Koban: The Mark of Koban

by Stephen W Bennett

  After the four visitors stepped into the dome, on their way alone to what the residents here called the Great Auditorium, Mirikami said with a smile, “I didn’t see any skeeters Maggi.”

  “Hmm. My eyes are getting old.” She shrugged. “They must have been there. I’m sure Cahill saw them. Did you see her pick up speed going the other way?”

  5. Actions and Reactions

  The Hub president was livid. “Admiral, telling me that the invading force lost six point nine percent of their invasion force compared to only a two point four percent civilian loss is asinine.”

  Admiral Anderfem, formerly of the Planetary Union Navy, now retired and a Presidential advisor, cringed at Charlotte Stanford’s words. The Admiral’s characterization was simply her attempt to make the Gribbles’ Nook disaster sound less one sided, to help the President’s public image.

  Stanford detailed the fallacy of the numbers. “The human cost was nearly two million fifty thousand souls, in exchange for five hundred sixty seven, or sixty eight aliens, depending on how they reassemble the pieces at Gem Town. Do not make that percentage comparison publicly, or even in private, Jean.

  “Those Goddamned barbarians sent only eight thousand two hundred twenty soldiers…, scratch that. Sadistic murderous bastards is the more appropriate description…, against an unarmed civilian population of eighty five million three hundred thousand or so people.”

  “I’m sorry, Madam President.” Anderfem told her sincerely. “I didn’t mean to sound as if I were diminishing the loss of so many lives. It was stupid to couch the numbers in percentages that way. I just don’t like how the media keeps laying the blame on you as heavily as they have been doing. Who had any idea we had hostile aliens on our door step?”

  “Jean, I apologize as well,” she told her friend, the heat leaving her face. “I know you were looking out for my best interest. Nevertheless, don’t get trapped in a numbers game like that. It would play right into the hands of my opposition, where they could claim I’m insensitive to the human tragedy involved.”

  “Yes Mam.”

  “I know you’ve been conferring with our active duty military, and have poured over the data that’s been arriving with each courier Jump ship. Give me an outline of what we know. I don’t have time for an in-depth briefing right now. I’m addressing parliament in less than two hours, the Senate and House in joint session.”

  “Yes, Mam, I’ll try.” She took a deep breath as she mentally organized what she had learned.

  “The analysts all say the available surveillance images show each of the sixteen ships held exactly five hundred twelve aliens in black or gray uniforms, at an eight to one ratio, suggesting the gray suits were squad leaders or team leaders in units of eight fighters. Then there was one blue and one brown uniformed alien per ship. The observations prove the blue uniform represents a leader of each ship, equivalent to a Captain. At least one of those leaders, in Capitol City, spoke excellent Standard in an accidentally recorded interrogation. That video recording ends horribly for the Police Captain involved. The brown uniformed aliens are likely only pilots, but possibly second in command, even though we saw no sign they controlled troops.”

  “Jean, the numbers and clustering of their combat teams, aliens per ship and the number of ships themselves seem familiar somehow. What is the pattern here that I can’t quite identify?”

  “Mam, the aliens have four digits per hand, a total of eight, so we believe they use octal numbers as the basis of their number system, just as we use base ten for our own numbers. We are finding multiples of eight in squad sizes, number of ships, and number of fighters per ship. The two blue and brown uniforms per ship is an exception.” Anderfem paused before broaching the next item.

  “In addition, another far more significant multiple of eight has been identified. This was marked top secret until you decide to release this data publically, or not. It might cause a panic.” Anderfem looked extremely concerned.

  Sighing, knowing it could only be worse news, “Let’s hear it.”

  “The sixteen attacking ships all performed their White Outs virtually at orbital distance from the planet, in clusters of four. A feat of navigation we can’t match, by the way. We categorized the recordings of the gamma ray bursts for all sixteen ships as deriving from sixteen identical mass ships. This correlates with what we already knew, from the subsequent landings.” Here came the worse news.

  “What has not been revealed is that there were two thousand forty eight such bursts detected with identical characteristic White Outs in the Oort cloud of the Gribbles’ Nook system. This happened the same day as the invasion. However, it required several days at light speed for the bursts to reach Nook. We suspect the sixteen attacking ships were a small flotilla from a much larger fleet in the Oort cloud.”

  The President shook her head in dismay. “Ok, what’s the best guess for alien numbers in a fleet that size, assuming the same number of aliens on each ship?”

  “Over one million fifty two thousand aliens, as a lower estimate.” Anderfem told her grimly.

  “Lower limit?” Stanford had caught that.

  “Our analysts believe the landing ships held far less than half of their maximum capacity, assuming the interiors were as roomy as comparable sized human ships.”

  “My God, we’re lucky they didn’t land their entire force. In two days there wouldn’t have been anyone alive to tell the tale.” Stanford realized.

  “That’s why we think they held the other ships back, Mam. This was a demonstration attack, intended to terminate after two days. They committed horrible atrocities, such as cannibalism, in order to provoke us, not to kill the entire population. Something they apparently could have easily accomplished.”

  “Jean, I don’t wish to sound ridiculous, but they aren’t human, so those weren’t examples of cannibalism, it could be actual feeding, or perhaps a means to extract the maximum emotional fear and terror from us.”

  “Yes Mam.” She accepted the factual correction, but retained the personal opinion that it was a form of cannibalism. This was why she posed her own rhetorical question next.

  “These are an advanced technological race, so why would they eat another highly intelligent life form? We were slow to clean up our own act, but people eventually banned consumption of our more intelligent species on Earth. Such as dolphins, whales, higher primates, dogs, cats, and horses.”

  The President shook her head, “Jean, I have an unpleasant feeling we will find out a lot worse about them. This is only the opening move. What do we know about them physically? They kicked the hell out of anyone that went up against them, but we have some of their remains for study.” She looked at several Tri-Vid images of the aliens.

  “How long before we have a profile of their capabilities, and anatomy. Perhaps something I can tell the joint parliament to convince them to enact the defense spending measures I plan to propose?”

  “Mam, the alien autopsies will not be ready in the couple of hours you have. Or, is that a necropsy for these things?” She didn’t want to be nitpicked again on the difference.

  “I shouldn’t have corrected you before, Jean. We aren’t going to make diplomatic contact any easier if we use terminology that reduces these ‘people’ to mere animals by our choice of words. As distasteful as it will be, we must try to enter negotiations with their leadership, or government representatives. We killed millions in our own wars, and yet we formed alliances with former enemies.”

  “Yes Mam,” Jean acknowledged, but without a shred of conviction. “Until their corpses have been examined in detail, why not use some of the less graphic footage of their physical capabilities as examples of what they can do? Although that may be redundant with the Tri-Vid news ‘wolf packs,’ as I call them, splattering the worst gore they can find on every channel. Naturally it’s always prefixed with the courtesy warning that what we are about to see may be disturbing.” She shook her head.

  The briefing went on, until Stanf
ord said she needed to rehearse her upcoming speech. She was grateful that her first six-year term of office wasn’t at risk for four years. However, her support from Parliamentary coalitions in the House might fall apart, if public outcry forced those Representatives to shift positions. They would be facing the wrath of the people they represented if they lost their confidence.

  A third of the Senate was up for election in eight months. The election results would feel the impact of what they did, or didn’t do, to satisfy the voters this week. Nevertheless, her large Senate majority support would likely endure, at least until the next third of them came up for election.

  For the first time in three hundred years, a Planetary Union president needed to propose a huge defense budget increase. The Navy was going to be very happy. If they could keep the aliens away from the planets, there would be no more massacres on the ground.

  ****

  Gatrol Kanpardi was addressing the joint clan leaders. “This new prey has no ground forces to oppose us yet, and they have no way of preventing our warriors and Clanships from landing when and where we want. We must be patient, and maintain small but steady pressure on different worlds, until they build the armies we now know they once possessed. Then we can expand our attacks and allow every clan, large and small, their full share of the Great Path.”

  He was Graka clan’s supreme commander for this series of initial strikes into Human Space. The title of Gatrol was equivalent to General in the human language they called Standard, although he also commanded his own clan’s fleet.

  The other clans wanted to begin invasions of many human worlds now, and as Gatrol of the Krall, not just of Graka clan, Kanpardi had to convince them to postpone that action. He had the difficult task of explaining why this would not be the most efficient use of the resources that this slow-to-react species represented.

  He was convinced that humans would be a worthy enemy, given time and proper “motivation.” The Krall selective breeding program for walking along the Great Path required that they force humans to organize to fight as they once had done. When human opposition reached a certain level, where their ground forces could reduce invading Krall raiders by ten or even fifteen percent, the Krall could increase pressure. Initially more raids on selected planets, then invading certain outer worlds, would push the humans into expanding their forces on each planet.

  The difficult part for Kanpardi was to get the joint clan leaders to themselves organize, to decide which clans would attack the selected human worlds, and in what order. He hated interclan politics. A simple weapon and an enemy before him was all he really desired, but he had an obligation to his race first, his clan second, and himself last, in achieving the racial goals.

  The Krall knew they were destined to conquer and rule the Milky Way galaxy. However, the Great Path to achieve this had encountered a pothole, if it deserved an analogy. To conquer every race they might meet, the Krall believed they needed to be physically superior to them all. They had thought they were close to that goal. Until the Dorbo clan stumbled onto a wild lush planet that they named Koban, before even exploring the world.

  It was located inside a volume of space once colonized by the Malverans. That race had been a useless reptilian species, and the Dorbo clan had easily exterminated them on their own. However, Koban proved to be a destiny changer when a Krall settlement was attempted.

  There was no intelligent technological species on Koban, but the heavy gravity planet, with a much higher than average percentage of heavy elements had, in its primordial era, produced organic superconducting neural networks in the most primitive of life forms.

  Evolution had passed this trait along to subsequent higher forms of life for billions of years. The native animals now on Koban were not only strong, something the Krall had also achieved and could increase, but had superconducting nerves that made the Koban animals too fast for the Krall to match. Animals destroyed their first settlements and warriors in short order, unless protected by walls, weapons, and electric fences.

  If they were to be sure of defeating every opponent in the galaxy, the Krall decided to direct their breeding to incorporate organic superconducting nerves. Fortunately, they believed they could do this within as little as fifty generations. After twenty five thousand years, they surely had the racial patience to wait. That long history won the day for Kanpardi’s argument.

  He reminded them of how long they had worked to reach their goal. They had left Koban in isolation, to preserve it in its pristine form for their eventual return, to make it their home world. He overlooked that it was pristine except for the humans left behind, for Koban to erase for them, a forgone result that deserved no thought.

  Finally, the joint clan leaders reached a consensus. The major clans would produce a list of which clans would have early opportunities for limited attacks on human worlds. The first worlds targeted would be those in their outer settlements, the region the humans called Rim worlds. There were over a hundred to choose from, but those planets closest to the Krall sphere of influence were more convenient. That lowered the number of targets to perhaps thirty, which the clan leaders would consider individually.

  With the major clans in agreement, Kanpardi left the meeting. Now he had the task of selecting a world as a base of operations for perhaps the first five generations of the war. It could be any world he found suitable on the edge of Human Space. For this selection, Kanpardi had considerable discretion, because it would be a human world where Graka clan, acting entirely alone, would conduct the assault. They would eliminate all humans on the chosen base world. They would bring in a number of properly trained and submissive Krall slave races. These would build the infrastructure of a forward base for the Krall for perhaps the next one or two hundred years.

  For help with his decision, Kanpardi called in his clan’s eight most experienced sub leaders, controlling two hundred fifty six Clanships each.

  The Gatrol outlined some of the requirements for a suitable world. “The selection should not be based on the best test of our novices in the conquest. That will last no more than a week for any of the suitable worlds, because of low prey populations on worlds so remote from the enemy’s center of expansion.”

  He knew other clans would judge Graka clan on the quality of the forward base, not on the quality of the conquest itself.

  Kanpardi listed some of the consideration, “The major clans will each establish compounds and nest areas there, so climate, gravity, natural resources, Raspani grazing and slave security from excessive risk should be considered. Fewer novices protecting our food and production mean more warriors on the Great Path, to be culled by the enemy when it builds its armies.”

  The Krall always valued efficiency. The human population in this case was merely vermin infesting their new temporary quarters. This step, to make a base, the Krall had made many times, and would be the first of perhaps four moves to temporary forward bases as the conquest slowly chewed through humanity’s seven hundred twenty four occupied worlds. The joint clans wanted the overall conquest to last a thousand years. Twice that time if humans proved to be a worthy enemy, as only two previous opponents of seventeen had achieved. They held high hopes for prey number eighteen.

  After examining scouting reports, then holding a short debate, Kanpardi selected a world which humans called Greater West Africa, a relatively new Rim region colony. Compared to most human colonies it had fewer nest areas to be cleared, and was less developed and therefore less disturbed from a Krall perspective.

  Its tropical climate and well-watered open plains on the two main equator-spanning landmasses were ideal for Raspani herds. It also had suitable territory for the Krall’s most useful slave races, seashores for the giant land crabs called the Torki, forests and jungles for the simian-like Prada. The gravity was lower than the Krall liked, but that was generally true for most habitable worlds other races preferred. It was also not located within twenty light years of another human occupied world.

  All that
remained was coordinating the fleet’s Jump to what Graka clan was calling Telda Ka, the less-than-poetic designation of “Base 1.” Of course, the trivial matter of exterminating eighteen million humans remained, with minimal collateral damage to buildings that might prove useful to slaves. Over all, it appeared to be an acceptable world once properly cleaned.

  Kanpardi issued the order to ready the Graka Clanships for Jump, and informed the joint clan leaders to summon their own fleets in one week, with material and slaves to build their own forward compounds on Telda Ka. He sent a courier to Graka clan’s old base planet, on a former Raspani colony world, to do the same. The new base planet would be ready for occupancy when they arrived.

  ****

  “Men!” Stanford was exasperated. She was speaking in private with her sole military advisor and friend, Jean Anderfem. “Sometimes I wonder why we restored them to full suffrage.”

  She said this in jest, though it was only half a joke in her present mood. The president was genuinely annoyed at Senator Bolivar Ortega, the junior senator from the Old Colony of Ponce, and the man that was the source of her irritation.

  The president wasn’t finished venting. “That twerp only got on the Armed Forces Committee because it was such an irrelevant and antiquated body. It seemed a cliché when a male lobbied for an appointment. The Navy is the only military force of significance, and saner heads dominate on the full committee. I wasn’t aware we even had a subcommittee for Airland. What’s it responsible for again, Jean?”

  “Mam, I had to look it up. It is responsible for Army and Air Force programs, even Navy and Marine Corps tactical aviation programs.” She noted the president’s incredulous expression. There had been no Marine Core for four hundred years.

  “Mam, this wording was retained from the original United States Senate committee structures from before the Collapse. When the Planetary Union formed, this structure was never reviewed when the military forces were disbanded. Except for the smaller Space Navy, of course. Senator Ortega is presently the only member of the Airland subcommittee, and thus is the de facto chairperson.” She saw Stanford’s negative head shake.