Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (57 page)
Read Koban 6: Conflict and Empire Online
Authors: Stephen W. Bennett
They have a pudgy pair of human-like jointed arms and dexterous looking hands. When grazing, they pluck tender grass shoots and fern leaves with their hands. They also eat fruits and berries if they can find them. They have the masticating side teeth of most herbivores, but sport two residual tusks, jutting up from the lower front jaw. These protruded three or four inches above fleshy lips, and have facial features arranged much like on a human. They have a central flat nose above their lips, with two large nostrils, and large, forward-facing brown eyes under light brown furred brows. The head was smooth, rounded, and hairless, but there was some sparse brown hair growing along their upper and lower backs.
Blue Flower Eater
A Raspani spokesperson’s mind, encoded on a modified quantum storage device along with millions of other Raspani minds, who sought protection from Krall atrocities on their species.
Prada
Bipedal, forest and jungle living, eats fruit, nuts, insects, and small game. The creatures are black or brown, with white markings. Resemble a lemur or monkey-like mammal, with a useful prehensile tail. About the size of an Earth Chimpanzee, they can use their five fingered hands (with longer middle finger for digging out grubs) and long toes almost equally well. They retain some arboreal ability. The Prada have large yellow eyes, and they were originally nocturnal animals. They were the Krall’s main assemblers and builders.
Their society took roughly seventeen thousand Earth years to colonize a volume some three thousand light years in radius. They selected moderate gravity worlds of 0.7 to 0.8 g’s, and preferred dimmer redder stars than Sol. They befriended other races, unless such contact was rejected. Engaged in cooperation and trade with the Olt’kitapi.
They are a long-lived species who place their eldest members in charge. This deferment to the elders is why they originally cooperated with the Olt’kitapi, the oldest intelligent species they knew. After the Olt’kitapi were all killed by the Krall, the next oldest species they knew was the Krall. They became loyal and submissive to them, and lost their original language, so speak only “low” Krall. They are the largest group of slaves and can build most things the Krall want for war, or have copied from other races.
Wister
A male Prada elder, roughly one thousand three hundred years old, found in a tree village on the planet next to Koban, left there by the Krall when they departed the system.
Nawella
A female Prada elder, and sister of Wister. She is a bit older than her brother is and he seeks her advice. Together they manage a small village of their people, who preserve an underground factory complex where anything required by the Krall can be built.
Torki
A highly intelligent eight-foot-wide by five-foot-long, and three-foot-high land crab race with one large defensive pincher and a smaller one for grasping, and a hard deep purple shell with eight amber colored legs. The two in front of their mouths are small and used as dexterous manipulators. Their eyes are on two-foot stalks, and they perform fine assembly of tools and electronics for the Krall, copying from plans taken from other defeated races.
They had been star traveling for eleven thousand years when the Krall over ran them. Preferred worlds with ample seashores, and bypassed most worlds inside their six hundred light year sphere. They built giant ships for their large bodies, and simulated seaside environments for their own comfort. Huge ships carried only a few hundred Torki, but when used by the Krall they had room for ten thousand warriors, or even more Prada. Several thousand Torki could fit, with great discomfort.
As adults, these land crabs are terrestrial and are found as far as ten miles from the shoreline, returning to the sea only to soak or breed. They sleep at night in cool burrows several feet deep, or at least to a level that will allow water to seep in for moisture. They are primarily vegetarians, preferring tender leaves, fruits, berries, flowers, seaweed, and some vegetables. Occasionally they will eat fish, beetles, or other large insects.
Like all crabs, they shed their shells as they grow. If they have lost legs or claws during their present growth cycle, a new one will be present after they molt. If the large claw is lost, males will develop one on the opposite side until their next molt. Newly molted crabs are very vulnerable because of their soft shells. They are reclusive and hide until the new shell hardens.
Coldar
An influential Torki in his lodge, left behind on the world next to Koban when the Krall departed. The crabs can communicate electronically by a quantum storage device they were given prior to becoming sentient, by the Olt’kitapi. As they advanced, the locked libraries in the storage devices open to help them access new knowledge and databases. They know of the ancient race, but they never met their benefactors. They build new storage devices as their population expands, and copy the data they have into them, not knowing what new information they may contain.
Hothor
A space traveling but subservient species in the Thandol Empire. They vaguely resemble upright sloths, and stand between five and five and a half feet tall as adults. They don’t move slow or sloth-like, and have a quick and nervous seeming quality when they move.
There is gray and white fur down their backs, thick looking hair of a few inches in length, thinning at the sides and on their upper limbs, and nearly gone on the front. Their arms are nearly hairless below their elbows, and the bare skin of the arms and hands are almost black, with only short fine and sparse gray hair there.
They have a round head with short hair on the top and sides on a long neck, the skull being slightly smaller than a human’s, with a circular, nearly flat and hairless face, with a small pointed muzzle and fine little teeth. Their wide set small eyes are dark, in a face that was is black as the skin of their arms. There are two slits between their eyes that served as nostrils, rather than being placed at the end of their small muzzle.
They cooperate with the Federation, in an effort to undermine Thandol rule. On their second colony world, the only free and surviving members of the Olt’kitapi reside hidden in a forest under a false canopy, their existence a Hothor secret from the Empire.
Ragnar
An ape-like species within the Thandol Empire. A former aggressive opponent of the Thandol, but defeated and made subservient by their higher technology enemy. Their combat ability and natural aggression was exploited, and they were made a security force for the Empire, with only limited naval and ground forces permitted, to keep them from attempting a revolt against the Thandol. They enforce the Emperor’s will on other species in one of the three sectors of the Empire, collecting and sharing in taxes, punishing disobedience, and participating in annexation of new species when encountered. They were tasked with conquering the Federation after the Krall threat was eliminated by the Kobani.
Gimtal Thond
The Force Commander of the Ragnar led Annexation Campaign of the Galactic Federation stars, on behalf of the Thandol Empire.
Thandol
They resemble amber colored smaller sized elephants, standing on four legs, with two very strong and flexible trunks below their mouths, paired with two manipulator tentacles on the front of their faces above their mouths.
The upper two manipulators, about half the diameter and length of the trunks, are true tentacles, with small gripping suckers on the undersides. The ends of the tentacles became very slender, almost tendrils, clearly capable of fine manipulation.
They’re strictly vegetarian, have no tusks, and are almost seven feet high at the front shoulder.
Their walking pace was similar to an elephant’s, two or three feet normally touching the ground at a time. With a smaller body mass, and adapted for lower gravity worlds, a Thandol could actually run, getting all four feet off the ground in a full out gallop.
Thandol evolved from herd animals, have a tremendous ego, with males driven to dominate their herds. That is why they formed an Empire, with a single Imperial Herb master Emperor over them all. Emperors are periodically overthrown and replaced, with little effect on their control over the species they dominate.
They are a naturally aggressive species, and it was their accidental discovery of higher level Tachyon Space rotations that gave them the edge in expansion, and the ability to defeat the only three aggressive species they encountered, of the twenty-six they have defeated and annexed into their slowly growing Empire. The Ragnar, Finth, and Thack Delos became their security forces in three sectors, but not permitted to have combined force close to what the Thandol maintained.
They were envious and fearful of the Olt’kitapi when they met them, but the “bugs” were so advanced the Thandol feared attacking the passive seeming species. They became concerned when the insects followed their own example, and armed a savage barbarian species to be heir protectors from the Empire. The Thandol pulled farther away from them as a result, and their caution was rewarded when the Krall revolted and killed the Olt’kitapi.
So long as the wild hordes of rapid breeding Krall clans ran rampant, they stayed silent and isolated from the Orion Spur, where the Olt’kitapi had lived. After drone scouts reported the Krall had been defeated, via a trick by an enemy that disarmed them, the Thandol renewed their interest in annexing that region of space, now part of the newly formed Galactic Federation.
I was born in 1942, so I'm an autumn rather than a spring chicken. I live outside of Tampa, Florida with my fabulous wife Anita, and one remaining son sort-of at home, Montana. I have three older boys, Mark, Gary, and Anthony, all of whom have married and presented us with terrific grandchildren.
My early reading interests were arguably all sci-fi related, from Doctor Doolittle, Captain Marvel, to Superman. I then transitioned to "real" science fiction on black and white TV, such as Captain Video and Flash Gordon. I read hundreds of books by the science fiction greats growing up, and thousands of fair to not so greats in dual novel paperbacks and magazines. I’ve had a lifelong love of science and science fiction.
My education gravitated to science, starting out as a physics major and my depression era folks told me I'd never make a living as a theoretical physicist (probably right, and Cosmology wasn't a career field then), so I moved to Electronics Engineering. I did most of that in the aerospace field for MacDonnell Douglas Corp, in St. Louis, Mo. I worked on the F4 Phantom project, and briefly on Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), before the fickle fates of government finance forced contract cancelations. I devoted (meaning I was drafted into) two years' service for the US Army from 1965 to 1967. A great two years, and the Army, caring not the least about my electronics background, offered this draftee a job as an Air Traffic Controller. Cool!
After discharge I spent a short time back at MacDonnell Douglas before the contract reductions laid me off, and was hired by Emerson Electric (1968), working on the design of a neat heads-up fire control system for the Army's new Cheyenne Helicopter (to be a 270-knot hybrid fixed wing/rotor craft). Never heard of it? The fickle fates of Army finance were why this time, plus Lockheed didn't keep the airframe part from crashing and burning at a crucial point in development.
I taught Electronics for about eighteen months (near starvation wages after the high pay), and finally decided to try my hand at actually supporting my family again. I hired on with the Federal Aviation Administration as an Air Traffic Controller in 1970. Thanks Army! In 1979, I changed jobs in the FAA to use my technical background to work on writing features for the software of the FAA's Terminal Automation Systems (for 28 years, with some controller time overlap). I spent exactly forty years (to the day) in federal service.
Retired, I now work as a consultant/contractor for the FAA, supporting a software system I helped to create. In anticipation of more free time while retired (wrong!), I finally decided to try my hand at writing what I love to read for escapism, Science Fiction.
Thanks for reading my books,
Steve Bennett
Published Books
Koban (August, 2012)
Koban: The Mark of Koban (February, 2013)
Koban: The Rise of the Kobani (October, 2013)
Koban Universe 1 (March, 2014)
Koban: Shattered Worlds (October 2014)
Koban: A Federation Forged in Fire (2015)
Koban: Conflict and Empire (2016)
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