Koban: The Mark of Koban

by Stephen W Bennett

  Both boys half-filled their clips with the frangible practice rounds, and took a bead on the far distant targets. The familiar Whoosh as the rocket propelled rounds left the guns sounded almost simultaneously. Both hits were nearly dead center of the bull’s eye.

  “Very good. I hear you’ve been practicing here since you started feeling better.”

  He got an affirmative from both.

  “OK. Now both of you do a quick draw, Carson you go first, then Ethan. I’m not as interested in which is faster, but in speed combined with accuracy. GO!”

  Carson’s hand and arm were a streak of motion as he drew and fired as the final word was still on Mirikami’s lips. Another hit in the bull’s eye. Ethan went next, with no discernible difference that Mirikami could see. However, Ethan sounded irritated with himself. “Darn.”

  “What?” Thad asked him.

  “I didn’t loosen the gun in the holster first, and it stuck slightly as I pulled, and it slowed me down.”

  “Yea, I saw that. But you were closer to center than I was.” Carson apparently had the only set of eyes that could see that slight holster movement in that split second.

  “So far so good.” Tet responded.

  “What do you mean? We both hit center slow, and with a faster draw.” Carson was a bit defensive.

  “Thad, on your Testing Day you had a Krall running towards you and your team, dodging and rolling you said, as three of you fired at him, and I presume he started from farther away than these targets. How accurate did he seem to you?”

  “Extremely. We were ducking as soon as we fired our guns, and his slugs were smacking the wall behind or the rock in front of us where our heads had just been. He hit within almost as tight a cluster as each of your shots just were. My friend was at least as far away as that target when he took a slug through his right eye, while the Krall had just lost a forearm to an explosive shell, and did a tuck and roll as he had fired.”

  “I think you see what I’m leading up to now, don’t you lads? I don’t want a tuck and roll, but I’d like you to go fifty feet up along the line here, and run back this way, firing as you go, spreading your shots out so we can see them hit individually. Fire the last round as you pass us.”

  Ethan went first, and with blazing speed, he covered the fifty feet in well under whatever the world record for that split of a hundred yard dash was, and put all six of his remaining shots in the bull’s eye of his target. Despite the instruction to space out the shots, they struck so fast that the dust from the successive rounds obscured Tet’s view.

  “OK, Carson you go.”

  It was a near duplicate of Ethan’s test, but the last two shots clearly puffed on Ethan’s bull’s eye, the rest were on Carson’s target. It had sounded fast, but something was different to Tet’s ear. Was that too many shots?

  Ethan confirmed that. “Clever trick, jackass. I didn’t see you add to your clip.” Both boys had loaded eight rounds at first, and had fired twice each before the last running accuracy test. Unseen, Carson had slipped two more rounds to his clip, and used those on Ethan’s target as a bit of one-ups-man ship.

  Looking at the targets, there were no dark spots to show either had missed the two-inch bull’s eye center at all. They had both filled their spots, and hadn’t missed them even in a sprint.

  Carson was ready for a personal challenge now. “Hey, Dad. Ready to match that?” A grin plastered his face, remarkably lopsided like his father’s matching grin.

  Mirikami held a hand up to forestall the fun, ready to explain why he brought them here. “Boys, I’m not interested in seeing you beat your fathers at anything tonight. However, a goal we set ourselves when the Krall left us here to die was to do more than simply survive on Koban. We wanted to make it our home. Collectively we have already done that, with the gene mods your father’s and I have now. After we made peace with the rippers and wolfbats, we began to leave the domes and change this world to suit us. Only that isn’t enough.

  “I don’t want you boys to ever forget that humanity’s greatest enemy promised to return here. If they do that, within your lifetime, or even your grandchildren’s life time, they will kill every single human on this planet.”

  Ethan wasn’t ready to accept that. “Uncle Tet, you said it yourself, or rather Jake said it. We Third gens are twice as fast as they are, and the next mods will improve those that follow us even more. We’re probably already stronger than they are, and I always heard that we outsmarted them often. We’ll not sit back and let them walk over us. We’ll fight.”

  Tet looked at them, then at their fathers, and saw the understanding in the men’s eyes. “Ethan, I’ll let your Dad explain the cold hard numbers involved. Why you would lose that fight.”

  He knew Thad’s militia background and training had taught him basic strategy and tactics, and the man was intelligent. He knew their limitations on Koban, and those extending considerably into the future.

  Thad began with a hypothetical question. “Ethan, if you and Carson were forced to go up against all of the other human beings on this planet, in a fight to the death, would you win?”

  “Uh, why would just the two of us have to fight? We’d lose for sure.”

  “The two of you against the twenty three thousand surviving people that arrived here as captives, plus the nearly three thousand children they bore in the last seventeen years. That is better odds than all of us combined would have against the entire race of Krall. We are a single, severely under populated, undeveloped world. It would be no contest. These creatures have depopulated hundreds or thousands of worlds, destroying billions or trillions of alien lives, usually fighting against more advanced cultures and science than humanity currently has. They are presumably doing that to our worlds in Human Space now. We do not want them coming here.”

  Carson was confused. “If this is all a waste, then except for the thrill we get from being stronger and faster, what use is this big project to make us better than the Krall?”

  Mirikami had his answer ready. “We don’t plan to simply sit here and wait for them. I promised that we would go looking for them. We will do that, take the fight to them, and not give away our home world’s location.

  “That may seem impossible, since they definitely know where Koban is located. However, we don’t have to let them know that’s where we are from. They expected us all to die within the first year after they departed. Humans, coming from Koban? That will be an impossible concept for those arrogant bastards to consider. Ethan, your dad has talked with me, and others, about what we’ll need to do.”

  “Dad, they will still outnumber us if we go looking for them.” Ethan looked to his father for explanation. He didn’t even ask how they intended to get off Koban, and Jump out of this system.

  One detail at a time, Mirikami thought, letting Thad explain their strategy.

  “Son, we will initially need support from other human worlds, where there is the production and technology we require. Our enemy builds nothing that they use for war themselves. By that, I mean the Krall themselves do not. Slave races do all of the actual production, on established base worlds inside the space they now control. We have learned some of this from them, some from the slave race they left behind here, the Raspani. We have pieced together smatterings of oral histories these remnants of a great race still retain, and hand down to the next generations.”

  Carson asked, “The rest of humanity, with all their population, their productivity and technology can’t beat them, how can we help beat them?”

  Mirikami told him. “Their weakness is their dependence on slaves to make their Clanships, weapons, habitat domes, essentially everything that they appear to use, down to uniforms and weapons belts. That is the heart of their capability to make unending war, how they devote every member of the race to fighting and breeding for better warriors.

  “We have to kill that war making capability with a symbolic spear thrust to its heart. The machinery of war the Krall have been running fo
r thousands of years will grind to a halt without replacement parts.”

  Carson demonstrated his grasp of the problem. “You tell us we are too few to even defend our own home. How can that same group of us, here on Koban, make any difference if a trillion other humans can’t?”

  “That spear I mentioned? It needs a very sharp, very strong point. Observing you kids tonight, I’m finally seeing the shape of that weapon. You, and those like you, will form that spear point, striking into the heart of the Krall’s strength. That is something no ordinary human could hope to do, but it is something a Kobani human can do.”

  ****

  “Aren’t most things clearer in hind sight?” Rafe asked. “We wanted the new TGs to focus on the faster nervous system’s input and output. Mental contact with rippers, which have no other option than to use their own high-speed network, obviously guide and stimulate that process in our kids. It didn’t even take a week to see considerable differences in the six test subjects. They almost match coordination and reaction speeds with Carson and Ethan now. We have a solution.”

  Tet agreed, but pulled at his lower lip. “We’re faced with a bottleneck. It’s an imposition on Kobalt, Kit, Kayla and Kally, to send three hundred TGs to frill with them every day, with a few more kids turning sixteen each month. We have to respect their independence. Besides, Kobalt and Kit are not getting younger. The lifetime of a wild ripper is apparently about twenty years. I think the better care and feeding our cats receive will increase that lifespan, but we need to plan for another generation of human and ripper interaction, until we have contact telepathy for ourselves.

  We will not use Kit’s newest cubs that way for at least a year, they’re babies, and they need mom and play time to become healthy rippers. I want to involve more adult rippers.”

  Thad thought he knew what Tet had in mind. “It sounds like you plan to work out another agreement with the three nearby prides. Send our kids to them as emissaries, or invite some of them into the compound? Even if the prides agreed, they don’t have very many members.

  “Dillon and I estimated that on average there are less than a hundred rippers combined in the three prides nearest to us. If we offered a rhinolo kill, possibly two, in exchange for a week of ten different kids a day interacting with them, while they lay around digesting, that could work. However, they are an independent lot, so I wouldn’t count on even half of them participating. We have almost three hundred kids and not enough time or rippers.”

  “I’m not talking just about Prime City area prides, Thad. I’m thinking of the two prides that hunt near Hub City. We have a truce agreement with them, but almost no one from Hub City ever goes out to meet with them. We only visit those prides ourselves when we send our people over for some repair work or to trade manufactured goods for Hub City meat or fish.

  “Vince and Sarah are virtual Hub City residents now, since they made the Raspani retraining school their full time work. They go out to see both prides once a month, taking them organ meat from the hunts, making sure they see that humans keep agreements. I’d like to send a contingent of fifty of our kids to Hub City with you, Dillon, and Kobalt, as soon as the burning phase ends. If you go out to meet them, taking Kobalt, Vince, and Sarah, that should provide you a chance to negotiate a temporary food for frill deal.”

  “You think MacDougal will accept a bunch of our newly enhanced TGs over there for a couple of weeks?”

  “He was just reelected, after four years of stagnation under Cahill’s old pal as mayor. Lady Toledo’s conservative anti Prime City attitude stalled every progressive thing most of the people there wanted done, and which needed our help to complete. I believe they only voted her in for that single term because Stewart had become a fixture, and they simply wanted a change. Now they want to change back. He has their support, and we have his.

  “I already know he’s willing to let us send some kids before school restarts. I spoke to him a few days ago. He and the thousands of parents there with SG kids want to see what our SG1’s, now changed into TGs can do. I want to show them we didn’t turn them into blue colored Kobani freaks. Fast and strong perhaps, but they look just like their kids.”

  “I heard from Noreen and Marlyn that Carson and Ethan say they want to attend the first classes of the College Hub City is setting up for their seniors, which will graduate high school next year. Maggi hopes we can send more of our kids over there. It will help establish a more integrated society.”

  Tet wasn’t surprised those two rambunctious boys wanted out from under parental scrutiny. “Let them know that after graduation, I’m pushing for settlements on the other two continents. With our population explosion, we’ll need that activity as a challenge for our young people, unless we solve the problem of getting higher than geosynchronous orbits.”

  “I don’t understand. We have two com satellites up there now, why do we need more?”

  “Rafe, I said above geosynchronous orbits, and not to put up com satellites. I want to reach our moon, or rather orbit the moon, to inspect the eight derelict passenger liners.”

  “Oh. I thought the Krall destroyed them.”

  “At the time they pulled out, we weren’t sure, and they obviously had moved them, because we couldn’t see them any more at night in orbit. I couldn’t let Jake turn on our radar system before they were gone, since they were positive they left us without power. Jake didn’t spot them a week or so later when I allowed him to scan near space. I thought they had taken them to interstellar space or the outer part of the system.

  “I guess that was too much of a delay for them, in their rush to start their war. They put them in close orbits around the moon to get them out of the way, avoiding the time consumption of towing them farther away. Remember, we talked them into not blowing them apart with the people aboard, merely because that would have dirtied the space around the planet. Jake did an observation when there was a lunar type eclipse, and saw the dots in the telescope. Radar confirmed all eight are there. That put them well out of our reach, so there wasn’t anything to talk about really. We knew they had shot off all of the Trap emitters, so they had no Jump capability.”

  “Then why go up and look closer, then?”

  “Because, we have other emitters on ships left here on the ramp, like those on the hull of the Flight of Fancy. There are spares on all the grounded ships, carried if an emitter suffers a meteoroid impact. We can take a bunch up with us, and look for their own spares on the eight in orbit. Those are large ships, and need more emitters than ships like the Fancy, and the designs and wiring would be different. However, if the Krall left the fusion bottles shutdown but intact, and we carried up replacement emitters, we might get one of those ships operational. Chief Haveram is convinced he could do the work if we get him and his Drive Rats to them. We haven’t had the shuttle fuel reserves to spend on the attempt, but with the new refinery starting up at Hub City, we will have more fuel soon. It’s a long shot, and risky, but it might work. The key is that we need their fusion bottles intact, and we need to take one of our own up to jumpstart one of those. A lot of if’s, risks, and work.”

  “If we did, are we going to let some people go home?” There were plenty of homesick people here.

  “Well, this is my home now. However, should we be willing to go back there to live? To prove whom we are, to get back our lives there, they will run a DNA match. You and I are not entirely the same Rafe Campbel and Tetsuo Mirikami that left there. The illegal mods will show up if they look.”

  “True. But couldn’t we sneak in and use a shuttle to land quietly on some Rim world. DNA scans were never used for interstellar travel.”

  Thad asked a question. “Rafe, do you think we can sneak into a probable war zone, in a giant passenger liner that went missing seventeen years ago, and draw no attention? The gamma ray burst will reveal the ship, and whoever is aboard will be DNA scanned.”

  “Perhaps send some of the unmodified people, with a cover story?” Rafe clearly had never thought
about this possibility.

  “To do what, exactly?” Thad asked. “Buy some advanced technology and fly back here? Would you trust your life to allow Cahill or one of her sympathizers to go back and keep quiet about us manmade ‘freaks of nature’ trapped here on this world in enemy space?”

  “How the hell would I know?” Rafe asked in irritation. “Until two minutes ago, I didn’t even know you were considering this. I don’t have a solution, so don’t ask me for one.” Thad had clearly annoyed the genealogist. “If we can’t go back, then why try?”

  “Rafe, I apologize,” Mirikami offered. “I let my mind wander and started a conversation and pulled you and Thad into it, and didn’t spend time explaining all of the problems first.”

  Thad put a hand on the scientist’s shoulder. “Rafe, I’m sorry too. I heard about this idea a few days ago, and all I’ve done is think about ways for it to go bad for us. The Krall are obviously the worst threat, but we can’t be certain that the Hub government isn’t a threat to us either, despite our intention to help them fight the Krall. I have children to worry about.”

  Tet shrugged his shoulders, and pulled at his lip. “I don’t know yet how we can make the best use of a Jump ship, but we need to actually have one first. Personally, I’d rather have one than not have one. However, you just heard Thad mention a good reason for keeping the knowledge of that prospect within the Inner Circle. If our people knew that we might be able to restore a Jump ship, some, and not just those from Hub City, might argue in favor of going back to Human Space and ignore the risk from our own government. I’m not sure anyone with children would think that way, but I don’t intend to take that chance. When we have the capability, if we get that capability, then it’s time to draw up a return plan.”

  17. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

  As the new Gatlek on Poldark, Pendor was compelled to acknowledge that the humans of this world were matching his expectations of what a worthy enemy would be. Gatrol Dektrak, Kanpardi’s successor as Gatrol of the entire human war, had told him that this world would be more of a challenge to him than the last world where he had fought.