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!”