Koban: Rise of the Kobani

by Stephen W Bennett

  “I like Sarah’s proposal, to move the Raspani here as soon as we can verify they can eat the plants, and we can make a secure compound for the first ones to arrive. They are living much shortened lives because of the stress Koban’s gravity places on them. They need the least amount of advanced preparation.

  “I have no doubt we can find some isolated island someplace in a temperate climate, with good grass and bushes, fresh water, and free of large predators from the mainland. The Raspani could be free for the first time in thousands of years, to thrive in their own little haven.”

  She paused in thought for a moment, as Sarah, a complete devotee to the study of the Raspani now, continued the new direction in their conversation. The flash of insight, when it came, was enough that Marlyn’s burst of excitement rudely interrupted the conversation.

  “Haven!” she shouted out. “It’s a perfect description of what we want to create here, not only for our own people, but for the Krall slave races we want to rescue. I’ll name it Haven.”

  Maggi smiled hugely at her friend. Naming a world for a noble purpose was a hell of a lot more meaningful than naming a “werewolf” or “marsh dog.”

  Now they needed to start the planning, to prepare the way. This would be fun, if she could shift all the hard work to younger backs. A cinch for an old manipulator like her.

  Chapter 10: Heavyside

  The multiple Jumps taken to Heavyside from Poldark, to throw off possible followers, ended when the Avenger did a White Out in the Oort cloud of comets, five light-days out from the planet. Noreen had the towed cargo pods hauled close and offloaded into the airless lower cargo bay. Pressurizing the hold after that, they cast off the empty containers, to wander with widely scattered balls of ice, taking thousands of years to orbit the pinpoint of light that was the parent star.

  Once the cargo was accessible, the future elevator equipment was stowed out of the way, for when they returned home. Three modern med labs were moved to higher decks and the Chameleon Skin armor and IR night goggles were issued to everyone, new weapons issued, and various spares were stored.

  For Noreen, the big prize was the KP model AI system, which came with instructions for installation on a clanship, using the Mark as the assumed template for all such modifications. The food stores were the second greatest gift, at least as far as Noreen and Macy Gundarfem, her engineer, was concerned. Real Earth coffee! Beefsteaks, hamburgers, leg of lamb, lima and green beans, sweet potatoes and more, were all veritable pieces of heaven to palettes starved for the tastes of home.

  The TGs, after sampling some of the “imported” foods from Human Space, were unimpressed with the “tame” flavors of the meat, and any vegetable was OK if buried on a pizza under cheese. Rhinolo burgers and yak steaks had “more kick” they insisted.

  The new flexible armor however, was the neatest stuff they had ever owned. Unaware that each suit cost more than most working people on Hub worlds earned in a year. Never having had money, the young Kobani couldn’t appreciate the credit bar tags on the packages as they opened them.

  They practiced arranging it, covering even their face so they needed internal view screens to see, and would crawl forward in plain sight, minimizing the ripple effect as they slowly repositioned the material to “sneak up” on friends and surprise them. If you were slow enough, even the IR eyeglasses worn by others didn’t notice the temperature difference, as the warm body beneath the Chamskin (as they started calling it), no longer left a heat smear on the deck when the edge of the flex armor slowly pulled away.

  For the teenagers, where high speed body motion was an everyday experience, the art of moving slowly and undetected was an alluring game to pass the time. The allure wore thin with the two adults, after spilling their precious new coffee or nearly wetting themselves, when suddenly an unseen hand grabbed an ankle and a disembodied voice would say “gotcha.” A “gotcha” could come in other ways, when extremely boring duties could be assigned to the sneak by the “victim.”

  It was almost four days before the “simple” installation instructions for the new AI proceeded to the point where Karl, its newly assigned name, was powered up. After that, he easily walked them through the remaining “Tab A into Slot B” confusion of a thick stack of printed instructions.

  It was a smart idea to give the AI its own set up guide, Marlyn thought. Mentioning that fact at the start of the damned assembly instructions, that the AI’s processor could be powered on separately, to direct you through all of the complicated steps would have been frigging brilliant!

  She and Macy scoured the printed instructions carefully for the name of whoever their Poldark “benefactor” was on the installation package. It was a fruitless search, so no concealed TG would be visiting the culprit with a big “gotcha” moment in his near future.

  With Karl online, Marlyn made some precision jumps to outer gas giants of the system, always appearing behind them so the gamma rays of the White Out would not be seen by the inner system. She had Macy do it several times, and even Alyson, one of two TG1s she had with her.

  Alyson was placed in charge of the twenty-five TGs aboard, with Jorl Breaker her second in command. He wasn’t a TG1, but he was a very competent and accomplished seventeen-year-old, and a natural leader. Thad and Sarge said he had finished the pre-mission training on Koban with the highest overall physical performance rating of any of the TGs.

  Only a few of the TG1s, such as Alyson, Carson, and Ethan, managed to outscore him on movement and eye-hand coordination tasks. They thought that was due to their more frequent Mind Tap inputs, which the three older TG1s received from other TGs in training. The adults had set an age of at least eighteen for the youngest of the TGs to receive the telepathy genes, but that wasn’t going to hold any longer, now that the benefits were clearly so great, and no detrimental mental effects had been noted. (Other than the somewhat “swelled” heads of the ten that got the mod first.)

  When they made the test Jumps in-system, Alyson, and Fred Saber, the other TG1, received the mental images and messages from the Beagle’s two TG1s, when that ship had performed the White Out at Koban. Those messages were sent a couple of days after the Avenger had reached the closer world of Heavyside. The Avenger’s TG1s had placed their own safe arrival messages in Tachyon Space when they got here, and the acknowledgement of reception of their message, and the Beagle’s reciprocal arrival message, told both ships the other had completed their journeys.

  The telepathic messages had “sat,” or circulated seemed a more appropriate term, in Tachyon Space, waiting for the intended TG1 receivers to “absorb” them. It had already been noted in testing, that once the intended receiver had picked up a message, even though it might wait for them up to five days to enter Tachyon Space, a second Jump within that five-day window did not find the message ready to repeat for them. Once received, it was gone. That was different from the increased garbling of undetected old messages after five days, turning them into increasing “white noise” before they fully died away.

  The Mark was out of the communication loop while parked on Poldark. However, they had a long schedule worked out in advance by Jakob, of possible “windows” of message opportunity for exchanging information. Tet would miss a number of those opportunities, and the needs of the different missions of the Beagle and Avenger would not always align with the roughly five-day “life” of these message windows.

  However, from time to time their message windows would overlap when the ships Jumped, and possibly find the ships in a situation where brief messages could be followed up, for a coordinated longer exchange of data via repeat “local” or null Jumps, as they were also called.

  With the AI controlled training Jumps out of the way, Karl had demonstrated he could Jump them where they wanted to go more precisely than they were able to do manually. The Krall preferred to do navigation manually, zooming in on screen for the destination, then talon tapping the place where they wanted to White Out. It fit with their personality, yet th
e Olt’kitapi had designed the ships to operate via a more sophisticated method, which accepted electronic input that the Krall ignored or could not use.

  Karl’s processor was bolted to the deck of the Bridge and mated to one of the input ports of the four navigation and weapons control stations, the consoles located in the center of the Bridge deck. Simply telling Karl what you wanted made the process much faster and more precise, and he would warn of instructions that created high risks (like a Jump into a planetary atmosphere or below its surface). The new acceleration couches were more interactive with the AI, and would automatically adjust to protect the occupants when uncompensated internal accelerations were expected. He also could operate the weapons with microsecond response times, and extreme accuracy through any complex series of maneuvers and accelerations.

  The Olt’kitapi had clearly built these ships to allow the Krall to operate them as they did now. However, they also either expected to fly the same ships themselves at times, or expected the Krall to change their personality and start taking full advantage of an advanced tool they had been handed. After so many thousands of years, it had not happened.

  No doubt, the Krall had evolved over time to become physically faster, and more adept at manual control, but they were never going to exactly match computer controlled response times and precision. Karl described the inputs he used to control the ship’s systems as apparently designed to receive data directly from an organic source, based on the signal levels used, and the feedback returned. It was as if the system was intended to connect directly to the brain of some operator. Yet, other aspects of the control system’s input and output were more robust than purely organic control could achieve.

  Karl, in a matter of fact tone that concealed the revolutionary aspect of what had been achieved, told them about the scientists that had spent years of study on clanship data ports previously, found on wrecks. They believed the original alien designers employed digital cyber components that supplemented an organic brain.

  The researchers had spent years studying abandoned clanship wrecks, trying to understand and copy the technology, but had never found a way to bypass the quantum lockout key that would grant them access. Ingenuity had inferred some aspects of how the data ports worked and what they would send and receive. However, they never got the internal control modules of the consoles to activate or respond, so they could never test input and feedback loops to see what they did. Not until the Mark of Koban arrived, as a working example of a clanship.

  The Mark’s functioning control system had been analyzed by an AI larger and more complex than a KP model, and it had set parameters in a previously built programmable test module for the interface. They assumed that someday they would find a way to activate a clanship’s control modules, and they knew how many input and output channels there were, and the approximate strengths of each signal, just not what the signals were and what they controlled.

  That interface module emulated the input required to operate a clanship’s systems, and could interpret the feedback for the KP model AI to use. That type of preprogrammed module could now be used with any of the current AIs to operate a clanship, assuming they could get an intact ship to activate. The Katushas, and the quantum encoding they embedded in their tattoos, would activate any equipment the Krall used. Humanity intended to steal technology from the Krall technology thieves, and try to improve on that when they understood how it worked.

  Noreen made a stealthed approach to Heavyside on the Normal Space tachyon powered inertialess drive, after first Jumping as close as possible behind a Neptune-sized gas giant. It would require a day and a half of travel to Heavyside that they could have covered with a Jump to orbital altitude in forty seconds.

  Sarge had told them at Poldark, where the Krall came and went weekly, the appearance of their three ships wouldn’t seem strange. However, Heavyside was in the Rim region on nearly the opposite side of Human Space from the Krall attacks, and the location of a secret Special Operations program. It wasn’t a settled colony world, so any gamma ray burst would be suspect. One with the signature of a clanship’s mass would draw instant attention and trigger alarms they didn’t want activated. The White Out in the Oort cloud would already have drawn attention when it arrived at Heavyside five days later, except they had been towing additional mass and volume with the cargo pods, and so would not match a clanship gamma ray profile.

  Karl had common knowledge survey data on Heavyside in his data banks, and Noreen had some word of mouth information on where the spec ops training base was located. The planet had originally been named in the honor of Admiral Elaine Andropov, a long dead war hero from before the Collapse. Now only the spaceport was called Andropov, and the nickname Heavyside had become the de facto name of the planet.

  It was considered unsuitable for long-term colonization due to the 1.42 times Earth standard gravity, and terraforming was too expensive for no significant payback. It had a livable biosphere, but simple plants, lichens, and algae had produced an oxygen nitrogen atmosphere. Three hundred fifty years ago, the surface had been cheaply seeded with plant life that would boost the oxygen levels, so that it now was at twenty-two percent. Sea life had been introduced that had taken hold in the three-fifths water covered planet, but only a small amount of shrimp was harvested for the protein, in a minor occupation ran by a few locals.

  Around Andropov spaceport, there were human crops, protected from one particular pest. The pest was one of a few small sturdy food animals that had managed to do well enough to supplement the meat imports. Who would have thought the puny rabbit would thrive in this gravity, without predators, and unlimited food? Lemmings and voles did well, but they competed for food, and rabbits were winning that battle.

  There were vast plains now with a medium height grass on most of it, acceptable by the rabbits that were still expanding their range. A limited number of trees had been accidentally mixed with the seeding, as were wild flowers that could only pollinate via wind, without dedicated insect pollinators, such as bees. Bees were imported at one point, and they died. The local insects paid no attention to flowers. At least there were no mosquito analogues, but with rabbit blood available, it was assumed it was only a matter of time. The mountains were mostly barren, and because of limited plate tectonics, there were no long extended ranges. Most mountains were isolated and of volcanic origin, and there were many active ones on the planet, which still had considerable heat from its slowly cooling core and mantle.

  Overall, Heavyside was considered a “shit hole” assignment for the military that was not part of Special Operations, with relatively few permanent residents, and nearly all of them living at Andropov. There was an orbital transfer station that handled shipments of goods inbound (other than spec ops troops, nothing was exported) and people coming and going. There was limited manufacturing of consumer products on the station, and medical care for residents that needed to get out of the gravity well.

  The “industry” that sustained the small economy was the PU Army, using the secret budget for the black ops programs. The recruiting to get spec ops candidates brought many young men, and a few women, to the transfer station (most ignorant of what it really required). Many were filtered out early, in a section of the station where Heavyside gravity was maintained.

  Being raised on or spending many years on the handful of settled planets with one g or greater gravity was essential. Earth, with a large population, was the lowest benchmark set for gravity of a home planet, but relatively few candidates came from there. As the heart of Hub society, Earth tended to produce fewer people willing to experience the hardships Special Operation demanded and inflicted on its candidates. None of them was told in advance of the surgical implants, performance drugs, or exomuscle booster suits they would almost live in. Not until after they made it through the tough physical training and initial team building, done on-planet.

  Late physical washouts, or usually surgical and drug refusals at that level, were still offered prest
igious and physically demanding enlistments in Ranger or PU Commando units. Now there were even newly formed Marine units, currently stationed on the largest Capitol ships. The lack of Navy combat fleet actions, with no Krall boarders to repel since the Rhama disaster, made those roles more ceremonial and largely a waste of their ability. They could and did serve as elite forces for protection from Krall raiders on worlds with Navy bases. They would join planetary defenders against raiders that the Krall still used to measure the strengths of future invasion targets, and for novice training.

  Once candidates made it past the initial screening, observed by bored spec ops that were either on the temporary disabled list or on a punishment detail, they transferred down to Andropov. Many patriotic hopefuls arrived at the station, many uninvited by recruiters. Some were even criminals, so no effort was made to create records at this stage, thus not shutting the door to some that might have the aptitude for the dirty work. Seventy percent were never sent down to Heavyside anyway. The selected thirty percent from the first screening were shuttled down to the planet. There, on Heavyside, they ran and performed calisthenics for a week. Normally, another ten percent of the original hopefuls were weeded out without ever wasting real training time on them.

  At this stage, if you were still part of the more motivated group, instead of credits for a government paid trip home, the remaining twenty percent did some minimal paper work. It was still called that, even though an AI took the data, recorded your retinal patterns, hand and foot prints, and took a DNA sample. The candidates were promised the information would be kept completely confidential, and it was, because spec ops functioned somewhat like an interstellar Foreign Legion. This was where your past was forgiven if you could meet the requirements, and you became effectively a new citizen with a clean record. If not, you were allowed to leave without prejudice and the information collected expunged.