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!