Koban: Rise of the Kobani

by Stephen W Bennett

  Maggi looked up into the black eyes on stalks above the purple carapace, looking unblinkingly back at her. “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship, Coldar.”

  Chapter 13: Beware of Accidents

  Crager dismissed his ninth interviewee, after confirming the man’s activities after dark with other troopers, video surveillance around the barracks, and through observation by any of the permanent cadre while the out-of-camp excursion was known to be in progress.

  “Breaker, get in here.” He called out loudly over the speaker system to the men waiting in the outer part of the auditorium. He had used the AI to configure the large space into a large waiting room with no chairs, his interrogation room with a single desk and chair, an access screen to the base AI, and a neurological sensor chair for the subjects under suspicion.

  There was a temporary holding room connected to the interrogation room, no other doors or windows, with bench seats along the walls. The only way in or out was through Crager’s interrogation room, and wearing his Booster Suit he felt much more than adequate to personally control anyone that decided to try and leave without his approval.

  There were three spec ops guards on the larger room’s double exit doors. Only men Crager had personally eliminated as the potential fence climber were allowed to leave. So far, he had placed only one man in the second holding area, with active surveillance showing him in a corner window of his large screen. The man wasn’t particularly suspicious; he simply had not been where anyone could verify his presence inside the camp.

  As Breaker entered the room, Crager’s link to the camp AI automatically provided basic data and history on the man. A glance at the screen on his desk showed him Jorl Breaker’s training evaluations (all good), and the few personal details that had been collected on the man.

  Seeing Jorl’s face triggered a recollection of this group’s first day. He was one of the few men that had not panicked or even showed a reaction when the realistic Krall hologram leaped at the people in the front row of the auditorium.

  “Sit.” He pointed to the sensor-equipped chair.

  What followed were a series of questions of his activities after sunset today. The responses on the display were no more erratic than most of the other men he’d spoken with that night. All of them were slightly nervous in the presence of the Top sergeant, with no clue as to why they were here. Except at least one of them certainly had a clue. One of them had left the camp to meet someone.

  “So you went for a run after dark, and you say you were in the shower when we called you outside to formation?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “You had free time. Why were you running?”

  “I have done this on other days. I had permission from Corporal Ranken.” He had not answered the question asked. Yet both his statements were accurate, and displayed no strong left-right confliction between brain hemispheres, as it should if he’d been strongly deceptive. Crager, not thoroughly an expert with this equipment, was unaware that the mental diversion Breaker had just used hid a minor reaction to the real question.

  The technology of monitoring neural networks had never produced an accurate lie detection system, but it had shown that the process of analyzing a question, and formulating a reply involved both brain hemispheres. If the reply was deceptive, the act of concealment revealed some mathematically modeled responses. That permitted some comparison of the thought activity of the rational and logical left side of the brain, to the activity of the emotional and creative right side, and displayed a pattern involved with possible conflict between a fully truthful answer, and a modified reply. It was still partly an art form for the interrogator and not a pure science.

  Crager paused to check with Corporal Ranken that Breaker had asked permission to run. That was confirmed.

  “Did you see anyone near the fence or outside of it when you made your laps?”

  “Yes, Sergeant. I did.”

  That could be helpful. Crager looked at the screen. Normal comparison.

  “What did you see?”

  “The patrol truck passed twice, on my first and third laps. There were rabbits humping outside on the road.”

  “You did not see anyone else near the fence, or that climbed over?”

  “No, Sergeant.”

  “Did you climb over?”

  “No, Sergeant, I did not climb the fence.” Of course he hadn’t, he jumped over. Going and returning. However, his brain knew there was something he was slightly concealing.

  The peaks of the curves differed slightly, but the computer showed the contours of the waves were similar, with the one for the right side hemisphere (emotional response) nearer to the screen’s top, partly out of view. Crager touched the scale factor icon on the touch screen, and both of the wave contours shot off the top of the display as the AI yielded automatic control of the scale adjustment to the human. A moment later, Crager had the curves back where they belonged. He wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong, but shifted his focus back to Breaker’s supposed shower alibi.

  “You have a towel around your neck now, and your head still looks damp. You were in the shower you said when Sergeant Norris called the formation, you dressed and dried on the run?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  Crager pulled the video recording of the door traffic of Breaker’s barracks. He watched the man stroll into the barracks door, passing other men standing and talking at the same entrance. He recognized one of the other men was someone he had already cleared, using this same Tri-Vid camera data. He checked the time stamp, and saw this was several minutes after the mystery man was assumed to have returned to the camp, when the patrol was chasing the rabbit. The shower story might be accurate, but it didn’t clear this man.

  “Wait in the room behind me. And dry off.” He had more men to check before focusing on those he couldn’t clear immediately.

  The next man’s shrunken waveform on the monitor made Crager curse and adjust the screen scale factor again. However, he quickly eliminated nineteen more men from suspicion, using video, and cadre as witnesses.

  The scale factor problem returned when he interrogated a young man named Yilini Jastrov. However, a break room Tri-Vid recording proved he was inside the camp.

  The next man repeated the too small-scale factor, which Crager corrected manually again, with more cursing. That man and eventually two more men were also sent to the rear waiting area, because they had no verifiable alibi for their whereabouts.

  Then the monitoring equipment repeated its same scale factor problem with a trainee candidate named Fred Saber. This time it impressed itself in Crager’s mind more firmly, because Saber was cleared by exactly the same video as had cleared the Jastrov kid, the most recent anomaly on the brain wave monitor. They had been sitting at a table together in the center of the break room, in conspicuous view of both cameras there.

  He let Saber leave, but was struck by the fact that he was searching for some sort of irregularity in the candidates, and three men had triggered a seeming hardware or software glitch in his equipment. He selected the camera in the holding room, and saw the five men there chatting, obviously discussing what was happening tonight. Well, not all were chatting. Breaker was pacing, but wasn’t really part of the conversation. He seemed nervous.

  Crager had the AI reverse the surveillance recording to when Breaker had joined the first man. They briefly spoke, each professing not to know why they were being questioned or held. Breaker started drying off with the towel he had to carry with him when he ran from the shower.

  As he paced, he opened the top of his jumpsuit to rub the towel around the back of his head and neck. That was when Crager saw what he first thought could be a bruise on his upper chest. He thought that whoever climbed the razor wire fence in the dark, under Heavyside’s gravity, might have been injured. He froze the image and had Karp, the base AI zoom in to see if it looked fresh, or if the skin had been torn.

  The palm-sized, sharply defined black oval looked
applied, not the result of an accident or a bruise. However, he wondered why the size and shape seemed somehow familiar to him. He thought a moment before he fed the image to his personal AI, and asked it to run a compare to similar shapes he perhaps had encountered in the past. It had to be something he’d previously seen.

  His internal visual projection system played a series of images in his left eye. They were mostly random small blobs he’d seen, which the AI had found in recordings of past missions. Conducting a live mission was the only time he made such recordings.

  “Wait. Go back several images.” Something belatedly caught his attention.

  When he found what he’d seen, it was on the fresh corpse of a Krall he and his team had ambushed and killed. The upper chest tattoo had a black oval rim, and inside it contained several dozen colored dots. The oval was perhaps one-third filled with color, as an experienced warrior usually had. However, it certainly wasn’t black inside, not even any of the internal dots were black.

  The part that caught Crager’s attention was the location, size, and oval shape. Breaker appeared to have a blackened Krall rank tattoo at the base of his neck, of the exact same dimension. It was odd, but he’d seen tattoos previously that represented a Krall face, or of a Krall being killed, or already dead. Tattoo body art had mostly died out as a fad centuries ago, although some military members were bringing it back into style, because it could easily be removed now. This marking didn’t look very decorative, and it wasn’t placed where it could easily be seen, as most military related body art was.

  Based on this eccentricity, and the odd brainwave height he shared with two other men, Crager had the camp AI run an analysis of all three men, to seek possible connections or similarities. There could be some sort of implants that altered their neural responses in the sensor chair. The platinum nerve overlays that graduate spec ops troops sported caused similar anomalies. This would make someone like that identifiable when in a neural sensor chair if you knew what to look for. However, he was also looking for anything common in their past behavior. He was actually surprised at what he learned. He’d assumed there would be no obvious links or connections if they had been inserted by some other secret government organization to spy on camp operations.

  One of the other two men, Jastrov, was seen on video bearing a duplicate tattoo, when his jumpsuit fasteners had snagged and pulled open on the training course during a testing run. Matching unusual tattoos would eventually be noticed for the three, after the remaining candidates were reduced in number. They all shared communal showers.

  He learned none of the three men had passed through the spec ops prescreening, done on the orbital transfer station. That wasn’t mandatory, but very few volunteers that simply walked into the terminal at Port Andropov to join the other arrivals made it through the next week, the “weeding out” process in the camp on the other side of the port area. Karp told him that none of the three men matched any of the faces that boarded buses from the terminal to the camp gate, over the two-day period their group was assembled.

  They were truly “walk-ons,” of which none like that had ever been good enough to make it to SOB-1, as far as Crager knew, and certainly none had ever passed “Hell Week.” This, and their joint youthfulness, made them obvious standouts if anyone went looking at them hard, as Crager was doing now. It seemed to be a clumsy infiltration method, counting on a lack investigation on the camp’s part. Although, why not? It had almost worked, and there was a well-known lack of interest in a volunteer’s prior background and criminal history by the black ops section. It wasn’t as if the Krall could slip a warrior by them.

  The three men’s performance ratings were spectacularly average for a selection of already superb physical specimens, placing all three on the top center of the bell curve distribution for the entire group. Farther back on the curve and they would be subpar, and if placed a little ahead on the curve they would be clearly superior to many of the already above average people being tested.

  There was a bell curve distribution for running, for speed, distance, and sprints. Curves for pushups, chin ups, sit-ups, long jumps, rope climbs, and more. The three always seemed to fall in the middle range after a day or so of repetition. All three were noted as “team building” participants because they encouraged the poorer performers to do better.

  None of them was physically outstanding enough to draw notice, but stayed free of the risk of being cut. Except that on several occasions, when the next cut was going to eliminate less desirable candidates, located slightly on the low side of the publicly posted average center points of the curves, these three men had spike performances on the day it was needed, and they were safely retained.

  Having helped design the elimination process, Crager was positive that anyone who’s effort was only average at Camp Port Andropov, would fall well below the final cutoff point during “Hell Week.” Yet all three remained almost exactly average even for that week. It meant at Andropov, they had only put out as much effort as necessary to get to SOB-1. Then only enough sweat to get through “Hell Week.” The competitive nature of the type of men that made it this far was such that they nearly always wanted to excel in competition against their peers. These three men did not do that, yet each was able to step up their physical performance when called to do so. In hindsight, it was clear they had been holding back all the way through.

  At this point, following his instincts, Crager was prepared to assume any one of those three had been the person that went off base and returned. However, two of them had rock solid video alibies, leaving Jorl Breaker at the focal point of his attention. The other two were clearly here to support him or act as alternates. The implication to Crager was that these men were ringers, slipped in here to spy on camp operations. Now they were detected before they had a chance to learn anything.

  The only spy worthy activity Crager knew of was the beginnings of the genetic research still being organized. There must have been a leak. If that suspicion were confirmed, this situation had potentially become a real life or death issue for the planners. The risk was worth taking.

  Because of the physical benefits the scientists insisted could be realized, if they repeated three hundred year old genetic experiments, this had strategic implications for the entire war effort.

  Washing out the three men immediately would alert whoever had sent them that the targets of the witch-hunt knew they were under suspicion. The government couldn’t have any evidence, or there would have been no need for this subterfuge. The “Hell Week” break this weekend must have been the first opportunity for any of the three to make a report or meet their handler. There wasn’t a single incriminating thing the three men could have learned from the camp instructors. Only he and Colonel Dearborn were in the loop out of the military staff, and they were generally not directly in contact with the trainees at this stage, and had never discussed their personal opinions with their underlings.

  If these three had official high-level help, they might have technology to back them up as well. “Karp, check the typical transducer frequencies used in the camp over the last week. Look for use that can’t be traced to any of our permanent party.”

  “Sir, there have been daily transmissions to and from various points in the camp that did not correlate with training instructors, headquarters or support staff, or our civilian personnel with such capability. The transmissions always occur within thirty minutes either side of noon, and they were often centered where candidates had gathered. Following privacy protocol, I do not have recordings of any messages that were not routed through my own communication system, and I would require Colonel Dearborn’s approval to reveal any contents of those I have recorded.”

  “I don't think I’ll need our own messages, Karp. Over what power range were these unknown transmissions made? Limited to within the camp or to the outside?” The power invested would suggest the distance of the possible receiver.

  “Sir, the incoming signals were always quite strong, the outgo
ing much weaker. The stronger transmitter was located at high altitude, or in low orbit. The weaker outbound signals had a range of no more than one hundred miles, or less, depending of course on the sensitivity of the...” Crager cut him off.

  “OK. That means they didn’t need to leave camp to communicate. However, one of them met someone outside. They gave them something, or received something that wasn’t simply a message. Has the recon team arrived yet, Karp?”

  “Yes Sir. They are outside the fence now, where the tracks were found.”

  “Link me to whoever’s in charge.”

  “That would be Sergeant Claude Williams, Sir. Just a moment.”

  A moment later Crager heard, “Sergeant Williams. Can I help you?”

  “Claude, this is Bill Crager. Have you and your men checked the footprints I asked you to examine, and looked at that presumed air boat landing site?”

  “Hey, morning there, Top. Still dark out here, however we have indeed been looking. There are two particularly odd factors, which I assume is why you are so interested in this. Whoever went out, and came back didn’t actually climb on the fence. The ground impacts, at least the ones your patrol boys didn’t step on or drive over, show that whoever came over the fence must have had a Booster Suit.”

  “What? How do you know that?” He did not expect that.

  “Their kickoff point left deeper impressions both ways, because they did not climb the fence, they jumped over. Only a Booster Suited man could have done that, and even so, it’s pretty damned impressive to clear a twelve-foot fence with two feet of coiled wire on top, and to do it on Heavyside. The landing print depth back into the camp supports that notion, although the landing point on the jump out was walked on and driven over by your intrepid patrol boys, as I mentioned.”

  “Crap. This is getting weird, Claude. You said there were two odd factors.”

  “I did. Multiply the weird factor by three or four. The landing craft impressions in the little ravine, where the footprints led, left distinctive size and shaped indentations, and the length and apparent weight also match.”