Koban 4: Shattered Worlds

by Stephen W Bennett

  Mirikami was at Bootstrap, working on rescue missions with his and Thad’s squadron, and almost fifty other Kobani ships. They were moving people from orbital stations to temporary inflatable domes, which looked more like a bubble filled with air, placed out where less maneuverable Jump ships could dock with them, to transfer people for leaving the system.

  The other half of the Kobani fleet was with Noreen at Meadow, where the rescue effort wasn’t going as well. Several fast moving small debris pieces had pelted the planet, but small was a relative term. Hundred-plus feet wide, those iron rich “rocks” caused a lot of damage, and three had hit the planet so far. The one impact on land had actually been the least deadly of the three. It wiped out several small towns and part of a midsized city and its suburbs on the east side. Blast damage and a heat pulse caused raging fires, and already panicked emergency workers worried about getting their own families off planet, would not fight the fires or staff the hospitals.

  Two similar sized rocks that struck in deep oceans killed millions more than had the land impact, due to the huge waves that swept over coastal areas of continents, and when the hundred foot high waves were reflected back to sea, they struck other already damaged coasts again. It had sounded heartless, but planetary civil defense ordered incoming rescue ships to focus on the central continental areas, where evacuations were better organized, and able to move more people faster, onto over loaded ships and shuttles.

  The Kobani ships were loading people from orbital transfer stations and doing micro Jumps to the same sort of domes-in-space as used at Bootstrap, which were mass-produced planetary habitats that had airlocks and water and food storage. Without gravity, sanitation in them was a mess, and all they were doing was housing people away from the looming larger disasters. A messy chunk of planetary core almost a mile wide, with its own retinue of satellite “moons” was headed for a brush with the planet in four days.

  It would pass a few thousand miles above the atmosphere, but an unknown number of the thousands of fragments traveling with it, some of them hundreds of feet wide, would devastate the planet in an unpredictable pattern of impacts. It wasn’t one of the “planet killers” that were still weeks out, but what organization there was on the planet would likely vanish when the impacts created more fires, soot, huge waves, and cloud cover.

  Against all odds, Meadow could possibly get nearly a half billion of its two point four billion residents off the planet before then. However, it would be a race to rescue many of those survivors from the habitat bubbles they were temporarily sent to, before those deteriorated into poisonous gasbags of sewage.

  A local habitat engineer came up with a better dynamic solution to stabilize their interiors, and furnish a local weak “down” direction for those inside. Link the tops of two dome bubbles together with multiple tethers, and use pairs of shuttles to start them rotating around their common center. That made water and solids settle to the base of the domes, even if it was somewhat bowed and rounded, and the waste collected in the compartment below the stretched flooring. Air filtration kept things breathable, barely, and ten thousand people per dome could be housed for several days, in fifteen hundred pairs of the ungainly, unbalanced, and wobbly contraptions. It took two Orbital Only jumbo transports to carry away the stinking and fouled “tenants” of each pair of habitats. Thirty million people passed through them all told, and as one was emptied, others came to replace them from the planet.

  Reluctance of anyone to enter one of those previously occupied pestholes was followed by an offer to drop them off on the planet on the return trip, in exchange for people that were willing to survive without comfort. A handful surprisingly went back, but not most.

  It was a better story at Bootstrap, not entirely because of Huwayla, but in large part. There were fewer and smaller core fragments for one thing. Millions of them to be certain, but the Dismantler didn’t need to place any of the larger ones into stable orbits. All she did was “nudge” the most dangerous large ones that were on a trajectory to hit the planet, into an orbit that would miss Bootstrap on their first pass around the star. There were too many in the hundred or so feet size, or less, for her to push them all away in the time she believed she had. When the three large strikes hit Meadow on the same day, her third day working at Bootstrap, she struggled to continue to help, but it was a losing battle for her.

  She told Maggi that the land impact at Meadow nearly ended her effort when so many died so quickly, but she was using her gravity generator at the time to pull a two-mile wide, still semi molten mass, a full degree from its grazing trajectory with Bootstrap. The wave of death at Meadow destabilized her mind, she said. She had difficulty determining if she had shifted the orbit enough.

  Jakob, without any humans aboard the Mark, and unable to use the Normal Space drive without Trap fields, made a calculation that assured Huwayla the object would miss Bootstrap by over forty thousand miles.

  Maggi tried soothing the ship as if it were a living person, trying to help it stay sane and functioning long enough divert more debris and to save more lives. Huwayla explained that every intelligent mind appeared to have some sort of minor quantum connection through their awareness to the alternate tachyon Universe. It was only when a massive number of such minds died at the same time, that there was a detectable wave in low energy tachyons, which passed instantly through that Universe. Huwayla and her sisters could sense those waves, and she claimed there were many such waves every day, originating from every part of our own Universe, near or far. She said the Olt’kitapi Mind Expanders had also been sensitive to them. Some of these daily waves had been definitely traced to known natural events, such as a super novae or stellar flares that wiped out intelligent life on an entire planet.

  Learning this, Maggi asked for an explanation. “Huwayla, why don’t these mass deaths hurt your mind? Some of those events must take many more lives than those that died on Meadow today. Is it the proximity?”

  “No, it is the knowledge that I am responsibility for these deaths. I did not cause the tragic distant deaths and I could not prevent them. That is not so on the worlds you called Meadow and Bootstrap. My own actions will cause them. I have detected a large gravitational mass approaching Meadow, but I’m certain I will not live to see it arrive. There were two other shocks at Meadow, a short time after the one on land that killed many beings there. I remotely sensed the gravitational change of the impacts, but there were not a large number of deaths when the planet shook. I believe that may end at any moment, because there is water on much of that world, and waves may be moving.

  “Additional deaths may only have been delayed, but I think they are coming soon. I cannot endure more lives lost like that again, even if you try to distract me from the guilt, and tell me how much good I can still do. I thank you for your kindness, but I will say goodbye while I am able to think rationally. I will not go home to my sisters. I am too broken, and I will never be able to repair myself in body or mind. I say goodbye now to you trusted operators, and to some of you who have acted as a friend to me.”

  Just as a Comtap message came from Noreen, reporting that monster waves were washing over continental shores at Meadow, Huwayla vanished in a Jump. She had done that many times in the last days, to move near rocks to alter their course. This time she didn’t answer Maggi and Tet’s Comtap calls, or reappear. She was gone.

  They knew they were on their own here now, but they had been granted added months for the rescue to continue. It was too soon to rest, or to tow the Mark of Koban home for repairs, but that day would come soon. More of the Planetary Union worlds were sending ships every day, traveling days to weeks after being notified by Comtap messages of the disasters. It was probable that the majority of the three point six billion would be saved in the Bootstrap system. Millions might yet die, as thousands had already died off planet from random hits. However, the scale of the disaster here, compared to Meadow was far less.

  The Mark was left parked in a wide orbit below
the southern ecliptic plane, because until its hull was repaired and it had new Trap field emitters, it couldn’t help with the rescues. Will Horst had used the Hellion to tow the Mark to Bootstrap, and parked the crippled ship well out of harm’s way. Mirikami and Maggi spelled Will on the Hellion’s Bridge, as they worked around the clock to rescue people, or used brute force to shove smaller asteroid sized boulders onto safer tracks.

  There had been a number of tense discussions with Bledso and President Medford. Mirikami’s assertion that the Krall could no longer control the Olt’kitapi ships were met with skepticism, particularly when they learned there were at least three more of the operational ships. He could offer little in the way of evidence of this, as he had with the recordings of exploding Eight Balls. The actions of the ship that had triggered the destruction, to delay the destruction it caused for one world, struck them as proof the AIs were too easily manipulated, by Krall or humans.

  Using the electronic capability of the Comtap chips, the Kobani communications specialists had learned they could link to an AI, and have it send the basic voice communication to a sound system, without the emotional and visual mental components available between Kobani by Mind Tap. It made the Comtap specialists almost like an equipment relay, sitting off to the side, partly out of the minds of those that used them for interstellar range conversations.

  Medford repeatedly called for Mirikami to come to earth to meet with her, to explain how he had managed to change the mind of an alien AI, to get it to help protect a system the Krall had convinced it to destroy. She was perfectly aware he knew of the Krall’s demand that the humans who had attacked their production worlds be identified, and their base revealed.

  Mirikami told her that the voice in the message was that of Telour, and that he was now the Tor Gatrol of the Krall war effort. He didn’t say they had known each other.

  “Madam President, I will travel to Earth eventually, but I intend to continue helping evacuate people here at Bootstrap for some time. Then I intend to have my ship repaired, to restore its Trap emitters and hull damage.”

  “I’m sorry.” She said. “I was unaware your ship had been damaged in the fight against the…, you called it a Dismantler?”

  “That is the name the Raspani have for that type ship. The Mark was damaged by clanships that were present to protect it, and I lost half my crew gaining possession of that ship. The ship, named Huwayla, had no offensive or defensive capability of its own, so we fought four clanships alone, to Jump it away from them.”

  “It can blow up planets, which seems damned offensive to me,” She snapped.

  “Madam President, a shovel can be used as a weapon, but it isn’t designed to be one.”

  “Chairfem Bledso tells me you seem assured it destroyed itself.”

  “These living ships have a sense of morality, and historically they have technically committed suicide after learning they have caused mass deaths. I believe it entered Tachyon Space and opened its Traps, permitting itself to be disintegrated there.”

  “Or it simply quit talking to you. That’s possible too isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think it did that, but I have no evidence to support my belief. Any more than we have evidence of any ship lost in Tachyon Space.”

  “Your Flight of Fancy was once thought to have vanished like that. However, you reappeared over twenty years later.”

  Irritated he asked her, “Are you leading up to something Madam President?”

  “Only that you don’t know that the ship destroyed itself. It acted on behalf of the Krall, and then it vanishes suddenly. You say it had over three hundred Krall warriors aboard when you left it at Pittsburg II, and it reached Bootstrap in under an hour, per your estimate of its speed. What happened to them?”

  “It told me that the untrusted guests, which were the Krall, were killed when we opened the Hull to get out, and that the atmosphere was fully vented. We observed the venting had continued throughout our evacuation, and no pressure doors had sealed. The corridor doors in the entire ship were locked opened at my request, which would account for the lengthy venting. It’s a large ship, so it held a lot of air.”

  “They fought you in armor.”

  “Which as I told you, had been discarded when those suits, and their plasma rifles, ceased to work for the Krall. The quantum code key was changed to deny them access. We used their discarded equipment to spread the deactivation to other Krall, which initially were not affected.”

  “Like a computer virus, I think was a comparison that was used. You didn’t bring any samples of that virus with you, however.”

  “The ship was returning to Bootstrap to help stave off the destruction, it would not Jump until we were off, because it didn’t want to risk the lives of us, as new trusted operators. It feared it might vanish in Tachyon Space, as it eventually did.”

  “It didn’t mind risking the Krall lives it had previously protected.”

  “They were dead when it arrived here.”

  “Two days before your slower ships could catch up with it.”

  Mirikami had had enough. “Madam President, I’ve been polite as I can be, and many of my people have died defending our common interests. We have given you alien technology you needed and have used it with you to fight the Krall. I sense you don’t feel very trusting of us right now. I have things to do to save lives here. Do you have any more pressing questions?”

  “Watch your tone with your President, Mirikami. I want you to report to Earth at your earliest convenience, Sir.”

  “I don't recall being a part of the Planetary Union, Medford. I live outside Human Space. We’ll help you beat the Krall, but none of us are at your beck and call.”

  There was an awkward silence, which Carol Slobovic filled with a personal note, which the other end couldn’t hear. “That made her red in the face, Sir. Her fingers clutched at the sound system as if ready to choke you. Thanks. I needed to hear that phrase. That we are not at her beck and call. The Hub people are very arrogant with Rim worlders in general, and we are a notch wilder and more uncouth to them than that.”

  “Well, I let her annoy me, so I’m happy to hear it was a two way street. You will continue to be polite However.”

  The tone, when Medford recovered her composure was apologetic, but Mirikami felt it was insincere.

  “I’m afraid I let our debt of gratitude to you escape me for a moment. I am deeply sorry for the losses among your crew. You must be exhausted after the experiences of the past week. I hope you’re getting some rest. Where can you possibly go to get away from the stress and pressure in a system so disrupted? You said there was damage to your own ship and it can’t Jump. Perhaps we can help you with its repair. Where is it? Chairfem Bledso can Jump one of our space docks to it for repair.”

  “It’s in a wide orbit below the southern pole of Bootstrap’s sun right now, to stay clear of the spreading debris field. However, the navy doesn’t have the technology to repair Krall clanships. We’ll have our Prada and Torki friends work on the Mark after we tow it home. As for my getting rest, I take six hours off each night, and Jump out with the Mark’s sister ship the Hellion, to get some needed rest in my own quarters.”

  “Well. I’m sorry we went in such a confrontational direction for a moment. We both are under a great deal of stress. I wish you well in your rescue efforts, and I thank you for your service. I know the people of Bootstrap appreciate what you are doing. Good day Captain.”

  “Good day Madam President.”

  He instantly linked to Carol. “Show me her expression as she signed off.”

  He nodded to himself, and thanked Carol.

  Maggi had been in a passive link the whole time. “Medford is under tremendous pressure, and I think she needs to produce you for the home audience, to find someone the Krall blames for the Telda Ka attack. She has to give the Hub worlds a face, someone who provoked the Krall into killing billions of humans.”

  Mirikami nodded. “Carol saw Medford grin and
wink at Bledso. I think you’re right.”

  “It’s about damned time you did! I told you which way the political wind would blow. What’s your plan, lip tugging husband of mine?” He had been doing that while he talked to the president.

  “Why, I’ll probably Jump out to sleep on the Mark every night, just like I told the president I do.”

  Four days later, three heavy cruisers did White Outs seventy four million miles below the ecliptic plane, almost directly below Tau Boötis A’s south magnetic pole. This happened a few hours after another Kobani clanship did a White Out, and briefly docked with the powered but disabled clanship. That clanship had a locater beacon mounted on its hull, making finding it easier for return visits in its slow orbit, positioned far below the majority of planetary wreckage, which was still spreading through the system.

  One of the heavy cruisers quickly moved close to the clanship as if to dock, when all three suddenly entered Jump Holes and vanished. The damaged clanship went along, inside an overlarge event horizon.

  The Comtap call was apparently expected, because the President was waiting for it at what was a late hour in the capitol, there on Earth. “I can explain, Captain.” Were her first words.

  That was a tacit admission she already knew why he’d called, demanding an answer. It was obvious that Carol Slobovic had been kept waiting as well, since the link wasn’t possible without her, and she wasn’t in her own quarters within the PU’s presidential mansion.

  “Medford, you ordered the navy to snatch a ship belonging to your allies, in the middle of my sleep time, without even a radio or Comtap call as a courtesy. What is a reasonable explanation, other than an attempted kidnaping?”