Koban Universe 1 (6 page)

She used her right hand to pull herself up to straddle the support beam. “How the hell did you find me?”

She heard Cory in the background mutter, “Just like her to quiz us, instead of listening to us
knuckle headed
kids.”

“Uh. I heard that, young man. Danner, I can’t see, I have dirt
and grit in my eyes. I’ll climb over to the other side. You guide me to the line.”

“OK.”

Following his directions, she found the line in a few seconds, with an improvised hook on the end.

“I can pull myself
over on the line if I tie it off here. Where the hell
are
you? You don’t sound very far away.”

“We’re sticking
through the floor of the dome. I guess from your perspective, we’re stuck through the factory ceiling. You only have about twenty-five feet to go, but I suggest you tie the rope securely around your chest, and swing down to let us pull you up by hand. Hurry if you please. There are Krall almost up to you.”

She
quickly looped the line around her chest and under her arms. At the sound of a snarl from right behind her, she pushed off into the darkness. To her accelerated perceptions, the second before the tug of the line was felt passed like an eternity. She had resigned herself to jumping to her death a moment ago, but with salvation now at hand, this short drop was terrifying.

As she was
being pulled up, her body rotated, and her ears sensed the enraged snarls of the Krall that had just missed grabbing her. When the point of origin of that sound suddenly shifted closer, she knew it had launched itself after her.

“Look out!...
”

Simultaneous with
Danner’s warning, she quickly drew and fired her last bullet.

The
Krall’s screech ended with the swoosh-blam of the explosive round and a spatter of wetness on her face and arms, thus eliminating that particular bit of noise pollution.

“…Damn, that was a nice shot,” Danner amended what he was saying, all in the same breath.

“Got your sight back just in time,” Cory added.

“Nope. Still can’t open my eyes
yet. However, I’ll have a neat trick to teach you two. Assuming you can learn how to use your ears.” She enjoyed the pun.

S
he felt a hand on her shoulder guiding her as she was lifted, and a rectangular opening bumped and scraped against her shoulders, then hips.

When she put her hand
out, feeling for support, she felt an instrument console tilted at an odd angle. She also smelled the inside of something she knew well, which could not be here.

“How did you get a
damned shuttle down here? What happened to the broken windscreen you just lifted me through? I don't smell Kopper or Kally, just your sweaty armpits.”

“Wow. You’re welcome. So glad to hear your thankful comments.” Danner sounded as much amused as annoyed.

Cory added, “If the window pisses her off, just wait until she finds out about the rest of the shuttle.”

“OK. I’m sorry.
” She responded. “Thank you both. Please get me a water bottle and the med kit, so I can clear my eyes. You can tell me what happened as you do that.”

“Uh
…, I’ll have to get a cup of water from the shuttle water cooler. You tossed all the water supplies out with the camping equipment. We couldn’t bring them inside with us because the cases wouldn’t fit through the windscreen frame. Which we had to shoot out, by the way, just to get back inside. The hatch code was changed somehow.” There wasn’t an accusation there exactly, but a question was certainly implied.

“Oh. You didn’t hear my last transmissio
n?” The guilt came back to her.

“It was broken up, and we were kind
of busy fighting off a bunch of big, unusually stupid Krall.”

Her heart skipped a beat when neither of them mentioned the two rippers, and she couldn’t smell a fresh scent from them.
“The cats?” She dreaded an answer.

“Oh. They were too large to fit
through the window. We used the ammunition stored in the shuttle to help them tear a hole through the wave of Krall coming out of the woods. They were headed for the open plain a mile on the other side of the trees. No Krall can catch them there, and after what we and they did to them getting back to the shuttle, I can’t believe the Krall would want to try that again.”

“After you were inside, why didn’t you open the
rear hatch for them?”

“Speaking of using ears.” Danner chuckled. “Didn’t I mention the code was changed? The standard code wouldn’t work.”

“Did you try the console master switch? It’s the override if you’re inside you know.”

“Uh…, no.
” He sounded sheepish. “We were shooting Krall out the window at the time, so Kopper and Kally could break through to the woods. We only thought of it later, after the Krall were crawling all over and banging on the top and sides.”

The application of water had loosened the gum around her left eye, and when she pulled both lids back, she had Cory pour more water onto her upraised open eye
s to flush them, blinking and rolling her eyes to clear them of grit. She could see a little now.

Squinty eyed, she asked,
“Why are we stuck here with our nose pointed down?”

“Because the pointy end of the shuttle made a better battering ram?” Answered Danner, with a smirk.

His expression annoyed her. “You broke through the floor of the dome with the shuttle? Were you nuts? How did you plan to get out of the same trap where I was? That all of us are in now? This thing isn’t going to fly us back out you know. It must be smashed to hell.”

“Before Cory burned an entry into the side of the dome for me to
hover through, to reach the central hall, I called Prime City by radio. They answered, and help is coming.”

“Oh
.” She was mollified somewhat.

“You don
’t want the answer to the most important question?” It was Cory’s smirk that irritated her now.

“Which i
s?”

“How we found you.”

“If I have to drag it out of you, I won’t tell you about the neat new thing we can do.”

“
Fine. You really made them angry and they all went down after you. The ultrasonic screaming came up from all of the stairwells, and we put our ears to the floor and heard it loudest from almost directly below us. Only
you
could have pissed anything off that much, and sure enough, we heard you curse a couple of times. You do that a lot, you know, when you think no one can hear you.” He hurried on, when he thought she was about to demonstrate her century old mastery of swear words.

“
Anyway, we had to see what was happening down below, and there was no other way to make a hole. Sorry about the shuttle you borrowed.”

Danner quickly
jumped in to remind her of her offer, hoping to divert her anger a bit longer. “What trick can we do that we don’t know about yet?”

Not fooled by the obvious diversion
ary ploy, she went along with it anyway, because she really did want to show off what she’d learned.

“Hear those Krall still screaming out there
in ultrasonic? I want you get close to the broken window, close your eyes, and listen for a few minutes. Then tell me what you see in your minds.”

Their surprised expressions
a minute later was reward enough to pay for a wrecked shuttle.

The giant not-live flier vanished into the sky, leaving Jura continent behind, and the former passengers watched its retreat from the gently rolling flat terrain atop the huge elevated pedestal-like formation. Flock Leader issued a recall to the four circling squadrons, sent to scout the area around the rocky plateau, as their supplies were unloaded.

The
four-mile wide flat-topped slab of stone rose several hundred feet higher than the surrounding rain forest trees, its vertical cliffs were draped with jungle vines, and the forest grew almost to its flanks.

The flock’s effort to colonize this area
had been supported by their human partners, in gratitude for services from the newly elected Flock Leader and his new Flight Leader, for past scouting missions to this largely unexplored continent of Koban. Last season they had scouted for a small pack of humans and a pride of four rippers, to travel upstream next to a river seeking where shiny bits of hard rocks were born. Why their human partners wanted the shiny rocks was a mystery the Flock Leader never understood, since they could not be eaten. The mind pictures implied they traded the shiny rocks with humans that did not live on Koban, for different not-live things you still could not eat.

The flock
insisted they be paid with something useful, things they could eat or use to make a strong nest, like meat that could feed them for many days without the need to hunt, as they made their new nest in the crevasses leading deep into the cliffs of the plateau. The cold bags of cubes of high quality rhinolo meat would be the last of those they would have, because there was none of those horned beasts near here. That didn’t actually matter to them, because before the humans became flock partners with them and paid them in that meat, the only time a squadron brought home rhinolo meat was when rippers left a kill unguarded. A wolfbat squadron, or an entire flock, could not bring down such large animals, and they had to scavenge to obtain such rare meat.

There were many small to midsized
prey animals here, living in and below the trees and on the top of the plateau for them to hunt. One thing they had learned from ripper mind pictures was never to kill all of any one kind of prey animal in a small area, or then there would be no more.

The
ir human partner’s mind images also suggested this was smart, so that a flock would always have enough food to eat. They would try to do like the rippers, and not have so many pups that the flock needed to eat everything they could find, and split into new flocks that would soon fight over what little was left to hunt.

There were distant flocks
living at other plateaus, and they would be a source for trading females when fresh blood was needed in the flock and as opponents for raids if the younger squadron males needed an outlet for their excess energy. These neighbors were lost flocks, which had established themselves here long ago, when individual squadrons or entire migrating nests were blown here by storm winds, forced to cross over the wide waters between the lands. Their signal calls were very different, but then, remote flocks in their former homeland also had strange signal calls. The wolfbats could learn new calls quickly, not as fast as they built complex mind maps made from sound echoes, but those mind maps could hold more than just the pattern of reflected echoes.

The human partn
ers, when they learned to hear like the wolfbat, also could make complex sound maps in their minds, and could save other information in the same matrix. Flock Leader and Flight Leader both had new ideas, learned from humans, which they had saved for use if they were able to lure followers to come here, to a fresh exciting place to form a new flock, with new prey.

Their practice with mind sharing with humans, and with rippers, had left the
m with an idea of how they might convince cousins of rippers to work with them as well. They could spot prey too large for a wolfbat from their aerial advantage point. On the ground, large cats that could pull down such prey, often could not find them, or position themselves for an ambush to make a successful sprint after fast and agile prey.

Because all of the families of cats on Koban had inherited the ancient common ability to share mind pictures, Flock Leader hoped they could find a way to cooperate with them, as they now did with rippers and humans on hunts on their home territory. He and Flight Leader had seen it was difficult to obtain cooperation from the mated pairs of lions that lived on the
open plains of this new land. They lived in relative isolation, and did not cooperate in hunts even with others of their own kind.

However, they could delicately, and cautiously,
try to approach other cat families for cooperative hunting in the forest. Cautious, because to those cats a wolfbat was not only a competitor for some of the same food sources, but potential prey.

Wolfbat flocks near dryer regions at home had learned to help dessert panthers find prey among the dunes, in trade for a share of the kills. This had been
initially arranged by their human partners, after they had trapped and shared thoughts with many of the midsized cats. The purpose of the humans was originally only to convince the cats to leave people alone, or to be hunted by them in turn. However, they recognized that threats alone would not prevent a hungry predator from attacking one of them if a person was found all alone.

The k
ey was to reduce how hungry the panthers became, and thus be willing to avoid a more dangerous sort of prey. That’s where their cooperation with wolfbats was the key. To help them find their prey more quickly, then guide them to the prey, or chase the prey to them. The concept of payment had been harder to convey, but leaving a quarter of a kill in exchange for more frequent kills was eventually arranged.

Without humans to be the mediators it would be more difficult
, but Flock Leader had hopes it would work. If it did not, there was ample smaller prey in the forest canopy, in the occasional clearings, and along the riverbanks of a huge slow flowing river only a few miles away. If they hunted other plateaus with wolfbat populations, there would be inter flock warfare.

When the squadrons returned, they reported numerous signs of flying birds and reptiles in the treetops, or gliding above them, and small four legged animals eating the vegetation on the more exposed flat top of their new home. Distant flock calls were heard from the nearest plateau, well away on the far side of the river, so they had
distant neighbors out hunting today.

When Flock Leader s
ignaled a migration to a new home, the squadron males divided the weight of the meat sacks between them and rustled their leathery blue wings as they opened them for the effort of the leap into the sky carrying the extra weight. They had to move their food supply first, into the large cavern that the humans had discovered under the plateau’s top. They said they used a form of echo, like wolfbat sounds, which found the hidden cavity and an entrance, but that the method didn’t make a noise that could be heard by ears. The hard dish the human herd leader pointed to was shaped a bit like a round ear, and he told them that it “saw” the underground opening from high above all of the air.

When a small
er not-life flyer brought Flock Leader and Flight Leader to explore last week, they had soon found the crevasse openings under the vines that hid the deeper passages leading into the large cavern. They were exactly where the human partner’s mental pictures indicated they would be found. The cavern was much larger than they needed right now, but had room for them to grow into a great flock if they found enough food.

The higher priority meat was already being moved, with Flight Leader showing the
four squadron leaders the way. Flock Leader called out to the females to prepare to follow him. The twenty four females, many already bearing future pups, grasped one each of the coils of light but strong chording, which the humans gave to them to weave long lasting support webs to hold their individual nests. That would keep their nests clear of the sides and floors of the cavern, where slithering predators would potentially come to eat their pups. The not-life coils were stronger, thinner, and longer than the vines they would have used. The slithering creatures would find them very difficult to use as a crawlway.

For two days, they were busy stringing the chords into a series of crisscrossing supports for the more complex webbing
that the females instinctively wove using the thin lines. Then most of the flock flew out to gather vines, sturdy limbs, and foliage to line the basket like structures, and thus provide firmer support for the weight of a family, and to hold the flightless pups securely. They were careful to leave the concealing vines over their outside entrance in place.

This was
hard, energy consuming work, and with their high metabolisms, they would have frequently needed to interrupt nest building to hunt for food. The high quality meat they brought with them sustained them while they completed their base of operations, and they had some left, in case early hunting failed to prove productive.

That proved to be a nice reserve
of meat, but unnecessary for their continued survival when the nest building was finished. Prey was plentiful and at least in this area, not particularly wary of the unfamiliar presence of wolfbats. That would change of course.

The females were settling into their
nests and preparing them for occupation by one or two pups each, using a soft downy blue lining, pulled from additional fur that pregnancy hormones caused to grow long and fluffy on their stomach. Flock Leader’s mate was as busy as the other females, and she was cranky and tended to snap at him (literally) if he perched on the side of the nest too long, presenting himself as the leader he was to the other wolfbats.

Most of t
he other males were off either guarding the entrance to the nest, out hunting, or scouting the new territory. As future fathers of many species had learned, on multiple worlds, going hunting for large game was often less hazardous duty that simply standing near your expecting mate.

Flock Leader, a fresh screech of irritation in his ear as motivation, wisely elected to be the leader
outside
, for a while. He went to seek signs of some of the several varieties of felines that were said to inhabit this jungle region. It was raining as he made his exit between the vines, but the rain was warm, and thus more inviting than his most recent contact with his grumpy mate.

He circled over the jungle canopy, sometimes dipping below the crowns of the giant trees, and flying under or between their layers of limbs, watching for signs of cats
on the forest floor. He saw marsh dogs, eight or ten in a pack, sniffing their way through the surprisingly sparse underbrush. The amount of ground cover here was less than in the forests where Flock Leader had previously lived. There was less sunlight leaking its way through the canopy of these trees, with overlapping limbs constantly trying to steal every photon of light from their neighbor.

He often saw browsers and scavengers rooting through the leaf litter, seeking tubers, insects, leaves, or small animals. He saw a few
fly covered stripped carcasses a time or two, often near small streams that the frequent rain fed. There were arboreal creatures in the trees, half the mass of a wolfbat, but taste tests had proven their rangy meat was bitter tasting, apparently a result of their tolerance of a bright red fruit that was toxic to most other animals.

Obviously, water source
s were places a predator could wait for meals to arrive. However, there were so many small streams and pools, that this didn’t narrow his search area greatly.

When his ears detected shrieks and screams under the canopy to his left, closer to the large river, he flew that direction, chew
ing on one of the last cubes of rhinolo meat, expelled from his throat storage sack. Flying burned more energy than gliding on thermals above the forest.

He soon followed the noise to a
pack of two dozen screamers. They had surrounded a large deer-like animal and her fawn. The sixteen to twenty inch high, two legged blue theropod dinosaurs had surrounded the two much larger creatures. The mother could have easily broken through the ring by leaping over or forcing her way through the little predators. However, her fawn, probably only a few days old, was unlikely to avoid the teeth that would try to grip its hooves and leap at is throat, in an effort to trip it and bring it down. Once on the ground, the small sharp teeth would deliver multiple wounds, to bleed it to fatal weakness even if helped to its feet by the doe.

The blood on the dappled fur indicated that the fawn had already been attacked, perhaps even down briefly, since there were bleeding bites on its lower legs
, sides, and on its neck. There were a few such blood marks on the doe’s legs, but she would have been able to kick the attackers loose. The heaving flanks of the bleating fawn were evidence of a longer chase, and that the pair had finally been overtaken when the fawn’s energy ran low.