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

Our tanks had been designed to tunnel through solid rock. They made short work out of carving out apartments, roads, and everything that a city needs into the granite walls of my valley.

They had done a class job of it, building for a design life of five thousand years. All of the exposed surfaces had a heavy coating of what had once been precious metals, but now were fairly common. The walls were studded with jewels, and the windows were "glassed" with sheets of single crystals of diamond.

I woke the next morning to find Kasia at my side. After a few hours, we made it to breakfast.

"Well," I said, to break the silence. "I trust that all of the problems have been solved?"

"Yes," Kasia said. "The Gurkhas will be moving out and building their own place."

"Indeed? And where are they doing this?"

"Next door. I've helped them buy the canyon to the southeast of us."

"Quincy and Zuzanna's place?"

"No, the box canyon in between us. It was originally purchased by a consortium of troops who couldn't agree on what to do with it. They finally made a decent profit selling it to the Gurkhas. Look, the Gurkhas have their own culture, and they are happy with it. They have no intention of being assimilated into somebody else's world if they can help it. At the same time, they like being members of our army, and they especially like our pay rates. So, their tanks are working with them, designing their own particular version of heaven."

"Well, our metal ladies are first rate engineers, artists, and architects. They have done it before, so they won't have problems doing it again. I imagine that what with all the stone cutting, that valley will be a cloud of dust for a few months."

"True, but in three months your troops will be able to start moving in. I think that Gurkhas are environmentalists at heart. They want natural rock, and not the gold and platinum plating that you used on this valley. They don't want all of the jewels, but they are getting the diamond windows. And their apartments and homes are only a quarter of the size of what you have built here."

"Whatever they want, they'll get, as far as I'm concerned. After the way they fought for us in the Battle of the Solar Station, we owe them a lot."

"That was my thought too, lover."



CHAPTER FOUR
FROM CAPTURED HISTORY TAPES,
FILE 1846583A ca. 1832 a.d.
BUT CONCERNING EVENTS
OF UP TO 3000 YEARS EARLIER
The Awakening

Duke Kren awoke slowly, sluggishly, to find himself in a locked cell. It was a combination lock, and his new body had to know the combination to get out. Otherwise, he would be left in there, forever.

This was to keep him safe while he was in his eating stupor, and to protect his subordinates if his old brain was not properly functioning in his new body.

The most common disaster was that the young carnivore could have a muscle spasm while it was eating your brain.

Normally, chemicals in the brain being eaten caused a sphincter in the esophagus to close off the second and third stomachs, and another sphincter to open to the first stomach, where the brain cells could migrate through the stomach wall, through the blood stream, and eventually up to the cranium.

If the sphincters failed to function properly, the new brain cells could instead be sent down to the third stomach, where they would be digested.

This process was commonly known as bad luck.

The malfunction rarely occurred, since any young carnivore who performed this atrocity was invariably and immediately killed, which promptly deleted it from the gene pool.