"Frankowski, Leo - Kren of the Mitchegai" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

Kren slept long in his eating stupor. The dreams he had fascinated him. The soldier he had eaten had extensive training as a medical corpsman. Besides the knowledge required for the treating of wounds, she had a vast knowledge of anatomy, including the anatomy of the brain.

Kren now knew precisely which portions of the brain could be safely eaten, increasing his knowledge and prowess, and which contained the personality, and were best discarded.

Many more weeks passed as Kren integrated all of this new knowledge into himself. He started to get hungry before the process was through, so he amputated one of his captive's legs and ate it. The skin and bones were again fed back to his prisoner, who resisted eating these bits of her own body until they were shoved down her throat past her now broken jaw.

Weeks later, he ate the rest of the creature, along with three quarters of her brain.

And much later, hungry once again, he walked up to the surface. Besides knowing the arts of the warrior, and of the medic, he now was capable of speaking three languages.

There was no guard at the tunnel mouth. Grass had started to close off the entrance, and there seemed to be no one around at all.

Cautiously, he stepped out into the sunlight for the first time in nine gross, eight dozen and two years.





CHAPTER FIVE
This Land Is My Land
New Yugoslavia, 2205 a.d.

The news was full of politics.

Before the war, the colonies had been loosely associated in what had been honestly called "The Smuggling Network," trading illegally with one another to get around Earth's strangling trade monopoly.

Now, they had formed "The Union of Human Planets," and had perhaps magnanimously made Earth an equal member. Since Earth had half of the population and more than half of the wealth in the entire system, the colonies arranged it such that taxes were to be paid by individual income taxes, but voting was on a one planet, one vote basis. Thus, Earth would pay half of the bills, but only have two percent of the say as to how this money was spent.

But then, Earth had both started and lost the last war, so what do you expect? Certainly, this arrangement looked much nicer than making them pay tribute.

New Kashubia, my home planet, was both the leading manufacturing center in the system and the main communication center as well. It was soon voted to be the capital of the Union.

My annoying uncle, Wlodzimierz Derdowski, had recently been elected President of New Kashubia, and this made him a major player in the new political order. But I was stationed on New Yugoslavia, and was happy for this excuse to not get involved in politics.

Four of my colonels were citizens of New Yugoslavia, and were involved in planetary politics up to their ears. Knowing intellectually that the job was important, I gave them leave to go at it, but said that since I wasn't a citizen here, it wasn't proper for me to have any say in it.

Mostly, I just don't like politics. For me the thing means just what the name says it is. Poly, meaning many, and ticks, a particularly disgusting sort of blood-sucking insects. Personally, if I have to persuade someone into doing things my way, I'd rather use a battalion of Mark XIX Main Battle Tanks.

Originally, the Kashubian Expeditionary Force had been a mercenary outfit where we hired ourselves out to fight such wars as the colonies wanted to fight, and did engineering work in our spare time.

Now, it had become the Human Army, and would have a much bigger budget to play with.

My boss, General Jan Sobieski, had been appointed to command the new army. I was afraid that this would mean that I would be appointed military commander of New Yugoslavia, and I wasn't eager for that job.

I felt that I would be much more effective, and happier, being commander of the Gurkha Forces, and having a little more independence, but what would actually happen remained to be seen.

* * *
With Kasia back working on her hobby of becoming the richest woman in human space, I went out to look at my land.

It would have been most efficient to get into the coffin of a tank and make the tour in Dream World, a sort of artificial reality where I could do things thirty times faster than in the flesh, but that wasn't what I needed. I had just spent many subjective months living in a coffin, and I needed a strong dose of reality.