Koban: The Mark of Koban (11 page)

“Lower limit?” Stanford had caught that.

“Our analysts believe the landing ships held far less than
half of their maximum capacity, assuming the interiors were as roomy as
comparable sized human ships.”

“My God, we’re lucky they didn’t land their entire force. In
two days there wouldn’t have been anyone alive to tell the tale.” Stanford
realized.

“That’s why we think they held the other ships back, Mam.
This was a demonstration attack, intended to terminate after two days. They
committed horrible atrocities, such as cannibalism, in order to
provoke
us, not to kill the entire population. Something they apparently could have
easily accomplished.”

“Jean, I don’t wish to sound ridiculous, but they aren’t
human, so those weren’t examples of cannibalism, it could be actual feeding, or
perhaps a means to extract the maximum emotional fear and terror from us.”

“Yes Mam.” She accepted the factual correction, but retained
the personal opinion that it was a form of cannibalism. This was why she posed
her own rhetorical question next.

“These are an advanced technological race, so why would they
eat another highly intelligent life form? We were slow to clean up our own act,
but people eventually banned consumption of our more intelligent species on
Earth. Such as dolphins, whales, higher primates, dogs, cats, and horses.”

The President shook her head, “Jean, I have an unpleasant
feeling we will find out a lot worse about them. This is only the opening move.
What do we know about them physically? They kicked the hell out of anyone that
went up against them, but we have some of their remains for study.” She looked
at several Tri-Vid images of the aliens.

“How long before we have a profile of their capabilities,
and anatomy. Perhaps something I can tell the joint parliament to convince them
to enact the defense spending measures I plan to propose?”

“Mam, the alien autopsies will not be ready in the couple of
hours you have. Or, is that a necropsy for these things?” She didn’t want to be
nitpicked again on the difference.

“I shouldn’t have corrected you before, Jean. We aren’t
going to make diplomatic contact any easier if we use terminology that reduces
these ‘people’ to mere animals by our choice of words. As distasteful as it
will be, we must try to enter negotiations with their leadership, or government
representatives. We killed millions in our own wars, and yet we formed
alliances with former enemies.”

“Yes Mam,” Jean acknowledged, but without a shred of
conviction. “Until their corpses have been examined in detail, why not use some
of the less graphic footage of their physical capabilities as examples of what
they can do? Although that may be redundant with the Tri-Vid news ‘wolf packs,’
as I call them, splattering the worst gore they can find on every channel.
Naturally it’s always prefixed with the courtesy warning that what we are about
to see
may be disturbing
.” She shook her head.

The briefing went on, until Stanford said she needed to rehearse
her upcoming speech. She was grateful that her first six-year term of office
wasn’t at risk for four years. However, her support from Parliamentary coalitions
in the House might fall apart, if public outcry forced those Representatives to
shift positions. They would be facing the wrath of the people they represented
if they lost their confidence.

A third of the Senate was up for election in eight months.
The election results would feel the impact of what they did, or didn’t do, to
satisfy the voters this week. Nevertheless, her large Senate majority support
would likely endure, at least until the next third of them came up for
election.

For the first time in three hundred years, a Planetary Union
president needed to propose a huge defense budget increase. The Navy was going
to be very happy. If they could keep the aliens away from the planets, there
would be no more massacres on the ground.

****

Gatrol Kanpardi was addressing the joint clan leaders. “This
new prey has no ground forces to oppose us yet, and they have no way of
preventing our warriors and Clanships from landing when and where we want. We
must be patient, and maintain small but steady pressure on different worlds,
until they build the armies we now know they once possessed. Then we can expand
our attacks and allow every clan, large and small, their full share of the
Great Path.”

He was Graka clan’s supreme commander for this series of
initial strikes into Human Space. The title of Gatrol was equivalent to General
in the human language they called Standard, although he also commanded his own clan’s
fleet.

The other clans wanted to begin invasions of many human
worlds now, and as Gatrol of the Krall, not just of Graka clan, Kanpardi had to
convince them to postpone that action. He had the difficult task of explaining
why this would not be the most efficient use of the resources that this slow-to-react
species represented.

He was convinced that humans would be a worthy enemy, given
time and proper “motivation.” The Krall selective breeding program for walking
along the Great Path required that they force humans to organize to fight as
they once had done. When human opposition reached a certain level, where their
ground forces could reduce invading Krall raiders by ten or even fifteen percent,
the Krall could increase pressure. Initially more raids on selected planets,
then invading certain outer worlds, would push the humans into expanding their
forces on each planet.

The difficult part for Kanpardi was to get the joint clan
leaders to themselves organize, to decide which clans would attack the selected
human worlds, and in what order. He hated interclan politics. A simple weapon
and an enemy before him was all he really desired, but he had an obligation to
his race first, his clan second, and himself last, in achieving the racial
goals.

The Krall
knew
they were destined to conquer and rule
the Milky Way galaxy. However, the Great Path to achieve this had encountered a
pothole, if it deserved an analogy. To conquer every race they might meet, the
Krall believed they needed to be physically superior to them all. They had thought
they were close to that goal. Until the Dorbo clan stumbled onto a wild lush
planet that they named Koban, before even exploring the world.

It was located inside a volume of space once colonized by the
Malverans. That race had been a useless reptilian species, and the Dorbo clan
had easily exterminated them on their own. However, Koban proved to be a
destiny changer when a Krall settlement was attempted.

There was no intelligent technological species on Koban, but
the heavy gravity planet, with a much higher than average percentage of heavy
elements had, in its primordial era, produced organic superconducting neural
networks in the most primitive of life forms.

Evolution had passed this trait along to subsequent higher
forms of life for billions of years. The native animals now on Koban were not
only strong, something the Krall had also achieved and could increase, but had
superconducting nerves that made the Koban animals too fast for the Krall to
match. Animals destroyed their first settlements and warriors in short order,
unless protected by walls, weapons, and electric fences.

If they were to be
sure
of defeating every opponent
in the galaxy, the Krall decided to direct their breeding to incorporate
organic superconducting nerves. Fortunately, they believed they could do this
within as little as fifty generations. After twenty five thousand years, they surely
had the racial patience to wait. That long history won the day for Kanpardi’s
argument.

He reminded them of how long they had worked to reach their
goal. They had left Koban in isolation, to preserve it in its pristine form for
their eventual return, to make it their home world. He overlooked that it was pristine
except for the humans left behind, for Koban to erase for them, a forgone
result that deserved no thought.

Finally, the joint clan leaders reached a consensus. The
major clans would produce a list of which clans would have early opportunities
for limited attacks on human worlds. The first worlds targeted would be those
in their outer settlements, the region the humans called Rim worlds. There were
over a hundred to choose from, but those planets closest to the Krall sphere of
influence were more convenient. That lowered the number of targets to perhaps
thirty, which the clan leaders would consider individually.

With the major clans in agreement, Kanpardi left the
meeting. Now he had the task of selecting a world as a base of operations for perhaps
the first five generations of the war. It could be any world he found suitable
on the edge of Human Space. For this selection, Kanpardi had considerable discretion,
because it would be a human world where Graka clan, acting entirely alone,
would conduct the assault. They would eliminate all humans on the chosen base
world. They would bring in a number of properly trained and submissive Krall
slave races. These would build the infrastructure of a forward base for the Krall
for perhaps the next one or two hundred years.

For help with his decision, Kanpardi called in his clan’s
eight most experienced sub leaders, controlling two hundred fifty six Clanships
each.

The Gatrol outlined some of the requirements for a suitable
world. “The selection should not be based on the best test of our novices in
the conquest. That will last no more than a week for any of the suitable
worlds, because of low prey populations on worlds so remote from the enemy’s
center of expansion.”

He knew other clans would judge Graka clan on the quality of
the forward base, not on the quality of the conquest itself.

Kanpardi listed some of the consideration, “The major clans
will each establish compounds and nest areas there, so climate, gravity,
natural resources, Raspani grazing and slave security from excessive risk
should be considered. Fewer novices protecting our food and production mean
more warriors on the Great Path, to be culled by the enemy when it builds its
armies.”

The Krall always valued efficiency. The human population in
this case was merely vermin infesting their new temporary quarters. This step, to
make a base, the Krall had made many times, and would be the first of perhaps
four moves to temporary forward bases as the conquest slowly chewed through humanity’s
seven hundred twenty four occupied worlds. The joint clans wanted the overall conquest
to last a thousand years. Twice that time if humans proved to be a worthy enemy,
as only two previous opponents of seventeen had achieved. They held high hopes
for prey number eighteen.

After examining scouting reports, then holding a short
debate, Kanpardi selected a world which humans called Greater West Africa, a
relatively new Rim region colony. Compared to most human colonies it had fewer
nest areas to be cleared, and was less developed and therefore less disturbed
from a Krall perspective.

Its tropical climate and well-watered open plains on the two
main equator-spanning landmasses were ideal for Raspani herds. It also had
suitable territory for the Krall’s most useful slave races, seashores for the
giant land crabs called the Torki, forests and jungles for the simian-like
Prada. The gravity was lower than the Krall liked, but that was generally true
for most habitable worlds other races preferred. It was also not located within
twenty light years of another human occupied world.

All that remained was coordinating the fleet’s Jump to what
Graka clan was calling Telda Ka, the less-than-poetic designation of “Base 1.”  Of
course, the trivial matter of exterminating eighteen million humans remained,
with minimal collateral damage to buildings that might prove useful to slaves.
Over all, it appeared to be an acceptable world once properly cleaned.

Kanpardi issued the order to ready the Graka Clanships for
Jump, and informed the joint clan leaders to summon their own fleets in one
week, with material and slaves to build their own forward compounds on Telda
Ka. He sent a courier to Graka clan’s old base planet, on a former Raspani
colony world, to do the same. The new base planet would be ready for occupancy
when they arrived.

****

“Men!” Stanford was exasperated. She was speaking in private
with her sole military advisor and friend, Jean Anderfem. “Sometimes I wonder
why we restored them to full suffrage.”

She said this in jest, though it was only half a joke in her
present mood. The president was genuinely annoyed at Senator Bolivar Ortega, the
junior senator from the Old Colony of Ponce, and the man that was the source of
her irritation.

The president wasn’t finished venting. “That twerp only got
on the Armed Forces Committee because it was such an irrelevant and antiquated
body. It seemed a cliché when a
male
lobbied for an appointment. The
Navy is the only military force of significance, and saner heads dominate on
the full committee. I wasn’t aware we even
had
a subcommittee for
Airland. What’s it responsible for again, Jean?”

“Mam, I had to look it up. It is responsible for Army and
Air Force programs, even Navy and
Marine Corps
tactical aviation
programs.” She noted the president’s incredulous expression. There had been no
Marine Core for four hundred years.

“Mam, this wording was retained from the original United
States Senate committee structures from before the Collapse. When the Planetary
Union formed, this structure was never reviewed when the military forces were
disbanded. Except for the smaller Space Navy, of course. Senator Ortega is presently
the only member of the Airland subcommittee, and thus is the de facto
chairperson.” She saw Stanford’s negative head shake.