Koban Universe 1 (18 page)

On the scene from the interior door camera, he watched one person leave, and a young man paused to hold open the door for an older woman to enter ahead of him. They were not together, as it happened, and the woman went to a table to join some friends. The slightly built young man walked to the bar. Or rather, it appeared more as if he
glided
across the room, weaving smoothly around the tables with occupants, as if he had practiced the moves repeatedly. The flat-topped, rakishly tilted black officer’s cap, with a gold filigree design on the bill concealed his upper face. It looked as if his hair on the sides was blond. He then slipped his hat off as he approached the bar, revealing more medium length blond hair, and the view angle suddenly shifted to show his face through the two-way mirror behind the bar.

Carl was startled. The young man looked to be in his early to middle twenties. Carl was just out of his late twenties himself. The boyish good looks told him why the female poker dealers found him so appealing. He had intense blue eyes, wavy blond hair, and wore a sincere looking smile that revealed perfect white teeth. He appeared to know their bartender, and called him by name. He was revealed to ha
ve a clear resonate deep voice.

“Hello again, Mister Gibson. How are you this cool evening?” It was approaching dusk, and a hot summer day was just ending. Cool had to be from this man’s perspective, because that season was always hot and humid. The new arrival, having walked over a mile from the customs office, showed no sign of perspiration.

“Mitch, he looks too young to be a captain of a ship, and you say he worked his way up from an engineer’s rating? How do you know he isn’t lying about his experience? His youth, even with better than average genes, is pretty obvious.” In the current human era, with life spans of up to one hundred thirty or forty years, and delayed ageing, skin condition and a lack of wrinkles still were reliable cues to identifying youth.

The bartender was the kind Carmody usually hired. Large and burly. Cordial seeming, but capable of becoming mean in a hurry, if that was called for by his boss. Smith appeared to be several inches shorter than Gibson was, making him probably about six
feet tall, and of medium build.

Switching the screen off, Carmody said, “Take six good men with you, and head for the port area. When Gunther calls, or I do, to tell you where Smith went, get inside the bar with him, and casually spread our people out around the room if it’s one of my places. He has plenty of them to choose from down there. If he’s not in one of our bars, then we can take him outside some place, but I don’t always have wipe ability on every video that may see you. He drinks like a fish, never sounds or moves as if he’s intoxicated, and walks like a damned dancer. He’s done some pretty athletic or coordinated things, so don’t underestimate him. I want him healthy, relatively unharmed, and cooperative.”

“Athletic like how?” Carl liked to size up an opponent, no matter how outmatched they seemed compared to the well-trained former Ranger, and Army deserter.

“Reviewing recordings, I watched him catch a drink knocked off a table by someone else as he passed through the room. He bent over in a quick movement, his hand moving extremely fast. He not only caught the overturned glass before it could hit the floor, but turned back upright and swooped his hand back up to scoop the spilling liquid and the swizzle stick. He hardly lost a drop, and sat it down on the table before he casually moved on. You’d have to see it to appreciate how fast and well performed it looked. There were other examples, such as how dexterous he can handle poker chips and cards. People I’ve seen like that have a high degree of muscle control and coordination.”

Carl often dismissed other people’s assessment of how tough someone they watched move would be in a fight. He didn’t often do that with Carmody’s opinion. The man had hired Carl after only a brief exposure to the ex-Ranger. He’d identified a physically capable individual quickly, even before he interviewed him for a job as an enforcer, and learned of his background. Nevertheless, he would have six big muscled men with him to confront Smith. Or whatever the young man’s name really was.

By sending so many men, Carl didn’t think his boss was concerned for an instant about any of his men’s health, or safety. He simply didn’t want the man he hoped to use for his own purpose to be hurt, by unexpectedly injuring one of the thugs he was sending to kidnap him. An injured man might overreact and seriously harm Smith, or even kill him.

****

Mike Haveram was headed for an evening on the town. He left his two genuinely young people with him to watch the ship. They were eighteen-year-old Daniel Waters, and nineteen-year-old Loren Mugaba, both full genetic Kobani, as was Haveram now that he’d received his final upgrades. He had needed to stop making supply runs for Koban long enough to allow the more delicate Mind Tap
genes to properly incorporate.

The Mind Tap experience was extremely familiar to him, of course, having been in frequent mental contact with many young full Kobani, and the more recently upgraded older Kobani, who had also used new nanite technology to achieve all of the genetic enhancements, including age regression and Mind Tap ability. Experiencing a Mind Tap for receiving information was one thing, but being able to exchange your own thoughts and images at a lightening pace was a heady experience. It accelerated learning and information exchange, and comprehension, all from simple
hand-to-hand physical contact.

Daniel and Loren had only rudimentary knowledge of the intricacies of an Engine Room and a Jump Drive when they left Koban. It was a six-day Jump to this remote side of Human Space, and Haveram had run out of new things to teach them about the technical details of his old job. The wolfbat ultrasonic hearing enhancement, along with organic superconducting nerves had long ago reorganized their memory storage, and they absorbed and recalled tremendous amounts of information and details in instants.

To fill the time, the two youngsters had taught Haveram the mostly theoretical combat skills they had absorbed from those slightly older young Kobani fighters (at ripe old ages of low twenties). The three of them practiced their newly learned fighting skills with one another, with the two youngsters, having had superconducting nerve capability since age sixteen, compared to eleven months for Haveram. They consistently beat him in speed of reaction activities, leaving him feeling old and slow, despite the nanites and gene changes, which had rolled back his physical age and appearance to his mid-twenties.

His main advantage over them was his sixty-four years of experience, which enabled him to recall how disparate facts and events could be brought together in a new situation, and allow you to contrive a new or better response to a situation, despite all three having essentially the same base of technical knowledge for instant recall.

After landing on New Australia, Haveram told them they had at least a day before they needed to meet the local merchants. They were here to buy more of the local products that the isolated people of Koban found to be such exotic luxuries.

Mike showed them, via Mind Tap,
some
of the activities he intended to be engaged in tonight, and the two youngsters, definitely more interested in each other, had not had much privacy for their first trip away from Koban. They preferred to wait to see the local sights after a night of not-sleep. They had been school sweethearts for two years, and following Koban’s cultural need for increasing its population from their original twenty five thousand people twenty years ago, the two had married the day after Daniel turned eighteen, just two months ago.

Mike set off alone, as he had also done on his most recent trip to this rough port area of Brisbane, a blue-collar city with frequent crime. The last time he was here, he’d just received the ripper genes for that predator’s carbon fiber muscles, and the whiteraptor’s carbon nanotube gene for bone strength. Now he had added ripper night vision, wolfbat ultrasonic hearing, and the contact telepathy gene from the tiger-like rippers, which in a human was called Mind Tap. The gene secret they had copied from the alien Prada, who deeply respected and honored their most aged members, had halted his aging at mid-sixties. However, it was the use of human nanites, combined with the Prada’s method of repairing age related damage as it happened, which made possible retroactive DNA repair, and had allowed him to exit the med lab two weeks later, looking physiologically young again.

It was great to feel not only fast and strong, but also young and good looking again. It had helped with the ladies he met on the previous trips when he was here. Now, if he chose to be so intrusive, he could actually find out what they thought about him. The Kobani, as a group, pressured those with the Mind Tap gene mod to use it with great discretion. Those without the ability could easily learn how to block their thoughts when they knew you had this capability, almost as easily as they could avoid blurting the same thoughts aloud. You could project lies and false images as well.

The
surreptitious sensing of what someone was thinking was a double-edged sword. It could deflate your ego as quickly as it was inflated, if someone was only being polite to your face in a verbal conversation.

He wanted to have some drinks, and with plenty of local currency from his last trip, he didn’t need to stop at the Port bank to exchange any of the gold or gems he’d brought on the Falcon. At least not until he was ready to buy what he’d come here to get.

He enjoyed the plainspoken, low browed and honest company of men that had worked at jobs similar to his, back when he was a Chief Petty officer in the Engineering Departments on commercial transports. He ingratiated himself with those men and women in bars here, initially by buying rounds of drinks, and eventually by sharing humorous stories from his and their experiences. He was captain of the Falcon now, but in his soul, he was still “Chief” Haveram, where his rating had replaced Mike as his first name. He needed to tell some funny tales of past bad captains before his new “friends” would share their own with him. It often took multiple rounds of drinks, which he certainly could afford. There was a slight drawback however.

His Kobani metabolism, needed for life on the high gravity planet of Koban, with ultrafast and powerful animal life, was now so high that he almost literally could not get drunk. His body burned the alcohol as fuel faster than it could infuse into his brain. He’d never needed booze to feel good or to have fun anyw
ay, so he didn’t miss it. Much.

Later, he’d either try a greasy spoon on the same street for a bite of basic Space Port food, or wait until he went to the casino at Club Roo, and order a rare steak to eat at a poker table. The drinks were free, of course, not that he cared.

His smooth gait, which non-Kobani humans compared to that of the cat like rippers, from whence the genes for his carbon fiber muscles and nervous system were derived, propelled him past one of the bawdy gang operated whorehouses, always found near any port district. The Ladies of The Night here were permitted to sit on a front portico to try to solicit a contract for an hour, or a night, with a man in need of company, all alone on a new planet.

The contract was a token of legality for the still female dominated society of humanity. The laws that once protected the depleted ranks of males were of less consequence today, but even Rim worlds obeyed the law of social inertia, which kept things moving in the same direction after three hundred years. The war with the Krall was quickly equalizing the genders again, with men doing most of the fighting, and recovering their former stature and belligerence. Not necessarily a good thing from a woman’s point of view, but needed for the war.

One of the admittedly attractive commodities on the porch called out to him as he passed. “Hey, sweet young Gentle Man, or should I say Gentle Boy? I can make a better man out of you tonight, if you’d like your blond hair tousled, along with your package.” Two of the other women laughed, and offered similar invitations.

Explicit propositions, not usually so crudely phrased, had been the norm from women for a least a couple of centuries, and from a growing number of assertive men in recent decades. The species had needed the sperm of the males who survived the Gene War, and the new female government leaders could not allow it to continue to be forcibly taken and often wasted. Men regained some rights, and laws were passed to protect them, at least from total exploitation. The Contract System was devised so that men could profit from the seed of their loins. Their mothers retained some financial rights to their future propagation, and shared the proceeds from contracts made by their sons. This encouraged more children, preferentially males if they were lucky, and doctors cautiously learned how to employ non-genetic gender selection methods to enhance male births.

Today, on most Rim worlds, farther away from the Hub social rules, the term “contract” used in this context was a ruse. A man contracted with a prostitute for his sperm donation, but the required “safe storage” of his deposit was more expensive than the apparent value of the sperm. He was granted “credit” for his contribution, and he paid in advance for long-term storage. The definition of “long-term” was deliberately vague and apparently extended only until the female’s safety deposit “box” reached an automatic cleansing and sanitation station, placed in every room (there was a charge added for the room too, of course). The donor recipient normally waited for the contributor to close the door behind him before she initiated the wash cycle.