There was Krall script around all of the controls, which would require translation and new labels. Each of the four consoles had a roughly two-foot diameter ring of rectangles on a sloped panel, with other rectangles in the center and around them. Mirikami counted those in the ring, and noted that the number matched the number of outside viewports. He saw no screens for long range viewing, as human ships had, and followed a hunch. He touched the top rectangle, as he faced the viewport directly across from him. It instantly became opaque, which startled the others at the dimming light. He had pressed the bottom part, so next he tapped the center. Some light returned, but the view was obviously telescopic, because he was seeing part of a magnified distant mountain range. He knew that range was in the direction the viewport faced.
“We had better be careful what we touch, but the viewports are also view screens, and the zoom I have on this one came from my tapping the center.” He touched the top of the same rectangle and the image, except for intervening atmospheric haze, showed distant stars. He pressed the center again, and the mountains returned.
Maggi was close to that port, and walked closer. “Tet, the image is remarkably detailed. Much sharper than what your ship puts on telescopic shots. At this range and expansion, the mountains would have a bit of jitter from the camera mount sensing vibration. This is rock steady.”
“The zoom has lost some of the view from the flanks of the mountain peak just off center to the left. I want to try something.” He tapped just to the left of center, and the image shifted its center of zoom the same way, showing the left flank of the same peak. However, his fingertip had struck a tiny bit lower that time, and the zoom was a bit less.
Mirikami thought he had it figured out. “I think we have rather fat fingers for fine control of the image. The Krall would be using a talon tip.”
Dillon stepped to another console, pulled out a data pad stylus, and selected the view screen to his front with a tap near the bottom that pulled the view way in, the horizon far distant, as if the focal point were just outside the ship. Then pushed the stylus up for a bit to watch the image zoom out, and as he went right, so did the center of the view, in a smooth drift.
Feeling adventurous despite Mirikami’s warning he tapped a small red dot in the center of the ring on his console. Miniatures of the scenes at all of the view screens, including the zoomed view Mirikami had selected on his front screen, appeared in Dillon’s ring of rectangles. Mirikami noticed the sudden glow of Dillon’s ring of rectangles on the console next to him, and asked what he had done.
Dillon was about to tap the red dot again to show him, when Mirikami’s hand grabbed his. “Hold off on that cowboy. What if the first tap primed one of the four heavy lasers, and it is set to fire on the center of your image on the next tap? We don’t know what these controls mean yet. Look at what is in the center of your front screen.”
“Oh…” was all he said. The top level of the dome filled over half of the screen.
“That probably is not how the lasers are fired, but we can’t be sure yet. The Krall are not big on safety features you know. I probably should not have activated my own screen.”
Reynolds, having heard the byplay, had a few questions. “You guys with the markings can activate things here, but what about your kids? They are going to have to carry the water, so to speak, when you fight the Krall. They can’t even open doors on this bus, or use any of the equipment.”
“He has a point Uncle Tet. Ethan and I have been wondering the same thing.” Carson and Ethan had talked privately, as the inspection worked its way up the ship’s levels.
Aldry had nodded at Mirikami, as Reynolds spoke, letting him know there was still a solution.
Mirikami said, “We have four Katusha’s that never found their way back into the Krall’s hands. Those are the Olt’kitapi devices, which gave us these tattoos. The control buttons are not very elaborate, so we will experiment on animals first to learn what to do. Did anyone ever learn how to use them to make tattoos?” He looked towards Aldry, who had given a Katusha to the physicists for study.
Before she said anything, Jake took that as a question for him. “Sir, I have video recordings of the Krall adjusting the Katusha’s when they administered the tattoos on the Flight of Fancy, and other setting for tattoos administered in the dome, later.”
When Mirikami used the now universally understood head tilt, as he listened to his transducer, everyone waited for what he’d learned from the AI.
“Jake saw the process multiple times on the Fancy, and again for the combat awards from Telour, after our final Testing Day victory. Those recordings can guide us.”
Carson had something to add. “Uncle Tet, I don’t want to sound snobbish, but I’d rather not have an empty oval like a Krall novice wears.”
Most of the tattoos the former captives wore were empty ovals, except for those with points awarded for kills.
Ethan chimed in. “Me either. Carson and I talked on the way up here, and we think we’re better than that.”
“You want one with kill dots inside?” Mirikami would be disappointed if they wanted to keep score, as the Krall did.
“No way.” Carson answered. “We think we’re a worthy enemy. We would prefer a solid black mark, exactly like yours.”
Mirikami was embarrassed, as well as flattered. “I don’t know if Jake recorded that setting, we were standing outside on the tarmac when I received that.”
“I have two clear recordings of that setting Sir,” came the prompt answer from Jake.
Head tilt again was the cue that Jake had told him something, so they eagerly waited for his reply. “Jake has the settings recorded. If you have to bear some enemy marking to use this enemy ship, I suppose that one is the least objectionable.”
“I’ll be proud to wear that mark.” Ethan answered quickly.
He was echoed by Carson. “It’s not objectionable to me at all. All the people I love and admire the most have some form or other of a tattoo. It’s been a symbol for us kids of the people that truly claimed Koban as their home. ”
Mirikami nodded his assent. “Well, at least now they do serve a useful purpose. No one should sail on this ship without one.”
“Excuse me.” Noreen’s voice rang out, having reached a decision. “As we started the inspection I was offered an opportunity to name this ship. I am considering one that will be appropriate, and derived from what I just heard these boys say. I knew I could never get my former Captain to agree to let me put his name on this ship…, so I won’t try to do that.” She said the last hurriedly, before Mirikami could object.
She swept her arms wide and smiled. “I have decided on a name for this ship.” She paused for effect. “You are on the Bridge of the Mark of Koban!”
****
“How’s the arm Sarge?” Speaking around a bite of gazelle meat, Thad had seen him massaging the new limb again. It had been over four months since he’d accepted the clone gene mods at the same time he’d regrown his left arm.
“It’s a strange feeling, Colonel, and itches sometimes. It’s stronger than my right arm now, and I can use my left better than my right now, even though I’m a born righty. Doing the clone mods as the new one regrew appears to have rewired my brain for hand preference, but not for everything else. I can draw a gun faster and shoot straighter left handed, but I find I tend to shift my head over so I can use my right eye for sighting if I use the left hand only.”
“We never had a limb regrowth before, let alone with simultaneous gene mods, so that might be normal. Did you ask Aldry or Rafe about that?”
“Why? I ain’t gonna let ‘em cut off the other arm and try again.”
Thad noticed he slipped into his rural Poldark mode of speech most of the time lately. It appeared to be almost instinctive rather than deliberate. As soon as he was in a position where somebody might expect him to assume greater responsibility, he started sounding uneducated. He was content to train the TGs in guerilla tactics, as a prelude
to Greeves setting up commando style training. Reynolds was teaching how to improvise booby traps, and methods of drawing Krall forces into ambushes. He was perfectly willing to work with a squad of youngsters, serving as their advisor, but he had outright refused to accept a spot on “Colonel” Greeves new organizational staff.
Thad appreciated his help in training, although his real value would be when they infiltrated to land on Poldark. Sarge’s general knowledge of Poldark’s new planetary defenses, and possible safe areas to hide the Krall made ship would be useful. However, his recent access to the updated military communications systems and to his former chain of command was more important. Thad needed to make contact with his old friend, Major General Nabarone.
With Nabarone’s help, they hoped they could get material and equipment, and professional instructors for their TGs. Nabarone might even have some Intel as to where the Krall manufacturing worlds were located. If the PU Navy would furnish ships, he could go looking for factory worlds, and start shutting down the Krall war machine from the back door.
“Thad, I heard Maggi say some of the former Spacer crews are getting excited, now that they have all eight OBO liners moved from Kratos to closer orbits.”
OBO was a reference to Orbital Based Only passenger liners, and the eight large liners that the Krall had left circling Koban’s moon belonged to that class. The large moon finally had its own name, voted on from a lengthy list of mythical creatures the citizens of Prime City and Hub City considered. They named the moon Kratos, a spirit of strength, power, and sovereign rule, which were descriptions that appealed to the Kobani.
Mirikami had used the maiden flight of the Mark of Koban to take repair crews to their old ships, where they restarted fusion bottles, and used their thrusters to move them to low Koban orbits.
“They’re like kids in a candy shop after nearly twenty years planet bound. With the thruster fuel they still have aboard the big ships, our hand-full of bigger shuttles can reach them and refuel for round trips. One or two refueled shuttles can then carry qualified pilots with them to each liner. They can check out the shuttle’s in all their hangers, and fly them back.”
The OBOs each normally held five passenger shuttles, with capacity ranging between forty to sixty passengers each. With those additional craft, the planet’s population would have considerably more mobility as it established new communities. Some of the small new towns would be established near Koban’s rich natural resources, which they needed for new industry.
The Raven was still the only passenger ship that they could try to restore to Jump capability. However, it would require more than a year of work to complete, in the absence of a repair dock, proper tools, and factory spares.
“Koban will have an expanding economy soon. I wish we had an expectation of more population, besides more of our own children. You and the sixteen people you arrived with were welcome Sarge, but having willing immigrants would be nice for a change.”
“You don’t think people will want to come here?”
“No. People can’t live here comfortably without the clone mods. The gravity and animals are too much to cope with without them. Even so, clone mods aside, they would be stuck in compounds like this one if they didn’t have the TGs. They, and the future trueborn TTG children they will have, will be the ones that can live outside of walls and domes.
“Besides, we can’t openly let the people in Human Space know how the TGs became so powerful. They have to believe it’s due to living in high gravity, and the use of booster drugs. Even us SGs are subject to the death penalty, by old Hub laws, because of the clone mods. The TGs go far beyond even that transgression, with alien genes. I don’t actually believe that the Planetary Union would pursue that a severe penalty for us here on Koban, not in light of our kid’s ability to beat Krall warriors one on one. Self-interest and survival will stay their hand. However, do you see them welcoming us into the Union, and permitting additional colonization here, which requires gene mods to succeed?
“We are going to be the freak step-cousins they have to tolerate, but only as long as they need us. I think we have to keep our location confidential even from the Hub government. Some of our gene mod opposition in Hub City wants to go home, and I sympathize. However, they are not personally at risk if our genetic modifications are discovered, and some of them would reveal all of our secrets, and where Koban is located.”
“Is that why only modified humans are joining our mission?”
“That’s a major factor, but not the more practical reason. We need to use the higher capabilities of a Krall built ship to accelerate and maneuver. Those of us with only clone mods are already limiting factors for the inertial stresses we can allow inside the Mark of Koban. The TGs could endure acceleration stresses that would incapacitate even a Krall. An unmodified human might not survive the attempt to simply land on Poldark, as we evade the planet’s defenses you told us about.”
“That defense ain’t stopped landing Clanships very often, but they do kill one occasionally. I’d hate to have the good guys kill me when all I did was come home to help.”
He posed a question about their stealth capability. “The Krall you have prisoner told you how to turn on the stealth crystals on the ship’s skin. At least the cats pulled that information from their minds. Why doesn’t their stealth work in the atmosphere, so we can land safe? Our AIs were able spot Krall ships two different ways after they hit air. How they did that wasn’t exactly advertised.”
“An explanation from one of our science people seems obvious in hindsight Sarge. Fast moving invisible large objects disturb the air, and you can detect the turbulence by radar and lidar, even if they can’t reflect beams off the object itself. Except for gamma rays at our White Out, we will be invisible until we enter atmosphere, where we need to zigzag to avoid predictability after that.”
“And about the ‘hole’ theory I heard somebody describe Colonel? Tracker systems that see a hole in the sky? I took mechanical engineering, not electronics. Nevertheless, do you think semiconductor hole current flow applies to a ship’s flight? Want to make a bet on how it works?”
“Damn, Sarge, my degree was military history, also not electronics. Besides, you frigging poker sandbagger, I know you are the one who told our physicist, Sam Wilkins, about the entertainment laser systems, which Poldark put over the big cities. They fill the sky with rapidly scanning beams, and Clanships either absorb or deflect the light beams from their skin, rather than reflect them directly back to the source. Sam thinks an AI is able to detect where the beams didn’t continue, and that looks like a hole in coverage.”
“Oh. Then it ain’t like electric current flow in semiconductors. That had me confused when I offered to bet you.”
Thad wasn’t buying that at all. “Right. Sure it did. Speaking of sandbagging, I wish your mental confusion extended to poker, pal. I’m tired of paying you off in favors. If we create our own currency, instead of using barter, I’ll still stay broke paying you and Mirikami everything I earn.”
Reynolds smirked. “If you can’t afford to lose, you can’t afford to play poker with us. Besides, I like how you polished my new rhinolo hide boots last week. You must have been a sharp looking trooper in your day. You have a real spit shine skill.”
“Ha. I’ll have you polishing my platinum belt buckle after our next game.”
“Ha, back at you. Your pants will fall around your ankles after I win your entire belt.”
Marlyn, who had quietly walked into the dining room looking for her husband, said snidely, “What you boys do alone together, with pants down, is your business. However, I needed to speak to my husband.”
“Huh? Oh, hi Angel. How’d you find us?” He and Sarge had eaten lunch aboard the Flight of Fancy.
“I simply followed the odor of testosterone and the sound of bragging.”
Thad shook his head with a grin and shrugged. “What’s up?”
“The interrogation of the two Krall followed a different ta
ct today. Noreen and I finally decided that the Krall really don’t know the coordinates of their production worlds, and they don’t have names for them any more than their ships or domes have names. However, they have to be able to navigate to them, and we learned previously that they have spectacularly detailed visual and auditory memory.”
“That was how they learn alien languages quickly, and memorized maps and battle zones, right?”
“We think so, but Noreen thought perhaps that their long range navigation used the same sort of memory as learning maps.”
“I don’t know Hon. Map reading skill sure doesn’t seem related to Tachyon Space navigation. Don’t computers need the mathematical certainty of the coordinates, to calculate how to get to those points in a Jump Hole? Even the alien designed computers the Krall ships use must need that. How do they enter the location coordinates if they don’t know what they are? They can’t tell the computer what they remember of light years of empty space, can they?”
“Noreen and I think the Olt’kitapi purposely designed these ships for use by the Krall, and would have taken their mental processes into consideration. Noreen considered how these brilliant benefactors would have solved this problem for their client race, to help them move around the galaxy with the skill set they possess. Captain Mirikami managed to get operational data from our two prisoners, which revealed how to call up star charts, and an immensely detailed map of the entire galaxy. It appears to be a dynamic map, because it has a representation of a pulsar created in a supernova less than fifty years ago. It must update without the Krall’s help.
“The map can be zoomed and shifted, much like the Bridge view screen displays are controlled, using talon taps and drags. Noreen had Jake update his own galactic map by recording the images from the Mark of Koban. By zooming in on Koban on the alien galactic map’s Orion Spur, and making that a center point of a smaller star chart, she included only Poldark and perhaps a thousand light years of Krall space. Noreen then had a detailed star map to put on one of our own screens.
Koban: The Mark of Koban Page 59
