Koban: Rise of the Kobani (59 page)

Coldar had a ready proposal. “I can tell you where to find such ships in orbit, empty and ready to use. They are stored where they are built, and returned there after use. On your navigation system, I can show you the planet where the largest Torki ships are built, and saved for use by any Krall clan. They are not a Krall design. They were designed by my ancestors to travel the stars in watery comfort. The ships are thirty times larger than a clanship, although they will not carry fully thirty times as much.

“They can hold twenty complete Prada villages, or four or five Torki colonies like this one, with sea water for us. The length of time for crowded occupation depends on what provisions can be stored. The number of Torki they carry also depends on how much seawater can be loaded. A short Jump needs less comfort and less water.

“The description of our ships in our language is a series of clicks and whistles, but means the journey our spawn starts when we release them in the sea. We now use the low Krall words for migrating animals as the purpose of these ships. We no longer gave individual names to them, because the Krall will use none. However, if you can use them, we would like to name those that bring any of our people here. I will give you a list of ship names, with the meanings before your people do this. It will have symbolic meanings to the Torki you rescue.”

Maggi didn’t grasp the usual self-centered Krall motivation here. “What do the Krall do with such large ships? Why do they use ships not designed for their own use, like the clanships were?”

“The migration ships still are built only because the Krall want to move us when they build a new base, or colonize a new world for a clan or a new finger clan. They can carry the Torki or Prada workers, and the factory sections for them to assemble a starter facility. That small initial facility is used to build the remainder of a full-sized production complex, and that factory then can make other complete factories if those are required, or to make weapons and ships. It is faster and more efficient for them to move us.

“To rescue our workers, you will not need to take the old factories apart, or load starter factory sections. You can destroy what you leave behind. This way you would be able to carry more workers inside each ship. Some of the past production worlds we have lived on would need no more than five migration ships to move all of the workers, Prada and Torki combined.”

Maggi gave Marlyn a skeptical look that was wasted in front of the oblivious Torki. “Tell me again how huge these ships are that only five will carry all of the workers from an entire factory world?”

Coldar understood her confusion. “Expect to need less than five for a single world. I used a number that I hope provides for less crowding and faster loading. To your populous race, I know it does not sound like many beings to fill an entire world, and it is not. That is because the Krall do not want or need worlds full of workers. When they choose a new world to colonize for a finger clan, they take only the workers needed. None of the worlds the Krall inhabit will have many workers, or many Krall warriors. They may have many pre novices, but those are culled greatly between breeding cycles.

“If the old world is to be abandoned by an entire clan, those workers left behind are eventually food for millions of hatchings of feral Krall left behind, who reproduce without limits or culling. The underground factories are destroyed before a clan departs, so we cannot use them to build effective protection or sufficient weapons.”

The wonderful Krall,
thought Maggi,
always a loving and caring species for their subject races.

“Why didn’t this happen on Koban, or here? They left us there to die.”

The Torki considered this question for a moment. “It may be that abandoned eggs hatched, and the faster native life ate the weaker hatchlings before they reproduced. It also may be that because the clans intend to return to this system to make a home world of Koban, they left no large nests of unattended eggs to destroy the balance of life. Their feral young consume most life on abandoned worlds, which is why the clans do not return to them later.

“In the time since they left Koban, over twenty orbits, ten thousand or more feral Krall should have hatched from a typical large nest in a less than twenty days. In three hands of orbits, they would mature enough that survivors would reproduce and increase numbers by ten or twenty times. In two more hands of orbits, they would multiply enough usually, to kill even the large animals on any continent, or killing their young would be enough. A starting nest of a hundred thousand eggs might cover any continent of your world by now. Perhaps that couldn’t happen on Koban, where even most herbivores are stronger and faster than a Krall hatchling, or faster than a novice aged cub.”

He waved a claw. “Even a few clutches of eggs from low status females can create a dangerous population after twenty orbits. These would be left at random, in forests or grasslands by females with too low a status to produce cubs worth training up to novice level. An unmanaged Krall reproductive cycle is shorter when the young are left untrained, without ruthless culling by adults. Twenty orbits is a more typical breeding cycle for producing warriors that earn higher status.”

Maggi shrugged. “Then we escaped the fate of other worlds they left behind. So we only need ten or fifteen of your giant ships?”

Coldar expanded on the number estimate. “The actual ships needed may be two tens more than that, depending on how many worlds you will raid at one time. I named numbers that are even multiples of ten in our method of counting. We use a base ten system, the Krall use base eight. What is your system for counting, a base four number system? You have four limbs, and we have ten, when you include our claw arms.”

Maggi explained humans also used a base ten counting system, because of the number of digits on our two soft “grasper claws,” and that we did not count based on our number of limbs.

Marlyn had a Spacer’s question. “Coldar, are these large ships controlled and flown the same way as the clanships? Can one of us that know how to operate a clanship fly them?”

“Once in space I think yes, because the Torki navigation and control systems were changed to be like those on a clanship so Krall pilots can operate them. However, these large ships must land on a planet to load and unload, and that is difficult for pilots that have not been trained to do this. If the ship is to carry Prada, it must set down on a hard surface, and that requires very fine control. To carry Torki, it can land in the sea much more safely, and our people would go to the ship where it floats, close to their lodge. It is then loaded with considerable sea water before it lifts, so no more than one or two lodges could be carried without crowding.”

“Do you have Torki here that know how to fly one of these ships, using both dry land and sea landing sites?”

“Using information on our Olt, in principle all adult Torki can learn to do so. Though some will do that better than others. Will you want some of us to travel with you? We are not good fighters or very fast, but we can lift heavy weights for loading, and operate the landing systems manually if computer control is not flexible enough for landing on the ground.”

Maggi shook her head, before remembering the alien wouldn’t know the human gesture yet. “I doubt we would want to risk taking you along to try to capture those ships. There are maneuvers our people can make in a clanship that will probably kill you or the Prada. I may not look very strong, but remember that I kicked you high in the air and onto your back.”

Coldar moved his large claw under his carapace to touch the tender place where her small powerful feet had nearly cracked his shell. “I have not forgotten.”

“What we
can
do,” she proposed, “is to have the Torki most qualified to be pilots of a migration ship mentally go through practice sessions, thinking of all the things they would do to operate the ships, while some of my people use a Mind Tap, and learn from them. Then we can teach that flying technique to our other people much faster.

“I promise you, Coldar, that we want you and the Prada free of the Krall, and not only because we want the Krall to lose the ability to make war. We need your help in making this world, and Koban safer places for you and for our people to live. If we gain new technology from helping you, our chance of stopping the Krall improves. This is a case of mutual benefit. We can help each other.”

Coldar waved a claw. “If you look around, you will see that the few Torki that can best teach you to fly our ships are coming to join us. I called them using the new Olt capability. If you will permit, I will show you on your ship, the Beagle, where our former worlds are located in your navigation system. One of our old colony worlds makes all of the migration ships, and other places are worlds that make many of the clanships. The clanships can be made by the Prada at any factory complex, but for efficiency, the Krall build them on only two worlds.

“You should also go to the single world where the Hammer weapons are made and kept in orbits. Just one of these is able to destroy an entire planet, but it takes many orbits to form even one. The
Botolians invented them as a smaller solid ball of dense crystal, which they launched at Krall clanship formations at high velocity with a magnetic accelerator. They often missed their targets because they could not be guided, but were almost indestructible.

“The Krall admired the powerful balls, and ordered the Torki scientists to learn how to make them as larger hollow balls that they could fly and steer. Using the Botolian made gravity projectors and their compression techniques, combined with the Raspani quantum disintegration tools to carve them without breaking their crystal structure, our technicians made them hollow with a hatch opening. When equipped with a tachyon powered drive system, a Krall pilot can Jump one of them to any world, and gradually build a velocity close to light speed if given enough time.”

Maggi told him they knew of these weapons. “They used one of them against my own home world of Rhama, I was told. It killed nearly a third of the population, and ruined the biosphere. We don’t want any of those balls used against us again. We have high velocity, diamond-tipped uranium projectiles to fire at them, to try to crack their surface.”

Coldar spread his claw arms wide. “We had not thought of that method of destruction of the hammers. They shatter if they strike a massive enough object at high velocity.  You found an alternative, a high velocity small mass with the hardest natural tip possible. We understand how a small crack will cause the shell to rupture violently. In making these balls, some lose stability and explode before completion when we try to carve the opening. You must need to shoot many projectiles to hit one of them when they move so fast.”

She explained the theory of defense. “There are hundreds of railguns around our planets, ready to fire in the direction of any of these incoming hammers, which we call Eight Balls for a reason not worth explaining. The hope is that we can kill them far enough away to protect the planet, using many thousands of high-speed, diamond-tipped heavy metal slugs. I was told our military has not had a chance to test the railguns against the real hammers, only against similar sized drones flying under computer control.”

Coldar raised and lowered his carapace on his left side, in a gesture Maggi didn’t yet recognize as equivalent to a human headshake. “To truly protect your worlds, you must destroy all of the hammers that are stored in orbit around the former Botolian home world. Then remove or destroy the gravity projectors the Krall made us operate for them, the Botolian machines that were captured after the war. Next, you must rescue the Torki there who may know how to rebuild and use the projectors. Without the projectors to focus intense gravity for producing the collapsed matter, no more hammers can be made.”

Then Coldar abruptly shifted to a very different subject. “Would your fighters like armor that is lighter, stronger, and more technologically advanced than any the Krall have?”

Maggi looked up into the black eyes on stalks above the purple carapace, looking unblinkingly back at her. “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship, Coldar.”

Crager dismissed his ninth interviewee, after confirming the man’s activities after dark with other troopers, video surveillance around the barracks, and through observation by any of the permanent cadre while the out-of-camp excursion was known to be in progress.

“Breaker, get in here.” He called out loudly over the speaker system to the men waiting in the outer part of the auditorium. He had used the AI to configure the large space into a large waiting room with no chairs, his interrogation room with a single desk and chair, an access screen to the base AI, and a neurological sensor chair for the subjects under suspicion.

There was a temporary holding room connected to the interrogation room, no other doors or windows, with bench seats along the walls. The only way in or out was through Crager’s interrogation room, and wearing his Booster Suit he felt much more than adequate to personally control anyone that decided to try and leave without his approval.

There were three spec ops guards on the larger room’s double exit doors. Only men Crager had personally eliminated as the potential fence climber were allowed to leave. So far, he had placed only one man in the second holding area, with active surveillance showing him in a corner window of his large screen. The man wasn’t particularly suspicious; he simply had not been where anyone could verify his presence inside the camp.

As Breaker entered the room, Crager’s link to the camp AI automatically provided basic data and history on the man. A glance at the screen on his desk showed him Jorl Breaker’s training evaluations (all good), and the few personal details that had been collected on the man.

Seeing Jorl’s face triggered a recollection of this group’s first day. He was one of the few men that had not panicked or even showed a reaction when the realistic Krall hologram leaped at the people in the front row of the auditorium.

“Sit.” He pointed to the sensor-equipped chair.

What followed were a series of questions of his activities after sunset today. The responses on the display were no more erratic than most of the other men he’d spoken with that night.  All of them were slightly nervous in the presence of the Top sergeant, with no clue as to why they were here. Except at least one of them certainly had a clue. One of them had left the camp to meet someone.

“So you went for a run after dark, and you say you were in the shower when we called you outside to formation?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“You had free time. Why were you running?”

“I have done this on other days. I had permission from Corporal Ranken.” He had not answered the question asked. Yet both his statements were accurate, and displayed no strong left-right confliction between brain hemispheres, as it should if he’d been strongly deceptive. Crager, not thoroughly an expert with this equipment, was unaware that the mental diversion Breaker had just used hid a minor reaction to the real question.

The technology of monitoring neural networks had never produced an accurate lie detection system, but it had shown that the process of analyzing a question, and formulating a reply involved both brain hemispheres. If the reply was deceptive, the act of concealment revealed some mathematically modeled responses. That permitted some comparison of the thought activity of the rational and logical left side of the brain, to the activity of the emotional and creative right side, and displayed a pattern involved with possible conflict between a fully truthful answer, and a modified reply. It was still partly an art form for the interrogator and not a pure science.

Crager paused to check with Corporal Ranken that Breaker had asked permission to run. That was confirmed.

“Did you see anyone near the fence or outside of it when you made your laps?”

“Yes, Sergeant. I did.”

That could be helpful. Crager looked at the screen. Normal comparison.

“What did you see?”

“The patrol truck passed twice, on my first and third laps. There were rabbits humping outside on the road.”

“You did not see anyone else near the fence, or that climbed over?”

“No, Sergeant.”

“Did you climb over?”

“No, Sergeant, I did not climb the fence.”  Of course he hadn’t, he jumped over. Going and returning. However, his brain knew there was something he was slightly concealing.

The peaks of the curves differed slightly, but the computer showed the contours of the waves were similar, with the one for the right side hemisphere (emotional response) nearer to the screen’s top, partly out of view. Crager touched the scale factor icon on the touch screen, and both of the wave contours shot off the top of the display as the AI yielded automatic control of the scale adjustment to the human. A moment later, Crager had the curves back where they belonged. He wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong, but shifted his focus back to Breaker’s supposed shower alibi.

“You have a towel around your neck now, and your head still looks damp. You were in the shower you said when Sergeant Norris called the formation, you dressed and dried on the run?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Crager pulled the video recording of the door traffic of Breaker’s barracks. He watched the man stroll into the barracks door, passing other men standing and talking at the same entrance. He recognized one of the other men was someone he had already cleared, using this same Tri-Vid camera data. He checked the time stamp, and saw this was several minutes after the mystery man was assumed to have returned to the camp, when the patrol was chasing the rabbit. The shower story might be accurate, but it didn’t clear this man.

“Wait in the room behind me. And dry off.” He had more men to check before focusing on those he couldn’t clear immediately.

The next man’s shrunken waveform on the monitor made Crager curse and adjust the screen scale factor again. However, he quickly eliminated nineteen more men from suspicion, using video, and cadre as witnesses.

The scale factor problem returned when he interrogated a young man named Yilini Jastrov. However, a break room Tri-Vid recording proved he was inside the camp.

The next man repeated the too small-scale factor, which Crager corrected manually again, with more cursing. That man and eventually two more men were also sent to the rear waiting area, because they had no verifiable alibi for their whereabouts.

Then the monitoring equipment repeated its same scale factor problem with a trainee candidate named Fred Saber. This time it impressed itself in Crager’s mind more firmly, because Saber was cleared by exactly the same video as had cleared the Jastrov kid, the most recent anomaly on the brain wave monitor. They had been sitting at a table together in the center of the break room, in conspicuous view of both cameras there.

He let Saber leave, but was struck by the fact that he was searching for some sort of irregularity in the candidates, and three men had triggered a seeming hardware or software glitch in his equipment. He selected the camera in the holding room, and saw the five men there chatting, obviously discussing what was happening tonight. Well, not all were chatting. Breaker was pacing, but wasn’t really part of the conversation. He seemed nervous.

Crager had the AI reverse the surveillance recording to when Breaker had joined the first man. They briefly spoke, each professing not to know why they were being questioned or held.  Breaker started drying off with the towel he had to carry with him when he ran from the shower.

As he paced, he opened the top of his jumpsuit to rub the towel around the back of his head and neck. That was when Crager saw what he first thought could be a bruise on his upper chest. He thought that whoever climbed the razor wire fence in the dark, under Heavyside’s gravity, might have been injured. He froze the image and had Karp, the base AI zoom in to see if it looked fresh, or if the skin had been torn.

The palm-sized, sharply defined black oval looked applied, not the result of an accident or a bruise. However, he wondered why the size and shape seemed somehow familiar to him. He thought a moment before he fed the image to his personal AI, and asked it to run a compare to similar shapes he perhaps had encountered in the past. It had to be something he’d previously seen.

His internal visual projection system played a series of images in his left eye. They were mostly random small blobs he’d seen, which the AI had found in recordings of past missions. Conducting a live mission was the only time he made such recordings.

“Wait. Go back several images.” Something belatedly caught his attention.

When he found what he’d seen, it was on the fresh corpse of a Krall he and his team had ambushed and killed. The upper chest tattoo had a black oval rim, and inside it contained several dozen colored dots. The oval was perhaps one-third filled with color, as an experienced warrior usually had. However, it certainly wasn’t black inside, not even any of the internal dots were black.

The part that caught Crager’s attention was the location, size, and oval shape. Breaker appeared to have a blackened Krall rank tattoo at the base of his neck, of the exact same dimension. It was odd, but he’d seen tattoos previously that represented a Krall face, or of a Krall being killed, or already dead. Tattoo body art had mostly died out as a fad centuries ago, although some military members were bringing it back into style, because it could easily be removed now. This marking didn’t look very decorative, and it wasn’t placed where it could easily be seen, as most military related body art was.

Based on this eccentricity, and the odd brainwave height he shared with two other men, Crager had the camp AI run an analysis of all three men, to seek possible connections or similarities. There could be some sort of implants that altered their neural responses in the sensor chair. The platinum nerve overlays that graduate spec ops troops sported caused similar anomalies. This would make someone like that identifiable when in a neural sensor chair if you knew what to look for. However, he was also looking for anything common in their past behavior. He was actually surprised at what he learned. He’d assumed there would be no obvious links or connections if they had been inserted by some other secret government organization to spy on camp operations.

One of the other two men, Jastrov, was seen on video bearing a duplicate tattoo, when his jumpsuit fasteners had snagged and pulled open on the training course during a testing run. Matching unusual tattoos would eventually be noticed for the three, after the remaining candidates were reduced in number. They all shared communal showers.

He learned none of the three men had passed through the spec ops prescreening, done on the orbital transfer station. That wasn’t mandatory, but very few volunteers that simply walked into the terminal at Port Andropov to join the other arrivals made it through the next week, the “weeding out” process in the camp on the other side of the port area. Karp told him that none of the three men matched any of the faces that boarded buses from the terminal to the camp gate, over the two-day period their group was assembled.

They were truly “walk-ons,” of which
none
like that had ever been good enough to make it to SOB-1, as far as Crager knew, and certainly none had ever passed “Hell Week.” This, and their joint youthfulness, made them obvious standouts if anyone went looking at them hard, as Crager was doing now. It seemed to be a clumsy infiltration method, counting on a lack investigation on the camp’s part. Although, why not? It had almost worked, and there was a well-known lack of interest in a volunteer’s prior background and criminal history by the black ops section. It wasn’t as if the Krall could slip a warrior by them.

The three men’s performance ratings were spectacularly average for a selection of already superb physical specimens, placing all three on the top center of the bell curve distribution for the entire group. Farther back on the curve and they would be subpar, and if placed a little ahead on the curve they would be clearly superior to many of the already above average people being tested.

There was a bell curve distribution for running, for speed, distance, and sprints. Curves for pushups, chin ups, sit-ups, long jumps, rope climbs, and more. The three always seemed to fall in the middle range after a day or so of repetition. All three were noted as “team building” participants because they encouraged the poorer performers to do better.

None of them was physically outstanding enough to draw notice, but stayed free of the risk of being cut. Except that on several occasions, when the next cut was going to eliminate less desirable candidates, located slightly on the low side of the publicly posted average center points of the curves, these three men had spike performances on the day it was needed, and they were safely retained.

Having helped design the elimination process, Crager was positive that anyone who’s effort was only average at Camp Port Andropov, would fall well below the final cutoff point during “Hell Week.” Yet all three remained almost exactly average even for that week. It meant at Andropov, they had only put out as much effort as necessary to get to SOB-1. Then only enough sweat to get through “Hell Week.” The competitive nature of the type of men that made it this far was such that they nearly always wanted to excel in competition against their peers. These three men did not do that, yet each was able to step up their physical performance when called to do so. In hindsight, it was clear they had been holding back all the way through.

At this point, following his instincts, Crager was prepared to assume any one of those three had been the person that went off base and returned. However, two of them had rock solid video alibies, leaving Jorl Breaker at the focal point of his attention. The other two were clearly here to support him or act as alternates. The implication to Crager was that these men were ringers, slipped in here to spy on camp operations. Now they were detected before they had a chance to learn anything.