Koban: The Mark of Koban (29 page)

Only she
was all alone. At best they would die connected to her umbilical, at worst
eaten by those that had killed her. Then oddly, a strong mind picture that
could not have come from her pride pushed its way forward into her fading mind.
The female she had killed had wanted cubs of her own. Her “pride” of slow ones loved
their own cubs, of course, but often loved the cubs of other species. They may
not save them, but they would never eat her cubs. She experienced one final
lucid moment before expelling her cubs in their membranous sac. She sent them a
powerful mental image of their mother’s devotion and love.

****

The
shuttle hovered at low altitude, well to the side of the downed ripper, blowing
the grasses and dust about violently. All four on board were watching the
heaving sides of the great teal colored cat as it took its final breaths, blood
pouring from the massive shoulder wound.

Noreen was
the first to notice, because the left side cockpit window was closest. “Oh my
God! It’s a pregnant female, she’s aborting.”

She
abruptly set down and shut off the thrusters. Both men kept steady aim on the
motionless huge cat, ready to resume a withering fire if the animal so much as
twitched. Noreen rushed to the left rear hatch and looked ready to step outside
when Dillon reached over to place a gauntlet on her thigh, holding her back.

“Noreen,
don’t go out there, what if it’s waiting for us to do just that?”

“Dillon,
it just gave birth, as it quit breathing. We may be able to keep the cub alive
if we act fast. We may never get another chance to see a live one up close.” He
heard the urgency in her voice, echoed immediately by Marlyn.

The two
men got to their feet, and motioning the women to draw their weapons and stay
behind them, they stepped down into the grass, now blown flat. Keeping their
rifles trained on the still cat, they cautiously covered the twenty feet to the
beautifully muscled animal. Its teal fur was short and sleek.

The men were
startled by a slight movement near the ripper’s rear. Then shocked when the two
women abruptly went around them, and approached the bluish pink translucent sack
where the movement was located.

Noreen
reached back with an impatient wave of her right hand to Dillon, who had
protectively stepped close behind her. “Give me your knife, quick!”

He bent
down, drew the eighteen-inch blade, and gave it to her handle first.

She
quickly inserted the sharp tip in a lifting motion and cut the wet and bloody
looking sack open. She and Marlyn pulled the membrane away and revealed two
slimy and wet looking little teal colored cubs. The two umbilical cords, as with
mammal analogs of many worlds, passed through the sack and into their dead
mother. They were wriggling and mewling, their eyes closed.

With
“ooohs” and “ahhhs,” Noreen gathered the two cords and cut them both, with
enough slack left for her to tie them in knots. She and Marlyn then each
reached down to gently pick them up with hands hooked under their front legs.
Ignoring the mess, they cradled the wet cubs against their shirts, using their
sleeves to wipe at their mewling faces.

Marlyn was
the first to place her hand under the chin of her four-pound cub, were there
was a fleshy frill under its chin. She instantly froze, with her thumb and
forefinger cupped under the cubs chin. None of the others noticed that right
away. Then Noreen also placed her bare hand under the second cub’s neck to
raise its head, and she promptly ceased moving and cooing to the little ripper.

Thad
noticed Marlyn’s stillness and touched her arm in the process of asking her a
question. “Hey, why so…” The words froze in his mouth. Even filtered through the
gauntlet’s contact with her arm, the confusing images were startling for their
novelty and clarity. He saw flashes of life through the eyes of generations of rippers.
Felt a ripper’s delight at the sense of terror experienced from their prey, understood
the now dead father’s fateful instructions to his mate. He saw the images of
the two humans the ripper had killed in her hunger, experienced the mother’s powerful
last message of love to her cubs, and sensed her regret for killing the female
human who had wanted cubs of her own.

Thad cried
out and pulled Marlyn’s hand away from the cub as he pulled back. She nearly
collapsed, abruptly sitting down, bursting into tears.

Dillon was
now aware that something strange was happening, connected in some way with the
cubs; he reached down to pull the cub from Noreen’s arms. As his armored hand
made contact with hers, he also touched the cub’s frill. He experienced the
same kaleidoscope of images pouring into his mind.

After
several seconds, with an effort of sheer will power, he broke contact by
pulling his hand away. However, Noreen remained frozen with her hand on the cub’s
neck. He now knew the source of the mesmerizing images, and how to end them. 
He had to break Noreen’s contact with the frill without his touching her
directly with his conductive armor or bare skin. He snatched off his fabric pistol
and ammo belt, dropped the end through the gap between her right arm and side,
looped it under her wrist and pulled her hand away. He did this gently. He didn’t
want her to drop the cub, simply to break the connection.

Noreen
also had tears in her eyes, and looked wobbly on her legs. Dillon helped her
sit, as Thad also moved to support Marlyn from behind. The two men, helmet
faceplates already open, looked at each other, the look of amazement and wonder
mutually apparent, and they each knew the other understood exactly what they
had both experienced. Knew what the two women must have felt, only stronger
with their bare skin contact, and for a longer time.

Thad
summed it up in his own delicate and expressive manner. “Holy crap! That was
intense.”

Dillon
agreed. “I was nearly knocked over by the raw emotions and images. I could
sense it was filtered down through secondary contact with Noreen, but I believe
my dual nervous system may have fed me the images more strongly than I would
have experienced otherwise. I experienced each image twice. Did you?”

“I absolutely
did. I also picked up feelings and images that didn’t come from that cub or its
mother. Marlyn, is that how you really feel about me?” He was kneeling beside
her, leaning over to look into her eyes.

Dazed,
Marlyn answered, her tears having ended. “I sensed your worry and fear for me,
how protective and caring you felt. And you have one wicked fantasy that I
think I’ll be happy to fulfill, you randy man!” Her voice grew stronger as she
finished, flashing him a sultry smile.

Looking
down at the cub she said, “I also think I’ll keep my bare hand off that little
gal’s neck for a bit. I definitely want to be better prepared next time.” She
realized she held a little female, and her brother was resting in Noreen’s lap.

Noreen was
also emphatic. “I agree. I
will
try that again. However, it needs to be under
controlled conditions, and I’ll be in a better mentally prepared state. Oh, and
Dillon, I accept!”

“Huh?” he
responded, a marvelous reflection on what a brilliant perceptive scientist he
was.

“That was
a marriage proposal I sensed from you, you big dummy. I was going to ask
you
,
just as a proper Lady should. Nevertheless, I’ll ‘sign the line’ and ‘tie the
knot.’ That will be shortly after we return to Prime City with this new genetic
treasure for Aldry and Rafe. The first example of contact telepathy humanity
has ever discovered.”

Thad
agreed with the quick return. “Dillon, grab that cargo net from the shuttle. We
need to take the adult ripper back with us, and see if she has any milk we can extract
and replicate for these soon to be hungry cubs. I’ll call Tet to tell him what
we’ve found, and that we need to get back to Prime City today.”

Noreen had
a better idea. “No, please, let me call him. I hope this news will take his
mind off my punching the lights out of Cahill. Besides, I can invite him to the
wedding and bribe him with an offer to make him a godfather. Oh, that reminds
me. Dillon, like you were thinking, I also want to have a boy first.”

“Huh?”

“Close
your mouth love, there are flies out here.”

The president was tired of excuses from the Planetary
Union Navy. Three years of expensive breakneck construction, and the Krall were
still raiding Rim and New Colony worlds at will. Her conduit into the inner workings
of the Navy was her military advisor, Admiral Anderfem, retired. She was on the
carpet right now, and told to sit quiet and hear the President out.

Stanford had her summary list for reference. “Jean,
you passed along the Navy’s requests to me, with your recommendation to support
their construction programs and to push for them in Parliament. I did that, and
every program requested was approved and budgeted.

“The Navy now has their new faster fleet. All
of the ships were purpose built, or modified to use the new Tachyon Squared
Jump, and better Normal Space drives, copied from Krall technology.”

She almost knew it by heart, but she checked
the list anyway. “We’ve built them two carriers, each with fifty single piloted
fighters and twenty-five two-man fighters. Two huge dreadnaughts, six
battleships, eight battlecruisers, a dozen heavy cruisers, fifty destroyers,
twenty patrol ships, two mine layers, and various support ships that are too
many to count.” She laid the summary on her desk.

“Add to that total the old ships we already
had, which now have retrofitted T-squared drives. That’s one more battleship,
thirty cruisers that are actually light cruisers now, and sixty destroyers that
are more like glorified large patrol boats in the new Navy.

“By the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs own
reckoning, we have thirty-one capitol ships to none that we know of for sure
for the Krall. Even our old retrofitted cruisers would seem to be a match for a
Krall Clanship. I read the intelligence estimates that we have observed roughly
four thousand Clanships, but most stay parked on our former colony, now designated
as Krall base one or K1.

“We are heavily outnumbered in total ships as
of yet, by about four thousand to 171 fighting ships. However, it looks to me
that the quality of our larger ships can give us the advantage if we pick our
battles wisely. I’m hardly a military mind, but this seems self-evident to me,
and to the public that has been paying for these ‘toys’ for the Navy.

“The Krall have yet to deploy in force against
us,
seldom
using more than one to sixteen Clanships on a
raid, as they called them in those more recent broadcasts to us in Standard. Nevertheless,
there’s nearly always a raid underway on some Rim world or New Colony, often
two or three raids in the same week on different worlds.

“These raids are
always
initiated by
Clanships, which I’m told are roughly equivalent to a light cruiser in mass,
but are used mainly as troop transports or pocket fighter carriers for their
single ships. We have seen a few Krall ships the size of our battleships, but
we have never seen what they do. They arrive at K1, land for a few days, then
lift and Jump for parts unknown.

“The summary reports say the enemy has
attacked us in only two ways. Dash in with one or more Clanships, release eight
to thirty-two single ships from each, then leave for a couple of days before
returning to pick up the warrior survivors. Then three months ago, they started
landing and offloading five hundred or so fighters per Clanship at large cities
or towns. They used eight to sixteen Clanships on three occasions, almost a
duplicate of the action initiated on Gribbles’ Nook. Then they pull out in three
days, before we even learn of the attack here in the Hub. Not even the new T
squared fast couriers can tell us soon enough to send help. The local ground
commanders have to fight them with their own forces. Luckily, the citizenry
isn’t as completely helpless as they once were. Nevertheless, they are no match
for the Krall, who swarm to the sounds of a firefight.

“The Navy has yet to
prevent a
single
one
of these attacks, or to drive them off before they damn well decide to
leave. The Krall make what looks exactly like preplanned orderly withdrawals nearly
every time. Only worlds following Poldark’s mobile force example have ever gotten
an attack to terminate early, by killing twenty-five to forty percent of the
Krall attackers. That is entirely a ground force success. Provided we consider
triple the combat casualties on our side a success. Obviously, the uncounted
thousands of civilians that they saved think it’s more successful than their
own slaughter.  

“The new armor, weapons improvements, and
recruitment that the ground commanders asked for was delayed for eighteen
months, to allow us to pay the Navy’s immense budget. The Army’s
total
request was just about the cost of a single new battleship.