Koban: Rise of the Kobani (76 page)

“Yes Sir.”

“OK. That wraps up the mission outline. You should break out into groups to plan your own mission details, and then we can have another group meeting in a few days to coordinate between us by Mind Tap. All of us will then know what everyone else will do. If there are questions or problems, come to me ASAP and we will find a solution. Let’s get to work.”

Mirikami was honoring a request for one of his captains. “Marlyn, since the orbital Eight Ball mission has no
planned
surface action to suppress Krall opposition, your team of TG2s can also take on the mission to deliver and protect the flight crews that will steal the migration ships from orbit. There is ample time to do that first, destroy the ships we can’t use, and
perhaps
rescue some Torki and Prada to place on one of the stolen ships. That craft would need some supplies right away, which you can take with you.

“As we discussed, the capture of those ships has a high priority for performing the other rescues, even before you try to rescue any of the local Torki that built them. If you do attempt a local rescue there, you have to measure the risk carefully. You can’t sustain damage to the Beagle that might prevent you from Jumping to the old Botolian home world, your primary raid site.

“To give the migration ships a head start, you’ll have the earliest departure from Koban to capture them. Those big turtles of ships will be slow to reach the other raid sites. Particularly to CS1 which is deepest into Krall territory. You will be transporting the Prada and Torki representatives for the rescue missions, including Coldar and Wister. Don’t let yourself be drawn into a clanship fight involving stressful maneuvers before they are off loaded to a migration ship. Dead allies are poor allies.” He grinned.

Chuckling, Marlyn answered him. “I’ll try to keep that in mind. My crew will be thrilled to have more to do. I almost called them ‘the kids,’ but half of them are adults that have finished upgrades just this month. The real kids that went to Poldark are Mind Tapping with them every day, teaching them what was learned from their spec ops instructors.”

She actually laughed as she described the activities she was seeing on the Beagle now. “It is positively harrowing to move up or down the damn stairs, with all of the running, flipping, and pretend shooting going on. It’s like those that have absorbed the experiences from Poldark by Tap, refuse to believe they have these new abilities until they test them out for themselves. I was scolding a reckless individual, whom I thought was one of the Hub City kids I didn’t know very well, when it proved to be
old
Max Hallow, from Prime City. The age regression made him nearly unrecognizable until I heard his voice. He was about to sass me back before he realized I was his age regressed captain. We
all
look like kids again, and the older we were when we changed, the more childlike we seem to behave.”

Mirikami joined her laughter. “I’m seeing the same reckless older generation activity on the Mark, although I have a higher percentage of the youngsters with me that went to Poldark. Noreen mentioned the same effect this morning, with a social twist that at first shocked me, for some puritanical based reason I suppose.”

“Ahh,” ahhed Marlyn, knowing of the event. “That must be the awkward liaison she stumbled onto, in what she expected to be an unoccupied anti-ship missile storage hold. She was verifying a missed inventory entry, and found Clarice Femfreid and Yilini Jastrov practicing missile firing and targeting, in the nude. A noisy bull’s eye strike apparently.”

After some heartfelt laughter and exchanging a few amusing remarks, he told Marlyn that Yil claimed they were going to sign-the-line for a short-term contract for one child.

Mirikami offered another observation and prediction. “Clarice’s husband was killed in Krall combat testing before the Fancy even arrived here. She was a member of my one and only combat team, and we have stayed friends. I know she had a couple of parings with uncontracted male friends over the years, but nothing that was long term or reproductive related. Our future prospects were bleak most of that time, and she never expected to be young again. None of us did.

“She has at least fifty years of experience over Yil, but they nearly look the same age now. We are going to see more of this. It’s no more surprising than the start of contract marriages of two generations ago, when males were in extremely short supply. Older women often contracted with mothers of teenage boys for reproductive rights, provided they were over sixteen and the woman could pay, and the mother received a seventy percent share of the hefty contract fee as dowry. We simply grew away from the necessity of wide age gap reproductive matches, once there were more males around.”

Marlyn agreed. “It’s odd how quickly we shift our societal rules and morals to match what we intend to do anyway, no matter what the rules were previously.”

“Did you hear from Aldry, or perhaps Rafe, that we Kobani are already expecting our first eleven TTGs? Genuine and True Third Generation children. Three conceptions came while we all were in Human Space, three more happened quickly after you returned with good news on our progress, and the rest were not reported until after Noreen and I came back.”

“Wow! I didn’t hear about all of that, Tet. So many so quickly. Who are the expectant parents?”

“I have no idea. Aldry and Rafe refused to say before the parents elect to speak out. Even then, the fathers may choose to stay anonymous. The contract records are sealed from the public unless the signers agree to the release. According to Aldry, the mothers will start to show earlier than normal, because the fetus will grow faster in the supercharged metabolisms they have now.

“Aldry also says the first pregnancies appear completely normal, other than seeming to be 15 to 20 percent farther along than for unmodified humans. I’m sure you recall that you and Noreen delivered your three bundles of joy almost a month early each time, and you only had clone mods and high metabolism. These new moms also have superconducting nerves and muscles.”

Marlyn had a practical concern. “If the mothers are any of our raiders, I wish I knew. I don’t want them endangered, and I recall that a high metabolism in us SGs made for rapid onset morning sickness for many of us. I briefly hated Noreen because she never had that, and I did, twice out of my three children. The expectant moms won’t be very effective, if they’re puking in their helmets.”

“According to Rafe, none of the mothers-to-be are on the teams we’re taking with us, based on threat of medical disqualification if they tried to go. However, there might be some recent conceptions none of the medical staff is aware of, or even the future mother knows about yet. Hell, Clarice and Yil might just have started a little rocket man.”

Marlyn displayed a brief pause with a puzzled expression, and then, “Oh! You mean because of where Noreen found them.” She laughed at the pun. “If so, I hope a boy isn’t named that.”

“Anyway, back to the first part of your double mission. How soon will you be ready to Jump? We will time the other launches around the departure times of the migration ships when you tell us you have them. My arrival to CS1 should be the most delayed, because of travel time of the rescue ships. I expect Trakenburg’s men to complete the clanship captures in a few days, and then I’ll have to wait somewhere closer to CS1 for the expected arrival of the big ships.

“I may arrange to hold up some of the other rescue ships at unoccupied star systems, as I’m going to do, to keep our attacks as close to simultaneous as practical. We can’t let slow and unarmed migration ships get to any of the targets first and give anything away.”

Marlyn was curious. “Tet, why is the coordination of such widely spaced attacks so integral to your planning? If you hold off a week longer to attack, waiting for your rescue ships to cover the distance to CS1, and Noreen is ready at CS2, any Krall couriers with the news of her raid would not be able to warn CS1 in time. So what if we miss starting a raid by a few days or a week? They won’t be ready for us.”

Mirikami considered her question and comments. “We have only recently discovered instantaneous long range communication as we enter and exit Tachyon Space. As far as we know, the Krall don’t have or even suspect this capability. However, in cautions passed to me by the Torki and Prada, they insist that we probably have not seen all of the Krall’s captured weapons or technology. If it couldn’t be copied or reproduced by their slave labor, then the Krall would hold onto whatever one of a kind weapon they had until it was needed.

“When I prompted Coldar for clues about possible technology or weapons that humans have not encountered, he spoke of an old event recorded on Torki Olts, of lodges in one star system where something important and secret was expected to arrive or to happen. Most of the Torki working there were placed on migration ships and relocated, as an
efficient
use of them as resources, or so they were told. The few workers that were left behind were never part of any later migrations, and no Prada village or Torki lodge has ever been sent back to that once well-populated Krall system. The secret, whatever it was, has been kept from their slaves.

“Krall surprises have a nasty habit of being dangerous.” He listed some. “At K1, the PU Navy didn’t know about Eight Balls, Worms, the old orbital defense platforms, or the traceable wave fronts created by massive ship movements in Tachyon Space. That ignorance cost the fleets and Rhama dearly.

He pulled at his lip in deep thought. “This first strike of ours is too important to have it go badly. We may never have another chance as good as this one to hurt the Krall as seriously, and to do it without any advance warning. It costs us nothing to coordinate it this way, and it
might
possibly cost us dearly if we don’t. Why take any risk not required?”

Seldom had a tug of a lip led to so prescient a thought, and yet indirectly brought unexpected destruction to so many victims, simply by the application of caution that the thought suggested.

****

The Beagle had been gone three days, and was within three more days of reaching Toborkiti. It was time for the Mark of Koban to lift for the first and closest of three Krall planets, each lightly occupied by specific minor clans. The Maldo, Dolbrin, and Kordak were finger clans with only a handful of domes on the conquered worlds they were given to settle, and they had only a minor presence in the joint clan council. They were mostly relegated to conducting raids on human worlds. On rare occasion, they had participated in an offensive on Bollovstic or Poldark. They had few resources beyond small weapons, armor, and vehicle manufacturing, and the original gifts of a nucleus of clanships, provided by their parent clans. Those were considered the softest targets for theft.

Between successful raids and culling weaker warriors, their ships would be parked on tarmacs, as they trained the next generation of novices, genetically the best they had produced or procured recently. After the surviving breeders of multiple raids had mated and nested, and the natural savage culling of the resultant thousands of cub hatchings had reduced their numbers to the toughest, the six to eight-year-old young killers were forcibly placed in training.

The pre-novices that were temperamentally incapable of submitting to a superior opponent, the adult trainers that captured them, were admired for their spirit and killed, as lacking the ability to learn when to obey those with higher status. The remainder entered a form of basic training to become better killers and to learn how to earn their own status.

For any clan, this meant intensive one-on-one attention for the early novices, which received their first empty oval of a status tattoo. A high percentage of clan members in a smaller clan would largely be occupied with training, with few spare warriors to assign to guard clanships that couldn’t be entered by other than a Krall anyway. With interclan warfare presently forbidden, there was no need to guard against theft by a rival clan.

Based on the last of a series of raids by any specific minor clan, the timing of their next nesting, hatching, and the start of several years of novice training could be forecast with reasonable accuracy. Data provided by Nabarone from reports about raids in Human Space was given to Jakob, the Mark’s AI, allowing him to predict which of three minor clans should most likely be “hip deep” in training young semi-wild novices right now. The Prada and Torki had identified where those worlds were located for the finger clans Jakob identified. That data was gleaned from their last contact with the Krall overlords sixty years ago; they knew where each of the finger clans had last been based.

Mirikami could reach the first of those planets in three days, sparsely inhabited by the Maldo clan, located in a volume of space formerly settled by the extinct Malverans. If too few of their clanships were found there, or conditions were not right, the next target planet was another two-day Jump to hit the Dolbrin, and the third option was within another three- day Jump, if the most distant choice of Kordak clan were needed.

They were ready to launch. Mirikami addressed the entire ship. “People, unlike the Beagle’s liftoff several days ago, we do not have any Prada or Torki on board, and everyone that is aboard is a TG2. Please get prone and strapped into your couch or pallets for this launch. It will be under the control of Jakob, and I have programmed in an acceleration performance that will certainly strain us, and is beyond the maximum limits the automatic Krall control settings would have permitted.” He let that warning register.

“This isn’t the first one of these I’ve done in the last two weeks of testing, but the watchers on the ground have not seen one yet, and few of you were on board. I hope they have their ears covered and eyes shaded, and that you all keep your underwear clean throughout this ride.”