Koban: The Mark of Koban (82 page)

Mirikami had
used the maiden flight of the Mark of Koban to take repair crews to their old
ships, where they restarted fusion bottles, and used their thrusters to move
them to low Koban orbits.

“They’re
like kids in a candy shop after nearly twenty years planet bound. With the thruster
fuel they still have aboard the big ships, our hand-full of bigger shuttles can
reach them and refuel for round trips. One or two refueled shuttles can then carry
qualified pilots with them to each liner. They can check out the shuttle’s in
all their hangers, and fly them back.”

The OBOs each
normally held five passenger shuttles, with capacity ranging between forty to
sixty passengers each. With those additional craft, the planet’s population
would have considerably more mobility as it established new communities. Some
of the small new towns would be established near Koban’s rich natural resources,
which they needed for new industry.

The Raven
was still the only passenger ship that they could try to restore to Jump
capability. However, it would require more than a year of work to complete, in
the absence of a repair dock, proper tools, and factory spares.

“Koban
will have an expanding economy soon. I wish we had an expectation of more
population, besides more of our own children. You and the sixteen people you
arrived with were welcome Sarge, but having willing immigrants would be nice
for a change.”

“You don’t
think people will want to come here?”

“No. People
can’t live here comfortably without the clone mods. The gravity and animals are
too much to cope with without them. Even so, clone mods aside, they would be
stuck in compounds like this one if they didn’t have the TGs. They, and the future
trueborn TTG children they will have, will be the ones that can live outside of
walls and domes.   

“Besides,
we can’t openly let the people in Human Space know how the TGs became so
powerful. They have to believe it’s due to living in high gravity, and the use
of booster drugs. Even us SGs are subject to the death penalty, by old Hub
laws, because of the clone mods. The TGs go far beyond even that transgression,
with alien genes. I don’t actually believe that the Planetary Union would
pursue that a severe penalty for us here on Koban, not in light of our kid’s
ability to beat Krall warriors one on one. Self-interest and survival will stay
their hand. However, do you see them welcoming us into the Union, and
permitting additional colonization here, which requires gene mods to succeed?

“We are
going to be the freak step-cousins they have to tolerate, but only as long as they
need us. I think we have to keep our location confidential even from the Hub
government. Some of our gene mod opposition in Hub City wants to go home, and I
sympathize. However, they are not personally at risk if our genetic modifications
are discovered, and some of them
would
reveal all of our secrets, and where
Koban is located.”

“Is that
why only modified humans are joining our mission?”

“That’s a
major factor, but not the more practical reason. We need to use the higher
capabilities of a Krall built ship to accelerate and maneuver. Those of us with
only clone mods are already limiting factors for the inertial stresses we can allow
inside the Mark of Koban. The TGs could endure acceleration stresses that would
incapacitate even a Krall. An unmodified human might not survive the attempt to
simply land on Poldark, as we evade the planet’s defenses you told us about.”

“That defense
ain’t stopped landing Clanships very often, but they do kill one occasionally.
I’d hate to have the good guys kill me when all I did was come home to help.”

He posed a
question about their stealth capability. “The Krall you have prisoner told you
how to turn on the stealth crystals on the ship’s skin. At least the cats
pulled that information from their minds. Why doesn’t their stealth work in the
atmosphere, so we can land safe? Our AIs were able spot Krall ships two different
ways after they hit air. How they did that wasn’t exactly advertised.”

“An
explanation from one of our science people seems obvious in hindsight Sarge.
Fast moving invisible large objects disturb the air, and you can detect the
turbulence by radar and lidar, even if they can’t reflect beams off the object
itself. Except for gamma rays at our White Out, we will be invisible until we enter
atmosphere, where we need to zigzag to avoid predictability after that.”

“And about
the ‘hole’ theory I heard somebody describe Colonel? Tracker systems that see a
hole in the sky? I took mechanical engineering, not electronics. Nevertheless,
do you think semiconductor hole current flow applies to a ship’s flight? Want
to make a bet on how it works?”

“Damn,
Sarge, my degree was military history, also not electronics. Besides, you
frigging poker sandbagger, I know you are the one who told our physicist, Sam Wilkins,
about the entertainment laser systems, which Poldark put over the big cities.
They fill the sky with rapidly scanning beams, and Clanships either absorb or
deflect the light beams from their skin, rather than reflect them directly back
to the source. Sam thinks an AI is able to detect where the beams didn’t
continue, and that looks like a hole in coverage.”

“Oh. Then
it ain’t like electric current flow in semiconductors. That had me confused
when I offered to bet you.”

Thad
wasn’t buying that at all. “Right. Sure it did. Speaking of sandbagging, I wish
your mental confusion extended to poker, pal. I’m tired of paying you off in favors.
If we create our own currency, instead of using barter, I’ll still stay broke
paying you and Mirikami everything I earn.”

Reynolds
smirked. “If you can’t afford to lose, you can’t afford to play poker with us. Besides,
I
like
how you polished my new rhinolo hide boots last week. You must
have been a sharp looking trooper in your day. You have a real spit shine skill.”

“Ha. I’ll
have
you
polishing my platinum belt buckle after our next game.”

“Ha, back
at you. Your pants will fall around your ankles after I win your entire belt.”

Marlyn,
who had quietly walked into the dining room looking for her husband, said snidely,
“What you boys do alone together, with pants down, is your business. However, I
needed to speak to my husband.”

“Huh? Oh,
hi Angel. How’d you find us?” He and Sarge had eaten lunch aboard the Flight of
Fancy.

“I simply
followed the odor of testosterone and the sound of bragging.”

Thad shook
his head with a grin and shrugged. “What’s up?”

“The
interrogation of the two Krall followed a different tact today. Noreen and I
finally decided that the Krall really
don’t
know the coordinates of
their production worlds, and they don’t have names for them any more than their
ships or domes have names. However, they have to be able to navigate to them,
and we learned previously that they have spectacularly detailed visual and
auditory memory.”

“That was
how they learn alien languages quickly, and memorized maps and battle zones,
right?”

“We think
so, but Noreen thought perhaps that their long range navigation used the same
sort of memory as learning maps.”

“I don’t
know Hon. Map reading skill sure doesn’t seem related to Tachyon Space
navigation. Don’t computers need the mathematical certainty of the coordinates,
to calculate how to get to those points in a Jump Hole? Even the alien designed
computers the Krall ships use must need that. How do they enter the location coordinates
if they don’t know what they are? They can’t tell the computer what they
remember of light years of empty space, can they?”

“Noreen
and I think the Olt’kitapi purposely designed these ships for use by the Krall,
and would have taken their mental processes into consideration. Noreen considered
how these brilliant benefactors would have solved this problem for their client
race, to help them move around the galaxy with the skill set they possess.
Captain Mirikami managed to get operational data from our two prisoners, which
revealed how to call up star charts, and an immensely detailed map of the
entire galaxy. It appears to be a dynamic map, because it has a representation
of a pulsar created in a supernova less than fifty years ago. It must update
without the Krall’s help.

“The map
can be zoomed and shifted, much like the Bridge view screen displays are
controlled, using talon taps and drags. Noreen had Jake update his own galactic
map by recording the images from the Mark of Koban. By zooming in on Koban on
the alien galactic map’s Orion Spur, and making that a center point of a smaller
star chart, she included only Poldark and perhaps a thousand light years of
Krall space. Noreen then had a detailed star map to put on one of our own screens.

“We showed
that map individually to our paralyzed Krall, and when Noreen pointed out Poldark’s
and Koban’s stars, we got a mental image of Poldark or Koban as seen from space,
from each one of them as we frilled them with Kit’s help. We get images of
other apparently habitable planets when we move the pointer around various
stars in the volume of space the Krall seem to control. Some stars give us no
such image, and may harbor no useful planets from a Krall perspective. We think
that’s how they travel to where they have been before. They have the star maps
in their own memory, and tap where they want the ship to go. By zooming in for
high detail, the Krall can refine where they want to White Out in a star system.”

“Did you
learn if any of the livable worlds you had in images were production centers?”

Marlyn
gave her husband a look of irritation. “Gee, how much in half a morning did you
think we could dig out of them? Based on their lack of information on many
stars in their own space, I don’t think they would ever have gone looking for
our worlds on their own. They don’t have much curiosity if they were never in a
star system. When they captured their first humans, they then had specific stars
to investigate for prey.”

“Excellent
work by you two Ladies. We have to let Tet know, and arrange for him to spend some
time learning more from those two reluctant informers. How is their health
holding up? They sure healed fast from their injuries at capture. However, when
I saw them last week it was the first time in two months. I had no idea what an
emaciated Krall would look like. Is it a matter of our not knowing what
nutrients they need?”

“Avery and
Rafe think it’s not that. We feed them meat bits and water through the tubes we
inserted into both stomachs. They are clearly aware that we extract information
from them, and they can’t stop us. Kit and Kobalt transferred fearful images into
their minds at first, as punishment for their “evil deeds,” but we finally
convinced the cats to block sending anything other than what we ask them to
send, and filtered out any feedback of what we learned from them. However, like
this morning, the
way
we used the star map told them we had located some
of their useful star systems. They want to die, and have tried to do so since
the day we captured and numbed them. I think they are gradually making that
happen.”

Sarge
expressed his sincerest sympathy. “It couldn’t happen to a nicer set of
murderous killers.”

Marlyn
delivered a bit of trivia she thought Reynolds might enjoy. “You do know that
Toltak apparently thinks your imaginary sleep drug is connected to how we are
doing this? I think she believes the scary images from the cats were what we
call nightmares. Carving you up alive and eating the pieces is her favorite mental
fantasy, which we have to pry her mind away from to get information.

“She
thinks the cats are there to protect us if their muscle control suddenly
returned. They can only see where we turn their heads or can roll their eyes. We
don’t let them see the cats when the frills touch their deadened fingers, or when
we touch the cat frills for the mental relay. If they knew we had that mind
reading ability, they might find a way to try to block or fool us.”

Thad
brought up another subject, related to frilling, that he suspected was her main
reason for looking for him right now. “You know we aren’t taking any of the
cats with us when we Jump. If the Krall caught a glimpse or scent of a ripper, it
would lead them directly here, the only place where they exist. However, we do need
contact telepathy for gathering intelligence from any other Krall we might
capture.”

Her words
confirmed his suspicion.  “Thad, you know Noreen and I are worried about the
impact of this particular mod. The other remaining Koban mods, visual and
auditory, are complex sensory mods, which are more examples of pure physical
improvements, and those are still on hold for now. The contact telepathy mod
has the potential to affect the kid’s minds and perceptions. Perhaps changing
how they think.”