Koban: The Mark of Koban (24 page)

Reddening, Dillon told her defensively, “Rafe has measured our
reaction times and says the forewarning really does increase our response time
slightly. Our brain starts the return signal to our muscles a couple hundredths
of a second sooner than it normally would have.”

Grinning like the mischievous sprite the small woman
resembled, she turned to Noreen, “Is he just as premature in bed, dear? Only
scientific curiosity, of course.”

Noreen, a product of their sexually open society wasn’t the
least discomfited by the question. Nevertheless, she knew that her lover would
be sensitive to her reply.

“It appears to sustain a longer climax for him,” she
answered almost clinically. “It lasts nearly as long as mine.” She smiled
warmly at Dillon, who appeared grateful for her support. After all, he did
splatter cereal on her clothes.

“So, we can mark that down as a positive change, I suppose.”
Maggi acted as if the answer were a datum of scientific interest.

Thad, sitting on the other side of the table had more than
scientific curiosity. “Really, Dillon?”

“Yes, it’s true, but it wasn’t exactly something I felt like
sharing with everyone.” He sounded mildly irritated.

“Are you kidding me? I’ve had some offers I put off until I
knew what effects this mod would have on us. I damn well won’t put them off any
longer.”

“I think we’ve found our motivation for gaining more male
volunteers,” Maggi concluded, with the same grin as before. “Rafe might call
this the
climax
of his career.”

Everyone groaned and shook their heads.

Before the morning meal ended, Mirikami Linked in to speak
with Dillon and Thad. “Good Morning. Are you two still at breakfast?” he asked.

Dillon answered first, since Thad had a mouthful. “We are,
Tet. Maggi and Noreen are with us.” He had tilted his head in the typical
indication to others that he was in a Link.

“Jake, include the others in the Link.” Mirikami requested.

“Do you mean just those others at the table with Doctor Martin
and Colonel Greeves, Sir, or everyone on the ship?”

With a sigh, “Just those at the table, Jake.”

Mirikami immediately told them why he had Linked. “Stewart MacDougal
has asked for our assistance. Hub City needs hunter help. They had two fatal
attacks last week at twilight that they think were by a ripper, or possibly a
desert panther. Our other two hunter teams are out on hunts, since you two have
been out of business for the last two weeks having your nerves jangled. Would
you be feeling up for a trip to Hub City?”

“Who is this MacDougal character?” asked Thad. “Those twits
get rid of Cahill already?”

“MacDougal says he is Cahill’s new Lieutenant Governor. He
didn’t say if she appointed him or if they had an election. Cahill apparently
dismissed her other aids after they all thanked us profusely for saving them
from the wolfbat attack on our last visit.

“MacDougal said she refused to call us for help, but they
don’t have our level of outside surveillance from the derelict ships we have parked
here, and none of them feel particularly competent with the guns we gave them. They
have shuttles and good pilots from some of the ships they arrived on, but they
haven’t spotted the animal from the air. MacDougal thinks the predator is a recent
arrival, and with nearly fifty five hundred square miles to check, they don’t
know what to do.”

“They have the enclosed Raspani herd area, has the animal
killed any of those?” asked Thad. “That would be a natural food source for a
ripper, and cut down on the search area.”

“I asked MacDougal, but the Hub City people don’t go into
the enclosure often, and its low ceiling makes a shuttle search impossible. Two
of our scientists went there a couple of weeks ago to study the Raspani. I
spoke with Vince Naguma and Sarah Bradley after talking to MacDougal, but they
haven’t seen any signs of predator activity.

“The missing man and woman appear to have been killed close
to the dome. They were armed, but their pistols were both found on the ground
unfired, near blood trails, and the bodies were gone.”

Dillon had a question. “How would a ripper or desert panther
get inside the compound? The electric fence is still active on the top of the
wall I take it?”

“The voltage monitors we set up for them indicate so,” answered
Mirikami. “But MacDougal claims that someone spotted a few gazelles grazing near
their dome a few days ago, and those can’t get
over
a thirty foot wall
even if the power went off for a time. I suspect one of the thirty-two double
gates is, or perhaps
was
open, and the power bypassed. As you know, when
someone manually opens an outer gate, the power diverts around that short piece
of fencing to avoid accidental electrocution. Then they need to rearm the outer
gate when it’s closed. The electric fence on the walls stay powered
continuously when someone bypasses a gate.

“I’m thinking we could use the heat sensing and night vision
capability of your armor’s helmet visors, plus the semiautomatic 50 caliber
rifles, which we will
not
give to them. I’ll also send more surveillance
equipment for their dome. I plan to go along, and if forced to do so I’ll run
interference with Cahill’s supporters, and take along any of you that want to
visit our Raspani researchers. At least that will be a good pretext to take so many
Prime City folks with me.”

Greeves was ready. “Tet, I want to go outside and play. I’m
tired of being cooped up and prodded and poked to see if I’m any crazier than I
was before the Kobani mods.”

Maggi chimed in, “Thad does seem fine and adjusting well,
though Dillon is probably just as nuts as before the last mods.”

“Maggi always has a kind word for me Tet,” answered Dillon,
with a grin the Captain couldn’t see. “I agree with Thad. I’m ready to field
test any detrimental effects the nerve mods may have had.” Then he committed
his faux pas.

“Who will we get to fly us over, since…” he bit off his
words. How stupid could he be, with Noreen sitting right next to him?
Continuing, he tried to cover the slip, “Since I don’t know the shuttle
qualified pilots of the other crews very well.”

If anything, his hesitation focused everyone’s attention on
the loss of Roni Jorl’sn two weeks ago; in the whiteraptor attack on the Flight
of Fancy’s only remaining shuttle. There were other shuttles to use, but they
needed a pilot. Noreen had taken Roni’s death very personally, and neither she
nor Mirikami were forthcoming about everything that had happened.

All Dillon knew was that a large raptor had Roni’s ravaged
body in its jaws when he and Thad arrived in another shuttle. Thad had killed
it with a .50 Cal semiautomatic rifle from a rear hatch, and two other raptors
ran away. A forth, smaller raptor, was already on the ground mortally wounded, apparently
by Roni and Noreen, since Mirikami had been briefly unconscious and never fired
a shot. A later necropsy found Roni’s left forearm in the upper gullet of the
smaller raptor. It must have been very traumatic for Noreen to witness, and he
wouldn’t ask her for details.

Noreen patted Dillon’s arm in reassurance. “I can fly them
there, Tet. Could you ask the Rimmer’s Dream to loan us their larger shuttle?”

“I’ll check with Marlyn Rodriguez. She still calls herself
First Officer after the ripper attack killed Captain Johnfem, but she’s taken
on the duties of Captain for her crew and the Rimmer’s Dream passengers. If not
their shuttle, I’ll find another. Gather up what you need for the trip, and I
think we can be on our way by noon.”

****

Stepping into the secure lab, Aldry found the man she had
been seeking.  “Morning Rafe. I saw your lab lit up late last night. Has your
team managed to locate the genes the whiteraptors use for growing those carbon
fiber claws and nano tube bone reinforcements?”

“Morning Aldry.” He was red eyed from the all-night analysis.
“I think we’ve identified the primary genes, but we’re looking for the source
of some proteins that help merge the nano tubes into bone growth. The huge toe claws
were straightforward genes to identify, but we don’t know of an application
yet, since we don’t want to put black claws on humans. However, raptor bone
growth is a mixture of calcium, minerals, and long carbon nano tubes that make
them incredibly resilient and difficult to break.”

He shrugged, and added, “At first we didn’t really know why
they needed bones that strong, even with the 1.5 g’s of stress they undergo. It
didn’t seem they needed that for running. Antelope and gazelles, which are fast
and perform impressive jumps, don’t have the nanotube reinforcement, nor do the
heavier rhinolo. Then we thought about the stress that raptor bones undergo for
those high leaps on moosetodons, to slash down at their prey.

“The large female would have an Earth weight of a ton and a
half, or equivalent to over four thousand five hundred pounds on Koban. Tet
says the big one was at least forty feet off the ground when she caught the
shuttle by the landing skids.”

Aldry thought she had a counter for that hypothesis, “Didn’t
it use the moosetodon carcass and wall as step-ups to get that high? It didn’t
simply jump forty feet straight up using only its muscles.”

“Ah ha,” Rafe grinned, “then it needed to survive
landing
from that high without breaking a leg or straining a leg muscle in case it
couldn’t hold on to the prey. We didn’t think it would act that reckless unless
it was sure it could do so safely. Testing proved the bones and claws could
take the landing strain easily, but a calculation from our dynamic model indicated
that their leg muscles shouldn’t be able to absorb the landing without tearing.
And the beast
did
get forty feet high, which also suggested more
strength than we would have expected in this gravity, even using the available
leverage.”

“You’re stringing me along, Rafe,” she prodded him gently in
the arm. “You probably already know how it could do that. Give.” She ordered
with a knowing smile.

He displayed a sheepish grin. “We don’t have that gene
complex fully isolated yet,” Rafe acknowledged, “because we didn’t start out
looking for it. However, we discovered sheets of tough carbon fiber woven into
the muscle tissue on the necropsy. It is there on other Koban animals as well, at
least in the muscle tissue. Everyone missed it initially because we didn’t think
to look for that. We didn’t
expect
anything like that.

Aldry looked a bit surprised. “I’ve heard of prosthetics for
amputees that couldn’t regenerate a limb, which use carbon fiber as synthetic
muscle. It was an idea taken from the powered military armor developers, from
around the time of the Clone Wars.”

“You’re right. Only here it’s natural. My team believes it
explains why Koban muscle mass and size is no greater than that of similar
weight Earth bred animals. Evolution solved the bulkiness problem here by
making the muscles stronger, without investing so much mass and resources into
building them up to exaggerated sizes.”

Anticipating the answer, she asked, “So what use do you
think you can make of these genes, once you have them all identified?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing at all for normal
control
humans, I think. Not even for people such as you, me, Dillon and Thad, with or
without the Koban nerve mods. We, basically, are standard model humans with
minor enhancements, compared to where we
want
to go. We
might
not
be able to use these mods for our children, which will be born with the new nervous
systems that react faster, to take better advantage of the enhanced human
muscles they will have at birth.

“We’ll have to wait until we have some of the second-generation
kids to decide if we can enhance them with new Koban muscles and bones. I’m
staying on the conservative side of adding risky new features. If we produce
any life threatening genetic failures, our list of willing participants will
dry up, and we will eventually lose to the Krall.

“However, the
third
generation will certainly be
receptive to these new genes, especially if we can incorporate them at the
fetal stage, before the bones and muscles form. I’m
not
ruling out a
bone and muscle retrofit for second-generation children, before they reach maturity.
We need to verify all of the genes required, and the insert points for them.
Then we have to prove that not only are they heritable, but compatible with our
Normal control groups for reproduction. Reproducing would be proof that they were
merely greatly enhanced humans. That would save us a full generation in
achieving a higher level of Kobani adaptation.”

Aldry fully understood the implications. “Wow. We had better
keep this within the Inner Circle, and share with the gene volunteers of course.
The more Koban adapted we become, the more Cahill and her supporters will
oppose us, until we can prove that those children can breed true with Normals…”
She paused just a moment then added, “Who the hell am I kidding? Ana Cahill
will oppose us at every step because she wasn’t in on the project from the
start, and has polarized herself into the ‘Loyal and Fanatical Opposition’ so
strongly that she can never reverse course.”

“Well, I’m already certain,” Rafe concluded, “from the
discussion you, Maggi and I have had previously, this is the
only
route
to making humans physically superior to the Krall. With the nerve enhancements,
we would be faster than they are only until they bred in the ability to grow
organic superconducting nerves of their own. Telour told us the Krall were
within perhaps fifty breeding cycles of doing that. They lay eggs; their cycles
must pass faster than our generations of live births.

“However, our
present
capability to enhance human
muscle and bone structure isn’t going to make us any stronger than the Krall. We
also don’t have the organ redundancy, or the rapid self-healing they exhibit
and limb regeneration. We do have medical technology to replace organs and
regrow limbs, which is nearly as good if you actually survive a fight. If a
Koban adapted human is faster, smarter, and also much
stronger
than
Krall warriors, then our only concern will be how badly we, the Kobani, are outnumbered.”