Koban: The Mark of Koban Read online

  “Terrific! That really makes this crap much more enjoyable today. Thanks.” Thad grumbled.

  “How soon before you said we might experience the premonition illusion?” Dillon inquired. “I’m sure I’m experiencing it right now.”

  Rafe looked puzzled. “Sensing something an instant before your standard nerve path does? That can’t happen until the superconductor nerves complete most of their growth. It shouldn’t occur this early.” Now he looked worried, as did Maggi and Aldry, sensitive to anything going wrong.

  “Well,” Dillon looked alarmed, “I sense I’m about to throw up this shitty tasting food.” He watched their faces for an instant before he burst out laughing.

  Whack!

  “Hey! I hid your damned wood strip,” Dillon yelped.

  “What?” Maggi asked smugly. “There’s only one piece of wood on Koban?”

  ****

  “Commander,” Noreen called out, “Port side, a bit behind us, I think I saw one just outside the wall.” She liked using his new title, despite his mild objections.

  Mirikami stood up to change sides in the shuttle, to see where she pointed, just as Roni banked the craft left where indicated, causing him to half fall into the left side seats.

  “Were?” he asked. Noreen shifted her arm to match the roll to the left, and indicated a spot now more to their front.

  “I see it. In fact there’s more than one, they’re directly against the outside of the wall.”

  As the shuttle passed well above Prime City’s compound wall, all three occupants could see there were four whiteraptors, feeding on a bloodied white haired moosetodon. It appeared they had trapped it against the thirty-foot high wall, isolated from the rest of its herd. Tracks in the three feet of snow showed the direction the rest of the fleeing herd had gone.

  “Jake, was right when he said to look over here. He couldn’t see them on cameras from the ship or dome, but the new seismic sensors picked up the stampede. Dillon predicted the sensors should detect something like this.” It was an idea conceived after Dillon had felt the ground tremble on a hunt last month, when raptors chased a moosetodon herd.

  Mirikami bobbed his head in approval. “The sensors are not only a way to passively scout for nearby herds to hunt, but if there’s a stampede we need to be on the alert for predators.” The four raptors looked up suspiciously at the sound of the shuttle, but didn’t seem in the least frightened. With their size and speed, not much should frighten them. They were apex predators.

  Noreen had a question to have relayed to Jake. “Roni,” she called to the pilot, “Ask Jake if he still can detect the herd’s vibrations. I see the snow cloud they’re kicking up, at least five miles away.”

  The AI was out of transmitter range of their tiny embedded transducers, which only had an effective range of about seven miles. Roni used the shuttle radio.

  The pilot asked the question, listened a long moment, and repeated the reply. “He says they have slowed, but he can still identify a sensor signal from them, now that he has a sample of what the seismic pattern is. From the center of the compound, he believes he can probably identify a herd of moosetodon simply marching at thirty to thirty five miles out, and if stampeding, much farther away. He asked me about a jumbled harmonic with them that didn’t match the four-legged moosetodon patterns. Any idea what that might have been?”

  “It may have been the hopping and running two legged raptors he picked up,” Mirikami surmised. When these three depart, we can find out what if anything he can detect from them in isolation. I don’t suppose they’ll be leaving any time soon. There’s a lot more meat than they can finish in a single meal. They will likely stay close for a day or more.”

  Roni had a question. “What use is Jake going to make of identifying the sound of the big animals?”

  “He’ll help us conserve shuttle fuel,” Noreen provided.

  “Excuse me?” The crinkling over the bridge of her nose displayed her confusion. “How does he manage that by the pitter patter of big feet?”

  Noreen explained. “When we range farther to hunt, we use more shuttle fuel. Until we can manufacture our own, we have to siphon from the grounded ships. Knowing when we can hunt closer to home saves longer trips.”

  “Oh. Well, in the interest of saving some of that fuel,” Roni proposed, “why can’t we give Jake the footsteps he needs to detect the raptors right now? We can buzz low over them, as we do rhinolo herds to drive them away from our own kills. We might even be able to salvage most of that fresh meat. We have a sling in back.”

  Mirikami pulled at his lower lip, his usual indication of thinking something through. “Besides giving Jake his data, and possibly gaining some meat, I’d like to know how fast these things can run, and how hard they are to chase away.” He explained his reason.

  “Thad and Dillon waited in their shuttle several hours for three of them to walk away from their own hunting kills the first time they encountered these things. A shuttle buzz might have cut down the waiting time. They had already sat freezing for a couple of hours in a snow filled crevasse, just waiting for the raptors to get gorged and sleepy.”

  He clapped his hands together. “Let’s try it Roni. Swing around to the inside of the compound and pass low over the wall. They won’t see us coming until we’re directly overhead. That should make them jump.” Those were prophetic words.

  Mirikami took the right side second seat in the cockpit, while Noreen leaned over their shoulders in the open doorway. Roni slowed the shuttle to what was essentially a forward drifting hover, moving towards the perimeter wall at about fifteen miles per hour, ten feet higher than the roughly thirty foot high flat-topped wall.

  The Krall had originally capped the wall with an additional twenty-foot electrified fence. The humans had scavenged the fencing here, to form a smaller electrified fenced compound around the dome. They had needed to do this after an angry Krall raid leader had destroyed all sixteen gates in the wall, because he was pissed off at Mirikami.

  This retribution had allowed dangerous large native animals and predators to enter the human’s compound. Getting the animals back outside of an area twenty-six miles in radius was beyond the former captive’s ability at present, so they built an inner electric fence barricade, salvaged from the top of the wall.

  Roni called the AI, “Jake, we will use the shuttle to drive off the four raptors feeding next to the wall. Be alert for the seismic impacts when we tell you they are running away from their kill.”

  “Yes Mam.”

  Noreen asked, “Roni, we can’t see them, are we lined up with where they’re feeding?” As they approached the wall this low, it blocked the view of the feeding raptors.

  Roni pointed through the front plazsteel window, “The two bushes sticking up through the snow, next to the wall, those are just a bit to the left of where they’re located on the other side. If I stay to the right of those bushes, it will take us directly over their heads when we cross over. That’ll get us some action.”

  As the shuttle drew closer to the wall, the thruster noise, muffled for the occupants was clearly audible outside. On the blind side of the wall, the increasing noise caused the four raptors to pause in their feeding. They weren’t even close to feeling sated, not after the energy burned stalking and chasing that herd for several miles.

  Something was coming closer, its rumbling roar resembling to them a threat to take their kill away. They were the alpha predators in their food chain, so there wasn’t anything that would force them to back down. Sensing the direction of the threat, the largest female backed away from their kill by several hops, craning her long neck to try to see the threat from over the lip of the wall.

  The instant she saw the nose of the oncoming interloper beyond the rim of the wall, she screamed a challenge and rushed towards the wall, using the seven-foot mound of dead moosetodon as a launching pad. Her leap intersected the wall twenty-five feet up just as the intruder passed over the top. She kicked again on the wall
and deflected her two-ton body higher, banking off the wall’s rough side.

  Roni had left the retractable landing skids extended, because they were only making a low speed short flight from the dome. The raptor grabbed the “limb” in its jaws, and momentum swung its heavy body up under the shuttle to strike at its exposed underbelly, using one of its carbon fiber eighteen-inch long slashing toe claws. The hard claw deeply scoured the surface of the metal, but didn’t gut the “animal” as the raptor expected.

  However, the claw did find purchase when it hooked on the same right side skid, and her added mass rolled her opponent to its right side. She pulled it to the ground with her, even as it roared louder, and fought to fly away in its strange wingless manner.

  In the cockpit, the three had been watching intently to catch first sight of the big raptors, to observe their reaction. To have one suddenly launch itself up at them, jaws agape and already above the top, startled all three.

  Roni, at the controls, yelled “Damn!” and immediately applied power to the smaller vertical thrusters, but not the powerful main rear thruster. This proved to be a crucial mistake, because the powerful rear thrust would have broken them free.

  As they felt the heavy thud on the underbelly, the shuttle rolled hard towards its right side. The vertical thrust vector quickly became a horizontal one, unable to counter gravity and an additional two tons of mass. It took only seconds for the small craft to fall forty feet, where the impact in the snow was partly nose down, rolling onto its right side.

  Mirikami and Noreen, neither one secured, flew forward, with Noreen falling into Mirikami in the right seat, forcing him painfully into the cockpit window and ceiling. Roni, strapped in, was still turning the yoke to the left when they struck, and now cut the useless thrusters completely.

  Fortunately, the forward velocity was low, but Mirikami hit the ceiling with more force than he could resist, particularly with another person’s weight on his left side. He struck his head, causing a laceration, and he lost consciousness.

  The raptor had been brushed off as the craft scraped along the ground in its short skid. The aggressive female scrambled to her feet, bruised but uninjured, and now prepared to finish the kill. Her three pack mates, two females and a young male, raced to join her in subduing this unknown competitor.

  Inside, Noreen, also bruised but uninjured, called out, “Tet?” When he was unresponsive, she saw the blood dripping from his head wound, where he lay on the right side window.

  Roni, unwilling to unstrap because she would then fall onto Noreen and Mirikami, told her “I can pull him up by his arm if you can drag him between the seats into the back when I do.” They both obviously thought they could administer first aid better in the larger rear compartment, even if it was lying sideways.

  As they started lifting and pulling the smaller than average sized man from the cockpit seat, crashing impacts on the outside began, and shaking and rocking of the shuttle made the task more difficult. However, Noreen managed to get Mirikami onto her lap, head cradled, where she lay awkwardly along the aisle, stretched across several sideways seats.

  “The blood is from a minor scalp cut Roni,” she told her companion. “It isn’t serious, but the loss of consciousness worries me.” Neither woman paid much attention to the raptors banging on the outside of the shuttle. After all, it was a spacecraft, built for the potential stress of a less-than-optimal atmospheric reentry. Flesh and blood wasn’t likely to tear through the hardened carbon fiber composite hull.

  The shuttle suddenly rocked more violently, as the frustrated largest raptor leaped onto the creature that refused to bleed, tear open, or fight back. Her weight bearing down on the now top side extended left skid, caused the shuttle to roll back upright with a jarring thud to those inside.

  With Tet now on the flat surface of the open aisle, Noreen pulled him farther into the rear cabin, as Roni helped untangle and lift his legs and feet from the right seat and center control console.

  Noreen lowered Tet’s head gently and said, “I’ll get the first aid kit. See if you can contact Jake to get some help out here.” As she glanced up at Roni, what she saw behind her friend froze her breathing and raised the hairs on the back of her neck.

  Looking through the plazsteel were two fearsome toothy faces, their forward facing blue eyes staring in at them. Roni, seeing Noreen’s wide-eyed reaction, looked to the front and gave a shriek when she saw two sets of killer teeth, just feet from her face.

  Roni laughed in nervous reaction. “Crap! That scared me half to death.” She reached for the radio mike clipped to the control yoke. She had just keyed, saying “Jake…,” when she flinched involuntarily as the larger raptor lunged its face into the plazsteel directly at her. The bang on the transparent steel-hard surface was unnerving, but it wasn’t scratched, let alone cracked.

  Jake’s voice came over the open speaker circuit. “Yes Mam? I detected several possible running impacts, then a very heavy impact signal. However, the sensors reported no extended running. Did…” Roni cut him off.

  “We crashed Jake,…” The rest of that transmission was never completed.

  The alpha female, frustrated at the rigidity of the flying animal’s body and its lack of fight, was drawn to look into its giant eye by the gaze of her youngest offspring, the smaller male raptor. He had seen movement within the creature, behind its clear eyes.

  The female saw a small animal moving just inside, perhaps an unborn offspring of this bizarre unknown thing. She struck hard at it, earning only a painful smashed muzzle and the feel of a broken front tooth. Enraged, she pulled her head back, leaped into the lair at least ten feet, and brought down her right leg and foot, carbon fiber claw cocked and ready. Just as the foot reached the large eye, she brought the claw down with maximum force.

  With satisfaction, she felt the creature’s eye shatter, and a scream of fear sounded from within. Her impudent young son rushed to insert his head in the eye to snap at the presumed fetus. He quickly discovered this creature’s young were less helpless that the mature adult appeared to be.

  There were loud reports from inside the larger animal’s head, accompanied by screams of fear and pain. Some of that came from her offspring. The mother roughly shouldered the brash youngster aside, and it withdrew a bloody maw with something in his teeth, but his left eye was also gushing blood.

  In the cockpit, Roni screamed with greater fear when the shattering impact broke open the entire one-piece crystal of plazsteel. She frantically pressed the seat harness quick release, but a large head came darting into the opening as she rolled to her right to get out of the seat. A crunch of bone as teeth sank into her left forearm brought a scream of pain. Her right hand reached for her pistol, as she heard shots sound from the cabin area. Noreen had both her weapons out, blazing away at the head and neck of the raptor.

  Roni managed to bring her pistol up and fired it at near contact range into the intense blue eye of that fearsome head. She thought it was about to release its crushing grip as the bite pressure eased. However, the larger raptor knocked it roughly aside, and her lower left arm separated and went with the beast. It withdrew, snarling with the pain of its lost eye and multiple other neck and head wounds.

  In shock, Roni turned again towards Noreen, struggling to climb out of the seat, blood spurting from the left arm stump. Noreen, keeping a gun in her left hand, reached with her right hand to pull her friend out of the cockpit and into the main cabin. They nearly succeeded.

  Roni’s eyes stayed locked onto her friend’s when the end came, Noreen’s hand pulling her right forearm instead of her hand, because Roni still held her pistol.

  The larger raptor struck again, this time without a plazsteel barrier in the way, and sank its teeth solidly into the body of its screaming victim. It started to withdraw its head when the supposed helpless “fetus” began somehow striking the raptor with painful loud blows on its face and mouth. It saw another supposed “fetus” behind the first, holding onto the one i
t held in its jaws. It too was somehow hitting the raptor painfully with loud noises. Suddenly the animal in its jaws experienced a spasm, and then grew still. The other “fetus” continued to strike the raptor, and the female suddenly lost vision in one eye. It quickly pulled away from this surprisingly difficult prey, taking the small kill it had so painfully earned.

  Noreen, sobbing at Roni’s terrible death, grabbed Mirikami’s jacket collar and drug his limp form to the back wall of the cabin. Presumably, the raptors wouldn’t be able to reach them there. That was her hope.

  Wiping her tears, she reloaded both her weapons and confirmed Tet’s were loaded before getting the first aid kit from the rear bulkhead compartment.

  She could hear Jake’s voice on the cockpit speaker, but wasn’t about to go forward to answer. The sounds of raptor snarls and crunching steps in the snow were too close.

  Jake had made some correct assumptions. He said another two shuttles were coming, and that he had informed them that there were whiteraptors present.

  Mirikami started to stir as she applied a sealing gel to his one-inch scalp cut. The battery powered med kit analyzer indicated a mild concussion with no internal bleeding of his brain. She administered the anti-swelling agent the kit recommended, and a mild pain reliever.

  Mirikami recovered his senses quickly, and immediately felt the cold outer air in the cabin, with the unfiltered smell of fresh air, mixed with a musty animal odor. He looked around the rest of the empty cabin area, and at the broken front windscreen. He glanced at Noreen, the unasked question obvious to her tortured mind. What happened, where is Roni?

  The tears came again, but his time the dam burst. She was hardly able to get the words out, that Roni was gone, the raptors had her, she couldn’t let her go, couldn’t let them eat her alive. Sobs wracked her at every breath. Despite the dizziness as he pushed himself to a sitting position, Tet pulled Noreen to his shoulder, and she cried there, repeating how she couldn’t let them have her.