Koban (27 page)

“I’m sure I can brief them on everything they missed by being
tardy, releasing you for more important duties.” She
thought
she would like
nothing more than to force Fisher and her two new groupies on the Board to have
to stand and listen to her talk. She thought wrong.

Quickly, before Fisher could begin what would surely be a blistering
reply, which might draw other Board members and unwanted attention, Mirikami boomed
out an uncharacteristically loud and enthusiastic welcome.

“Doctor Cahill, I’m so happy to find you, just the Great Lady
I was about to seek. There actually
are
vital things that need doing right
now, which call for the organizational and social expertise of an experienced and
accomplished Lady such as you. These are poorly suited talents for males such as
me, a ship’s Captain yet only a Spacer by training. I know space craft operation
and navigation, while
you
know
people management
, something we need
right now.” She faltered, her mouth open, yet glowing in the unexpected praise.

Mirikami, still beaming a big smile towards Cahill, noticed with
amusement that the Chairfem was caught with her mouth also open, her still formulating
retort frozen on her tongue for the moment, as she looked dumbfounded at the Captain.

Grasping that delightful moment, Mirikami continued. “Doctor
Cahill, while I perform the lessor task of briefing your fellow Board members on
mere details you clearly have already grasped, I would like you to organize the
people that are not with Mister Rigson, and gather them into the center of the room
to form committees. You should explore various proposals to defend ourselves from,
and to fight against the Krall warriors. We can always alter the committees later,
once we know what ideas we have available to consider. I think this is a vital step
for humanity’s effort to resist the Krall, early organization, a task which you
are uniquely well suited to manage, don’t you think?”

As he expected, the flattery and seemingly important task was
exactly the bait needed to hook her.

“Why thank you Captain. I will proudly step forward to do my
part to help the human race take its historic first steps to oppose this horrible
invasion. Do you have any committee names and members in mind?”

“Not at this time Doctor Cahill, but I’m sure there are a few
people present with some military background that you can consult, some of my crew
certainly, and you can use anyone’s input to devise exploratory committees. This
is an area where I know you will excel. I’ll leave the first steps entirely to your
discretion, so please start as soon as you can, while I brief our late arrivals.”

“You can count on me Captain.” As she turned away, a second withering
look raked over the other three Board members, with a final smirk reserved in particular
for Fisher. Raising her voice, she began calling the milling people to meet her
in the center of the room, the force of rightful authority driving her once again.

 In an undertone only the group of five by the door could hear,
Fisher rendered her opinion.

“Captain, I’m damned delighted I didn’t have to fight someone
like you for the Chair position on the Midwife Project. That was frigging brilliant!”

“I have my moments,” and he chuckled with the group, before looking
to his First Officer.

“Noreen, since we are all directly under the overhead camera
where I wanted us…, please don’t anyone look up to check,” he added hastily. “Will
you tell them what has been arranged with our quiet friend?”

“Yes Sir. The cameras in this room have a switchable lens system,
and the only one in use now is over our heads, using a sort of fisheye type lens
that catches all of the room in a single view. However, there is distortion particularly
at the viewing edges like where we are standing, because it is aimed at the center
of the room and not down at us. We can be seen but only in a stretched sort of way
at the rim, a highly distorted image but we are obviously inside the room.”

“Uh...,” Aldry began uncertainly, “we can still be heard by audio
pickups Commander, right?” She wasn’t sure this was a safe question.

“Please, call me Noreen within our friendly group here, and no,
we can’t be heard in isolation. The only mike pickup active is the one on the podium
near where Mister Rigson is standing, and the mike overhead is off. I have manually
confirmed that. Our friend will tell us if that changes.” As was their new custom,
an unnamed friend was obviously Jake.

She continued. “Because the camera fisheye view is basically
from the tops of our heads, our lip movements are not visible, and can’t be correlated
with what we are saying, or even show if we are talking at all. The Captain had
originally intended only to have Mister Rigson gather the information Telour expects
us to gather, standing closest to the open mike. Now, in the center of the room
is Lady Cahill, loudly organizing another impromptu aspect of our so-called ‘secret’
resistance plan Telour has ordered us to produce. I am confident that where we are
standing is out of mike range, and covered by the background noise in any event.

“We know the Krall have
much
more sensitive hearing than
we do, and over a much wider range. To counter this, our friend has modified ship
mike sensitivity to enhance the upper ranges he is able to record, confirming they
use audio ranges well above what humans can hear when they deploy those folding
ear arrays. He can also adjust sensitivity to remove some frequencies or introduce
distortion. He will do that for us if necessary, to cover our discussions where
we are standing. We don’t know what the Krall are saying yet, of course, but a rudimentary
translation table is under construction.”

Dillon asked, “You mean that so long as we stay below the camera,
speak normally without looking up, Telour can’t hear what we say or even know for
sure if we are talking?”

“That’s correct,” Noreen replied, and looked at the Captain,
to indicate her explanation had concluded.

Mirikami started his briefing. “I’ve gathered a lot of the information
from crew and passengers first hand, had some of it relayed to me from overheard
exchanges during the day, and unlike our friend, I can discriminate between trivia
and what I believe is important. I think I can provide a reasonable summary. Because
I don’t know exactly how long we will have, please try to hold your comments and
questions for now.” Then he simply dove into the story.

“The Krall have been in space an astonishing twenty five thousand
Earth years. They overthrew and wiped out their early benefactors, the Olt’kitapi,
within roughly two thousand years of that first contact. Krall records from that
era were lost since their home world was destroyed in the revolt.

“The Olt’kitapi themselves had been spacefaring for at least
twice that length of time before encountering the Krall. They are, or rather they
were the most technologically advanced race the Krall have met so far. However,
they obviously were also far too trusting and benevolent.

“The majority of the technologies we have seen the Krall use
apparently derive from that race and little seems to have been independently developed
or improved on by the Krall themselves.

“The space settled by the Olt’kitapi is now Krall controlled,
and is about four thousand light years across and a thousand thick. This is over
twenty times the volume we have explored!”

“My God, that large?” Aldry gasped. “But why only a thousand
thick and not a four thousand light year sphere?” she asked.

“That’s because the galactic disk is roughly one thousand light
years thick. They wouldn’t have been able to expand above or below the disk. We
have yet to reach that limit.”

“But still, that much volume was added to what the Krall already
had?”

“I doubt that it was added to what they already had. The Krall
don’t appear to know much about
what
they were doing before the Olt’kitapi
came. The earliest history they speak of came from oral stories passed down, that
were recorded only after first contact. I don’t think they had even progressed off
their planet of origin. That might explain why it took them so long to become inserted
into a peaceful Olt’kitapi society, learning what they needed to know in order to
take over.”

 “In any case…” he paused. “Where did I leave off?” He tilted
his head as Jake’s voice reminded him, and Aldry apologized for the interruption,
promising to hold her questions. He picked up the narrative.

“It does get worse. They have increased that original volume
in subsequent wars with other races. Except that they seem to live on and use only
a fraction of habitable planets that humans find acceptable.

“Of the sixteen races they say they conquered after the Olt’kitapi,
only two had apparently colonized as far from their origin as humanity has, yet
both were spacefaring for thousands of years longer than we have been. They say
a third much less expansive race had a civilization even older than the Olt’kitapi’s,
but it also fell easily.

“Figuring out how much space the Krall actually control will
be hard, because our friend suggests a number of these lost races were possibly
included
within
the sphere of influence of the Olt’kitapi. Some were friendly
with the Olt’kitapi, and were probably neighbors that were conquered by the Krall
as they consolidated their hold.

“The total volume is complicated because the Krall shifted direction
to grab whatever space any new race they found occupied. It would probably be lumpy
looking if we could see it on a galactic map of the Orion Spur. An interesting trivial
fact I learned from our friend is that an early space telescope, named after Johnannes
Kepler, did a planet search in the Krall’s general direction.

“We presently are hundreds of light years off to the side of
that old search area, towards the gap by the Sagittarius Arm and the much more distant
core. Newborn was fairly close to an area where one of the now extinct races lived
thousands of years ago. That side of our Rim world settlements would have expanded
to touch on that space eventually, in a hundred years or so, so we were
destined to meet.

“It doesn’t sound like the Krall do any serious exploring and
expansion of their own volition; it’s more driven by their predatory instincts when
they detect fresh prey in new territory.

“They don’t even use all of the subjugated planets, partly because
the majority of habitable rocky worlds have lower gravity than the Krall like. They
simply depopulate worlds they don’t need and move on.

“Individually, a few races made specific scientific advances
that were new to the Krall, and which even the Olt’kitapi had not surpassed or discovered.
Nevertheless, collectively none of their opponents was as advanced as the original
contact race. The Krall take the better parts of the technology of defeated races,
provided it has a military use.

“They employ part of two surviving populations, the Torki
and the Prada, as slave labor to supply individual Krall clans with replacement
war material, or to grow food or build domes. They did not care to describe
them for us.

“A third surviving race is called the Raspani, and were
defeated many thousands of years ago. They had been peaceful space faring herbivores
with only a few dozen colonized worlds, occupying a relatively small volume of space.
Their description sounds like a cross between a centaur and a hippo.

“That they described them at all was unique, since they didn’t
do so for any other race. However, that race still survives because they taste extremely
good to our big red devils. They are described as meat animals, raised on many of
their worlds in herds. Part of the food stores they brought aboard are from that
source, and herds are grazing now in a protected compound on Koban.

“There has been no experience with a ‘feral’ alien species for
many generations of Krall. They don’t yet appreciate how tricky and deceitful humans
can be. I think they are out of practice dealing with aliens, and will have to check
their historical records.

“The Krall all seem surprised at how backward we are in technology,
yet we have managed to settle many hundreds of star systems within a radius of about
five hundred light years of our home planet. This is apparently a lot higher colony
density than any of the other races achieved, in a smaller radius. It suggests to
me that humans are perhaps more adaptable that the other prey races the Krall
met.

“They assume humans have been in space and expanding for tens
of thousands of years, as had the other races with a comparable volume of space.
We strike them as scientifically and perhaps intellectually dim for that reason.
They have not grasped that barely seven hundred years ago humanity had not mastered
flight within their own home planet’s atmosphere. They are certainly underestimating
us based on that assumption. We seem to be hyperactive galactic prodigies compared
to the races the Krall have met, but we are still weak small kids in their schoolyard.

“They have the ability to increase population quickly by expanding
breeding rights and by producing many more eggs. Yes, they are egg layers, and do
not give live birth. They don’t nurture their young as we do, but the cubs are born
with much higher levels of motility and physical capability, no surprise there.
Females are also warriors, and lay clutches of ten to twenty eggs at a time.

“At about age five or six, they catch the little self-raised
killers and start their education and training to enter novice stage, perhaps in
their teens or later, depending on their individual progress. They continue to learn
and study throughout adult hood, something we humans can do but apparently not to
the Krall’s extent.

“If a large population increase is needed, they can provide simple
prey to cubs and allow more of them reach age five. Then start them on mass combat
training as sort of “cannon fodder” when needed for major wars. Some few of those
novices prove to be successful warriors, and gain status and breeding rights.