Koban: The Mark of Koban

by Stephen W Bennett

  As Ethan had expected, it waited a moment to allow a pursuer to start after their wounded prey, and then took blind shots around a corner to catch them. He knew the two shots in the right side back were hardly going to stop a Krall. This was a very cagey fighter, not at all like the rhinolo-in-a-gift-shop typical warrior, constantly charging at the enemy. This one was using deception, ambush, and cover, as if it had experience with those human tactics. Suddenly Ethan heard additional pistol shots from the direction where Jorl should be coming, and heard the sizzle of a plasma bolt from that same area. His help had arrived.

  It was time to resume the more vital mission. With a second shooter as a distraction, Ethan went to the closest stairwell. He leaped straight up to the next deck without pushing off an intermediate step. He still nearly reached the ceiling of that next level, but he had not wanted to expose himself to this observant Krall for that long, by taking a second step for a higher leap. He continued up stairs now at a reckless pace, gun ready but not making an effort to clear a deck. He needed to reach the command deck as quickly as possible, in case a warning had been given.

  He saw no other Krall, and finally reached the highest few decks where the curvature of the hull was gradually causing the staircases to converge, reducing in number to only four. Not slowing, he pulled his second pistol and erupted onto the command deck. He instantly killed the one black uniformed Krall that had promptly leaped over the consoles at him. He realized afterwards that the warrior’s only armament was his plasma rifle, disassembled for cleaning. He’d been completely unaware that anything was amiss on the Clanship. The ship was theirs.

  The blue uniformed Krall below must not have been wearing a com set after all. In hindsight, why would it need one, when it was eating on its own ship, parked by its own dome, on a Krall base the humans wouldn’t dare attack from space, let alone land and conduct a raid.

  Thank you Dorbo clan he thought. We’ll put this to good use.

  ****

  Alyson and Yil both sprang onto the command deck of their ship, and severely wounded the brown suited K’Tal they found using the star charts. It had managed to draw its pistol despite multiple wounds to hands and both arms, before Yil shot it in the jaw, and Alyson shot its pistol. They had been more concerned with avoiding damage to the command deck equipment than capturing the pilot alive, but they managed to do both. They administered the Death Lime toxin, which would have her immobile in five minutes.

  Yil raced back down the stairs, to let the other boarder’s know they had control of at least one ship. Except for the surprise of running into an octet having a practice session, the Dorbo clan had lived up to its reputation of being the Krall equivalent of slackers. Three TG’s per ship had proven perfectly adequate to capture the two lightly crewed Clanships.

  Alyson considered this fact. A veritable army of Normals would not have been enough. Hell, they couldn’t even have opened the bottom doors, she thought.

  ****

  Still avoiding any radio broadcasts that could be identified as of human origin, Mirikami and the Chief kept an eye on the view screens centered on the two open portals of the captured Clanships. They were waiting for the double thumbs up signal from each ship, indicating that Noreen and Marlyn were ready to launch. They had already had the signal of a successful capture of each. They would signal him and not each other, because they couldn’t see each other’s hatches. When both were ready, Mirikami would close his two hatches as a signal for them to launch in the planned order. Noreen would lift first, followed promptly by Marlyn’s ship, and Mirikami would be right behind.

  Reynolds had told them that after the full invasions had started on human worlds, this sort of sequential Krall launch string had been a common practice on Bollovstic and Poldark. Recon drones had also seen it used here on K1, except the times when they launched in a mad scramble to meet the PU Navy on those two attacks. Clanship pilots, as independent as any Krall, liked to display their flight skills and distained the automatic control system the ships were capable of using. Multiple launch collisions had happened during the attacks on K1, when Clanships came up in massed liftoffs. The Navy’s assumption was that flying by the seat of your red-skinned butt was acceptable for Krall pilots in those cases. However, they usually staggered their lift offs, or spread them over wider ramp areas when it wasn’t an emergency.

  As badly as Mirikami wanted to get into space, he didn’t want a crowd following them, or even to attract any attention. He didn’t know squat about the Krall tracking capability of ships after they Jumped. He assumed a colder tail made the task harder, so they would leave in a manner that looked normal, before splitting up in three directions.

  Noreen and Marlyn obviously put their intensive practice on the Mark of Koban to good use. They nearly tied in signaling and closing their hatches. Mirikami taped the two controls to shut his own hatches, as the signal for Noreen to lift as soon as she was ready. He made a ship wide broadcast. “We are launching within minutes. This will be Krall level acceleration, so secure now. Captain Renaldo will lift first, then Captain Greeves. You should be able to hear them through the hull. I will be thirty seconds or less behind the second launch. As soon as we reach a safe distance out of atmosphere, we will Jump. There will be no announcement. The TG1s that plan to test your Tap ability ship to ship, be ready, but know that we will not all three enter the event horizons simultaneously. Mirikami Out.”

  He heard the first rumble as he cut off. Glancing at the view screen still centered on the base of Noreen’s ship, he was in time to see it lift out of view, in a wash of flame and billowing exhaust. On two other screens covering the local ramp area, he saw it lift rapidly, the nose of Marlyn’s ship visible off to one side.

  In no more than ten or twelve seconds, he saw the flames erupt below the second ship. Five seconds later, he initiated his own main thrusters, and stabilizing side thrusters, and applied power. He was off as well, the three ships no more than fifteen seconds apart on lift off. In minutes, they had all cleared atmosphere.

  It was exhilarating to realize they now had three elements of a Kobani Naval Strike Force. The lead ship disappeared as it Jumped, followed quickly by the second ship.

  Mirikami lingered a bit longer, looking back at the colony the Krall had murdered to make their base. I’ll return and help exterminate this infestation, he thought. We will return this world to human control. Then the Mark of Koban winked into Tachyon Space.

  23. Risk Factors and Three Missions

  A day later, after two intermediate jumps, the Mark of Koban emerged in a protoplanetary system that had never formed planets. It had a thick, wide dusty belt of constantly colliding planetesimals that would coalesce, collide, shatter, and do it again in a few hundred thousand or a million years. This thinly old protoplanetary disk had never been more than a debris field.

  It was too dirty there to simply White Out inside the plane of that dusty fragmented orbiting mess. However, it had the advantage that there were no planets or moons for potential observers, or a pursuer to use for concealment. The rendezvous was to be the clear region well above the disk, on the galactic north side, directly above the tilted star’s axis at about one AU distance.

  Mirikami started an active scan as soon as Jakob confirmed they were where he had intended to be. A more specific spot was impossible to select from six light years away, without a planet or other reference body, but it would be easy to detect any gamma rays from a White Out. The other ships could navigate to them when they arrived.

  “Sir, I have detected a White Out that must have preceded our arrival by several minutes.”

  Jakob highlighted the location on a screen, and the characteristics proved it had the mass of a Clanship. At over three light minutes distance it wasn’t in their lap, but before they let that that ship get near, they needed to have communication to confirm the identity. For them it was received almost instantly. Noreen had sent her identification codes almost as soon as she emerged. Mirikami sent his code
and waited. She would get his confirmation signal just after her sensors picked up his gamma rays, after a three-minute wait. She was the first to arrive it appeared.

  Ten minutes later, they had exchanged other greetings, but the range was too great for a convenient question and answer talk, not when it took six minutes for the reply to arrive. However, that time lag would shrink rapidly soon.

  “Sir, there is a second White Out, Clanship mass.”

  The new arrival’s position was higher above the plane than the Mark, but a little closer to them. Mirikami repeated his identification code.

  Marlyn’s ID code arrived less than a minute after her reentry gamma rays, and all Mirikami needed to do was wait for them to close the distance, which would not take long. The Krall computers had the ability to let you zoom in on star maps to navigate, or use nearby artificial things visually. Then execute a short Jump to reach them quickly. The protocol they had decided on was to let the other two ships come to the Mark of Koban.

  In less than five minutes, after short Jumps, they were in a cozy three-ship formation, less than a mile apart. The ring of view screens could also become video communications stations between ships. Mirikami set Noreen’s Bridge on one screen and Marlyn’s to the right of that. Then he walked away from his console and up to the images.

  There was nothing like a camera they could find that captured the images, it was as if the whole screen surface captured the image and repeated it on the other ship. In appearance, it was as if you were looking through an invisible window into the other Bridge. There were no reflections on your side, either of you, or of lighted objects behind you. The effect was so perfect that you were tempted to reach through and touch the other person.

  They already knew that the two Krall captives on Koban had no idea how it worked, and didn’t care. They knew how to use them, and that was enough for them. Once, Mirikami had produced an image of his own bridge on a screen, looking in as if from outside. He walked up to confront himself in person. Leaning in close he saw his own skin pores, as his image scrunched its face to see them, less than an inch away. It was awkward to do, because it was not your mirror image, something everyone had used their entire lives. If you raised your right hand, the image raised its right hand, as if you could reach across your body and shake your own hand coming at you.

  Mirikami had Carson, Sarge, and the Chief with him. From time to time, some of the TGs came up on the Bridge and watched quietly in the background, sitting on the benches.

  On the second Bridge with Noreen, was Dillon, Alyson, and Macy Gundarfem, a Drive Rat performing the Chief’s duties over there, in an Engine Room that didn’t seem to need anyone at all. There were some background observers as well, all standing since there were no benches.

  Marlyn stood on her own Bridge with Thad, Ethan, and John Yin-Lee, another of the Chief’s Drive Rats. There were several kneeling TG’s in the background, and they had a grip on a seated, limp looking Krall in a blue uniform. They were holding him up, not still, since he obviously had received the paralyzing drug. He bore visible gunshot wounds on the chest and arms that had sealed and scabbed already. The Krall’s jaw looked funny and seemed to be tied in place, as if broken.

  On Noreen’s ship, Dillon moved to the side, almost out of the picture for Mirikami as he stepped close to the screen/window into Marlyn’s Bridge. He leaned back again, looking puzzled.

  “Ethan, have you Mind Tapped that Translator behind you? I’m almost certain we know him from Koban.” That put a startled look on everyone’s face, except Ethan.

  “I have Uncle Dillon. You do know him, only I don’t think until now that he recognized any one of the SGs with us. However, he has already figured out where all of us must have come from.”

  Dillon nodded. “The broken jaw had me looking closer, but I think that is Dorkda. He was from Maldo clan, not Dorbo. Jakob, I think our ship is in range for transducer use. Can you confirm that for me?”

  Dillon tilted his head as he listened to the AI, then nodded and repeated what he heard. “Jakob says it indeed looks like Dorkda, and Maldo is a finger clan that split from Dorbo, so they are naturally allied clans. That may be why he was at their dome. Dorkda will know quite a lot about us and about Captain Mirikami in particular. I’m sure if you ask, he might even recall an incident with me. He nearly decided to kill me once, because I offended his sensitive nature with an innocent question about why they were leaving Koban.”

  Noreen leaned close and looked also, and then pulled back, shrugging. “I don’t remember him as well as you do Hon, he wasn’t facing me down, ready to tear out my heart. I was terrified he was going kill you.”

  Mirikami had an uneasy conclusion to offer. “We SGs are a risk on missions were we will be seen by Krall that may have been to Koban and might know us. Ethan, I need you to determine how well he can recognize or remember any of us, and if that’s how he knows we are from Koban.”

  “I’ll feed him images of you and all the SGs with us, to see if he knows your faces, although I think most of us look alike to them. However, that isn’t how he guessed. He can smell traces of Koban on us, and on our clothes. He was a more careful fighter than I’ve ever heard from any of the stories I’ve you tell us. He hid, tried to shoot me from concealment, changed hiding places and used covering fire when he heard my rifle power pack activate, and acted rather like a human does in his own defense and method of attack.”

  “Well, pick his brain son. We want as much as we can learn from him, and any other prisoners. What else have you gotten that seems important?”

  “Not from him, but from us. We TG1s have some strange results to report, from when the three ships did their multiple jumps. We had flashes of personal messages each time, which we had agreed to try.”

  “How is that different than what you already told us, when we jumped into Human Space, and then to K1?”

  “Sir, all of us were on board the Mark of Koban in those cases, moving together, and each of us was at least nearby. This time we had flashes of thoughts between TG1s on different ships. As best we can tell, we exchanged the images in real time when the senders and the receivers were far apart. In fact, we were extremely far apart. It was nearly instantaneous connections, across light years of distance.”

  Mirikami was well beyond intrigued this time. “This mental flash, as you describe it, happens both on entry and exit from Tachyon Space?”

  The three TG1s by the view screens each looked towards their TG1 companions standing in their respective backgrounds for confirmation, saw agreement from them, and answered in the affirmative.

  Carson said, “It isn’t full-fledged long communication, but a surprising amount of information is conveyed in the part of a second it takes to enter the Jump Hole, or to emerge.”

  Mirikami, as was typical, used his thumb and a knuckle of the index finder to pull at his lower lip for a moment. “Noreen did you and Marlyn make any arrangement to coordinate your Jump timings with each other? I did not, and definitely was last to leave K1, for a nine light year Jump.”

  Noreen shook her head. “Marlyn and I knew where each of us were going, and the approximate time in the Hole, but I don’t know how we could deliberately match entry and exits, not without going to the exact same destination at the exact same time, as with a fleet formation.”

  Mirikami agreed. “The first Jumps you each made, in different directions, were several light years shorter than mine was, but not exactly equal to each other. That means we probably never were entering or leaving Tachyon Space at exactly the same time. The contents of the transmitted messages must have been hanging around somewhere, in Tachyon Space I suppose, until the recipient was entering or leaving an Event Horizon and able to receive.”

  “Tet,” Marlyn wondered, “I was pretty good in the Special Relativity part of FTL and Jump Hole explanations, but how would a thought, no matter how insubstantial, travel almost instantly over light years?”

  He had a question too. “It doesn’t happ
en once we are fully rotated into the Hole, or after the White Out, is that right?” He looked to each of the TG1s close to him. They all agreed that it hadn’t worked that way.

  “We will try some testing before we leave this empty system. This capability may give us some sort of long-range communication, and do it far faster than we can travel. We don’t have to be light years apart to experience a time lag that we can measure. It is obviously happening only as we shift into or out of Tachyon Space. We can make more short Jumps right around here.”

  “How do you think it works?” Sarge asked, from behind Mirikami.

  Mirikami shrugged. “None of us are scientists, and we left those guys at home. However, one possibility I’m thinking of is the ‘spooky action at a distance’ thing that quantum entanglement can produce. That’s where quantum entangled photons separate, and no matter how far apart they fly, a measurement of a complementary property of one, instantly determines the same property of the other photon at any distance away. However, that property does not allow actual communication, which would violate the laws of our universe, with its velocity of light limit on information transfer.”

  “Tachyon Space is out of this Universe,” Noreen reminded him of the obvious, unnecessarily.

  “True, but establishing quantum entanglement is not easy to produce outside of a lab or in special equipment. I don’t think these contact telepathy genes and superconducting nerves would be able to do that. It could be another method altogether. Tachyons are odd beasts to us in our Universe. It takes enormous energy to slow a near infinite velocity low energy tachyon particle to very close to light speed. That complements the enormous energy needed in our Universe to accelerate a low energy particle to near light speed.