Koban: Rise of the Kobani (86 page)

The four ships that had never been used aggressively were now off limits to casual visitors, to preserve their use for future contingencies. Telour’s title as Til Gatrol meant he was not a casual visitor like that, but Parkoda, with his low status was barred from visiting a functional ship. Even Telour was permitted to visit only one ship, and was accompanied by an octet of warriors.

As he approached the airlock, the ship sensed the group’s approach, as would the other five ships, it dilated open as if it were a biological
sphincter.

“Welcome,” the ship greeted them, in perfect high Krall. The outer opening squeezed shut and the inner wall then dilated open to admit them. Telour wondered why the airlock was active while they were on a planet with a breathable atmosphere. Then, the purest fresh air of the most pleasant nature he had ever smelled, enveloped him. He drew in a deep breath of the refreshing combinations of gasses and scents. He was suddenly aware of the octet with him, watching his reaction.

He turned to the gray clad octet leader. “This is something you expected, and wished to observe my reaction. Is this some sort of drug I have experienced? The other ships did not smell this way.”

“My Til, the other ships are said to have once smelled this way when we entered them, before they were used in a manner they found…, unpleasant.” The octet leader had sought an uncommon word to describe the reaction of the other ships, those previously used for
mass destruction. Telour had found the air in the other ships just like that of this world, despite the automatic activation of the airlocks when the group approached. Those ships no longer chose to please a Krall visitor.

Telour understood exactly what the unpleasantness referred to was, so he asked about the atmosphere he was now experiencing. “I have visited many worlds. None had as an agreeable scent as I detect here. What has been added?”

“My Til, study by many breeding cycles of K’Tals lead us to believe that this is the exact mixture of gases of our original home world. There are also added scents from growths and animals from there that we would experience if that world still existed.”

Telour understood the human concept of irony at play here. An Olt’kitapi ship, of the same type that had wiped out the original Krall home world, had fabricated an internal atmosphere to match that of the lost world of the species the Olt’kitapi had tried to destroy in their last days. The same species that subsequently succeeded in killing off the Olt’kitapi that had built this and other identical ships.

If this were of a Krall design, assuming they had ever designed anything a fraction this complex, the atmosphere would be some choking poison for any visitors that had defeated them. It was another sign of the weakness of the Olt’kitapi, even when extended to their intelligent ships.

“Where is the command deck?” His question was directed to the octet leader, whom he had not deigned to ask for his name. His tattoo revealed he was Dorbo clan, and the octet was a mix of Graka, Maldo, Dolbrin, and even younger clans. A reflection of the mutual responsibility all clans had to preserve these ships.

The ship answered him instead. “Follow the gold strip on the floor, that path will guide you to my control center.”

A gold
colored, metallic looking two-foot wide strip appeared on the floor, passing through the inner airlock door and bent to follow a curving path along a tubular corridor.

A gold path,
he thought.
I can’t be the first Krall to see a comparison to the mythical depiction of the Great Path in our histories. How clever are the minds of these machines?

It also had spoken of “my control center.” It had a concept of “self,” what it possessed, and who it was. He had heard that these artificial intelligences were literally aware, and that they were described as living ships that made their own decisions at times.

Human made AIs were shadows of what the Olt’kitapi had achieved. From a Krall perspective, man was foolishly following the same delusional path towards physical weakness. Trusting machines to help them make decisions or to think.

After all, it was because Olt’kitapi trusted machines to think for them that helped the ancient Krall to trick and defeat them. The
ancient species had supplemented their minds with artificial devices in their bodies to help them think faster and remember more. They gave smaller, customized versions of this technology to the Torki and to the Raspani. Those species fell easily to the Krall as well.

It was an Olt’kitapi mind “gift,” to a Krall clan seeking an advantage over the others, which had sparked the revolt and destruction of the givers. The devices began changing the way of thinking
of warriors that accepted the implants. In a few generations they became the soft ones, able to operate sophisticated Olt’kitapi machines, and could directly use their minds to operate the clanships that all Krall were permitted to use. They began to avoid killing unless threatened.

Today the soft ones no longer had the electronic mind enhancement
devices they once had. However, their minds remained different even when the tiny machines were removed from the base of their skulls. The last generation of ships the Olt’kitapi had produced was able to sense the differences between the soft Krall and the true Krall warriors.

The ships
originally accepted instruction from the Olt’kitapi, of course, or the soft Krall. Even without the interface link between their brains and the ships, the soft Krall could still use verbal and manual commands to direct the ships. At least they could do that until the commands that were obeyed resulted in actions that the ships ultimately perceived to be a violation of their inbuilt moral restrictions.

It was incomprehensible to the Krall. How could a machine, however smart, be allowed to make a moral choice? To a true Krall, that was itself immoral. You pointed a gun, pulled the trigger, and it killed. It was not proper for it to decide if it should do that or not.

The degree of reaction of each ship varied, from total withdrawal from sentient thought, as had the two ships that had been directed to apply one of their “benign” designed functions on two populated worlds, many thousands of years ago. A deliberately misapplied function, when then led immediately to the deaths of large populations. A lesser reaction was displayed now, by five ships that had been used in a more indirect manner for destruction. A variation was tried each time to thwart their adverse reactions, a result of what they had been tricked into doing. For these ships, it was via a simple refusal to accept any further command inputs from a soft Krall. That seemed to be because the action taken
indirectly
caused harm to an intelligent species. There now were only four ships that were still willing to follow soft Krall instructions. They were a precious and dwindling resource for ultimate acts of war.

The Krall had never learned how any of the ships determined the deaths of the targeted populations
, even if the mass murders were delayed for days after the triggering event, and the ships were safely parked here when it happened. The Krall were of course aware of the fatal weakness of the ship builders, a respect for intelligent life, which the Olt’kitapi somehow installed into the artificial minds of the ships. The ships refused to perform actions that would clearly harm planets that were obviously inhabited by a civilization. This was easily discerned from close-in observations.

The Krall exploited the same naive trust flaw that had made the Olt’kitapi vulnerable. They
made the soft Krall order the ship to operate at a considerably “safe” distance from the targets, after previously having used the ship on a similar test target in a dead star system. The tests were performed under the pretext of obtaining a wealth of minerals to expand Krall civilization.

The fact that a Krall cared little for possessions that were not weapons, such as worlds to inhabit, cities to live in, property or mineral wealth to own, eluded the ships as it had their designers. A Krall valued status, earned by killing or dominating an opponent.

To fool the ships, they were directed to Jump into a test star system, perform the triggering event, and promptly Jump away. The action was then repeated in the target system, at a similar great distance (several billion miles), and then the Olt’kitapi ship was immediately Jumped away before the result was even visible, due to the speed of light limitation. The ships never communicated to the soft Krall what they learned later, or how they learned it, so it was a deduction on the Krall’s part that the ships stopped cooperating because they somehow discovered how they had been misused.

The visit to the control center
today was anticlimactic. There were roughly three feet in diameter, gray colored, circular places on the floor, where the gravitational restraint system would deploy for those in the control center, when the ship was in flight and involved in sharp maneuvering. Other similar restraint systems were located at multiple locations on the ship for other occupants.

For its large size,
the ship didn’t have the passenger capacity it would seem capable of holding. At five times the volume, it held only a fraction of the warriors that a clanship could carry. As evidence that they were not all expected to be of the same species, there were compartments that appeared to have wider gravity restraints that might accommodate a Torki, smaller ones that could better fit a Prada, and elongated ones that could have contained a Raspani. Those on the control deck suited the Krall, and presumably the Olt’kitapi.

The Olt’kitapi had not been interested in representations of themselves, so there were no statues or still pictures of them, and their digital records were indecipherable to the many K’Tal that had attempted to read them.
One of the few clues to their shape was that they used the same size gravity restraint as fit a Krall. This left a great range of body shapes and heights. The soft Krall alive today had no anecdotal stories of the Olt’kitapi, and the Krall themselves had erased those them if ever they had them.

The early histories of the warrior race, composed by the surviving Krall, invested no time discussing the appearance of the hated and physically weak enemy, but described how they had fallen to their fierce attackers by the millions, in
only a few days. The hated enemy seldom was armed with anything that was intended to be a weapon, and only descriptions of their red blood, and brown, tasty flesh was considered worth mentioning. They were easily overcome if they permitted an aggressive Krall to approach them.

The Krall had established themselves as the fierce guardians of their benefactors. They protected the
m from every threat encountered, because not every species the Olt’kitapi met was welcoming. Some were mildly to strongly aggressive, and the Krall’s natural tendencies were exploited to keep threats at bay. The Olt’kitapi didn’t want fights, and preferred a withdrawal and separation to fighting, even if it were a simple rejection by another sentient species. They didn’t impose their will on other intelligent races, and required an invitation to enter into trade and technology exchanges.

The sole known exception was the Torki, encountered when they were mindless sea creatures with a potential to learn to think. They helped them to become aware, even though they did not survive to see the results.

The clanships and weapons they built for th
e Krall were for performing their security duty. A task the Olt’kitapi recognized they needed performed, but one they were temperamentally unsuited to perform themselves. Recognizing that the unmodified Krall were too violent for the lesser need of protection from, versus annihilation of, other unfriendly species, they offered their new client race the advantages of advanced civilization, in exchange for diminishing their excessive aggression. A handful of the old breed of Krall accepted the offer.

A small gland in the Krall brain was the primary source of the addictive chemical that generated the drive th
ey felt for constant combat. A new quantum mechanical based circuit, a small chip, provided some Krall access to parts of Olt’kitapi technology, and modified a set of genes that produced an adrenaline-like chemical. This was done with the permission of the recipients. It simultaneously made the aggression-inducing chemical non-addictive, and that eliminated the triggering of murderous impulses. That single biological trait had kept this species locked into violent internal clan struggles on their own world, and had prevented the development of an advanced society beyond that of barbarians.

The urge to reproduce
, to make more warriors to join in fighting other clans had driven them to a callous disregard for their own young. There were so many of them that they needed to be culled to prevent starvation, saving only the best fighters. Those that produced the combat stimulating chemical were better fighters. The Krall were within a few hundred years of falling into total collapse, with the entire planet’s ecosystem destroyed by self-consuming offspring. The Olt’kitapi’s effort to save them, and open the Krall up to expansion to the stars and friendship, unleashed a scourge that otherwise would have killed itself off when it had nowhere to go.

Of course, none of this was in Telour’s thoughts as he left the ship that refused to respond to him, other than to show him around. He couldn’t activate any screens, or equipment. He knew that the bulk of the ship was given to massive generators of a type the K’Tals had been able to understand. They did something in Tachyon Space that required tremendous power to control, but in turn gave them greater ability to apply some of that power in Normal Space. The Olt’kitapi intended the power to be used to build a great civilization. The Krall saw a “better” use.