Koban: The Mark of Koban (59 page)

Maggi resumed control of the meeting. “Let’s
get down to what we all came here to find out. How is it that two of our first
fifty candidates have adapted sooner to the new nervous system than the other
forty-eight? What is different about them, or what did they do differently?”

Matt said something that offered the second clue.
“If I could have practiced with one of the rippers, I think I could have gotten
faster on the hand slap game. Carson and Ethan sure got faster that way.”

Ethan explained how it had happened with him. “At
first I could never beat Kit, her paws always got me. Except after a time I
could sense sooner when she was about to move, and react earlier. Do you think
just that bit of practice would help?”

Dillon, with his knowledge of both the gene
mods and the ripper nervous system, had a different idea. “I doubt if it’s
simply practice. I’m sure most of the kids practiced those moves because it’s
fun to amaze us slow pokes. However, I think Carson’s and Ethan’s faster progress
is connected to frill contact with rippers. Frilling may have stimulated early maturity
in the newly forming super conductor nerve receptors. Both boys have certainly
had frequent exposure to frilling, which may account for accelerated nerve
receptor maturation. I suggest we try this for a week with some other
candidates. Some from this group and a couple from the next class, and see if
we can measure an increased rate of progress.”

Marlyn made an offer as well. “Kit’s cubs from
two years ago, Kayla and Kally, are returning from a visit to their father’s
pride this week. Her newest cubs weaned last month, and if Kit will permit the
exposure, I’ll see if we can get her to let some more kids spend time with the
babies. Kopper and Kandy are too young to play the hand slap game, but that
would expose at more TG’s to increased ripper mental contact. If it’s not just the
game, it could be the mental exercise of using the new nervous system, which
frilling may encourage.”

The simple experiment started with a random
drawing, done by Jake, who announced names of six TG kids that would start frilling
with the older cats today and with the new cubs if they received Kit’s approval.

After the meeting, Tet asked Dillon, Thad, and
their boys to go with him to the firing range. He wanted to test them a bit more
than watching a quick draw and hand slap games.

When they entered, Dillon said laughing, “Not
sure what you’re up to, Tet, but I’ll not get into a shooting competition with
these two. I’m proud of them, but I had my butt handed to me once already.”

“Aw, come on Dad. I’ve never beaten you at
anything physical, and now I can. Let me try.”

“Perhaps later son. I really do want to see
what you can do.  First, I’d like to know what Uncle Tet has on his mind.”

“I’ll get to that soon Dillon. I want them to
show off a bit first. Look down range to the farthest targets, the one in each
lane at a thousand feet. The Krall are notoriously accurate shots. If you are
faster, but can’t kill one before he kills you, your speed is useless. Reload
your pistols and use eight of the target rounds on the table. I’m not
interested in a fast draw now. I want to see you hit the bull’s eye, single
shots.”

Both boys half-filled their clips with the
frangible practice rounds, and took a bead on the far distant targets. The
familiar Whoosh as the rocket propelled rounds left the guns sounded almost
simultaneously. Both hits were nearly dead center of the bull’s eye.

“Very good. I hear you’ve been practicing here
since you started feeling better.”

He got an affirmative from both.

“OK. Now both of you do a quick draw, Carson
you go first, then Ethan. I’m not as interested in which is faster, but in
speed combined with accuracy. GO!”

Carson’s hand and arm were a streak of motion
as he drew and fired as the final word was still on Mirikami’s lips. Another
hit in the bull’s eye. Ethan went next, with no discernible difference that
Mirikami could see. However, Ethan sounded irritated with himself. “Darn.”

“What?” Thad asked him.

“I didn’t loosen the gun in the holster first,
and it stuck slightly as I pulled, and it slowed me down.”

“Yea, I saw that. But you were closer to
center than I was.” Carson apparently had the only set of eyes that could see
that slight holster movement in that split second.

“So far so good.” Tet responded.

“What do you mean? We both hit center slow,
and with a faster draw.” Carson was a bit defensive.

“Thad, on your Testing Day you had a Krall
running towards you and your team, dodging and rolling you said, as three of
you fired at him, and I presume he started from farther away than these targets.
How accurate did he seem to you?”

“Extremely. We were ducking as soon as we
fired our guns, and his slugs were smacking the wall behind or the rock in
front of us where our heads had just been. He hit within almost as tight a
cluster as each of your shots just were. My friend was at least as far away as
that target when he took a slug through his right eye, while the Krall had just
lost a forearm to an explosive shell, and did a tuck and roll as he had fired.”

“I think you see what I’m leading up to now,
don’t you lads? I don’t want a tuck and roll, but I’d like you to go fifty feet
up along the line here, and run back this way, firing as you go, spreading your
shots out so we can see them hit individually. Fire the last round as you pass
us.”

Ethan went first, and with blazing speed, he
covered the fifty feet in well under whatever the world record for that split
of a hundred yard dash was, and put all six of his remaining shots in the
bull’s eye of his target. Despite the instruction to space out the shots, they struck
so fast that the dust from the successive rounds obscured Tet’s view.

“OK, Carson you go.”

It was a near duplicate of Ethan’s test, but
the last two shots clearly puffed on Ethan’s bull’s eye, the rest were on
Carson’s target. It had sounded fast, but something was different to Tet’s ear.
Was that too many shots?

Ethan confirmed that. “Clever trick, jackass.
I didn’t see you add to your clip.” Both boys had loaded eight rounds at first,
and had fired twice each before the last running accuracy test. Unseen, Carson
had slipped two more rounds to his clip, and used those on Ethan’s target as a
bit of one-ups-man ship.

Looking at the targets, there were no dark
spots to show either had missed the two-inch bull’s eye center at all. They had
both filled their spots, and hadn’t missed them even in a sprint.

Carson was ready for a personal challenge now.
“Hey, Dad. Ready to match that?” A grin plastered his face, remarkably lopsided
like his father’s matching grin.

Mirikami held a hand up to forestall the fun,
ready to explain why he brought them here. “Boys, I’m not interested in seeing
you beat your fathers at anything tonight. However, a goal we set ourselves
when the Krall left us here to die was to do more than simply survive on Koban.
We wanted to make it our home. Collectively we have already done that, with the
gene mods your father’s and I have now. After we made peace with the rippers
and wolfbats, we began to leave the domes and change this world to suit us. Only
that isn’t enough.

“I don’t want you boys to ever forget that
humanity’s greatest enemy promised to return here. If they do that, within your
lifetime, or even your grandchildren’s life time, they will kill every single
human on this planet.”

Ethan wasn’t ready to accept that. “Uncle Tet,
you said it yourself, or rather Jake said it. We Third gens are twice as fast
as they are, and the next mods will improve those that follow us even more.  We’re
probably already stronger than they are, and I always heard that we outsmarted them
often. We’ll not sit back and let them walk over us. We’ll fight.”

Tet looked at them, then at their fathers, and
saw the understanding in the men’s eyes. “Ethan, I’ll let your Dad explain the
cold hard numbers involved. Why you would lose that fight.”

He knew Thad’s militia background and training
had taught him basic strategy and tactics, and the man was intelligent. He knew
their limitations on Koban, and those extending considerably into the future.

Thad began with a hypothetical question. “Ethan,
if you and Carson were forced to go up against all of the other human beings on
this planet, in a fight to the death, would you win?”

“Uh, why would just the two of us have to
fight? We’d lose for sure.”

“The two of you against the twenty three
thousand surviving people that arrived here as captives, plus the nearly three
thousand children they bore in the last seventeen years. That is
better odds
than all of us combined would have against the entire race of Krall. We are a
single, severely under populated, undeveloped world. It would be no contest.
These creatures have depopulated hundreds or thousands of worlds, destroying billions
or trillions of alien lives, usually fighting against more advanced cultures
and science than humanity currently has. They are presumably doing that to our
worlds in Human Space now. We do not want them coming here.”

Carson was confused. “If this is all a waste,
then except for the thrill we get from being stronger and faster, what use is
this big project to make us better than the Krall?”

Mirikami had his answer ready. “We don’t plan
to simply sit here and wait for them. I promised that we would go looking for
them. We will do that, take the fight to them, and not give away our home
world’s location.

“That may seem impossible, since they
definitely know where Koban is located. However, we don’t have to let them know
that’s where
we
are from. They expected us all to die within the first
year after they departed. Humans, coming from Koban? That will be an impossible
concept for those arrogant bastards to consider. Ethan, your dad has talked
with me, and others, about what we’ll need to do.”

“Dad, they will still outnumber us if we go
looking for them.” Ethan looked to his father for explanation. He didn’t even
ask how they intended to get off Koban, and Jump out of this system.

One detail at a time,
Mirikami thought, letting Thad explain their strategy.

“Son, we will initially need support from
other human worlds, where there is the production and technology we require.
Our enemy builds
nothing
that they use for war themselves. By that, I
mean the Krall themselves do not. Slave races do all of the actual production,
on established base worlds inside the space they now control. We have learned some
of this from them, some from the slave race they left behind here, the Raspani.
We have pieced together smatterings of oral histories these remnants of a great
race still retain, and hand down to the next generations.”

Carson asked, “The rest of humanity, with all
their population, their productivity and technology can’t beat them, how can we
help beat them?”

Mirikami told him. “Their weakness is their
dependence on slaves to make their Clanships, weapons, habitat domes,
essentially everything that they appear to use, down to uniforms and weapons
belts. That is the
heart
of their capability to make unending war, how
they devote every member of the race to fighting and breeding for better
warriors.

“We have to
kill
that war making capability
with a symbolic spear thrust to its heart. The machinery of war the Krall have been
running for thousands of years will grind to a halt without replacement parts.”

Carson demonstrated his grasp of the problem.
“You tell us we are too few to even defend our own home. How can that same
group of us, here on Koban, make any difference if a trillion other humans
can’t?”

“That spear I mentioned? It needs a very
sharp, very strong point. Observing you kids tonight, I’m finally seeing the
shape of that weapon.  You, and those like you, will form that spear point,
striking into the heart of the Krall’s strength. That is something no ordinary
human could hope to do, but it
is
something a Kobani human can do.”

****

“Aren’t
most things
clearer in hind
sight?” Rafe asked. “We wanted the new TGs to focus on the faster nervous
system’s input and output. Mental contact with rippers, which have no other
option than to use their own high-speed network, obviously guide and stimulate
that process in our kids. It didn’t even take a week to see considerable
differences in the six test subjects. They almost match coordination and
reaction speeds with Carson and Ethan now. We have a solution.”

Tet agreed, but pulled at his lower lip. “We’re
faced with a bottleneck. It’s an imposition on Kobalt, Kit, Kayla and Kally, to
send three hundred TGs to frill with them every day, with a few more kids turning
sixteen each month. We have to respect their independence. Besides, Kobalt and
Kit are not getting younger. The lifetime of a wild ripper is apparently about
twenty years. I think the better care and feeding our cats receive will
increase that lifespan, but we need to plan for another generation of human and
ripper interaction, until we have contact telepathy for ourselves.