Koban: The Mark of Koban

by Stephen W Bennett

  “In any case, Rafe has determined that he can place the ripper genes for that sixth sense in the appropriate sections of the cerebral cortex of our brains, where our finger’s tactile nerve endings terminate. Specifically, the contact path will start from the thumb, index, middle and part of the ring fingers, to the median nerve. The median nerve enters the brachial plexus, then to ….” He stopped, as Mirikami raised a finger to press it against Dillon’s lips.

  “Son, I’m not going to design the damned modification myself. How will it work when adapted? What would a modified person use to touch someone, and connect where on their body to sense their mind, or to send them mental images from their own mind? OK? Keep it simple for a simple Spacer. And I understand that it will not involve opening the fly of your pants.” He winked.

  With a sheepish grin, Dillon resumed. “The next generation will do much like we do now with the cats, use a thumb and two fore fingers for contact. However, any place we touch will provide some level of connection. Not with hair of course, but it will be strongest hand to hand. Not hand to head like we first thought, though that might be a decent connection.”

  “What about filtering input and output, like we know the cats can do, as they did do for their best little buddies yesterday. They don’t appear able to lie, but they can hold information back.”

  “That’s an unknown quantity for us, Tet. Based on the cat’s earliest memories today and our own studies of them as they grew, they could not always block or select what they send to us. That required practice and learned mental control. Humans have no experience with this, but we will probably learn to guard or control our thoughts just as they did.”

  Then Dillon’s grin turned devilish. “Just like most of us can hold our temper, instead of acting on whatever impulse pops into her empty head.”

  Whack! Whack! It was a double retaliation. Noreen aimed high, Maggi low.

  Dillon simultaneously tried, and failed, to cover groin and head. He flashed a hurt expression at his beloved wife.

  “Why did you thump me? I was talking about Maggi!”

  “Oh…, I thought you meant when I got mad and punched Cahill. Well, it doesn’t matter, we Ladies have to stick together.” She and Maggi smacked palms together, with winks.

  15. Fjord

  The Krall had largely bypassed Fjord, after nearly four years of light to heavy raids on other Rim worlds. Frequent raids had forced abandonment of several Rim worlds, including the first Krall target in Human Space, Gribbles’ Nook.

  The Nook was effectively a privately owned world operated by mining companies, and without a citizen base, it could not vote to join the Planetary Union to receive a mobile defense force. Contract labor wouldn’t sign on without greatly higher wages and benefits, and they insisted on owning their own guns. The companies couldn’t enforce their former strict control, nor make enough profit. Therefore, they pulled out.

  Using remote monitoring it was clear that the Krall virtually ignored Nook after the humans were gone. This was further evidence they didn’t particularly care about holding on to even valuable resources. The Krall didn’t care about territory other than as a place to build a base, such as Greater West Africa, now called K1.

  What drew them were opportunities for exciting combat, many kills per warrior, and significant warrior culling. Fjord didn’t offer them much in that respect.

  The infrequent small Krall raids here had encouraged the population to resist joining the Planetary Union. If they voted to become a New Colony, they would be expected pay for and host at least ten thousand troopers in a mobile force. That system was based on the most successful ground defense system found thus far, the Poldark model. It was a double-edged sword if they did this, possibly making them a more desirable target. The discussions on why the Krall seldom targeted this planet centered on several factors.

  First was climate. The cold world had a Nordic type climate even at the equator, with huge polar ice caps extending over a half way to the equator. The equatorial landmasses, with seaports ice-free only in the summer, were rife with narrow glacier gouged steep walled coastal valleys, remnants from past ice ages, the most recent one being in slow retreat. Glaciers had been gradually retreating since humans discovered the planet three hundred years ago. Because the Krall preferred warm climates, they usually raided temperate worlds.

  Second, it was true that worlds that were the most successful at driving off raids, such as Poldark, also received more raids, presumably because they were better opponents. The basing of troopers on Fjord might draw a large Krall raid.

  Third, a sizable percentage of the population lived on boats or giant floating rafts where they docked their fishing fleets and where they built fish processing plants. Much of the remaining population lived in coastal regions, with sections of towns built on piers out over the water. The Krall didn’t like water and, with their dense bodies, they swam like flailing rocks. When one or two warriors raided a town on Fjord, the heavily armed population evacuated to the rafts, boats, or other locations over water, limiting the Krall’s options for reaching them.

  As the name Fjord might suggest, hardy, independent Scandinavian immigrants with a generous smattering of other Nordic peoples had settled the colony. With a population of barely fourteen million, spread widely, they didn’t want ten to twenty thousand socially disruptive armed outsiders in their midst, accompanied by the taxes for their upkeep and equipment.

  Instead, every family had one or more automatic weapons, and the volunteer militia, five thousand strong, had decent older model armor, with good IR concealment and AI controlled weapons.

  Furthermore, they possessed several hundred of the new plasma rifles that killed a Krall relatively quickly, unless they were in their own armor. They also had fifty dual barrel plasma cannons on AI controlled platforms to share among the largest towns. This defensive capability had proven adequate for previous raids, when a normally stealthed Clanship released only one or two single ships at a time, rather than the usual eight to thirty-two. This light raid pattern was almost unique to Fjord.

  Every one of the warriors that came to Fiord in the past had stayed and fought until killed. This was different from single ship raids elsewhere, when a Clanship returned to retrieve warriors one or two days later. Planetary Union Army advisors, sent to train the local militia, had told them non-retrieval single ship landings did happen on other planets, but it was very rare.

  The poorly equipped and stranded warriors never had armor or plasma weapons, and always fought with more reckless abandon than other Krall. They behaved rather like ancient Viking berserkers, apparently intentionally left to fight to the death. The reason for that was speculative, of course, but analysts suspected the Krall were punishing those warriors. One factor was that they never lived to collect any of the breeding rights they considered currency. Apparently, their clan leaders allowed them a fighting death against an enemy, but not the right to reproduce.

  Fjord seemed to be the most common destination for such punished warriors, possibly because it offered the least desirable conditions for the Krall. It was a world that offered cold weather, icy water, and prey that retreated to difficult to reach positions over frigid water.

  The season now was well into fall, with ice forming on the edges of the shorelines and under the piers and docks every night, taking longer to melt each day. The season for trawler fleet fishing was over and soon ice fishing would start, with fishermen dropping lines through the ice, and sitting in warm huts with four to a dozen friends, drinking and relaxing. Telling stories was nearly as important as fishing in that slower season. No one was thinking of the Krall threat here, not at this late season.

  So naturally, today would deliver a different sort of raid. Unfortunately for the residents, Fjord was about to join the mainstream of other Rimworlds. Four Clanships performed simultaneous White Outs four hundred miles above the night side of the planet. In the absence of planetary defenses and radar, the Krall ships didn’t bothe
r going into stealth operation. One of the Clanships entered an orbit towards New Oslo, as the other three descended and spread out to release single ships, distributed over Stockholm, Reykjavik II, Copen, and Nuuk.

  The planetary alert network triggered as soon as any Clanship White Out was detected, galvanizing the populations to start moving towards boats, docks, piers, and the floating fish processing plants. Most people went armed all the time, packing large caliber pistols, loaded with the KK chip ammunition that was now common issue.

  People owning heavier automatic weapons kept them close, and even carried them to and from work. The militia members needed to go home to get their armor, or some of them carried it with them in government subsidized work trucks. Despite fewer Krall attacks, the high loss of life from past berserkers had promoted strong civil defense preparations.

  One of the preparations had been cities taking advantage of the mostly narrow terrain of the fiords, where they met the water. A flat paved area was located close to where the piers and docks started. This was the only landing pad suitable for spacecraft in each city, where New Oslo and other cities shipped out their frozen fish exports. They became a quickly evacuated flea market at other times.

  Artful construction of sturdy stone buildings of various heights around the pads and along the streets of the narrow strip of level surface made setting down elsewhere next to impossible for the Clanship’s landing jack design. Cities built much of the residential housing into the steep sides of the fiord’s rock walls. Extensive tunneling provided horizontal and vertical shafts for two-way slidewalk corridors, elevators, ramps, and escalators in those sidewalls.

  Four plasma cannon platforms, built into the rock faces, had two miles of city between the walls, with coverage of the only possible landing place located midway between them.

  Agneta and Henrik Heilesen were married and both in the New Oslo militia. They had raced the short distance home from their bottom level cheese shop to get into their armor. Once suited, they leaped onto the slidewalk that ran past their midlevel apartment towards plasma gun 3, their nearby duty post.

  Henrik checked his communications as he and Agneta smoothly stepped in towards the faster belts. “Eric, Greta, have you suited up yet?” He saw Greta’s icon in his helmet, proving her suit was coming on-line. That couple worked gun 4, a half-mile farther along the same rock face, on the same level as gun 3.

  Greta responded. “I’m stepping onto the slidewalk, Henrik. Eric just reached our apartment when I ran out. He’ll be on-line any moment. What do you hear from Jarl and Elin, or Alf?”

  They were the militia members that staffed guns 1 and 2, the plasma cannons on the opposite rock face of the fiord, two miles away.

  “I called you first when I saw your icon, but let me check if they are in-suit yet.” Henrik was the senior member of New Oslo’s four-Battery unit, and technically in charge. In practice, any of them could step in to coordinate their operation, depending on who was able to get to their station and get the AI’s data feed of what the Krall were doing.

  Before he could make a call, his suit helmet flashed icons for Alf, and Elin, and they were reporting in. “Henrik, this is Alf. I’ll be at number 1 in about two minutes.”

  Elin jumped in, “Henrik, Jarl wasn’t home yet when I suited. I’m about three minutes from gun 2.” While Alf and Elin were reporting in, Eric’s icon had appeared, meaning he was on the heels of his wife, Greta, heading for their duty post at number two. Jarl was the only one of the seven members of the four plasma batteries that had not reported, and his wife was already on her way.

  At this pace, all four batteries would be staffed and operational within ten minutes of the alert, well before the Clanship could arrive. The AI had automatically initiated the heating of the dual plasma chambers for each Battery when the alert sounded. The four fusion bottles that powered them stayed on all of the time, furnishing power to adjacent apartments and local businesses normally. If the cannons required all of the power, other power customers were quite likely to be forgiving of the energy diversion.

  As Henrik and Agneta neared the “step off” closest to their gun platform, they moved outwards towards the slower moving strips of the slidewalk, moving around people that were hurrying home to pick up their own weapons, or headed for the waterfront. Those people respectfully stayed out of the militia’s way, knowing they would be staying behind, risking their lives to cover the evacuation.

  As Henrik and Agneta entered the heavily armored room of gun 3, Agneta pressed the code to close and seal the thick outer door. When sealed, the inner armored door opened to admit them to the control room for the plasma cannon. The outer double armored walls, with insulating ceramic between, would provide protection from return plasma or heavy laser fire.

  The planners had buried the AI computer deep below the base of the western rock face, and it could operate the cannons independently if a human decision maker was not available. The team named the computer Norb, and he was in a constant Link with the four batteries, and usually with all four team members.

  Norb had the current visual tracking feed for the incoming Clanships, sending it to monitors in each control room. The lack of stealth wasn’t a surprise, because after previous small raids the Krall had stopped bothering with stealth mode when no targeting systems ever tracked them.

  Aside from Fjord not having the tax money to build such a defense, they had proven largely ineffective for repelling the Krall on other worlds. Here, with the enemy uncloaked, they could visually follow them. It hadn’t mattered to the previous suicide berserkers if humans were expecting them. Apparently, the various Clanships that delivered them had reported the unopposed airspace penetrations and departures. Now, perhaps that overconfidence would work to the benefit of the militia, which had never needed to face so many Krall before today.

  Henrik could see the monitors, but didn’t have the benefit of the tracking histories. “Norb, where are the four Clanships headed?”

  “Sir, three Clanships are currently releasing single ships over four other cities, but it appears that the fourth ship is inbound for New Oslo. It has not released any single ships as it passed near other cities, traveling from the night side. This appears to match patterns on other worlds of a five hundred twelve warrior landing attack, when a Clanship passes viable targets and drops no single ships.”

  These type of murderous landing raids typically lasted three days, or perhaps less if the number of warriors killed reached thirty to forty percent sooner than that. These more destructive attacks had completely bypassed Fjord. Until today, that is.

  Every city located in a relatively narrow fiord, such as where the first settlers built New Oslo, and nearly all of the other larger cities on Fjord, had recently cleared buildings and other property to build those distinctive and inviting landing pads. They placed the pads so they were the most practical place to land a spacecraft amid the surrounding and densely built up cityscapes. Every large city had four plasma cannon emplacements in the rock walls covering the landing pads. Apparently, New Oslo had just “won” the lottery.

  Henrik linked to the team via their suit coms and the AI. “Ladies and Gentle Men, we have an inbound Clanship, and it isn’t dropping single ships. We have seven minutes before we get five-hundred twelve visitors, and we want it landing on the pad.” He flipped a switch and new sirens sounded a mile away, around the pad. This ensured that anyone that had not yet evacuated that area did so more quickly. It was now ground zero.

  After five minutes, the team members were all at their posts, Jarl Boldsen having driven his delivery truck recklessly to get home. Alf was the only militia member present at gun 1, due to his wife being too pregnant to fit into her armor. Henrik silenced the sirens near the pad. There should not be anyone within a mile of it by now. He activated another control console, which lit up similar consoles in the other three control rooms. Any Battery could operate any of the circuits those special defense consoles controlled.

  S
till Linked to all of the team, Henrik said, “Nord, range and synchronize all batteries.”

  “Yes Sir.”

  They could hear and feel the sound of the heavy duty mounts rotating, and the massive three-foot thick shield doors opening just wide enough to pass the dual plasma beams. Heavy mirrored panels also slid out of protective “cleaning” slots, prepared to deflect laser fire as long as possible. Clanships had four heavy-duty lasers, eight lighter lasers, and four potent plasma cannons, providing three hundred sixty degree and overhead defensive or offensive fire for the ship.

  “Team, arm the manual overrides.” One person at each Battery went to a set of large joysticks with triggers, and activated several video monitors that showed recticles on screen for the aiming point of their cannon. This targeting was via three small video cameras located along the rock face, well away from probable enemy fire.

  These modifications came at the request of the militia. They wanted direct human control of the weapons if Nord was unable to remote Link to the guns, and/or he lost the incoming hard control lines, or the AI was somehow disabled. The manufacturer’s tech reps insisted that the automated control systems were foolproof and redundant enough. However, the technical experts lived on safe Hub worlds, and their asses were not on the line.

  Direct human operation provided yet another redundant set of controls that were fully contained within the armored compartment. A useless feature or not, it made those that staffed the batteries feel more secure.

  The Clanship finally appeared on local video cameras and not just on computer projection feeds of the track over the planet towards New Oslo. The ship rapidly slowed and hovered over the water in the inlet, obviously examining the options for landing. Even with flea market awnings and small stands on the perimeter of the pad, and a roadway roundabout of a small fountain in the center, the Krall ship’s radar would see that the area had ample flat surface for several starships.