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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?"
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"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
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]