Koban: The Mark of Koban (19 page)

Instead of contacting the head, where her people knew lay
the source of images, she lowered her own head to permit the frill to contact only
the outstretched front limb. She found the images were still present, but that
degree of filtering made them weaker and less painful. They were slipping away
as her life also slipped away. Merki absorbed images that were confusing and
strange to her, lacking any context for most of them.

Others images were not unlike those experienced from pride
mates that opened their minds, not deliberately shielding. Merki sensed Images of
this creatures own pride mates, some whom she loved or liked, and some she did
not like. Again, a fleeting image of the red ones and a strong fear of them for
her entire pride came through, unmistakable.  This creature’s people hated them
as predators that killed wantonly, for pleasure. The same sense of
wrongness
the pride images conveyed of the red ones. The pride shared a similar morality
with these slow ones.

The mind faded as Merki’s senses told her the heart had
finally stilled. Confused, she backed away a short distance. It wasn’t easy to
consider this female as prey now. Oddly, that impression did not fully extend
to her dead mate. He had tried to defend against the attack, and use the
stinging stick to kill her. Yet that wasn’t why he felt more like a prey animal,
and the female did not. It was possibly because there had been no mental
connection with him.

A sense of hunger reminded her of why she had stalked these
creatures. Her responsibility to her cubs overrode her reluctance. She
regretted having made frill contact with the female, because of the confusing
and conflicting sensations she now experienced. The slow ones no longer seemed
like normal prey to Merki. However, her cubs needed the nourishment the meat
would indirectly provide. This was not a wanton kill, and wasting the meat
would make it one.

Placing the carcasses almost parallel, heads touching, Merki
used a method she’d seen in mental pictures. She opened her massive jaws wide,
gripping both of the skulls, with left and right canines puncturing the tops
and bottoms of each head. An awkward wide stance as she dragged them away made
her slow, but the weight was minor for her.

After reaching a medium height tree some distance from the
slow one’s den, Merki placed one carcass there, well off the ground. Now, with
one carcass, she could move faster to reach her birthing den on a rocky hillock
quite some distance away. She then raced back to retrieve the second kill. She
had made sure there were no subterranean insects near her new den, to steal her
store of meat. Now she would feed and await the delivery of her cubs.

She had no idea how she was going to keep producing the
protein rich milk for them unless she continued to prey on the slow ones. It
was the only way to keep the cubs alive until she could escape their territory,
although stalking them had lost its attraction.

The mind images from the dying female and its feelings were
disturbing to Merki, because they conflicted with her life experiences, what
she had learned. Her cubs had learned nothing directly from the outside world
yet, receiving only what their mother provided. Now they had these foreign
images.

General Nabarone finally had his new Planetary Union command
complete. Ten thousand troops, the pick of the last six training cycles from TB-85,
twenty five thousand recruits per cycle, the best soldiers out of one hundred
fifty thousand, processed through an ever tougher training program as the Krall
maintained their murderous pressure on the Hub government.

“Mike, you followed through for me. My boys in the training cadre
spotted the best prospects, and the signing bonus you provided kept many of
them here. Frankly, the raid on Bollovstic provided as much motivation as the
cash. These are motivated young people, ready to fight. Finally out from behind
mother’s apron.”

Governor Boldovic was annoyed. “Hank, your loose tongue and
anti fem sentiments will get your ass fired, and I personally don’t care for
your
attitude any more than I like the anti-male sentiment we’ve endured from the
Ladies in charge.”

“They wouldn’t be giving this much of a role to the men if
they could do it themselves, Mike and you know it. We are entering another
reversal in culture.”

“Hank, women make up almost one quarter of your new crack
troops, and if humanity dies, the Ladies go with us. Men are not sacrificial
lambs in this war; we all face the same fate. If you disrespect any of your own
troops, I’ll replace you myself.”

Nabarone paused in thought a moment. “You’re right. You are
right and I apologize, Mike. I’ve had that shoulder chip so long it’s hard to
knock it off myself. I’ve seen how my female troops perform. They are smart,
fast, and good at improvising, and all of them became good shots. With the
powered armor, they can match up against any man except for height and weight.
None of us can match a Krall.”

Boldovic waved his acceptance of the apology. He accepted
his friend’s sincerity because Hank seldom felt the need to apologize, and his
pause just now was his typical reaction when he reconsidered and admitted he
was wrong.  

“Anyway Hank, I asked you here to tell you that the orbital
arms factory will be Jumped in-system sometime this week, and the news of
that
impending arrival was delivered by the Union cargo carrier that bought your
twenty new combat shuttles and pilots.”

“Hot Damn! Now I can start to disburse my troops to protect
more cities. But shuttles are far cheaper than tanks, why only twenty? I
requested a hundred.”

Boldovic laughed out loud. “That was fast even for you Hank.
From ‘hot damn’ to looking the gift horse in the mouth in ten seconds. Did you
also ask for trained pilots?”

“Ah, no. I assumed we could scrounge those up on Poldark,
and train them,” he admitted.

“Well you now have fast, well equipped and heavily armed
shuttles, and two Warrant Officers to operate each of them.”

“Warrants?” He asked suspiciously. “Navy?”

“Navy trained, because they have the only school, but
they’re Army, and in your chain of command and have to answer to you.”

“OK. Except with only twenty fast transports, we aren’t
going to be as mobile as I was planning. The Krall attacks on colonies Bollovstic,
New Dublin, and the one deeper into the New Colony, Brussels, all followed the
rapid, brief, and dispersed strikes I predicted. Thirty-two single ships,
except for the additional eight on Brussels.

 “You recall that I wanted to distribute our ten thousand
troops widely, to move one hundred defenders into one hundred population
centers in less than an hour. How many can each of these shuttles carry?”

“The communication I read said fifty troopers plus two
medics, and all of their equipment.”

“Hell, that’s only ten percent of my force that’s mobile
Mike. We need to get our troops where the bastards are killing people.”

“Hank, it goes against my grain, but if we sell our new factory
weapons to people that want them, even at lower than fair prices, that income
can be used to buy civil shuttles locally to eventually meet your needs. That’s
really a hidden tax, but they won’t resent it as much when they get guns.

“In the meantime, if you spread the other nine thousand
troops among the larger population centers, we have ground transportation to
move them to the outskirts. The Krall have so far landed outside of towns and
cities, and then raided into the suburbs. We can protect most of the people
most of the time, to paraphrase.”

Nabarone grumbled and mangled his own old saying. “If it was
their
‘ox being screwed’ I suspect the Hub would respond to the pressure
a lot faster.”

“You’re mixing up your metaphor’s Hank.”

“No I’m not.”

****

Actually, the Hub government did feel
political
pressure.
However, the outer worlds felt the pain and loss of their citizens and
security. Bollovstic was the first to suffer, when thirty-two Krall single
ships landed randomly on the planet, and those warriors killed at least nine
thousand defenseless men, women, and children before departing. The Krall’s
only losses were two single ships, one destroyed by its anti-tamper device, and
a miner collapsed a mineshaft on the other.

That Krall warrior had concealed his ship inside a gold
mine, of all places. Literally, and metaphorically as well, as it turned out.
The crafty miner made a hundred times more money from selling the ship’s
location to the Planetary Union than he had ever made in five years of gold
mining.

The Krall had needed to retrieve those two stranded warriors
with a shuttle, for a net loss of zero Krall lives. That was probably a null
genetic improvement mission from the Krall’s standpoint, if they intended to
gain more than simply the terror effect.

****

Admiral Anderfem stood next to the captured Krall single
ship. “Doctor Magnus, I have to say that this doesn’t
look
like a leap
in technology. It’s not very impressive looking, about five and a half feet high
and…, what? Thirty feet long?”

“Close Admiral, thirty four and a half feet by five feet
nine, ignoring some fractions. That flat matte grey finish isn’t flashy either.
However, this is one hot little ship, with a tough hull, with active and
reactive skin.”

“Can you turn it on for me yet? I heard that we’ve been
unable to switch on Krall equipment.”

“No Mam, we have not managed to activate their systems. It
just doesn’t respond to us when we try to power it up. However, that did not
prevent us from studying its design, and figuring out what it does and how it
does things. Much as we might study a Tri-vid set we couldn’t activate, and
learn what it did and how it might work. We know some gee whiz stuff, but don’t
understand everything.”

“I’ve been hearing rumors, why don’t you just list the gee
whiz features you know about, even if you don’t understand them yet. Assume I
haven’t heard any stories. I’ll have to brief the President later, and neither one
of us were physics majors, so go easy.”

“Yes Mam. Well, consider that dull unimpressive looking hull.
It’s a nearly diamond hard carbon crystal matrix material that we are trying to
understand at a quantum level. We know that when a laser, maser, or plasma
strikes it, the surface instantly becomes reflective at that specific frequency,
or for radar, it can also become absorbent. It can vary that reflectivity for
multiple beams of different frequencies at different places on the hull,
meaning it is a localized effect, not a global change. Otherwise, we could hit
it with multiple beams of differing frequencies at different spots and one
might burn through if the entire hull was set to reflect at a single frequency.
There is a feedback mechanism that takes the impinging radiation and…” Anderfem
was tapping him on the arm, interrupting his thoughts.

“Go easy on me. You
do
remember that request, made
just one minute ago Doctor?” She was smiling.

“Oh. Sorry, I’ve hardly been able to get this gem out of my
mind. OK, onward to the next gee whiz it is.” He walked over to four
protrusions on the hull, spaced evenly around the front circumference. There were
four matching protrusions at the rear.

“These are the Krall equivalent of Trap field emitters. Not
enough to form a full spherical enclosure for a Jump Hole, and in fact they
appear to exist only to trap low level tachyons for powering the Normal Space
drive and inertial compensation system.” He patted the hull almost reverently.

“The Trap based Normal Space drive system is one that we
can’t match in a ship this small. This one would out power a naval cruiser.

“That’s why we can’t get away from them when we run, we’ve
observed them accelerate or decelerate at just over two hundred gravities
external. Our best inertial compensation capability would allow whoever was
inside to experience forty-four gravities, assuming we could package it this
small. And if we also didn’t care about them being crushed into a mush patty.”
He glanced at her quickly to see if his wisecrack had crossed the line.
Anderfem just nodded.

“Even allowing for Krall physical superiority, this is
beyond certainty a fatal level of g’s for them as well. Forcing us to conclude
that they found a means that exceeds even our theoretical physics concerning
what we can do with gravity and inertia via feedback from Tachyon Space.”

Anderfem had a grim expression. “Then we can’t even match
them in our
understanding
of fundamental physics and math?”

“That was our fear at first Admiral, despite our impression
that the Krall, on average, are less intelligent than the average human. Both
species could have exceptionally brilliant members, but our exceptional
geniuses should be smarter than theirs should be.”

Magnus tilted his head and cocked an eyebrow with a twinkle
in his eye. Anderfem sensed an
Ah Ha
moment was coming. She was right,
but it took more than a moment to get it out of the good Doctor.

 “We reanalyzed the Gribble’s Nook raid. We noted the times
of arrival and clustering of the Krall fleet into the Oort cloud of that system
by the later arrival of the White Out gamma rays. Then we examined the arrival
times of the other sixteen ships from that fleet at the planet. Exactly two
thousand forty eight ships had White Outs in the Oort cloud, then exactly
sixteen White Outs at the Nook. The sixteen raid ships Jumped inwards at
Tachyon Space superluminal velocity, and naturally arrived long before the
original Oort cloud White Out gamma rays did, because those gammas traveled
only at the speed of light.”

Before Anderfem could complain about him not “taking it
easy” again, he raised his hand to forestall her.