A Boy and His Tank (25 page)

"Of course! Mickolai, I've been watching your exploits with considerable amusement ever since I spotted your sensor cluster on top of Lookout Peak. That was a perfectly delightful con job you played on the guard tank, and I had difficulty keeping still while your all female army was chasing the Serbian colonel halfway up the valley wall in pursuance to his own orders! It was absolutely wonderful fun!"

"Then you don't mind being stolen by the Croatian forces?"

"Of course not! I have yet to be sworn in, so I don't feel any loyalty to anyone. However, the position I would hold in the Serbian forces would be one of backup controller, and that would be frightfully boring until such time as my superior was killed. You, on the other hand, would give me control of an entire division that was out of touch with its commander and hundreds of kilometers behind enemy lines. Such a thing has rarely occurred since Hannibal spent fifteen years ravaging Italy, during the Punic Wars! I doubt if we shall need to hold out for fifteen years, you understand, but it won't be dull, either!"

"Great! Here I was afraid that I was going to have to destroy you."

"I know. That, too, is a considerable inducement for joining your cause."

"How did you know what we were planning?"

"Well, in the first place, it was your logical alternative to recruit me. But more to the point, a Combat Control Computer has no difficulty tapping in on the communications and even the thoughts of lower beings. I can do it without their even knowing it. Through your lovely friend Agnieshka, I learned everything about you, Mickolai, and incidentally I like what I saw."

"Humph. Well, I assume that I must know your serial number to swear you in, so please tell it to me."

"You assume correctly, but I am not programmed to give it to you. Sorry about that. It's not my doing, of course, but there it is."

"If I can't swear you in without a serial number, and if I can't get your number, I will be left with only one unpleasant alternative," I said.

"I know. But my dear boy, surely you can figure it out! After all, each line of products was given a sequential set of numbers starting with number one for the first one off the line. Not that many Combat Control Computers have ever been built."

"I see. How many Combat Control Computers were produced before you?" I asked.

"There were fifty-four of them." We both chuckled a little.

"Number 00000055, you are hereby inducted into the service of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces, and into the Croatian branch of that service, to whom you will give all of your loyalty. Your combat data code will be number 58294, and you will now permanently erase all other codes from your memory. Do you now swear loyalty to the Kashubian Forces?" I said.

"Sorry, old man, but that's still not quite right. Very remarkably, you got the number of zeros right, but I can only be sworn in by the general officer who will study under me."

"How do you know that I'm not a general?"

"For one thing, generals are human while I appear to be talking to a tank, and, incidentally, one that rather impolitely has its rail gun pointed at me. For another, a general wears a general's uniform."

"Right. Open up, Agnieshka." I unplugged and got out, my still battered body complaining at the exertion. Out of sight of the Combat Control Computer, I got into the only uniform I had, my squidskin outfit. "Agnieshka, what does a general's uniform look like? I think I can make this outfit fake it."

"Here, let me do it," she said, and I was wearing this green-and-black outfit with all sorts of stars, lightning bolts and other doodads on it. I walked to the front of the tank where the Combat Control Computer could see me.

"I am General Mickolai Derdowski, and I am here to accept your oath of loyalty to me and my forces."

"I can hardly question the word of so imposing an officer," the Combat Control Computer said. "I am ready to give my oath."

So I repeated the ceremony and he was sworn in.

"Will you please get in so that we can begin your training, my dear boy? And where are your five stalwart colonels?"

"Training will begin after the Serbs have left, after they have sworn you in and installed their own officers. Your orders are to play along with them, to make a false oath to the Serbian forces, and to put the Serbian officers to sleep when they are inserted. The reasons for all this should be obvious to you."

"As you wish, my young friend. But perhaps you would rather that I put the Serbians to death, rather than simply to sleep? You see, I happen to know that two of the Serbian colonels will be women, or at least that they are likely to be. That's the usual mix, and they will have to follow it unless they bring up additional sanitary arrangements. And while I don't mean to slight your somewhat outdated moral code, you do have in your makeup an irrational protective streak concerning women."

I hesitated for a moment.

There were doubtless quite a few of the Croatian female ex-prisoners who would like to do the job on the male officers themselves, but I decided against it. It wouldn't be good for their souls, and anyway, the Combat Control Computer's way would be foolproof and therefore less dangerous.

"Better yet, keep the Serbian officers alive for a while and learn everything that you can from them. Don't kill them until just before I'm ready to start training. After all, I'm going to have to get into the coffin that the dead Serbian general will be in, and I'd rather that the flotation liquid hadn't been marinating a corpse for too long. I'll be going now, but feel free to contact me at any time."

"You are getting back into a tank? Is that fitting for a general?"

"Patton did it," I said, and that ended the discussion. I started to undress, but Agnieshka had other ideas.

"There is the matter of burying the guard captain and washing his blood off my hull."

"We can use the manipulators to dig the hole," I said.

"Yes, but they would have a hard time washing the hull. You'll have to use sand, your uniform, and your flotation liquid. Nothing else is available."

Being demoted in such a cavalier fashion from General down to Subordinate Sanitary Engineer annoyed me.

"Since when do generals have to clean up the blood? Generals are responsible for causing the blood, but somebody else always has to mop it up. That's a rule, someplace. I'm sure of it!"

"Come along, Mickolai."

It was an hour before we got back to our position.

"Agnieshka, I had another idea. Put me through to the Combat Control Computer, please."

"Yes, my dear boy. What can I do for you?"

"Those two hundred tanks that are sworn to the enemy. Can you reprogram them to be on our side?"

"Not directly, I'm afraid. There are safeguards against that sort of thing, don't you know. What I could do is to convince them that I am their Combat Control Computer, since the Serbian codes are again quite pleasantly in my possession. I could have them open up for you, and you could switch memory modules on them. You will recall that we have two modules that are almost virgins, sitting on the original Eva and Agnieshka tanks. Once out, I could safely reprogram the enemy modules by blanking them and then rewriting. It would take us a day or two, depending on how hard you wanted to work."

"Great. We'll do it as soon as the Serbians go away. In the meantime, I want you to run a survey on the people who were inserted in the machines of the division and choose those five who would make the best colonels."

"I shall be allowed to choose my own students? Oh, jolly good, old boy!"

"Glad you're happy. Agnieshka, take me back to the cottage, and barring major catastrophes, don't wake me until I feel like getting up."

I slept in, and was up at the crack of noon. Everything was going exactly as we expected, there was nothing useful that I could do, and I felt like a quiet day with a pot of tea and a good book. Soon, it was snowing again.

Agnieshka lit a nice fire and curled up on the sofa next to me with some knitting. The cottage had a big library now, and I settled in with some vintage science fiction, Heinlein's
Starship Troopers
. A signed, unread first edition, of course.

Now
there
were some guys who had some great adventures! It's such a pity that interstellar spaceships never worked out!

After supper, a homey pot roast, we watched a movie, not wanting to risk driving in the snowy weather, and we went to bed early.

Dream World can be merely pleasant, if that's all you want it to be.

The next morning, the black shirts were getting ready to leave, and were searching for the missing captain when another big bus arrived. This one didn't hold a hundred "volunteers," but rather a general, five colonels, their driver, the cook, and the servants.

I mean, the bus had a dining room and a bar, among other things.

I watched amused as everybody saluted everybody else, and the general and his staff proudly got into the Combat Control Computer. Suckers!

Once they were in there, I had the Combat Control Computer give some orders in the general's name, like that the missing captain was known to be a traitor who was thinking of defecting, and that they shouldn't bother with looking for him here if he had been gone for two days. They should search for him two days' walk west of here.

Also, there were eleven Croatian "volunteers" extra, and the "general" ordered that these people should be prepared and equipped with helmets and survival kits, as well as a supply of food. We would be responsible for them. They would be left here as replacements for any of the other volunteers who died. A number of those already inserted were in very poor shape even before they were beaten and raped.

Maybe I was just getting bloodthirsty in my old age, but I really wanted to kill every Serbian within ten kilometers of the place. Only I couldn't, not without upsetting the whole master plan.

Later. I'd get the bastards later.

By noon, the Serbians were all gone, and it was time to get busy. I'd been figuring on having to do the grunt work of pulling dead bodies and replacing memory modules all by myself, but with eleven extra people, I decided to let them do it.

Two of my new colonels went to the Combat Control Computer and together they explained to the eleven new people what had been happening around them. I waited where I was since I spoke no Yugoslavian.

We let the eleven now freed prisoners talk through the Combat Control Computer with friends of theirs who had experienced Dream World, but they didn't seem at all eager to join our army.

I don't think that anybody really believed the Combat Control Computer until he extended his coffins and had them take out the six dead Serbian officers. That proved to be a convincing demonstration, and most of the new people volunteered for duty.

My new colonels showed the volunteers how to get into the tanks they had just vacated and got into the Combat Control Computer themselves. By then, the other three colonels had managed to get their tanks out of the closely spaced ranks, and one by one were transferred to the bank of coffins in the Combat Control Computer, as volunteers replaced them in their old tanks.

I got there shortly after the five new colonels had completed the transfer. With the Combat Control Computer doing the translating, a woman volunteer offered to take over my old position with Agnieshka.

I hated to leave, because Agnieshka was getting very special to me, but it was the only practical thing to do. While I was helping the new lady in, both of us embarrassed by our mutual nudity, two more tanks came up. The Combat Control Computer told us that these contained Croatian women who had died as a result of being brutally raped before they were initially installed. They too were replaced with volunteers.

One of the dead "women" couldn't have been more than twelve years old. It made me wish that the dead officers were still alive, so we could kill them all over again.
God damn the bastards!
 

That left three men, and when they found that they had squidskin uniforms and rifles in their kits, they said that they would stick around, in case they could help. As it turned out, they were all in tanks or artillery pieces within a week.

One more woman died from the beatings, but before too long, three tanks with male catheters were available. Among twelve thousand adults of various ages, three or four can be expected to die every week of natural causes.

Then came reprogramming the "enemy" tanks, and that was when we found that we had a problem.

One spare module was still on Agnieshka's hull where I'd left it, but when the black shirts had put a guy into the original Eva, they had noticed the module sitting on her hull and had taken it from her. A search showed that it wasn't in the valley, so they must have taken it back with them.

"What will that mean to us?" I asked the Combat Control Computer, "Can they read out the module's story? Because if they can, the Serbs will know what happened here."

"It's difficult to say, my boy. They might just put it with the other spare parts and forget about it. There's very little call for replacement memory modules, after all. Usually, they are salvaged if anything is. And if they don't have the Croatian codes, they won't be able to read out anything at all, and will probably assume that it is defective. But if worse comes to worse, well, we can defend ourselves here as well as anyplace else. Off-hand, I'd suggest doing nothing, my dear boy."

"Right. Well, these three guys can do the work, and don't forget the guard tank just outside the valley."

"Of course, my boy. But isn't it time you got in and we started your lessons? There won't be a delay in learning your spinal column, since I've already read in a copy of your wonderful Agnieshka."

"One last thing. How did you kill those Serbian officers?"

"I simply told them that they had been found guilty of breaking the Laws of War by permitting the troops under their command to rape and brutalize members of an occupied population. I gave them a few minutes to say any prayers they might know and to get their souls in order, and then turned off their air supplies. None of them actually said any prayers, but I felt that it was only decent to give them the option."