He considered sending a clanship to check that Koban was as pristine as they had left the planet. However, the previous Joint Council had forbidden any unauthorized visits there, to discourage any clan from spoiling the world, or from claiming any advantage for their warriors by training them there in high gravity. To ask the new council to authorize the trip would expose him to ridicule from rival clans, particularly if he used the human leader’s words as his justification.
Frakod, by his intelligence and good advice had risen in status, almost equal to that of aides promoted from within Graka clan. However, he was from Dorbo clan, a Great clan that was presently an ally with his own clan. Telour had selected Gatlek Bendor of Dorbo to lead the New Dublin invasion. Telour knew that with Tanga clan reduced in status, that the natural way of things would lead Dorbo clan leaders to maneuver and exploit any advantage.
They could use Frakod to learn of things that Telour did or would do, for use in interclan politics. This was not a time of interclan warfare, but Dorbo would try to gain advantage over other clans. Having evidence that Telour had been concerned that humans had survived on Koban would be useful to encourage him to offer them war roles they desired, to keep that knowledge confidential. Worry of such an impossible thing made him appear weak.
He would have to send a low-level Graka clan aide. Someone that was less competent than Frakod, but would not be missed for three weeks of round trip travel. A low enough status clan mate would value the trust given by the Tor Gatrol, and they would maintain confidentiality for the benefit of the clan, and for themselves. He would send someone alone to Koban.
For now, Telour decided to avoid any mention of the human name for their most effective fighters. Someone else might note the name similarity to ko ban. If it was a coincidence in sound, the most probable case, then it was best forgotten. If not, then Telour wanted the credit for noticing.
****
Mirikami was satisfied, watching the monitor screen as the frustrated warrior beat on the closed door. “Paralyze him again before he wills his hearts to stop, and send him back to Koban.”
Dorkda had enjoyed a taste of fresh raw meat to chew for the first time in over two years, and half an hour to move about the Mark, free of the drug. Despite fluids and meat paste infusions, the Krall’s frame had thinned noticeably since his capture on K1, when two clanships were stolen from there, before Mirikami’s first visit to Poldark. Toltak and Pindor, the surviving Krall of the six warriors that had brought the first clanship to Koban, renamed the Mark of Koban, had finally managed to waste away and achieve the death they craved.
Dorkda, despite one heavy meal and a brief taste of faux freedom, with a half hour of limited exercise, would likely follow them soon. Captured Krall felt deep shame and revulsion at being captured alive by an enemy, and Dorkda briefly thought he’d be able to escape from his new prison compartment, inside a functional clanship rather than the disabled human ship that had held him for so long.
Maggi, observing on the Bridge of the Mark with the others asked, “What do we do with the information now? We don’t want to lose this chance by being sloppy, taking half measures.”
Mirikami looked pensive, but spoke in confidence. “I’ll summon Coldar, Blue, and Wister to meet with us here on the Mark. Let them see this recording, and explain what it means. They can run tests to see how quickly the infection will spread, although Max Born thinks it should be very fast.” He handed out tasks.
“Dillon, please find out where we stored that railgun platform we used to blast the Eight Balls on our first raids, and particularly all of its ammunition. Give some of the slugs to the Torki to modify their signal chips. We don’t need hits to tell us where a stealthed enemy is. We hope to disable them. Mount the platform in your ship’s hold for a test firing when we have some of the modified ammunition. Please don’t waste shots, since we don’t have replacement railgun ammo here at Koban. Have someone fly one of our ships for a quick test, and try not to damage anything vital. We only need a single hit as proof of concept.” He continued to spread out the assignments.
“Thad, if you and Sarge will gather up the .50 caliber Krall Killer slugs from storage at Prime City and bring them here to Haven, we’ll also have the Torki look at possibly modifying the smaller ammo. If they can replace the KK chips, the Prada might be able to mass-produce them. We also had some modern .50 cal machineguns with belt feed, which we bought through Nabarone, before Krall body armor became so tough. I want the .50 slugs for those guns changed out too if we some with KK chips in them, and mount the guns to fire out of an open clanship portal. They have to be able to work in vacuum.”
Thad was puzzled. “Tet, what good are the low caliber weapons on clanships? I can understand using the railgun, with twenty-pound slugs at an impact of many miles per second. They’ll penetrate. Small mass and low velocity slugs can’t even penetrate the heavier Krall body armor, let alone a clanship. Even if it has the added velocity of the ship from which it’s fired.”
Mirikami nodded and grinned. “Then the Krall pilots probably won’t bother to avoid them, will they? We don’t need a penetration. They might decide to dodge the heavier and faster rail gun rounds which can penetrate, but not the lighter ammunition.”
Noreen felt a bit left out. “OK, what can I do?”
“You can work out the mounting of anywhere from one to four of those machine guns on the lower deck of the Avenger, and figure out how to secure the gunners from falling out of the open portals when we have to maneuver, or get them adapted for remote firing by a ship’s AI. Whatever you come up with will have to apply to other ships. Have Karl, your AI, help you and your gunners learn the basic orbital mechanics for slugs this slow. Our other ships don’t have AIs, so let’s hope the technique doesn’t require a computer to make it practical in every case.
“By the way, I need your gunners or AI to place the slugs to where we want them, in an area before a clanship gets to that point. We need to hit them at least once for this to have a chance to work from space. Get some practice, and ask several other ship captains to play villains, but they need to fly within standard Krall acceleration limits. Keep it realistic. If you can’t hit them often enough, we have to think of something else. At least you aren’t as limited as Dillon is, since we have a lot more of that ammo and it isn’t dangerous to test on friendly targets.”
He turned to the antsy younger set of Kobani, which included Carson, Ethan, Jorl, Fred and several others. “You are not being left out. When, or I should say if, we can get the .50 cal ammunition that I want from our alien friends, you hotshot pilots and crack shots will practice firing semiautomatic rifles from shuttles at parked clanships. That’s something you can practice right now, and you will have to do it at speed. The Krall will be shooting back if you aren’t low and fast, and you need to get off the first shots. See if the shuttle hatches can be modified with closable firing slits on each side. There’d be less turbulence than if the hatches are slid open like they are when we hunt from them for meat. You’ll be able to fly faster. You may have to stay in armor if the slits can’t seal airtight for orbital flight, but you’d do that anyway. If you miss your shots, you may have to make another pass on the same target, and they certainly would be ready for you.”
Sarge had an inquiring mind. “What’re you gonna do, Tet?”
“Why, let you people figure it all out for me, and then steal the best ideas to use them on the Mark.”
****
Bledso tendered her resignation as Chairfem of the Joint Chiefs. “Madam President, I respect your right to overrule the advice of your military. However, I believe you have betrayed an ally we cannot afford to lose, and you have forced the navy to be a part of that betrayal. Have you considered the possible repercussions of making an enemy of the Kobani? They kicked the hell out of the Krall even when they were outnumbered. In a head to head space battle, the Krall mangle the hell out of our ships even when we outnumber them by ten to one, or more at Poldark.”
“Admiral, you assured me that Mirikami and his people were not anti-government, despite operating a militia outside our chain of command, violating our genetic laws, and maintaining a level of secrecy of their organization that even Special Operations admires. I do not expect them to attack us.”
“Mam, do you listen to yourself when you use logic like that? You tried to hand them over to the tender mercies of a genocidal enemy of humanity. Why wouldn’t they consider the PU an enemy now?”
“Watch your tone with me Admiral. I am your Commander in Chief!”
“Mam, I don’t think you fully read the papers I sent to you this morning. I resigned from the navy as well as my position as Chairfem. My retirement papers were submitted yesterday, and were effective before I made my courtesy call on you today. You are no longer my Commander in Chief.”
“Flag officers are never truly retired, I understand.”
“I don't think you want to play that card Mam. I intend to enter the political arena in the near future, and you could find your actions concerning me, as well as the Kobani, part of a public discussion.”
“The public will remember the scenes from Midwife, when over a billion people died when that huge fragment slammed into the planet. Millions more will die yet on Bootstrap. The voters will be reminded of that, and who provoked the Krall into taking that action. I assume you will join the opposition party, and with two years until the next election I suppose you propose to run against me?”
“Mam, I didn’t come here to discuss my future, but that of humanity. We were losing this war beyond any doubt, and those of us in the military knew that, and knew we could not stop the Krall if they simply decided to push hard enough to march right through the Hub and out the other side. They could likely have finished the job in less than a hundred years.
“Then, unexpectedly the Kobani forced them to slow down. We suddenly saw a chance to hold them at bay. We’ve learned from the Kobani there are not as many worlds full of Krall as we thought there was. With new technology from the alien allies of the Kobani, we might have developed some new technology that these barbarians with spacecraft had not already stolen in a previous conquest.” Rudely waving down the president as she was ready to rebut her, she spoke over her objections.
“I’ll be done in a moment, Mam. If not for Captain Mirikami, and I mean him specifically, the Krall would have destroyed Pittsburg II, and then Earth would have been next. You would have escaped of course, in the presidential yacht. Which young Carol Slobovic so easily took away from the best security detail in the Hub. She’s a perfect example of why you needed them as friends. I hope the Kobani give your successor another chance to be their friend.”
“You’re a novice at politics, Bledso. I’ll eat you alive if you run.”
“Possibly. I don't know if I’ll have the backing to run against you anyway. Nevertheless, someone will, and with your record of poor decision making, I think any opponent will have a good chance. You blamed an enemy of our enemy, rather than the enemy itself for all the deaths the Krall caused at Meadow and Bootstrap. The twenty billion people the Kobani saved are going to hear the story of who saved them. It’s a macabre truth, but only the living vote in elections. The populations of Earth, Mars, and Pittsburg II will not appreciate your actions to try to kill their saviors. They’ll eat you alive. Good day Madam President.”
****
Koldok had never seen Koban up close. She had been a mere novice in Graka clan when Kanpardi led the Krall armada away from here, and Telour was granted the honor of the first raid on the new enemy. She’d only caught hurried looks at the legendary planet from high orbit, as she helped stow supplies and weapons for the fleet’s departure, which were formerly kept at their main compound below.
She wouldn’t dare try a landing now, since the Tor had emphasized this scouting mission did not have prior approval of the new Joint Council. If the visit was later revealed to the Joint Council, because of what Koldok reported to the Tor, there must be no record of her touching down. The ship’s sensors were set on record mode, activated by Telour himself, with a warning that there could be no gaps in the record. This record would prove Telour had not ordered a landing in violation of the injunction to stay off their future home world.
However, a good pilot and navigator such as herself could get quite close to a planet in an assault style White Out, barely a hundred fifty miles from the surface. She could use magnification on her screens to see detail as small as insects on the surface, if she found atmosphere clear enough. She wanted to see rhinolo, and perhaps a ripper pride stalking them. The primitive beasts on the isolated largest continent were legendary for their size and numbers, as were the huge predators of the great herbivores.
The Tor said identifying traces of the last of the human prisoners at the former Maldo clan dome might be impossible from orbit. The native life forms wouldn’t have left anything visible of their remains on the surface after more orbits had passed than for a full Krall breeding cycle. She certainly couldn’t enter the dome to seek their bones. However, she had hunted humans on Telda Ka when they were hunted down to cleanse the new base world, and she had hunted down human stragglers on Bollovstic after resistance collapsed there. She knew the small clues that would reveal where they were, if they had somehow survived here.
Their survival here was a preposterous idea, and she was surprised someone as high as the Tor Gatrol had placed credence in a report that humans had lived here recently. He had sensed her skepticism, and lied that it was a report from a finger clan that lost their clanships in the attack on Telda Ka. He believed they wanted to be given a clanship to investigate for themselves. He assumed they would ask to keep the clanship later when they found nothing. His concern was that they may have shared that story, and it could be repeated in council. If so, he wanted to have an answer in advance, proving he was efficient.
Telour had said the gates had been breached and the electric fence shut down at the prisoner compound, days before he was the last warrior to walk on Koban. Rippers had already killed some humans by then. What he expected her to see was wild growth by the dome with native animals grazing near the tarmac, no signs of agriculture, no new structures, and no cook fires. He’d cautioned her that there were many abandoned and disabled human ships on the tarmac, so that she wouldn’t confuse them for signs of recent visitation.
The navigation timer was nearly expired, and she was experiencing a rare feeling of curiosity. To see the world of legend, where an unarmed Krall, outside of a walled compound with electrified fencing, could seldom survive more than a single day. The native life seemed to seek them out, and the typical speed and strength of the larger prey animals were dangerous, even life threatening for warriors without plasma rifles. The predators of those prey animals, particularly the rippers, were lethal to a Krall. It was more than just the strength of creatures that thrived in high gravity; they also had uncanny speed, and were intelligent. Armed with only projectile weapons and hunting with a hand of warriors, those fiercest of killers were nearly unstoppable. They worked as a team, to draw a warrior’s attention away from the death stalking them from behind or the side.
Like every Krall that had ever heard the stories, she wanted to be a killer like a ripper herself, to be able to pit her abilities against this planet and its life forms. There was no Krall equivalent to the applicable human expression. Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
The timer expired and the clanship made its White Out. She was disappointed because her first view was an expanse of ocean, with a swirl of white clouds following a weather flow. There was a coastline visible, and she activated her reactionless drive to move that direction. She could see the traces of teal shades of foliage, the grass a lighter shade than the more nearly blue of the leaves of the presumed forest, the trees set back from the coastal plain.
She dropped to a height of fifty miles as she neared land. The Tor had not given her a lower limit to fly. She eagerly
zoomed in on a forward view screen, to observe that there were cliffs with waves breaking at their bases. There were flying things in quantity, but those held no interest for her. On the rolling flat terrain above the cliffs, she spied a herd of large four legged animals browsing. They had squat wide bodies, short necks and long spiked tails, and from the swath of different shaded grass behind them, they were plodding along eating as they went. Plant eaters, which she also had no interest in observing.
She saw other browsers with differing body types, some with long necks eating dark blue leaves or needles from the tall trees. There were many different types of grazers, but she hadn’t seen a predator yet. After more minutes and miles of similar sightings, she increased speed. This had to be the continent with the largest animals, which wasn’t the one she was tasked with scouting. She angled a bit north towards the latitude of the dome she needed to observe. The recording would annoy the Tor if it contained too much of the wrong continent’s terrain.
Increasing speed and altitude to go sub orbital, she still had a view of the ground and animals, if in less detail than before. Another coastline arrived quickly, and a much narrower sea was crossed in minutes, reaching the continent she was supposed to examine closely.
Suddenly, something moving caught her attention. A line of white was crossing her path ahead of her and much lower. She instantly slowed, and descended, flying and manipulating the view screen at the same time. She could see the white line was still forming, but the reason she had not been able to put it at the center of her view screen was that it was changing course from time to time, and descending. That was a contrail she was watching form. It suddenly turned directly away from her and increased speed. The contrail made the shape of the object indistinct from behind, but at this speed and altitude, with the narrow double lobbed trail it left in its wake, she knew this was a stubby winged shuttlecraft.
Koban 4: Shattered Worlds Page 90