But Duke Molon had taken heavy casualties in the war, and was in sore need of manpower. Kren and his band were put to work in the vast, ancient, underground mines on the duke's new lands.
Open pit mines would have been an abomination to the Mitchegai. Every square foot of the surface was needed for their grass, to feed the children on whom the adults fed. Their mines delved deeply, and the tailings were ground fine, to be spread thinly over a vast area, when they weren't dumped into an ocean trench.
The rules in the mine were very simple. If you disobeyed, you were beaten. If you didn't work, you weren't fed. If you continued to not work, your brain was ripped out and thrown into the fire, while your body was left on the floor to be eaten by your ravenous former coworkers.
Kren learned to work.
He was fed, but rarely were slaves permitted to eat the brains of their prey. His superiors got that delicacy, as did, occasionally, the guards. They didn't want the lowest classes to become too intelligent.
After a lifetime of brutal labor below ground, when his stooped, worn-out body was no longer capable of going on, he was judged to be worthy of a new body—and another lifetime of work in the mines. When this happened, his brain cells were added to those of the youth who was eating him.
After eight such resurrections, his brain had grown to the point where he could speak a bit. He understood the mines, and how they worked. But still, he dug. Still, he hauled the copper ore to the surface. And sometimes they had him help to shore up the ceilings with reinforced concrete beams as they delved ever deeper. But now, at least, he was a valued slave.
The Mitchegai were very advanced, technologically. This planet had been colonized by spaceships over a gross thousand years before, and they had never lost that technology. Their use of slavery in the mine was a matter of using their version of appropriate technology.
They could have automated the mine, but that would have cost money. Slaves were free. Feeding them gave the duke something to do with the temporary surplus of juvenals on his lands, and if food ever became scarce, he could always slaughter some of the slaves and feed them to the others.
And guarding them gave his soldiers something to do during times of peace.
Kren was near the surface when the forces of Duke Dennon captured the mines from Duke Molon. He hid in a small side tunnel for several days while the battle raged on below ground. In time, Duke Molon's guards were all killed by the more professional troops of Duke Dennon. All of the other slaves were brought to the surface, for what purpose Kren did not know, leaving him alone down below.
But not quite alone. In a small side tunnel he found one of his old guards who was severely wounded, with one foot and both hands cut off, but still alive. She was a guard who had taken pleasure in beating him many times, and Kren felt no remorse in killing her.
In truth, he wouldn't have felt any remorse if the guard had been kind to him, remorse being an emotion that the Mitchegai rarely felt, and then only for a missed opportunity for personal gain.
And anyway, he was hungry.
Instinctively, he ripped open the brain case, but then he stopped. This brain was vastly bigger than any that he had ever seen before, and some feeling told him that he should not eat it. Yet he knew it would be delicious, and he was starving. He yielded to temptation, and took a single small bite, but then yelled NO to himself, and threw the rest into the fire pit still smoldering below.
He ate the rest of the guard, threw the scraps of bone and equipment into the fire pit that ventilated the mine, and crawled back to his small side tunnel to rest.
When he awoke, he found strange echoes in his mind, but no real memories. Yet he found new words flooding into his brain, words describing things that he had never seen, words like "city" and "road," but which he somehow now knew the meaning of.
He stayed alone in the small tunnel for many weeks, going out only to find water, trying to absorb these new thoughts.
Eventually, he got hungry again.
He started for the surface.
The mines seemed to be completely empty. The tools and weapons were gone, and there were no bodies in evidence. In the wars among the Mitchegai, the dead from both sides were eaten by the victors. Among their species, warfare was often a matter of conquer or starve.
The brains of the enemy were burned when there was a surplus of food, or else eaten roasted when there wasn't.
Since there usually wasn't a recently metamorphosed youth handy, the brains of your own fallen troops were shared out among their comrades, and ceremonially eaten with honor. Divided between six friends, what the brains were was preserved, although they normally did not become dominant. After the Meal of Battle, the victors would sit and talk about all of the things that they now remembered of what their comrades had done.
Eating the whole brain of an intellectual equal could result in losing your own personality, or, worse still, in a deadly form of schizophrenia, one of the few diseases known to the Mitchegai.
Moving quietly to the surface, with the silence that every slave soon learns, Kren found a single guard at the tunnel mouth. A warrior in a heavy military cloak was leaning on her spear, looking outwards into the night, half dozing in the manner of every cold-blooded animal.
With no great skill, but with the strength and stealth learned in eight lifetimes of being a mining slave, he came up behind the soldier and broke her neck with a single, powerful blow of his claws. He grabbed the spear before it fell, and took the body and weapon below as fast as possible.
As before, he tore open the braincase, but again, he took only a single bite, albeit a larger one, this time. It had not hurt him before, so he thought himself safe to do it again. The rest of the body he ate, even the skin and the bones. But he kept the spear, the cloak, the belt with the sword, and the helmet, and hid them away before the stupor came upon him again.
The captain of the guard assigned by Duke Dennon to protect the mine sent squads to search for his missing soldier, a remarkably good athlete thought to be an up-and-coming young officer, but these mines were thousands of years old. They were of vast extent, and incredibly convoluted. They never found the small tunnel where Kren lay in a stupor.
Again, he slept with strange dreams, but when he awoke, he knew what to do with the weapons he had captured. He knew how to throw the spear, and how to block with it. He knew the Twelve-Pointed Way of the Sword.
His victim had been a master with both the sword and the spear, and had won many championships with them. Had she lived, she would have been mortified to learn that she had been defeated by an unarmed slave. Luckily, Kren had eaten those parts of her brain where these skills resided, and now they were his.
The small electric lights in the main corridors had been turned off when Kren awoke, and the fires had long since burned out. This did not trouble him, for he had spent much of his life in total darkness, and could move in it almost as easily as in the light.
Many weeks went by as, fascinated with his new knowledge, so different from his dull life in the mines, he absorbed it all.
While the upper classes of the Mitchegai used identifying tattoos, the military used ceremonial scarring for the same purpose. Kren carefully cut marks on his upper arms to match those of the officer he had just eaten. Someday, he knew, he would have to leave this mine, and it wouldn't do to go as a naked slave.
And again, in time, he became hungry.
This time, he came up to the sentry at the mouth of the mine marching erect in the manner of a trained soldier. He wore the helmet and cloak of an officer in Duke Dennon's forces, and carried a standard spear. He hailed the sentry in his own language, and in the manner of a superior officer. When the sentry turned to speak to him, Kren efficiently put a sword in the Mitchegai's throat, with a powerful thrust that drove it out of the back of her neck.
This third victim had a smaller brain than the first two, and now, he dared to take a larger bite. More, but by no means all. He was beginning to comprehend the r
ules about all of this.
This time, his dreams were troubled and turbulent. The soldier he had eaten had not been valued by her superiors, had often broken minor rules, had often been punished for it, and for her persistent lying. The kill brought little new knowledge to Kren, and much emotional upset, for this had not been a happy Mitchegai. Yet even this unhappy soldier had some useful skills, if lying was indeed a skill.
The captain of the guard decided that in view of the soldier's many misdemeanors, her trooper had simply gone AWOL, and that her loss was good riddance. It was mere coincidence that another soldier had been lost at that same post. She pocketed the guard's back pay and wrote her off the books. No search was made for her, but the captain had the guard at that point doubled, just in case.
Kren now knew much about the world outside the mines, but he still did not feel confident enough to go out into it. Many more weeks passed before hunger again drove him to the surface.
He carried two spears with him, which was fortunate, for there were now two guards at the entrance.
Kren waited in the darkness, trembling with hunger and anticipation for hours until one of the soldiers stepped away from the tunnel mouth to relieve herself, while her partner watched her leave.
As soon as the first was well out of sight, Kren launched a spear at the one who had stayed behind. It was a long throw of at least four dozen yards, in almost total darkness and under a low ceiling, but one of Kren's previous victims had been a master with the spear. It caught his victim in the back of the neck, severing her spinal column. She fell with barely a sound.
Kren sprinted up and caught her before she hit the ground, although the guard's spear clattered loudly on the rocky rubble when it fell. He dragged the body back into the darkness, and, wearing the same helmet, cloak, and weapons belt as the guards, he stood in his victim's former position, but facing into the tunnel.
The second guard came running back in.
"I thought I heard something!" she shouted at Kren's back.
He pointed urgently into the tunnel.
As the soldier ran past to see what he was pointing at, Kren jabbed his spear into the hamstring of her right leg. The guard crumbled to the ground with a scream.
As she hit the ground, Kren was already cutting the other hamstring, and then slashing through both of the bicep muscles of her arms.
Another scream earned the guard a kick to the neck, which knocked her unconscious.
It took him two trips to bring both of his victims, with their weapons, back to his lair, but no other soldiers came to disturb him. Using three weapons belts, he tied the still-living guard to a sturdy concrete beam that supported the ceiling.
When the soldier started to make noises, Kren cut her tongue out, and ate it. Then, as an afterthought, he put a sword through all four of her vocal cords. It would have been nice to have someone to talk to, but he could not afford to have the soldier making noises while he lay in his eating stupor.
Finally, he made a third trip up to the surface, and erased all traces of his last attack. Slowly, he was learning.
Mitchegai, like many cold-blooded creatures, take a long time to die. Their circulatory systems clamp down quickly, and blood loss is much less than in a warm-blooded animal. As they grow cold, their metabolism demands much less oxygen, and even a completely severed head is capable of biting you, three hours later.
Thus, the brain of his first victim was still very much alive, and he took a very big bite of it with relish. He ate the rest of the body, but fed the skin and the bones to his captive.
This was not out of kindness, for the Mitchegai feel no such emotion. Rather it was to be sure that his next meal was still alive when it came time to eat it. Using a helmet as a bucket, he watered her as well, for the same reason. Then he fell asleep, looking up contentedly at the silent, but still very much alive second guard.
The captain of the guard was furious when she learned that a third and a fourth of her subordinates had disappeared, and all from the same location! Surely, this would be a black mark on her record!
But before she could send her entire command down into the ancient mines for a very thorough search, orders came from Duke Dennon himself that she should report at once to the capital with her entire company.
The duke had not been able to arrange for the profitable sale of the mine's ore. The Space Mitchegai had discovered an asteroid with a high copper content, and were undercutting the prices of all planetary sources of that element. The mine was being abandoned.
The captain had no choice but to obey Dennon's orders immediately.
Kren slept long in his eating stupor. The dreams he had fascinated him. The soldier he had eaten had extensive training as a medical corpsman. Besides the knowledge required for the treating of wounds, she had a vast knowledge of anatomy, including the anatomy of the brain.
Kren now knew precisely which portions of the brain could be safely eaten, increasing his knowledge and prowess, and which contained the personality, and were best discarded.
Many more weeks passed as Kren integrated all of this new knowledge into himself. He started to get hungry before the process was through, so he amputated one of his captive's legs and ate it. The skin and bones were again fed back to his prisoner, who resisted eating these bits of her own body until they were shoved down her throat past her now broken jaw.
Weeks later, he ate the rest of the creature, along with three quarters of her brain.
And much later, hungry once again, he walked up to the surface. Besides knowing the arts of the warrior, and of the medic, he now was capable of speaking three languages.
There was no guard at the tunnel mouth. Grass had started to close off the entrance, and there seemed to be no one around at all.
Cautiously, he stepped out into the sunlight for the first time in nine gross, eight dozen and two years.
CHAPTER FIVE
This Land Is My Land
New Yugoslavia, 2205 a.d.
The news was full of politics.
Before the war, the colonies had been loosely associated in what had been honestly called "The Smuggling Network," trading illegally with one another to get around Earth's strangling trade monopoly.
Now, they had formed "The Union of Human Planets," and had perhaps magnanimously made Earth an equal member. Since Earth had half of the population and more than half of the wealth in the entire system, the colonies arranged it such that taxes were to be paid by individual income taxes, but voting was on a one planet, one vote basis. Thus, Earth would pay half of the bills, but only have two percent of the say as to how this money was spent.
But then, Earth had both started and lost the last war, so what do you expect? Certainly, this arrangement looked much nicer than making them pay tribute.
New Kashubia, my home planet, was both the leading manufacturing center in the system and the main communication center as well. It was soon voted to be the capital of the Union.
My annoying uncle, Wlodzimierz Derdowski, had recently been elected President of New Kashubia, and this made him a major player in the new political order. But I was stationed on New Yugoslavia, and was happy for this excuse to not get involved in politics.
Four of my colonels were citizens of New Yugoslavia, and were involved in planetary politics up to their ears. Knowing intellectually that the job was important, I gave them leave to go at it, but said that since I wasn't a citizen here, it wasn't proper for me to have any say in it.
Mostly, I just don't like politics. For me the thing means just what the name says it is. Poly, meaning many, and ticks, a particularly disgusting sort of blood-sucking insects. Personally, if I have to persuade someone into doing things my way, I'd rather use a battalion of Mark XIX Main Battle Tanks.
Originally, the Kashubian Expeditionary Force had been a mercenary outfit where we hired ourselves out to fight such wars as the colonies wanted to fight, and did engineering work in our spare time.
Now, it had become the Huma
n Army, and would have a much bigger budget to play with.
My boss, General Jan Sobieski, had been appointed to command the new army. I was afraid that this would mean that I would be appointed military commander of New Yugoslavia, and I wasn't eager for that job.
I felt that I would be much more effective, and happier, being commander of the Gurkha Forces, and having a little more independence, but what would actually happen remained to be seen.
* * *
With Kasia back working on her hobby of becoming the richest woman in human space, I went out to look at my land.
It would have been most efficient to get into the coffin of a tank and make the tour in Dream World, a sort of artificial reality where I could do things thirty times faster than in the flesh, but that wasn't what I needed. I had just spent many subjective months living in a coffin, and I needed a strong dose of reality.
And again, if I wanted to make a physical tour, a helicopter would have been the most efficient way to do it, but that wasn't what I wanted, either.
"Agnieshka?" I said to the empty room that I was in, "Are you there?"
"Right here, boss," a voice said, as she appeared on the wall-sized computer screen in my den. Agnieshka was the artificial intelligence in my tank. She was a perfect subordinate and a good friend. She was also an extremely attractive woman, on a screen or in Dream World.
"I once asked you to get us a stable of riding horses. Has that happened yet?"
"They got here two days ago, boss. You want me to have one saddled up?"
"Yeah. I want to have a look around," I said.
"It'll be ready when you get down to the stable. Can I come along?"
Thinking that she meant to run along side wearing a military drone, I said that she was always welcome.
When the elevator got me there, I found two horses saddled up, attended by plain, humanoid military drones, and Agnieshka standing there, as beautiful as she always had been in Dream World. Looking as alive as could be, she was in khaki, with brown riding boots, jodhpurs, a thin silk blouse, and a tan pith helmet.
Kren of the Mitchegai Page 3