“I knew Captain Mirikami was extremely strong when he tossed my big butt over his head when I tried to take his gun way. For a small man he’s a real bull. But I do believe you could take him with one hand behind your back.”
Mirikami nodded, smiling as he walked down the stairway to join them. “With both hands behind her back and probably on one leg, and blindfolded. I’d prefer it if you called me Tet. I haven’t really been Captain of a ship since the Krall gutted her to keep her grounded on Koban. Which, by the way, is the name of planet where you have landed.”
“I go by Gar, since Garland sounds like a pretty decoration. I thought I’d recognize all the habitable planet’s names in Human Space if I heard them. But not one called Koban.”
“Well, Gar, if we get out of this predicament alive today, there are a million questions me and the people stranded here will be asking you and answering. We’re twenty years out of date with news from Human Space, because we are far outside of even the Rim worlds. How goes the war over all?”
“You won’t like it. The Krall started the war just about as long as you say you’ve been gone, so you don’t know how bad it’s looking for us. We’ve lost six worlds, several with most of their populations, and Poldark is slowly going down. They could take us in a month or two if they really wanted, but they actually want it to last. They…”
Mirikami interrupted him as he made the last step down, and held up a hand. “That part of their long term plan we know, but we can spend days talking after we kill or capture the six Krall wanting to get back inside this ship.”
“I heard your side of the conversation earlier. You have a transducer, probably an older version of the one I have. You seem to have them stalemated because they appear to think they are up against another group of Krall, from a different clan.”
Mirikami nodded. “This word was placed off limits to all Krall by the joint clan’s leadership. These six have violated that restriction. We think they want to make a deal with a clan they think is already here, also in violation. We have to either kill or capture them, or destroy this ship. If we do the latter, I’d like it a lot if we were not still aboard.”
Reynolds looked surprised. “These are hard to knock out. If you have that kind of firepower, why don’t you just take out the six Krall I heard you say are waiting by their parked shuttle?”
“Because our big firepower is only two shuttles of our own that we can ram this ship with. The Clanship can’t doge or shoot back at us, sitting here without a crew. If we go after their shuttle their pilot is inside, he could probably get airborne first, and our craft are not armed. The five other Krall would run back in here. I don’t think we can keep them out. The best option is to ram this ship before we let them regain control, and the nineteen of us needs to cross a gap of a hundred feet of flat open pavement to reach cover. Between a rock and a hard place, as a pithy Lady friend of mine might say.”
“Can you lock the big doors down below?”
“I doubt it. I just figured out today how to open and close doors on this ship using the default codes, and discovered that I’m the only one of us aboard that can do even that. You already told me our spooks, spies, and intelligence people can’t do it. Let’s go down anyway, and look at ways we can possibly block the doors from opening.”
He, Alyson, and Reynolds made the descent to the lowest level alone, because they had the only weapons if the doors should suddenly open. There they saw the four large heavily armored hatch portals, designed to draw swiftly up into hull pockets above them, permitting warriors waiting behind them to leap nearly fifteen feet to the ground and swarm to the attack.
Reynolds described recordings of Clanship raids he’d watched many times, and told Mirikami that warriors poured out of those hatches in a steady stream, leaping to the ground and racing away as the next warrior dropped behind them. However, under the wide decking beneath their feet, he said there were recessed ramps that could slide out and drop to the ground for loading or unloading heavy equipment, supplies, and mini-tanks he called Dragons, and trucks or other ground transports.
Mirikami checked the double key pads, placed on both sides of the portals with thirty or so feet of heavy hull plating in between each portal. It appeared you could operate ramps and hatches from either side of the doors, and the armored hull plating and doorframe lips would give the door operator cover from external fire. The double key pads were identical to those he’d seen earlier, and one must control the hatch, and one the extendable ramp, although Reynolds didn’t know which key pad was which.
They would need a ramp extended to get the new prisoners down. In this gravity, Mirikami could tolerate, with care, a fifteen to twenty foot jump if he rolled on landing. Alyson, and any TG, could go off the fifteen-foot drop in a dead run and with just a bit of knee flex keep right on running when they hit the ground. The newcomers could break bones or suffer severe sprains if they tried to jump down, as if they had fallen from twenty-three feet.
Alyson, despite her inexperience, had been thinking of all she was seeing here, at ten times Mirikami and Reynolds thoughts. “Sir, if we destroy the key pads, will that keep the doors shut? Then the only way in is by the open shuttle hatch, which poses a bottle neck for them, and is also covered from the dome entrance.”
Mirikami shook his head. “Alyson, they can open these remotely, I’ve seen that done from the ramp at Prime City. I doubt destroying the key pads would disable the doors. The motors that move them are inside armored hull plating for the hatches, and even if there are maintenance hatches here, we don’t have time to find the tools and disable all four doors.”
Reynolds added his dismal observation. “The hatches are smooth surfaced and I don’t see a way we can insert anything, even if we found it, to hold the doors jammed and closed. If they want in, we can’t stop them, and they have eight stairways to go up from here. Even sharing a gun with Karl, a young man up there with some militia training, we can’t keep them all trapped down here. You need an external distraction; one that they don’t think requires them to run back here.”
Their subsequent search of lockers around the central thruster shaft, and others against the bulkheads between the portals revealed what at first appeared to be treasure. They found sixteen Krall plasma rifles, which Reynolds casually identified for Mirikami, apparently disinterested.
“Why can’t we use these, if they’re charged?”
“Like the doors of this ship, Krall plasma rifles will not activate for anyone but a warrior.” Realizing what he’d said he shouted, “Hey, maybe it will work for your ‘magic touch.’ Let me show you the activation sequence.” He rushed over and accepted a long and too heavy rifle from Mirikami.
Demonstrating he said, “They insert a talon tip here, and slide this catch forward, and a string of gold colored lights briefly activates on the power pack if it has a charge.”
“Sorry, I left my talon tips at home. Does anything else work?”
Alyson pulled a slender stylus out of a side pocket. “I use this to write or tap on my pocket computer tablet when I don’t want to talk to it, will it do?”
Mirikami inserted it into the small hole on the side by the catch, and slid the button forward. His reward was a dim amber glow of one light for a moment.
“Damn.” Reynolds looked strangely at Mirikami again. “We can take them apart, and even improved our own rifle designs based on theirs, but I heard we never got the control modules to ever activate their weapons for us. Some sort of quantum encrypted device was what I heard kept them dead. For a short time, after a warrior dies, you can use their dead hands to activate a weapon. It will stay operable about thirty minutes. After which you need another freshly dead Krall.”
He tapped the replaceable power module below the weapon. “This power pack is nearly drained because it should have more lights and a much brighter glow if charged.”
Mirikami rapidly tried all sixteen rifles, and a dozen never glowed at all, but several others gave the sa
me dim glow of a single light. The power packs needed replacing or recharging, and they found no spares, and didn’t know where a recharge station was located.
“Gar what if I activate the four with weak charges, and even if there are only one or two shots in each, you use them? I’ve certainly never fired one of these.”
“Nope. You’d have to hold hands with me. When you let go, the weapon will switch off in ten or fifteen seconds. In basic training, we’re taught to use an available enemy weapon system so long as the Krall owner is recently dead and is in physical contact. We had to haul that heavy ass carcass with us if we needed to move for the next half hour.”
“Why not take just the hand? Not squeamish are you?” Mirikami couldn’t help but smile at the thought the rugged one-armed sergeant would be concerned about this.
“Hell no. I’d wear their hollowed out skull if that would keep me alive and killing other Krall. Except the hand alone doesn’t work. We naturally get few opportunities to test or try this, but reports from the field say when a soldier could stay with the corpse, or carry it near him in a truck, he had use of the Krall rifle. Even then it only lasts for roughly thirty minutes after death, when the gun decides its official user is really dead.”
“Well place the four with any power over by that portal. If we need to make a run for the dome, that door and ramp is on the side towards where you need to go, with the Krall on the opposite side, I’m told.” He pointed to the opposite side portal.
“Sir, what use are they on that side?” Alyson had the same question Reynolds was about to ask.
“If we open that portal, and drop the ramp, I can cover all of you from behind that ramp as a shield. If you run straight away from the shuttle, the Krall can’t get a clear shot without moving away from the shuttle. That gives me and the folks at the dome a chance to pin them down or keep them occupied.”
Looking skeptical, Reynolds asked, “Have you ever fought the Krall? They don’t stay pinned down.”
“I don’t have as much experience as you Gar, and mine was twenty years ago, but there are two more boys outside like Alyson, and they will also be shooting at them. The warriors will definitely respect their abilities after only a couple of shots.”
“I don’t mean disrespect, but strong isn’t enough with these warriors. I use armor that nearly matches them in strength, but I can’t move fast enough to make it do what they can do.”
“We think we have that covered,” was all Mirikami said.
Then he added, “Let me Link with my men outside and see what they may have come up with while we were busy here. Jake, a Link please.” He didn’t wait for an acknowledgement anymore.
“Dillon, Thad, we can’t find a way to lock them out of the ship, and I doubt even with Alyson’s help we could hold off five of them if they charge in here. What have you come up with?”
Thad answered. “Ethan and both cats are behind the Krall, not quite straight out from the dome, so they are out of the line of our fire. He has a hand radio, which is set to receive text only since they would hear voice calls. He also has a .50 caliber rifle with him. When shooting starts he can get one or more if they head for the Clanship, before they duck around the shuttle for cover. We have some shots at them from the other side, from under the overhang, but only by shooting around landing jacks. It’s possible for them to have cover from both directions for most of the way. Some of them might make it through, and their shuttle still has its pilot. We have it tough, no matter what we do. If we send our two shuttles up, the sound is different, and they will spring into action before we ram, and you all will still be inside.”
“Like sergeant Reynolds said to me a few minutes ago, we need a distraction that convinces them they don’t need to come back to the ship. I have something in mind, but I need to consider it for a bit.
“Jake will need to talk to them in High Krall. He won’t fool them for long, and they will figure out he isn’t really one of them. We will speak to them in Standard after that, perhaps ordering them to go away and leave us alone. That should piss them off, and I don’t think they’d be inclined to do anything a human told them to do.
“We might explain we are survivors from the other compound and are no threat to them. Nothing excites a Krall more than weak prey to kill that defies them. I want to push them towards a hunt that will sound fun for them, since we had only their guns and flimsy armor when they left. We can threaten them and say they are outnumbered eight to one. That’s normally terrific odds for six novice warriors, and these are all battle experienced. Our attempt to fool them and to hide will be a clear sign of weakness to them.”
The others agreed, and Mirikami ordered Jake to start a conversation, and feed a translation to him, Thad, and Dillon. Then he signed off.
Reynolds promptly had a question. “Who is Jake? You’re saying he understands and speaks High Krall? We only have a partial dictionary of either Krall tongue, because they nearly always encrypt communications, just as we do.”
“I think twenty years ago the Krall were unconcerned about what we learned here, because we were not expected to survive long after they departed. Jake is a JK model AI from my old ship, and without his help we would not have survived to see the Krall depart, nor have had the help to construct industry and develop the technology that helped keep us alive. He learned their language from unguarded conversations they had in our presence, and from bugging a habitat dome where they occupied the top levels to monitor us captives. We never let them know he existed.”
“Your people and computer would be a gold mine of information for our intelligence folks. Especially if they can figure out how you personally can operate Krall equipment.”
“Yes. Well, I don’t think I’m the only one that can do that, but I’ll wait for a chance to test my theory if we survive our current problems.”
One of the other captives called down. “When are we going to make a break for it? Can you open the hatches for us?”
Reynolds identified him as Karl Wetherby, a young blond haired man with some militia training. The sergeant was explaining what was happening when a completely unplanned, distraction arrived.
Dillon broke in on Mirikami’s monitoring of Jake’s simultaneous translation of his opening conversation with the Krall. “Tet, Cahill found an unwatched maintenance side door, and just stepped out onto the tarmac. I think a Clanship jack or the shuttle’s position has the Krall view of her blocked, but that won’t last long. You threatened to shoot her if she interfered, but I don’t think that’s going to be necessary. She’s walking towards the shuttle wearing her old blue governor’s robes, with her hands in the air. She must have completely lost her mind.”
19. The OK Corral with Knives
Once the Krall had made it clear they suspected there were occupants in the dome, Thad ordered Jake to transmit a carrier wave with random Krall style frequency modulation in a directional signal beamed out over the savanna, and to do it intermittently. Thad knew the Krall detection equipment on their shuttle was certain to pick up some part of the radiation leakage from the side lobe of the dish on top of the dome. He based this belief on empirical evidence from shuttles used to hunt humans on Testing Days, when the Krall located human teams using such directional dishes when they tried to communicate secretly.
However, they would get no information from the purely garbage transmissions Jake sent, although the time wasted on pointless decryption might prove beneficial. Thad figured the Krall would believe that the message contents were coded, rather than simply junk. After all, who sent random messages in a semi secure directional beam? They would assume there was a distant recipient the dome occupants were trying to reach.
Confirming there were occupants in the dome was clearly revealing no secrets. They had turned back from their hunt, landed, and were repeatedly trying to make contact with the mysterious clan they thought was inside, offering to negotiate.
The actual frequency Jake used for the dummy transmission was one sugges
ted by Dillon. It matched the frequency Jake recorded from the hunter killer octet sent after the combat team Mirikami had formed. That was on the last Testing Day the Krall conducted on Koban, proving humans were capable of fighting well enough to match Krall expectations. The Kimbo clan had used that frequency, and they were a small but extremely aggressive clan, which might be of concern to these Krall.
Dillon hoped they might believe that Kimbo clan was here illegally, and hesitate to initiate hostilities with that volatile clan if they could negotiate instead. Interclan negotiations were common, even if almost never used with humans. Thad endorsed the frequency choice, noting that each clan did seem to have a set of frequencies they preferred to use on former hunts.
Now, with Jake attempting to open a fake negotiation that was sure to fall apart, Cahill’s action might serve as a completely different distraction for the six Krall they faced.
****
Toltak stepped into the shuttle for the third time to check the progress of the computer’s effort to decode the intercepted message from the clan inside the dome. With so many thousands of years of conflict, and encounters with alien communications and codes, their slave races had established an immense database of previously used encryption systems for their masters, and quantum methods of searches for known patterns. Learning who was inside was tied to knowing not only what they had said, but also whom they were trying to reach.
They had two earlier transmissions to work with, and a third transmission interception a short time ago was the longest yet. The software system indicated all three transmissions contained different contents, but used the same encoding and modulation. They were all on a frequency used most often by two clans. Based on past interclan warfare, the computer should have enough data now to furnish at least a hint as to which clan was here.
Koban: The Mark of Koban Page 52
