Koban: When Empires Collide Read online

  “Say that I need the crews to finish their training. Of course, Kobani crews don’t forget anything anymore, or need pointless and repetitive training out here, but they should rejoin the fleet. I can now deploy fleet elements where they might be needed.” She was still relishing her own feeling of rejuvenation as a Kobani.

  She was the first, and highest ranking naval officer to be transformed, when Bledso enviously notified her of the removal of the gene law restrictions on commissioned officers. It was called the Kobani Exception, leaving out the somewhat contentious words gene modifications. A quick administering of the revised loyalty oath, and she took a shuttle to a nearby Federation hospital ship. The aches, pains, and mild fever were nearly gone after spending a full additional week in a med lab.

  Mentally absorbing personnel reports, using her increased processing speed, she noted, “The crews of the other modified ships are bored. The first ones completed have been orbiting K1 for the last month. Oh, damn it…, I just said we don’t forget crap. I meant orbiting Greater West Africa. Wait! Will there be a name change again, or what? I’ve been out of touch in that med lab, but I heard the Department of Colonization will call it New Africa.”

  Her assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ken Bracy, also a new Kobani, but suffering the aches, pains, and mild fever of his continuing transformation, performed a quick Comtap link to the flagship’s AI. One of the fun things he could do now. In under a second, he had the AI send the requested message concerning the ten heavy cruisers to Bledso’s staff on Earth, via instant communications. Only then did he respond to his superior’s question, which he wasn’t sure if it was rhetorical or not.

  “Mam, my navy Comtap friend on the president’s military advisory board, says the president signed the joint resolution from parliament last night, and it was renamed New Africa in that Bill.”

  He added other details Foxworthy must have missed. “The colony renaming was included in an amendment, but the full resolution authorized the Federation to continue to operate the Prada factory here, under an expanded navy contract. It’s obviously the fastest way to perform the stealth modifications on our existing ships, although Hub shipyards are squawking foul play. My guy says contract negotiations are also underway to have the Prada build our new Scouts here, or perhaps construct navy versions of Federation Mark II’s instead. He’s of the opinion that politics will give the larger ship construction to the Hub yards.”

  Based on the past plodding implementation of new naval contracts, she said, “Wow. That’s more efficient than I expected our side to be. Those furry little lemur-like primates have thousands of years of experience running those automated Olt’kitapi designed factories. Now that they’re a free people, and get paid for their work, they’ve increased their previous productivity.

  “Their 3-D component printing, incorporating quantum encoded materials and circuitry, has expanded recently. I was told by a Federation representative that worked on the license and patent contracts, that the Prada are doing much of the technological quantum level work the Torki had once done for the Krall. She explained that they had wanted to help the Torki retain their value to the Krall. They still don’t have the level of theoretical knowledge the Torki do, but their factories were designed by the Olt’kitapi, and had always had capabilities beyond what the Krall needed, or understood was possible. Now, the Prada are learning how to make use of those built-in production features.

  “Despite the Prada one accepting the Krall as an elder race, and their rightful Rulers, they knew all too well that when they worked too diligently, their Rulers wasted the lives of unneeded workers, and reduced their population.”

  Bracy agreed the Prada were enthusiastic. “I’ve been down inside that factory to watch them at work. They don’t follow breeding restrictions now, and there are half grown kids underfoot everywhere. There are webs of walkways and rope links to move Prada automation supervisors and programmers quickly around the expanding production lines. There are hundreds of young ones, hanging by their tails, watching how it’s done by their elders.

  “The eldest factory manager told me they used the programable machinery to replicate almost a complete new factory down there. They expanded the existing production lines with the new machines. The machines use some sort of fifth force effect to make metals more malleable, and incorporate embedded quantum level circuitry. There’s no blast furnaces or high impact presses to form materials, or to create special alloys. That’s accomplished by those amazingly fast matter printers.

  “Without the Krall demand that factories should stay hidden underground, and under a single dome, they avoided the delay of excavation. They built dome extensions and expanded onto the surface of that big island they bought. There’s no air, water, or any environmental pollution that I could see, because they take the steps to clean up wastes, which the Krall, not caring, made them skip. The Krall had plenty of depopulated worlds to waste if one became too polluted.

  “I guess they don’t have child labor laws in Prada society, although I don’t think they could keep the little farts away from the factories. They receive school lessons during several long breaks every day. You’d not see that level of eagerness in human kids. At least not for work and school. They seem to consider operating machinery, making, and building things, a sort of play.”

  Foxworthy mulled over some thoughts she’d formed, after learning more about the Prada’s past. “I think the Krall did more than direct their own evolution. Perhaps unintentionally, for twenty thousand years they forced the Prada to live and evolve in ways the Krall required of them, to stay useful and to survive. It may take generations to produce Prada that don’t crave more than learning how to use new technology, and working incessantly to make things.”

  Bracy, amused, offered an observation. “We pay the factory by the value of the units produced, of whatever it is, as measured by human factories that make similar things. The Prada divide that payment fairly, between the elders and workers, so no CEO or majority stockholder gets the bulk of the earnings. They outproduce any automated human factory I’ve seen. They’re going to become rich little suckers at the rate they push finished ships out the factory doors, or whatever widgets they agree to make.”

  “I really don’t want us to exploit them, even if they don’t care,” Foxworthy said sincerely. Then added guiltily, “but I hope no labor union gets to them before we have enough ships built to kick the Empire’s ass. The Prada don’t take holidays, or demand five day weeks. After a two-week vacation, they can’t wait to get back to work. That’s good for us and the Federation.

  “The Empire was already effectively on a stable and sustaining war footing when we encountered them, because of their suppressive and militarized regime. As soon as we defeated the Krall, the PU started cutting back on ships, weapons construction, and personnel. It’s ironic, but meeting the Thandol so soon may have saved our butts, had we met them a hundred years later. I’m confident the LOR would have cut the military budgets drastically.”

  Not in disagreement with anything she said, Bracy nevertheless changed the subject. “Have you decided yet where to repost the two thousand heavy cruisers already converted?”

  “Locked inside that med lab, I could still use my new Comtap after the first week, when my superconducting nerves stabilized. President Flacco, of Tanner’s World, has invested in an orbital docking facility for visiting warships, where we can dock ships for resupply and routine maintenance from orbit. He also had the spaceport facilities at Fort Bradford upgraded to accommodate parking and moderate servicing needs, for up to two hundred heavy cruisers at a time. That way, we can provide frequent rotating ground leave for a taskforce of a thousand ships there. Flacco promises that our Kobani crews will be most welcome at that former military base, which is also undergoing expansion. He assures me there are ample entertainments and bars for that many navy personnel at one time, of both genders.”

  “The other thousand ships?”

  “Dawson.” She
said firmly. “The Rim colony ten light years from Tanner’s. Before you joined my staff, that’s where I was stuck because of government indecision, when the Ragnar attacked Tanner’s. I told the president of Dawson that fewer forces would be involved there this time, only the navy, and those would not be grounded continuously. We have leased space on their large moon for a base, and our personnel would only be groundside when taking leave. There wouldn’t be any of Nabarone’s troublesome nine thousand unruly spec op ground forces, fresh from months of combat with the Krall.

  “They agreed to give us a trial period for a visit, before we start building the base. Having a one thousand heavy cruiser taskforce overhead, for defense from the Empire, was still a harder sale than I expected. In a not-so-veiled-veiled warning, they said they only have enough jail capacity for a hundred rowdy navy crewmembers at one time. They refused to accept the risk again of trying to incarcerate hundreds of misbehaving spec ops troopers, who working together, could bend bars of jail cells. I conveniently failed to mention that our navy crews have now been genetically modified into Kobani. I hope our people prove to be better behaved than Nabarone’s troops were.”

  Bracy smiled, sharing her hope. “Anyway, that puts all our remodeled ships close to Empire territory, but the Finth bypassed the frontier to reach One Land. Even if the enemy can’t see our stealthed taskforces in orbit, they may be headed for other planets.”

  “We have to start deploying somewhere, and close to where they last attacked Human Space seemed reasonable. If our new monitor boats, posted well above and below the galactic plane, pick up inbound enemy ships, we can get to where they’re headed at about the same time, or possibly ahead of them. We have stealth they can’t penetrate, and we have ships and crews that can outperform theirs. We don’t have cruisers with gravity projectors yet, but I plan to attach twenty Scouts to each task force, and they have proven to be deadly at space combat.

  “In an emergency, I have another two thousand ships waiting their turn at refitting, a quarter of them heavy cruisers, the rest medium cruisers, and all of them flown by Kobani, no gel filled suits needed. Their stealth is at least as good as the enemy’s, and although the acceleration limits won’t be removed until modified, they can still sharply maneuver at higher g forces than normal humans can tolerate. In addition, we have Comtap links for coordination and instant long-range communications, in or out of a Jump Hole. They do not.

  “After the fighting on Tanner’s, we know normal humans are not as strong as an unarmored Ragnar, but most humans can accept higher g forces. Per Mirikami’s people that went to Den Home, normal humans wouldn’t be nearly as strong as a Finth. Fortunately, like the Ragnar, the Finth evolved in lighter gravity.

  “Earth is a heavier gravity planet than their home worlds, so our physiology handles higher gravities better than they do. Humans started out in higher gravity than is average in the galaxy, but the Krall evolved in even higher gravity. Then they bred to become physical freaks. Thanks to our apparently unique mastery of genetics, we Kobani are far freakier than even the Krall. As more of us receive the gene mods, there won’t be any Normals facing combat.

  “Our two thousand unmodified ships, waiting out here in the Rim region for the Prada to modify them, can reach most planets on this side of the Rim in a day. Additional help isn’t very far away with T-cubed travel.”

  “OK.” Bracy summarized. “We can put four thousand ships into a fight, half of them technologically better than any in the Empire, and half roughly equal. That is, unless we’re facing Smashers with Decoherence bomb launchers. We have novae bombs, but they’re large and massive, and we can’t deliver a hundred of them per minute. Our Scouts had better be able to find and hit those ships fast. Enemy mass detectors will locate the larger ships quickly, and we’d be forced to keep moving randomly and Jumping so often that it would be difficult to fight effectively.”

  “Ken, you’re talking like we’ll face a Thandol fleet right away. We expect to fight one or more of their three security forces before facing any of the Thandol fleets. They don’t share Decoherence equipped Smashers with their security forces.

  “The species we know almost nothing about are the Thack Delos. The Empire’s Security Sector three is the one most remote from our border. We haven’t learned much about them, other than they evolved from a large salamander-like animal, and use nukes in combat because they are radiation resistant. Mirikami informed us he sent a squadron of Scouts to check them out and make contact. Using Comtap links, we’ll learn more about them soon after Mirikami does.”

  “I hope so. It’s hard to get accustomed to all the different species and cultures we’ve encountered or learned about, just in my lifetime. We went from there only being humans in the known Universe when I was a teen, to the worst nightmare possible when we ran into the Krall. I mean, I learned in high school that over four hundred years earlier some scientists claimed they’d briefly detected a radio signal from an alien race. They named them the Corrillians, and based on a triangulation from a receiver on an early robot exploration, out past Pluto, calculated they must live in a globular cluster, located at least twenty thousand lightyears away, above the plane of the galaxy. They were never heard from again, and I always thought it was some wiseass that pulled off a spectacular hoax.”

  His superior smirked slightly. “In hindsight, it probably wasn’t a hoax.”

  ****

  Mirikami, lip pulling ended, reached his decision. “We’ll Jump more of our patrol boats above the plane of the galaxy, to its magnetic north. That’s the direction our Thack Delos contact team says a tachyon wave trace indicates their fleet moved.”

  “Headed our way?” President MacDougal was worried about which Federation world, as spread out as they were, might be the fleet’s target.

  “Tet, if we leave our ships prepositioned closer to the Empire, protecting our colonies, they couldn’t get back to the Koban system very quickly, if this is the next target. Yet, pulling the task forces back home now would leave Raspani, Prada, Torki, and the Krall’tapi world unguarded.

  “Three to four thousand ships might drop down on any one of them from the north, with too little warning to gather our forces to meet them. We lucked out on the Finth attack, by having Mind Taps to suggest at least which species they were ordered to attack. The Prada planets are all within a few hundred lightyears of One Land. Putting a handful of patrol boats below the galaxy’s plane, close to their worlds, spotted the enemy coming early.”

  Tet pointed out an omission Stewart had made, listing possible targets. “You forgot to mention the Olt’kitapi. They just competed moving their population to the Excelsior system, where they’ll build their giant multispecies habitats. Although, they haven’t truly established much of a base on that planetary moon of the super Jovian. They told me they could evacuate their few hundred thousand population on their own ships.”

  “How could they do that fast enough? They needed to use our Scouts to sneak undetectably away from Canji Dol, to rendezvous with their relatively few Dismantlers. Their ships might have three times the volume of a clanship but the eleven of them made a lot of round trips.”

  MacDougal did a mental comparison. “I remember being aboard Pholowela once, and they aren’t as roomy inside as a Torki migration ship. How can they squeeze a population of nearly three hundred thousand onto so few Dismantlers?”

  “Apparently, they won’t need to. When I linked to Frithda, warning him of their peril if they had to evacuate, I learned they have another three hundred nineteen ships, besides the eleven Dismantlers.”

  He grinned in a conspiratorial manner. “Wanna know where they came from?”

  An incredulous Stewart quipped, “Dismantlers are called living ships. I guess they had babies?”

  Mirikami laughed. “No, but that’s a better guess than you expected with your joke. However, it is a kind of family relationship. I’d call them big brothers to Dismantlers. Frithda says they have male name endings of da, lik
e the female gender names for Dismantlers, with the la ending.

  “It’s a class of ships we’re calling Differentiators, after Pholowela described them to us once in a discussion of how the Olt’kitapi would gather pieces of dismantled planets. They were the tool ships that would hold molten blobs of a disrupted planet’s core in stasis, and use internal machinery to separate and preserve the various constituents, like metals, silicates, water, and gasses, for constructing planet sized habitats.”

  “Huh. I thought the Krall would have destroyed those, just like the Olt’kitapi commercial ships and cities. If it couldn’t be used as a weapon, like break up a planet as a Dismantler could, they weren’t interested in building a new place to live.”

  “The surviving Olt’kitapi thought that too, until they embedded more of the thousands of recovered mind enhancers from their dead ancestors, and explored the stored files they found there. There were maker forms that specialized in the use of those intelligent ships, and when the Krall revolt spread, those makers feared the plan to destroy the Krall home world might not stop them. The complete fleet of those tool ships was stationed in the system of the future habitat, a lot of Differentiators and the smaller number of Dismantlers. The Differentiator AIs were instructed to hide themselves in the super Jovian’s atmosphere to escape Krall destruction. The Dismantlers didn’t have the capability to hide in the same way.”

  “Why not? Leaving them parked where they could be found gave the Krall a damned dangerous weapon.”

  “For one thing, the original Olt’kitapi knew the Krall couldn’t operate them, and they didn’t think about their forcing the Krall’tapi to control them on their behalf. A Dismantler simply couldn’t survive by hiding the same way. The Differentiators settled to where the Jovian’s atmospheric density was great enough for them to float, suspended. That world has ten times the mass of Jupiter, so to preserve them from damage and planetary storms that might carry them deeper and crush them, they placed themselves into stasis, using fields powered by high energy tachyons held in their Trap fields. Once in stasis, they no longer experienced the passage of time in Normal Space, and they survived in an envelope of fields that protected them from all external forces in this Universe.