“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.
This wasn’t going to be a conventional battle. It was going to be Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Little Big Horn, and the Great Mariana Turkey Shoot rolled up in one!
“It has got to be a trap!” Colonel “Conan” Birach said, “This kind of a gift from Heaven does not come to mortal men more than once in a century, so it is not likely to be coming now to poor sinners like us. We must open fire with everything we have got as soon as we can possibly be sure of getting them all on the first salvo. Otherwise, we go to our certain deaths!”
“You are too pessimistic, Conan,” Colonel Garczegoz, my loving Kasia, said. “It is a typical trait of the sadly aged. I think that if we play this situation right, we might be able to accomplish much more than simple destruction, and do it with far less loss of life.”
“Young lady, pessimism has high survival value. The reason why so many mature people are pessimistic is that you bright-eyed optimists all tend to die young. And what’s so bad about death and destruction anyway, so long as it is visited solely on the enemy? After all, that’s what armies are for!”
“Armies exist to further the political ends of their governments. If killing is absolutely necessary to achieve those ends, so be it. But if people are killed without absolute need, I call it murder and ammunition wasted!” My lovely Kasia was warming up to a knock-down argument, but she never needed my help with this sort of thing.
We were all old friends, who understood that we could debate, argue, or scream at the top of our lungs without changing the basic respect we all held for each other. As general, moderator, and judge of the last court of appeals, my job was to sit back and wait for the truth to eventually emerge. If I took sides too early, I might suppress some of the ideas that would otherwise come out.
“So just what do you know about the politics of New Croatia, Kasia?” Colonel Buich said.
Maria often sided with Conan in the Saturday morning debates, not so much because she lived with the guy but because they thought so much alike. Conan wouldn’t talk about why he hated the Serbs so much, but hate them he thoroughly did.
In Maria’s case, she had been captured by the Serbs while she had been teaching an eighth grade girls’ gymnastic class. The Serbs did not rape Maria, but they’d done some very ugly things to the young girls in her care.
“None of us here know what the politicians are doing. We’ve been out of touch with our country’s forces for months,” Maria continued. “And they don’t even know we exist! So don’t you dare talk about `political ends.’ Our job, which all of us Croatians here volunteered for, is to kill as many of those damn Serbians as we possibly can before the war ends.”
“A nice bit of Freudian slip you have showing there, Maria dear! You see the war as an excuse to kill Serbians, rather than the killing of Serbians being necessary as a way to end the war!” Kasia said.
That momentarily shut Maria up, but Colonel Lloyd Tomlinson came quickly to her aid.