Koban: The Mark of Koban (12 page)

“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 no 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.”

“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.”