adventurous actions, and dumb luck he works his way upward into the light.

  But this was my first book for the very nice people at Baen Books, my contract said that I was to write 90,000 words, and I didn't yet know what I could get away with. Finishing the story but finding myself a few pages short, rather than going back and padding in something that I hadn't planned to pad in, I simply continued the story on a bit, adding a chapter into what I planned for the next book in the series.

  Anyway, I told myself, it would be nice to win an award for something, and history proves that the best way to do that is to write something with a sad, tragic, or futile ending. It's that, or making your hero a black, handicapped, homosexual lady who, while confined to a wheelchair, goes around rescuing Jews from the Nazis.

  Well, nobody suggested that I was deserving of a Nobel Prize for Literature, but while there were no actual death threats, a lot of people said that ending a book with " . . . and then the little boy fell out of bed and discovered that it was all just a bad dream!" was a shitty stunt to pull on your readers.

  And, you know, they were right. I asked Jim Baen if I could change it, and he's letting me do it, despite the added costs.

  So the paperback now has one less chapter in it than the hardcover. Don't worry about it. It will be resurrected as one of the opening chapters of the sequel, providing the next large crock of shit.

  Waste not, want not, after all.

  —Leo Frankowski,

  October 5, 1999