“My Tor, I could force Tanga clan to show me the precautions they have in place for containing the soft Krall, and account for them all. This would embarrass the sub leader they placed in charge, who was moved far from the war he wanted to be able to start.”
Next came the most pleasurable part. “Parkoda, our mutual antagonist before we departed Koban, was sent there by Tanga clan for his political blunders and other mistakes, which gave our Graka clan the right to start the war with humans. You know he tried to provoke your resignation as Gatrol, in order for you to be allowed to answer dishonorable remarks made to you, if you challenged him to a death match.”
Kanpardi initially sounded sour in his response. “You explained my grudge with Tanga clan, and with Parkoda, as if I had forgotten them within a single breeding cycle. I well remember his failed attempt to provoke me.”
Then his tone became more enthusiastic. “I will forgive your unnecessary reminder because you have offered an excellent means to force a symbolical lick from him on my cloaca, in front of his warriors and K’Tal. Having a soft Krall watch him be humbled would not increase his pleasure either.” Kanpardi appeared fixated on the topic of butt kissing today.
“Telour, you obviously knew in advance that the long travel to our clanship yards would pass conveniently near the planet where we keep the soft Krall. That was careful planning on your part, and provided me with an excellent inducement. You do show promise.” It was high praise, from a hard to please Tor Gatrol.
Kanpardi wasn’t finished. “I have another suggestion to humiliate Parkoda more, who will not dare to offer you a challenge after I give you the promotion you have cleverly extorted from me.” He snorted in amusement.
“When you Jump from the soft Krall world, for our shipyards, I want you to insist that Parkoda go with you to inspect the living Olt’kitapi ships where they are hidden. They are not Tanga clan’s responsibility to protect, but you have evidence for legitimate suspicion that soft Krall may have escaped. That is even less possible than saying humans somehow raided us and took our clanships, but use that excuse to your advantage. Naturally, a soft one would want to seek out those four old ships to try to force us to free his people.
“After seven thousand light-years, it is but a small side trip for verification of the security of the Olt’kitapi ships. Make Parkoda escort you inside all four ships, to prove they are all alive and still awake, and no soft Krall are hiding inside.” They both snorted in amusement at Parkoda’s upcoming humiliation.
Thus, a fateful confrontation was set in motion, although not the one Telour had carefully arranged.
Chapter 12: Haven
A month into the cultural contacts, and Wister had convinced more of the village to see and meet these strange people, some of whom spoke with their minds if you let them touch you. This was an amazing ability to them, and there were no stories from his people of other races with this ability. That was significant, because stories among the long-lived Prada went back many orbits of many planets around many stars.
He wondered if the Rulers should have left the humans alive. Did they know of this ability of the mind, of their great strength for their small size, and particularly their speed? Entire species, which were much less of a threat to the Rulers power, had been ruthlessly destroyed as quickly as possible. The most recent species they had killed, that Wister knew of, were the Malverans. Annihilated by a single clan in less than a hundred orbits.
His grandmother had seen some of these insect eating intelligent reptiles, which resembled half-sized cousins of the Rulers. The Malverans had lived in this part of the galaxy for thousands of years, and expanded very slowly. They had known of the planet the Rulers later described as Koban, the training world. They knew too of this safer world, which Wister had learned to like greatly. The Malverans used only warm, relatively dry worlds with lower gravity, and neither of the planets in this system was to their liking for colonization.
Despite long affiliation with the Rulers, he and the elders of other Prada villages did not understand the minds of their masters well. Their words of contempt for all other species was one thing, but their actions appeared to show a greater fear of weak, peaceful species (whom they defeated quickly).
They were most tolerant of those that fought them hardest and offered them the greatest risk (fighting those species could last a thousand years or more, when the Rulers could have been victorious much sooner). It was as if they enjoyed the conflict of becoming the elder dominate species of the galaxy. Why would such an elder rational species want constant war? The motives of this harsh senior race, apparently too complex for the Prada to grasp, had followed their Great Path over many millenniums.
All other species were destroyed or dominated by the Rulers eventually, as was their right as an elder species. They performed other acts incomprehensible to his people. The survival they granted to the Prada and the Torki were examples.
The Rulers, as ancient, as large and powerful a species as they were, could have built anything they needed on their own. Instead, they had granted the lowly Prada continued existence in exchange for their doing what they had always done, build and make things, and obey their elders.
The Torki often did not act as grateful to the Rulers as they should. Nevertheless, they built for them the delicate electronic and quantum mechanical parts of the machines that controlled the clanships and their weapons. Some parts they had created from their own science, others they copied or learned from the races the Rulers did not choose to save.
Wister saw no understandable pattern to Ruler behavior in this respect, but every Prada was grateful for their generosity in allowing them to share some of the many worlds the Rulers controlled.
The Raspani had somehow pleased the Rulers greatly, because they lived on all their worlds. They had hidden their great minds, and now existed only to feed the Rulers with their bodies. The Prada were granted this honored purpose on rare occasions, proof that they could please the masters this way at times. Hard work was all that was normally asked of them. An insolent Torki would be killed if it displeased a Ruler, as they deserved, but as an insult to them, the bodies were never eaten.
There was no way the Prada would understand that the lack of red meat was the only reason Torki were off the dinner table for the Krall, or that the pallid lean meat of a Prada was repulsive to their Rulers.
Unlike the Rulers who chose their planets more carefully, the humans apparently used almost any world, like an infestation, if their mind pictures of populations and type of worlds could be believed. Just as the Prada and Torki had survived on this gentle planet when left alone for a time, the humans had miraculously survived on terrible Koban, even when left without Ruler protection. They had managed to do on heavy savage Koban what the Rulers had not chosen to do, and the Prada and Torki could never do. They made it a safe home. They had brought two of Koban’s smartest most deadly predators with them, as proof they had become partners. Thousands of Prada had died in their huge jaws, over the many orbits it took to build the domes on that deadly world.
Wister, because he had directed some of the construction on the two domes the Kobani now used, knew humans were recent arrivals to Koban, just as they claimed. They told the Prada that the Rulers had left this star system, intending to be gone for many orbits before they returned to live on Koban. (The humans insisted on disrespectfully calling the masters by their species name, the Krall). They urged the Prada to work with them to build cities on this world, without waiting for the Rulers to direct them in their wisdom.
There was no need to rush. The Rulers had disappeared from other worlds many times in the past, and returned to some of them eventually. They would surely come back for many of the loyal and faithful Prada they left behind. The Rulers had only been gone from this system for perhaps a full breeding cycle, certainly less than two complete egg-to-novice-to-warrior cycles.
Compared to the Prada’s indefinite life span, this was a trivial interval. There was no
reason to activate the underground production facilities now, which they maintained with their surplus population, awaiting the Ruler’s return. It was two orbits early for him to replace his older sister in the vast factory complex, but he wanted her advice on what to do about these rash, pushy, and irreverent newcomers. His older sister, Nawella, would guide him as she had for over a thousand orbits on three planets.
The little “diplomat,” as he thought of the Kobani named Maggi, had claimed the Rulers would be surprised to find this world full of people when they returned someday. She said it had room to hold Prada, Torki, and humans, all preparing for their return. Wister took the word “surprised” to mean the same as “pleased.” He did wish to please the Rulers, without having to wait to do so.
The distinction when Maggi sometimes said human, other times Kobani, for her people, was confusing to him because the mental images and visual evidence suggested they were exactly the same species, but different somehow. Humans lived on many worlds, yet Kobani only lived on Koban. Since he could mind share only with those humans he knew were from Koban, a tiny minority population compared to the many billions on other worlds, it was easier to think of them all as simply humans.
They had a leader of the small human village living inside and around the clanship they used, and she named herself as Captain Marlyn Greeves. A triple name, as only a great Ruler might use. He understood that the first word was a rank position word that granted her authority over other humans, and her last name was something like a clan name. Like Dr. Maggi Fisher, she too preferred the middle name in conversation.
Marlyn often used Maggi as a mind-to-mind connection to communicate with him, providing more detail than the Ruler low speech could. She said the Kobani humans would find more Prada and Torki left behind on worlds the Rulers had left. They would bring them to this world, as a haven for them.
Just as the word for the deadly training world was “Koban” in the Ruler’s low speech, the humans used that same word as the world’s name. The word haven, meaning “a safe place” in the human language they called Standard, was being used as a name for this world.
Maggi told him, “Haven is where as many of the Ruler’s servants as we can find and rescue will be taken to live.”
The word “servants” was one that Maggi told him she had substituted for the actual descriptive word in her own language. She said the low speech Krall word for their role, under the rule of the masters, actually translated to another word in Standard, as slave, which implied ownership of the servants. A servant could choose not to serve anyone, but a slave could not refuse to serve a master.
Wister considered the distinction strange. He could not think of why he would choose not to serve the elder Rulers. Had any Prada sinfully chosen not to serve, the Rulers would quickly simplify their choice. A new living Prada would serve in that one’s place.
However, knowing the Torki as he did, he thought it possible that some of them might choose not to serve. The word servant, versus slave, would do for a compromise description, he decided. The Ruler’s rightfully owned the service of all races anyway.
The justification the Kobani put forward for the construction of cities on Haven, to house the new arrivals, was based on the Rulers having told the Prada they wanted to make Koban their new home world someday. If that were so, then many of the Rulers would return there to live. Where would that living take place?
Marlyn asked, “Where will the servants come from, to build new domes for them, install fusion plants, air handlers, assemble equipment, trucks, new clanships? Haven would be the natural place to find them,” she said, and it sounded reasonable.
Wister was concerned that the Rulers did not want their servants living in larger gatherings than a village when they were away (he said the Rulers limited them to an octal 3400 residents each).
That accounted for the now confirmed 1,792 Prada in this village, and remote aerial surveillance of two other Prada villages indicated similar numbers there. Wister was waiting for the diplomat, Maggi, to arrive this morning to discuss the population limit he had told her about the day before, as she proposed larger cities.
He sat in the shade at the edge of the forest, idly rubbing Jelko’s long ears, scratching his chest. The marsh dog resembled its namesake, with a panting pale white tongue lolling out of the side of its mouth.
Maggi said humans had latched onto several socializing pack animals on various worlds that filled the ecological niche that wolves or coyotes filled on Earth, humanity’s home world. Most of those alien animals did not look anything like a dog, but if taken as pups they bonded with the human social creatures from outside their pack. The marsh pack animals had taken to the Prada very well, and humans seemed to like them as well.
The clanship, which the humans had strangely given the name Beagle, per their custom, was now parked on the half dirt-covered tarmac by the old dome, the construction of which Wister had overseen.
The Torki were another people that named inanimate objects. The stories his own people told of the Prada’s former existence, before the Ruler’s came, contained names for places and things. That naming tradition apparently stopped because the Rulers did not name things, and the Prada wanted to please and emulate the older species.
He saw the truck coming from the dome when it was several miles away on the mostly flat scrub brush and grassland. It was the same style as the hundreds of thousands of identical trucks he had seen previously, which the factories could produce any time the Rulers instructed Prada to make more. Jelko stirred, and growled. A bump, protruding over the back of the cab of the truck was the head of one of the two giant cats the Kobani had brought with them.
The rippers were well behaved, other than a predisposition to enjoy making anyone that wasn’t a Kobani feel like they were potential prey. He calmed Jelko, with soft words and petting. The marsh dog had been near a ripper before this. The one named Maggi had brought a smaller female one with her for the second meeting, and for several others. It initially had stayed back by the shuttle they used to fly here, before moving the clanship closer. Maggi said the cats were “partners” with them, but that marsh dogs were Prada pets. He did not intend to call any of his pets closer today, while that killer “partner” was so near. He even warned his people to stay as high on the trees as possible at first. It was only after repeated safe visits and some mind picture exchanges that he relaxed his caution.
He learned on that second day that these intelligent predators were connected with how the Kobani had learned to speak with their minds. He knew obviously that it wasn’t a taught ability. It had to be a genetic change, as his people once had done to themselves. They had never ever considered using genes from non-Prada, but it was possible in principle.
The few genetic changes he was aware of for his species, was that they had made themselves live indefinitely, providing them with even older leaders they could respect, follow and trust. There were some other trivial gene changes he thought, to make them resistant to infections for example, or cancers, but they had never achieved the near physical perfection of the Rulers.
Rulers did not live long lives. However, they did not desire an old age as warriors that could not fight as they did when young. Dying in battle was so likely, that longevity was a pointless trait for them to select via breeding anyway. Nevertheless, they had marvelous bodies that could suffer considerable damage, and could repair and regrow itself, and they employed redundant organs. They were impervious to many poisons and infections. This was achieved without use of any artificial changes to their genes. It was the result of their ancient heritage, and high reproductive rate, matched by the attrition of their own weakest.
That ancient bloodline for their species was the trait that made them so admirable to the Prada, who apparently did not think selective breeding, and culling undesirable genes through war, was merely a slower form of genetic manipulation and improvement. Exterminating other species was their prerogative, as the senior and wisest life
form in the known galaxy. Newer species could not fully understand the long-range plans of the elder races.
The truck stopped a hundred feet from the tree line, and the small female Kobani human stepped down. She was alone today, except for the ripper of course. Not that she needed any protection from the Prada, and little even from the marsh dogs. Not with her surprising speed and strength.
When the cat jumped down from the back of the truck, its size was evidence that it was the male of the two rippers. The Kobani all called him Kobalt, and the creature actually considered the leader of the group of humans to be his mother’s sister. His biological sister, Kit, thought of the leader as her real mother. Harming any of the two cat’s extended family would have a bad outcome for the perpetrator. Their brief mind pictures made that amply evident, bringing an involuntary shiver to Wister.
Wister had actually seen the Rulers flee from these predators on Koban. They would bravely stand their ground to shoot the large blue humped animals with long nose horns, from which they loved to eat cuts of raw red meat, except when rippers were near. From the top of a partially completed dome, Wister had seen a pride of five rippers move to ambush three hunting Rulers as they focused on a herd of the large meat animals too intently. The wind was wrong, and they never smelled the doom closing from their rear and sides.
All three of the hunters were killed that day, with only a wound to one of the large male rippers. The fast agile beasts took them all down in a coordinated attack from three sides, avoiding most of the hasty brief gunfire with relative ease. Afterwards, they all took turns standing over two of the badly injured yet still living Rulers, and lowered their heads to touch them. Next, they roared a challenge before killing the two survivors and carrying the mangled bodies away to eat.
His memory was jerked away from its dark musing by a voice. “It is a bright and good morning, Wister,” Maggi called to him as she approached. She had one hand on the small ring of blue flesh around the ripper’s neck.
Koban: Rise of the Kobani Page 43
