Free Koban 4: Shattered Worlds by Stephen W. Bennett

towards the scuffmark. As he was watching, the scuff widened and it was paired with a new mark, which appeared a half step to the right. He instantly fired the beam and then, with a talon tip on the targeting screen, made the red beam wander back and forth above the scuffmarks. Imagine his surprised pleasure when scorch marks appeared in the air not only over the section of glass, but in another area almost a leap farther beyond. Two different targets had been revealed, and they started moving very rapidly, in different directions, but the scorched parts remained visible to him.
    Droktad put more burn marks on the original target, playing the beam on it for longer. It suddenly seemed to twist and drop into the debris field of scrap metal and plastic, seen only as a few visible burnt marks that were not moving. He played the beam more thoroughly, with pinpoint accuracy all around the whitish and some black sections, which were quickly defined as the form of a biped, of roughly human form and scale, wearing some sort of armor.
    The animal had clearly been stealthed to the point of invisibility. Something Krall armor couldn’t fully do, and in his prior experience on Poldark and a hand of other raids, neither did human armor. He tapped the waiting firing command on the main console, and the two heavy lasers ravaged the two small ships. Even they were much more resistant to his beams, deflecting their energy far longer than a single ship would have survived. He now believed the reports of how effective the human raiders had become.
    He pulled back his view screen from its tight zoom to look for more of these stealthed humans, and noted with satisfaction that Fangar had watched him, and was already searching.
    “Until I damaged the coating on the armor I did not see them at all. Try different detection methods. I didn’t see them in infrared until the suit surface was damaged and burning hot.” Following his own advice, he studied the control range settings for the view screens, which he was aware of, but had never found cause to adjust beyond the visible light or infrared spectrums. He shifted towards ultra violet with no motion or human shapes observed. Fangar, to his annoyance and then reluctant satisfaction, apparently found them!
    “I have one.” She blasted it, with her now barely online plasma cannon, operating at minimal energy for that ship-to-ship weapon. He saw where the bolt struck and splattered, at an empty (to him) point in space near the edge of the sagging dome wall to the north. The flying limbs and head from the destroyed suit torso became visible, as the power source for the stealth technology was destroyed.
    He couldn’t wait to get such a shot. “How did you see it?” he demanded her to tell him.
    Fangar achieved a superior sounding attitude, without crossing the line to insolence. “I moved my talon down the screen scale to where I have looked at radiation from stars in the radio region. A signal frequency that is far below infrared. Closer to the waves we use for communications.” She was a K’Tal, so that perhaps explained her knowledge of what most warriors considered useless information.
    He noticed that as his talon tip reached the bottom of his current range scale of electromagnetic frequencies, that meaningless (to him anyway) Krall script numbers appeared beside his tip. When he reached the bottom, below infrared, the scale suddenly changed, with a red dot and the same number where he had been touching, now shifted to the top so he could drag down more. For the first time he realized there were more frequencies that the screens could select than he’d ever needed. There were a huge number of frequencies, and the numbers changed as his talon returned to the top and started down again. He could seek over a much larger frequency range.
    “At what number did you find them visible?”
    “They are seen in a range between…” and she provided two numbers, one a higher wavelength than the