Kren of the Mitchegai

by Leo Frankowski

  2000 YEARS EARLIER

  Wrapping It Up

  Kren spent the rest of the day collecting up heads and decapitated bodies and sending them down into the tunnel for resurrection, that is to say, to be eaten alive by young carnivores who would soon have their brains taken over by the person that they had just eaten.

  The colonel's insignia on his shoulders was a great help in getting the troops to obey him. Never once did he have to kill one of them to encourage the others.

  Bronki and Dol were wearing armor with captain's insignia that Kren had arranged for. They set up a surgery in one of the basements, and with the help of a dozen shanghaied soldiers, performed well over a thousand questionably legal operations on slaughtered civilians. Many of them were members of the former nobility hereabouts, but some of them were merely servants who had gotten in the way. Kren decided that he might as well have them all. There were plenty of young carnivores. With the right conditioning, he was sure that he could make most of them into willing slaves.

  When they ran out of heads and decapitated bodies, the duke's men started slaughtering the nobility who had been captured, but not yet killed. Many of them were still in their eating stupors, and never did wake up.

  Bronki ran into over a dozen of the nobility who had once been friends of hers, since in five thousand years, you meet a lot of individuals. With a bit of trickery, and some help from Dol, she managed to send these down for resurrection with their brains intact, having quietly cautioned them to act as if they were brainless when they woke up, and reminding them that one day, they would owe her some really big favors.

  * * *

  Duke Dennon spent his time negotiating with groups of Tendi's soldiers who had yet to surrender, and accepting their oaths of allegiance, once they did.

  "Kren, I think that this might be written up as one of the most successful campaigns in history," the duke said. "We have taken a major duchy, killed almost a thousand of their soldiers, and captured nine entire divisions of their troops, thus far. And we did it with an assault force of only two divisions, and the loss of barely two dozen of our own warriors! And I owe much of this success to you! I thank you, Kren, and somehow, in the future, I will find a way to reward you properly."

  "Thank you, Your Grace. I would say that ours was a mutually profitable relationship. But for now, I have only one favor to ask."

  "Ask it!"

  "I understand that you will be needing all of your regular troops, controlling this new duchy, at least until your new recruits go through basic training and get settled in to your army," Kren said. "But could I please have your engineers back? The construction and tunneling projects on my land have come to a dead stop without them. Also, there is one of your captains, Yor, who is a remarkably good administrator. I would like you to transfer her to me permanently."

  "Absolutely! I'll release them to you immediately! And you are right about my needing the rest of my army for the foreseeable future, but look. You seemed to want half of the enemy soldiers that you had resurrected. Would you like them all? I have plenty of new recruits for the time being, and I'll be getting many more once I've had a chance to talk to Tendi's other divisions in all of his outlying fortifications. After all, I have more land now, but one fewer border to guard!"

  "Thank you! I'll take them! I'll have to figure out a way to get them, the old nobility, and my carts back to my lands. There's no way that we can get the carts up that small tunnel that your engineers built into the basement here, but it's a three week march back to your palace by the old tunnel."

  "Don't worry about it," the duke said. "I'll be marching all of these new recruits back to my old palace by way of that tunnel. That's the program, you know. You fill your new lands with your old troops, and then take the new ones, retrain them, distribute them around your old lands, being careful to break up all of their old platoons and squads. Left as individuals, they rarely cause trouble."

  Dennon continued, "Anyway, they might as well haul your prisoners and property back to the palace while they're at it. From there, I'll have a MagFloat train take it all back to your Research Center. I'll be staying here, of course, and I'll be bringing most of my leaders here as well. You have to do that with newly conquered land, for a few years at least, until the populace is used to your rule. My old estates are secure enough to get along without me."

  "Again, thank you, Your Grace. Well then, Bronki has finished slicing up all of the brains that needed it, so with your permission, we'll be going home."

  "Must you leave so soon? I thought that you'd want to stay for dinner. We're serving Tendi!"

  "I hate to give up on a chance to eat a real duke, but I'm still a schoolboy, Your Grace. Tomorrow is a school day!"

  After a quick talk with Dennon's chief engineer, Kren, Bronki, and Dol changed into their usual academic garb, walked to the train station, and bought tickets for home.

  * * *

  A team from the Battle Confirmation Authority soon arrived at Tendi's old castle. Their job, among other things, was to confirm that the Laws of War had been properly adhered to.

  They were particularly fascinated by the ancient tunnel that Duke Dennon had found, and even though he repeatedly warned them that he had lost seven soldiers trying to explore the mazes at each end, the inspectors insisted on investigating it personally, using electrically powered motorcycles that they had shipped in.

  When two of their members were permanently killed in a cave-in at the east end of the tunnel, they gave up on this portion of the investigation.

  They spent three weeks interviewing everyone concerned, and even talked to Kren, at Bronki's apartment.

  In the end, they declared that everything had been done in a legal manner, and congratulated Duke Dennon on his remarkable victory.

  The duke had a thousand sets of arms and armor sent to Kren for use by his new guards. They were identical to those worn by the duke's soldiers, except that he had them painted in red and black, to match Kren's academic garb.

  Kren thanked him profusely, and then quietly had all of the tail armor removed and put in storage.

  * * *

  Kren returned to school, got good grades, and stayed with his program of making huge winnings at his betting on collegiate sports.

  Bronki stayed angry at Kren, refusing to speak to him for weeks, but betting on him nonetheless.

  Dol remained philosophical about the entire affair, knowing when she had a good thing going.

  * * *

  About the time that Kren's first, well-fed offspring were eating their way up to the top of the grass as juvenals, his biochemists reported that they thought they knew which genes were responsible for Kren's athletic prowess.

  They weren't positive about their findings. There were still many unknowns. What they told him about were simply their best guesses at the present state of their investigation.

  But certainly, it wasn't just one gene. It seemed to be several dozen of them working together. Also, several of them were located on the "J" chromosome, which in the Mitchegai determined the sex of an individual. This suggested that it was unlikely that a female would have all of his athletic and military prowess.

  Kren's comment was, "Well, it's sure going to make for some stinky locker rooms!" A heavy concentration of male aerosol sperm was considered offensive by a Mitchegai.

  Kren put his scientists to selecting several gross of the female children who had a maximal number of the genes that they thought might be making him so good. In a dozen years, they would be mature and he would go into another round of breeding.

  Kren decided that it wasn't necessary to preserve any of the males, since he was still there to do the male side of the breeding.

  Some of his scientists secretly objected, and preserved a few promising-looking males just in case Kren came to an early death. Also, it would be interesting to run some tests and comparisons on them, and a vivisection now and then always provided some comic relief.

  All of the rest
of Kren's offspring were eventually eaten in house.

  Meanwhile, every juvenal brought in from the surface to the underground feed lots was branded with an ID number and weighed periodically. Those who put on the most weight were placed in a special group to be raised to adulthood for use as breeders.

  Once they found some that were particularly productive, the scientists could get busy at finding out why this was so, and productivity could be increased even further.

  * * *

  Four weeks passed before Kren's new slaves, military and civilian, were delivered to him. Duke Dennon had lent him a dozen trained drill instructors to train the thousand or so resurrected soldiers in the duke's way of doing things.

  Kren told them, "It is very simple. You were all killed in combat. I killed a fair number of you myself. It is traditional for dead enemy soldiers to have their brains thrown into the fire, and their bodies eaten by the victors. You were lucky. Duke Dennon permitted me to resurrect you because I needed soldiers willing to work and willing to fight. If you do not want to do this, let us know, and we will happily kill you again, permanently, this time. If you want to live a fairly decent life, you must work very hard at staying with the program. But remember that for the next twelve years or so, your legal status will be that of slaves. You have no rights at all. You must prove to me that you are valuable enough to be worth feeding. After those twelve years, if you keep your teeth clean, you will be granted the full privileges of an adult citizen. Sergeants, take command!"

  * * *

  To Kren's surprise, Bronki got over her anger at being dragged off to battle, and volunteered to set up the training program to educate the thousand or so young vampires that their use of Duke Tendi's nobles had resulted in.

  "We're alone now," Bronki said to the supposedly mindless student across from her. "Do you know me?"

  "Yes, of course. You are Bronki. You saved my life. I'm Seba. We studied art together."

  "Well, I'm glad I've found you again, Seba. I'll be putting you in a class along with the dozen or so others I managed to save. While in class, you will be able to talk with the others, but outside of it, you must continue to pretend to be stupid. It will probably be a few years before I can get you out of this, but if you want to live, and if you want me to live, play the role very well at all times!"

  "I will, Bronki. But tell me, why did you risk your life to save me and the others?"

  "You know, I'm not entirely sure. On the one hand, being a friend of Bronki has always meant something. Or maybe, I was just so mad at Kren at the time that I wanted to disobey him. But once having done it, I am now forced to protect you as best as I can, and to complete the job, for my own security. Just remember that someday, I might need some serious favors and when that happens, I will expect your bunch to be obliging."

  "Oh, we will be. You can count on it!"

  * * *

  Kren's surveyors managed to prove, with a bit of fudging, that Duke Tendi's castle was in fact over two gross yards away from the position shown on the ancient maps. Whether this was caused by an error in transcription, some time in the last three dozen thousand years since the castle had been built, or if it had been a deliberate error on the part of the architects to confuse future aggressors, was a question on which they could not offer an opinion. Duke Dennon grumbled, but was eventually satisfied.

  Actually, the error had to have been made by one of the engineers, since no one else worked on the project. But Kren needed all of the technical troops to keep his building projects going, and he didn't want Duke Dennon to kill any of them.

  * * *

  In the spring, Duke Dennon was confronted with two half-hearted attempts at counterinvasions, but when he faced them each with many divisions of fully armored soldiers, the enemy soon ran away, or rather the survivors did. It would be several years before Duke Dennon would have things organized well enough to dare making another attack himself.

  One of these invasions happened to coincide with the spring break, and Kren was able to participate in the battle, to Duke Dennon's delight.

  At Bronki's suggestion, Duke Dennon hired a friend of hers as a ghost writer, and came up with a book called Three Battles. It sold remarkably well, adding to Dennon's fortune and fame. More importantly, it made other dukes deadly afraid of attacking him, for now they considered him to be a master of the warrior's art.

  At the end of the book, Dennon said, "It will therefore be obvious that anyone who attacks me will encounter large numbers of very well-trained warriors who are all well armed and armored. On the battlefield, we regularly kill four of our enemy for every soldier we lose.

  "Furthermore, I have the wealth to see to it that every one of my troops who dies in combat is properly resurrected. When you attack me, you do not reduce the size of my army! I also see to it that all enemy soldiers killed are resurrected as well. Then, both these resurrected soldiers and those whom my warriors have captured are given the option to either die, or join my army.

  "Very few choose to die! Among other things, I feed, treat, and pay my warriors very well. I give them the finest arms and armor that money can buy. They live in sumptuous private rooms, and when they are not rigorously training, their time and money are their own. Sometimes, our enemies seem to want to be captured!

  "When you attack the lands of Duke Dennon, you reduce the size of your army, and increase the size of mine!

  "You might also make me angry enough to attack you in return!"

  Dennon's success with the use of armored troops caused many dukes to consider the use of armor with their own armies. At Kren's suggestion, Dennon sold it to them, painted in their own colors, at very good prices. After all, if they didn't buy it from Duke Dennon, someone else would eventually start producing it, and Dennon would lose the profit.

  Bronki was given the contract to handle these sales on a commission basis, and she soon hired Brandee to come up with attractive coloring schemes for the armor.

  At Kren's suggestion, the weight of the tail armor sold to other dukes was doubled, and the design was changed to make it difficult to remove. Also the armor around the neck was made of an inferior metal. They might one day have to fight an army wearing this armor, and there was no point in making an enemy more comfortable, or that much better protected.

  Based on the casualties sustained at the taking of Tendi's castle, and the two field battles that followed, a number of subtle but very effective modifications were made in the armor worn by Dennon's troops.

  The original space armor had been intended to protect the wearer against abrasion to the inner fabric, and not to be effective against swords and spears.

  Innovations were in order. By making those edges of the plates that were on the inside curve outward, to snag the enemy's blade, and those edges on the outside curve inwards, to deflect it, it became much more difficult to slide a sword between two armor plates and injure the wearer. Also, the neck protectors became stronger, the tail pieces became lighter, and the sensitive Mitchegai skull was better protected.

  These modifications were kept secret, and were not available to the public. If anyone noticed the difference, they were told that they were looking at the old style armor, and what was sold to cash customers was the new stuff.

  * * *

  At the Planetary Championships, Kren was entered in eleven events. He again won three gold medals, and set two collegiate planetary records. But they were in swimming, all three of them, and the outside betting on Kren was low, since no one had seen Kren swim before.

  The money rolled in.

  * * *

  Dol graduated with honors, and promptly enrolled in a doctoral program, studying aerodynamics. She had decided that there was no need to rush things, she had plenty of other things to occupy herself, and why risk any possibility of being charged with vampirism, anyway.

  * * *

  That summer, Kren officially moved into his lavish apartment above his research center, mostly for tax reasons. He was virtually
a duke in his own right, so why should he have to pay taxes to anyone? Taxes, after all, existed for the benefit of the rulers, and not for those who are taxed!

  Nonetheless, he often visited Bronki, and happened to stay the night, about three times a week, when there wasn't a home game. When there was, he stayed over six times a week.

  An inexpensive worker was hired to travel back and forth from the Research Center to the university every day, always getting Kren's season ticket punched, again for tax reasons.

  She also acted as a courier for messages between the Research Center and Kren's interests in Dren, those that were best not trusted to the phone lines.

  * * *

  The next several years went very smoothly. Growth was as projected, and all concerned were content.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,

  FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.

  Progress, Boredom, and Something Kren

  Can Sink His Teeth Into

  On Earth, it was 1832 a.d. Americans were crossing the Appalachian Mountains and sometimes finding their way into the Great Plains, flintlock rifles in hand. Europe had finally recovered from the Napoleonic Wars, and a private British company was conquering India without quite intending to. The Mitchegai could not possibly have cared less.

  At the same time, Duke Kren was waking up again from the long stupor of resurrection. He stumbled once again to the toilet and to the drinking fountain. Then once more he lay down and put on the recording helmet.

  Every time he got a new body, it seemed to take longer. And to hurt more. Still, the pain was starting to abate. Perhaps in a day or so, it would be time to leave the resurrection chamber and get back to work.

  He glanced at the recorder. He had three thousand years of personal history to record, and most of what he had gotten down in his two weeks of recovery time had covered a period of barely two years.

  At that rate, this body would be middle-aged before he was through, and the colonizing fleet would be long gone without him.

  Bronki, his academic advisor, would not be pleased.