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CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS OF UP TO
2000 YEARS EARLIER

The Start of a Pleasant Little War 

The duke's well diggers had made their fascinating discovery, the tunnel had been surveyed, and Dennon's army was secretly mobilized.

As a favor to Kren, the duke scheduled the attack to coincide with the two-week-long midwinter break. The scheduled date of the attack would be on Warrior's Day, a major winter holiday among the Mitchegai military.

Bronki's sales representatives arranged for a major giveaway program designed to encourage sales to the countryside outside of the cities. Duke Tendi was to receive two thousand selected children a week before Warriors' Day, as would eleven other dukes in the area.

This program had been designed to encourage Duke Tendi's forces to eat well and go into a stupor just before Duke Dennon's attack, and to have all of the other duchies around in no position to immediately counterattack Dennon.

At least that was the hope. Maybe it would work. And sales were such that there was a surplus of children just now, anyway.

Kren arrived the evening before the attack was to be launched, and he brought with him an entire trainload of supplies, along with Bronki and Dol.

"Welcome, Kren!" Duke Dennon said in high spirits while gesticulating with his sword, "But what is all of this stuff?"

"It's a present for you, Your Grace! First, there are a few thousand baggage carts, with room in each one for the armor of more than four dozen troops, water enough for the trip to Tendi's place and back, and room for two dozen warriors to sleep on top of it while another two dozen pull them along. With half sleeping and half pulling, you can keep going day and night! You've got a five-gross-mile-long march ahead of you, and with these carts you can do it in a week and a half, not the three weeks it would otherwise take you. Also, you will notice that they have lights on them, so you won't have to walk in the dark."

"You had these made especially for this attack? That must have been expensive! And I can't imagine ever needing them again. Wheels aren't permitted for overland transport over the grass, although they would be allowed in a tunnel. But, I mean, we will probably get away with pulling this 'discovered tunnel' stunt once, but I wouldn't dare try it again!"

"The carts were costly, Your Grace, but once you are through with them, I'll take them back, install electric motors in the wheels and new control panels for the operators, and use them for delivering children from the train stations to my underground stores. But as they are right now, they are perfectly legal for use in war."

"Well, thank you, Kren, although you really should have informed me of this in advance. If your scheme works, it will be a wonderful aid to our advance on the enemy. But if it doesn't, don't be offended if I abandon them all and do it the hard way. And those cages back there?" Dennon asked, pointing with his sword, "The signs on them say that those are young carnivores!"

"That's exactly what they are, two thousand of them! Please consider that you are inevitably going to take some losses in this attack. With all of these new bodies, you won't have to permanently lose any of your well-trained troops."

"That's very thoughtful of you, but all of my men have armor now," Dennon said. "We won't be taking that many casualties."

"Then perhaps we will be able to find some other use for the rest of these young adults. What do you do with captured troops, anyway?"

"Well, most dukes just kill them as a security risk, but my policy has always been to give them a choice. Once I've killed the opposing duke, his soldiers may either die with him, or they may give their oath to me. They lose two grade levels, and they have to go through my basic training system when coming into my army. We watch them very carefully for the first two years or so, but we treat them very well, otherwise. The great majority of them turn into loyal soldiers. If they don't, well, they still have that death sentence hanging over them."

"A practical policy. Do any of them prefer death?" Kren asked.

"One did, a few gross years ago, so we killed her. But you don't often see that sort of loyalty, not once they know that their leader is dead."

"And what do you do with the enemy dead?"

"The same thing that everybody else does. We burn their brains and eat their bodies," the duke said.

"Well, wouldn't it make more sense to rejuvenate them? I mean, why waste good troops? Once you conquer Duke Tendi's duchy, you will have to enlarge your army to guard it properly. Why not feed each of them to a young carnivore? Once those dead soldiers wake up in new bodies, you can give them the same choice that you gave the ones who weren't killed."

"Well, normally, there aren't that many young carnivores handy, and we need the food, anyway."

"But now there are, and I can provide all the food that your troops need," Kren said.

"Very well, once my own men are taken care of, we will try out your idea."

"Could I have half of the resurrected enemy soldiers? I could use some guards for my own lands."

"If you wish," Dennon said. "But I still think that you have too many carnivores out there. This battle will be mostly a matter of sneaking up inside of Tendi's castle, killing a few guards, and then killing the duke. It's not as though we will be fighting a full field battle. There just won't be all that many dead soldiers in need of ressurection."

"Perhaps. I imagine that you don't kill enemy civilians."

"Not normally. They are part of the wealth of the land, and after I reduce the taxes a bit at first, few if any of them will feel the least bit of loyalty to their old nobility. The noble leaders are all killed, of course."

"That makes sense," Kren said. "They have every reason to hate you, and it would be dangerous to have them around. Still, it seems such a waste, all those years of education, experience, and training, just dumped into the fire."

"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."

 

 

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