Koban: Rise of the Kobani (63 page)

Crager was just coming out of the door, alone, when they arrived. He spotted them quickly, in the shadows between buildings. He waved a hand, and came towards them.

“Gentle Men…” He started. “Sorry, I don’t think of you as candidates now, and Breaker here told me you all would be leaving once you hand over the data you came to give us. I’m not comfortable with you calling me Bill, so Top will still do, and in case we are overheard. As it is, you three will be passed off as voluntary training withdrawals to the other candidates.”

Jorl nodded. “That’s fine with us, Top. Let me formally introduce my friends.”

He gave Yil’s full name, perfectly aware that Crager had all their slender data files at his disposal. He shook hands with Yil.

As Fred was introduced and while they shook hands, Jorl asked, “What will you do after we give you the data, Top?”

“I’d actually like you to give it directly to Dr. Markel, and I’ve asked her and Colonel Dearborn to meet us in the company HQ. I honestly don’t believe they will want to believe me without meeting you. We’ll have more privacy there, and it’s a timely moment to have you sign the electronic withdrawal forms. After tonight’s activities, it’s a good pretext to have Breaker here leave, and claim you other two were of like minds. I’ll stick to the story you went out to meet a girlfriend, and violated the rules.”

“Good enough for us I think. Right, Fred?” Jorl and Yil both looked to their friend.

“Yes. That will be perfectly suitable, Top.” Fred agreed, his nod assuring his two partners that the surreptitious Mind Tap verified all was fine. “We’ll be happy to meet the other two people, and perhaps fill you in on some historical details of how our people were able to do what they have done. The name and location of our world will be kept secret. If the Krall knew where we came from, we couldn’t defend the planet. Much of our background is on the data cube. The most crucial genetic advances were not achieved overnight we can assure you, but your program can benefit from our experiences, and you won’t have to wait a generation to get results. Captain Renaldo of the Avenger may be available to talk to you if you wish.”

Crager now assumed that Fred Saber was the one actually in charge, based on the two other young men apparently deferring to him. Jorl had actually been granted overall responsibility for the mission, partly for his age (nine months older than Fred and six months for Yil), and because of his mastery of athletic ability and fighting skills.

The matter of which of them was considered in charge wasn’t actually a concern for any of the young Kobani in general. They all had been exposed to some military structure, but not indoctrinated by years of service. Because of the way they mentally shared information by Taps, any of them quickly had the same information that others knew, and could make informed decisions. Of course, Crager was unaware that Fred spoke up because he was providing confirmation of the sergeant’s genuine intentions, via the Mind Tap he’d just used to sense the unguarded thoughts. Unethical, but then Crager had recently been prepared to kill all three of them, to protect his own secrets.

“Mr. Saber, I had not thought of that possibility. Let me remove the block on your transducers.” He Linked to the camp AI and had the restriction removed.

“Dr. Markel was awakened, but not provided any details. She was getting dressed, and she’ll be at the HQ building shortly. Colonel Dearborn was already up because of the fence incident, and should be there by now. If you’ll follow me we can have breakfast sent over and some coffee made.”

Jorl responded eagerly, on behalf of his stomach. “Breakfast sounds great, Top, but you don’t need to make coffee for any of us. Our home world isn’t in Human Space and none of our generation ever had coffee prior to this mission. Most of the older generation likes it, and are delighted to have a supply again. However, excuse me for expressing our generation’s commonly held opinion. We think it tastes something like bitter brown piss.”

****

Noreen was satisfied things had worked out better than expected, even though her plan had gone awry. “Colonel Dearborn, I have recently received word that we have had a lot of interesting things happening back in our home system, and we want to return there as soon as practical. I’d like to collect my three young men. Sending them to Andropov won’t help. I can’t just set our captured clanship down where everyone can see it and panic, and we don’t want to land near your training camps. Can you drive them to a point midway to the spaceport, where I can set down stealthed to meet them?” 

“Captain, I will send First Sergeant Crager with them to do that. However, I’m certain I’ll receive some questions as to why my Top sergeant is turning bus driver for three withdrawn candidates. We may just hide them in the back of a staff car. Would you have time to let him walk through the ship for a short tour? Frankly, I’d like to go along, but I can’t come up with a pretext that will explain both of our being gone. We’d each like to see inside an operational clanship.”

“I can do that, Colonel. I’m confident one of our ships will return to give you another opportunity. It might be a fast tour, Sergeant, if we see any traffic coming our way. Even stealthed, we are not eyeball invisible, and there’s a big burn spot when we leave.”

“I understand. Thanks.” Crager answered. “I’ll be starting the drive in the next thirty minutes. Do you need one of your men to call you?”

“No need. Our sensors can see a military marked passenger vehicle parked next to the HQ building, if that’s the one you plan to use. We’ll see you drive off.”

“Pretty good sensors you have there.”

“Yes. The Krall have some nice technology. Your left front tire is low, and the car is dusty.” She laughed.

Dr. Markel had to offer her thanks again. For the last hour, she had been skimming the data and reading the synopsis of what the data cube contained. “Captain Renaldo, this information cuts literally a decade of research from what we needed to learn, and takes us much farther than we would have managed on our own. Thank you. I hope we can contact you for more help as we go.”

“We intend to stay in contact with you. It’s dangerous to have all of our genetic resources for humanity on one planet, our own. Very shortly, the Krall are going to know that we are attacking their supply lines outside of Human Space, and we hope to move very fast.

“Our information is that they have grown so confident about their security over thousands of years of dominance, that their most critical manufacturing centers are concentrated on relatively few worlds. Major items like clanships, single ships, the Eight Balls, Dragons, the heavy battlefield armored transports, artillery defense systems, and the largest heavy ships they use to move their slaves and factories are made on only one or two worlds each.

“There are many worlds where they make trucks, personal armor, plasma rifles and cannons, and other small-scale war production items. They can even make those on Poldark, and do. However, moving warriors to fight takes clanships, and we can reduce those over time as they waste them.

“If we knock many of those production centers out quickly, we think they will start to feel the pinch on combat worlds like Poldark, and have to drain supplies from K1 and other worlds they control. They have a great deal of war material already at their disposal, but they use it up as if there was an endless supply. We want to cut that supply.”

Dearborn had an obvious question, wondering if Noreen and her people had considered the answer. “If the Krall start to run low on materials to fight a slow protracted war on human worlds, what do you think they will do?”

“We don’t think for a moment they will call a truce or pull back. If they reduce raids and invasions on new worlds, it will only be because they can’t get to the point of attack, because they have a fewer number of clanships. We expect they will stop holding back in restricted wars like the one they are running on Poldark, and do what they have always had the means to do. Crush their opponents quickly, and move to another world and repeat.

“They surely must have other more potent world wrecking weapons you have not seen, equivalent to the power of the Eight Balls. Railguns may be able to stop those collapsed matter weapons, and we learned they don’t have many of those because they are made very slowly, by a slave race on one single planet. We expect those and new weapons to come out of storage. We’ll have to find and destroy each as they appear, or find some counter measure. We may lose planets, but that was going to happen to all of them anyway, if we let the Krall do what they want.”

“OK. I wasn’t sure if you understood that your raids, if successful, would not go without consequences for other human worlds. The Krall will try to exterminate every human settled world if they sense they are losing. A scorched Earth policy, in the most literal sense.”

She answered back sharply. “What were you people hoping to do with a beefed-up spec ops program, Colonel? Obviously much the same as what we are going to try to do. Fighting the Krall face-to-face on planets with troops that are their match, or even superior to their warriors, isn’t going to win for us in the long term. We take eighteen to twenty years to produce a child that becomes a soldier. Those egg-laying bastards can produce cannon fodder killers at a hundred times our reproductive rate. If we can take away their ability to travel and spread, isolate them on the planets where they are now, we have a chance.” She sounded ready to argue more.

“Captain, I’m not disputing your opinion or understanding. What you said isn’t significantly different from what I’ve heard come out of the Army and Navy think tanks. I simply wondered if you expected it to be as simple as knocking out the Krall factories. I see you
have
thought past that point. We need more miracles, and I see your people’s existence as one of those. The ability to modify people genetically to become like you is another one.

“We have an enormous population of one trillion, and if even a fraction of one percent of our population opted to receive your genes, we could have billions capable of fighting the Krall. Somehow, we have to get our own side to move out of the way of our own survival.”

“From the opposition I saw on our own world to what we were doing genetically, I fear billions on Rim Worlds and New Colonies will die before the massive Hub world populations feel frightened enough to accept us. However, we may not have to rely only on ourselves to fight this battle.

“In the last month we encountered two new alien species, Colonel, one is definitely an ally, and we believe the other may become one. They are two of the Krall slave races, and they know things we need to learn. We have made first contact with the Prada and the Torki, as they call themselves. They have sparse populations, and control no worlds, so we don’t know where cooperation could lead. They might hold the keys to open doors to some of the miracles we still need.”

Dr. Markel was amazed. “Two intelligent species? My God! Are there others?”

“There were.” Noreen acknowledged sadly. “The Krall eliminated another thirteen star traveling species. A third slave species is a meat animal for the Krall. We are the seventeenth or eighteenth civilization unfortunate enough to meet them. This all has happened along a volume of perhaps six or seven thousand light-years length of a cylindrical section of the Orion spur and Sagittarius arm, spinward of where we are located. Our human explored region is relatively small. We assume there are many other intelligent peoples in the galaxy. With a race like the Krall around, I’m not surprised those nearby keep quiet.”

Markel sounded eager to meet aliens. “Will you be bringing any of these races here to meet with the Planetary Union Government?”

“Most of my people are death penalty worthy genetic freaks to your government, as you will be if you use the data we gave you. I’m personally not going to introduce them to the aliens. Besides, we don’t want the Hub government to know where our world is located, and the aliens might spill the beans. They don’t have planetary governments of their own you understand. They have been slaves for thousands of years. Even if I trusted the PU to leave us alone, if the news leaked of where we are from, a fleet of clanships will soon appear on our doorstep. There are millions of stars and worlds out there, and we like our anonymity for now.”

The three former candidates had been listening quietly after the introductions were made and the questions and answers had started. Now Jorl was impatient to start his journey back to Koban. He knew he’d be receiving the next round of mods, become a TG1 at least, and possibly a TG2 if all the mods were ready. Mind Tap the lessons learned on Poldark, and then prepare for the first real combat mission.

“Captain, I’ll be happy to guide the First Sergeant around the ship, and I believe we are all ready to get started.” That was a bit pushy, but he’d been pushed around a lot the last few weeks. He wanted to get home.

****

Standing at the bottom of the ramp, Crager was impressed with what he’d seen inside the Avenger on his thirty-minute whirlwind tour. He made sure to record it all for showing to Dearborn and the civilians, in the soon to solidify group of earnest conspirators, preparing the first steps in building their own genetic supermen. They had not been left with all of the Kobani gene secrets, but enough to prepare for future steps, when they were offered.

He’d been swarmed by other youngsters, amazingly strong and graceful in their movements, like the three he had driven back to the ship. It was hard to get in his own questions between their eager ones, until their truly gorgeous, raven haired Captain Renaldo ordered them to calm down, and let him ask his own questions.