Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire (46 page)

Ella Sven grimaced at her much younger first officer, Madelyn Darlington. “Damn Madie, I’ve been feeding the images to the lower decks all along. I’d have done so for any human passengers. I suppose the Prada have had too many generations of Krall orders dictated to them, following the old mushroom principle.”

“Following what?”

“Oh. They were kept in the dark and fed bullshit. Sometimes called the mushroom principle.”

“Wow. Thanks for
that
image! I
used
to love mushrooms.”

“Don’t be so literal. I don’t really know what that revolting fungi grows on. I can’t believe you eat them.”

“You let me cook last night, after we left Haven. Hope you enjoyed that pizza. You ate mushrooms too, those little cubed gray bits with the antelope meat and cheese on top. You said it was good, that you’d never had pizza before.”

“I hadn’t. It isn’t exactly the national dish of Fiord, where I was raised. Just for that little revelation, tonight you get to try whole anchovy on crackers with a tomato based sauce, or perhaps anchovy risotto. Your choice. In the risotto, you can’t see the anchovies either.”

The Koban born young woman prevaricated, avoiding a direct answer. “I’ll let you know, once you tell me what the hell an anchovy is. They damn well don’t come from Koban or Haven.”

“It’s a small fish. The canned variety I brought with me was imported from Fiord, thanks to Chief Haveram. Thought I’d never live to taste them again.”

Noting the two Prada nearing the stair top, Madie said softly, with a wink. “Here come the raw grub eaters, let’s not upset their fragile digestion discussing cooked food.”

Sven countered. “A pickled anchovy might not be considered cooked.”

Madie grimaced, “And now I might consider not eating tonight.”

They subsequently completed their orbit, and then hovered briefly over Valley Center, allowing the two Prada to make a decision. Rithal’s decision was followed of course, as coming from the eldest.

“It is reasonable,” Rithal insisted. Nawella had favored an area where there was evidence of more technological development. “In a new small village today, the construction progresses all around the first house built for the elder in charge. That is where the people gather for the stories and wisdom from the words of the elder as the village is built. That is an ancient tradition of our people, and it seems reasonable that this city grew around a source of accumulated wisdom. There may be a library structure or a cultural center in that large cluster of squares that fill the geometrical center of the city. It is a good place to seek written examples of our former language.”

As Nawella predicted, their first steps on One Land was a heady experience. They felt lighter on their feet, the dimmer red sunlight yielded perfectly shaded colors, where the Kobani needed their ripper vision to brighten the scene, and the air smelled wild and invigorating. The latter invigoration was probably due to the air being a bit higher in oxygen than before, due to the long absence of an industrial society, and increased plant growth.

Nearly every one of the giant trees had bark infested every few feet it seemed, with a plump grub of a large symbiotic beetle that protected the trees from some sort of nuisance pests. The Prada longer middle finger, with its hooked claw, was ideally suited to extract the grubs. Even though they proved not to be “sweet” as predicted by Nawella, they were indeed savory, with the flavor of the tree bark infused in their juices. The Kobani crew effectively vanished while the Prada acted more like furry gluttons for the first hour.

Captain Sven said they were seeking possible threats from wild animal life that would live in this forest. They did in fact encounter a group of fifteen to twenty pack animals, which could pass for hopping wolves here, and chased them away. Their real motive was not to have to see another wriggling, three-inch yellow grub bitten into, with thick clear juices squirting to the sides of furry little jaws. Then the lips and fingers fastidiously licked clean, and that to be repeated, and repeated, and repeated, until fuzzy gray, brown, beige, and black tummies were bulging with satisfaction. Not even the captain was interested in pickled anchovies that night.

In that days that followed, the industrious swarm of Prada cleared jungle residue, covering collapsed structures. These buildings, like those seen elsewhere on the continent, had never been bombed, and it was theorized that when the Krall first attacked the outer colonial outposts of the Prada, that the surviving populations learned of the Krall background, and of the age of their species. The Prada had previously said they slightly knew of the Olt’kitapi, but they were too remote for trading. They had been warned away from Olt’kitapi space when the revolt started, but didn’t directly know about the Krall.

After a long period of no contact from the Olt’kitapi, they suspected the elder race was gone. When the Krall arrived and bragged it was so, as they raided Prada worlds, they had quickly accepted that their new enemy was the elder species, and refused to fight them, offering instead a willingness to follow their bidding and to work for them in the empire they were building. They had then followed their elders into slavery, frequent relocation, hardworking survival, and a severe population reduction.

The small six-person Kobani crew watched them work, but unless individual strength was required for the minor task of moving a piece of debris too heavy for several Prada, and machinery wasn’t quickly available, they remained observers and protectors. Except for one attempted rescue that failed, and a retribution that was thwarted when the futility was recognized.

A young male Prada had been hanging by one foot and his prehensile tail, as he used a hand laser to cut away thick ropy vines hanging from thirty to forty story high tree limbs. He swung over on smaller vines towards a massive tree trunk to clamber down to aid in removal of the pile of vegetation he’d helped create. He reached for a protruding thick green end of a large vine, about the thickness of his body, which wrapped around the slender trunk this far up, to use it to slide closer to the forest floor.

The “vine” opened a large mouth, not even needing to unhinge its jaw, extending its body in a rapid strike from the support of the tree, and closed its toothed jaws over the surprised and screeching victim, who dropped his burner in a futile effort to hold open the irresistible jaws of the massive snake.

In response to the other cries of Prada distress, Madie arrived on scene with Nawella, close to the base of the tree as the snake analogue spiraled around the tree to the more open sheltered ground under the shade of the vast tree canopy above. There was a noticeable bulge, located ten feet back from the head, followed by another fifty feet of body that quickly reached the ground.

Madie reached for her plasma rifle, but she was stopped by Nawella.

“Let it go. Our brother is already dead, and from the size, this is an old one of its kind. This has been its territory for many years. Its type will be pushed far from here as we reclaim our cities. We will be more alert now, as we are for the ground predators you frightened away the first day. This was once our world, but we had been so safe from such threats for so long that we don’t even have stories of these animals. We are strangers in our own land, where we first evolved. We will master our world again, but I hope we have learned to share and conserve better, after seeing how the Krall treated every living species they met, and every world they ruined if they stayed there long enough.”

The clearing effort continued but with Prada eyes more alert, in the trees now as well as on the ground. There were another few deaths, two from poisonous animals and one a poisonous insect, but nothing ate another Prada.

Rithal was proven correct in her assessment that there would be a repository of written material in the center of the old city. There were even printed versions of old preserved documents in heavy clear cases that had survived the collapse of buildings. Many of their more modern records had become digital representations, and even if the media on which they were recorded was recovered, the means to read and interpret the data was assumed lost to time.

That was when Nawella’s small expedition to a scientific research area proved to be the solution. In underground tomb-like vaults, used for unknown purposes thus far, were ancient experiments sealed from moisture and extreme temperature changes. In the vaults, they found relatively well-preserved electronic instruments, and the mediums on which technical data had been preserved. It wasn’t literature, history, or even daily stories of life, but Nawella was convinced that some of it would be the recorded language of the Prada who had performed the research. Even if unintelligible technical data were present, there would be verbal notes added to discuss what had been learned. Using Krall equipment, the Prada had done the same sort of thing in organizing their war production systems for them.

Nawella consulted with the technical specialists she had brought, who told her the inoperable instruments could be replicated, and the old recording media could then be read, or copied carefully, and heard for the first time in perhaps eighteen thousand orbits.

They also rejoiced that they again had a
standard
orbit on which they could base a reconstructed year for Prada ages. This was something else lost to them, as the Krall moved them around, often without allowing them to collect any personal possessions, such as time keeping devices. When they converted the orbital periods of all the worlds where Prada had been taken by the Krall, they could eventually calculate, with reasonable accuracy, which of them was the truly the eldest in years, as measured by One Land’s orbital period.

This had a high priority for them, further proof that the Prada could not abandon their deeply ingrained cultural, and possibly instinctive acceptance of following the guidance of their elders. At least now, thanks to advice from an elder species, the Raspani, they would only follow the lead of the elders within their own species.

****

Blue Flower Eater made an elbow squeeze, the Raspani gesture of negation, and said, “We are not seeking our home world. We knew where Great Plains was located from the day our massed personalities were reawakened in the chip within this skull,” he tapped the side of his head with a slender dexterous finger that seemed at odds with his pudgy looking arms.

Maggi was puzzled. “You don’t want to resettle Great Plains, to repair any damage the Krall may have caused?”

“I certainly don’t, personally. Besides, I was born and raised on the colony world where this mind enhancer chip was found, in that relic skull saved by the Torki. The world you called CS2, where clanships were built by the Mordo clan. That world, we called it Red Grain after the delicious forage on its plains, was ruined by the rape of its resources for the shipyards, and its air is poisoned. The grain we loved has all withered and died. I don’t want to return there, since we were forced to become a food herd there, and our processed dead were shipped to other worlds by the Krall as rations. Those minds still inside my chip were from there, and they too have only bad memories.”

“OK. I see why you don’t want to restore Red Grain for habitation. Why not your home world, of Great Plains?”

“It is less of a personal reason for myself, and for the nearly quarter million minds I still carry, but most Raspani feel the same, that Great Plains too was ruined, but not only by the Krall. Graka clan moved their nesting grounds from the planet you called CS1, because they had ruined that world. Just as CS2 was ruined by Mordo clan by clanship production, strip mining, foundries, and smelters. Graka moved their clan nesting grounds six thousand or more years ago from CS1. Would you care to guess where they went?”

“I presume it must have been to Great Plains. Did they rape its resources too?”

“Not to the extent they did on their clanship production world, but that was because there were fewer resources left to plunder. Fewer, because we Raspani had done our share of plundering the environment for a longer period. We are a
much
slower developing people than humans are, even after the Olt’kitapi gave us our mind enhancers, leaving us thousands of years to extract what we wanted from our home world.

“Then the Graka clan dismantled our cities, homes, and factories, for metals to make their domes, and to send the metals in trade for status points from Mordo to build clanships, or to other clan production worlds to make other weapons in exchange for their status points to become a Great Clan. It’s far easier to steal metal already processed, than to dig the ores, transport it, process it, and then build something. We can’t easily rebuild what we had on Great Plains because most of the materials would have to be imported, and we Raspani have less emotional attachments to places than do the Prada and even the Torki, who are not noted for sentimentality.”

He pondered a moment. “Less attachment to flat plains covered in grasses, perhaps because such grassy plains are common and similar on any world we selected for colonization. They all soon feel like home. We do however have long lasting emotional reactions to events that happen on a world.

“I explained about Red Grain, and on Great Plains we learned that the Graka clan allowed their newly hatched cubs, and pre-novices to hunt down nearly the entire population for sport and training, and to eat some of them, of course. They forced our people there to plant the red spice plant everywhere it would grow, so that when the Raspani had too little of grains, grass, and ferns to eat, that plant kept them alive, and got them slaughtered when it spiced up their flavor for the Krall. Red spice grows everywhere there now. I won’t live there, when we have alternatives.”

Maggi reassured him. “You know the Kobani will help you to resettle the colonies that are still acceptable to you, and help you scout worlds that might prove suitable for new colonies. If you could safely operate the captured clanships you could explore on your own, but that appears risky. I presume when each of your peoples has your own planets and industries, you will construct purpose-built ships for each species to use, but that might be well in the future. I’ll bet you can hire human spacecraft companies to build ships for you, based on your designs. I’d think they would like the expanded business. Wherever you decide to explore, we have no shortage of worlds, that’s for certain.”