Passing through a broken doorway in the back wall, she walked along the corridor to the next set of destroyed doors, which led down a wide passage towards the large hall or auditorium that was always at the center of one of these domes. There appeared to have been some sort of fighting here, long ago, from the amount of dust accumulated on the broken windows and doors she saw on the floors. The debris had been moved to the sides, but not cleaned up, and no repairs started.
There was still no sign of another of the little gray creatures, like the one she had seen through the third level opening earlier. She had not heard another sound, other than her own muffled movements, and the sound of wind whispering through the hallways. That air movement proved there were other openings out of here, or the breeze couldn’t flow through so continuously.
When she reached the central hall, she saw her first signs of life. Or rather, there were many signs of past life. There was a disorderly pile of bones, filling almost a third of the central area’s floor, stacked three times her own height at the center. She pivoted in place, looking all around, seeing or hearing nothing alive.
The typical ring of eight elevators was spaced around the wall of the hall, placed midway between each of the radial passageways that led in to here. They were all closed. There were stairways built next to each elevator. In this dome, the stairs led up, and descended down into darkness. This building apparently sat over one of the underground Krall factories, which would have once been operated by a slave race. The Krall only fought, they didn’t make anything but war, and lay eggs to make more Krall.
She stepped several feet over to the closest bones, and saw that they were not only old but were clearly animal bones, and had been broken open to get to the marrow. None of the bones or skulls was of animals instantly recognizable to her. That wasn’t surprising, since they knew little about the animals on the island anyway.
Maggi was mystified by the macabre display of bones. What animal would, or could, pile them up like this? Rising from the broad base of the pile, the bones at the peak would have needed to be thrown over fifty feet to reach up there. Four legged predators like a ripper, or a swamp dog, didn’t have that sort of dexterity using only jaws. A wolfbat could drop them from the air, but she was confident none lived near here. Why a predator would trash, or decorate was a better word, their den this way was another question.
As she skirted the pile, staying near the closed elevator doors and wall, the breeze flowing from the passage she had entered by finally brought her a scent of the death all so evident, as she went halfway around the large room. The outer bones, those at the base of the pile, were old and desiccated, with little odor. As she moved downwind of the stack, the odor grew stronger. It was chillingly familiar.
She drew her other pistol, and sought the source of the smell she recognized.
Looking higher, the evidence was in plain sight, scattered on the topmost layers of the heap of bones. They were so mixed and jumbled that they had not registered as different from the animal bones lower down. The evidence also formed the freshest new top layers.
One small, cracked open skull was peering at her, from where it had been tossed after the brains and flesh were stripped and eaten.
A young Krall.
It had been probably eight or nine years of age, old enough to start early warrior training, and subject to the brutal culling administered by the adult trainers. There had been no Krall trainers on Koban for twenty-three years. Furthermore, this particular dome, the only one on New Australia, had clearly been abandoned about a hundred years ago. Yet she estimated this skull was on a living creature less than a week ago.
Peering closer, she saw that there were at least a hundred such small skulls amid the tangle, and a few significantly larger ones, which would correspond to a slightly older Krall of novice age. All of them having been killed and eaten, with their bones tossed here. The symmetrical pile suggested that the remains had been tossed there from every side, and the high central point was equidistance from the railings of the three rings of balconies around the hall.
She was sure the feasters had had ringside seats as they added to the pile. There was also no doubt as to who the killers were. Feral Krall infested this island.
They would have originally hatched from a deserted nest of probably one low status Krall female, possibly two or three, and after a century, the offspring had to be seriously inbred. The deadly but untrained aliens would grow and reproduce unchecked, and might eventually swarm over an entire continent or perhaps a whole planet if all of the landmasses were connected.
On nearly any planet but Koban, they would kill and eat every animal encountered, and eventually have only each other to eat. On the larger landmasses here, the high gravity prey animals were extremely fast and tough, and their predators even more so. Feral Krall couldn’t spread very far against that competition. This isolated island might be a different case, and vulnerable to being overran.
The larger Krall bones, literally teenagers it appeared, probably ate hatchlings when nearby game grew sparse. Any fight between a pair of older Krall would lead to a least one set of larger bones on the pile. The adults, those that survived to that stage, must have to move out in ever widening circles to hunt for diminishing prey each day. Those surviving until about eleven to twelve years old could breed with a sibling, and the females would lay clutches of as many as twenty eggs.
Maggi considered the math and time span a moment. Proof that all of those hatchling females didn’t live to reproduce and find enough food, was the fact there had been room to even land here by this dome. If only twenty eggs (with ten females hatched, on average), had each laid twenty more eggs every twelve years, for a hundred years, the island would be hip deep with Krall. However, the survival rate of hatchlings was an unknown factor here.
Each round of new hatchlings would fight each other, and eat anything they could find or kill, and were subject to predation from older Krall, and from Koban predators when they went outside. That must be why there were no insects in this charnel house. They were food. The smaller Krall would also have to learn to hide from the hungry larger ones, unless starving and they had the numbers to try to take a bigger one down.
That figure I saw was one of the small ones she thought. It feared being seen by me…
“Wait.” She interrupted her own train of thought aloud. “Even small, these are Krall! Those little shits are not afraid of me. Simply looking for an advantage.”
Looking at where she stood, that advantage came to her. “Damn! I’m in the middle of their turf, alone.”
Confirmation came in the flurry of ultrasonic sounds that her voice provoked. From the passageway she had just traversed, scrabbling taloned feet and high frequency gibberish issued forth. More of the same came from the other passageways, and some from above on the balconies. They had done what adult Krall warriors, in their arrogance of superiority, rarely did. Sprang a trap. This may be how they had killed a few of the larger Krall examples on the bone pile.
The naked ones she suddenly saw climb on the railings were more than hatchlings, but slightly smaller than a novice warrior. These were not speaking anything that sounded like language, just making angry, competitive sounding cries, without lower frequency sounds mixed in with them. They must have learned that making low frequency sounds spooked hearing limited prey prematurely. Maggi was definitely spooked with what she could hear. It sounded as if there were quite a few of them.
Looking for a route for escape, she headed for the closest stairs, planning to shoot her way up the steps, intending to exit through one of the outer wall openings. As she turned that way, one of the young Krall directly above her leaped from the second level rail, straight down at her. She shot it through its gaping, tooth-filled mouth, while it was in mid ultrasonic screech.
The loud report of the .45 ended the low frequency sound restrictions, when that dead, five-foot killer smacked into the floor, a future dinner for others. There were impressive ro
ars of anger from those that witnessed the killing. They might not feel individual loyalty when they ate that dead clan mate, but peer pressure and instinct said they couldn’t tolerate the existence of prey animals that attacked them.
Five more of the pre-novice aged Krall launched from the railings, just as more turned the corners of the nearest radial corridors. She calmly picked off all five that were dropping towards her, headshots each, and stepped away from where she had been standing, to let the corpses land there. Their leaps were as accurate as any adult’s would have been, right on target.
For most sentient creatures, six noisily delivered deaths would probably have turned them back, or at least caused them to pause. If anything, she appeared to have triggered a berserker’s rage that she had only heard described. The lower pitched screams of rage were nearly as loud as any delivered by an adult. If they had been armed with guns, she’d already be dead. Only a few older ones even carried a club.
If she was going to get away, she needed to find a route out now, or a secure place to stand them off while she called for backup. Her mind in high gear, she decided that the swarming balconies were no safer than the ground floor, and the radial passageways were filling with them, funneling them into the hall. There had to be many hundreds of them.
She couldn’t help her next wry thought. How the hell did they plan to divide me up? A bite apiece?
As she fired the Krall pistol eight times to make a lane, she stepped over bodies and moved past the front of a closed elevator door. On a wild hunch, she holstered the .45 in a blur, and stuck a finger in a talon hole on the call panel to see if the door would whisk open. It didn’t. No power, of course. Probably being backed into a box with no way out wasn’t a good idea anyway.
Down! There were none of the maniacal horrors coming up from below, and plenty coming down the stairs. She drew the .45, and both guns blazing, one with a SWOOSH, the other BLAM, she accurately plowed her way through the dozen midsized Krall leaping and rushing down from the upper levels. Her eyes already adapted to lower light, she saw no sign of heat signatures below, or movement in the dimmer light. When she entered the darkness, her eyes would adapt more to the lower light, giving her the full night vision of a ripper.
Holstering the .45 again, she leaped down to the first landing where the stairs turned, and swapped the magazine on the Krall pistol even before lightly touching down on the balls of her feet. There were Twenty-nine rounds gone, twenty-five Krall dead and four with serious head wounds. She knew that her remaining ammunition wasn’t enough, even at the same efficient one-shot-one-down rate, to keep her alive for another fifteen minutes. Not if the berserker’s rage of the feral Krall continued to drive them to kill her at any cost.
“Link to Team.” The transducer, a rice grain sized device buried behind her right ear, would use that audio cue to connect to Cory and Danner, if they were within range.
She didn’t wait for an acknowledgement and she stared talking. “Boys, I found feral Krall inside the dome. I need your help to get out.”
The answer was relatively quick, but for someone with an organic superconducting nervous system, the delay of almost three seconds was very noticeable. The signal, as she descended below the metal framework of the dome and flooring, with a steel ceiling now over her head, was weaker than if relayed by the transmitter of an Artificial Intelligence on a spacecraft. They were relying on the signal strength of only their small transducers, perhaps twenty miles in open territory. She was underground and they were in dense woodlands.
Cory answered her, and the signal was weak and broken. “Aunt Maggi, we found …em too. We’re fighting… way… to the shuttle. We didn’t take… ammunition…us, so we’ll reload, lift off…., laser… way through …., …et to you. Tel…where you are.”
Maggi was shocked by, and ashamed of her earlier display of spite and pettiness. Not because they had encountered other Krall, she hadn’t caused that, but by the instant realization that she had locked the shuttle hatch with a new code, to force them to set up the camp before they ate. The small amount of spare ammunition was locked inside with the food. They never expected a fight.
She could hear the Krall’s talons on the stairs above her, so going back up to improve reception would expose her to dozens of them, leaping down the stairs at her. She stood her ground a moment, firing accurately around the corner and up the stairs.
“Cory, the new code for the hatch is two one four one, the hatch code is two one four one. Do you hear me?”
“… what? … we…”
She couldn’t remain this far up the steps to hear what else he might have said in that broken transmission. She fired her last round from the .45, then used its butt to smash in the skull of a four foot, red eyed little demon. It had suddenly leaped down onto the back of the corpse she had just created. Between its grasping talons, her hand flashed out and back before it could close its grip. After that, the deep pistol butt shaped dent between its blazing red eyes occupied what little mind it had left.
She whirled and leaped down another entire flight, as the thuds of her pursuers struck the landing she had just vacated. There was no more ammunition for the smaller gun, so she holstered that and snapped the retainer while she leaped down another flight, firing the Krall pistol again as she did. The .45 could always be a short club if needed, since those boney heads were hard on your bare hands.
The faded light from above illuminated the open stairwell, enough for her night vision to see two more flights left, before reaching the first level of the factory. That was always where administrative offices for the slave managers were located. The Krall didn’t go in for safety railings, so slipping over the side was a possibility if you went too fast. The sound of several snarling bodies falling past her on the right, demonstrated that fact. If they survived the fall in the 1.52 g’s of Koban gravity, they’d try to intercept her when she reached the bottom.
She couldn’t see very far away from the pool of dim light around the stairs. Had she been reliant on her normal human vision, she would be all but blind, with only the faint glow above revealing the shadows of the hell that was coming for her.
When she reached the last landing, the heavy thudding sounds of two other Krall landing to the sides of the stairwell told her more were down ahead of her. Unlike trained warriors, these advertised their presence and intentions with deep-throated screams. The two closest ones moved towards the base of the steps from her right.
She could see both were limping, with an obviously broken leg for one, because she could see a bone protruding. Krall were bred to ignore pain, and had and astounding ability to halt bleeding. These were likely the first two that had plummeted past her, with the longest drop. They retained the natural physical gifts bred into them, and had landed on their feet, even if striking with a force greater than their thick muscular legs could absorb.
Two half-grown Krall had jumped down to her left to try to get ahead of her, or perhaps they were pushed off by the press of bodies. No matter how it happened, they were attempting to cut off her retreat from the two larger Krall.
She kept track of every round from each magazine, and had two left in this one, with four targets below her. In training, she was told to swap magazines more often, to avoid running empty. However, with her speed of reloading, the lack of armed opponents, and her limited ammunition, she intended to use every single shot she had. One-on-one, she could probably defeat and kill a full-grown warrior with her hands. However, she couldn’t afford to let them slow her down while others closed the gap.
Her next direction to run was chosen for her by the two cripples. She shot the two healthy ones, as they came into the light from her left, a slug through an eye for each. Then pulled her knife from its calf sheath, and made a running leap from the landing that took her in a high summersault over the two cripple’s up-reaching arms. She figured correctly that they couldn’t jump high, and would be too slow. When she was inverted over their heads, she reached down in a fl
ashing motion and lopped off extended fingers, on both hands for one of them, and on a single hand of the other. The molecular thin edge, and hardened blade, could significantly scour most metals. Flesh and bone wasn’t much of an obstacle. Using knives on human captives was a warrior’s entertainment for the trained killers. This was not fun for her, simply self-defense.
Her memory of the standard layout of Krall factories, told her this corridor split in three directions at the base of each set of stairs. She could go left, right, or straight away from the last step. She had chosen the right side, because the two slowed cripples she jumped over were to her right. This would circle her towards the next stairs along the corridor ring that passed behind the elevator shafts. The inbred undisciplined beasts all seemed to have charged to the same stairway where she had descended. She imagined it was similar to being pursued by the Krall equivalent of Neanderthals, if even that bright.
There were no sounds from ahead of her in the nearly inky darkness, where a pale glow of dim light came down the next stairwell.
She noticed that her Infrared vision, somewhat less sensitive than that of the Krall, was detecting small heat related contrasts along conduits and dead light fixtures on the walls. These helped guide her around the gentle curve. She didn’t make any more sound than necessary, but those after her didn’t need to hear her footsteps to guide them. They could literally follow their noses. Her own sense of smell was claimed to be equal to that of the Krall, but hunting them down in the dark wasn’t her problem. They only needed to follow the single scent that was hers.
They were following noisily after her now, and she intended to stay far enough around the curve to avoid a direct IR image of her heated body. With her enhanced metabolism, she’d be quite visible in the dark. She put on a burst of speed to get to the second junction around, and pressed her hand hard against the inner wall, dragging it and building friction.
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