Koban: Rise of the Kobani (40 page)

“Wister believes there is a colony of Torki on the western coast of his landmass. The crabs don’t always obey Krall instructions when not watched, and the Prada do not fully trust them because of that. It appears that after so many thousands of years of servitude, the Prada virtually consider themselves part of the Krall Empire. They have difficulty doing things contrary to their master’s wishes. I think Prada society is naturally subservient to their species eldest leaders, and grant this instinctive obedience to the Krall as an elder race. They don’t
want
to be free of them, and wish they would return.”

“Why? We never saw any hint that the Krall particularly wanted the Prada around, or even kept them close. As far as we are aware, there aren’t any Prada on Koban. Of course, we have a great deal of territory to explore, but we’ve had satellite images for years, and saw no signs of them. It looks more as if the Krall kept most of their workers here, sending some of them to Koban when needed, and then returning them. Is that how what’s-his-name is able to remember Koban?”

Maggi indicated yes, with a caveat. “Wister was last on Koban perhaps sixty orbits ago, he says. However, there is something else you need to know.” She asked the AI a question first.

“Kap, this world has a two hundred seventy-six day year, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.” He answered on speaker, aware of the group listening.

“Sixty orbits would be how many Standard years ago Kap, in whole numbers.”

“Forty-five years, in Standard measure.”

“Wister spent ten years directing work on Koban all told, as sort of a senior builder foreman. This work was done in rotations that permitted physical recovery back here, and Prada replacements were sent to Koban from here. Koban was very tough and dangerous without the walled compounds they built later, as we would expect. They simply called this world a base. Following Krall convention, they have no name for this world or for the village, but I think they love the forest. They think of the giant trees as temples. Not as places of worship, but as tall slender buildings they revere.”

“They do have a name for our home, it’s called Koban.” Bradley pointed out.

“No, that is what
we
use for its name, but it was only a description to the Krall of what they used the world for. It translates as a training place, or perhaps a testing ground is a better meaning of the word. The early human captives latched onto the word to use as a name for where they were held.

“Initially the Krall tested their novices there, and established new finger clans to see if they would survive and flourish. The Prada came from here in teams, to assemble the domes for the trial settlements, built with materials shipped from other Krall production worlds. Then they were rotated back here as new, fresher teams were sent to finish or continue the work.”

“You mean the Krall actually conserved the Prada? They treated them better than us ‘expendable animals.’ I can hardly believe that level of consideration from them.” Francis said.

“Not much conservation or consideration actually, and nearly half that went to Koban died.” Maggi informed them. “They gradually grew sick and wore out in that gravity. It was more efficient, from a Krall standpoint, to send the live ones back here to recover for some years, and use fresh ones for the work on new domes and compounds. Wister did that rotation three times.”

“When did he start working on Koban, if the last time he was there was forty-five Standard years ago?”

“Right after he directed the construction of the dome we just passed over.” Maggi waited for that information to register.

Bradley snickered. “It’s a falling down wreck. He didn’t do a very good job.”

Marlyn caught on immediately, and asked a question. “The Krall abandoned this dome about three hundred years ago. If Wister directed the construction here, how long before it was abandoned did he do that? How the hell old is that little Prada?”

“That is
exactly
the key question.” Maggi told her. Then gave the best answer she had derived.

“Wister has lost track of measures of years, because he has lived or worked in three other Krall solar systems in his lifetime. He remembers what he did in all of them, but the length of local years was different each place, and in this system he split his time between two worlds with different year lengths. As well as I was able to estimate, based on rough guesses, Wister is well over a thousand years old. And he isn’t the oldest Prada in this one village.”

“They don’t die?” Hakeem asked, incredulous.

“They apparently don’t age.” She corrected him. “However, they die as easily as we do. From sickness, accidents, animal attacks, or by being shot or bombed while building Krall installations in a battle zone. Actually, I think we are healthier than they are, with our genetically enhanced immune system. But we age, and they apparently don’t, after reaching full adulthood.”

Hakeem asked the obvious question. “Are you sure he didn’t lie about that?”

She shook her head. “It was a Mind Tap, on an unprepared mind. I don’t think it knows how to block or fabricate a memory for me. It had detailed memories of other worlds, and multiple lifetimes of experiences readymade to share. He knows he has been lucky to live so long and avoid accidents or serious disease. When they have children, they seem to grow up at a normal pace, and mature and change until reaching adulthood. Then they simply stay the same, physically.

“Their reproduction is a puzzle to me, because they can have children at any age, per Wister’s thoughts. Therefore, their population pressure should force them to expand. Yet that is a small isolated village, and yet we saw about a dozen young ones. They may have some population management system. If they don’t, in order to maintain a stable population at the roughly eighteen hundred Prada that Wister claims lives in the village, they must have had a dozen fatalities this year, out of a small town of near immortals. Eventually they would be mating with some cousin or other that also outlived most of the small population.”

The shuttle landed next to the Beagle, surrounded by a crowd, and all the news as Maggi had predicted had to be shared again. Marlyn reported the day’s events to Koban to spread the news, and had Kap save her the task of repeating everything, by letting Jake record it all for wider dissemination.

There was a new hot item of discussion at home on Koban, after the Beagle’s initial close up survey and discovery that Prada could survive there. With the revelation that the animal and plant life was largely suitable for human consumption, it added fuel to the fire. They heard there were empty Krall domes (no matter that they were falling apart from neglect), and there was a push by some Hub City residents to relocate. 

These were mostly people that had steadfastly refused even the clone gene mods; therefore, gravity and climate were seriously wearing them down. The Raven was said to be approaching readiness for flight tests, and its large volume could move all of the people wishing to go in two Jumps.

Naturally, the proponents of immediate relocation were completely overlooking the fact that the Raven could not land. It was an orbital only transport, and shuttles could only carry just so much down. They would need a great deal in the way of material to establish safe and habitable conditions on a world completely wild. None of these people had experienced what Koban was like for the earliest human captives. They already had a place to live when they arrived, food and a developing infrastructure to support them.

Marlyn met with Maggi, Sarah and Francis, her primary confidants and planners for the mission to the Morning Star planet. She told them about the push to move people here, using the Raven. They discussed all of the immediate problems, and the time and effort it would take to resolve them. However, after all the discussion points started to wind down, Marlyn made a prediction.

“Eventually, the problems of settling here
will
be solved. It’s not as difficult or hazardous as the last twenty years was on Koban, so beyond a doubt we will have people living here. There are already Prada here, and they say there are also Torki, which would make this the only known planet, to us anyway, with multiple intelligent species living together.

“I like Sarah’s proposal, to move the Raspani here as soon as we can verify they can eat the plants, and we can make a secure compound for the first ones to arrive. They are living much shortened lives because of the stress Koban’s gravity places on them. They need the least amount of advanced preparation.

“I have no doubt we can find some isolated island someplace in a temperate climate, with good grass and bushes, fresh water, and free of large predators from the mainland. The Raspani could be free for the first time in thousands of years, to thrive in their own little haven.”

She paused in thought for a moment, as Sarah, a complete devotee to the study of the Raspani now, continued the new direction in their conversation. The flash of insight, when it came, was enough that Marlyn’s burst of excitement rudely interrupted the conversation.

“Haven!” she shouted out. “It’s a perfect description of what we want to create here, not only for our own people, but for the Krall slave races we want to rescue. I’ll name it Haven.”

Maggi smiled hugely at her friend. Naming a world for a noble purpose was a hell of a lot more meaningful than naming a “werewolf” or “marsh dog.”

Now they needed to start the planning, to prepare the way. This would be fun, if she could shift all the hard work to younger backs. A cinch for an old manipulator like her.

The multiple Jumps taken to Heavyside from Poldark, to throw off possible followers, ended when the Avenger did a White Out in the Oort cloud of comets, five light-days out from the planet. Noreen had the towed cargo pods hauled close and offloaded into the airless lower cargo bay. Pressurizing the hold after that, they cast off the empty containers, to wander with widely scattered balls of ice, taking thousands of years to orbit the pinpoint of light that was the parent star.

Once the cargo was accessible, the future elevator equipment was stowed out of the way, for when they returned home. Three modern med labs were moved to higher decks and the Chameleon Skin armor and IR night goggles were issued to everyone, new weapons issued, and various spares were stored.

For Noreen, the big prize was the KP model AI system, which came with instructions for installation on a clanship, using the Mark as the assumed template for all such modifications. The food stores were the second greatest gift, at least as far as Noreen and
Macy Gundarfem, her engineer, was concerned. Real Earth coffee! Beefsteaks, hamburgers, leg of lamb, lima and green beans, sweet potatoes and more, were all veritable pieces of heaven to palettes starved for the tastes of home.

The TGs, after sampling some of the “imported” foods from Human Space, were unimpressed with the “tame” flavors of the meat, and
any
vegetable was OK if buried on a pizza under cheese. Rhinolo burgers and yak steaks had “more kick” they insisted.

The new flexible armor however, was the neatest stuff they had ever owned. Unaware that each suit cost more than most working people on Hub worlds earned in a year. Never having had money, the young Kobani couldn’t appreciate the credit bar tags on the packages as they opened them.

They practiced arranging it, covering even their face so they needed internal view screens to see, and would crawl forward in plain sight, minimizing the ripple effect as they slowly repositioned the material to “sneak up” on friends and surprise them. If you were slow enough, even the IR eyeglasses worn by others didn’t notice the temperature difference, as the warm body beneath the Chamskin (as they started calling it), no longer left a heat smear on the deck when the edge of the flex armor slowly pulled away.

For the teenagers, where high speed body motion was an everyday experience, the art of moving slowly and undetected was an alluring game to pass the time. The allure wore thin with the two adults, after spilling their precious new coffee or nearly wetting themselves, when suddenly an unseen hand grabbed an ankle and a disembodied voice would say “gotcha.” A “gotcha” could come in other ways, when extremely boring duties could be assigned to the sneak by the “victim.”

It was almost four days before the “simple” installation instructions for the new AI proceeded to the point where Karl, its newly assigned name, was powered up.  After that, he easily walked them through the remaining “Tab A into Slot B” confusion of a thick stack of printed instructions.

It was a smart idea to give the AI its own set up guide,
Marlyn thought. Mentioning that fact at the
start
of the damned assembly instructions, that the AI’s processor could be powered on separately, to direct you through
all
of the complicated steps would have been
frigging brilliant!

She and Macy scoured the printed instructions carefully for the name of whoever their Poldark “benefactor” was on the installation package. It was a fruitless search, so no concealed TG would be visiting the culprit with a big “gotcha” moment in his near future.

With Karl online, Marlyn made some precision jumps to outer gas giants of the system, always appearing behind them so the gamma rays of the White Out would not be seen by the inner system. She had Macy do it several times, and even Alyson, one of two TG1s she had with her.

Alyson was placed in charge of the twenty-five TGs aboard, with Jorl Breaker her second in command. He wasn’t a TG1, but he was a very competent and accomplished seventeen-year-old, and a natural leader. Thad and Sarge said he had finished the pre-mission training on Koban with the highest overall physical performance rating of any of the TGs.

Only a few of the TG1s, such as Alyson, Carson, and Ethan, managed to outscore him on movement and eye-hand coordination tasks. They thought that was due to their more frequent Mind Tap inputs, which the three older TG1s received from other TGs in training. The adults had set an age of at least eighteen for the youngest of the TGs to receive the telepathy genes, but that wasn’t going to hold any longer, now that the benefits were clearly so great, and no detrimental mental effects had been noted. (Other than the somewhat “swelled” heads of the ten that got the mod first.)

When they made the test Jumps in-system, Alyson, and Fred Saber, the other TG1, received the mental images and messages from the Beagle’s two TG1s, when that ship had performed the White Out at Koban. Those messages were sent a couple of days after the Avenger had reached the closer world of Heavyside. The Avenger’s TG1s had placed their own safe arrival messages in Tachyon Space when they got here, and the acknowledgement of reception of their message, and the Beagle’s reciprocal arrival message, told both ships the other had completed their journeys. 

The telepathic messages had “sat,” or circulated seemed a more appropriate term, in Tachyon Space, waiting for the intended TG1 receivers to “absorb” them. It had already been noted in testing, that once the intended receiver had picked up a message, even though it might wait for them up to five days to enter Tachyon Space, a second Jump within that five-day window did not find the message ready to repeat for them. Once received, it was gone. That was different from the increased garbling of undetected old messages after five days, turning them into increasing “white noise” before they fully died away.

The Mark was out of the communication loop while parked on Poldark. However, they had a long schedule worked out in advance by Jakob, of possible “windows” of message opportunity for exchanging information. Tet would miss a number of those opportunities, and the needs of the different missions of the Beagle and Avenger would not always align with the roughly five-day “life” of these message windows.

However, from time to time their message windows would overlap when the ships Jumped, and possibly find the ships in a situation where brief messages could be followed up, for a coordinated longer exchange of data via repeat “local” or null Jumps, as they were also called.

With the AI controlled training Jumps out of the way, Karl had demonstrated he could Jump them where they wanted to go more precisely than they were able to do manually. The Krall
preferred
to do navigation manually, zooming in on screen for the destination, then talon tapping the place where they wanted to White Out. It fit with their personality, yet the Olt’kitapi had designed the ships to operate via a more sophisticated method, which accepted electronic input that the Krall ignored or could not use.

Karl’s processor was bolted to the deck of the Bridge and mated to one of the input ports of the four navigation and weapons control stations, the consoles located in the center of the Bridge deck. Simply telling Karl what you wanted made the process much faster and more precise, and he would warn of instructions that created high risks (like a Jump into a planetary atmosphere or below its surface). The new acceleration couches were more interactive with the AI, and would automatically adjust to protect the occupants when uncompensated internal accelerations were expected. He also could operate the weapons with microsecond response times, and extreme accuracy through any complex series of maneuvers and accelerations.

The Olt’kitapi had clearly built these ships to allow the Krall to operate them as they did now. However, they also either expected to fly the same ships themselves at times, or expected the Krall to change their personality and start taking full advantage of an advanced tool they had been handed. After so many thousands of years, it had not happened.

No doubt, the Krall had evolved over time to become physically faster, and more adept at manual control, but they were never going to exactly match computer controlled response times and precision. Karl described the inputs he used to control the ship’s systems as apparently designed to receive data directly from an organic source, based on the signal levels used, and the feedback returned. It was as if the system was intended to connect directly to the brain of some operator.  Yet, other aspects of the control system’s input and output were more robust than purely organic control could achieve.

Karl, in a matter of fact tone that concealed the revolutionary aspect of what had been achieved, told them about the scientists that had spent years of study on clanship data ports previously, found on wrecks. They believed the original alien designers employed digital cyber components that supplemented an organic brain.

The researchers had spent years studying abandoned clanship wrecks, trying to understand and copy the technology, but had never found a way to bypass the quantum lockout key that would grant them access. Ingenuity had inferred some aspects of how the data ports worked and what they would send and receive. However, they never got the internal control modules of the consoles to activate or respond, so they could never test input and feedback loops to see what they did. Not until the Mark of Koban arrived, as a working example of a clanship.

The Mark’s functioning control system had been analyzed by an AI larger and more complex than a KP model, and it had set parameters in a previously built programmable test module for the interface. They assumed that someday they
would
find a way to activate a clanship’s control modules, and they knew how many input and output channels there were, and the approximate strengths of each signal, just not what the signals were and what they controlled.

That interface module emulated the input required to operate a clanship’s systems, and could interpret the feedback for the KP model AI to use. That type of preprogrammed module could now be used with any of the current AIs to operate a clanship, assuming they could get an intact ship to activate. The Katushas, and the quantum encoding they embedded in their tattoos, would activate any equipment the Krall used. Humanity intended to steal technology from the Krall technology thieves, and try to improve on that when they understood how it worked.

Noreen made a stealthed approach to Heavyside on the Normal Space tachyon powered inertialess drive, after first Jumping as close as possible behind a Neptune-sized gas giant. It would require a day and a half of travel to Heavyside that they could have covered with a Jump to orbital altitude in forty seconds.

Sarge had told them at Poldark, where the Krall came and went weekly, the appearance of their three ships wouldn’t seem strange. However, Heavyside was in the Rim region on nearly the opposite side of Human Space from the Krall attacks, and the location of a secret Special Operations program. It wasn’t a settled colony world, so any gamma ray burst would be suspect. One with the signature of a clanship’s mass would draw instant attention and trigger alarms they didn’t want activated. The White Out in the Oort cloud would already have drawn attention when it arrived at Heavyside five days later, except they had been towing additional mass and volume with the cargo pods, and so would not match a clanship gamma ray profile.

Karl had common knowledge survey data on Heavyside in his data banks, and Noreen had some word of mouth information on where the spec ops training base was located. The planet had originally been named in the honor of Admiral Elaine Andropov, a long dead war hero from before the Collapse. Now only the spaceport was called Andropov, and the nickname Heavyside had become the de facto name of the planet.

It was considered unsuitable for long-term colonization due to the 1.42 times Earth standard gravity, and terraforming was too expensive for no significant payback. It had a livable biosphere, but simple plants, lichens, and algae had produced an oxygen nitrogen atmosphere. Three hundred fifty years ago, the surface had been cheaply seeded with plant life that would boost the oxygen levels, so that it now was at twenty-two percent. Sea life had been introduced that had taken hold in the three-fifths water covered planet, but only a small amount of shrimp was harvested for the protein, in a minor occupation ran by a few locals. 

Around Andropov spaceport, there were human crops, protected from one particular pest. The pest was one of a few small sturdy food animals that had managed to do well enough to supplement the meat imports. Who would have thought the puny rabbit would thrive in this gravity, without predators, and unlimited food? Lemmings and voles did well, but they competed for food, and rabbits were winning that battle.

There were vast plains now with a medium height grass on most of it, acceptable by the rabbits that were still expanding their range. A limited number of trees had been accidentally mixed with the seeding, as were wild flowers that could only pollinate via wind, without dedicated insect pollinators, such as bees. Bees were imported at one point, and they died. The local insects paid no attention to flowers. At least there were no mosquito analogues, but with rabbit blood available, it was assumed it was only a matter of time. The mountains were mostly barren, and because of limited plate tectonics, there were no long extended ranges. Most mountains were isolated and of volcanic origin, and there were many active ones on the planet, which still had considerable heat from its slowly cooling core and mantle.