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of clothing and other necessities, they were welcome to loot the Serbian Officers' Housing Area to satisfy
those needs. Additional food and medical help would be available at the chow halls and the base
hospital.
The prospect of loot quickly motivated the most downhearted of them, and the camp was soon emptied.
It was soon filled again, with Serbians of various sizes, ages, and sexes. That is to say, with all those
Serbs who were neither dead nor out obeying orders in the desert.
There were a small number of Serbian officers who had escaped the carnage at the officers' club, and
with my permission, the professor put one of them in charge of the people in the concentration camp. He
was given a phone to request whatever he needed, and the camp was surrounded by thirty of our tanks
to keep people from escaping. Since we only had one tank with antipersonnel weapons, this meant that
any escape attempt would have to be met with rail gun fire, and the death toll would be huge. The officer
seemed to be the sort who would do the sensible thing and simply keep order in the camp.
Conan was convinced that most of the former internees could be talked into joining the Croatian forces,
or at least getting into a tank as the safest and easiest transportation back to our own lines.
A check with the computers in the enemy warehouses showed that there were plenty of helmets and
spinal inductors around, so we put the program into action.
Since Conan was so enthused with the program I put him in charge of it. We'd all agreed that he would
have to go out and talk to the people in person. Words coming out of a speaker on a war machine just
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wouldn't have the right effect.
Conan spent the early afternoon cleaning up and getting ready for his four o'clock speech.
"It's strange," Kasia said as we watched the speech on the display screen in the war room. The
computer was translating it into Kashubian subtitles for our benefit. "Intellectually, I know that that's
Conan out there, but what I see is a stranger, an old man who is talking in a language that I don't
understand."
"I think that we've been spoiled by Dream World, love. It makes me worry if we will have much trouble
getting used to the real world again."
"Well, if it slows down your worrying about the present situation, it's all for the better. We'll make it."
"You always were the smart one."
At six, I found that the Serbian infantry was thirty-five kilometers from the base. I ordered them to
bivouac there, and automatic trucks delivered enough supplies to last them the night. They still thought
that they were getting orders from their own officers, relayed to their earphones from the dozen tanks we
had accompanying them.
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
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