"It was simply that you students were getting in a rut. You were getting so that you were all worrying more about next Sunday's entertainment than about the task at hand. You are studying the Art of War, and warfare happens when it does, not when you feel like fitting it into your precious schedules!"

He said this even whenhe was the one who set up the schedule in the first place!

Well, maybe he was right about us getting a little lax, but dropping Neto was absolutely stupid, and everybody knew it.

The new guy, a Croatian with the improbable name of Lloyd Tomlinson, had started out in artillery. He wasn't a bad sort, but he was three years behind the rest of us, and while we were in school he never did catch up, academically or socially.

I mean, in class, it seemed to him that he was studying with the rest of us, as we were during the earlier stage of our course. Talking to him about it during our weekends, when we met with each other in battle or socially, we decided that he was mostly seeing recordings of us, from Neto's viewpoint. Mostly, but not exactly. A few times, what he remembered simply never happened, as far as the rest of us were concerned. But the slip-ups were few, and somehow the computer made it all work.

Still and all, our team was never quite the same again.

During all this time, the Serbs never caught on to what was happening to their prized division.

Occasionally, patrols came around, looked things over, and then went away. They always heard exactly what they wanted to hear, because that's what we told them.

Eventually, Kasia and I graduatedcum laude , the only ones in the group to do so.

Along with our diplomas, we also received commissions in the forces of New Croatia. I made general and the others, except for Lloyd, who had yet to graduate, were made colonels.

I asked the professor how we could be commissioned without the knowledge of the New Croatian government.

"My boy, that could be a bit of a problem, I admit. On the one hand, it is traditional to commission you as I have done, if you were not already officers in your country's military. The government should simply confirm your commissions once they are properly informed of the circumstances."

"And if they don't?"

"In that unlikely circumstance, I would imagine that you would be thede facto owner and leader of a very powerful independent mercenary company. I don't think that the government would want that to happen. Acknowledging your commissions and paying you your salaries would be so much cheaper than any of the possible alternatives that I simply can't imagine them not doing it."

"I don't think that I'd want to be a mercenary."

"Are you really sure of that? Among other things, since you've obtained your forces at no cost other than a bit of time, the profit potential is enormous. Also, it could be a great deal of fun."

"Your definition of fun must be much different from mine, professor. But as you say, the whole situation would be most improbable."

After graduation, Kasia and I took a month's vacation still in our coffins but in real time. The group had decided that the troops could use another month's training, and Lloyd needed to finish his course. Neither Kasia nor I wanted to wait another four years before settling the Serbians' hash, and getting on with our plans for a ranch, a marriage, and a family.

Lloyd stayed in school to complete the course, studying alongside of electronic copies of the other five of us, just as we were for the last five years in school. It was weird to think of him studying with me, but me not in there studying with him.

The poor kid was living in a totally faked environment. The professor said that he would learn better that way, so that's how they did it.

I can't help wondering what would have happened if he'd done something that couldn't be fit in with everybody else's reality. What if he developed an affair with Maria, for example, and she enthusiastically went along with it? What would Conan think about the whole thing?

But apparently, no such thing happened, so it doesn't matter.

Or did it happen, but nobody knew about it?

If a tree falls in the forest, and . . . Oh, to hell with it!

Conan and Maria elected to stay in school and pick up multiple doctorates. They rarely saw Lloyd there.

For reasons of his own, which I never asked about, Mirko opted for real time in Dream World the same way that Kasia and I did.

Our timing was fortunate, because two days before we had figured to declare the initial training period to be at an end, and to start planning to head out to war on our own, orders came from the Serbian Grand Command to the people that we were impersonating. We were to report immediately to the staging area at Beach Head.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

PRELUDE TO BATTLE.

I called an immediate meeting of the general staff, that is to say, the professor, my five schoolmates, and me. We met where we always did every Saturday before battle-in our "war room." It was a big place with intelligent wall screens, smart communications gear, and more three-dimensional graphics than any six old-time science-fiction movies you've ever seen, all grouped around a huge round table.

Anything there could and would change just by thinking of what you wanted different, or by itself, to display whatever it thought you might want. I mean, if you were talking about World War II fighter planes, there would suddenly be a precise model of a Spitfire Mark IX on the table in front of you, and a combat ready ME-109 all set to climb into and fly, right behind you.

The rules there were such that while in it, anyone could make any change he or she wanted, even to other people in the room. This required a certain amount of discipline on the part of the group, and by general consent, practical jokes were definitelyout .

At present, there was an accurate model of the enemy camp at Beach Head on the table, and maps of our valley and the intervening terrain on two of the screens. The rest of the walls were done up with stands of ancient armor, mounted weapons, and battle flags, just to give the place a martial flair.

After what had been to us more than eight years of preparation, we all had an incredibly electric feeling ofthis is it!

We were all so excited that the professor insisted that we go back to Combat Speed to give us time to cool down.

The wall screens began to show our division moving out of the desert valley where we had stayed for so long, moving with incredible slowness.

Professor Cee then had a waiter in full Scottish regalia give us each a stiff glass of scotch while a platoon of Scots pipers filed in.

"Confusion to the enemy!" he shouted, and threw his glass into a fireplace that appeared just in time to catch the shards.

"Damn their eyes!" "Their parents were brothers!" and "But I don'tlike scotch!" came from the rest of us, along with a half dozen more flying glasses.

Then, as we sat back down, the platoon of pipers let loose, and we stood it for at least thirty-five seconds before I decided that I had better take control of the proceedings.

"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 hasgot 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.

"You know our history as well as anybody, Kasia. Any Serbians who live through this war will just live to be killed or killing in the next one! Better to get the job done now!"

Colonel Mirko Jubec stood and waited for everyone to pay attention to him. They quieted down quickly because he didn't speak often, but what he said when he did talk was always worth hearing.

"If we go in with all guns blazing, we will kill most of the civilians in the concentration camp. Do wewant to do that? Can weafford to do that?"

Then Mirko sat down, and a few moments went by before Kasia stood up.

"An excellent point, Mirko. Also, we don't really know how badly off our own side is, but we know that they are not actively attacking the Serbs just now. I am fairly certain that they would not turn their noses up at two more armored divisions besides our own, especially if they were cost free. I think we can steal those divisions for them! I think that we can rescue the people in the concentration camp and turn many of them into soldiers. As to the Serbian infantry, once their armor is gone and their communications are in our hands, capturing them shouldn't be too difficult."

"I'm worried about the civilians too, Kasia. But if we try to be too clever about all this, we could end up losing the civilians, losing the battle, and losing our own lives as well," Maria said. "We are fighting a war, and we can't let ourselves get too squeamish."

I sat back and waited for some sort of consensus to evolve.

It didn't.

After the debate had gone on for more than three hours, it settled in pretty much as I had suspected.

Kasia and Mirko favored a limited attack that would destroy the enemy computer and general staff, but capture everything else. Lloyd, Conan, and Maria wanted to destroy everything and kill everybody who wrote home in Cyrillic, while trying to miss the civilians as much as possible.

When they started to repeat themselves, I told each group to take a three-hour break and to come back with some solid battle plans.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.