Koban: The Mark of Koban

by Stephen W Bennett

  “Madam President,” Anderfem needed to explain what Stanford wasn’t ready to accept. “He was within his rights to present his recommendation to the full Armed Forces Committee.”

  “Fine,” Stanford replied, clearly showing that it was not fine with her. “Except for the first time in probably the last two hundred years, every damned Tri-Vid news outlet was covering that meeting. I invited them, specifically to publicize the actions I recommended for expanding the Navy. To authorize new ship construction, recruiting, and training.” The president was beating herself up now for the fiasco.

  “Yes Mam. However, some sort of news coverage would have been at the full committee meeting, so the story would have gotten out anyway.”

  “Sure, buried in the late news, after the latest corruption or sex scandal,” The president complained. “Not on prime time news in every home and bar on Earth. Just wait until it hits the colonies.”

  What exasperated her most was that the publicity backfire was her own doing. She had requested the committee meeting’s actions be broadcast as reassurance for the public. Well, that was almost the most exasperating aspect.

  Waving her hands in the air she asked, “What possessed him to recommend a Military Draft, for us to build, train, and equip an Army? This isn’t even the Senate’s responsibility; it belongs to the House of Representatives to vote on, and for the President to sign. Not for some little shit to wag the whole dog.” The vulgar language demonstrated the depth of her ire.

  “Mam, what may have ‘possessed him’ was Admiral Canard’s testimony that because the aliens performed sixteen White Outs, barely five hundred miles from the surface of Gribble’s Nook, that the Navy would not have much of an opportunity to repel an invasion. We would need to focus on driving them away after the fact. The enemy would be on the ground before any naval force could move to intercept.”

  Anderfem, a former Admiral, privately held the same opinion, but didn’t feel it was wise to express that to her angry friend, and her President.

  Stanford pointed out what she thought was the absurdity of the Senator’s proposal. “Ortega’s suggestion would require a ground force on virtually every planet we need to protect. Of course, that would be every single one of them. I’d be pilloried if I omitted any.”

  She cocked her head at a remembered phrase from the Senator’s own mouth, in an interview. “Did you hear the melodramatic remark he made in the hallway for the press after the meeting ended? Really!”

  Stanford shook her head in exasperation. “Remember the Nook. That is his rally cry. What does he think that was, the Alamo? We were hardly wiped out to the last woman and man.”

  That poorly conceived comment would personally haunt Stanford to the end of her term of office, and long afterwards.

  Three weeks later, a fleeing Jump ship reported a massive raid of extermination was underway on the Rim colony of Greater West Africa. The ship had recorded a broadcast, reputed to be from an alien that gave its name as “Telour.”

  Speaking oddly accented Standard, it claimed that his race, the Krall, intended to make war on every human world until they had conquered them all. It was an odd declaration of war, because parts of it sounded much like personal bragging. The speaker claimed responsibility for the raid on Gribble’s Nook, took credit for individual kills, then provided details that suggested he was telling the truth. There was no offer of negotiation or terms offered, only the promise that if humans did not fight, that they would be exterminated.

  The President, under tremendous public pressure, backed House Bills to create a Planetary Union Army, and initially to rely on volunteers. However, a revival of a Selective Service process was under consideration if an all-volunteer force wasn’t large enough. Ten million soldiers in arms was the initial goal, but that would clearly spread them thin among so many planets.

  The militarization measures, debated hotly by some pacifists, had wide public support. Both houses in Parliament approved the final versions of the Bills in a week, a record time for so massive an expenditure, and the President signed them into law the same day.

  Confirmation of the newest disaster spurred the political process. A huge groundswell of sympathy for the colony’s sponsor, the West African Republic, stirred memories of past neglect of the parent region. The post-Collapse merger of the former nations of Nigeria, Ghana, Niger, Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, and five other smaller countries had a rebounded population of two hundred fifty million people. They were a solid block of voters that Earth’s representatives to Parliament had to please.

  Scouting missions, conducted by hurriedly reconfigured automated Jump drones, supported the finding of a probable total massacre of the Rim colony’s eighteen million people. The Navy also sent well-armed crewed ships to investigate, none of which returned. Only a fraction of the large number of drones sent out reported back, but some did. They showed an enormous fleet of alien ships in orbit. The constant landing and departing made it apparent the Krall were settling in for a long stay, converting the planet into a base.

  ****

  “Madam President…,” Anderfem started, before she was interrupted.

  “Jean, please,” her hand raised. “It’s just the two of us Ladies today. Can we go back to our college dorm days? I just want to be Char right now. Duty can bully me later. I need some down time, and a friend is needed, not an advisor. I want to talk about life, forget aliens and death for now.”

  Pleased that her old friend was ready to “let her hair down,” Anderfem quickly agreed.

  “Char, you aren’t the only one that yearns for the simpler days. We both became career oriented and went separate ways after school. You went to law school, and eventually into politics here. I shunned politics for Navy life, because on Alders, politics is all that my family does. Having had a Grandfather as the last male President, is hard to overlook as a family precedent.” She chuckled.

  “Your younger sister managed to stay out of politics, as I recall. Didn’t Aldry head a science department at Staunton University? That wasn’t political. You both broke away from family tradition.”

  “True, though Aldry became more of a black sheep than I did. She went into the biosciences, and just between the two of us, Aldry confided to me that she was delving into genetics. Our mother would have disowned her. It was the last thing she was working on.” It sounded as if she was revealing her sister had become a gangster.

  Stanford had a bad premonition, though, because Jean had said it was the “last thing she was working on.”

  She put out a feeler. “How is Aldry?” Why does this feel like such a loaded question?

  “Oh…,” Jean answered in a way that indicated a painful revelation was coming. “Aldry disappeared several months ago, on a trip to a research station. Neither the ship or scientific station were heard from again.”

  Oh God! Stanford thought. This is horrible. How can I tell her?

  Jean had learned to read people as she rose in rank. Charlotte had a light complexion, yet she positively blanched with a stricken look in her eyes.

  Misunderstanding, she told her friend, “Char, we had a quiet memorial service only for the family. We didn’t even make a formal announcement because of the nature of the ship’s mission. There could have been some unpleasant news coverage.”

  Stanford wasn’t one to avoid a difficult decision, nor duck responsibility. “Jean, I think Aldry was on the Flight of Fancy, headed for Midwife Station, which was orbiting a world the scientists called Newborn.”

  Anderfem realized her friend knew too many details to have stumbled across the story. “Char, how do you know about this?”

  “Jean, I surreptitiously provided grant money for the University consortium that organized the Midwife research project. I learned that their chartered ship, the Flight of Fancy, failed to return on schedule. A rescue mission to the system found no trace of the ship or the station. They found the automated radar stations they had set up, several still working. However, there was n
o debris, no sign of them.

  “All hands were reported lost, and for the same reason you mentioned, the controversial nature of the mission, there was no major news release. I had no idea Aldry was aboard. I didn’t even know what branch of science she had entered.” Stanford wondered if her friend would blame her for the loss.

  “Char, I can tell from your shocked expression you had no idea. Dear, I’m not going to blame you for the loss of Aldry’s ship. Any more than I blamed her University for letting her go.”

  They hugged for a few minutes, before pulling back to dry their eyes. Jean, almost against her will, felt her mind pushed towards a new speculation.

  “Char, Midwife station was a couple of hundred light years from the edge of the Rim, in the same general direction of Gribbles’ Nook and of Greater West Africa.” She left the implied Inference hanging.

  “I hadn’t made that connection, Jean. I suppose it’s possible those scientists ran into the Krall a couple of months before they attacked Gribbles’ Nook. We know the aliens have been studying us for some time, because they know our language, and seem familiar with how we will react. I’ll bet they have had humans to study well before they invaded. I think I’ll ask the Navy to send a couple of scout ships back to Newborn to see what they might find.”

  Anderfem shook her head sadly, “If they encountered the Krall, I doubt they survived the introduction.”

  6. Caught by Surprise (Koban)

  “You survived meeting the Krall so this is just a walk in the park,” Anderfem told the two men.

  Thad made a face, and told Aldry, “We didn’t expect to walk there naked, with a hundred tiny little guns shooting our asses along the way.”

  He was looking apprehensively at a casket-like box with a lid, equipped with at least a hundred injectors. They would produce high velocity tiny fluid jets, simultaneously penetrating their skins to introduce the viral carriers of the Koban organic superconducting gene mods.

  “The walking part was just a metaphor Thad,” for some reason her smile reminded him of a predator. “We’ll have you strapped down so tight you won’t be able to do more than tighten your sphincter. Besides, it isn’t a hundred shots at once…, it’s a hundred twenty!” Her chuckle would have done Joseph Mengele justice. He was the war criminal Nazi doctor that organized horrible genetic experiments on captive twins, during World War II on Earth.

  Dillon asked, “We’re going to have anesthetics, right? There no reason to do this ‘wham-bam-thank-you-mam’ is there?”

  Maggi took her turn now, “Wham-bam…, isn’t that sort of how you injected all those young admiring Ladies at Rhama University? Did you even thank them?”

  Dillon reddened. He was glad he’d talked Noreen into helping Mirikami on another project today.

  “You two sadists are enjoying this too much,” Thad grimaced.

  Aldry offered a bit of comforting information. “You’ll have a topical anesthetic sprayed over your entire body to numb your skin. The injections are not painful at all. You both have received similar shots multiple times in your lives. We just don’t want you jumping or moving around when they all go off at once. We will adjust the nozzle positions for each of you separately, to hit the targeted spots.”

  “The other mods didn’t need this elaborate a set up,” Thad complained.

  “We may not really need this complicated a setup for these,” acknowledged Aldry. “Since we don’t know the full physiological side effects of the superconducting nerve generation, as it progresses through your bodies, we decided to give it an equal start everywhere in your systems at once. At least as well as we could manage with the equipment we have available.”

  “Why didn’t you do this for the livestock trials?” Dillon questioned.

  “You want us to treat you like a pig? No problem,” Maggi offered, grinning enthusiastically.

  “You know what I mean,” he recoiled from her pretend eager grasp. “They came through alive and well with only four or five injection sites,” he reminded her.

  “Did you interview them after it was over to see how uncomfortable it was for them?” Maggi asked him.

  “That’s a dumb question,” he declared.

  Whack! The sound was from the back of Dillon’s head. It was caused by a slender wooden door trim strip Maggi held in her hand, illustrating what she thought of his observation.

  “Hey!” Dillon voiced his objection to his usual friendly mistreatment from the tiny woman. “You should be nice to me, to both of us. You ladies will get to see two perfect specimens of naked manhood today.” He leered at them.

  “Oh God,” Maggi groaned. “When we have them strapped down and helpless, is there anything particularly debasing you’d like to do to this one Aldry?”

  “I’ll have to think on that,” she answered, assuming a thoughtful pose.

  Trying to get the project’s discussion back on track, Thad asked, “Who goes first, and when do we start? I want the waiting to be over.”

  Aldry told him, “You’ll go first Thad. Jake used your body metrics to help us preposition the injectors this morning. He will monitor your vital signs as you lay there for about an hour. It’s OK to talk up until injection, but we don’t want muscle contractions or joint movements to affect absorption for the first hour. You won’t feel any of the effects for a few days. That’s about when the animal trials seem to indicate changes that were detectable by the subjects.”

  “Jake, Link us all together, including Rafe and his technicians when they arrive, and display Thad’s vital signs on the wall monitor.”

  “Yes Mam,” the AI replied.

  The salvaged casket-like box was a med lab from a medical department of another Krall disabled passenger ship. Rafe’s team had modified and rigged it with tubes and injector jets from several med labs and spares from other ships.

  Rafe Linked in to say they had almost finished filling the virus-laden vials for the injectors, and were leaving the refrigeration unit in five minutes. He suggested the first volunteer (he actually said guinea pig) should strip and position himself inside the med lab.

  The two Ladies, both Doctors, but not physicians, both elderly, but not dead, politely turned their backs so Thad could strip and climb into the med lab. Nude, he first stepped through a decontamination booth, converted to spray a light coating of a topical anesthetic.

  His eyes had a set of plastic goggles over them. Aside from protection from the spray, the goggles provided a firm attachment for two ultra-fine injectors that would see to it that the optic nerves integrated into the gene modification process very early.

  By the time Rafe’s team arrived, Thad was as comfortable as the modified framework would allow. His view of the room was one of tunnel vision with the goggles in place. Even that view reduced once the injectors were mounted. He wouldn’t see anyone else in his exposed state, but he was on full display for all seven people in the room.

  Tie down straps were made snug, and the hundred twenty vials were screwed onto the injectors. The final set up took less than twenty minutes, while the lumps and corners of the med lab equipment taught Thad how little he ever wanted to spend a week convalescing in one of these things.

  They were ready to start before Thad expected them to be. The last steps were of clipping injectors to each fingertip and thumb.

  “Thad,” He recognized Aldry’s voice, since he couldn’t see anyone. “We’re ready if you are. I’ll count up to ten, and we trigger the jets on ten. You can answer me right now, but avoid speaking for the next hour.”

  “I’m ready,” he muttered, equipment mounted around his face and neck muffling the words.

  “Fine, here we go. One, two, three…,” Pshhht went all one hundred twenty injectors.

  “Humphh,” was all that Thad uttered.

  “That was damned sneaky!” Dillon laughed. Admiring how Aldry had ensured her patient’s muscles were relaxed before the injections took place.

  An hour later, Thad climbed out of the med lab, r
ubbing at the places that had grown numb from things pressing too hard on his anatomy. Jake directed the minor repositioning of the injectors. Dillon stripped while Rafe’s team returned with fresh vials.

  The younger man was similarly strapped down when Maggi stepped to his side. Aldry was busy examining Thad’s injection sites.

  “OK, cowboy, same drill. I’ll count up to ten, then inject. Right?”

  “Sure,” was his skeptical reply. She smirked, knowing he couldn’t see her, but clearly expecting the same trick.

  “Here we go. One, two, three…,” she paused. “Dillon, stop tensing up. I’m not going to go on the same damned number you twit. Relax so I can start counting again...” Pshhht. She caught him by surprise anyway.

  A grunt was all she heard. Good.

  An hour later Dillon was out of the med lab getting dressed, and found they had a lovely meal prepared of supplement loaded meat and fish, with mineral laden drinks to wash the delicious stuff down.

  “The greatest drawback I see to doing this mod,” Thad commented, “is the crappy food reward we get after enduring your torture. Where’s the chocolate cake?”

  “That may not be too far in the future,” Rafe told him. “One of the cargo ships the Krall captured had a lot of coco seeds in one of its containers. They’re the hardy Forastero variety coco trees, which were headed to Greater West Africa for cultivation. Their loss is our gain,” he added, unaware of the grim irony.

  “Jimbo Skaleski has had the trees growing in the new Hydroponics section on the former Krall top level of the dome. He says they’re doing very well. Luckily, this genetically tweaked variety matures early. The trees were modified well before the Collapse, naturally. We have peanuts and peanut butter coming too. Jimbo’s going to provide us some fresh tastes of home.”