Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (40 page)

“We do not experience the pretend death they call sleep. What is this strange story you weave to excuse mistakes?”

“My Tor, it was in a report, one I made after my investigation of my predecessor’s death at the hands of humans. Gatlek Gentda’s death was part of a deliberate plan to capture him alive, and extract information using a sleep drug, derived from an unknown natural chemical that forces a human to need sleep. In our ancient histories, our race once also did this daily rest, before we bred this weakness away. I’m told the soft Krall still go partly dormant at night.”

“I recall that report, but not any results from an investigation of the human that confessed to you. Explain the story.”

Pendor repeated the sheer fabrications that Sergeant Reynolds had spun to try to stave off his torture and death. Namely, that the humans had deliberately gone after the old Gatlek to drug him and get information. At the time, Reynold’s fabrication seemed smarter than to admit what would be a fatal truth for him. That Gentda was simply brash and dumb enough to be caught in a human ambush and killed, and Reynolds only took the Gatlek’s body because his more advanced looking armor displayed some different communications technology.

The concocted story had kept Reynolds alive, and gotten him off Poldark, enroute to some other Krall world, to safeguard his phony knowledge from supposed assassination by humans that knew he might “talk.” An unexpected and unauthorized detour of the clanship to land on Koban inadvertently saved his life, a detail unknown to Pendor.

That bullshit story apparently lived on with Pendor. Except now, it was part of the Gatlek’s own bullshit cover story. The Krall certainly couldn’t have quoted a better source for his heaping pile of bovine dung.

Kanpardi glared at his subordinate. “No one else has ever reported a similar story. You said the ship with this captive disappeared. Is there evidence to back your story?”

“I have recordings of the interrogations, my Tor.”

“Even if it was true, how would that have revealed any of the withdrawal plans?”

“After your plan was under implementation, there were sub leaders of the major clans reported missing in combat that had that knowledge, and a middle status warrior from my own staff vanished. He left the bunker to organize and coordinate the moving of supplies for the withdrawal, shortly before an artillery barrage. We assumed his, and the other missing warriors, were typical random losses due to enemy action or perhaps from a death challenge from a warrior in a rival clan. The bodies were not found.

Pendor shivered his left shoulder, in the pattern of a Krall shrug movement. “It is conceivable that one or more of them, each with partial knowledge of the coming withdrawal, was seriously wounded and taken alive. This reported sleep drug is used to prevent a warrior from forcing their own death, and to place them into the same pretend death that humans enter nearly every day. In that state, it was said that some warriors speak in answer to questions. I have seen this happen with the prisoner I mentioned, who when exhausted by forced alertness for days, spoke to our questions when allowed finally to enter pretend death.”

“I do not accept that a warrior can be made to betray the Great Path.”

“The human, who agreed to help us if we allowed him to live, said a warrior would not know they were helping humans, or were even speaking the words into the air. I will repeat this story before the joint clan council. I have a copy of my report and the recorded interrogations, since the original must have been lost. This reported new drug might explain the sudden human competence in the face of what should have been a masterful and unexpected strategy on your part, Tor Gatrol.”

Kanpardi wasn’t fooled by the clumsy and blatant flattery from Pendor, yet there was an advantage to be had here for him. The invasion force to land on the old human colony of New Glasgow, a heavily populated and advanced world on the edge of their Hub region, needed every advantage to establish a firm talon grip before the humans brought in reinforcements. The loss of ten percent of the material for Pendor’s invasion force could possibly jeopardize that operation, and Kanpardi, who had developed that plan, would suffer a loss of status and influence if it did.

Kanpardi swiped talons of one hand at empty space. “I do not see another way for humans to have predicted in advance what I would do in response to their attacks on our factory worlds.”

Kanpardi was intelligent, but his inbred Krall ego wouldn’t permit him to consider that a human prey animal, one much like the now surely long dead Mirikami, could understand his motivations so well. A prey animal that had foreseen his most probable course of actions, based on the Krall’s current supply shortage. A shortage created by the prey’s own actions. That possibility fell outside any reasonable worldview of the Krall war leader.

He reached a decision, one that required him to keep Pendor as Gatlek for the next invasion. “I will take you to speak to the joint clan council. Tell them your story. I will recommend that the needed supplies be furnished for your fleet. After you have established a base of operations on the target world of New Dublin, I will personally visit there to see that things proceed as I want.”

He needed Pendor’s invasion started and removed from his immediate concern, so he could focus on his next task. The second invasion he was planning was of another world, also located one quarter of the way around the sphere of Human Space, in the opposite direction, named New Glasgow. This was one of the outer lying main Hub worlds, which humans considered safe. It would be easy to establish a successful landing there, due to a lack of any sizable military base and a modest agricultural economy, much as Bollovstic once had been like. It was far removed from the region where Poldark and the now defeated Bollovstic were located. Attacking both New Dublin and New Glasgow would deliver a shock to humanity.

He idly wondered where the
old
places they were named after were located. Attacking those would truly shock the humans. He’d have to assign someone to research where those older named worlds were located.

The two new targets were even farther from the dead colony that humans had called Greater West Africa, before Kanpardi ordered the population exterminated so he could use the world as a base, now called K1 by humanity. These two invasions, in opposite directions, would demonstrate the long reach and power that the Krall could still exert. A double blow to an enemy that might think they had significantly damaged the Krall’s ability to wage uninterrupted war.

Kanpardi believed his approach offered the best future for developing new breeding lines of Krall. The latest hatchings were producing a higher number of cubs that displayed faster learning, and which employed better strategies to find advantages over larger cubs born weeks earlier. It was clear that breeding only for brawn and strength was not all that was needed to confront a highly adaptable species like humanity. This race could be easily defeated at this stage, but what would have happened if they had not met them for another five thousand years?

The Tor Gatrol decided they definitely had to add higher intelligence and trickery to the list of advantageous attributes to breed for, when facing an enemy like humanity. It appeared humans might have found a way to turn a great weakness, the need for sleep, into a potential weapon.

If Reynolds bullshit stories could be weaponized, they would be lethal.

“Wake up, sleepy head. Can’t win this war with your eyes closed half the time.”

Carson prodded Alyson awake, where she lay napping in her acceleration couch on the Bridge of the Beagle.

The pretty girl snapped to instant wakefulness, quickly absorbing her surroundings and data from her console, as only a Kobani could do. “We’re still three thousand four fifty two miles out. Not a sign of clanships, no radio transmissions, and no radar scans of us. It’s not the start of my watch until we reach low orbit.” She checked the time. “I could have slept at least another six minutes,” she protested.

“What would six more minutes do for you, lazy bones?” Carson asked with a grin, seated at a nearby couch and out of immediate reach of an irritated woman.

“At ten times a normal persons thought processing speed, it’s like an hour of sleep to me.” She answered in a rather lighthearted grumble, as she triggered her couch to morph into a sitting position.

She added, in a dig at her new husband. “Or for a slow male mind like yours, that’s almost like a full night of rest.”

“Oh ho. It’s going to be a bit grumpy out this morning, it seems. I let you sleep longer when I came up thirty minutes ago, carrying some breakfast for you.” He countered.

“Oh? Where is it?” She looked around, in obvious interest.

“I ate it. You were asleep.” He laughed at the contradiction.

She stuck out her tongue. “Honeymoon is over, I guess.”

“Nope, I made more. Enough for you and the Captain, and left it in the warmer. She went down to eat hers a half an hour ago, and she’s on her way back up with yours. It’s why I woke you. That, and to let you see this abandoned Krall world as we approached.”

“Philodor was a Prada colony, not a Krall world.” She reminded him.

“Not for probably ten or fifteen thousand years, since the Krall took it from them. The sensors haven’t found signs of Prada construction at this range. There are numerous seriously dilapidated dome circles, which the Krall left behind. From what Wister and his sister Nawella told us, a Krall clan pulled out of Philodor at least a thousand years ago. That’s time enough for any villages to have grown into cities, and factories to have been repaired and turned to local use.”

There was a voice behind them both. “You’re forgetting that these still were the elder worshipping Prada, obeying the commands of the Krall, whom they thought was the eldest race and their rightful Rulers.” That came from the top of the stairwell. The Captain was back on the Bridge. Marlyn walked over and set a tray of food on the console by Alyson.

“Thanks Captain.” Alyson asked her a question. “Wouldn’t they realize they had been abandoned after the first couple hundred years?”

Marlyn shook her head. “From Mind Taps I’ve had with Nawella this week and with other Prada elders on Haven, unless the elders down there died by accident or disease, the last leaders here should still be alive. If the final Krall to leave here told them not to increase their population, not to build anything new, they’ll be doing exactly what the Prada on Haven were doing when we found them. Living in a few small tree villages, maintaining underground factories for future use. They had been doing that on Haven for over a hundred years without changing. Wister’s people didn’t want to disobey their elders.”

“They’re sure building like hell now.” Carson noted.

“They haven’t exactly been on their own since we showed up, have they? Particularly after we, and the Torki, worked to restore the Raspani as a thinking species. The Raspani are the oldest species the Prada now know, and they told the Prada they are free of any Krall restrictions. To the Raspani’s credit, they also told them to do what their own elders want them to do, not what any other race tells them to do, older or not. That’s why we have Nawella with us, and Torki and Raspani representatives. To smooth the process of making new contacts, assuming we find survivors here of any of their peoples.”

Looking at the sensor data from Philodor, Alyson looked sad. “The Krall really left a trail of empty worlds behind them. Often covered with lush vegetation, and having many small to mid-sized animals and a lot of sea life normally, but nothing approaching higher intelligence.” Alyson spoke around a bite of smoked rhinolo meat, and scrambled golden gem bird eggs.

“Kids, you missed out on some of the school lessons your parents and I got when living in Human Space, about typical native alien life. On Koban, you needed to be taught how to survive, and learn something about our own largely unexplored world. However, the majority of planets we’ve found have hosted some form of life, but rarely anything approaching intelligent. There are more and brighter animal species on Koban than on any other planet humans have settled. More even than found on old Earth. The smartest of these on Koban seem to be the rippers, but there are plenty of clever animals. That’s probably a result of the superconducting nervous systems, which speeds thinking of animals there.

“In Human Space, people settled over seven hundred twenty habitable worlds, or at least made extensive use of them, and every single one of them had some sort of life. More than half of them already had very lush and diverse ecosystems. None but Earth had produced technological intelligent life, or a species that might evolve to become technological. Koban, with highly intelligent rippers and their cat cousins, and our smart wolfbats, some surprisingly smart dinosaur species, and the recent find of clever sea mammals, is an exceptional world. Would there ever have been a technological species evolve on Koban? We don't know, but certainly not soon. Only primates on Earth advanced to complex tool making, and that took about two million years, from stone hand axes to electronics.

“Do you foresee even the smartest animals we’ve found on Koban evolving to change body designs, so that they could build spaceships and leave their world?”

Shaking her head, she answered her rhetorical question. “I don’t think rippers or wolfbats would evolve in that direction, but over many millions of years some other new species there might have.

“We know a great deal more about successful technological species now, from information provided by the three friendly alien races we’ve met, and the one unfriendly species we wish we’d
not
met. Of the seventeen species beaten by the Krall, each had colonized systems around their home world, where a single technologically capable intelligence had evolved after billions of years, as had humanity and they too expanded after reaching space. However, they all achieved space travel much later in their racial histories than we did, and even then they expanded very gradually, over many thousands of years after first reaching orbit.”

She shrugged, “We humans seriously broke that pattern of gradual expansion, and even the time taken to reach the stars after first reaching orbit. We are apparently the hyperactive kids in this neck of the galaxy. We were not necessarily the brightest people, at least not when we built our early civilizations, but now we may be capable of matching the best minds we’ve encountered thus far. That would be the Raspani, Torki, Prada, and we don’t know how we would measure up to the Olt’kitapi.

“All of those races have tens of thousands of years of experience over us. We certainly surpass the Krall, but that isn’t a guarantee of survival, since all of the species the Krall conquered were probably smarter than they were, on average, and some were much smarter. Being strong, adaptable, and warlike appears to be an advantage we share with the Krall. Not a flattering thought.” She grimaced for a moment.

“Anyway, with our advantages of superconducting brains, ripper Mind Taps and wolfbat memory organization and storage, I think mentally we will soon catch up to the science of the Raspani and Torki, who use mental technical aids given to them by an older species. I think we already exceed the Prada, who use longevity to extend their learning time. Some of our scientists are absorbing what our alien friends know day by day, and are experimenting with new applications the other species didn’t even consider, or were afraid to try if they seemed risky. I’m sure we’ll make brash mistakes, because humans always have, and yet we have survived some extremely bad mistakes. It wasn’t our mistake to meet the Krall, but I think we’ll find a way to survive that meeting. Perhaps we’ll have to escape to another part of the Galaxy. We can adapt to most worlds we’ll find.

“Evolution and stiff competition on higher gravity Earth has already given us an adaptation edge over most races we’ve met or heard about. Physically, we already were stronger than nearly any intelligent species we’ve learned about except for the Krall, and they didn’t evolve naturally, using deliberate breeding. Unmodified humans aren’t as strong as the Botolians were, I suspect. The Botolians were fought to extinction by the Krall, so we’ll never know how we would have matched up with them, physically.”

Carson countered what he saw in her discussion as anthropocentrism, of focusing on the human example. “The Krall have expanded, they are active in space, and they are widely distributed. They also have some rather bright representatives. Humans don’t seem so rare to me.”

Marlyn didn’t entirely agree, and explained the differences. “If the Olt’kitapi had left them on their home world I doubt the galaxy at large would have ever seen a single Krall off their original planet. The Krall didn’t become a space faring and colonizing species by their unaided efforts. They don’t truly colonize now. They were placed in space by an advanced race, handed spacecraft, weapons and technology, which provided them the means to expand. They didn’t achieve this start on their own initiative.

“When they have encountered another species, they have immediately attacked and conquered an unprepared peaceful race, took what they could use for war, wiped them out or enslaved them, and in a relatively short time moved on to new territory when they stumbled onto the next slowly expanding species. Except for holding onto some factory worlds with slaves doing the work, they leave nearly empty and habitable worlds in their wake when they get bored with the lack of fighting and move on. Those planets appear ready for colonization again, after the Krall plague of destruction has passed by, and the ruined ecosystems start to recover.”

Alyson, as she continued to eat for two, perked up a bit. “Then there must not be as many Krall as we first thought, since they don’t stay to populate and fully develop a world, as we would do. We’ve overestimated their numbers and their threat because we assumed they would exploit those worlds as humans would.”

Marlyn, looking at the small bulge over Alyson’s abdomen, smiled at her naivety.

“No, there aren’t nearly as many Krall as we first thought. Surely not as many as there are humans alive today. However, should they want to do so, they can expand their population exponentially faster than we can ours. A sturdy woman with a sperm source available for insemination, right after the Collapse when we needed to rebuild a population reduced by half, could
theoretically
produce twenty children in twenty to thirty years. However, not very many women ever matched that extreme reproductive rate, or even tried.

“The vast majority of women never came close to that many children, settling for two to five deliveries, with male selectivity being slightly favored over female deliveries with non-technological methods. Some harsh gender enhancement methods consisted of abortions when the fetus was determined to be female. In the post Collapse era, the new central government would not allow the use of genetics or advanced medical technology for gender selection. Despite the need for increasing the male population, it took centuries to achieve.

“In contrast, from the age of twelve a Krall female is capable of producing roughly twenty eggs every eight months, roughly half being additional females. In twenty years, there can be at least six hundred direct offspring from a single egg layer. After reaching the age of twelve years, the first ten of her female offspring are physically capable of breeding and laying eggs. In eight more months, another ten egg layers will be ready from each of those older hatchings, and so on from each new female.

“The Krall normally allow the majority of hatchlings to die in a raw struggle for survival before they even select those they want to start training. Many of those chosen don’t reach adulthood under the harsh combat training conditions. After completing novice training, few win enough status to deserve breeding rights until it’s earned in battle, roughly by age twenty. If they survive, but fail to be a good enough killer, they are sent to train novices but don’t get to breed.

“However, the Krall
could
decide to preserve all of their hatchlings, if they wanted to build a force composed mainly of fierce cannon fodder. They could give novices rudimentary training and pulse rifles, and then a thousand clanships could deliver two million of the young killers to a Hub world in an hour. When they run out of the ammunition they brought, a human civilian population still can’t protect themselves effectively from a Krall’s teeth and talons, and from what other weapons they can steal. It takes armies, which must protect every single city on every planet. The same thousand clanships can add another two million warriors at any time on any other planet.

“Even adolescent cubs are capable of fighting and killing ordinary unarmed humans with near impunity. We would truly face a savage, if perhaps
dumber
horde, which the populations in Human Space could not defeat, even with guns placed in every hand of every adult and teen. It’s only the Great Path’s selective breeding concept that prevents the Krall from using such a tactic. If we started winning the war, do you think they would withdraw, and offer to make peace, or go after us tooth and talon with everything they have? They can clean up their genetic weaknesses later, when we are all dead.”