Koban: The Mark of Koban (48 page)

“In any case, Rafe has determined that he can place
the ripper genes for that sixth sense in the appropriate sections of the
cerebral cortex of our brains, where our finger’s tactile nerve endings
terminate. Specifically, the contact path will start from the thumb, index,
middle and part of the ring fingers, to the median nerve. The median nerve
enters the brachial plexus, then to ….” He stopped, as Mirikami raised a finger
to press it against Dillon’s lips.

“Son, I’m not going to design the damned
modification myself. How will it work when adapted? What would a modified
person use to touch someone, and connect where on their body to sense their
mind, or to send them mental images from their own mind? OK? Keep it simple for
a simple Spacer. And I understand that it will
not
involve opening the
fly of your pants.” He winked.

With a sheepish grin, Dillon resumed. “The
next generation will do much like we do now with the cats, use a thumb and two
fore fingers for contact. However, any place we touch will provide some level
of connection. Not with hair of course, but it will be strongest hand to hand.
Not hand to head like we first thought, though that
might
be a decent
connection.”

“What about filtering input and output, like we
know the cats can do, as they did do for their best little buddies yesterday.
They don’t appear able to lie, but they can hold information back.”

“That’s an unknown quantity for us, Tet. Based
on the cat’s earliest memories today and our own studies of them as they grew,
they could not always block or select what they send to us.  That required
practice and learned mental control. Humans have no experience with this, but
we will probably learn to guard or control our thoughts just as they did.”

Then Dillon’s grin turned devilish. “Just like
most
of us can hold our temper, instead of acting on whatever impulse pops
into her empty head.”

Whack! Whack! It was a double retaliation.
Noreen aimed high, Maggi low.

Dillon
simultaneously tried, and failed, to cover groin and head. He flashed a hurt
expression at his beloved wife.

“Why
did
you
thump me? I was talking about Maggi!”

“Oh…, I thought you meant when I got mad and punched
Cahill. Well, it doesn’t matter, we Ladies have to stick together.” She and
Maggi smacked palms together, with winks.

The Krall had largely bypassed Fjord, after
nearly four years of light to heavy raids on other Rim worlds. Frequent raids
had forced abandonment of several Rim worlds, including the first Krall target in
Human Space, Gribbles’ Nook.

The Nook was effectively a privately owned
world operated by mining companies, and without a citizen base, it could not vote
to join the Planetary Union to receive a mobile defense force. Contract labor
wouldn’t sign on without greatly higher wages and benefits, and they insisted
on owning their own guns. The companies couldn’t enforce their former strict
control, nor make enough profit. Therefore, they pulled out.

 Using remote monitoring it was clear that the
Krall virtually ignored Nook after the humans were gone. This was further evidence
they didn’t particularly care about holding on to even valuable resources. The
Krall didn’t care about territory other than as a place to build a base, such
as Greater West Africa, now called K1.

What drew them were opportunities for exciting
combat, many kills per warrior, and significant warrior culling. Fjord didn’t
offer them much in that respect.

The infrequent small Krall raids here had encouraged
the population to resist joining the Planetary Union. If they voted to become a
New Colony, they would be expected pay for and host at least ten thousand
troopers in a mobile force. That system was based on the most successful ground
defense system found thus far, the Poldark model. It was a double-edged sword
if they did this, possibly making them a more desirable target. The discussions
on why the Krall seldom targeted this planet centered on several factors.

First was climate. The cold world had a Nordic
type climate even at the equator, with huge polar ice caps extending over a
half way to the equator. The equatorial landmasses, with seaports ice-free only
in the summer, were rife with narrow glacier gouged steep walled coastal valleys,
remnants from past ice ages, the most recent one being in slow retreat.
Glaciers had been gradually retreating since humans discovered the planet three
hundred years ago.  Because the Krall preferred warm climates, they usually
raided temperate worlds.

Second, it was true that worlds that were the most
successful at driving off raids, such as Poldark, also received more raids,
presumably
because
they were better opponents. The basing of troopers on
Fjord might draw a large Krall raid.

Third, a sizable percentage of the population
lived on boats or giant floating rafts where they docked their fishing fleets
and where they built fish processing plants. Much of the remaining population
lived in coastal regions, with sections of towns built on piers out over the
water. The Krall didn’t like water and, with their dense bodies, they swam like
flailing rocks. When one or two warriors raided a town on Fjord, the heavily
armed population evacuated to the rafts, boats, or other locations over water,
limiting the Krall’s options for reaching them.

As the name Fjord might suggest, hardy,
independent Scandinavian immigrants with a generous smattering of other Nordic
peoples had settled the colony. With a population of barely fourteen million,
spread widely, they didn’t want ten to twenty thousand socially disruptive armed
outsiders in their midst, accompanied by the taxes for their upkeep and
equipment.

Instead, every family had one or more
automatic weapons, and the volunteer militia, five thousand strong, had decent
older model armor, with good IR concealment and AI controlled weapons.

Furthermore, they possessed several hundred of
the new plasma rifles that killed a Krall relatively quickly, unless they were
in their own armor. They also had fifty dual barrel plasma cannons on AI
controlled platforms to share among the largest towns. This defensive capability
had proven adequate for previous raids, when a normally stealthed Clanship
released only one or two single ships at a time, rather than the usual eight to
thirty-two. This light raid pattern was almost unique to Fjord.

Every one of the warriors that came to Fiord in
the past had stayed and fought until killed. This was different from single
ship raids elsewhere, when a Clanship returned to retrieve warriors one or two
days later. Planetary Union Army advisors, sent to train the local militia, had
told them non-retrieval single ship landings did happen on other planets, but it
was very rare.

The poorly equipped and stranded warriors
never had armor or plasma weapons, and always fought with more reckless abandon
than other Krall. They behaved rather like ancient Viking berserkers,
apparently intentionally left to fight to the death. The reason for that was speculative,
of course, but analysts suspected the Krall were punishing those warriors. One
factor was that they never lived to collect any of the breeding rights they
considered currency. Apparently, their clan leaders allowed them a fighting
death against an enemy, but not the right to reproduce.

Fjord seemed to be the most common destination
for such punished warriors, possibly because it offered the least desirable
conditions for the Krall. It was a world that offered cold weather, icy water,
and prey that retreated to difficult to reach positions over frigid water.

The season now was well into fall, with ice
forming on the edges of the shorelines and under the piers and docks every
night, taking longer to melt each day. The season for trawler fleet fishing was
over and soon ice fishing would start, with fishermen dropping lines through
the ice, and sitting in warm huts with four to a dozen friends, drinking and
relaxing. Telling stories was nearly as important as fishing in that slower
season. No one was thinking of the Krall threat here, not at this late season.

So naturally, today would deliver a different
sort of raid. Unfortunately for the residents, Fjord was about to join the
mainstream of other Rimworlds. Four Clanships performed simultaneous White Outs
four hundred miles above the night side of the planet. In the absence of
planetary defenses and radar, the Krall ships didn’t bother going into stealth
operation. One of the Clanships entered an orbit towards New Oslo, as the other
three descended and spread out to release single ships, distributed over
Stockholm,
Reykjavik II, Copen, and Nuuk.

The planetary alert network triggered as soon
as any Clanship White Out was detected, galvanizing the populations to start
moving towards boats, docks, piers, and the floating fish processing plants.
Most people went armed all the time, packing large caliber pistols, loaded with
the KK chip ammunition that was now common issue.

People owning heavier automatic weapons kept
them close, and even carried them to and from work. The militia members needed
to go home to get their armor, or some of them carried it with them in government
subsidized work trucks. Despite fewer Krall attacks, the high loss of life from
past berserkers had promoted strong civil defense preparations.

One of the preparations had been cities taking
advantage of the mostly narrow terrain of the fiords, where they met the water.
A flat paved area was located close to where the piers and docks started. This
was the only landing pad suitable for spacecraft in each city, where New Oslo and
other cities shipped out their frozen fish exports. They became a quickly
evacuated flea market at other times.

Artful construction of sturdy stone buildings
of various heights around the pads and along the streets of the narrow strip of
level surface made setting down elsewhere next to impossible for the Clanship’s
landing jack design. Cities built much of the residential housing into the
steep sides of the fiord’s rock walls. Extensive tunneling provided horizontal and
vertical shafts for two-way slidewalk corridors, elevators, ramps, and
escalators in those sidewalls.

Four plasma cannon platforms, built into the
rock faces, had two miles of city between the walls, with coverage of the only possible
landing place located midway between them.

Agneta and Henrik Heilesen were married and
both in the New Oslo militia. They had raced the short distance home from their
bottom level cheese shop to get into their armor. Once suited, they leaped onto
the slidewalk that ran past their midlevel apartment towards plasma gun 3,
their nearby duty post.

Henrik checked his communications as he and
Agneta smoothly stepped in towards the faster belts. “Eric, Greta, have you
suited up yet?” He saw Greta’s icon in his helmet, proving her suit was coming
on-line. That couple worked gun 4, a half-mile farther along the same rock face,
on the same level as gun 3.

Greta responded. “I’m stepping onto the
slidewalk, Henrik. Eric just reached our apartment when I ran out. He’ll be
on-line any moment. What do you hear from Jarl and Elin, or Alf?”

They were the militia members that staffed guns
1 and 2, the plasma cannons on the opposite rock face of the fiord, two miles
away.

“I called you first when I saw your icon, but
let me check if they are in-suit yet.” Henrik was the senior member of New
Oslo’s four-Battery unit, and technically in charge. In practice, any of them
could step in to coordinate their operation, depending on who was able to get
to their station and get the AI’s data feed of what the Krall were doing.

Before he could make a call, his suit helmet
flashed icons for Alf, and Elin, and they were reporting in. “Henrik, this is
Alf. I’ll be at number 1 in about two minutes.”

Elin jumped in, “Henrik, Jarl wasn’t home yet
when I suited. I’m about three minutes from gun 2.” While Alf and Elin were
reporting in, Eric’s icon had appeared, meaning he was on the heels of his
wife, Greta, heading for their duty post at number two. Jarl was the only one
of the seven members of the four plasma batteries that had not reported, and
his wife was already on her way.

At this pace, all four batteries would be staffed
and operational within ten minutes of the alert, well before the Clanship could
arrive. The AI had automatically initiated the heating of the dual plasma
chambers for each Battery when the alert sounded. The four fusion bottles that
powered them stayed on all of the time, furnishing power to adjacent apartments
and local businesses normally. If the cannons required all of the power, other power
customers were quite likely to be forgiving of the energy diversion.

As Henrik and Agneta neared the “step off”
closest to their gun platform, they moved outwards towards the slower moving
strips of the slidewalk, moving around people that were hurrying home to pick
up their own weapons, or headed for the waterfront. Those people respectfully stayed
out of the militia’s way, knowing they would be staying behind, risking their
lives to cover the evacuation.

As Henrik and Agneta entered the heavily
armored room of gun 3, Agneta pressed the code to close and seal the thick
outer door. When sealed, the inner armored door opened to admit them to the
control room for the plasma cannon. The outer double armored walls, with insulating
ceramic between, would provide protection from return plasma or heavy laser
fire.