“I feel certain that another one of your wild ideas is coming up.”
“One is, Your Grace. I would like to try feeding most of each of them to a young carnivore. Everything but the central portion of the brain, which contains the basic personality and personal memories. I think that what we would end up with would be a very well-educated idiot.”
“The world does not need any more well-educated idiots, Kren,” Dennon said. “The universities are full of them!”
Ignoring the duke’s joke, Kren said, “But I also think that in time, a new personality will grow in there. It would be a personality that we would have a hand in molding, and I think that we could make it into a very loyal personality! I think that this might happen much quicker—and much more cheaply!—than it would if we had to start from scratch with a young carnivore. Anyway, I’d like to try it. I’ll keep them all safely caged until we know for sure what happens.”
“It smacks of vampirism, Kren, but actually, it is really the exact opposite of that, isn’t it? Well, I won’t stop you. Run your experiment if you wish. But not on Duke Tendi! He must die, or my rights to his lands will always be in doubt. Furthermore, I have a spot on the wall of my Trophy Room all picked out on which to hang his mummified head!”
Due to the complete lack of microbes, any Mitchegai body part naturally mummified and was preserved indefinitely provided that grubs and juvenals were kept away from it. For trophy heads, this was accomplished by smearing them with a bad tasting poison.
Adults, on the other hand, found mummified body parts to be particularly foul tasting, so bad that some Mitchegai would consider death by starvation to be preferable to eating them.
Some time later, the duke said, “But how are you going to get all of those young carnivores to Duke Tendi’s castle?”
“I have a thousand large juvenals in the last three cars there to pull them along in the tunnel. We’ve come up with a harness that keeps three dozen juvenals facing in the same direction. With some encouragement, and confined in a narrow tunnel, well, it worked when we tried it out. They’ll have to be rested each day, so they won’t be as fast as your army will be moving, but we’ll get them there by the time the rest of you dig your way up into Tendi’s castle. And of course, those same children will act as a mobile food source for your army.”
“And you are doing all of this at your own expense?”
“Yes, although the loan of four dozen of your soldiers to act as drivers would be greatly appreciated,” Kren said. “I could bring in some of my own men, but most of them are newly hired, to replace the soldiers who used to do the work, before you recalled them. I worry about their dependability and loyalty.”
“Oh, very well, I’ll tell the staff to assign the necessary warriors to your command. We’ll let them ride to battle instead of walk. They’ll still be there for the attack, after all.”
* * *
The duke’s staff officers got no sleep that night, reorganizing their army on the eve of embarkation so that they could work with the carts. They swore at Kren for pulling this surprise on them, but only after he had finished briefing them, had handed out three gross sets of written instructions on how the resurrection process would be arranged down in the narrow tunnel, and had left. Kren wasn’t someone whom any of them would want to have for a personal enemy.
And they had to admit that at least now, once they started to roll, they could catch up on their sleep, while their troops pulled them into battle.
Duke Dennon’s soldiers were delighted with the carts. The original plan had them walking the entire distance, and in armor! This way they only had to walk half the distance, they could do it naked, and they could sleep for the rest of the time. Pulling the pneumatic-tired carts on a smooth, level, metal floor, wasn’t all that hard.
Four gross of engineers led the column, their twelve carts filled with cutting tools, tunnel liners, shovels, buckets, and surveying equipment. These carts were to their own design, and were not part of Kren’s gift. However, in order to keep marching twenty-four hours a day, they were augmented by four gross of standard troops, whose armor and weapons were spread out throught the column.
Four divisions of the duke’s best troops followed them, pulling carts with several dozen children chained to the back of each to feed the soldiers on the way. The chains were needed because the kids could generally chew their way through a rope, given time.
Kren’s four dozen carts filled with young carnivores brought up the rear. These were boxed in large juvenal shipping crates and drugged with illegal substances to keep them lethargic, although they still grumbled and snarled a bit.
* * *
When the other dukes learned that Duke Dennon was attacking Duke Tendi, there was a strong possibility that one or many of them would attack Dennon, or Tendi, or both. The fact that it was winter might dissuade many of them, which is why Dennon chose this time of year for his attack.
Throughout Mitchegai history, many invading armies had won through to their objectives, only to find that they had lost their own lands behind them.
Thus, even though it was winter, and not the usual season for fighting, most of Dennon’s army was prepared to go on alert in his palace and in his outlying fortifications, as soon as the attack started.
At that point, all civilian communications would be stopped. All railroad terminals would be guarded to stop word of the attack from getting out. Travelers would be allowed in, but not out. Everything of value that the duke owned had already been safely hidden away.
Whole towns would be evacuated and the citizens would be permitted to enter into the huge dungeons below the fortifications. The food supplies available to them were meager, but they would soon discover that they could order packaged juvenals from the Superior Food Corporation, at expensive wartime rates, of course.
* * *
Bronki was not happy.
“So here I am! I’m underground in a dark, stuffy, claustrophobic tunnel, I don’t know how many miles from the nearest fresh air! I’m lying above a cage full of snarling, mindless young carnivores, with the roof inches above my nose! And I’m doing this so that I can perform a tediously large number of probably illegal operations on the nobility of a duchy that is about to be conquered in a highly illegal manner, so illegal that we will all likely be nuked to shit for participating in it! Why do I let myself be talked into doing such stupid things?”
“Because Kren wanted us here,” Dol said. “And we have both made a lot of money off of Kren.”
“I think that all of this is madness!”
“You should look at the brighter side of things.”
“This insane mess has a bright side?” Bronki said.
“Well, they could have made us walk the whole way.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
2000 YEARS EARLIER
Into the Breach!
Keeping four dozen carloads of young carnivores moving was more work than Kren had expected. Most of the problems centered around the large juvenals that were doing the towing.
When they had tested this idea out, they quickly found that they couldn’t use whips to keep the kids moving. The tunnel was simply too small to swing a whip long enough to reach the lead pair. Eventually, it had been found that electrical wires fastened to the buttocks of the children, and connected to the same capacitors that ran the headlights, and would one day power the wheels of the carts, seemed to do the trick. The operator was equipped with a control panel that let him encourage individual children, or to give all of them a poke when the whole group was moving too slowly.
A more serious problem occurred when Kren found that he had underestimated the amount of food that the juvenals required. The difference in food requirements between a cold-blooded juvenal who was simply staying alive, and one who was being energetically exercised was huge, a factor of eight or more.
After a week on the road, they ran out of the compressed grass blocks they’d brought along to feed the draft teams. Two days later, the first child died. Kren chopped the kid up and fed her to the rest of the team. This seemed to make them all a bit more energetic. When another died a few hours later, on one of the other carts, he had all of his drivers slaughter the weakest member of each team, hack it up, and feed it to the others.