Koban: The Mark of Koban (14 page)

As they felt the heavy thud on the underbelly, the shuttle
rolled hard towards its right side. The vertical thrust vector quickly became a
horizontal one, unable to counter gravity and an additional two tons of mass.
It took only seconds for the small craft to fall forty feet, where the impact
in the snow was partly nose down, rolling onto its right side.

Mirikami and Noreen, neither one secured, flew forward, with
Noreen falling into Mirikami in the right seat, forcing him painfully into the
cockpit window and ceiling. Roni, strapped in, was still turning the yoke to
the left when they struck, and now cut the useless thrusters completely.

Fortunately, the forward velocity was low, but Mirikami hit
the ceiling with more force than he could resist, particularly with another
person’s weight on his left side. He struck his head, causing a laceration, and
he lost consciousness.

The raptor had been brushed off as the craft scraped along
the ground in its short skid. The aggressive female scrambled to her feet,
bruised but uninjured, and now prepared to finish the kill. Her three pack
mates, two females and a young male, raced to join her in subduing this unknown
competitor.

Inside, Noreen, also bruised but uninjured, called out, “Tet?”
When he was unresponsive, she saw the blood dripping from his head wound, where
he lay on the right side window.

Roni, unwilling to unstrap because she would then fall onto
Noreen and Mirikami, told her “I can pull him up by his arm if you can drag him
between the seats into the back when I do.” They both obviously thought they
could administer first aid better in the larger rear compartment, even if it
was lying sideways.

As they started lifting and pulling the smaller than average
sized man from the cockpit seat, crashing impacts on the outside began, and
shaking and rocking of the shuttle made the task more difficult. However,
Noreen managed to get Mirikami onto her lap, head cradled, where she lay
awkwardly along the aisle, stretched across several sideways seats.

“The blood is from a minor scalp cut Roni,” she told her
companion. “It isn’t serious, but the loss of consciousness worries me.”
Neither woman paid much attention to the raptors banging on the outside of the
shuttle. After all, it
was
a spacecraft, built for the potential stress
of a less-than-optimal atmospheric reentry. Flesh and blood wasn’t likely to
tear through the hardened carbon fiber composite hull.

The shuttle suddenly rocked more violently, as the
frustrated largest raptor leaped onto the creature that refused to bleed, tear
open, or fight back. Her weight bearing down on the now top side extended left
skid, caused the shuttle to roll back upright with a jarring thud to those
inside.

With Tet now on the flat surface of the open aisle, Noreen
pulled him farther into the rear cabin, as Roni helped untangle and lift his
legs and feet from the right seat and center control console.

Noreen lowered Tet’s head gently and said, “I’ll get the
first aid kit. See if you can contact Jake to get some help out here.” As she glanced
up at Roni, what she saw behind her friend froze her breathing and raised the
hairs on the back of her neck.

Looking through the plazsteel were two fearsome toothy
faces, their forward facing blue eyes staring in at them. Roni, seeing Noreen’s
wide-eyed reaction, looked to the front and gave a shriek when she saw two sets
of killer teeth, just feet from her face.

Roni laughed in nervous reaction. “Crap! That scared me half
to death.” She reached for the radio mike clipped to the control yoke. She had
just keyed, saying “Jake…,” when she flinched involuntarily as the larger
raptor lunged its face into the plazsteel directly at her. The bang on the transparent
steel-hard surface was unnerving, but it wasn’t scratched, let alone cracked.

Jake’s voice came over the open speaker circuit. “Yes Mam? I
detected several possible running impacts, then a very heavy impact signal.
However, the sensors reported no extended running. Did…” Roni cut him off.

“We crashed Jake,…” The rest of that transmission was never
completed.

The alpha female, frustrated at the rigidity of the flying
animal’s body and its lack of fight, was drawn to look into its giant eye by
the gaze of her youngest offspring, the smaller male raptor. He had seen
movement within the creature, behind its clear eyes.

The female saw a small animal moving just inside, perhaps an
unborn offspring of this bizarre unknown thing. She struck hard at it, earning
only a painful smashed muzzle and the feel of a broken front tooth. Enraged,
she pulled her head back, leaped into the lair at least ten feet, and brought
down her right leg and foot, carbon fiber claw cocked and ready. Just as the
foot reached the large eye, she brought the claw down with maximum force.

With satisfaction, she felt the creature’s eye shatter, and
a scream of fear sounded from within. Her impudent young son rushed to insert
his head in the eye to snap at the presumed fetus. He quickly discovered this
creature’s young were less helpless that the mature adult appeared to be.

There were loud reports from inside the larger animal’s
head, accompanied by screams of fear and pain. Some of that came from her
offspring. The mother roughly shouldered the brash youngster aside, and it
withdrew a bloody maw with something in his teeth, but his left eye was also
gushing blood.

In the cockpit, Roni screamed with greater fear when the
shattering impact broke open the entire one-piece crystal of plazsteel. She
frantically pressed the seat harness quick release, but a large head came
darting into the opening as she rolled to her right to get out of the seat. A
crunch of bone as teeth sank into her left forearm brought a scream of pain.
Her right hand reached for her pistol, as she heard shots sound from the cabin
area. Noreen had both her weapons out, blazing away at the head and neck of the
raptor.

Roni managed to bring her pistol up and fired it at near
contact range into the intense blue eye of that fearsome head. She thought it
was about to release its crushing grip as the bite pressure eased. However, the
larger raptor knocked it roughly aside, and her lower left arm separated and went
with the beast. It withdrew, snarling with the pain of its lost eye and
multiple other neck and head wounds.

In shock, Roni turned again towards Noreen, struggling to
climb out of the seat, blood spurting from the left arm stump. Noreen, keeping
a gun in her left hand, reached with her right hand to pull her friend out of
the cockpit and into the main cabin. They nearly succeeded.

Roni’s eyes stayed locked onto her friend’s when the end
came, Noreen’s hand pulling her right forearm instead of her hand, because Roni
still held her pistol.

The larger raptor struck again, this time without a
plazsteel barrier in the way, and sank its teeth solidly into the body of its
screaming victim. It started to withdraw its head when the supposed helpless
“fetus” began somehow striking the raptor with painful loud blows on its face
and mouth. It saw another supposed “fetus” behind the first, holding onto the
one it held in its jaws. It too was somehow hitting the raptor painfully with
loud noises. Suddenly the animal in its jaws experienced a spasm, and then grew
still. The other “fetus” continued to strike the raptor, and the female
suddenly lost vision in one eye. It quickly pulled away from this surprisingly
difficult prey, taking the small kill it had so painfully earned.

Noreen, sobbing at Roni’s terrible death, grabbed Mirikami’s
jacket collar and drug his limp form to the back wall of the cabin. Presumably,
the raptors wouldn’t be able to reach them there. That was her hope.

Wiping her tears, she reloaded both her weapons and
confirmed Tet’s were loaded before getting the first aid kit from the rear
bulkhead compartment.

She could hear Jake’s voice on the cockpit speaker, but
wasn’t about to go forward to answer. The sounds of raptor snarls and crunching
steps in the snow were too close.

Jake had made some correct assumptions. He said another two
shuttles were coming, and that he had informed them that there were
whiteraptors present.

Mirikami started to stir as she applied a sealing gel to his
one-inch scalp cut. The battery powered med kit analyzer indicated a mild
concussion with no internal bleeding of his brain. She administered the
anti-swelling agent the kit recommended, and a mild pain reliever.

Mirikami recovered his senses quickly, and immediately felt
the cold outer air in the cabin, with the unfiltered smell of fresh air, mixed
with a musty animal odor. He looked around the rest of the empty cabin area,
and at the broken front windscreen. He glanced at Noreen, the unasked question
obvious to her tortured mind.
What happened, where is Roni?

The tears came again, but his time the dam burst. She was
hardly able to get the words out, that Roni was gone, the raptors had her, she
couldn’t let her go, couldn’t let them eat her alive. Sobs wracked her at every
breath. Despite the dizziness as he pushed himself to a sitting position, Tet
pulled Noreen to his shoulder, and she cried there, repeating how she
couldn’t
let them have her.

After several minutes of listening, and holding her,
Mirikami thought she had released enough grief that she might be ready to
listen to him. Her sobs had dwindled to just crying now. Not knowing exactly
what happened, he thought he’d reassure her that their friend’s death wasn’t
her fault.

“Noreen,” he stroked her long black hair, in a fatherly way
for a grieving daughter. “You didn’t cause her death. It was all of us
underestimating the raptors. It could have been any one of us.” The vehemence
of her denial startled him.

“No! I killed her,” she told him, another sob rising. “The damned
monster had her in its jaws and it was going to eat her alive. She looked at me
for help…,” she told him, sobbing harder, “and I shot her in the head. I
couldn’t let her die like that, but she wanted me to help her.” The sobbing
went on longer this time. Only now he knew why, and what he would say when she
was able to listen.

He could hear the sound of an approaching shuttle. Over the cockpit
radio, he heard Dillon’s anxious voice calling to them. Noreen also heard and
her crying suspended for a moment. Now he could talk to her, and explain that
what she had done was show a friend the greatest love possible, at considerable
self-sacrifice. He knew it would be some time before she believed the truth of that
herself.

“Stanford is just trying to get tighter control over
Poldark,” Colonel Henry Nabarone protested. “This training base will bring tens
of thousands of off-world recruits for us to turn into Planetary Union
soldiers, and they will feel no loyalty to you, Mike. I think it’s a mistake to
allow this.”

He was speaking to Michael Boldovic, Poldark’s Governor. He formerly
was the planet’s President before the referendum to join the Planetary Union.
That had passed by well more than the required two-thirds majority of the
planet’s citizens. Nabarone had opposed the change in status.

“Hank, you see Hub conspiracies everywhere,” Boldovic told
him. “You previously suspected Mavray Doushan’s disappearance was some political
move by Stanford, to block a trade agreement between us and Bollovstic's
Republican Independency.”

Nabarone wasn’t giving up yet. “Yes, well if Doushan had succeeded
with the trade negotiation I don’t think the Planetary Union’s economic
proposals would have sounded so good to our people. The referendum might not
have passed. It was a plausible idea that the Hub could have acted to block his
mission.”

“I question your use of the word
plausible
, Hank,”
rebutted Boldovic, “but we now know that it was the Krall, not the Hub that
kidnapped Mavray and his diplomatic mission, including your mentor, Thad
Greeves. We have had the recording analyzed that the Krall used when they captured
several passenger ships right after they made their White Outs. The man that
identified himself as Mavray Doushan had a Poldark accent; he matched Doushan’s
voice imprint, and the date of captivity he mentioned matched closely the date
his ship went missing.

“I listened to that recording, Hank, it sounded just like
the man I knew. There isn’t any possibility the aliens could have faked that.”

Nabarone’s nod conceded that point but not his other. “It
still doesn’t mean Stanford isn’t using the alien scare to try to gain more
control over the Rim worlds and New Colonies.”

Boldovic sighed. “Again, Hank, the Planetary Union will
relocate the troops after training, placing them on the worlds considered at
highest risk. Poldark is one of those high-risk worlds. The Planetary Union is
only planning to keep ten thousand permanent postings here. Having the
continuing availability of partially trained recruits at TB-85 increases our
level of protection. That security in turn will encourage the investments that
we want the Hub corporations to make.”

A New Colony, Poldark was located on the boundary of what
most “Hubbers” considered the Rim. A region noted more for its comparison to North America’s old Wild West, than a stable place to do business. By joining the Union, there had been a promise of corporate investments to follow, based on the assumption
of future stability. Union spending for government construction and hiring
civil servants would also increase employment.

“Stanford is
only
keeping ten thousand here, eh? That’s
nearly nine thousand more than the militia Thad trained before he disappeared,
and that I command now. I’m sure they will be better armed than our troops. We
can get better weapons you know. There are ways to get them if you’re willing
to pay.”

Boldovic was tired of the word game, and played his trump
card with pleasure and anticipation. “Actually the permanent Planetary Defense commander
will actually have eleven thousand troops, who will have the best weapons and body
armor the Planetary Union can provide. This will include our militia, who are
already trained.” Now he waited with an amused expression for the explosive
outburst he knew was coming. He wasn’t disappointed.