Koban: Rise of the Kobani (101 page)

They have a pudgy pair of human-like jointed arms and dexterous looking hands. When grazing, they pluck tender grass shoots and fern leaves with their hands. They also eat fruits and berries if they can find them. They have the masticating side teeth of most herbivores, but sport two residual tusks, jutting up from the lower front jaw. These protruded three or four inches above fleshy lips, and facial features arranged much like on a human. They have a central flat nose above their lips, with two large nostrils, and large, forward-facing brown eyes under light brown furred brows. The head was smooth, rounded, and hairless, but there was some sparse brown hair growing along their upper and lower backs.

Blue Flower Eater

A Raspani spokesperson’s mind, encoded on a modified quantum storage device along with millions of other Raspani minds, who sought protection from Krall atrocities on their species.

Prada

Bipedal, forest and jungle living, eats fruit, nuts, insects, and small game. The creatures are black or brown, with white markings. Resemble a lemur or monkey-like mammal, with a useful prehensile tail. About the size of an Earth Chimpanzee, they can use their five fingered hands (with longer middle finger for digging out grubs) and long toes almost equally well. They retain some arboreal ability. The Prada have large yellow eyes, and they were originally nocturnal animals. They are the Krall’s main assemblers and builders.

Their society took roughly seventeen thousand Earth years to colonize a volume some three thousand light years in radius. They selected moderate gravity worlds of 0.7 to 0.8 g’s, and preferred dimmer redder stars than Sol. They befriended other races, unless such contact was rejected. Engaged in cooperation and trade with Olt’kitapi.

They are a long-lived species who place their eldest members in charge. This deferment to the elders is why they originally cooperated with the Olt’kitapi, the oldest intelligent species they knew. After they were all killed, the next oldest species they knew were the Krall.

Now they are loyal and submissive to the Krall, and they have lost their original language, so speak only “low” Krall. They are the largest group of slaves and can build most things the Krall want for war, or have copied from other races.

Wister

A male Prada elder, roughly one thousand three hundred years old, found in a tree village on the planet next to Koban, left there by the Krall when they departed the system.

Nawella

A female Prada elder, and sister of Wister. She is a bit older than her brother is and he seeks her advice. Together they manage a small village of their people, who preserve an underground factory complex where anything required by the Krall can be built.

Torki

A highly intelligent eight foot wide by five foot long, and three foot high land crab race with one large defensive pincher and a smaller one for grasping, and a hard deep purple shell with eight amber colored legs. The two in front of their mouths are small and used as dexterous manipulators. Their eyes are on two-foot stalks, and they perform fine assembly of tools and electronics for the Krall, copying from plans taken from other defeated races.

They had been star traveling for eleven thousand years when the Krall over ran them. Preferred worlds with ample seashores, and bypassed most worlds inside their six hundred light year sphere. They built giant ships for their large bodies, and simulated seaside environments for their own comfort. Huge ships carried only a few hundred Torki, but when used by the Krall they had room for ten thousand warriors, or even more Prada. Several thousand Torki could fit, with great discomfort.

As adults these land crabs are terrestrial and are found as far as ten miles from the shoreline, returning to the sea only to soak or breed. They sleep at night in cool burrows several feet deep, or at least to a level that will allow water to seep in for moisture. They are primarily vegetarians, preferring tender leaves, fruits, berries, flowers, seaweed, and some vegetables. Occasionally they will eat fish, beetles, or other large insects.

Like all crabs, they shed their shells as they grow. If they have lost legs or claws during their present growth cycle, a new one will be present after they molt. If the large claw is lost, males will develop one on the opposite side until their next molt. Newly molted crabs are very vulnerable because of their soft shells. They are reclusive and hide until the new shell hardens.

Coldar

An influential Torki in his lodge, left behind on the world next to Koban when the Krall departed. The crabs can communicate electronically by a quantum storage device they were given prior to becoming sentient, by the Olt’kitapi. As they advanced, the locked libraries in the storage devices open to help them access new knowledge and databases. They know of the ancient race, but they never met their benefactors. They build new storage devices as their population expands, and copy the data they have into them, not knowing what new information they may contain.

I was born in 1942, so I'm an autumn rather than a spring chicken. I live outside of Tampa, Florida with my fabulous wife Anita, and one remaining son at home, Montana. I have three older boys, Mark, Gary, and Anthony, all of whom have married and presented us with terrific grandchildren.

My early reading interests were arguably all sci-fi related, from Doctor Doolittle, Captain Marvel, to Superman. I then transitioned to "real" science fiction on black and white TV, such as Captain Video and Flash Gordon. I read hundreds of books by the science fiction greats growing up, and thousands of fair to not so greats in dual novel paperbacks and magazines.

My education gravitated to science, starting out as a physics major and my depression era folks told me I'd never make a living as a theoretical physicist (probably right, and Cosmology wasn't a career field then), so I moved to Electronics Engineering. I did most of that in the aerospace field for MacDonnell Douglas Corp, in St. Louis, Mo. I worked on the F4 Phantom project, and briefly on Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), before the fickle fates of government finance forced contract cancelations. I devoted (read: I was drafted into) two years' service for the US Army from 1965 to 1967. A great two years, and the Army, caring not a whit for my electronics background, offered this draftee a job as an Air Traffic Controller. Cool!

After discharge I spent a short time back at MacDonnell Douglas before the contract reductions laid me off, and was hired by Emerson Electric (1968), working on the design of a neat heads-up fire control system for the Army's new Cheyenne Helicopter (to be a 270-knot hybrid fixed wing/rotor craft). Never heard of it? The fickle fates of Army finance is why this time, plus Lockheed didn't keep the airframe part from crashing and burning at a crucial point in development.

I taught Electronics for about eighteen months (near starvation wages after the high pay), and finally decided to try my hand at actually supporting my family again. I hired on with the Federal Aviation Administration as an Air Traffic Controller in 1970. Thanks Army! I spent exactly forty years in federal service, deciding in 1979 to use my technical background to work on writing features for the software of the FAA's Terminal Automation Systems (for 28 of those 40 years).

Retired, I now work as a consultant/contractor for the FAA, supporting a software system I helped create. In anticipation of more free time in the future, I finally decided to try my hand at writing what I love to read, Science Fiction.

Thanks for reading my books,

Steve Bennett

Published Books

Koban (August, 2012)

Koban: The Mark of Koban (February, 2013)

Koban: The Rise of the Kobani (September, 2013)

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Attention reader:
This concludes our regularly scheduled broadcast at this time.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the story.

LOOK FOR:

Koban: Shattered Worlds (working title)

Book four in the Koban Series

Expected in
early half of 2014.

Chapter 1: A Raid Less Easy

The two ships of operation Fast One winked into Normal Space in the outer reaches of the Krall occupied star system.

Noreen Renaldo, captain of the Avenger and in charge of the raid, tersely instructed the second ship to start their passive scans. “Slasher, focus on the southern hemisphere region of the planet and the area below the plane of the ecliptic. We’ll cover the northern half, and above the ecliptic plane. I’ll check out the moon myself.”

“Roger,” Was the only reply. They had discussed this previously.

Noreen had taken a page from the Krall’s playbook. Stopping in the outer solar system for a look around before Jumping the final billions of miles to their next intermediate stop, a moon, on their way to the real target. The range out here was too great to wait the many hours for
active
scans to return information that would be out of date before the return signal arrived. The speed of light round trip would require just over two days, and radar and laser scans at this range would contain too little detail anyway. Besides, actively scanning and then waiting that long for the signal to return would alert the Krall that someone was conducting surveillance well before the raiders arrived at the planet.

Instead, Noreen wanted to conduct passive observation of the inner system as it appeared a day ago, using the superior Olt’kitapi view screens on the converted clanships. If their plans went as laid out, the raid should be over by the time their gamma rays from the dual White Outs reached the inner system. Their next Jump inward, faster than light, would pass up their gamma ray wave front “announcement.”

The Avenger, and the Slasher under Captain Anna Retief, carried four hundred Kobani each, all of them with speck ops training. Indeed, some of them were actual spec ops troops from Human Space, who were now fully gene modified Kobani. With Mind Tap abilities, the level of training of everyone on the mission went beyond the specialties of spec ops troops, but the mission was one that was closer to that mode of operation. In theory, each one of them could pilot a shuttle, the new four-man ships, or even a clanship. They all had the knowledge of how, if not the actual experience of piloting each of those.

Their mission today was to try to slip in close to the Krall planet undetected, assault the intended dome, and the weapons factory under it, with relatively few raiders and then extract them as quickly as possible. There would be no attempt to rescue the Prada factory workers on this mission. They would do their best to spare them any harm, but it was impossible to sneak in and land a huge, slow migration ship for an evacuation.

Wister, one of the elder Prada on Haven, had said convincing these Prada to climb aboard quickly, before the enemy rallied to knock the nearly defenseless tubs out of the sky, was highly unlikely if not impossible.

Not to belittle the value of the lives of the Prada slaves here, it was nevertheless recognized that they didn’t have special skills that wasn’t available on dozens of other clan worlds. Evacuated or left behind (killing them was never considered), their absence or continued survival would not affect the Krall nearly as much as the loss of the underground factory. That facility would require a year or two to replace, and more time to bring it back up to its present productivity. The workers would be of even greater use to the Krall after the destruction of their workplace, to prepare for the new factory’s arrival, so they were relatively safe.

It had been slow to sink in for Captain Mirikami and his other planners, just how important the theft of the migration ships had been, as well as the destruction of those much older migration ships stored in parking orbits.

To replace a factory, a modular starter factory would have to be produced by Prada, usually on some other world, for replacing any that the Kobani raiders destroyed. Because there were no giant ships to deliver the bulky things already partly assembled, at least twenty clanships would have to haul the components for delivery in one shipment, and then they required more ground assembly. A successful Operation Fast One would have a greater impact than simply halting the weapons now being produced by this particular factory.

Clanships, in shorter supply than before, had to be taken from the fighting fronts and used for internal supply runs. Logistics problems were not something the clan leaders had needed to think about in their past wars of conquest, of weaker, less aggressive species. When you found a worthy enemy, they presented you with new problems.

The Krall had had time to notify all of their major clan worlds, and most of the medium status clans, of the human raids that had knocked out four crucial manufacturing sites. Those were planets responsible for most of their strategic weapons manufacturing, and for the ships that delivered forces and supplies. They had needed those production sites in order to expand their war with humanity. They lost the two most significant shipyards for clanship, shuttle, and single ship production, and the only yard that built the Torki designed giant migration ships, which were used to move supplies, large warrior forces, and slaves. In the case of the Hammers, (humans called the partly collapsed matter weapons Eight Balls, because they were black spheres), the Krall lost a tremendously effective means to punish entire human worlds. Accelerated to a significant fraction of the velocity of light, an Eight Ball could slam into a world with an extinction level impact.

This was hardly the first time a foe had ignored restrictions or rules the Krall had imposed on them, of course. All of them did that at some point. However, it
was
the first time a foe had been so effective against them, and humans had forever destroyed their second most devastating weapon, the Hammers. They couldn’t replace the Botolian designed gravity projectors (not available from a species they had made extinct), even if they found fresh Torki slaves that could relearn how to produce the Hammers using those projectors. The partly collapsed matter balls they had laboriously completed over centuries of labor had been placed in storage orbits for future need. The humans had somehow destroyed them in place, despite their being tough enough to batter their way through heavily armored human battleships, resisting lasers, plasma cannons, and missiles, virtually unscathed.  The method of their destruction had yet to be determined by the Krall. That was because the high velocity, diamond tipped, depleted uranium railgun slugs were also destroyed on impact, or the near misses had left that stellar system at escape velocity.

The problem now was that the Krall didn’t have a quick and convenient means (for them anyway) of rapidly punishing human worlds, to make them regret these acts. There certainly were plans to make human worlds suffer, but all of them required time and some level of unprecedented Krall sacrifice. Such as limiting the scope of new invasions, being less able to focus some special level of intense mass suffering on entire human worlds. Radiation would make those worlds worthless for war by their Great Path breeders, and would encourage use of nuclear weapons by humanity, which was also detrimental to the Great Path. Pity the plight of the poor genocidal warriors, with fewer opportunities to earn status point kills.

The most devastating reply possible to humanity presented the Krall leaders with a great level of difficulty, a material sacrifice of one of their most cherished super weapons. The highest leadership levels were in a dispute over what was the best course to follow. In the meantime, preventing additional human raids was imperative, and the more important clan worlds were on a high alert. Minor clans and new finger clans would eventually learn of the human raids, as successful warriors returned home from combat to breed the clan’s next generations. However, those small clans could fend for themselves until word spread to them. After all, they only represented yet unproven bloodlines for the Great Path.

The most damaging three raids by humans had happened in a single, well-coordinated day a couple of months ago, when simultaneous attacks destroyed the irreplaceable Hammer making facility, and the two shipyards that produced or repaired the majority of their workhorse fleet of clanships. In the process of preparing for these raids, a matter of days earlier, the humans had captured or destroyed all of the huge migration ships used to move supplies, slaves, and factories to the war fronts. They also captured eleven more intact clanships to use in the larger raids. In the process, they destroyed hundreds of undefended parked clanships on dome tarmacs, and leveled many domes themselves. It was a humiliating experience for the clans that were attacked, and it represented a loss of status for each of them.

In a final insult, the humans used the stolen giant Torki ships to remove the most critical workers for building these complex pieces of war equipment, and destroyed the factories. At least clanship production could be slowly ramped back up within a few years. In the meantime, an unpopular requirement that the joint council of clan leaders and the Tor Gatrol war leader was promoting, was for clanship pilots to be more conservative in risk taking. They were asked to avoid excessive damage to their ships and to be more on the defense.

In order that the joint clan council could approve Tor Gatrol Kanpardi’s plan to expand invasions to two new human worlds, the edicts went out that limited some of the more aggressive clan styles of attack, which placed clanships at greater risk. Kanpardi promised to rigorously pursue the fight on Poldark, to push the nearly thirty million men in the human army back on their heels, so that half of the four million Krall force could easily and suddenly withdraw, for starting a new invasion on another more vital and populous human world. This request produced a great deal of resentment among high status warriors and leaders, to be told to limit their aggression to protect mere
equipment,
and for a
withdrawal
on Poldark
.
No matter if it was to expand the war, the reduction in resources that made this necessary went against the instincts of these warriors.

Fortunately, there was ample production of less strategic but nevertheless, essential war material such as mini tanks (or Dragons as humans called them), anti-artillery laser batteries, counter battery rockets, plasma canons, and the heavy armored battlefield transport trucks.

The particular Krall world being scouted by the Kobani today had a large high capacity production facility of exactly those types of essential war materials. Noreen’s concern was that the midsized Sudok clan, who controlled this world, might have placed clanships in orbit around its sizeable moon, located in a relatively close orbit to the habitable planet. It was expected that there would be clanships in orbit around the planet itself, but they hoped not around that moon. The clan could also have brought in orbital defense platforms, like those few that had survived the two PU Navy attacks around K1. It had been over a year since the passive Planetary Union navy scouting mission had observed this system, and that was before any Krall world had been placed on alert. The unstaffed, slow reacting orbital platforms were not as great a worry to Noreen as clanships stationed around that moon.

The moon was the intended “shield” for the Avenger and Slasher, to White Out behind its bulk to prevent the Krall from detecting their close-in arrival. Evidence of random Krall White Outs around the planet or moon would suggest they were doing micro Jumps to make undetected infiltration such as that harder to conduct.

The two human ship’s sensors should be able to detect the presence of clanships in orbits around that moon, and certainly random White Outs. Noreen only intended to use an hour of observation before making her decision to Jump inward, or leave here if not. The two ships had quietly departed a previous target star system, located much closer to Human Space, because of a high level of watchfulness. This alternate target was deeper into Krall territory, and protected by a smaller clan with fewer resources.

Anna Retief was from the Old Colony of Suid-Afrika, and had fought her newly captured clanship once before, backing up the Avenger when the CS2 shipyards were attacked. Her aggressive nature and competence made her a natural to participate in this next raid. The Slasher, as she had christened her purloined ship, had been partly modified for greater human comfort (no slow sissy elevators needed for the fully gene modified TG2s), and she had an AI similar to the Avenger’s, delivered from Human Space by the Falcon.

Chief Haveram had surprisingly kept his command of that former smuggler’s ship, now turned into a Koban freighter. The former Flight of Fancy’s Drive Room chief made regular Jumps to Human Space from Koban, carrying precious metals to convert to currency for purchasing things the Kobani needed, such as AI’s for installation on the eleven captured clanships. The chief-turned-captain, surrendering to the physical temptation, was a TG2 now. The age regression he had undergone, curtsey of the Prada longevity genes, the new med labs and nanites, transformed him socially, and he had become something of a dashing figure around the rough Rim world black market ports he visited. He also had a reputation as someone you
did not double cross in a deal!
He was apparently much tougher and experienced than the very young man he appeared to be.

After almost an hour of watching the day old inner system activity, Noreen thought they had seen enough. “Anna, I’m not observing anything moving close to the moon, and Carson has so far spotted only a single clanship in a polar orbit around the planet.” She was on view screen with Captain Retief.