Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire (27 page)

Telour snorted. “I saw you display speed just now. You need more than speed to live on Koban. You need our strength, our endurance.”

“I’ll show you that too, eventually. We outmatch you in each of those traits. Even a small man such as myself. Nearly any one of us, unarmed, can defeat the best warrior you have ever produced. Humans are the people that will expand and explore the galaxy, and do it without trying to kill every species we meet. Except yours, of course.”

“You must want to tell me how you survived on Koban, or I’d already be dead. It must have been difficult, hiding from the predators there. How you must have feared them when they came to eat you.”

“You mean rippers? Like this one?” He gestured behind him.

A large shadow loomed in the light of the corridor behind Mirikami, and a scent Telour had never allowed to get very close to him drifted on the air. A huge teal colored head peered around the edge of Mirikami’s right shoulder, intense blue eyes sizing up a possible meal.

The lips drew back revealing its long white incisors, in what seemed similar to the Krall’s frequent caricature of a human smile, used to frighten prisoners. It worked on Telour the same way. He moved a hand near his pitifully inadequate blade.

“Thank you, Kit. You made our point of how we get along with the most feared predators of Koban.” He rubbed his cheek on a soft, low ridge of flesh around the big cat’s neck. The beast gave the Krall a final look, making a deep low rumble in her chest, and she turned away.

As if Mirikami understood her, he said to her retreating form, “There will be other hunts today. We want this one alive.”

Telour let his hand drop away from his knife handle. Aware of how fearful that reaching move had made him look. “You have told me the part of your story you wanted me to hear, but you cannot have bred enough warriors in so short a time to defeat us all. We can outbreed you a thousand to one. Even more. You will still fall to a swarm of Krall.”

Mirikami nodded. “Possibly true. If they could find a means to reach our worlds. Except, we will soon have disabled essentially all of your clanships on all of your worlds, even this deep into the space you have controlled for tens of thousands of orbits. Trapped on your clan worlds, your feral offspring will consume the unarmed adults that produced them if you increase reproduction, exactly as would have happened if the Olt’kitapi had left you stranded on Kronos. We’ll rescue your slaves. We’ve been doing that anyway, as we raided your factories, and now we’ll raid just to rescue them from you.

“Your race no longer knows how to build anything the Olt’kitapi gave you. Their factories, which you don’t understand how to use anymore, won’t run for you anyway after we disable the keys for their power plants. You are an untrusted species to all of their encoded devices. Like these plasma rifles.” He kicked one closer to Telour.

“We have defeated your entire fleet at Telda Ka, and captured those clanships. Even Normal humans are defeating your invasion forces on Poldark and New Dublin, after our Kobani disabled your clanships and weapons. Bollovstic is nothing but a training site for novices, and that will be completely retaken quickly. Plus, we have these technological marvels to learn about.” He gestured at the walls of the ship.

Telour tried a bluff using a snort of amusement. “These ships will only respond to the Krall.”

“I think you meant the soft Krall, the Krall’tapi. But is that really so? How hard was it for you to get inside the first two ships today? Only this one airlock would open for you on this ship, where we were impatiently waiting for you to walk by.” He removed a gauntlet and touched the wall. Not that he needed to do that, since his Comtap would have served better. It was a visual act for Telour.

“Pholowela, the Krall outside have been subdued now, would you please inform your sisters that there is no need to keep their doors locked any longer?”

In perfect Standard, a female human’s voice sounded in the air around them, “It is done Captain Mirikami. Will you be removing the five distrusted ones from inside me, before they can try to do harm to my systems, as they did to Huwayla? I would find it distressful to force them to exit from me. Even for the now untrusted six Krall’tapi they brought with them from their prison compound.”

Telour blinked once at that revelation. If this was indeed the ship speaking to humans, and it knew of the soft ones, it was obvious he had never had a chance to take these ships, and now it appeared the humans had control of the last great Krall weapons. He began to understand how fully he had failed at being the Krall’s greatest Tor Gatrol. If any of their histories continued after this, he would be a reviled war leader to any Krall that lived.

Death by any means was preferable, so he gathered himself, prepared to force Mirikami, or that huge ripper, to kill him. He underestimated his opponent yet again. Mirikami bent his knees slightly and his right hand flashed to a clip behind his waist and produced the small needle gun.

Phhitt! Phhitt!

“Don’t be so rash, Telour. I can hold you off until that drug takes effect. You’re going to Earth, to face justice for your crimes against humanity, and as the top representative of your species, for crimes against every intelligent species the Krall have ever encountered.”

Telour wiped at the small pricks over the artery in his neck, and leaped, knowing he only had seconds to kill this enraging little animal, or to force him to use his pistol.

He swiped at Mirikami’s head with his left hand as he descended, fingers spread wide and talons extended, expecting that to be blocked, despite putting his full weight behind the blow. With his right hand, he drew his short sword, and prepared to deliver a lightning fast stroke at the human’s exposed right hand and wrist, where a gauntlet had been removed.

The rest of the fragile human body was covered with the form fitting armor. That surface would resist talons and knife, but bent back, the limbs and joints inside the suit would break. He swung his feet forward in mid leap, to use the grasping ability of his long toes to grab the left leg of his opponent and bend it in a direction he knew a human couldn’t flex.

  Mirikami had seen the slight bunching of muscles, and the lids over red pupils and black orbs narrowed, as the Krall made precise visual measurements of how his enemy was positioned. He watched where his focus shifted as he rose from the deck in his leap, and deduced exactly where Telour intended to strike. It was obvious that his exposed head and right hand would be inviting targets, but the glance down at his left leg was the clue that the real damage Telour hoped to deliver would be to his armored leg. Only his prehensile toes and stubby legs would be in a position to accomplish that.

It would be easy to drop the needle gun and draw his pistol to put slugs through both eyes, well before the leap reached him, but that honorable combat death was what Telour was trying to attain. He stood motionless, to keep Telour focused on his original mode of attack. This way, Mirikami’s faster reactions would leave his opponent no time to decide on alternative actions. What was the point of having five times his strength in your muscles, and ten times the processing speed of the superconducting nervous system, if you didn’t use them?

As Telour’s surprise registered in his eyes, that his attack had apparently caught the human off guard, Mirikami made his move. He’d been in a slight crouch from when he’d drawn the needle gun. He’d not needed to bend his knees or flex down at the waist to use the weapon, but it looked to be a natural part of his drawing and firing the weapon. He knew there had been zero possibility a Krall warrior would go down without a fight, let alone an arrogant one like Telour.

As Telour descended in triumph, the face of his target flashed him a quick mysterious smile, and one eye blinked shut, then open. When the wink was over, Mirikami suddenly shot up in a blur as if fired from a missile launcher.

Springing from his half crouch straight up, going into a forward tuck, feet pivoting up, rotating to present the back of his head, just as Telour’s nearly four hundred pounds of weight drove his left hand down through the spot where that smile and wink had just been. The man’s body had rotated upside down, with the short black hair lingering below just long enough that a single sharpened talon sliced off a wisp, missing his head by the width of a talon.

Mirikami struck the corridor’s ceiling, fifteen feet above him feet first, and pushed off, flipping again, with a body twist, in the manner he’d Mind Tapped from the younger Kobani that had done this maneuver in training so often. He came down along Telour’s back and shoulders, just as the Krall’s feet slammed onto the deck, where Mirikami had just been. Mirikami whipped his armored right forearm down onto Telour’s right forearm, between the elbow and wrist, just behind the hand holding the knife. The bone snapped with a loud crack, and the hand pivoted upward at the break at the wrist, the knife flying free. Mirikami, as if he’d planned this part, snatched the turning knife from the air by the handle with his bare right hand.

As he came down, he kicked the back of Telour’s right knee with his own right foot, causing Telour to collapse to the right from the loss of support, and the force of Mirikami’s momentum on the Krall’s back. Telour pulled his left arm back from his undelivered blow, a scream of rage, mixed with pain, to use his long reach to grasp at the small weight on his back. That earned him a second broken arm, at the bicep this time, and the stolen knife pierced the back of his left hand, pushed through to the hilt.

Mirikami quickly down slid off his back and grabbed Telour’s waist. The stretched taut blue fabric of his uniform could be gathered enough to get a grip, but the material would certainly tear when its wearer started to struggle. There was no such thing as a love handle at a Krall’s waist, so Mirikami created one from muscle with his gauntleted left hand, used his bare right hand to press in hard on the ribs on the right, and lifted the Krall overhead from behind.

Now, with two broken arms, a knife through his left hand, a sprained right knee, Telour was gripped painfully tight at his waist, face up and kicking, held screaming in rage over the head of his small opponent at the center of the wide corridor, waiting for the paralyzing drug to take effect.

Mirikami was the first, possibly the only human ever to receive a title from the Krall. An earned title, not the single name given to every warrior. This title had even been awarded by Telour, long before he was Tor Gatrol, to this Worthy Enemy.

****

“Tet, I actually expected you to kill him when he jumped you.” Dillon confessed.

“I was sorely tempted, but I know what I have planned for him is worse, in his mind. To be handed over to the leader of the
animals
in Human Space
.
The one he made come crawling to meet his demands. It also lets us publicly present the Hub worlds with someone to focus their blame on besides us Kobani, for the loss of Meadow and Bootstrap. Which is what the president did, trying to save her political ass.” Mirikami grinned.

“She called for my head, and I’ll give her Telour’s instead. In addition, we recovered two lost planets for them, and ended the invasions on two others, leaving the mop up operation for the PU Navy and Army, who are going to be very indebted to us.

“Handing this one over to her,” he gestured to the immobile Telour, secured to a rolling chair, “in as public a forum as possible will help improve the public’s perception of us. I want full media coverage, where the President’s people can’t control what gets out.”

Maggi nodded her approval. “You’re finally learning how to manipulate politicians, in a way they can’t control what the world sees and hears. Except I haven’t heard how you plan to force Medford to set up a public press conference. Holding it inside some government building, you risk her trying to arrest you, and taking credit for the capture of Telour. You could become joint scapegoats for her.”

He pulled at his lip, “I’ve discussed our return to Human Space with Pholowela and Harlshonla. They wish to determine if all of humanity is deserving of Trusted Status, as we now have with them, and as have the Raspani and Torki. The Prada will have to be evaluated, due to their long subservience to the Krall. Trusted Status will no longer be automatically extended to every new civilized species they encounter.” He shrugged.

“They learned a painful lesson from their experience with the two versions of Krall, that Krall’tapi can easily be controlled by their untrusted genetic cousins, and that they had not evolved far enough away from their common origins. They recognize that we are a genetic variant of humanity as a whole, related to Normal humans much more closely than are the Krall and Krall’tapi, who cannot interbreed.

“Nevertheless, we have clearly discernable genetic and mental differences from the rest of our species. They seem convinced by our arguments that thought patterns and demonstrated morality are more revealing than the genetic similarities within an entire species. Apparently, the Olt’kitapi’s racial morality and mode of thinking was uniform and consistent, leaving them vulnerable to species that didn’t follow their pattern. For the ship’s purposes, all Kobani are trusted because our numbers are few and they don’t think there is much chance for wide variation. Clearly, since we are human, that isn’t true, and I tried to explain that it is possible for some members of a species to be trusted and others not.

“The untrusted list has essentially unlimited capacity for excluding any number of
individual
specific DNA patterns that they find cause to doubt, or reason to trust. I believe I have convinced them to use a case-by-case exclusion or inclusion rather than apply a blanket species inclusion from now on. They seem to find the concept of wide moral variation within a species confusing.”

Maggi pointed out how the ships’ Trust selectivity for access to their technology would become a moot point the future. “We’ll soon learn a great deal of what the Olt’kitapi knew. Sometimes it’s merely knowing that something is possible, or a that new force of nature exists, like the short-range fifth force they use in their quantum key equipment, to stimulate discovery and technical development.