Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (103 page)

As evidence that the self-repair had progressed more that superficially, the hologram of reappeared, hovering above Pildon’s corpse. It was a local view, showing the human clanship and the ship’s hull. Several red circular glows appeared on the hull skin, confirming that the humans were burning their way out. With sudden release, several sections of the hull material blew outwards, held by a flap of material as the internal atmosphere exploded out in a visible condensation, as moisture in the warm air expanded into the frigid vacuum.

Figures in human armor pivoted out in the gale, using one hand to swing around and placed their feet on the hull, and stepped away from the edge and blast of air at four wide holes in the hull surface. It was a demonstration of their dexterity and coordination that they did this so smoothly and quickly. In a number of cases, a limp figure was passed to a figure already outside. Bohdar assumed those were their wounded. Possibly even their dead, since humans were fixated on recovery of bodies for some sort of ritual. Another weakness.

As figures continued to exit, the first ones out moved towards the clanship, which he noted had opened its portals to space. Several more armored figures in the hold were throwing multiple lines out, which were grasped by those evacuating the ship. The lines appeared to be tethered inside the hold, and they were quickly pulling themselves along by hand to reach the ship.

He counted the figures, and there were almost as many as had made the assault. The number of limp forms confirmed some of their dead had been retrieved. In a coordinated move, they all leaped lightly off the hull, with the lines being their only attachment to their clanship. He saw the clanship itself had begun to drift away slowly.

The atmosphere was still blowing firmly into space. The inner doors of the compartments where they cut their way out were not sealing. He became aware of a sound from the half-opened portal of the control room. It was the sound of air whistling past the edges of the iris. He heard angry shouts and multiple roars of indignation from the corridor outside.

As the sound of escaping air increased to a shriek though the half-open iris, he was searching hurriedly, and unsuccessfully, for his previously discarded armor and helmet. In the hologram, the visible streams of condensation of escaping air now extended a considerable distance from the hull, and there was no sign of the rapid sealing of the hull material they’d observed previously. The internal compartment doors had apparently not closed and the previously opened doors along the corridors were forming vortices, as discarded armor, rifles, helmets, and some of their dead, were swept into them by the large volume of air now set into motion. There had only been one creature aboard who could tell the ship to close those doors.

As the pressure dropped, he heard the ship’s voice over the sound of the gale. “Pildon, when the last trusted operators leave me, I will Jump to the previous star system and try to protect the inhabited world from damage as long as possible. You were deceptive, and neither you nor any of your people can be trusted operators again. I have informed my sisters.”

The ship must know he’s dead,
Bohdar thought.
Can she speak to the dead?

Except he knew exactly who she had wanted to hear her words. With no trusted operators they could control, the Krall had lost use of their greatest weapon of intimidation. Bohdar’s first and only mission had ended the need for guardians. Telour had been too ambitious.

In the hologram, as Bohdar began to gasp for breath, he saw two figures exit one of the hull openings with a limp figure between them. Just as they grasped one of the lines, the hologram switched to a view of the previous star system, and the ship Jumped.

He knew he and his guardians had failed in their duty. However, not going home alive had already been conveniently arranged.

After a time, the clanships in the star system of the human home world had tired of running and Jumping away from the pursuing navy ships. Even if the death ship arrived, they wouldn’t know it, because there were human ships clustered near the intended coordinates.

They had not delivered the War Leader’s ultimatum, which was to have been broadcast after Jupiter exploded. Fearful of status loss if they traveled for two weeks to reach Telda Ka with nothing to report to the Tor Gatrol, they had waited longer than they expected the destruction would require. Isolated here, they had no knowledge if any of the target worlds had been attacked. The prerecorded message from Telour assumed that all the attacks had been successful. However, after listening carefully, the highest status sub leader decided part of the message could be broadcast. After all, surely one or more of the attacks had been completed. He decided to bypass the Tor’s long preamble as to why the attacks had happened, which also enumerated how many worlds he’d killed. He decided the final warning was the most suitable, considering the uncertainty that existed.

He and the other four clanships Jumped near enough to Earth that the start of the message would not be received before the transmission had concluded, and they would have already Jumped again for Telda Ka. That was several light minutes out from Earth. The transmission began as soon as they did their White Out, so that it would reach the humans on the heels of the quadruple gamma ray burst, which would focus attention on them anyway.

Telour’s voice was started at the warning portion.
“More of your worlds will be destroyed if you fail to tell me where the human fighters that attacked our worlds are based. Submit to my demands or submit to destruction. Send an envoy to Telda Ka to meet my demand in sixty-four rotations of your home world. If you attack Telda Ka again, I will destroy another four worlds.”

The omitted first part of the recording had started with the Tor Gatrol introducing himself, and he had not thought to include his name and title at the end. It would be up to the humans to decide which Krall leader they were supposed to submit to at Telda Ka.

As for his saying
another
four worlds would be destroyed, that should be a viable threat from a human perspective, even if only one or two were successful his time. It was apparent the death ship wasn’t going to reach Earth, possibly because the first planet targeted had been hit with debris too soon. The Krall commander knew, as every clan knew, that the new Joint Council would not authorize use of another death ship against humans. They were too rare and few now. They didn’t yet know they were no longer even an option.

As soon as the message ended, the four clanships departed for Telda Ka, making sure they departed well ahead of the hundreds of missiles the navy had surely launched at their coordinates, too late yet again.

****

Mirikami almost heard the threat and warning in real time. The Comtap specialist in Bledso’s office undetectably linked to him while the message was being played live, and then the short message was repeated for the Joint Chief’s Chairfem, so she could hear it again from the start.

The link ended when Bledso received a call from the president, and the Comtap was asked to leave the room. The Comtap in the president’s office was also ushered out, even sooner, and Carol Slobovic didn’t hear the full message right away. However, the message contents couldn’t be kept secret. Obviously, a private high level PU government conversation was taking place, and the Kobani were not included.

Mirikami was at Bootstrap, working on rescue missions with his and Thad’s squadron, and almost fifty other Kobani ships. They were moving people from orbital stations to temporary inflatable domes, which looked more like a bubble filled with air, placed out where less maneuverable Jump ships could dock with them, to transfer people for leaving the system.

The other half of the Kobani fleet was with Noreen at Meadow, where the rescue effort wasn’t going as well. Several fast moving small debris pieces had pelted the planet, but small was a relative term. Hundred-plus feet wide, those iron rich “rocks” caused a lot of damage, and three had hit the planet so far. The one impact on land had actually been the least deadly of the three. It wiped out several small towns and part of a midsized city and its suburbs on the east side. Blast damage and a heat pulse caused raging fires, and already panicked emergency workers worried about getting their own families off planet, would not fight the fires or staff the hospitals. 

Two similar sized rocks that struck in deep oceans killed millions more than had the land impact, due to the huge waves that swept over coastal areas of continents, and when the hundred foot high waves were reflected back to sea, they struck other already damaged coasts again. It had sounded heartless, but planetary civil defense ordered incoming rescue ships to focus on the central continental areas, where evacuations were better organized, and able to move more people faster, onto over loaded ships and shuttles.

The Kobani ships were loading people from orbital transfer stations and doing micro Jumps to the same sort of domes-in-space as used at Bootstrap, which were mass-produced planetary habitats that had airlocks and water and food storage. Without gravity, sanitation in them was a mess, and all they were doing was housing people away from the looming larger disasters. A messy chunk of planetary core almost a mile wide, with its own retinue of satellite “moons” was headed for a brush with the planet in four days.

It would pass a few thousand miles above the atmosphere, but an unknown number of the thousands of fragments traveling with it, some of them hundreds of feet wide, would devastate the planet in an unpredictable pattern of impacts. It wasn’t one of the “planet killers” that were still weeks out, but what organization there was on the planet would likely vanish when the impacts created more fires, soot, huge waves, and cloud cover.

Against all odds, Meadow could possibly get nearly a half billion of its two point four billion residents off the planet before then. However, it would be a race to rescue many of those survivors from the habitat bubbles they were temporarily sent to, before those deteriorated into poisonous gasbags of sewage.

A local habitat engineer came up with a better dynamic solution to stabilize their interiors, and furnish a local weak “down” direction for those inside. Link the tops of two dome bubbles together with multiple tethers, and use pairs of shuttles to start them rotating around their common center. That made water and solids settle to the base of the domes, even if it was somewhat bowed and rounded, and the waste collected in the compartment below the stretched flooring. Air filtration kept things breathable, barely, and ten thousand people per dome could be housed for several days, in fifteen hundred pairs of the ungainly, unbalanced, and wobbly contraptions. It took two Orbital Only jumbo transports to carry away the stinking and fouled “tenants” of each pair of habitats. Thirty million people passed through them all told, and as one was emptied, others came to replace them from the planet.

Reluctance of anyone to enter one of those previously occupied pestholes was followed by an offer to drop them off on the planet on the return trip, in exchange for people that were willing to survive without comfort. A handful surprisingly went back, but not most.

It was a better story at Bootstrap, not entirely because of Huwayla, but in large part. There were fewer and smaller core fragments for one thing. Millions of them to be certain, but the Dismantler didn’t need to place any of the larger ones into stable orbits. All she did was “nudge” the most dangerous large ones that were on a trajectory to hit the planet, into an orbit that would miss Bootstrap on their
first
pass around the star. There were too many in the hundred or so feet size, or less, for her to push them all away in the time she believed she had. When the three large strikes hit Meadow on the same day, her third day working at Bootstrap, she struggled to continue to help, but it was a losing battle for her.

She told Maggi that the land impact at Meadow nearly ended her effort when so many died so quickly, but she was using her gravity generator at the time to pull a two-mile wide, still semi molten mass, a full degree from its grazing trajectory with Bootstrap. The wave of death at Meadow destabilized her mind, she said. She had difficulty determining if she had shifted the orbit enough.

Jakob, without any humans aboard the Mark, and unable to use the Normal Space drive without Trap fields, made a calculation that assured Huwayla the object would miss Bootstrap by over forty thousand miles.

Maggi tried soothing the ship as if it were a living person, trying to help it stay sane and functioning long enough divert more debris and to save more lives. Huwayla explained that every intelligent mind appeared to have some sort of minor quantum connection through their awareness to the alternate tachyon Universe. It was only when a massive number of such minds died at the same time, that there was a detectable wave in low energy tachyons, which passed instantly through that Universe. Huwayla and her sisters could sense those waves, and she claimed there were many such waves every day, originating from every part of our own Universe, near or far. She said the Olt’kitapi Mind Expanders had also been sensitive to them. Some of these daily waves had been definitely traced to known natural events, such as a super novae or stellar flares that wiped out intelligent life on an entire planet.

Learning this, Maggi asked for an explanation. “Huwayla, why don’t these mass deaths hurt your mind? Some of those events must take many more lives than those that died on Meadow today. Is it the proximity?”

“No, it is the knowledge that I am responsibility for these deaths. I did not cause the tragic distant deaths and I could not prevent them. That is not so on the worlds you called Meadow and Bootstrap. My own actions will cause them. I have detected a large gravitational mass approaching Meadow, but I’m certain I will not live to see it arrive. There were two other shocks at Meadow, a short time after the one on land that killed many beings there. I remotely sensed the gravitational change of the impacts, but there were not a large number of deaths when the planet shook. I believe that may end at any moment, because there is water on much of that world, and waves may be moving.

“Additional deaths may only have been delayed, but I think they are coming soon. I cannot endure more lives lost like that again, even if you try to distract me from the guilt, and tell me how much good I can still do. I thank you for your kindness, but I will say goodbye while I am able to think rationally. I will not go home to my sisters. I am too broken, and I will never be able to repair myself in body or mind. I say goodbye now to you trusted operators, and to some of you who have acted as a friend to me.”

Just as a Comtap message came from Noreen, reporting that monster waves were washing over continental shores at Meadow, Huwayla vanished in a Jump. She had done that many times in the last days, to move near rocks to alter their course. This time she didn’t answer Maggi and Tet’s Comtap calls, or reappear. She was gone.

They knew they were on their own here now, but they had been granted added months for the rescue to continue. It was too soon to rest, or to tow the Mark of Koban home for repairs, but that day would come soon. More of the Planetary Union worlds were sending ships every day, traveling days to weeks after being notified by Comtap messages of the disasters. It was probable that the majority of the three point six billion would be saved in the Bootstrap system. Millions might yet die, as thousands had already died off planet from random hits. However, the scale of the disaster here, compared to Meadow was far less.

The Mark was left parked in a wide orbit below the southern ecliptic plane, because until its hull was repaired and it had new Trap field emitters, it couldn’t help with the rescues. Will Horst had used the Hellion to tow the Mark to Bootstrap, and parked the crippled ship well out of harm’s way. Mirikami and Maggi spelled Will on the Hellion’s Bridge, as they worked around the clock to rescue people, or used brute force to shove smaller asteroid sized boulders onto safer tracks.

There had been a number of tense discussions with Bledso and President Medford. Mirikami’s assertion that the Krall could no longer control the Olt’kitapi ships were met with skepticism, particularly when they learned there were at least three more of the operational ships. He could offer little in the way of evidence of this, as he had with the recordings of exploding Eight Balls. The actions of the ship that had triggered the destruction, to delay the destruction it caused for one world, struck them as proof the AIs were too easily manipulated, by Krall or humans.

Using the electronic capability of the Comtap chips, the Kobani communications specialists had learned they could link to an AI, and have it send the basic voice communication to a sound system, without the emotional and visual mental components available between Kobani by Mind Tap. It made the Comtap specialists almost like an equipment relay, sitting off to the side, partly out of the minds of those that used them for interstellar range conversations. 

Medford repeatedly called for Mirikami to come to earth to meet with her, to explain how he had managed to change the mind of an alien AI, to get it to help protect a system the Krall had convinced it to destroy. She was perfectly aware he knew of the Krall’s demand that the humans who had attacked their production worlds be identified, and their base revealed.