Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire (37 page)

Mirikami had just told her the motorcade had originated from behind the normal State Department complex, suggesting they were to have been sent to a less official building, without any press invited.

With laser focus, Maggi looked at Oswald. “Do you not agree Mister Secretary?” She had noted his red face and obvious discomfort.

Letting his breath out in a rush, he was committed. A diplomat gain, even if for the last time. “I do Ambassador Fisher. The normal hearing room is available. Do you wish to accompany us now?”

“Mister Secretary, I’m sure you have noticed that some of our non-human species would have difficulty in traveling in one of your limousines, and it is impossible for the Torki to pass through the doors of any of the cars. We were hoping to enjoy a walk up the Grand Mall to observe the beauty of the architecture, and for our alien friends to see the heart of the seat of government of the Planetary Union. That will be
after
we conclude our press conference. We promise to be punctual.”

Now it was Medford’s face turning red. In her case, it was anger, not embarrassment.

In anticipation of an outburst, Maggi commanded her Comtap to amplify what she heard next by a considerable amount. What she heard was transmitted faithfully, and loudly, to the hundreds of suit speakers.

“I did not…,” and as the words boomed out, she froze in mid outburst. “Stop that.”

Without admitting she had done anything, the Comtap amplification was set back to the previous level. “I’m sorry Madam President, I don’t understand. Stop what?”

“Everything I say is being heard by everyone present.”

“But, this is a press conference Madam President. That is its very function, to allow everyone present to hear what is said.”

“I did not call this press conference.”

“That is true, Mam, I am the one who requested the press to meet us here in public. I’m pleased that you have decided to join us, however, if you aren’t prepared to participate in this unexpected gathering, I fully understand. We’ll finish shortly, after I answer a few questions.”

Thinking furiously, and wanting to force an admission of some kind that would put them in an unfavorable light, Medford said, “The Raspani representative, Blue Flower Eater, told us that
Captain
Mirikami divided your fleet. He left part at K1, sent part to New Dublin, part to Poldark, some to Koban, and some into Krall territory to attack their worlds. Was he correct in that statement?” Her sarcastic tone when she said Captain was warning enough that Medford thought she had a zinger for them.

At the lightning speed that a Kobani mind could work, and with Comtap providing secure communications, the strategy was prepared as Mirikami, Maggi and others coordinated the reply.

“Madam President, what our Raspani representative said was exactly true.” Maggi asserted.

“Then you Kobani have again exposed Hub worlds, and Earth, to the threat of total destruction by the Krall. By all navy accounts, after the joint K1 attack with the five navy task forces of Operation Forestall, you Kobani had a small fleet of a hundred eleven ships going into that battle, and you lost two. Now you proudly proclaim to have sent those few ships to five different locations to defeat thousands of Krall clanships. That is spreading a hundred nine ships a bit too thin to hold thousands of Krall ships at bay, don’t you think?” 

The frank admission that followed, coming from Mirikami himself, surprised her.

“That’s absolutely correct, Madam President. The hundred nine ships we had after that fight at K1 was too few to fight the entire Krall fleet. However, when we returned to K1 on our own this month, we had picked up some additional captured ships by then. We hit them with a hundred seventeen.”

“Still too few to defend even a single world in Human Space, if the combined Krall fleet attacked.” She accused, with a snide smirk.

Mirikami shrugged. “Ten
thousand
ships would be too few to effectively defend more than seven hundred human worlds from four or five thousand Krall ships, which could appear unexpectedly, in full strength, over any human world. It could also have been an attack by one of the Krall super weapons suddenly appearing in a system. Like the one that hit Meadow and Bootstrap, and which then tried to destroy Pittsburg II.”

Medford felt he’d just helped her argument. “Thanks to your reckless actions we’ll find out, when the Krall destroy more Hub planets.” She was confident she had made an irrefutable point that would resonate with the people.

Chapter 8: Facing Challenges

Mirikami shifted tactics, going on offense. “And thanks to your private deal with Tor Gatrol Telour, when you betrayed us to him in exchange for his not attacking Earth, we were forced into making our desperate attack on K1 before the Krall could launch a massive attack on Koban.”

“That is a lie,” she answered hotly. “I did not tell the Krall where your base was.”

“Only because you didn’t know exactly where our world is. You suggested that the planet’s name was probably connected to why we call ourselves Kobani. You furnished him with enough clues that his scouts did look for us on Koban, and his next act would have been to attack our world and kill our families, while we would be away, fighting to save everyone in Human Space.

“Telour discovered that we were living on a former Krall planet they describe as
ko ban
, two words that mean
training ground
in their low Krall language, and which we named Koban from what we heard them say. Your action, personally helping the Krall to find us, forced us to try our extremely risky, but ultimately successful attack on K1.

“Let me remind you Madam President, that I said we have adopted the genetic ability for contact telepathy from the rippers. We have already obtained the details of your deal with Telour, obtained directly from the minds of captured Krall.”

Laughing, she dismissed his allegation and offer of proof. “You can fabricate any claimed information you wish when it can’t be verified. We all know that the Krall can’t be interrogated, they refuse to live as prisoners and kill themselves, assuming anyone could capture one alive. You again stand guilty of exposing Human Space to a relentless and ruthless enemy, who is willing to use a weapon for which there is no defense. Their planet buster.”

“To save time, I’ll bypass the verification of our information obtained from Krall minds, at least for now. Still, I must correct a serious misconception you keep repeating. I’m pleased to inform you, and all human worlds, that the enemy can’t use what you called the planet buster ships anymore. Those ships are independently intelligent, equipped with AI minds far in advance of our own AIs, and they are now allied with the Galactic Federation.

“We won them over to our side when we showed them how they were misled into starting fake, massive planetary scale construction projects by the Krall, which subsequently led to the destruction of nearby inhabited worlds. These ships have a form of Artificial Intelligence based on the minds of the ancient and peaceful species that created them, called the Olt’kitapi. We used our mental abilities to communicate with them, and explained how they were tricked. They will never allow that to happen again. All of our worlds are safe from that threat now.”

“We’ll believe that when we see proof.” The sneer in Medford’s voice was unbecoming a woman of her political stature. She was unraveling.

“Look down there.” He pointed at Pholowela on the Mall. “The ship we arrived on is one of those ancient Olt’kitapi ships that you called a planet buster. It is how we were able to arrive without a revealing gamma ray burst, and using its advanced technology, settled gently on the Mall unseen, to hold this press conference.

Medford didn’t yield that easy. “Then the Krall can still strike at us with the four to five thousand clanships my navy analysts estimate they still have at their command. Your hundred or so ships can’t defend against that many, nor can the navy.”

“The Krall
had
that many ships, Madam President, not anymore. Things have changed. As Commander in Chief of your military, I’m confident you must have been briefed on what happened at Poldark and New Dublin, and you seemed aware of our attack on K1 before that. Did the briefing tell you that we used a new technological bit of software, which acts a bit like a computer virus, and shuts down clanships and Krall weapons? That software virus was passed to one of our own captured clanships by a sister ship of the one you see on the Mall. It was programing designed by the Olt’kitapi, who also designed the weapons systems used by the Krall. It blocks the Krall from using that equipment. Those same weapons and ships will still activate perfectly for us Kobani, because we carry the quantum encoded key in our bodies as do the Krall, and we are not blocked.”

He unbuttoned the top of his formal tunic, and revealed the black oval of his tattoo. “Every Kobani has one of these tattoos with our DNA code pattern recorded, which allows us to use their equipment, even when the Krall tattoos have been locked out of those systems. Do you want to know where all those Krall clanships are now?”

“Stop playing games. Where do you claim they are?”

Mirikami gave her a cheerfully irritating smile. “I thought you’d never ask.”

He turned in place, arms held wide, and addressed the crowd and the press. “Everyone, please look up.” He gestured to the sky, and sent the Comtap signal to start the show. Most eyes, and all of the Tri-Vid cameras raised skyward. Except for the majority of Medford’s security detail, who continued to watch the crowd, and particularly watched Mirikami.

Four thousand silver reflections suddenly appeared in multiple concentric rings, forming a disk of rings that covered a large portion of the darkening sky overhead, where only the brightest stars had started to appear. The cloud cover was sparse.

The ships were reflecting the sun’s light, which was well below the horizon now, and they glowed brightly, their hull material not set for absorbing radiation, but changed to a mirrored surface that reflected it all. They were a hundred fifty miles up, and glittering like diamonds from the random atmospheric distortions.

Then, to Mirikami’s amazement, they all turned ruby read, then royal blue, followed by emerald green, then bright gold, as they altered their reflective properties in step, selecting from the spectrum of sunlight the frequencies to absorb and which to reflect. Lastly, the rings turned a Koban-like teal color and started to rotate, each concentric circle of reflected light moving in opposite directions by use of Normal Space drives. It was dazzling.

The extra colors and ring movement had to be Noreen’s doing, because he’d only discussed a motionless glittering formation using thrusters for light. When he saw Maggi recording his expression on a small handheld camera, he knew the two of them had worked together. He quickly sent the signal to send the fleet back into ghost status in Tachyon Space, well before the navy on Luna Base grew alarmed and launched missiles.

Maggi took up the narrative next, speaking to Medford and the media. “You just saw four thousand of the captured Krall ships, which we brought with us to demonstrate to you that we have eliminated the Krall threat to Human Space from the enemy fleet. We have taken possession of their ships, we have at least another five hundred besides those you just saw, and we are capturing stragglers daily.

“We are using those other five hundred craft to guard Koban, K1, Poldark, and New Dublin, from the stray arriving clanships I mentioned, which may have been in transit and are unaware of our new software weapon. We are continuing our search of former Krall planets for clanships we may have missed. The Galactic Federation lays claim, by right of conquest, to the captured clanships, and to the planets and volume of space, which we have taken from the Krall.

“That volume of territory is roughly eight thousand light years long on the Orion Spur Arm, by nearly eight thousand light years wide, and perhaps one thousand light years thick in the plane of the Milky Way. You should compare that to the approximately five hundred light year radius of the much smaller sphere that comprises all of explored Human Space. The Galactic Federation now controls, at a
conservative
estimate, over eighty thousand times the volume of space that the Planetary Union has under its umbrella, even if you include all of the Rim Worlds, which are not actually part of the PU.

“The Prada, Torki, and Raspani, will resettle their original home worlds, and as many of their former colonies as they are able support There are at least seven or eight thousand habitable worlds available for colonization by all of our member species, which I would like to remind you, we humans are one of those species. The Kobani presently are the only human representatives within the Federation, but we have ample worlds for immigrants.

“We propose to negotiate a mutual defense treaty with the Planetary Union, but only after diplomatic relations have been established. Your navy commanders will surely confirm that we Kobani can operate these captured ships considerably more effectively than the Krall could. That’s because they watched a hundred ten of our ships fight off many hundreds of clanships, when the Krall tried to move in and finish off the three damaged navy task forces at K1, at the end of Operation Forestall. We now have a large enough navy to defend the worlds that we claim, and the Krall effectively have none to attack us, or you. This is cause for a joint celebration.”

Medford had briefly been as awestruck as everyone was, at the sight of so many gleaming warships overhead. Then she grew angry. “Fisher, the thousands of clanships captured at Poldark, New Dublin, and at K1 were on our colony worlds, so they rightfully belong to the Planetary Union. Only those clanships found in Krall territory would belong to your new so called Federation.”

Mirikami snapped out a reply to her rudeness, and her deliberate failure to use the proper title of ambassador for their official envoy. He replied in kind. “Medford, in twenty three years of fighting the Krall, tens of millions of your PU forces never captured a single operational clanship. In just over one year, we Kobani have destroyed thousands of them, and captured more than four thousand five hundred of them intact. Our people are able to fly them, while not a single navy captain can so much as open their damned hatches. Without our help, those same ships would now be supporting Krall invasions on your worlds.