Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire (60 page)

The colony AI had a library of all of the languages of each of the Federation members, and for the two Krall languages, high and low versions. The Raspani had once spoken various dialects and versions of their original languages when their civilization fell to the Krall, but now, with other races to communicate with, they had simplified and settled on the most widely used of their old languages. These were of no help at all in deciphering the message.

The mysterious transmissions were not encrypted; they were simply in an unknown language, with no parallel to languages known to the AI. The sender had never responded to colony attempts to communicate when their transmission ended, and the absence of White Out gamma ray bursts suggested a Jump ship with advanced T-cubed technology, like the Dismantlers and Kobani ships. After nine minutes forty-two seconds, the identical length of each of the first three signals, they ended and those responsible didn’t reply to transmissions sent back in the same direction, spoken in Standard. The first three messages arrived at intervals that were a bit over four and a quarter Paradise days apart. The three messages, which all arrived in daylight, came hours later in the day each time they were sent.

The AI claimed to recognize a pattern of sentence structure, and clear word groupings, and parts of some sentences and words were repeated more than once. It seemed to be spoken speech, but apparently prerecorded, and it displayed a multipart structure with no clicks or hard consonants, and had what some listeners described as a “bugling” quality, with simultaneous notes intertwining, but it didn’t sound musical. It certainly wasn’t a known speech pattern.

Peshawar, feeling useless in the face of the AI having already contacted the only person he had been instructed to notify, stepped out of the shack into the cool night air. The com shack was located on the edge of the colony’s town landing pad, near the shuttle.

Neither of the small moons were above the horizon right now, and the only light, besides the glowing band of the Milky Way, came from scattered windows of the fifteen residence halls and entryway lights of the few dozen work buildings. There were a few forgotten lights in workshops that glowed dimly through grimy windows.

As most of the colonists did at night, if not too exhausted to drop immediately into bed, he looked up. He was always impressed by the Milky Way’s pale glowing band of stars and dark nebulae, seen prominently here where there was no back scattered surface lights to cause an obscuring sky glow, as near established cities on most human worlds.

He quickly discovered what the AI had missed tonight with its sensors, as it was probably focused on the radio message contents. There was a noticeable blanked out region of the band of galactic core stars, right above the town. The size of the blotted out region couldn’t be easily estimated, not without knowing something about the object and its distance. To Peshawar, it conveyed an impression of something immense, because he assumed it was far above the atmosphere. He tapped his transducer to talk to Margo, only to discover that Murchison was linked with the AI, and was trying to reach him.

“Pesh, there you are. Margo said you were outside of the com shack with your transducer off. What were you doing? I need you to lift off in the shuttle right away, to see if we can triangulate how far away the transmitter source is, before the signal ends.”

“Gale, I can see it this time. It’s a dark triangular shape, and it blots out some of the Milky Way overhead.”

“Blimey! How far up is it? Is it a ship?”

“Can’t say. It’s either immense and at orbital height, gigantic and in the upper atmosphere, or much smaller and low down. If small and lower, it’s likely the size of a normal ship or a drone.”

“Quick, get to the shuttle and fly off to the side for the triangulation. Margo has my authorization code to start a preflight for you to save you a few minutes. With the shuttle, we can use their radio signal direction, as well as a visual recording of their position to get a triangulation angle for a size and distance measurement. Be sure to record everything with the sensors.”

She shifted to issuing instructions to the AI. “Margo, select whatever frequency they’re using and let me try to speak to them before the end of their message. They might decide to leave again as soon as the recording is finished, so I’m not doing to wait this time.”

Tolvert started running towards the shuttle, as he saw the side hatch open and the external lights activated, which then flicked on and off in a pattern, as part of the AI conducting the preflight check. He was a few hundred feet away from the com shack when he heard a soft pop behind him, followed by a loud rush of air past him, which diminished rapidly.

He looked back, and the shack was gone, with a large gray mist spreading up and away, drifting on the evening breeze. In the starlight, he saw what looked like a dark circle drawn on the pavement where the shack had been. Suddenly, the image shifted into proper perspective for him, and he realized there was a round pit where the shack had been, not a dark circle on the surface.

“Pesh, did you kill the power in the com shack? Margo said the transmitter and receiver circuits quit feeding her data, and…” Pesh interrupted her.

“Gale, the shack is gone! There’s a hole in the ground where it was.”

Another soft pop sounded, with a slightly weaker sound of rushing air. That too was behind him because he had turned around to face where the com shack had vanished.

He knew before he turned to look, that the shuttle had just vanished in a puff of air. There was a smaller sized circular pit where it had been parked, and misty gas spread from where the craft had been.

“Gale, sound an alert. I think we should get everyone away from the settlement. The shuttle also just vanished, leaving only another hole in the ground and a burst of gas, just like the com shack did. I think we’re under attack by some sort of weapon from that triangle shaped object.”

“You could be right. All we have are fire and severe weather alarms. I think only a fire would get them out of the buildings. Margo, sound all of the fire alarms and send a broadcast message to each person’s transdu…” Her voice cut off in mid transmission.

The sound of distant pops, unaccompanied by flashes, reached Tolvert just as he heard the fire alarms. One of those pops, and a burst of gray gas, came from the main administration building, where Gale’s personal quarters were located on the second floor of the low four-story extruded plastic building. That was so the colony leader could always be at the center of activity, coordinating the work to be done day or night. He knew she had just been at the center of unexpected deadly activity, and was now part of the gasses he saw expanding from there.

There also were rapid multiple bursts of wispy mists from the residence halls, which jetted out through ruptured windows or missing walls from the internal gas pressures. Parts of the buildings fell into spherical voids that suddenly appeared at the base of the structures, others at points well above ground level. The material of the building’s walls and rooftops fell inwards, dropping below ground level. There were no basements under these buildings, so the pits they fell into had obviously just formed.

Tolvert stood frozen in horror for long seconds, as he realized every building, and everyone in the small colony, was being systematically vaporized by some bizarre weapon. It arrived invisibly and struck suddenly from within the structures, and disintegrated the material in a spherical volume hundreds of feet in diameter, making only a deceptively soft sounding “pop,” followed by the sudden expansion of the gasses thus formed. He glanced up at the triangle shape, and it looked exactly as before, a shadow blocking starlight. He knew whoever was in that thing, or controlled it, was killing everyone and destroying everything in the town, without mercy or warning.

Or had the transmissions been some sort of warning, which they couldn’t understand? How could they understand? It wasn’t sent in any language they knew.

Along with the shock of the mass killings, happening as he watched helplessly, came a dose of reality and a desire to survive. Tolvert, turned and ran at a right angle to the path he’d followed towards the shuttle, racing between the animal pens of GMO cattle, sheep, and pigs, kept away from the town for odor reduction. He barely noticed the smell now, and his lungs gasped for air to feed his clone mod enhanced muscles, suitable for the 1.15 standard gravity world. He was running faster than he’d ever ran in his life, and when he heard a pop off to his left, in a cattle pen, he knew it wasn’t fast enough.

The snorting and grunting
noise
came from animals for which a nearby mild pop sound wasn’t as alarming to them as was the sudden puff of gas that briefly enveloped those at the edge of a circular pit. On the other hand, or hoof, terrified bellowing and an extremely improbable sounding screech from a cow was a testament to the pain and confusion that one cow experienced. Her rear quarter had vanished, and she fell backwards, entrails and organs spilling, into a newly formed shallow pit.

More pops, puffs, snorts, grunts, and bellows, but no more screeches, followed from the cattle pen. Those were accompanied by species varied equivalent sounds of alarm from the pig and sheep pens, as they too were assaulted.

Tolvert assumed he too was, or would be a target, and he desperately looked around as he ran, seeking a place to hide. Although, the buildings of the residence halls hadn’t protected or concealed the others very well. He ran past a drain cover’s grillwork in the paved walkway he was running along. He slid to a halt as he quickly backtracked in a panic. He bruised his fingers as he jammed them into the grid work of the iron cover, and tilted the seventy-pound weight onto one side. He raised it enough to drop through, and let it fall back into place with a deafening clang. There was only a five-foot drop to the bottom of the rain drainage culvert. Something he knew about, because he’d help lay this drain line. It was one of his assigned work tasks, right after they experienced their first heavy rains on Paradise, which had flooded the new streets laid out for the future town, when they still lived in Smart Fabric tents.

The town’s storm drains, all of them dry tonight, led to a large creek, or shallow river, depending on your definitions, about a half mile from the animal pens. It was too low inside for him to stand in the culvert, but he could scurry in a bent over position. He made it all the way to the open end, located in the stream bank, eight feet above the slowly flowing thigh deep water. Upstream, it went into the forests that surrounded the town on two sides, and it was clean, cold, and clear water that originated as mountain snowmelt, coming out of some foothills where the forest ended. A few miles downstream of the drain outlet, the creek led to a larger, muddy, and wide river, well away from the cover of the rather Earth-like forest. Shivering, he waded upstream and vanished into the woods, accompanied by the distant sounds of continuing soft pops, and the sounds of animals screaming and bellowing in distress.

****

Mirikami was stunned. “Under attack, and Margo was cut off? How much did the AI say about the attack before then? They can send even faster than we can via Comtaps.”

Thad shrugged. “The data started out as an automatic report, saying they were getting a repeat of the same message format that Paradise reported previously. Margo was using Instellarnet, via a Prada link the colonies all take with them. The link was located in their administrative building. The first strike was apparently on their communications center, when Gale tried to talk to them via radio, routed from the antenna out there.”

“Communications center? When did they have time to build that? All I saw last month when we delivered supplies was a Smart Plastic cube, ten feet on a side, by the landing pad.”

“OK, fine. The colonists called it a com shack, and the AI said communications center. So sue Margo for its AI precision. The com shack is what was hit first, according to the transducer report from the watch stander, a Peshawar Tolvert, who was enroute to their shuttle when it happened, and then he said the shuttle was hit the same way.”

“Do we have the recording of the transducer reports he made? We might pick up on the sounds of the explosions he heard.”

“That wasn’t recorded, but what he said was passed along, and knowing an AI, it was probably repeated verbatim. According to his description, the shack and shuttle both vanished in bursts of gas, leaving holes in the ground. He thought it was an attack from a triangle shaped object in the sky. He thought it might be very large. Gale was talking when her transmission cut off, and the AI finally recognized the urgency and it sent everything that had been said through Instellarnet. You heard her last word, cut off as I think she was telling the AI to warn everyone via their transducers, once the fire alarms had them awake. I hope only the link was cut, but I fear the worst. That Prada com device address isn’t online now. None of the smaller prospecting outposts have anything but local radios, and they would be out of transducer range of anyone in Elysium.”

“Alright then, we need to send enough armed ships to find out what happened, and render any aid we can. I’ll have Maggi organize and collect some relief and medical supplies, and leave after us. It’s only a twenty-six hour Jump, but she can probably get underway before we even arrive.”

“Who are we taking?”

“The Mark, of course, your ship the Ripper, Sarge’s ship, the Sneaky Bastard, Avenger with Noreen and Dillon, Carson and Ethan on Wanderer, Maggi will captain the Vanguard when it comes a day later. How many do you think we should take altogether?”

“At least ten ships, all armed to the teeth, and we spread them out so we don’t make a cluster target when we arrive. We still make a blast of gamma rays on arrival, at least until we make the software changes Max’s team tested last week. Unfortunately, we can’t wait that long for the production version trials. I think we’re about to meet a high tech opponent, since that triangle craft didn’t produce gamma rays.”