"You know, Dol, after five thousand years, one gets to know just about everybody who is really important."
By Monday afternoon, she had struck a deal whereby the Superior Food Corporation had permission to cut tunnels into a dozen and nine of their largely unused stations, provided that they placed a secure and attractive door over the opening when it was not in use. They could use the currently underutilized loading docks to package the children at no cost, provided that they cleaned up after themselves.
Superior Food would then pay normal rates to ship the dirt to the Borako Ocean Trench, to transport their machinery and personnel, and to get the juvenals to market, but these fees would be paid in packaged juvenals at a price of two dozen Ke each. The MagFloat Corporation would then sell these kids at a modest profit to their employees.
MagFloat also had plans to use the juvenals to promote long distance "Party Trips," in the hope of cutting into the long-distance trade, currently dominated by the airlines. The longest possible rail trip took five days. If a customer could enjoy a good party, and then eat a really big meal, she could sleep it off, and would be ready to do whatever she had to do at her destination, without the problems of jet lag.
"But Bronki," Dol said, "how are you going to make your usual kickback on all of this? There isn't any money involved!"
"Well, no, but a certain small number of the packaged children they receive will be delivered to my store. I'll get two per gross of what we pay them. There's always a way."
* * *
On Tuesday, Duke Dennon telephoned Kren, and asked him why all of his engineers were working on getting Kren's equipment ready for shipment.
"Your Grace, I think that Dol and Dako decided that your technical sorts needed something to do, and your engineers all offered to help out. I mean, I never agreed to pay them to do this."
"Well, don't you think that you should have asked me before you made use of my army?"
"I never intended to offend you, sir. Are you offended?"
"Well, not really, but you and I have a business arrangement." The duke said, "If you wanted something else, you should have discussed it with me, and not just let our subordinates go off on their own!"
"You are absolutely right, and I apologize. I'll see that this never happens again. However, it can't be good for morale to have troops who are absolutely bored, and I still could use their services. May they lend Dol a hand?"
"But I am paying each of those engineers a salary. If you want them, you should pay for them."
"Very well. The nature of having an army during peacetime is that you must pay for something that you aren't currently using. What if I were to pay you one third of their salaries, with the understanding that if they were ever needed by you, I would release them to you instantly. You would then still have your engineers when you needed them, but would be cutting your expenses by one third."
"And you would feed them while they were working for you?"
"Assuredly."
"Then make it half their salaries, and we have a deal."
"Excellent. I will of course be paying you for them in corporation stock, since you've already gotten most of my money."
"Humph. Okay, tell me which event you will be winning at this coming weekend, and we have a deal."
"I'll take the distance throw. But please, don't go betting another gross billion."
"I don't have a gross billion free anymore. My wager will be under a dozen billion."
"That won't depress the odds too badly."
"Very well, we have a deal. I'll write it up, and send it along with the deal we made last weekend. My courier will get there tomorrow evening."
"Excellent, Your Grace. Another thing. I'm going to be needing a fair number of unskilled workers, to herd and box up the juvenals for market. Would you be interested in renting me some of your ordinary soldiers, at the same rates?"
"Very well. But in a week's time, I'll expect to know about your next win in advance."
"We have an agreement."
* * *
On Thursday morning, the small tunneler was working on the first connection to a wintering center, which was projected to be completed within the week, being the shortest one.
On Friday afternoon, Kren had completed his sketches of the Research Center, to be placed near a railroad station in the center of his lands, and which had a wintering center near by. Besides the separate growing chambers for the various lines of juvenals, there was the genetic research building, an administration building, and very pleasant housing for twice as many workers as he could imagine needing.
These rather tall apartment buildings were to be equipped with "freight elevators," which were allowed by law, provided they each had a key-operated lock distributed only to certified movers. But since Kren was the law, and he was not averse to some illegal keys being distributed, he thought that the upper floors would soon be thought of as the most desirable. His own apartment would take up the entire top floor of the tallest building, and would be three times as big as Bronki's.
He gave his rough sketches to Dol, to have formal drawings made.
"Do it all to the standard building codes," Kren said, "But we don't have to bother with anybody's approval, since we are the law, hereabouts."
"Yes sir. But I've just completed my analysis of the costs of tunneling out floor space versus conventional construction, and you know? Once we have the tunneling machines, building underground is four times cheaper!"
"Now, that's good to hear. But our research workers are all going to be high-quality, well-educated individuals, and I think that they will prefer living and working aboveground. The shop rats can live and work in the tunnels, but the Research Center really ought to be aboveground."
"As you wish, sir."
"Good. Now, get all of the big tunneling machines working. And then start working on growing a lot of grass, underground."
* * *
The next weekend, Kren won at the distance throw for the second time in a row, on the theory that since they hadn't done this before, the odds should be higher. They weren't. The payoff was only two to one, and following his new policy, he only bet half of his ready cash on it. Nonetheless, he still made a billion Ke on the match. Dol, who was betting everything she had, made much more.
* * *
The week after saw their first shipments of children go out, a thousand to fill Bronki's new store, and three thousand as their payment to the MagFloat Corporation. The cold winter weather was closing in, but the wintering centers were still far from full, and they only had access to one of them. Next week the take would be much better.
They also broke ground on the Research Center. Construction would go on through the winter, with the workers in electrically heated suits. The first isolated breeding unit was to be completed by spring, and the whole complex was to be finished by midsummer.
Below ground, two of the big tunneling machines were in operation, filling hopper car after hopper car with dirt. MagFloat personnel connected them into gross-car-long unit trains, and sent them out at night when the shipping rates were lower.
Two more of the big tunnelers would be brought online each week. Fortunately, the equipment purchased from the duke had included a six-year supply of the metal coils used for making the tunnel linings, as well as the welding wire, and bottled argon used in the MIG welders that put them together, so this would not be a financial burden for a while.
Besides Duke Dennon's two gross of engineers, Kren now had six gross of regular troops on his payroll, in addition to almost two gross of workers that he had inherited from the duke when he had bought the land. In fact some three quarters of the native population on Kren's new lands were workers on his payroll. These workers maintained the wintering centers and the long grass fields above them, and they had to be paid in cash, not with company stock. The same was true for the genetics scientists Kren had hired. By Friday, Kren had to hire an accountant to keep tract of things, and she had to be paid in mone
y, too.
The crews putting in the fencing had to have regular progress payments, as well, and soon they would be paying for the huge number of monochromatic lighting panels that they had on order.
And the Research Center had to be paid for in cash progress payments.
When the buildings that you are putting up are expected to last for many thousands of years without serious maintenance, construction costs are high. Kren was forced to buy stock in his own company with his own cash, to keep it liquid.
Neither Bronki nor Dol was the least bit interested in making any cash investments. Any money spent now on stock was that much less that they could use to bet with next weekend. They were both still saving everything they could, and betting it all on Kren's athletic prowess, in preparation for what they both knew would be a stock fight for membership on the board of directors of the Superior Food Corporation next year. Once that happened, the corporation would be rolling in cash, but until then, Kren saw some lean times ahead.
The next meet was an away game, and Kren won the accuracy throw, not quite breaking his old record. The odds only paid three for two.
Dol said that a billion here, a billion there, hey, it all added up. She now had more than twice the cash that he did.
Kren decided that, computing his projected expenses, he couldn't afford to play it safe any more. He'd have to go back to betting it all on every event, just to break even.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Last War and Planetary Defenses
New Yugoslavia, 2213 a.d
Toward the end of the last war, our enemy, a renegade computer, as it turned out, had developed a method of destroying all of the Hassan-Smith transmitters and receivers on an entire planet. He had managed to do this to four of our colonized planets. He was too dangerous to leave alive, so I had fried him without finding out his secret.
Attempts to figure out how this had been accomplished had so far ended in failure. We even tried to duplicate the computer, and had tried to get it to develop the same technology, but no go.
The receivers had been placed in each solar system by a fleet of robot ships as they spread out from Earth. These ships never stopped at the solar system in question, they simply passed through at almost light speed, dropped a probe equipped with transceivers, and headed toward the next possible solar system.
But with all of the transmitters and receivers gone, the only way to get in contact with the cut-off planets was by ships moving at less than light speed.
Soon after the war, six new ships had been launched from the planets closest to each of our missing friends, each bringing transceivers with them.
Before their ships got to them, the inhabitants of New Erie had managed to build transceivers from scratch, and reestablish contact with the rest of Human Space. The inhabitants and the Earthly invaders had worked out a truce, figuring to let the outcome of the war be settled somewhere else, as it probably already had been.
Now the first ship had gotten to New Israel. The Israelis had fought a six-year-long slugfest with Earth's abandoned forces, with things escalating until their population was down to one tenth of what it had been before the war. Earth's forces had been completely obliterated. Their once beautiful planet had been reduced to radioactive craters and scar tissue.
With hindsight, they would have been so much better off surrendering, since they would have ended up winning in any event. But some people just don't know how to quit.
Massive amounts of aid was now pouring into their planet, and what was left of them was being invited to join in the new political order.
The fate of the other two planets remains to be seen.
Our general staff had now seen to it that every inhabited planet had at least two disassembled transceivers hidden on it, along with assembly instructions. With them powered down, it was felt unlikely that any detection scheme could find and destroy them. If ever this transceiver-destroying technology was invented again by another enemy, we were ready for it. But it was much like locking the barn door after all the horses had escaped.
* * *
Ships were being launched very regularly from the New Yugoslavia system as well. Picket ships for our planetary defense system. Now that a duplicate set of production lines had been built, we were launching two a week.
The sixty ships for the Distant Early Warning Sphere were now all on their way, although it would be a few years before they got to their destinations. Once on station, they would each place over a thousand sensor clusters in their sector, to watch for incoming Mitchegai ships. These sensors also each contained a full-sized receiver, so that a counterattack could be launched through any one of them.
Also, every one of the ships and sensors would contain one of the microtransceivers that permitted small memory chips to be sent quickly to anywhere in Human Space. Up until now, these expensive items had been restricted to Combat Control Computers, but in the future, I intended every one of our fighting machines to have one.
Every one of our ships and sensors would have an artificial intelligence aboard. Years ago, when the computers in all military machines had been upgraded from silicon chips to diamond ones, I'd bought up over a million of the old computers. There was no great need for cybernetic speed on either the ships or the sensors, and so when the silicon ladies volunteered for this duty, I gave them my blessings, and my thanks.
Our ships did not use the hydrogen-oxygen rockets that the old Earth ships still used. Cesium ion engines were cheaper to build and to keep supplied. New Kashubia had vast amounts of cesium available that nobody had ever figured a good use for. Now, they were mining it in great quantities.
At one light-year out from our sun, another sixty ships were being sent to make up the Comet Belt Sphere. It would have the same number of sensors as the DEW Sphere, but they would be planted four times more densely.
Additional spheres would be set up at a half light-year, a quarter light-year, and an eighth light-year.
Inside that, there would be a diffuse cloud of sensors throughout the solar system.
Then the planet itself would have three spheres of orbital defense, plus many other sensors in a loose cloud.
None of these ships and sensors would be armed, exactly, except for a massive self-destruct mechanism. They were there to detect the enemy, and to function as gateways where our fighting forces could exit into a wide variety of points. The plan was to let our forces go almost instantaneously to any point in the system where they were needed.
Getting those fighting forces together was another problem entirely.
Plans for our planetary defensive system were sent free to every planet in Human Space. We also offered a "Starter Kit" of basic machinery, so that they could do as we had done, using the fighting machines that they already had. We charged full price for that, but gave them credit on it.
More than half of the planets were building their own systems. As for the rest, well, we had done our best.
CHAPTER FORTY
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
2000 YEARS EARLIER
Offers You Can't Refuse
Things started to settle down to a routine.
Dol made an inspection trip to the building and packaging site twice a week. Since his academic grades were now outstanding, sometimes Kren cut classes and went with her in the mornings, but not too often.
The design of the City of Dren was such that you could go almost everywhere by tunnel, and not have to expose yourself to the winter weather. Construction sites were something different. They had to wear heavy winter clothing and electrically heated underwear to go outside and inspect the progress of the construction work.
Kren found it almost as annoying as wearing armor. He vowed that when circumstances permitted, he would move to the tropics, where it was always warm, even if it was more expensive to live there.
Construction workers wore form-fitting, elec
trically heated garments in the wintertime, with safety helmets. Like most Mitchegai garments, these were color coded according to their specific trade. Heavy equipment operators wore black, plumbers wore brown, electricians red, and so forth. Their status and skill levels were displayed by the colors of their equipment belts.
In the summer, they might work nearly naked, but they still wore their belts and their color-coded safety helmets.
There was a separate construction language, Geno, but there were over a dozen dialects within this language that were almost languages in their own right.
There was an intricate cross-referencing between the various Mitchegai languages. An electrician, for example, could talk with an electrical engineer with little difficulty, but had trouble conversing with a hydraulics engineer, even though these two engineers could easily communicate with each other, and an electrician could always speak to a plumber.
There was no possibility of Kren's cutting his physical training classes, or his obligations to the director, so he always had to leave early in order to be back in Dren by seven, in the early afternoon.
Bronki ran the sales end of things fairly well, and sales increased, about one part in six, every week, and with very little spent on advertising. There was nothing on television, and only a few posters in the underground walkways.
One said, "The Superior Food Corporation now has a store in Dren! We have the best children at the best prices! Check us out! We're right under Bronki's Place! Or phone 24B9-129A3."
Soon, she was opening a second, larger store, on the other side of town.
"Have you heard the news?" Bronki said one evening.
When Kren said that he didn't usually pay any attention to that sort of thing, Bronki said, "The KUL and the PPG have just fought out a major war! When the KUL had the PPG down to a quarter of its original size, the PPG launched a poison gas attack on the KUL headquarters, effectively wiping them out! Now, the planetary police are attacking the PPG for their use of illegal weapons, and the PPG don't have a chance. It is expected that the City of Dren will be peaceful for a while, until some other gang moves in."
Kren of the Mitchegai Page 25