Koban: When Empires Collide Page 12

  Ragnar were far from the only forest creatures that took advantage of the path-vines, but most were smaller in mass. I sharp vibration transmitted along the sagging young vine had to be from something nearly of Candar’s own mass. He whipped his head around to look over his right shoulder, back along the vine towards its anchor tree.

  “You’re a pair of foul droppings, aren’t you?”

  The sound, more than the accusation startled him. The words were spoken in oddly accented Fotrol, and “dirty shits” had translated into a milder term than Macy intended.

  His right arm was already elevated, prepared to fling a whirling knife towards a target down on the path.

  He quickly, but carefully, turned to pivot his torso for a better throwing position, moving his right foot down to the vine, bringing his right shoulder around. The receiving end attachment point under him was secure, but the young tendrils had not hardened for maximum tensile strength yet.

  The human female stood, one foot close behind the other, perfectly balanced, a half body length from the path-vine’s anchor tree. Amazingly, with surprise to her advantage, her hands were empty. She hadn’t launched an attack at his exposed back. Perhaps she wasn’t adept at the skill of knife throwing. Nor of approaching your victim quietly, either.

  There was a knife sheath at her left hip, one on the outside of her lower right leg, and images had shown she had a medium length sword, carried in a scabbard slung down her back, held by a cross body strap. She shouldn’t have warned him, and he knew Felspan would have heard the words and see his movement. Both had been alerted by her foolishly giving away the element of surprise, which she had somehow achieved.

  The swish sound he heard to his left told him Felspan, her throwing arm in a better position, had hurled her first knife. He followed instantly with his own, so it would arrive a split second later, while the human was either ducking or struck by the first blade. He saw a flicker of her eyes to her right, proving she saw Felspan’s throw. His knife, aimed at her torso, would arrive just as she would be avoiding the first blade.

  He stamped lightly on the vine to distract her with the vibration. If she survived the first two blades, Felspan’s second would be on its way. He reached up and over his right shoulder to pull his second throwing knife, just as we saw a blur of arm movement from the human.

  The human was only a quarter of a tree height from him, almost exactly five body lengths from him, based on his expert judgement, and the laser range finder in his left eye. He estimated Felspan was two additional body lengths from the target, placing it well within a high probability for a deadly throw, and a certainty for his own to blade to strike the center of the human’s chest, sinking deep.

  He registered the enemy’s arm movement, as Felspan’s blade glittered in the brighter light at the forest’s edge. The human didn’t react as if she’d been struck, but his first blade was an instant from impact, and he used knives with a flat dull finish exactly because he didn’t want his opponent to see it coming, as he’d seen Felspan’s blade.

  He pulled his second blade, and threw it at the same moment he saw two things he considered impossible. The female raised her left hand, a blur to his vision, her body still perfectly balanced on the vine, and grabbed his throwing knife out of the air at chest height, holding its smooth handle. The second impossible thing, came in a glittering twirl, reflecting light from the edge of the forest behind him. That twirl ended with a solid sounding thud on his chest, as Felspan’s blade sunk slightly deeper than its balance point. He looked down to see the end of the throwing handle protruding from his chest, just as the searing pain of his punctured lung robbed him of his next breath.

  He didn’t see his own first blade hurled, left handed by the human, at Felspan, because he was grasping at the vine to halt his fall into the undergrowth below him. He caught the vine, but the sharp tug snapped the immature tendrils, and he started a short downward arc to meet the brambles and berries there. He’d expected to be browsing for those berries, after his kill. He wasn’t around for that, nor did he see what happened next.

  Felspan watched in disbelief when her blade was grabbed out of the air, and with a mere wrist flip, not a full arm movement, was thrown at Candar. She was already in the process of drawing and throwing her second blade, when she saw a repeat grab of Candar’s blade in mid-flight. Forewarned, she knew what would happen next. Even as her second blade was released, she used her forward arm momentum to hurl her body down, and being at an anchor tree for her path-vine, grabbed it in her fall to swing feet down, and dropped into the underbrush, just as she heard Candar’s knife smack against the tree above her. Since her body wasn’t there to receive the timed throw, it didn’t strike point first, and bounced off into the underbrush. She heard a crash on the other side of the trail, as something heavy hit the brambles. That close to Candar’s tree, it had to be him. If he’d been fully functional, he’d never have fallen, or landed so hard if he did. She was facing this human alone now.

  A glance up to the other side of the trail revealed that the vine had pulled free at Candar’s end, and the human couldn’t be seen. There had been no sound of another body falling into the brush from that height. It was too quiet. For a moment.

  “Come out, come out, I know where you are.” The words had a strange sing-song quality, but was in the same accented Farlol. No one had told her the enemy could speak their language, but then there had not been much time for a briefing. The direction of the words didn’t seem to be close the tree she’d used. It was closer. She was out in the open, on the trail. She moved quieter than one would expect, for a person that had not been raised in a forest like this.

  There wouldn’t be a camera image of this part of the trail, since the support pole was just outside in the open, and she knew it was blocked by trees a short distance into the forest gloom. She moved as quietly as her training taught her, and worked her way towards the trail, closer to the entry. She wanted the light behind her when she stepped onto the trail with the sunlight at her back, possibly dazzling her opponent.

  “Stop crunching around and get out in the open. I can even hear you breathing, and I know you are working your way closer to the path. I’ll stay where I am until you can see me. Too bad the camera view is blocked for you. If you keep moving closer to the outer glade, or whatever you call that area, I’ll be able to see you on that camera myself.”

  That comment startled Felspan. She has access to the training cameras?

  The voice was even farther away, so she pushed carelessly through the brush and brambles, and reached the trail. She was just at the edge of the coverage of the camera, which may have detected her movement. When she spoke, she knew it would pivot in her direction.

  Stepping onto the trail, she saw her opponent, relaxing, down on one knee. “You got here ahead of us. Clever move, to ambush the ambushers.”

  “I didn’t exactly ambush either of you. Surprise, yes, but I didn’t attack first. For some bizarre reason, I didn’t want to start the fight, but since you two did, I have no qualms about finishing what you started. I don’t know if your partner is dead, but it’s probable. Sorry for you it happened with your own knife. In any event, I didn’t select a good throwing blade out of those offered to us, so I had to use yours.”

  Seeing the smaller human should have given Felspan greater confidence, but the reason she was so successful as a knife fighting instructor, was her own size, speed, and agility, when pitted against one of the over muscled big Ragoons, that she needed to learn some of her art and skill.

  All she had left of her own weapons was a long double edged knife and a dagger in a sheath strapped to her right inner forearm. She drew both, aware that the human had a short sword, greater strength, and carried a hunting knife and a shorter blade strapped on her lower leg. Well, she only had two arms, and wore boots, which meant she didn’t have grasping feet, therefore a third weapon was only a backup. Her enemy watched, as she drew her weapons, and she stood up smoothly, and s
tarted walking gracefully towards her. She didn’t draw any of her own weapons.

  Felspan waited, letting her approach. This fight would take place within camera range. Either showing the world her victory, or providing her teammates with useful information about this enemy’s skill and abilities. These individuals were presumably not selected for their mission to Tantor because of their skill at this primitive form of warfare. Something for which her team of eight today was considered experts.

  With the image of her opponent catching and throwing back her knife, that last thought wasn’t as comforting as she’d like.

  The woman, still empty handed, walked right up to Felspan’s defensive pose, where she held a dagger in her left hand, double edged knife in her right. The Ragnar slashed backhanded at the woman’s belly with the knife, as she simultaneously kicked with her left leg, going for the groin, both moves a diversion. She thrust with the dagger, intending to stab her opponent in the right side when she used her right arm to block the kick and turned to her left, away from the belly slash.

  This wasn’t what she’d initially planned to do, but the moment she realized there’d be no swinging short sword or a knife thrust to counter, dodge, or block, she went entirely on the offensive.

  The kick was blocked by a raised right knee, her dagger hand and wrist was suddenly grasped in a painful iron grip, and when her right-side wrist was also grabbed, she pivoted that hand to slash the long razor-sharp edge of her blade along the inside of the forearm of that grasping arm. She saw the material of the long shirt sleeve slice open, and the blade’s edge sliding along the pale flesh.

  First blood! She thought exultantly, and with her arms held tightly, she lunged down and forward with her forehead, aiming at the top of the shorter human’s unprotected head. The fool was so focused on using her superior strength to hold her wrists, she was unprepared for the head butt coming her way. All Ragnar retained a slight sagittal crest, a ridge of bone running front to back along the midline of their skull. Their heads bashed together with a loud clonking sound, and the result was predictable. Reeling back afterwards, only one remained unfazed, and dropped to her knee.

  It wasn’t the ape.

  “That was dumb.” Macy let the wobbly ape go. “Kobani skulls have stopped bullets.” While she watched, as her opponent tried to recover, she tore off the cut sleeve at the shoulder of her shirt.

  “Damn! You drew first blood.” There was a fine line with two small drops of blood along the inside of her forearm. She was irritated at having been so careless. She should have grabbed the hand with the long knife, not the wrist, to better control the weapon it held.

  The ape had sagged to her right knee as she shook her head, to try to throw off the effects of a mild concussion.

  In Fotrol, Macy told her, “I don’t give a damn about your rules of honor, I didn’t come here to kill any of you if I didn’t have to. I had to kill your partner, but you sure look beat to me. How about we stop this pointless combat test?”

  Macy extended her right hand to her, and the ape let her long knife fall to the ground and opened her hand, and held it out. Taking the hand as Felspan gripped it tightly, the ape seemed to swoon and fall to her side. It was another ruse.

  The dagger trust upwards in a killing thrust. At least that was the intention. What happened was, Macy yanked back so violently that she dislocated the treacherous ape’s right shoulder as she spun her around, the dagger briefly poking a hole in her shirt and the skin, drawing a bit more than a drop of blood this time.

  “Rules and honor it is, then.” Her decision made for her, Macy grasped Felspan’s chin and the back of her head, and with a quick twist, snapped her neck and let her drop.

  She looked up at the camera, the pole standing outside in the full sunlight and yelled, “Screw you!”

  It was said in Standard, so she doubted the term would translate into anything that would make sense to them, so she added a gesture.

  Her middle finger was probably just as untranslatable, but the unfriendly attitude and obvious anger would surely serve her purpose.

  Chapter 4: Reconsidering Ragnar Priorities

  Thad, informed by Comtap image of what Macy had done, was already inside the forest. He and Mel, like Macy, had cut over to small game trails to enter the trees, to stay hidden from the cameras that watched the wider main trails. “Mel, I haven’t see any Ragnar movement on this side of the island, and I told Macy to join up with you in the center. I’m hearing some sort of ultrasonic noise from deeper in the forest. It reminds me of wolfbat calls and their echo location.”

  His wolfbat hearing had detected the sound as soon as he entered the woods, but it had quieted down from its initial frantic echo pulse repetition, and high volume screeches. This background noise was above his normal human range of hearing. If there was a lifeform that used echo location, he thought of a way he might take advantage of the noise, if he could provoke them to increase their level of calls.

  He fished his Torki voice replicator disk out of his small back pack, and draped it around his neck, then scrambled up the nearest Skytouch tree, bypassing the three path-vines he encountered. He needed height before going deeper into the forest. At the fourth vine, a mature one near the base of the canopy, he faced in the direction of the continuing ultrasonic sounds. The directionality had improved as he rose higher, because less of the high-pitched sounds were absorbed in the ground cover.

  He pulled a recorded wolfbat echolocation session from a Comtap file he’d preserved, from a pterodactyl type of dinosaur photo jaunt he’d taken with his daughter, on Juro continent. She took two pet wolfbats along, and used them as sort of aerial hunting dogs, to locate the flying dinosaur’s nesting grounds. He aimed the disk towards the source of the sounds, closed his eyes, and played the recording. In seconds the response he hoped for, filled the forest with an ultrasonic flood of cries and echolocations projected his way. He didn’t know what animal made them, but he could use the reflected sounds.

  With his eyes closed, the active section of his wolfbat memory matrix started forming an echolocation map in three dimensions. The woods did not form an enclosed space, so the sound map image wasn’t complete behind him or to the sides, but using the volume of the alien sounds to his front, and his own sound transmission, a grainy, shadowy sonic image formed in his mind in that direction. He could visualize the individual trees, even the faint lines of the vines linking them, and a mostly dark region on the ground where the sound was absorbed. What he searched for was movements within the sea of sound between the trees, that would either be bright points of shifting ultrasonic sound reflection, or if the object absorbed those frequencies, darker shifting blobs of absorption.

  Maggi Fisher had first discovered this unsuspected ability, derived from the wolfbat genes they adapted for hearing Krall ultrasonic communications. The Kobani had wanted to hear and understand Krall ultrasonic speech, but they gained more than they expected. It was paying off again.

  Moving towards him, away from the background of alien animal generated sounds, were two clumps of darkness, that were following the thin glowing lines of vines between trees. He even sensed, from his own wolfbat echolocation broadcast, bright pinpoint echoes from reflective objects connected to the shifting dark points of sonic absorption.

  Two Ragnar were coming his way, and he counted at least three metallic, or at least reflective weapons, being carried by each opponent. He needed to move to intercept them, because they would pass below him and well to his right. They were headed for the larger animal-made path he’d abandoned prior to entering the woods. Obviously, as with Macy, they knew where to expect him, and had no idea their broadcasts from the cameras were being intercepted. His ultrasonic burst of wolfbat echolocations, coming from him personally, seemed to have no impact on the paths they were following along the vines. They couldn’t hear the high frequency sound. He sensed each of them when they shifted to new vines, descending rather than climbing the trees, selecting the lower vine
s that took them towards the edge of the forest. They were assuming he would naturally be limited to ground travel, and walk right into their aerial attack.

  He opened his eyes, and visually picked out the nearby trees that matched with his sound map matrix, and started moving in a direction to intercept the Ragnar.

  “Mel, Macy, the other two Ragnar came down the island on my side. Macy, head back to the compound. Mel, you’re closer to me, and might have to go after the one nearest to you if he doesn’t stay with his partner. Here’s where they are right now. He sent Comtap coordinates he’d measured, based on where the compound was when they departed. Mel could translate, since he also knew where the compound was from himself.

  He knew Macy had risked minor wounds to try and convince the female Ragnar to accept a draw, when in fact it wasn’t even a close-call. Thad wasn’t inclined to do that. Hitok would see an offer of a draw the same way he had the offer of a truce on Tanner’s World. Weakness on the part of the Federation, and of the Kobani, the defenders of the Federation.

  Greeves ran smoothly along several vines, leaping down to the next two trees at the ends, to reach the next lower vine quicker than climbing down. A descent like that would take too long, and he needed to reach his target tree before his movements across their field of view could be noticed.

  He finally reached the tree above where he expected one of the Ragnar to go past, and who would have to climb down to the next path-vine. Making a quick assessment, he pulled a knife and walked back thirty feet from the receiver tree before cutting the slender but tough young vine. He swung down with it, even as he pulled himself up the vine as he dropped. At the tree, he cut away the tendrils holding it securely to the tree, and now had a flexible, slender, and strong section of vine, after stripping it of leaves and immature seed pods.