Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (52 page)

“Tet, it’s too risky. You plan to walk out on that ramp to kidnap a high status Krall and bring him back, right out in the open. Send someone else.”

“Ahh.” He replied, with a mischievous grin. “Your persuasive argument must be that I’m too old, clumsy, and untrained to perform as well as any other Kobani with similar mods. Therefore, I should send someone that can actually get the job done.”

“Uh…, no, it’s… it’s not that.” He stammered.

“Right.” Mirikami rubbed his chin in pretend thought. “You mean it’s so dangerous to do this that I should only send people that we can afford to lose. Sacrificial and suicidal lambs, so to speak. The youngest kids we brought, you think?” He looked appraisingly over at the six least experienced TG1’s, seventeen years old, and all within hearing. This was fun, making Dillon squirm.

“Blazes no! It isn’t very dangerous.” He glanced at the last six youngsters, who had never been on any sort of a mission. “The Krall won’t detect us or expect anything like this. They’d be perfectly safe.” He knew they had been in a Mind Tap with experienced speck ops troops as late as this morning, as had he. They were as prepared as they could be.

In a low disheartened voice, Mirikami said, “Then, its back to my being old and feeble minded, isn’t it?” He let his face look sad as he lowered his head. No need to let a floundering fish off the hook.

“Damn it! You’re as sharp and capable as ever and you know I don’t mean you couldn’t do it.” Dillon grasped at another straw to try to keep the leader of the Kobani safe aboard the ship.

“Maggi will hound me if I don’t talk you out of this.”

Mirikami’s face brightened. “So, I only need my wife’s permission to go? I expected this, so I came fully prepared for that. Will a note from her do?” He promptly produced a folded slip of paper from his pocket.

Dillon didn’t take the offered slip of paper. “You planned this!” he accused. “I can’t believe you got your wife to write me a damned note that approves you going on a scouting mission, just to make me give in to you.”

“Ridiculous isn’t it? You have no idea how hard it was to get her to sign that.” He put the old Watch Stander’s list back in his pocket, reeling in his gullible fish.

“While I’m gone Dillon, that puts you in charge here, if you’re up to it with only one kid to help you instruct Jakob on what to do. I’ll take five of them with me, and one will keep you from feeling all alone, and afraid of what my wife will do to you.” He hooked a thumb at the six eager seventeen year olds. One of whom would be very disappointed to have to stay on the ship.

“I can handle the ship alone just fine Tet, and you damn well know it. Jakob runs almost everything anyway, so a dummy could do it. Besides, Maggi doesn’t retaliate against me often anymore. She’s mellowed since you two married, or perhaps you’re the new target. In any case, I get wacked a lot less now.”

Mirikami grinned and spoke cheerfully over his shoulder as he walked towards the six TG1’s, his helmet under his arm. “OK, then. As you suggested, you’ll be the lone dummy in charge. I’ll take all six of them with me. If I get too tired, feeble or lost, they can carry me back.”

The nervous looks of the youngsters immediately eased. None of them had wanted to stay behind.

Dillon finally nodded in understanding. “You know what? Maggi has had a bad influence on you. You set me up for this, didn’t you? Let me see that damned note.”

“She just wrote that I should give you a whack in the head if you give me any grief. I’m starting to fell aggravation returning.” He reached towards a long wooden pointer on the conference table, used when they were lecturing the new youngsters via images on a wall screen.

Yielding at last, Dillon said, “Ye gods, put on your helmet so I don't have to endure that satisfied smirk.”

****

Kartok wasn’t happy. He was being forced to leave this critical council meeting by his clan leader, so that leader could return for an upcoming council vote on a new Tor Gatrol. As the
third
highest status warrior of Ditka clan, he of course could not voice his clan’s single permitted vote, but he had wanted to hear all of the votes as they were spoken with fierce passion. A single vote was granted to a middle status clan like his, a clan that had earned a place with the Major and the Great clans on the council only within the last two thousand years. The ancient Great clans each had three votes, cast by their clan leader and the next two highest status warriors. Major clans had two votes each, and a minor clan had one vote.

Ditka was a former finger clan of Great Graka clan, which meant in these council battles they would back the parent clan, until they repaid their status debt for their formation.

His clan leader needed to be here if the voting started today or tonight, as the unexpectedly rapid push for a vote appeared about to win a consensus among the Great clan leaders. The presence of every clan leader, even midlevel clans, was essential for each of the Great clans that had proposed or supported a particular warrior for elevation to Tor Gatrol.

Graka clan was in a razor edged lead in the struggle to elect their candidate, Telour, the current Til Gatrol, who was second in rank to the now dead Kanpardi. Both warriors were of Graka clan, but some of the seemingly less aggressive tactics of the former Tor had made him unpopular with a few Great clans, and even more so with Major and middle status clans.

To gain support for his elevation, Telour had been pushing for greater punitive actions against humanity. However, that was now a position also taken by a few other Great clans, who had their own candidates for Tor Gatrol. Most Great clans previously had supported Kanpardi, on using new invasions as the punishment. However, they were invasions that they had wanted anyway, so they seem less punitive than simply a normal progression of the war. Now the mood was for something else to be done, something more drastic than two new invasions.

Every warrior put forward as a Great clan’s candidate for Tor Gatrol had spoken to the Joint Council, except for Telour, who as the Til Gatrol reserved the right of addressing the council last. He was due to speak soon, and was expected to present his plan of how to punish humanity into forever ceasing attacks on Krall production worlds.

All four of the other candidates had offered plans of violence to various degrees, but Telour was said to have been working on the details of his plan the longest. It was rumored to be able to deliver the most damaging heavy blows to the enemy, with the least cost of a vital and limited resource, the Olt’kitapi living ships.

Kartok had been ordered to fly their clanship a quarter the way around the planet to his clan’s dome, and allow the clan leader to fly it back alone, while Kartok assumed the duties of directing new novice selection and training. All of their remaining fifteen clanships were still at New Dublin, delivering supplies, equipment, and supporting their warriors in the invasion force already on the ground.

A suborbital shuttle trip from their dome would take two hours for the clan leader to arrive, so Kartok was to take the much faster clanship to him, which was parked at the council dome. Trading places with the clan leader would deny Kartok the privilege of seeing a relatively rare moment, when a new Tor Gatrol was chosen. Such a selection was not very rare in the long Krall history, but was certainly rare in the life of a warrior.

He made his way by the most direct route, out to where a midlevel clan was forced to land, on the outer ring of parked clanships. He wasn’t consoled by a handful of other similar status warriors of middle clans such as his, that he’d seen radiating away from the dome in different directions, also on unwilling missions to fetch their own clan leaders. None had gone in the same direction ahead of him, so there would be no sudden firey launches that he’d have to avoid with a detour. Therefore, he sullenly walked in as straight a line as possible, directly under any clanship along that path. For a Krall, a sullen walk would constitute a steady jog for a human.

As he was about to pass below the bell mouth of a clanship’s main thruster, he felt a sting on his neck. Telda Ka was a largely tropical warm planet, one reason for it to be selected as their first base in human territory. It supported a huge variety of insects and dozens of small flying predators. Even after so many orbits, the less intelligent of the native life had not learned that a Krall was not a source of palatable nutrition. Furthermore, they were dangerous to even approach. However, this time Kartok had not heard the buzz or flutter of wings. When he swiped at the left side of his neck, he found nothing there to crush.

He’d been engrossed with his own complaints, and in this secure place, he’d been less on alert than would be normal on another world. Annoyed, he whirled about to see what had dared to intrude on his foul mood. Even killing a mere insect would give him a miniscule measure of pleasure. Except there was nothing to hear, and nothing out of the ordinary to see. He clawed in irritation at the air and continued now at a normal Krall pace, the speed of a human sprint.

He passed below and between two more clanships, and was nearly three quarters of the way to where his clan’s craft had landed, when he faltered in his run as he nearly ran into a landing jack of a clanship. He suddenly realized his peripheral vision had narrowed, and his right shoulder had missed the jack only by a last minute twist of his body as the object suddenly appeared in the right edge of his strangely reduced tunnel vision.

Simply the act of turning aside suddenly put him off balance, causing him to stagger to stay upright, demonstrating instantly to his now alert mind that all three modes of establishing equilibrium and spatial orientation were affected. The statoreceptors were two fluid-filled vesicles that responded to natural or artificial gravity to furnish an up-down reference. He also had fluid filled phasic rotation receptors that responded to angular accelerations, similar to a human’s inner ear workings, and lastly, his visual reference system used external cues to calculate spatial orientation. The common factors for these balance systems to all fail were his nervous system, eye, and muscle control.

He believed he was thinking in a fully normal manner, but muscle control was weakened, his vision was impaired, and his nervous system wasn’t sending his brain feedback from his sense of touch along his limbs as it should.

He quit running, and rather than fall down as he felt muscle control slip away, he quickly sat on the tarmac to assess what was wrong. He could see another landing jack on the other side of the clanship when he moved his eyes in that direction. He could control where his eyes pointed, but the image was similar to looking through a tube. He could tell he was far enough away from that jack that he wasn’t directly below the main thruster. However, he couldn’t turn his head, to enable his eyes to swivel enough to see the jack that he’d narrowly avoided running into a moment ago. It should be close, and he wanted to try to lean back against that in an effort to remain upright.

Suddenly, from the speed with which his viewpoint shifted, from looking at the landing jack he could see, to one where he was looking up at the
bottom
of the clanship, he knew he was on his back. However, he couldn’t have fallen over that quickly in this low gravity, nor should he have fallen
backwards
from the forward leaning slump he’d been in as he sat down. Something must have pushed him backwards.

That impression was reinforced when his narrowed vision indicated he was being lifted slightly, and his head rolled back and forth for a moment. Then he was lowered again, and suddenly found he was in near total darkness. It wasn’t completely dark to his senses however because his IR vision saw a diffuse and uniform dull heat glow everywhere he could roll his eyes, trying to see some detail. He was unaware that he was inside a closed box now. He briefly considered the possibility that he had died, because he had no feeling from any part of his body or limbs. Most Krall didn’t believe in an afterlife, although there were some that questioned that thinking, in the absence of evidence either way.

Then he heard muffled sounds, which clearly was speech. An unfamiliar chill of fear came over him as he heard two sentences spoken. The reassurance that he was probably still alive was totally negated by what he heard. The first words were spoken in a low frequency, in the human language. Next, he heard words in high Krall. Both sets of words would haunt his thoughts.

****

Mirikami and his six followers had crossed from the trees that grew almost to the edge of tarmac. They ran all the way through the abandoned city and now the woods, with stealth active, but they could see one another via helmet icons. Except for a handful of startled animals they spooked with slight noises as they passed them invisibly, they were less substantial than ghosts.

They used a group Mind Tap before they started their run from the Mark, despite the reduced detail shared when they did this through their conductive gauntlets, rather than by skin contact. Mirikami had told them to run until they were directly under the first clanship, which he would select as he started across the half-mile strip of open tarmac, which lay outside the ragged ring of parked ships that surrounded the council dome.

Mirikami kept a closer eye on the pair of icons for Drake and Tara, because those two youngsters were carrying a large empty cargo box between them. It was plugged into both of their suits to power its stealth coating, but if they let it drop or they pulled apart while making their way through the trees, the normally gray colored box would ripple into view in visible light but more dangerously, would also reflect radar.