Koban

by Stephen W Bennett

  Once back at the Hall they found six of the dispirited volunteers, gathered at tables to one side. Noreen, Dillon, and a few other people from the Fancy were assuring them that the Captain was trying to find a way to help them.

  Mirikami asked, “Where are the other applicants, and that companion of one of our volunteers?” The question spoken softly to Noreen.

  “They didn’t think we’d help them Sir. Some of them stayed on the firing range practicing, or looking for the best fitting set of armor with the fewest repairs. We haven’t even found one of them yet.”

  “We have to make certain they all know that I’ll do my best for them, even if they were not accepted as active volunteers. They were targeted because of some connection to us, even the companion probably.”

  Walking over to the group of six, Mirikami tried to look reassuring.

  “By now you’ve heard that we are certain that the selection was manipulated. All of the names of the first ten people that submitted applications to work with us were on the list. There have been rumors of cheating before, but this is blatant, flagrant, and clumsy.”

  “What can you or we do about it?” Deanna Turner demanded. “Nobody will tolerate erasing our names and having a new drawing. Any one of them could be chosen in our place. There could be shooting.” She warned.

  Maggi told her, “Dear, our first step is to identify the people responsible. That information might cause a change of heart. Please listen as Captain Mirikami tells you who we want to locate.”

  “We first need to find a man named Talbert Carltron, who we think took your names from a pocket computer he stole from us thirteen days ago. Do you know him?”

  All of them knew the name, and several knew where he slept. Mirikami sent Ray McPherson and Jimbo Skaleski with one of the male volunteers to check Carltron’s compartment. The three of them were armed of course.

  The Captain continued. “We have two possible names for a woman that was with him that day, but we don’t want to tarnish the name of the innocent woman. One of the names is...,” he was cut off by two people at once.

  One man, Roger Singleton, deferred to Deanna with a hand wave, who had blurted the same name as he had.

  “It has to be Arless Blythe.” She repeated. “They are a long time noncontract couple, and they have adjoining cubes.”

  Mirikami quickly swung around to Noreen and sent her to join Ray and Jimbo, to warn them and add a fourth gun. The other two men didn’t have a transducer, but they had not reached an elevator yet and heard her shout.

  “Gracious Ladies, Gentle Men,” he addressed the five remaining volunteers. “We suspect those two have been keeping their names off of the Training Day lists for a long time, and one or both of them have knowledge of computers. They have likely been here for quite some time, since Blythe told Mister Rigson she had been here over four years.”

  Suddenly from behind him, a woman who was following the discussion volunteered information.

  “Carltron used to be a programmer, or something like that for a mining company. He told me once he was on his way to set up an automated Rim world mining operation when his company ship was captured. He was here two years ago when I was captured, but he had already been here for at least two years, I think.”

  “Thank you…Lady…” he waited for her to give him a name.

  “I’m Penelope Daniels.”

  “Thank you Lady Daniels.” Other Primes were starting to gather, as the rumor of list tampering spread.

  “Remember,” Mirikami cautioned the growing crowd. “We don’t have any more than circumstantial evidence against these two people yet, but it is absolutely certain that there was tampering!” He looked at the faces all around him.

  “All ten of the very first ten people that offered to volunteer to work with us were put on that list today. Whoever did that undoubtedly keeps their own names off of every Training Day list, and could have put any of your names on that list!” He raised his arms and waved down the voices to suppress the noise.

  “We believe a Krall set up and taught a human how to use their computer in the north maintenance bay, possibly done in exchange for teaching the Krall our letters and numbers or how human computers work.”

  A woman shouted out “A K’Tal, the brown uniformed type, set that computer up before I got here three years ago. I heard that from Captain Phillips, he was a leader here then, just before he was selected. He said a man had showed the K’Tal how to make the display show Standard characters for our lottery.” Another outcry followed that revelation.

  Realizing he had a large crowd around him now, Mirikami stepped up on a table. “The companion of Talbert Carlton is Arless Blythe. Does she have computer training as well?”

  A couple of snickers resulted from that question.

  A man volunteered. “Her only training is more of the bedroom type. She was a Tri-Vid sex star on vacation with some important holo producer when she was captured. She has been here forever it seems like. I never understood how a homely little recluse like Talbert Carltron held onto her. She’s attractive and flirtatious and could have had a lot of stronger, better looking men.”

  While others in the growing crowd were discussing how the Blythe woman manipulated men, Noreen Linked with Mirikami.

  “Sir, I know you can’t answer. I’m on level two looking at you. The two compartments are empty, but we found a Krall thin panel flexible computer screen stuck to the bottom of a low table in Carltron’s cube. We’re searching to see if there is a keyboard hidden somewhere. Renaldo Out.”

  Raising his hands again to quiet the loud discussions springing up all around him, Mirikami sought some other information. “How portable is that computer at the north entrance? We saw that there was a place for similar computers at each entrance.”

  He had to select just one person of the dozen or more that spoke up. A man had actually worked with the one in the north entrance.

  He told them, “That system is bonded to the table, and the screen bonded to the wall to make them permanent fixtures. I helped to do that several years ago with some resin we scavenged out of a wrecked ship outside. The other three computers were just as movable and they had all disappeared. We wanted to make sure the one we used stayed put. We assumed the others had been taken by the Krall.”

  “There were no cables or power feeds to them?” Mirikami asked.

  “Not that I saw. You could simply pick the keyboard up, which I understand also holds the processor, and the screen had a sort of sticky side that clung to the walls. There were no holes in the table top or in the wall, except for the slot for printed copies of data, so I guess they would work any place you took them.”

  Noreen Linked in again. “The keyboard was hidden in a wide slot built under a table in the woman’s cubicle. I guess I need to know what you want me to do, Sir. I’m at the balcony railing just to your left if you want me shout out to you so we can talk openly.”

  Mirikami nodded his head twice as if listening to conversation around him.

  Noreen called out loudly, “Captain Mirikami!”

  Turning towards the caller, as did the faces around him, he called back “Were they in their cubicles Commander Renaldo?”

  “No Sir. But there are two half-empty water bottles and two unfinished ration packs on Carltron’s table. It looks like they left suddenly.”

  “I assume you did a search of their quarters?” Mirikami asked his leading question. “Did you find anything?”

  “Yes Sir. We found a keyboard and a computer screen like the one in the north entrance. They were hidden in the two cubicles under table tops.”

  There was an immediate explosion of outrage, and dozens of people headed for the nearest elevators. As Mirikami intended, they went to look for themselves. The word would spread, and it would not be simply an unfounded allegation from the people of the Fancy.

  Shortly a crowd of angry Primes returned with the two parts of the second computer. Now everyone in the Great Hall could se
e that it really existed.

  A woman that knew how to run the north entrance system pressed the equivalent unlabeled keys on the second keyboard and pressed the “Start” key. They watched as the nearby-but-detached screen instantly lit with lines of Standard characters preceded by Krall scripts. They were menu items. The lines were:

  Add Names

  Testing List

  Full List

  Block Names

  Select Names

  The woman cursed and instantly clicked the character key in front of the line that read “Block Names.” Two names appeared. They were Talbert Carltron and Arless Blythe.

  Then she chose The Select Names key, which merely presented a line that read “Enter names here” with a cursor lit below that. She hit the back key and tried the second menu.

  The Testing List item repeated the sixteen names already posted, and had two menu options. New and Exit.

  The Full List selection showed Krall numbers and names one screen at a time, in three columns per screen. Painstaking scrolling showed that the sixteen names posted that day were missing from the list, as expected, and the two blocked names were shown.

  The woman, who had been whispering with some of those gathered around her, stood up and told everyone that the last two menu items were extra on this computer, which anyone that had ever observed the selection process already knew.

  She looked up at Mirikami, still standing on the tabletop next to her. “It looks like they could enter a list of names that could not be selected, and it only contains Carltron’s and Blythe’s names. The other new menu is to add the names they want to be selected. The top three menus are the same simple ones we have used for years.” She shook her head sadly.

  “My husband was killed six months ago. I wonder if he was selected by them or just unlucky?”

  At least a thousand people were already searching for Carltron and Blythe, and hundreds more of those in the Great Hall went to search as well, checking their weapon loads as they went.

  However, Mirikami was no longer concerned about those two, dead or alive they were irrelevant to the problem he had to solve now.

  32. Put up or Shut up

  The Captain had eight volunteers who were now officially “his” people, facing what was tantamount to a death sentence in three more days. Moreover, there were two other applicants he felt equally responsible to protect. He was certain they were targeted simply because they had applied to join his volunteers.

  The more he heard comments floating around, the more he doubted that the rest of the captives would accept a second selection list from the compromised Krall computer. There was no way a new selection system was going to be agreed on and implemented in the interim.

  Fair or not, over twenty seven hundred people were fully prepared to send the sixteen unlucky people out to face their fate. Just as they had sent so many other unlucky, and largely forgotten names before them.

  To appeal to Telour to force a fair selection or grant immunity to his volunteers would turn all of the Primes against him. However, to allow the ten volunteers to die despite a grossly unfair selection would destroy his credibility as a leader. He needed to retain that credibility if they were to implement their greater plan.

  He asked Maggi and his other friends to leave him undisturbed for a while and let him think. They went to the other side of the Hall to talk and hear news from the search parties.

  He was sitting there alone, pulling at his lip and considering a fateful decision when a heavily armed Thad Greeves abruptly walked up in brown armor, his helmet off. He dropped a stuffed shoulder bag on the table and sat down with a creaking sound and a bang as he set his helmet down.

  “Hey Tet, I leave for a morning hunt and come back to find you’ve overturned everything Koban Prime holds holy.” He clapped him on the shoulder with his gauntlet. “Congratulations, man. I didn’t think that could be done.”

  “Thanks, I think,” Mirikami responded. Looking at Thad’s armor, and the bulging bag, he asked him where he’d been.

  “I head out to collect some of the Death Limes when I think the easy to reach bushes have ripe ones, and a bit deeper into the woods if someone already got the easy pickings. Plus I like fresh meat in my diet.”

  “Rhinolo?” Incredulity was apparent in Mirikami’s face and tone.

  Thad laughed hard. “Do I look suicidal? Hell no, I shot some of Koban’s rabbit dash squirrel dash bird dash anything edible equivalents. All of those live inside the compound.”

  He pulled the bag over and lifted the Smart Fabric seal tab. A combination tangy odor and smell of animals and blood wafted out when he folded the top flap back. Reaching in he lifted out a deep green colored fruit that did slightly resemble a large lime.

  Mirikami started to reach for the fruit when Thad pulled it away with a cautionary hand wave.

  “It might be safe to touch without a glove, but I haven’t washed the skin or confirmed no thorns broke off in the fruit. If you touch any fresh toxin I’d miss you a lot, or you’d miss the hand that touched it.” He dropped the fruit back into the bag and wiped his gauntlet with a chemical laden rag from the bag.

  Mirikami stood up and looked down into the bag. It was divided into three sections by dividers. The green fruit filled one section, and there were pale green grape sized berries on stems in the center, along with some sort of thick brown tubers. The third section held one teal furred animal with six legs and a two-foot long torso. Another was bushy-tailed skinny blue-gray colored animal with four short legs, and what looked like tiny hands for feet. At the bottom was a radiant green looking animal he couldn’t see very well.

  “Are all of those things dangerous to touch?” he asked.

  “Nope. Not the berries or roots, and not the animals and the bird when they aren’t alive. The six-legged things I always have called ground hogs because they dig burrows, but they forage above ground for the berries and for those roots underground. They are also fast as hell and those six sets of digging claws and their gnawing teeth will tear a man up something awful if you pick up a wounded one. When I spot their burrows, I know there are these edible roots near them, and probably a few berry bushes.

  “That skinny blue thing with the bushy tail is a close analogue of an Earth squirrel I think, or a Poldark tree skunk without the smell. That guy is really fast in the trees and I don’t see them often enough to have a special name for them, but I hear them a lot. I have no idea what they eat, and they don’t have much meat on them. They can ruin your hunting with their loud chatter to warn everything close by. That was just a lucky shot through some leaves to hit him. He gave himself away with his big mouth.” He grunted in humor.

  Reaching to the bottom, he lifted out a long necked green bird that also had tall spindly legs. The bill was long and thin at the end, but right at the mouth it flared much wider. The feathers were a beautiful iridescent green. Thad pulled the wings out and they were not as wide as Mirikami expected for the size of the body, and he said so.

  Thad shrugged. “The denser air helps support them better, I guess. This is a Dagger bird, which is a very appropriate name. They hunt in marshes and at the edge of water. They stab small prey with the beak, toss it in the air, catch and slide it towards the wide part of the beak to swallow it whole.

  “If you get too close to their nest, you can get a flying dagger beak thrust in an eye. Like every animal here, you don’t touch it until you are sure it’s dead. The most innocent looking creatures can be dangerous, possibly venomous, always stronger than you’d think, and much, much, faster than you expect.”

  “What did you shoot them with?” Mirikami welcomed a distraction just then, and happened to be interested.

  “The small buck shot, fired from a short Krall rifle.” Pointing at the one slung on his back. “The shot starts to separate a few feet from the muzzle and gives you a wider coverage.

  “I killed another ground hog, but a wolfbat had been in a high tree watching me watch the burrow. It seem
ed to know better than to come after me in my armor. But as soon as I fired, it flapped madly down and dived right on the dying animal. It latched all four sets of hooked claws and flapped off easily with the extra weight. Its lack of hesitation at the sound of the shot makes me think it was waiting for that. It could have dived sooner when the animal cleared its burrow opening, but I think it waited for me to shoot it.”

  Thad returned the animals to the bag, but as he shifted things around, Mirikami spotted a loose thorn laying on one of the two dozen or so Death Limes. He pointed that out to Thad.

  “Sometimes the defensive swat from the plant breaks off a thorn when it hits the handle of the picker. The waxy surface of the thorn is sticky. I don’t know how long the toxin lasts but lucky for me it does degrade with time. My rhinolo horn was covered with the dried stuff. I had touched it before I smelled the scent from the plant. I handled the horn when I removed it and then later mounted it.”

  “How did it get there I wonder?”

  “The Rhinolo like the fruit too, and I’ve heard that on a couple of hunts a Krall warrior used the scent of a crushed fruit in the grass to draw an animal away from the herd. I suspect they use their thick hide and long horn to shake or knock a fruit safely out of a bush when they want one. That could leave waxy residue on the horn. Plus, for a time I bet it makes the horn that much deadlier to anything they stick with it.”

  “You told us that the Krall like the fruit, but won’t reach in to get it. How do you know this?” He’d just had an interesting thought.

  “I’ve watched them go out in a truck on perimeter patrol and stop to get some on the way. I used binoculars and from a higher level of the dome, I saw them run over Lime plant and spin a wheel to rip the bush out of the ground. Then a warrior used a tool from the truck to pull away the fruit.”

  “Do you think the toxin works on them like it does on humans?”

  “I never gave it any thought. Humans finally die of total muscle paralysis, in great pain until then. I don’t know what it does to a Krall, but they obviously don’t like it. Why?”