Koban: The Mark of Koban (17 page)

Striding directly into the cool water of the creek up to his
knees, he waded to the side of a large boulder that water flowed around lazily.
On the downstream side, he plunged his arms into the cool clear water to his
elbows, and felt for the capstone he had placed over his hidden gold stash. It
was in place, and a brief strain to lift it proved that his accumulated wealth
was safe.

He restored the capstone, and looked around carefully.
Except for his footprints, no one had been on the creek bank today, so the
demon had not found his gold nor even looked near here. He carefully used leafy
underbrush to wipe away his own footsteps leading into and away from the creek.
Then he examined his damaged cabin.

The demon had apparently taken nothing, the only destruction
had been the hole it had made smashing in the wall, large enough for it to
enter and make its exit. The door was latched as he had left it yesterday,
before he started his camping trip to prospect for a new gold vein.

Goran was now burning with curiosity about what the demon
had been doing at the mine entrance. It certainly hadn’t had time to dig, and
even if it had done so, he knew there was almost nothing left to extract from
the played out gold vein.

He had forgotten about the small spacecraft itself, and
looked around to see if he could spot its hiding place. He solved that minor
mystery when he pulled away the brush from the mine opening. He assumed the
little ship had used radar to see through his camouflage bushes.

The slender craft was inside the ten foot by ten foot
opening, with the dusty floor swept clear as the thrusters that supported the
little ship blasted it away. It had been set down close to the right side wall,
presumably so the demon could squeeze out of an opening along the left side.
The reflective surface was now a flat dull gray, smooth and warm to the touch.

Running his hand along the surface as he walked into the tunnel,
he felt no breaks, just a minor depression in the middle, but the light was dim.
He dug into his tool pouch and withdrew the small intense hand light he always
carried. Setting it for a wider beam, he walked another forty feet to a side
alcove. His small supply of explosives and code activated electronic detonators
were untouched.

He pondered why the demon had hidden its ship. It was
clearly coming back or it wouldn’t have gone to the trouble. It had left in
hurry but when it returned, it might have more time to search.

“It might have time to find and take my gold.” He talked to
himself, as he often did. “It can’t carry it away if it doesn’t have this for
an escape,” he reasoned. The mine was no longer productive anyway, and he
intended to abandon it soon. Why not use it to prevent the demon from using its
ship to run off at all, with or without his gold.

Now in a rush, he started carrying his explosives and
detonators to the front of the mineshaft. The little ship was about twenty-five
feet from the opening, and there was a high bluff over the mouth of the mine.
That tonnage would seal the ship away from even a demon, he thought.

In thirty minutes, he had placed enough explosives to bring
the roof down, and he hoped much of the bluff above. Perhaps it would crush the
damned ship. His plan was to collect his gold, and set off the explosives as he
headed out of the canyon in the opposite direction from
Kragujevac. No way did he want to run into a
returning demon.

In another
thirty minutes, he’d gathered some supplies that he’d not carried to the other
side of the ridge for prospecting, and had a backpack stuffed with his modest
hoard of gold. It was time to move on if demons haunted this claim. There were
many other promising places on
Bollovstic
to prospect. Looking back towards his labors of several
hard years, he pressed the detonator pack without any regrets.

He saw the dust and rock billow out of the mouth of the mine
before he heard the booming echoes in the canyon. For just a moment, he thought
the bluff would stand, but then it started to sag and crumble as it collapsed
and obscured the mine opening under a thousand cubic yards of rock.

Shifting his pack, he started for the next town over from
Bollovstic, called Sombor. A smaller town, but it had an assay office where he
could sell his gold. He wouldn’t be wealthy but he could live well for years
off what he had saved.

Later, after he learned about the Krall and saw they
looked
like demons, he would make a great deal more money out of the Planetary Union,
for leading them to an intact buried single ship, and its advanced tachyon
Traps and drive.

****

The other human that observed a single ship land also saw the
warrior leave it in a section of forest. He soon heard firing and screams as it
entered the outskirts of his own hamlet. Jovan knew about the Krall, and that
this one was killing people he knew. They always departed after killing as many
people as they could in the time they gave themselves. Jovan wanted to see if
he could find a usable weapon in the alien ship, or at least disable the ship
so the alien could not escape to do this again to another city.

Jovan found the shallow depression of the hatch release,
which the warrior had not bothered to encode. It had no respect for the
“animals” it was here to kill, thinking they were too stupid to find the ship,
or enter it if they did. He was wrong on both points; one did find it and get
inside. Unfortunately, this human didn’t comprehend the Krall characters on the
countdown timer on the console. He also didn’t know how to stop a fusion bottle’s
loss of containment even if he had recognized the threat.

The explosion leveled the large grove of trees, and the
sound and location of the small mushroom shaped cloud informed the Krall of his
loss of transportation. He was so upset that he would be required to explain
this mistake to Parkoda, that he killed far fewer humans than he had planned.
It was a tough day all around.

Merki
missed her pride, and her lost mate. When Bolar died, the result of a poisoned
rhinolo horn’s scratch, she nearly joined him trying to divert the bull’s
attention. Her pride mates interceded to save her from a futile sacrifice,
reminding her with mind touches that she needed to protect the two cubs they
all knew she was expecting.

Her pride mates drew the aggressive bull closer to the
rhinolo cow he was trying to protect. The pride had crippled and brought the
cow down and it was only a matter of time until the rhinolo herd would have to
leave the female to her fate. However, this gave Merki a final chance to race
in and touch neck frills, to exchange mind pictures with the steadily weakening
and doomed Bolar.

She shared with him, for the last time, the impressions of
the barely aware cubs in her womb, her first. Bolar cautioned her to protect
their cubs from other males, who would want to mate with Merki when he was
gone. They would not want to feed and protect cubs that were not their own, and
another unmated female would have to take them.

Bolar passed her an image that he knew that the mere scratch
had doomed him moments after it happened. He had smelled the waxy yellow
substance on the minor wound when he licked a trickle of blood away. The pride
had pursued the cow well into open flat grassland, with no shelter for Bolar
before temporary paralysis rendered him helpless.

Just as he accepted the rhinolo cow’s death to benefit the
pride, he accepted his impending death from one or more of the avenging bulls
of the herd. He had been careless and complacent as he toyed foolishly with an
old bull, drawing it away so some pride mate could finish suffocating the cow
with a jaw grip on its throat.

Because the herd was far from any forest, where the
dangerous bushes usually grew, he had not bothered to sniff the bull’s nose horns
for the aromatic wax traces from the shrub’s thorns. Clearly, the bull had
recently found such a bush, and wiped its horns on the thorns, collecting the waxy
neurotoxin. It was too early in the spring awakening for ripe fruit on a bush,
so the old experienced bull had done it exactly for this purpose, to coat its
horn. It was recently enough that the substance had not yet degraded.
Belatedly, Bolar granted the bull respect, it had done its best to defend its
herd.

His awareness would not diminish as he lost the ability to
control his body, although the flaming pain as the poison started to spread
through his body was impossible to ignore. He let Merki know that death would
be a release from the terrible pain. He also knew that despite her youth, she
had shared mind pictures from pride elders of the agony he would soon feel,
passed down from those that had eventually recovered from similar wounds by
reaching shelter. There would be no gradual recovery from the paralysis for
Bolar.

As the bull turned back to exact its revenge, he urged Merki
to leave him, to protect his cubs. That was the last mind image she carried
away as their telepathic organ, their fleshy neck frills, broke contact. That
imperative had led her to follow a course of isolation, away from her pride and
new suitors. This had indirectly led her into her present trap.

Without the pride or a mate to work with her, it was
difficult to catch the fleet small prey she could easily kill by herself. She
was fast and strong; they were slightly faster even in short pursuits when she
hit her burst of speed. The small prey was nimble and changed direction often.
Larger prey was harder to take down alone, and difficult to ambush on the plains
because their higher positioned eyes saw her crouching in the grass farther
away.

Migrating rhinolo were plentiful, but healthy ones were unobtainable
by a lone ripper. Fortunately, smaller prey often grazed along parallel tracks,
adjacent to migrating herds of rhinolo. It was the smaller prey that Merki had
been seeking today. There were rhinolo passing close to her hidden position, but
she had spotted a group of gazelles, browsing near the enclosed area claimed by
the red ones.

Merki approached the wall of the red one’s territory to take
advantage of the cliff wall around it, to reduce the directions her agile prey
could use to flee. The pride had witnessed that the red prey, with their
dangerous stinging sticks, had departed into the sky in many of their not-life
carriers. A new slower prey replaced the red ones. These were much less
dangerous, even with remote killing stinging sticks and not-life flying things.
They were very slow.

She had stalked the small herd of gazelles to the cliff
wall. She was ravenous, and her twins were sending her distracting mental
hunger sensations. They had no visual images yet, but they knew hunger and
other basic feelings.

The prey group was moving closer to the cliff wall, where,
if she charged them, they would have only two directions to flee from her. Left
or right, and some would choose one or the other direction. Merki had only to
commit to one or the other side to have an increased chance of getting her
claws and jaws on one animal that had too few other directions to leap.

The gazelles happened to be grazing near one of the cliff
openings. These openings the red ones sometimes used when their not-live
carriers were the type that stayed only on the ground. If Merki could force one
or more of her prey to touch the not-live deadly vines that guarded the
openings, she might achieve more than a single kill. That would be enough food
to last her beyond the birth of her cubs, due within weeks.

When she determined the pursuit angle was at optimum, she
could force them to split when she rushed them, then she would leap to one side
to try to capture one of the prey directly as they scattered. Now it looked as
if there could be a chance to force a second gazelle to touch the deadly gray
not-live vines, providing a potential additional kill.

Finally, the dozen gazelles were close enough to the cliff
and the protected opening. Merki surged to her feet from her belly crawl and
charged slightly from the left of the prey, forcing more of them to choose to
turn to her right, as anticipated. She immediately adjusted her next leap to
her right, ready to sink her claws or fangs into one of the prey forced to
remain parallel to the cliff. Either that or they might contact the deadly
straight gray vines that killed from the slightest touch.

Instead, the eight prey that had moved to her right suddenly
turned directly towards the cliff opening, away from her rush. They might all
die if they touched the vines.

To her surprise, there was an opening in the vines. It had
not been apparent from her approach from the left. All eight gazelles attempted
to turn to pass through the narrow opening through the cliff. Several of the
prey animals made contact with the vines, or with the stiff grey trees that
held them off the ground. They did not die!

One of them stumbled, first as if afflicted by the touch,
but it quickly struggled to its feet and continued through the opening,
limping. Not sure why the vines no longer had a killing effect, Merki’s hunger
drove her through after them, staying well clear of the sides of the opening.
She pursued the injured looking prey, which although still fleet footed, was
unable to leap as high or switch course as quickly as normal for its kind.
Merki was confident she could run it down.

A short pursuit ensued, and she was able to strike at its
rear legs as it tried to turn, too slowly, and knocked its rear legs from under
the animal. It was over, as the ripper swarmed onto the fallen bleating prey,
claws holding it firmly. She sank her massive jaws into its throat, simultaneously
piercing blood vessels with her canines, and crushing closed the
trachea
. The touch of her neck frill transmitted the
thrilling sense of the prey’s terror, as its life slowly faded over the next
few minutes.