Koban Universe 1 (3 page)

Looking for a route for
escape, she headed for the closest stairs, planning to shoot her way up the steps, intending to exit through one of the outer wall openings. As she turned that way, one of the young Krall directly above her leaped from the second level rail, straight down at her. She shot it through its gaping, tooth-filled mouth, while it was in mid ultrasonic screech.

The loud report
of the .45 ended the low frequency sound restrictions, when that dead, five-foot killer smacked into the floor, a future dinner for others. There were impressive roars of anger from those that witnessed the killing. They might not feel individual loyalty when they ate that dead clan mate, but peer pressure and instinct said they couldn’t tolerate the existence of prey animals that attacked them.

Five more
of the pre-novice aged Krall launched from the railings, just as more turned the corners of the nearest radial corridors. She calmly picked off all five that were dropping towards her, headshots each, and stepped away from where she had been standing, to let the corpses land there. Their leaps were as accurate as any adult’s would have been, right on target.

For most
sentient creatures, six noisily delivered deaths would probably have turned them back, or at least caused them to pause. If anything, she appeared to have triggered a berserker’s rage that she had only heard described. The lower pitched screams of rage were nearly as loud as any delivered by an adult. If they had been armed with guns, she’d already be dead. Only a few older ones even carried a club.

If she was going to get away, she needed to find a route out
now, or a secure place to stand them off while she called for backup. Her mind in high gear, she decided that the swarming balconies were no safer than the ground floor, and the radial passageways were filling with them, funneling them into the hall. There had to be many hundreds of them.

She couldn’t help her next wry thought.
How the hell did they plan to divide me up? A bite apiece?

As she fired the Krall pistol
eight times to make a lane, she stepped over bodies and moved past the front of a closed elevator door. On a wild hunch, she holstered the .45 in a blur, and stuck a finger in a talon hole on the call panel to see if the door would whisk open. It didn’t. No power, of course. Probably being backed into a box with no way out wasn’t a good idea anyway.

Down! There were none of the maniacal horrors coming up from below, and plenty coming down the stairs.
She drew the .45, and both guns blazing, one with a SWOOSH, the other BLAM, she accurately plowed her way through the dozen midsized Krall leaping and rushing down from the upper levels. Her eyes already adapted to lower light, she saw no sign of heat signatures below, or movement in the dimmer light. When she entered the darkness, her eyes would adapt more to the lower light, giving her the full night vision of a ripper.

Holstering the .45 again,
she leaped down to the first landing where the stairs turned, and swapped the magazine on the Krall pistol even before lightly touching down on the balls of her feet. There were Twenty-nine rounds gone, twenty-five Krall dead and four with serious head wounds. She knew that her remaining ammunition wasn’t enough, even at the same efficient one-shot-one-down rate, to keep her alive for another fifteen minutes. Not if the berserker’s rage of the feral Krall continued to drive them to kill her at any cost.

“Link to Team
.” The transducer, a rice grain sized device buried behind her right ear, would use that audio cue to connect to Cory and Danner, if they were within range.

She didn’t wait for an acknowledgement and she stared talking.
“Boys, I found feral Krall inside the dome. I need your help to get out.”

The answer was
relatively quick, but for someone with an organic superconducting nervous system, the delay of almost three seconds was very noticeable. The signal, as she descended below the metal framework of the dome and flooring, with a steel ceiling now over her head, was weaker than if relayed by the transmitter of an Artificial Intelligence on a spacecraft. They were relying on the signal strength of only their small transducers, perhaps twenty miles in open territory. She was underground and they were in dense woodlands.

Cory
answered her, and the signal was weak and broken. “Aunt Maggi, we found …em too. We’re fighting… way… to the shuttle. We didn’t take… ammunition…us, so we’ll reload, lift off…., laser… way through …., …et to you. Tel…where you are.”

Maggi was shocked by, and ashamed of her earlier display of spite and pettiness. Not because they had encountered other Krall,
she hadn’t caused that, but by the instant realization that she had locked the shuttle hatch with a new code, to force them to set up the camp before they ate. The small amount of spare ammunition was locked inside with the food. They never expected a fight.

She could hear the Krall
’s talons on the stairs above her, so going back up to improve reception would expose her to dozens of them, leaping down the stairs at her. She stood her ground a moment, firing accurately around the corner and up the stairs.

“Cory
, the new code for the hatch is two one four one, the hatch code is two one four one. Do you hear me?”

“… what? … we…”

She couldn’t remain this far up the steps to hear what else he might have said in that broken transmission. She fired her last round from the .45, then used its butt to smash in the skull of a four foot, red eyed little demon. It had suddenly leaped down onto the back of the corpse she had just created. Between its grasping talons, her hand flashed out and back before it could close its grip. After that, the deep pistol butt shaped dent between its blazing red eyes occupied what little mind it had left.

She whirled and leaped down another
entire flight, as the thuds of her pursuers struck the landing she had just vacated. There was no more ammunition for the smaller gun, so she holstered that and snapped the retainer while she leaped down another flight, firing the Krall pistol again as she did. The .45 could always be a short club if needed, since those boney heads were hard on your bare hands.

The
faded light from above illuminated the open stairwell, enough for her night vision to see two more flights left, before reaching the first level of the factory. That was always where administrative offices for the slave managers were located. The Krall didn’t go in for safety railings, so slipping over the side was a possibility if you went too fast. The sound of several snarling bodies falling past her on the right, demonstrated that fact. If they survived the fall in the 1.52 g’s of Koban gravity, they’d try to intercept her when she reached the bottom.

She couldn’t see very far away from the pool of dim light around the stairs. Had she been reliant on her normal human vision, she would be all but blind, with only the faint glow above revealing the shadows of the hell that was coming for her.

When she reached the last landing, the heavy thudding sounds of two other Krall landing to the sides of the stairwell told her more were down ahead of her. Unlike trained warriors, these advertised their presence and intentions with deep-throated screams. The two closest ones moved towards the base of the steps from her right.

She could see
both were limping, with an obviously broken leg for one, because she could see a bone protruding. Krall were bred to ignore pain, and had and astounding ability to halt bleeding. These were likely the first two that had plummeted past her, with the longest drop. They retained the natural physical gifts bred into them, and had landed on their feet, even if striking with a force greater than their thick muscular legs could absorb.

Two
half-grown Krall had jumped down to her left to try to get ahead of her, or perhaps they were pushed off by the press of bodies. No matter how it happened, they were attempting to cut off her retreat from the two larger Krall.

She kept track of every round
from each magazine, and had two left in this one, with four targets below her. In training, she was told to swap magazines more often, to avoid running empty. However, with her speed of reloading, the lack of armed opponents, and her limited ammunition, she intended to use every single shot she had. One-on-one, she could probably defeat and kill a full-grown warrior with her hands. However, she couldn’t afford to let them slow her down while others closed the gap.

Her next direction to run was chosen
for her by the two cripples. She shot the two healthy ones, as they came into the light from her left, a slug through an eye for each. Then pulled her knife from its calf sheath, and made a running leap from the landing that took her in a high summersault over the two cripple’s up-reaching arms. She figured correctly that they couldn’t jump high, and would be too slow. When she was inverted over their heads, she reached down in a flashing motion and lopped off extended fingers, on both hands for one of them, and on a single hand of the other. The molecular thin edge, and hardened blade, could significantly scour most metals. Flesh and bone wasn’t much of an obstacle. Using knives on human captives was a warrior’s entertainment for the trained killers. This was not fun for her, simply self-defense.

Her memory of the standard layout
of Krall factories, told her this corridor split in three directions at the base of each set of stairs. She could go left, right, or straight away from the last step. She had chosen the right side, because the two slowed cripples she jumped over were to her right. This would circle her towards the next stairs along the corridor ring that passed behind the elevator shafts. The inbred undisciplined beasts all seemed to have charged to the same stairway where she had descended. She imagined it was similar to being pursued by the Krall equivalent of Neanderthals, if even that bright.

There were
no sounds from ahead of her in the nearly inky darkness, where a pale glow of dim light came down the next stairwell.

She noticed that her Infrared vision, somewhat less sensitive than that of the Krall, was detecting
small heat related contrasts along conduits and dead light fixtures on the walls. These helped guide her around the gentle curve. She didn’t make any more sound than necessary, but those after her didn’t need to hear her footsteps to guide them. They could literally follow their noses. Her own sense of smell was claimed to be equal to that of the Krall, but hunting
them
down in the dark wasn’t her problem. They only needed to follow the single scent that was hers.

They were following
noisily after her now, and she intended to stay far enough around the curve to avoid a direct IR image of her heated body. With her enhanced metabolism, she’d be quite visible in the dark. She put on a burst of speed to get to the second junction around, and pressed her hand hard against the inner wall, dragging it and building friction.

When she reached the
selected junction, she passed the open stairwell, and dragged her hand along the wall on the other side, then lightly lifted it as she went. She next whirled and backtracked, to dive through the open radial corridor that led straight away from the bottom of the steps. She jumped as far as she could down that corridor to avoid a heat spot where she touched the deck. If she’d timed it right, she made the turnoff before the first of her chasers could catch a glimpse of her around the curve.

Not that she waited to see. This passage intersected with another concentric ring corridor in roughly twenty feet, and she made a left turn into that one before the sounds of pursuing growls and inarticulate grunts passed where she had made her
jump. As she had hoped, momentum kept them moving straight, and the scent trail continued briefly.

Most telling
for them was the faint IR glowing streak, which she’d left on the right side wall, focusing their attention to that side and away from her true direction. Even when the warm streak faded, the push of the mass behind the leaders moved them farther in the wrong direction. When the scent and IR streak ended, they had to shove to go back the way they came. Lacking language, they couldn’t communicate other than by clubbing those in their way, and displaying the signs that the trail had gone cold.

Soon, her new scent trail direction attracted Krall who had been farther back in the pack, and they moved into the correct corridor.
By then, Maggi had made another two turns and had gained some separation. It was effectively pitch black for visible light, and the temperature differences of the structure around her was largely based on the heat conductivity of the materials used. She had a memory of factory layouts from having been inside several other underground facilities, and this level was more or less a standard layout for any of them. Two levels down, the factory would open out into larger high ceilinged production and assembly areas, with hoists and abandoned machinery lining wide and open pathways between various manufacturing stations.