When a geek prince hired out as
a laborer for a year on Niflheim, he did so for only one purpose--to
learn Terran technologies.
Gurgurk then announced that so enormous a crime against the friends of
His Sublime etcetera had not been allowed to go unpunished, signaling
behind him with one of his lower hands for the box to be brought
forward. The slaves carried it to the front, set it down, and opened
it, taking from it a rug which they spread on the floor. On this, from
the box, they placed twenty-four newly severed opal-grinning heads, in
four neat rows. They had all been freshly scrubbed and polished, but
they still smelled like crushed cockroaches.
The three Terrans looked at them gravely. A double-dozen heads was
standard payment for an attack in which no Terran had been killed.
Ostensibly, they were the heads of the ringleaders: in practice, they
were usually lopped from the first two-dozen prisoners or over-age
slaves at hand, without regard for whether the victims had even heard
of the crime which they were expiating. If the Extraterrestrial's
Rights Association were really serious about the rights of these
geeks, they'd advocate booting out all these native princes and
turning the whole planet over to the Company.
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