Koban (57 page)

“Tet, let’s go back to the Great Hall. Our volunteers will know
everyone here, and perhaps their backgrounds and longevity. Certainly no one has
more
incentive to identify them.”

“Noreen and Cal are already there. I’ll Link to them as we walk,
to see if they can gather them up for us.” He tactfully didn’t mention Dillon, who
was probably just feeling his legs again.

Once back at the Hall they found six of the dispirited volunteers,
gathered at tables to one side. Noreen, Dillon, and a few other people from the
Fancy were assuring them that the Captain was trying to find a way to help them.

Mirikami asked, “Where are the other applicants, and that companion
of one of our volunteers?” The question spoken softly to Noreen.

“They didn’t think we’d help them Sir. Some of them stayed on
the firing range practicing, or looking for the best fitting set of armor with the
fewest repairs. We haven’t even found one of them yet.”

“We have to make certain they all know that I’ll do my best for
them, even if they were not accepted as active volunteers. They were targeted because
of some connection to us, even the companion probably.”

Walking over to the group of six, Mirikami tried to look reassuring.

“By now you’ve heard that we are certain that the selection was
manipulated.
All
of the names of the first ten people that submitted applications
to work with us were on the list. There have been rumors of cheating before, but
this is blatant, flagrant, and clumsy.”

“What can you or we do about it?” Deanna Turner demanded. “Nobody
will tolerate erasing our names and having a new drawing. Any one of them could
be chosen in our place. There could be shooting.” She warned.

Maggi told her, “Dear, our first step is to identify the people
responsible. That information might cause a change of heart. Please listen as Captain
Mirikami tells you who we want to locate.”

“We first need to find a man named Talbert Carltron, who we think
took your names from a pocket computer he stole from us thirteen days ago. Do you
know him?”

All of them knew the name, and several knew where he slept. Mirikami
sent Ray McPherson and Jimbo Skaleski with one of the male volunteers to check Carltron’s
compartment. The three of them were armed of course.

The Captain continued. “We have two possible names for a woman
that was with him that day, but we don’t want to tarnish the name of the innocent
woman. One of the names is...,” he was cut off by two people at once.

One man, Roger Singleton, deferred to Deanna with a hand
wave, who had blurted the same name as he had.

“It has to be Arless Blythe.” She repeated. “They are a long
time noncontract couple, and they have adjoining cubes.”

Mirikami quickly swung around to Noreen and sent her to join
Ray and Jimbo, to warn them and add a fourth gun. The other two men didn’t have
a transducer, but they had not reached an elevator yet and heard her shout.

“Gracious Ladies, Gentle Men,” he addressed the five remaining
volunteers. “We suspect those two have been keeping their names off of the Training
Day lists for a long time, and one or both of them have knowledge of computers.
They have likely been here for quite some time, since Blythe told Mister Rigson
she had been here over four years.”

Suddenly from behind him, a woman who was following the discussion
volunteered information.

“Carltron used to be a programmer, or something like that for
a mining company. He told me once he was on his way to set up an automated Rim world
mining operation when his company ship was captured. He was here two years ago when
I was captured, but he had already been here for at least two years, I think.”

“Thank you…Lady…” he waited for her to give him a name.

“I’m Penelope Daniels.”

“Thank you Lady Daniels.” Other Primes were starting to gather,
as the rumor of list tampering spread.

“Remember,” Mirikami cautioned the growing crowd. “We don’t have
any more than circumstantial evidence against these two people yet, but it is absolutely
certain that there was tampering!” He looked at the faces all around him.

“All ten of the very
first
ten people that offered to
volunteer to work with us were put on that list today. Whoever did that undoubtedly
keeps their own names off of every Training Day list, and could have put any of
your names on that list!” He raised his arms and waved down the voices to suppress
the noise.

“We believe a Krall set up and taught a human how to use their
computer in the north maintenance bay, possibly done in exchange for teaching the
Krall our letters and numbers or how human computers work.”

A woman shouted out “A K’Tal, the brown uniformed type, set that
computer up before I got here three years ago. I heard that from Captain Phillips,
he was a leader here then, just before he was selected. He said a man had showed
the K’Tal how to make the display show Standard characters for our lottery.” Another
outcry followed that revelation.

Realizing he had a large crowd around him now, Mirikami stepped
up on a table. “The companion of Talbert Carlton is Arless Blythe. Does she have
computer training as well?”

A couple of snickers resulted from that question.

A man volunteered. “Her only training is more of the bedroom
type. She was a Tri-Vid sex star on vacation with some important holo producer when
she was captured. She has been here forever it seems like. I never understood how
a homely little recluse like Talbert Carltron held onto her. She’s attractive and
flirtatious and could have had a lot of stronger, better looking men.”

While others in the growing crowd were discussing how the Blythe
woman manipulated men, Noreen Linked with Mirikami.

“Sir, I know you can’t answer. I’m on level two looking at you.
The two compartments are empty, but we found a Krall thin panel flexible computer
screen stuck to the bottom of a low table in Carltron’s cube. We’re searching to
see if there is a keyboard hidden somewhere. Renaldo Out.”

Raising his hands again to quiet the loud discussions springing
up all around him, Mirikami sought some other information. “How portable is that
computer at the north entrance? We saw that there was a place for similar computers
at each entrance.”

He had to select just one person of the dozen or more that spoke
up. A man had actually worked with the one in the north entrance.

He told them, “That system is bonded to the table, and the screen
bonded to the wall to make them permanent fixtures. I helped to do that several
years ago with some resin we scavenged out of a wrecked ship outside. The other
three computers were just as movable and they had all disappeared. We wanted to
make sure the one we used stayed put. We assumed the others had been taken by the
Krall.”

“There were no cables or power feeds to them?” Mirikami asked.

“Not that I saw. You could simply pick the keyboard up, which
I understand also holds the processor, and the screen had a sort of sticky side
that clung to the walls. There were no holes in the table top or in the wall, except
for the slot for printed copies of data, so I guess they would work any place you
took them.”

Noreen Linked in again. “The keyboard was hidden in a wide slot
built under a table in the woman’s cubicle. I guess I need to know what you want
me to do, Sir. I’m at the balcony railing just to your left if you want me shout
out to you so we can talk openly.”

Mirikami nodded his head twice as if listening to conversation
around him.

Noreen called out loudly, “Captain Mirikami!”

Turning towards the caller, as did the faces around him, he called
back “Were they in their cubicles Commander Renaldo?”

“No Sir. But there are two half-empty water bottles and two unfinished
ration packs on Carltron’s table. It looks like they left suddenly.”

“I assume you did a search of their quarters?” Mirikami asked
his leading question. “Did you find anything?”

“Yes Sir. We found a keyboard and a computer screen like the
one in the north entrance. They were hidden in the two cubicles under table tops.”

There was an immediate explosion of outrage, and dozens of people
headed for the nearest elevators. As Mirikami intended, they went to look for themselves.
The word would spread, and it would not be simply an unfounded allegation from the
people of the Fancy.

Shortly a crowd of angry Primes returned with the two parts of
the second computer. Now everyone in the Great Hall could see that it really existed.

A woman that knew how to run the north entrance system pressed
the equivalent unlabeled keys on the second keyboard and pressed the “Start” key.
They watched as the nearby-but-detached screen instantly lit with lines of Standard
characters preceded by Krall scripts. They were menu items. The lines were:

Add Names

Testing List

Full List

Block Names

Select Names

The woman cursed and instantly clicked the character key in front
of the line that read “Block Names.” Two names appeared. They were Talbert Carltron
and Arless Blythe.

Then she chose The Select Names key, which merely presented a
line that read “Enter names here” with a cursor lit below that. She hit the back
key and tried the second menu.

The Testing List item repeated the sixteen names already posted,
and had two menu options. New and Exit.

The Full List selection showed Krall numbers and names one screen
at a time, in three columns per screen. Painstaking scrolling showed that the sixteen
names posted that day were missing from the list, as expected, and the two blocked
names were shown.

The woman, who had been whispering with some of those gathered
around her, stood up and told everyone that the last two menu items were extra on
this computer, which anyone that had ever observed the selection process already
knew.

She looked up at Mirikami, still standing on the tabletop next
to her. “It looks like they could enter a list of names that could not be selected,
and it only contains Carltron’s and Blythe’s names. The other new menu is to add
the names they want to be selected. The top three menus are the same simple ones
we have used for years.” She shook her head sadly.

“My husband was killed six months ago. I wonder if he was
selected
by them or just unlucky?”

At least a thousand people were already searching for Carltron
and Blythe, and hundreds more of those in the Great Hall went to search as well,
checking their weapon loads as they went.

However, Mirikami was no longer concerned about those two, dead
or alive they were irrelevant to the problem he had to solve now.

The Captain had eight volunteers who were now officially “his”
people, facing what was tantamount to a death sentence in three more days. Moreover,
there were two other applicants he felt equally responsible to protect. He was certain
they were targeted simply because they had applied to join his volunteers.

The more he heard comments floating around, the more he doubted
that the rest of the captives would accept a second selection list from the compromised
Krall computer. There was no way a new selection system was going to be agreed on
and implemented in the interim.

Fair or not, over twenty seven hundred people were fully prepared
to send the sixteen unlucky people out to face their fate. Just as they had sent
so many other unlucky, and largely forgotten names before them.

To appeal to Telour to force a fair selection or grant immunity
to his volunteers would turn all of the Primes against him. However, to allow the
ten volunteers to die despite a grossly unfair selection would destroy his credibility
as a leader. He needed to retain that credibility if they were to implement their
greater plan.

He asked Maggi and his other friends to leave him undisturbed
for a while and let him think. They went to the other side of the Hall to talk and
hear news from the search parties.

He was sitting there alone, pulling at his lip and considering
a fateful decision when a heavily armed Thad Greeves abruptly walked up in brown
armor, his helmet off. He dropped a stuffed shoulder bag on the table and sat down
with a creaking sound and a bang as he set his helmet down.

“Hey Tet, I leave for a morning hunt and come back to find you’ve
overturned everything Koban Prime holds holy.” He clapped him on the shoulder with
his gauntlet. “Congratulations, man. I didn’t think that could be done.”

“Thanks, I think,” Mirikami responded. Looking at Thad’s armor,
and the bulging bag, he asked him where he’d been.

“I head out to collect some of the Death Limes when I think the
easy to reach bushes have ripe ones, and a bit deeper into the woods if someone
already got the easy pickings. Plus I like fresh meat in my diet.”

“Rhinolo?” Incredulity was apparent in Mirikami’s face and tone.

Thad laughed hard. “Do I
look
suicidal? Hell no, I shot
some of Koban’s rabbit dash squirrel dash bird dash anything edible equivalents.
All of those live inside the compound.”

He pulled the bag over and lifted the Smart Fabric seal tab.
A combination tangy odor and smell of animals and blood wafted out when he folded
the top flap back. Reaching in he lifted out a deep green colored fruit that did
slightly resemble a large lime.

Mirikami started to reach for the fruit when Thad pulled it away
with a cautionary hand wave.

“It
might
be safe to touch without a glove, but I haven’t
washed the skin or confirmed no thorns broke off in the fruit. If you touch any
fresh toxin I’d miss you a lot, or you’d miss the hand that touched it.” He dropped
the fruit back into the bag and wiped his gauntlet with a chemical laden rag from
the bag.

Mirikami stood up and looked down into the bag. It was divided
into three sections by dividers. The green fruit filled one section, and there were
pale green grape sized berries on stems in the center, along with some sort of thick
brown tubers. The third section held one teal furred animal with six legs and a
two-foot long torso. Another was bushy-tailed skinny blue-gray colored animal
with four short legs, and what looked like tiny hands for feet. At the bottom was
a radiant green looking animal he couldn’t see very well.