She quickly assured me that a twin sister would have no difficulty faking it as an untouched virgin, and swearing a false oath was no problem as long as it was to an enemy. The problem became simply one of a race as to who could get to the majority of the tanks first, and Agnieshka was sublimely confident.
On the first round, the score stood at twelve for the good guys and eight for the bad. Okay, I thought. It’s their arithmetic progression up against our geometric one. I knew it would be eighteen minutes before we could score again, so they would pull temporarily into the lead. They might be faster now, but every tank we converted was a teacher working on our side.
Six minutes later, the score stood at twelve for us and twenty-eight for them.
They were doing things by the numbers, like a bunch of strutting Germans. They passed one complete “class” of twenty every five minutes or so, and Agnieshka was updating the scoreboard every time they did it. The next update said still twelve for us and forty-eight for them. It made me wish that I could get my hands inside my helmet, so I could chew my fingernails.
Scanning up and down the line, I watched them strip naked a young woman who had a remarkably attractive body. Three of the black shirts pulled her from the line and took her to the bushes behind the assembly area. I couldn’t see what went on back there, but I knew. Some time later, they brought her back, bruised and bleeding, to have her head shaved and be forced into a tank.
Until then, I really hadn’t felt strongly about the enemy. Until then, they had been just opponents with whom I was playing a very deadly game. Now I was learning to hate the evil bastards.
My inclination was to open up with my new rail gun and kill every one of them, but I couldn’t do that without killing most of their prisoners as well. There were no combat infantry on New Yugoslavia, so none of the tanks except for that guard were equipped with antipersonnel weapons. All we had was antiarmor stuff, and the shock wave from a rail gun will definitely kill anyone who was unprotected and within ten meters of the stream of osmium needles. Unarmored people would be at least severely wounded out to thirty, and being a hundred meters away wasn’t safe. Furthermore, the radiation damage was infinitely worse than the shock wave in the long run. There was nothing that I could do for those poor people but lay there and watch them suffer.
The more I thought about that, the less sense it made. Why on New Yugoslavia would anyone brutalize someone else, then promptly put them in command of more firepower than that possessed by an old-style battleship? It sounded like a messy way to commit suicide. I asked Agnieshka about it and she told me that she was busy, and that I should shut up and soldier.
The score was twelve to sixty-eight. Soon, it was twelve to eighty-eight for the bad guys.
“Agnieshka! What’s going wrong?”
“Everything is just fine. Shut up!”
More women were abused, as were some very young and smooth-skinned men. What’s more, I noticed that after a bunch of goons brought back a victim, they went to this guy with a clipboard, and he scored them up! They each had a quota that they could fill. This wasn’t individual brutality, this was official policy. This was recreation for the troops!
The next score was twenty-eight to ninety-two, and I started to feel some better. The tide was finally turning.
But after that it was twenty-eight to a hundred and twelve, and my heart sank again. Five minutes more and it was twenty-eight to a hundred thirty-two, and I just shut my eyes for a while.
The way it looked to me, we were going to have to fight the tanks that had sworn loyalty to the Serbians before we could reprogram them. Even with surprise, outnumbered the way we were, we didn’t have much of a chance. What’s more, I was starting to feel a lot of empathy for the poor people who were being forced into observing for those war machines, and I didn’t want to kill them even if they were on the other side.
I opened my eyes and it was still only twenty-eight for us, but now it was a hundred fifty-two for them. I shut them again. I tried to sleep. When there is nothing useful that you can do, and you can’t enjoy yourself, you should go to sleep. I told myself that, and my much battered body let me do it.
“Wake up, Mickolai, it’s all better now!” Agnieshka said.
I looked at the scoreboard, and it read sixty for us and a hundred eighty for them.
“That’s better?” I said.
“Certainly! We’re so far ahead that my input isn’t needed anymore. Do you want to go to the cottage?”
“Yes, but it still looks like we’re losing.”
“We’re in fine shape! Come on.” I was back in Dream World again, the pain in my battered body was gone, and I was stretched out in a leather chair with a glass of wine in my hand. Snow was falling softly outside the windows, and there was hardwood fire going in the fireplace.
“Wonderful. But show me the scoreboard anyway.”
The Escher original on the wall turned into a scoreboard, and as I watched, it changed to sixty for us and two hundred for the bad guys.
“Agnieshka!”
“Hush, dear,” she said as she came in wearing a long wool skirt and a heavy sweater. In the background, Ravel’s “Bolero” was starting quietly on the stereo. She sat on the thick rag carpet in front of me, pulled off my boots, and started to rub my feet.
“Oh! Oh, Agnieshka, that’s wonderful, but we’re still losing the war.”
“No we aren’t, love. Listen to mama if you can’t do the arithmetic in your head. Soon, it’s going to be all better.”
When she had finished with my feet, she worked on my calves for a while, then pulled me to the floor and got to work on my bruised back. Eventually, things turned from sensual to sexual. She was as lecherous as ever, but somewhere along the line, she’d picked up a lot of class. Yet her precision was still machine-perfect, and when “Bolero” reached its climax, so did we.
In a while, I checked out the scoreboard, and it said one sixty to two hundred.
“And that’s all that they’re going to get,” Agnieshka said. “When it’s all over, they will have only two percent of the tanks. And probably none of the artillery and other things at all.”
“Probably?”
“Well, Eva and I can’t transfer directly into an artillery piece. I mean, well, we could, but we’d make darned poor artillery men. But we’re working on the problem, and I think we’ll have it solved by tomorrow. It’s just a matter of combining some of their existing programs with some of ours.”
“And if the black shirts decide to start filling the guns before they have filled up all the tanks?”
“They won’t, love. Small minds don’t work like that, and good minds won’t work for organizations that encourage rape.”
“But if they do?” I asked.
“Then we will kill them, my love,” she said, and smiled sweetly. Sometimes I forget that after all is said and done, Agnieshka’s still a deadly fighting machine.
“Oh. Back to my much earlier question. Why are the Serbians mistreating the very people that they plan on trusting to fight for them? And just who are all those poor people, anyway?”
“The inductees are all either prisoners of war or Croatian displaced persons. And yes, using them this way would be against the laws of war, except that none of the combatants on this misused planet ever signed the Geneva Convention. As to how they can be used, well, you must consider that the original plan for all these forces involved the Wealthy Nations Group using criminals, multiple felons, as observers.”
“I didn’t know that.” I thought for a while. “Then what stops them from revolting? Wouldn’t it be in their best interest to fight their oppressors? Or at least to run away?”
“Partly, it’s the loyalty of the tanks themselves, Mickolai. But only partly. Much of the makeup of any civilized person urges him to go along with the crowd, to move with the flow. If everybody’s doing it, well, then it can’t be too bad.”
“Some people are that way, but many of them are not. And certainly not a woman who has just been stripped naked in public, beat up by a gang of thugs, and then gang raped. Women with that experience tend to feel a deep, long-lasting, and not particularly rational anger.”