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CHAPTER TWENTY

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

An Attack in the Afternoon  

Kren slept poorly that night, kept awake by the pain in his arms. In the morning, he was half dozing, sitting upright in his suite when Bronki came in.

"Kren, I've been thinking. It appears that it will be impossible to find you a standard, undergraduate room anywhere in the city for this semester. Also, certain business associates of mine have been acting in an unpleasant fashion lately, and while I think that it would be very unlikely for them to actually do anything physical, I would find it very comforting to have a real warrior living with me. What would you think of making this room your own, say, for the next year?"

"I've yet to see a standard undergraduate room, but I cannot imagine that one would be as large, or as beautifully appointed as this suite is. Yes, I would accept your offer eagerly."

"Then we will consider it done. And if I were to need your martial aid, you would come?"

"Yes, but in the unlikely event that this should prove necessary, I think that it would be appropriate that I should be rewarded for my efforts. Shall we say, a thousand Ke?" Kren said.

"That seems like a large amount for a few minutes' work, but very well. I long ago had an alarm system put in. It sounds like my voice, telling where you would be needed."

"When I hear it, I will come, and I will do what is necessary. And while the hourly rate might be high, the typical job does not require one to risk his life."

A few hours later, Kren was again half dozing while considering sending out for a small juvenal to eat. Perhaps that might ease the pain in his arms.

Suddenly, an unseen speaker was shouting in Bronki's voice, "I need help in my bedroom! I need help in my bedroom!"

Already wearing his sword out of habit, he picked up his spear and ran toward Bronki's room.

There were four Mitchegai in the living room, wearing not cloaks, but formfitting dark green garments of a sort that he'd never seen before. Mentally, Kren thought of them as being the Greenies.

On seeing Kren, one of them pulled out a throwing knife, and was preparing to hurl it at him when a military standard spear went through her throat and out the back of her neck. The Greenie standing behind her had tried to jump up and to the side, but wasn't nearly fast enough. The spear next went through her shoulder and pinned her to the wall with her toes inches above the floor. It ruined a beautiful painting in the process.

The two remaining Greenies drew their swords and came at Kren. Fighting alone against two, standard military doctrine is to run to one side and to dispatch the first one you come to as quickly as possible. If your enemies can get you between them, the one in front of you needs only to block your blows, while the one behind you can easily put a blade in your back.

They will undoubtedly kill you, no matter how good you are, or how inept their swordsmanship might be.

Kren followed doctrine.

He used the "spear" attack, a dangerous maneuver that involves holding your sword straight out in front of you while running at your opponent as fast as you can, while screaming at the top of your lungs in the hopes of startling her.

It worked.

The warrior in green could easily have blocked the blow, if she'd had a moment to think about it, but she lacked that moment, she missed the opportunity, and shortly thereafter, she lost her life.

The Mitchegai heart is located low, surrounded by the pelvic girdle, and is assisted by two smaller, single-chambered hearts below the knees that pump blood depleted of nutrients and oxygen upwards. Swollen ankles and varicose veins are unknown in this species.

At the last instant, Kren lowered his sword and sent it straight through her heart. He quickly pulled out his dripping blade, and used a horizontal blow to decapitate his opponent, since a Mitchegai can function for minutes without any heart at all.

The Greenie who was pinned to the wall was still struggling between a dead coworker and a valuable painting, so Kren turned to his last opponent. This one, he could take a bit of time with, and perhaps they would get into some interesting sword play.

As they squared off, two very loud explosions sounded from Bronki's bedroom. This startled the last Greenie, who turned and looked to the bedroom doorway. Almost regretfully, Kren took advantage of this by cutting off the female's right arm. As she stared stupidly down at her severed limb, Kren took her head off in disgust.

The girl had been no fun at all!

When Kren got into Bronki's bedroom, she was standing with a complicated-looking metal object in her hand. It was smoking.

Lying on the floor were two more Greenies with large holes in their abdomens, bleeding on the lovely carpets.

"Well! It certainly took you long enough to get here! I had to do the job myself! Now, put that sword of yours to some use and dispatch these two! I didn't have time to do anything but gut shots. These two have been knocked out cold by the hydrostatic shock, but I would just as soon that they don't come around."

"Yes, Bronki," Kren said, decapitating the two unresisting Greenies. "I regret the delay, but there were four more of these . . . individuals in your living room."

"Indeed?" Bronki stepped out to look. "I see. Please excuse my earlier remarks. You've served me well this day. You'd better kill this last one, too, but please be delicate about it. That's a genuine Kado that this trash is stuck to, and there are only three other paintings by her still in existence."

By the time that Kren had done the job without further damage to the painting, chopping the Greenie's head in half from the top, and had retrieved his spear, a dozen servants were crowding in, and Bronki was giving orders.

"Well, you can all see that we've had a disturbance here. Strip these bodies, flush their clothes down a toilet, and put them on the party tables. Remove the brains, chop them up, and flush them down the toilets, too. We wouldn't want any of this sort of trash to be resurrected. Put everything else they had with them in a pile somewhere. I'll go over it later. If you find any identification or credit cards, bring them to me at once. Then clean this mess up. After that, we'll all have a nice, family feast. Once we're all completely through, you will remember that nothing unusual happened here today."

"None of these Greenies knew anything worthwhile?" Kren asked Bronki while the servants scurried around.

"Greenies? That's as good a name for them as any, I suppose. Do they know anything useful? I doubt it, since these were all low-ranking trash. I mean, look at their small heads! But one of those in my bedroom was the leader of this bunch, and considerably smarter than the rest. Quality trash, I suppose you could call her. Come with me."

Bronki was soon sketching out another brain, showing Kren exactly what he should and should not eat.

"There. That should give you a considerable background into the underworld of this city, without taking up too much of your cranium. That's if you want it, of course."

"I think that it might be helpful, if today's events prove to be common."

"That remains to be seen, but by all means, help yourself."

"Thank you. About that feast, tell them to save me an arm and a leg, would you? And could I have some of their weapons for souvenirs?" Kren asked.

"Okay, and yes, I have no use for them, so you may have them all, if you keep them hidden in your room. It wouldn't be healthy to be seen with such things in the streets. Your sword and spear are legal, but that will not be so for everything that these Greenies were doubtless carrying."

When Kren had eaten those eight small portions of the brain that Bronki had suggested, he collected up and cleaned all of the weapons that he could find, his own included. It was quite a collection.

Besides six belt knives and four ordinary swords, most of which had beautiful handles, hilts and sheaths, but blades of less than military quality, there were dozens of other strange weapons.

There was one straight sword with a handle that fit backward into its metal sheath, and locked there, converting it into a sort of spear.

The knife thrower had carried six oddly balanced blades in a harness that crossed her chest.

Another Greenie had carried a pouch with nine palm-sized eight-pointed stars in it. The sharp points were covered with some sort of green substance. Apparently, they were to be thrown, but at first glance, they didn't seem to be a very practical weapon. Thinking that the green stuff was perhaps some sort of poison, he cleaned them and their pouch very carefully, washed his hands, and flushed the cleaning cloth down the toilet.

There was a dagger with a small trigger on it which, when pressed, released a spring that propelled the center of the blade across the room with considerable force. It imbedded itself deeply into the carved woodwork at the head of Kren's ornate bed. The projectile had narrowly missed hitting him, and left him with a strange, but still serviceable, two-bladed knife in his hand.

The use of any form of stored energy was forbidden to the military, except that dropping things on an enemy was permitted. Before he had triggered the knife, Kren had assumed that it was a legal military weapon. He wondered if some of the senior officers had carried them.

There was an assortment of small blades intended to augment a Mitchegai's natural claws, and four small clubs apparently intended for beating citizens without actually killing them, though why someone should want to do such a strange thing was beyond Kren's imagination. It seemed insane to injure someone, and then leave them alive to seek vengeance on you.

There was a flat, heavy metal plate with many holes in it that mystified Kren, but which a human would have recognized as a set of brass knuckles.

Kren wiped all of his newfound toys off, put them away in a drawer, and resolved to puzzle all of them out at some future date. Perhaps when his new brain cells finally integrated.

He joined the others who were just sitting down to the feast. The blood and mess had been cleaned up, and many of the carpets were missing, but Bronki and her servants seemed to be in good spirits.

"Come join me, Kren," Bronki said, sitting by a low party table. "This girl is old, and she won't be the best tasting one of the bunch, but since she was the leader of the team that threatened us, I thought that I would enjoy eating her the most."

She slit open a thigh, peeled back the skin, and helped herself to a large gobbet of fat and muscle. The tougher skin and harder bones of an adult generally weren't worth the trouble of eating. Since the meat would be tougher than that of juvenals, and the dead bodies couldn't scream pleasantly in any event, she had provided very sharp knives for this feast.

"Thank you, although since classes start the day after tomorrow, I can't afford to eat a really big meal."

Kren cut a more delicate slice from the forearm on his side of the corpse. It was colder than he usually liked it, but still, it wasn't bad. And anyway, the new brands on his upper arms had started to throb again, now that the Mitchegai equivalent of adrenaline was subsiding in his system. A good meal would lessen the pain.

"We're all in that situation here, except for the laundry servants, and two of the scrubbers. Those four will probably be out of it for days. But what we don't eat can always be cut up and flushed down the toilets. It's not as though the meat cost me anything."

"Well, I expect to be paid for my services, of course," Kren said. "I killed four of them, so that's four thousand Ke, isn't it?"

"Kren! Greediness is such an unattractive trait! But no. I called you once, you came once, and in your own words, you 'did what was necessary.' I'll put a thousand in your account the next time I get to the bank. You've earned it. That was a remarkable piece of work you did today."

"None of them were truly competent with their weapons. I was very surprised with your success against the two who were in your bedroom. What was that metal thing you were holding, anyway?"

"It's called a pistol, and it is very illegal. Please don't tell anyone that you saw it."

"I won't. But what was the loud noise? And how did that small, blunt thing put such big holes in those Greenies?"

Kren decided that he had a day and a half to sleep it off, and cut himself a much larger piece of meat from the leg. It was such a pity that their meal was already dead, and couldn't scream.

"There are chemicals, nitrates, that burn very rapidly without needing air to do so. This produces a gas at very high pressure which propels a soft metal slug down a metal tube at high speed. The expanding gasses made the noise, and the metal slug made the hole."

"The use of fire is forbidden in military weapons. Also, your device sounds dangerous."

"I'm not in the military. And it is only dangerous if you are standing at the open end of the tube. A mechanical arrangement quickly replaces the nitrates and the slug, permitting you to take several shots. Eight of them with my pistol."

Bronki was working at freeing up another large gobbet.

"I think that I will stay with the weapons that I know."

"Yes, that would be wise. Some more leg for you? Or would you like a nice bit of tail?" she asked.

"Some tail, I think. We'll split it. How did the Greenies manage to get into your apartment? Your security measures seemed to be extreme to me."

"I like to think that none of my servants let them in, but one can never be sure. More likely, some electronic device was used to confuse the locks. I've ordered the whole system to be gone over and updated if necessary in the next week or so."

"Were you able to find out just who these strangely dressed Greenies were?" Kren asked.

"Yes. Four of them were foolish enough to carry their credit cards with them, and I checked them out on my computer. They were all members of a local crime syndicate, the KUL."

"Did they have much money in their accounts?"

"One of them did, the girl that we're eating now. I was tempted to keep it for myself, but then decided against it. Money transfers can always be traced, if you work hard enough at it. What can't be traced, if you know how to do it, is the person who did the transferring," Bronki said.

Kren remembered that his bargain with Bronki had included his getting her computer skills. This had apparently not happened. However, it was too late to do anything about it now, so he let the matter drop.

Bronki continued, "So, I transferred all of the money from all four of the cards to the account of a lieutenant in the KUL's rival syndicate, the PPG. This person once offended me badly. If I am fortunate, the KUL will think that the PPG killed their fighters, and the PPG will blame their lieutenant for holding out money from the group. With any luck, there will be a few dozen gang murders performed in the next few weeks, and perhaps both groups will forget that I ever existed."

"That sounds like a devious, but possibly workable plan."

"One can always hope."

"But why is the KUL so angry with you?" Kren asked.

Kren had stripped the meat off of the entire leg on his side, and was working his way through the buttock, one of his favorite parts. Then he decided instead to see just what this illegal weapon of Bronki's was capable of.

He cut into the chest, and found the breast bone shattered, with bone fragments in the lungs, liver, intestines, and even as low as the heart. Furthermore, two vertebrae were broken, and a third was completely pulverized. The pistol was a formidable weapon, indeed!

"I'm sure that the KUL are not angry with me. No, the Greenies who attacked us were simply hired to come here, either to scare me, or perhaps to kill me."

"I see. And who hired them to do this?"

"That is a very good question, my fine business major. I intend to answer it. When I know for sure what happened, it is possible that we may do some more of your sort of 'business' together."

One good bite leads to another, and before too long, Kren had eaten two-thirds of the cadaver, before he wandered off to sleep.

 

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