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.