Koban 4: Shattered Worlds

by Stephen W Bennett

  “Caroline, did he touch the console with a talon tip before you reached him?”

  She sorted through her memory, running it back and forward in detail. “Yes, he did. I thought he was only moving backwards to get away from me, but he touched it. I can show you where.”

  “Let me dump that tachyon first. I don't want anyone to accidentally do what he was trying to do.” He shut down the power to the Trap emitters, and without a whisper of sound, the vast energy of an energetic tachyon escaped the confines of the curved field in that other Universe, which had kept it perpetually swirling along a curved geometry, formed by the Trap field.

  “Now show me, although I’m sure I already know.”

  He held her hand in a Mind Tap as she also physically pointed to a grid outlined on the navigation control display, with a red colored tint in the one she indicated. Depending on what any of the four interchangeable consoles were being used for, it could depict computer controls for multiple weapon types, navigation, communications, sensor scans, or other control functions.

  Mirikami nodded. “Thank you Caroline. You can go home. You performed well for a youngster that had never faced a Krall, and you overcame your fear to end the threat he represented.”

  After she was gone, Thad and Sarge came over to see which navigation control she’d indicated. “She saved our asses I guess.” Was Sarge’s comment.

  Thad had different take, and a question. “How the hell slow was that Krall? From where she started her leap, he could have hit the activate control several times over. Did he look away and simply miss?”

  Mirikami shook his head. “I saw her mental replay after she was calmer. He didn’t miss. If Jakob hadn’t been in standby mode, he would have prevented the console from even activating. Maggi gave him instructions to block console inputs if the Krall captured the Mark on the day we were inside Huwayla. They would have eventually figured out that his AI module was bolted over there on the deck, blocking them, and take him offline.

  “This morning, if the tachyon I just released had already been captured when Bithdol hit that control, we shouldn’t be here.”

  Sarge, hearing that the girl did see Bithdol tap the switch that should have resulted in a huge explosion, had another idea. “That activation requires an active key device. The Torki must have it disabled.”

  “Sarge,” Thad pointed out the obvious. “The tachyon was there and Tet was able to release it, which requires the same key device to do the release as to activate a Jump. He just proved it works.”

  Mirikami tapped his lip, and asked, “Do we still have any Krall prisoners over on the Flight of Fancy? I haven’t inquired about any of them for months, since they don’t have current intelligence we can use. Sooner or later they all manage to make their organs shut down, and they die.”

  Thad looked puzzled. “I think Dillon’s old buddy, Dorkda, was alive the last I heard. Why?”

  “Ask one of the captains over at Koban, or perhaps someone can use one of the new patrol boats we just acquired, to Jump Dorkda or another Krall over here. If we don’t have a prisoner still alive, contact Henry to have spec ops capture one on Poldark, and to send it here on the first available Kobani transportation. The Mark won’t be ready to Jump anywhere for at least another week, and we need a question answered as soon as possible.”

  Chapter 22: The End Game Starts

  “Who’s asking?” Nabarone wanted to know.Major Caudwell had passed along an unusual request delivered by a courier from Earth.

  “Henry, the formal document has headers that show the request was sent to planetary commanders for the Army, Navy, Marines, Special Operations, and Colony Governors. It came from the Department of State, which would sound more like a civil or diplomatic matter for the colonies, but it doesn’t include any Rim worlds. Because they also sent it to the military commanders at each colony, it means this had to originate from higher. The military branches don’t answer to State.”

  Nabarone agreed. “Munford. It has to be her doing. She’s fishing, and wants to keep her ignorance of the Kobani out of the limelight. She thinks someone somewhere knows things they haven’t told the PU.”

  Caldwell shrugged. “She’s absolutely right. But none of us that actually know the truth will tell her, because our butts would be caught in the same wringer.”

  “Howard, there are bound to be people who have overheard things that they assumed were government secrets. Someone that has heard that Kobani come from Koban, and that their home system is outside Human Space.”

  “You and I don't come from Koban, you’re from Poldark, and I’m originally from Alders. Knowing that Kobani come from many worlds won’t answer the questions of where they are based.”

  “True, but unless you intend to openly admit you’re now a Kobani, your origins won’t help confuse the issue, or keep Koban’s location a secret.”

  “How are you going to answer?”

  “I’m not certain I have to, since I don't work for the Department of State. Except that might make me standout from the crowd, and I’ll just get the request again through a channel I do have to answer to. This is the first time I’ve actually had to lie for questions about whom and where the Kobani are. I guess I could try the old standby, of acting like I’m fat dumb and ignorant.”

  “Henry! You’re a Kobani now. You aren’t fat.”

  “Hummph. Remind me again why I hired your insolent ass to be my aide?”

  “Because the Lady Admirals liked me, and thought you were a fat, dumb, ignorant, chauvinist jackass? Incorrectly so, as I feel compelled to say in my own self-interest and job security.”

  “Right you are. I’ll Comtap Tet to warn him about the witch-hunt. ”

  ****

  Medford thought she had their best lead, from the literally hundreds of thousands of leads that flooded in through the Department of State. Colony Governors, in their haste and eagerness to protect their worlds from Krall retribution, had passed on ridiculous stories, some with the sort of validity normally reserved for reports of an alien Bigfoot that was pregnant with some celebrity’s baby.

  The most annoying “reports” were resurrections of five hundred year old early colony legends of a wise alien, named Kodar, who could take on the form of a human, and somewhat like the story of Diogenes, walked among humanity in search of a truthful/honest/trustworthy person. The personality trait he sought varied between worlds, based on the reputation of politicians in charge at the time, and their presumably failing Kodar’s tests. It was likely it was the vague similarity of Kobani to Kodar, which made that story most repeated. He was seen everywhere. That wasn’t very surprising, since he presumably took on a human form, and odd acting people weren’t hard to find. She placed those reports in the loony bin category where they belonged.

  Speaking to her Director of Intelligence, she asked for a clarification of one report, “Kenneth, This biologist, who tried to remain anonymous and his family was killed before they could be evacuated. Were they on Meadow or Bootstrap? If you can confirm that, it lends veracity to his story, because it provides a motive for his revealing his part in an illegal gene modification program conducted within Human Space.”

  “Mam, we are attempting to filter through the records of both planets, from older digital copies which were stored off those worlds, of course. We hope to identify him or her, for an interview. If we give the informant immunity, we might learn more about other participants, and if they have knowledge of the Kobani’s base world, or worlds.

  “It isn’t easy, with billions of people on the two worlds to sort out and find one individual, but knowing we are looking for someone with such an unusual career field helps immensely. The people that did these gene changes are not just biologists as you called them. They will have a much rarer background in genetics. That reduces the field down from hundreds of thousands, to just thousands. Their anguished frustration concerning contacting their parents and children means they have to be working away from their home world, to explai
n their inability to reach them. That’s another couple of search parameters to narrow the field. We know that the rerouted virtual mail trail had an initiating sector routing code from the anti spinward side of Human Space.”

  She knew what that inferred. “You mean we may have been looking on the wrong side of Human Space for the Kobani base? It was the Rim worlds facing the greatest Krall threat where we’ve looked the hardest. So they could be Rimmers far from the front lines?”

  “Mam, remember this individual isn’t a Rimmer, they’re from a Hub world. They may not be working on a Rim world at all. However, that’s another filter to apply to find the person, which also eliminates half of Human Space for the location of this gene program. By the way, I don't think this person is having a crisis of conscious in revealing the gene mods they worked on. They don’t consider their gene modification to be immoral, which is why they tried to protect their coworkers. Technically illegal, yes, but they don’t consider them wrong. They want to get back at those they blame for their home planet being destroyed, not punish those that have built supermen to fight the Krall.”

  “That isn’t logical. The so-called supermen fought and hurt the Krall, provoking them to destroy two worlds.”

  “Mam, I recommend that you not apply logic to emotions and grief. Had some other Hub world been hit than theirs, we might not have heard from this person.”

  “Perhaps so. What can I take away from what they said, however? I have to send a drone to K1 with an AI, to tell them what little we have. I’m not risking lives on the hints and best guesses we have to offer. I don't want an angry Krall to skin them alive.”

  “Mam, tell them they call themselves Kobani, that they have gene modifications that are illegal under our laws, our speculation is that their name is derived from where they live, and we don’t know which worlds they use for bases. Say they don’t trust us, so they keep secrets from us. Just like one Krall clan has secrets from other Krall clans.”

  ****

  The so-called human emissary was an AI. Telour gave a snort of frustration.

  “Record the rest of what their machine says and have it translated for me. This is not what I demanded of their leaders, but humans are even less united than are we. They betray one another to avoid pain and death, and they will hold secrets to preserve their own lives.

  “It does not surprise me,” he confided to Frakod, as he left the dome’s command center. “Even our own clans hide their strengths from rival clans, and humans hide strengths from each other. The new weapon technology first appeared with the humans who raided our production worlds, and they were slow to share those secrets with other human clans.

  “The humans on the worlds where we now fight them did not have the new ship stealth then, or the new body armor, that came much later. That small clan has now shared stealth technology with the PU navy, but not the new strength and speed of their small number of fighters. They must want additional advantages before they trade them for the status they have earned.”

  Frakod proved he’d been attentive. “The human leader says the new fighters have a genetic improvement that makes them stronger. It is claimed they did this without breeding and testing. This is not a good way to prove the worth of a warrior, without the test of combat. Humans breed too slowly for that improvement to spread quickly.”

  Telour gave a snort of humor, to indicate he too saw the human folly.

  Both warriors conveniently ignored the repeated tests these new warriors passed every time they had faced the Krall in battle. Based on the long history of the Krall, that was blatantly appropriate to dismiss their seemingly superior performances. After all, this small clan had only fought a few hands of battles. It took tens of thousands of combat tests and deaths to select the best bloodlines, the best warrior traits for future generations. Unproven new abilities often proved to have a weakness that another clan could exploit.

  They had no idea that the modified humans were using genetic traits that had hundreds of millions of years of evolution behind them. These were not untested and unproven random mutations. In truth, the testing of the new traits was irrelevant, because in the short term, the Kobani could outperform any warrior ever born. These humans had no intention of waiting thousands of years to be able to defeat their enemy. All they lacked were the number of fighters needed to pound the Krall back into a pre-spaceflight culture.

  If Telour found where they lived, he already had an immense numerical advantage. He’d quickly grind the Kobani into dust, at any cost. Then he’d resume producing warriors and tools of war to grind down the remainder of humanity, using a leisurely pace that bred the best warriors for the Great Path.

  Later in the day, Frakod brought him the transcribed human message, translated to low Krall. Telour intended to speak to the newly constituted Joint Council of clans. He would extract anything positive he could from the information furnished by the human leader. The invasion forces on Poldark and New Glasgow were secure, and beginning to push the humans back again, after a brief period of supply shortages. Clanships now infiltrated the planetary defenses at both worlds on a daily basis, supplying replacement equipment and arms.

  He decided he would send many of the warriors not sent to new Glasgow to join them, because idle warriors were bored and unhappy. Besides, he didn’t have a new target for the increasingly frustrated clans to hit. They wanted the Tor Gatrol to give them battles that were predictable victories for them.

  He was reading the transcript of the full message, which was better than hearing the annoying human speech. He had gained an excellent understanding of Standard in the decades he had worked to know his enemy better. As a young warrior he’d offered prisoners advantages to teach him their language. Later, to gain intelligence for leading his warriors to the best fighting, he had dismantled thousands of humans to make them tell him what they knew. He learned to tailor his interrogation methods into those that made humans become the most informative prisoners possible. Until they died.

  He had long been aware of random human words that almost sounded like words in low Krall, particularly those that were screamed under his interrogations. He’d learned to ignore those seemingly meaningful sounds from humans because they were distracting, and could lead your interrogation in the wrong direction. A few human soldiers knew low Krall well enough to converse, but they rarely became prisoners. That was because their knowledge of their enemy meant they would rather fight to the death than surrender and be tortured. He had encountered very few humans he particularly wanted to hear speak Standard, so he used translators.

  With his increasing status came a staff and hangers-on. Telour had several Krall translators that transcribed intercepted and unencrypted radio messages. If a review by his aides suggested the messages might be of interest to the Tor they were passed to him, but that was rare. If a high-ranking human leader were captured alive, military or civilian, their words were similarly translated and put into written low Krall. It was more efficient for his use of time.

  Telour read the transcript of what the clan leader of humans claimed to know of those fighters. Next, he practiced how to speak the human words he wanted to say to the new Joint Council, and to devise a logical argument of what actions he recommended, of how the war with humanity should progress. He wanted to choose the parts of the message with the description of the newer more effective enemy fighters. As was often done with words that did not translate directly into a low Krall equivalent, some human names were replaced with their phonetic sounds in low Krall.

  As he spoke the phonetic sound for the clan name of the Kobani aloud, it was written as the Krall script for the words “ko ban” with a following script character that represented the additional ending sound of “e.”

  The first part of the word was written in actual low Krall, but with a phonetic symbol on either side to show it was done to represent the sound the human made. As a matter of his own convenience, the translator had used the sound of two actual Krall words for describing
a place used as a training ground, as the sound to make for the human word.

  The expression appeared several more times in the transcript, where it was spoken as a human style name for these people. The human leader, her name written phonetically as the sounds “prez e dent mun ford,” had suggested that the name this human clan gave themselves might have followed a human convention. Where part of the name of where they came from could be in their name for themselves. She’d provided two examples. An Earthling was from Earth, a Martian was from Mars.

  Telour had heard this Kobani name spoken earlier, before he decided not to listen to more of the human words, and not translate for himself. It was just the sound of a random human name for something. If the human leader was not going to speak of what he wanted to hear, he would not waste his time listening. He had staff for that.

  Now, as he practiced saying the words he would speak to the council, he pronounced some of the more difficult human names more smoothly. However, he slipped into saying Kobani as if it were the two low Krall words with the odd end sound added.

  As he used the description of how the Kobani had used human biological science to make them stronger and faster, he couldn’t help but see the parallel with the Krall breeding goals. The world where Telour had earned enough status for his Graka clan to start the war against humanity was the training ground, or ko ban in low Krall. The human captives he had manipulated for his purpose had named the planet Koban. The similarity of that name to Kobani, and the breeding program that the Krall hoped would send them back to that future home world steered his thoughts to where his own role on the Great Path had begun.

  Left unprotected from the native life that the Krall could not defeat without weapons, nor live there without electric fences and walls around their domes, the captives would have died soon after the Krall departed. However, the similarity in a name to a word stirred a sense of unease. The first worthy enemy human Telour had known was one of those now dead captives. His excellent memory fed him the name and title. Captain Mirikami.