“And we are now going to take Kodo’s place?”
“Yes. The duke doesn’t care where the money comes from, but he desperately needs it. We’re stepping into a done deal. Here is a copy of the papers we’ll be signing. You’d better read them. We should arrive in two hours.”
Kren read, fascinated. When he had finished, he was amazed.
“Duke Dennon is deeding away one-third of his duchy,” Kren said.
“In area, yes. But it’s mostly just empty hinterland. There are no cities or factories on it, just a few freeholders whose rights you are required to respect.”
“If you say so, but this also grants me the rights of both high and low justice! I can create a law and then punish anyone I want for breaking it! I can do anything that I want on that land! By the terms of these agreements, I’m not just buying land, I’m almost being made a duke myself!”
Bronki said, “Almost, although I would advise against using the title. You can see why Kodo and his syndicate were willing to pay so much for it. On this land, they would not only be above the law, they’d actually be the law.”
“Until some other duke decided to invade and take it from them.”
“True. But first off, the agreements, while filed with the Bonding Authority, are otherwise secret. The rest of the world will think that the property still belongs to Duke Dennon, and he has a very fine army. Second, you will be paying Dennon an additional gross million Ke a year for his protection. If you are attacked, he will come to your aid, or you won’t be there to pay him his gross million next year. It also keeps him from attacking you, for the same reason.”
“Kodo was a remarkable business man,” Kren said. “This is an amazing deal!”
“It’s also the only deal in town. Neither the syndicate nor the duke has reported Kodo missing as yet, but you can be sure that his college will tomorrow. The papers must be signed, the money transferred, and the Bonding Authority paid today. Otherwise, this credit card will become just a piece of plastic and Kodo’s fortune will be in probate.”
“Where am I supposed to have gotten this kind of money? Surely, the duke will be curious!”
“We will say that you made it betting on yourself in the games. You are quite famous, you know, having won a planetary record and two gold medals on your first time out as a freshman. If you had borrowed everything that I owned, and bet it all on each of your victories thus far this year, you would have made more than what is held in Kodo’s credit card account. Or, maybe you had saved that much in the thousand years that you have been alive. Who could prove that this didn’t happen?”
“If you say so. The only part I don’t understand is why the duke won’t know that we are using Kodo’s credit card.”
“He won’t know because his chief accountant, my friend Sala, will handle the transaction, and she won’t tell him,” Bronki said.
“And why won’t she tell him?”
“Because you will be paying her a billion Ke not to.”
“The amounts called for in these contracts will take almost every Ke in Kodo’s credit card account. I don’t have another billion Ke,” Kren said.
“No, but I do, partner.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Different Folks, Different Strokes
New Yugoslavia, 2212 a.d.
Our new ally, Bellor, had been talking with the professor for over three months, and apparently, things were happening.
The most obvious thing to me was that a large, portable swimming pool had been set up in my garage. It contained a pleasant grotto where Bellor spent half of his time, and a spigot that dispensed the industrial strength booze that he preferred.
Agnieshka said that thermal imaging of the energy he generated suggested that he was metabolizing only six percent of what he drank, and chemical tests said that none of it was getting out into the garage, yet he didn’t seem to be gaining any mass. He had been repeatedly asked about this, but he politely sidestepped the questions, and nobody wanted to press him too hard about it.
The Tellefontu refugees on New Yugoslavia had made it several hundred light-years from their home planet, but they didn’t know if other fleeing groups had gotten to other places in Human Space. Some ninety-six of their diplomats had been sent to forty-eight human planets where their species might possibly have settled. It was expected to take years before these emissaries came back to make their reports. Each pair had an entire planet to search.
Agnieshka and her metal ladies had located twenty-eight tons of ninety-five percent ethanol on the planet. Only a small amount of it was really bonded Everclear, but Bellor said that he could live with that. At his suggestion, this consignment had been weighted down and dumped into the ocean at a precise geographical location. He said that his people would take care of it from there.
This would have raised eyebrows, except that the Tellefontu’s first gift to us, the “ray gun that made things disappear,” had been built in a prototype lab on New Kashubia. Soon, people were just calling it the “Disappearing Gun.”
The professor himself wasn’t too clear as to how and why it worked, but it did work. Our new allies kept explaining the basic principles again and again, ever more slowly.
On the other hand, the crabs were equally confused by our Hassan-Smith transporters. Our physicists said that our allies just couldn’t grasp the basic principles.
Hell, I couldn’t, either.
Our two races just looked at the universe differently, was all that I could figure out. Nonetheless, they could give us working plans for things that worked. And that was enough, in my book. Our smart boys would figure it all out eventually. After all, it took us a whole generation before many of us could understand Einstein.
It seemed that I was now mostly out of the loop, but that didn’t bother me in the least. I had other problems of my own.
I had been assuming that the neutron bombs that the Mitchegai used were similar to the neutron bombs that had been developed on Earth centuries ago. This would mean that with a bit of warning, if I could fill the lowest level of the Loway transportation system with air, and get the entire population down there, I could keep them alive.
The specifications for the Mitchegai bombs that our crabby friends had given us suggested that we were off by a factor of about thirty. Their bombs could instantly destroy everything alive, be it electronic or biological, down to a depth of five hundred meters. And it wasn’t realy safe unless you had at least three kilometers of dirt and rock above your head.
“Agnieshka, you and your sisters have a really big job to do. We are going to need a set of fallout shelters dug at least three kilometers down, and big enough to hold everybody on this planet, biological and electronic. They are going to need food, water and oxygen supplies to last them for at least two years, while we figure out a way to fight the enemy on the surface. And if we are going to keep the humans sane, we will need something for them to do down there, and some sort of entertainment. We will also have to make provisions for the Tellefontu. Get our technical people on it ASAP, and let me see what they come up with.”
“Yes, sir. Does this mean that the social drone project is getting dumped?”
“Not exactly, but it has definitely become a low priority item. Sorry about that, but equality won’t do you guys any good at all if none of us are alive.”
“Yes, sir.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
2000 YEARS EARLIER
Duke Dennon
Sala met them at the Capital Train Station and said, “Bronki! It’s so nice to see you again after so long! And this must be Kren, the athlete that we’ve all been watching so avidly on the sports casts! You know, the duke is a fan of yours. I think that he is secretly delighted to be working with you on this matter, and not that horrid Kodo person. Well, do you have it with you?”
“If you mean the credit card, yes, of course,” Bronki said.
“Then we’ll go directly to my office and take care of that first,” Sala said, leading the way.
As he followed, Kren noticed that while Sala’s clothing was of the finest quality, it was slightly worn and the hem was tattered. This shabby-genteel impression was reinforced as they got to the nearby ducal palace. It was certainly a fine, ancient building, built for defense as well as for beauty, but as they walked up the long hallways, he couldn’t help noticing that the carpets were worn, and that the curtains were faded. Many thousands of years had gone by since any of it had been replaced.