Koban: Rise of the Kobani (33 page)

Flight Leader, from his high vantage point saw it was already too late for an escape. The pursuing predator had instantly shifted direction to its own left, as its hidden companion started to pounce from the right side. The original pursuer would now intercept the turning and slowed prey before it could turn away again. The trailing predator had put on a burst of speed, proving before that it was merely keeping the prey group moving in the direction it wanted. There was a squall of terror, as the larger of the two predators, the one with a red ruff on its neck and back, brought the prey animal down. It was quickly joined by the slightly smaller version that had sprung the trap. Those two would eat well today.

Flight Leader was envious again, and his “snack” was not enough to power him for an entire morning. Soon his stomach would “ask” him to turn back. The food giver would see in his mind what he had seen, and there would always be some food offered, but not perhaps as much as was craved.

There was one valuable lesson to take from this hunt. The two-legged prey animals were small enough
, and unstable enough on their feet, that two wolfbats could surprise and knock one to the ground. The open mouth of the victim as it struggled had revealed there were no teeth, and the front was shaped like the hard mouth of some water birds at home, which ate only wet vegetation in water. They couldn’t bite very well. The back trail suggested they had been chased from the nearby river. He wondered why they had not entered the water to escape. His newness here prevented him from knowing how much more dangerous the river could be for careless animals.

He turned back, to see if his visions would earn him more food for a renewed and longer scouting flight. The food givers were usually fair.

****

“I see them, Kayla.” Cory was responding to a nudge and brief frill, pointing out the returning wolfbats. The nicknames they were given by the humans were the only useable names they had. The wolfbats knew which of them was being addressed when they heard the meaningless human sounds, but their self-identification was a sound pattern a human could not reproduce or understand.

Big Blue was the older and larger of the two, and had assumed the leadership role. He considered himself the leader of what mentally, to him anyway, was a small Flock.  Because there had been no loud voice calls in a nest “vote” to elevate him over any contender, he would not think of himself as Flock Leader. He thought of a lesser, but still lofty title of Flight Leader, normally reserved for a wolfbat that guided the actions of several squadrons in a large Flock. Cory figured that if you were putting on airs and assigning yourself a grand title, why display false modesty at all. Consider yourself king. No one cared here.

Streaker, the name they had given the smaller of the two, accepted Big Blue as the leader, but considered him just a squadron leader. To his mind, he himself was the sole squad member. Since there was no formal mode of address that differed between the tiles of Squadron Leader, Flock Leader, or Flight Leader, injured or offended pride on the part of Big Blue wasn’t going to be a factor. Deference to the levels of authority was how wolfbats ranked one another, and with only two rankings here, there was no conflict or reason to challenge.

Streaker had apparently spotted something first, because Big Blue joined him, and then sent him back to report, and receive a reward. Big Blue circled in one place for a time, before he turned back as well. Neither rushed, as they would if they had seen a major threat which would earn them a bonus treat of what they considered the best meat, a piece of heart, kidney, liver, or even tongue. Cory and Danner were perfectly happy to reserve those organs from a hunting kill for the cats and wolfbats to enjoy, leaving none for some adult to insist they “just try it.”

Streaker landed on the roll bar the humans had welded to the back of the truck cabs. Cory slid back the roof panel and stood up to Tap the scout for his report, which he repeated to the driver.

“Uncle Mel, they spotted a pair of lions hunting a small herd of animals, and they made a kill about two miles ahead. No large dino predators around. He first thought the prey animals were mini versions of a K-Rex. They seem to be a sort of two-legged duckbill, about four feet tall, short front legs or arms, and perhaps six to eight feet long with a thick tail for balance. The image reminds me of hadrosaurs, except these are smaller than the fossils from Earth were. Except for the specialized duckbill like mouth, they look similar to early ornithopod grazers.”

Rigson raised an eyebrow. “How do you know anything about hadrosaurs, or ornithopods?”

Cory frowned. “Jake has at least a billion books in his library you know. Some are about extinct animals from Earth and some are about those from colony worlds. I read several books before we left to come here.”

Rigson smiled. “You remember them all, and their names? Dinos, I mean?”

“I read about many of them on screen, and looked at some animations and digital recreations on Tri-Vid. Why would I forget them?” He had jumped directly from SG status with a parallel and unused ripper based nervous system, to climbing out of a med lab as a fledgling TG2, with wolfbat-inspired hearing, and the memory organization those genes promoted.

He
had
noticed how much better his memory seemed now, since there was little effort in absorbing new knowledge, and none at all to recall what he’d absorbed. Danner was the same way. It did take some correlation to put academic details in context when the real world’s facts came at you, but that too happened faster. He had pulled the hadrosaur description from memory and compared it to the image Streaker sent to him, and it was a close match. 

He reached over the cab to the cooler kept strapped on the top of the pile of gear. He covered the lock with one hand, and entered the simple code for the latch. That precaution was needed because the little devils had figured out how to unlock the coolers at home. A fat, weighted-down wolfbat riding on your truck half asleep made a poor scout. They would eat their fill, and stuff their throat pouches.

Extracting a piece of rhino liver, he flipped it expertly right at Streakers snout. It vanished with an audible click of fangs. He knew liver was this scouts favorite treat. It made Cory shudder to recall the taste. Before he could sit down, he heard the high-pitched ultrasonic calls from the incoming Big Blue. He waited for the second scout to alight, did a Tap, pulled out another piece of meat, not Blue’s favorite because he didn't add anything new to the report, and made the toss. Then he Tapped them both and asked (you didn’t make a demand of the temperamental animals) that they go back out and look another five miles ahead. He didn’t think “five miles” but rather the time it would take them to fly that far.

They fluttered off, and he told Mel and Kayla a bit more about the mated lions and their kill, and considered the matter done.

Kayla had other ideas. She didn’t come here simply to ride. She wanted to invite Kopper to go with her to meet the lions and
inform
them of the expedition’s passing, and warn them to leave humans alone. They would also inquire about knowledge of the area that the lion’s would surely have, and of any big predators that called this their territory. Kopper was not a blood relative, and Kayla might want to get to know him better. A private hunt and a shared meal could accomplish that. She’d even let him make the kill, so he felt more “the provider.” Feminine wiles crossed species lines.

She frilled both men before she leaped out and dropped back to the third truck to invite Kopper to go with her. The two of them ran ahead, easily out pacing the ten miles per hour pace of the trucks.

“Hey Mel,” it was Ricco. “Where is Kayla taking Kopper?”

“To meet and frill with a pair of lions the scouts reported seeing, and get some information. I also think she wants to hunt.”

“I think so too, but I believe she took her real prey with her,” he laughed, thinking of the unsuspecting male ripper.

They continued on to midday, finding a well-trodden path that paralleled the river a half mile farther away from the riverbank. They picked up the pace to twenty-five miles per hour, on the wide beaten down earthen trail, formed by the thousands of large animals that passed the same way, looking for a wide shallow place to ford the river safely. The trail would turn to red mud if they got the rain that threatened to come up the river from behind them, off the ocean. That would push them back to driving on the grass, with the lumps and bumps.

They stopped to make a meal, and to watch the herd of frilled ceratopsians they had finally overtaken, run away ahead of them. The scouts had returned and reported no sign of dangerous predators, other than the two rippers which they’d seen hunting and stalking some burrowing animals. They mentally emphasized that report, as if it were of greater value, to see if they could get a larger serving. Rippers were predators, after all.

Danner, making certain the two scouts knew the ripper report was worthless, nevertheless, gave them each a generous portion of heated, cubed muscle meat. It wasn’t a treat like the preferred organ meat, but the warmed meat would replace the energy they had expended. They had flown from thermal to thermal, circling over the future path of the not-life “animals” that carried the food givers.

The scouts didn’t exactly grasp that a negative report of any dangers was also of value, which was why they had pointlessly flashed pictures of the two rippers in their last report.

After eating, the trucks moved on, slowing some to stay behind the herd
, which they had spooked earlier. Pushing into their midst could panic some into ramming the trucks. Cory, driving now, was tired of swerving to miss the inevitable piles of poorly digested vegetation, in the form of smelly excrement.

Once, there was a
really unpleasant
smelling pile of scat, which Cory’s nose had detected long before it was in sight. Rigson, listening to Cory’s constant complaint about the smell of dung, said he didn’t notice it so much. Not until the nearly black, oily looking mess appeared. That one he and the others could smell, even without a sense of smell derived from the rippers. The two cats that had stayed with them most of the day, Kally and Kandy, revolted Cory to near nausea, and to a less extent Danner, when they not only smelled the glop up close, they touched a tip of their tongues on the disgusting stuff, then rubbed frills.

Afterwards, Kally went to Danner and frilled him.

“Oh,” he said, in belated recognition of what his nose had been telling him, and that Kally had confirmed. “This is poop from digested meat, and it was originally from one of the ceratopsians. Kally says the size of the pile means it was a large predator, but it’s more than a day old. She and Kandy don’t know what kind of predator ate the animal, but she will remember the scent of whatever did.”

Then he added with an abashed grin. “I was just accused of having a stupid nose, because I didn’t detect what was in the crap.”

Ricco made a helpful suggestion. “Show us you have something smarter than a nose. Taste it, like they did.”

Cory suddenly added a
really
unpleasant smelling smaller pile to the trail, with several wet sounds that resembled calling out the name “Ralph.”

The older men found this hilarious, and when both cats sniffed that, Danner added his own name calling contribution to the mess on the trail. The older generation was in a merry and superior state of mind the rest of the day. TG2s apparently didn’t have stronger
stomachs
than SGs.

Rigson resumed driving, while Cory curled up on the seat in misery and embarrassment for an hour. The mushy sounds of driving “accidents” and “kind” proposals and suggestions from Uncle Mel didn’t help all that much.

“Please. Stop driving over the piles, Uncle Mel.”

“No! I don't want anything to eat.”

“How will this make me a man?”

The first sign that the day was about to change was when the wolfbats returned and refused food because they didn’t want to fly again. They fluttered onto the floor of the third truck’s cab with Ricco and Chack, because with Kopper away hunting, they had more room.

A swift storm front, with thunder, lightning, and heavy rain finally overtook them. That ended the teasing fun for Mel, and torment for Cory. It was a vicious storm.

Strong wind gusts in the dense air of Koban rocked the trucks. Danner proposed they drive under a copse of low to midsized trees they were passing, less than a quarter mile away. Cal Branson was just starting to explain why that was a bad idea, out here where most of the ground was so open, when the answer forced itself indelibly into Danner’s mind.

There was a tremendous blast of thunder, simultaneously accompanied by the brilliant blue-white flash of lightning, and the tallest tree in said copse became the shortest, with shattered wood flying in all directions. They did pull off the animal trail that was turning to red mud, and drove onto soil bound tightly with grass roots, well away from any trees, and stopped. Cal assured Danner that the metal alloy of the truck would carry a lightning strike safely around them if the truck were hit. Fortunately, that prediction wasn’t tested, and in forty minutes, the rain had slacked as the fast moving front moved past.

The cooler air was welcomed after the hot day, but the older men, experienced at camping on Koban and other worlds, warned that when the sun returned, their heat mod adaptations would be tested. The humidity would make it feel worse.