Koban: Rise of the Kobani (7 page)

“Stop.” Nabarone cut her off. He didn’t anticipate the Krall would remotely consider fighting tanks inside a narrow tunnel. However, they might move forces through them into fighting positions fast and undetected.

“Sir,” the major offered a reminder. “The base is mined and has Krall body detection sensors. If they enter that, the sensors will blow and collapse the main base and any tunnels they enter. They’d lose the equipment, which they often seem to value more than the warriors inside the tanks or trucks.”

“Right! But, I damn well won’t risk a major city and a war-manufacturing center if the Krall have found a way to fool our sensors or disable the explosives. What sort of sensors do we have in there, and how much remote control do we have over the areas we mined? If we could let them
think
they could use the base, I’d be happy to let them fill tunnels with columns of tanks and trucks before we brought it all down.”

“The spec ops commander would be able to say, Sir. They gave us control of the base, but continued to use the tunnels even after the Krall controlled those hills. They would pop out to conduct surveillance, direct artillery strikes, plant explosives, and release spy bots. They even managed to capture some wounded Krall warriors.”

With a wave of annoyance, Nabarone was ready to dismiss any cooperation from that source. “Those shits from Heavyside don’t answer to me. The pentagon put them outside Army control. They only share what they want me to know. I know Colonel Trakenburg is field testing secret human enhancements, and they don’t want the rest of the Hub to know what they are up to on Heavyside. They mainly come here to test them in a live combat situation. I can see some of their results, and they know that I can see that. Yet they still won’t admit what they are doing. I don’t
care
if they are doing some illegal human physical improvements. I just want
my troops
to get them so they will be able to kill Krall faster, and stop their damned advance.”

“Sir, if they have abandoned the base, then I don’t see why they wouldn’t share how it’s set up for demolition. It also must have a complement of spy bots inside to report to them, although I doubt their people actually use the tunnels any more. They’d have to infiltrate ten miles behind the Krall offensive lines just to reach the closest of them now. The Krall would sniff them out before they got very far. I’ll contact Trakenburg’s command post on your behalf, if you wish, Sir.”

“Do that, and tell him about the clanship landings near that base. I want to be certain they can prevent Krall use of their base against us.”

****

Thad sent Ethan and Richard Yang to scout the other clanship. Rather than follow the valley floors, they were going to travel in nearly a straight line, up and down multiple intervening high ridges for speed. They would be within Link range the entire way, although Jakob told them their Link transmissions might fade out on the valley floors as they drew closer to the clanship, which was five miles away. However, they would be able to receive from Jakob the entire way, and transmit from ridge tops.

Twenty TGs, with Conrad Boston as the sole TG1 with them as group leader, were sent to the valley opening with Krall plasma rifles, using the boulders and rocky outcrops for cover. Thad reminded the green kids that underbrush might block them visually, but not from Krall infrared vision, and certainly not from any return fire the Krall would use. Conrad Mind Tapped Colonel Greeves for what they needed to do. The thought transfer process was spread out over a fifteen-minute rapid-fire question and answer period.

Conrad spent less than two minutes total, passing all of that imagery and information to the other nineteen TGs. He used a double handgrip with his outstretched left and right hands, as the other TGs circled him and reached in to make hand contact.

Dillon, Thad, and Mirikami were once again amazed at how fast and easy it was to provide these youngsters with detailed training and tactics. The forward watchers in the valley would warn of any Krall that entered the canyon, staying concealed, and then shut the door to block their escape when a hundred other TGs ambushed the interlopers along the length of the valley, using shared tactics that Sergeant Reynolds furnished them.

Carson and fifteen TGs were going with the four SGs to explore the empty spec ops base. Reynolds led them to where he said were concealed down ramps, right in front of the back wall of the cliff. He stepped over to a waist high boulder on the left of a faint track-way, and on its side, popped open a small cover, revealing a simple touch pad. He put a thumb to the pad, and with almost no sound, the left side surface dropped down to form a thirty-degree ramp, with a back opening high enough to pass a sizable truck.

“Is that coded to your thumb print, Sarge?” Mirikami asked, curious if any of the rest of them could operate the mechanism.

“No. If you’re human, and know where the pad is hidden, you can get inside with a touch. This leads to an underground parking garage, and there is added security after that. ” He closed the small cover, which looked seamless when shut.

“Notice the roadway, or dirt way I should say.” He prompted. “It’s artificial, including the weeds and tufts of grass, but looks real, and doesn’t leave tire tracks or foot prints. Not for the last hundred feet in fact, if you look back where we just walked.” Glancing rearward, there was no sign that twenty people had just trod this way.

Reynolds strode confidently down the broad ramp, and disappeared into the shadows as they followed him down. As the last person left the ramp, Reynolds operated another touch pad to raise the ramp as silently as it had lowered. They were briefly in deep gloom, with only some faint ceiling panels providing dim, red colored light. Another touch pad suddenly brightened the parking area to near daylight conditions, as the entire ceiling glowed with a pale white light.

“These lights switch off the instant a ramp is activated.” He showed them markings painted on the floor that indicated where the second ramp would lower, to provide a two way up/down roadway for people or equipment.

Pointing to several openings along the back wall, on either side of the ramp’s hydraulic pistons, he said, “These are personnel tunnels that lead back to concealed rabbit holes along the canyon floor. There are branches that lead you up to trap doors behind clumps of boulders. I used this very corridor the day we ambushed the sixteen Dragons that saw us duck into the mouth of the canyon. We parked down here, and ran back that tunnel to spring the trap, and called a mass of prearranged artillery down on them even before we fired our rockets.”

He reflexively rubbed his left arm, recalling what had happened to him not long after that ambush. He’d been captured fleeing the area, losing his left arm in that explosive process. It had been regrown after he was rescued by these people, now his friends, on Koban. However, he remembered the pain and being without an arm for months.

“OK people,” he turned towards the doors on the other wall. “Let’s see what was left behind. Anyone that sees a rat, mouse, large insect, bird, snake, frog, or any other small creature, must be alert for the possibility that it could be a spy bot, and potentially a means for us to make contact with the Poldark military.” He went over to one of the personnel sized doors, rather than one suited for a truck, and used a thumb pad while looking into a retinal scanner. The door promptly slid opened.

“I think my retinal pattern is on store here in the computer, but I’ve seen newcomers also get right in, so there may be a planet wide data base. It might simply be a way to verify that I’m a live human and not just a dead hand on the thumb pad. The spec ops folks that let us use the base were pulling out, and didn’t much care what we did here. They warned us that if we let the Krall follow us down that we’d better find a way out fast.”

He led them through the door and along a wide corridor that went past empty, open rooms with wires protruding from walls and ceilings, where equipment and computers had been removed. There were a few items of dilapidated furniture left behind, some scraps of paper and signs on the walls. Reynolds turned into a large room and stopped to look around.

“This was a command center, with satellite feeds, secure, jam-proof landline communications, several AIs, and screens all over the place. However, right over here, around this corner is what I’m looking for, I think. I hope they didn’t tear it out when they left.”

He went around the corner, into an open side room off the main area, then smiled and nodded. Mirikami and the others joined him, looking at a large relief map of the area, as if an x-ray had been made from overhead, fifteen miles up, with the network of tunnels revealed along the ridges, and crossing under valley floors in some cases.

“Obviously we’re here.” He pointed at the nexus of most of the tunnels, although there were some smaller hubs where ridges intersected and other tunnels split off. “Novi Sad is east southeast from here, about forty miles to the river along the outskirts, and there was a sizeable suburban area on this side of the Solda River, perhaps thirty miles from us.” 

He ran fingers along the map. “These three tunnels are large, and they go more than halfway to the edge of the housing areas and some former industrial parks. Even before I was captured, they had all been evacuated by the civilians, and the military was preparing for urban warfare there, to hold Novi Sad as long as possible. It’s very hilly over there and the terrain in between us and there is rather exposed, open farmland mostly. That’s why the supply tunnels were dug, to avoid attacks by single ships on convoys headed to this area, supporting our forces holding the mountains, and later just these foothills as we were shoved back.

“I think we can head towards the current front lines through them, but from there, we’ll have to figure out a way through the fighting from behind the Krall. They tend to push sporadically in limited fronts of three to ten miles wide, when a single clan is carrying the load of fighting along a hundred mile front. The other clans normally hold in place, to let the other clan draw all the action. When that dies down, another clan, possibly several hundred miles away, takes their turn. There will be four to six of the single-clan shoves going on somewhere on the continent every day. We could most likely infiltrate through the rear of a clan not part of an assault. The spec ops troops do it somehow, and they don’t have the ability of a TG.”

Mirikami considered that last remark. “They can’t do it by direct confrontation with a warrior unless they have a sure-fire, quiet method of assassinating a guard, so it must be by stealth. I wonder how they get around their superior sense of smell.”

“Oh, that. I was told that because so much of the area where the Krall are fighting us has recently been under human control, and there are so many dead that their sense of smell becomes less sensitive. I’ve also heard spec ops use pressurized cans of ‘eau de suer’ to temporarily overwhelm the Krall sense of smell.”

Dillon barked a hard laugh. “Sewer water? Really?”

Reynolds looked at him with a grin. “Like Maggi might say, ‘you don’t have any couth.’ Not sewer you lunk head, it’s the French word for sweat. Suer, you illiterate barbarian.” He chuckled at having sucked him into a joke.

Dillon had only lame repartee to offer. “Ha! Raise
your
arms and you’d knock out an octet all by yourself.”

Thad, never a man to avoid fart jokes added, “This entire subject stinks to high heaven.”

Mirikami had to break it up before the surrounding young TGs jumped in with their own youthful enthusiasm. “Enough guys,” he said sharply, cutting off the laughter.

“Sarge, can you show us which tunnel is most likely to take us close to where we need to be? Please, you go first…, so we can follow our noses.” The youngsters found the bit of irreverence from their normally staid captain hilarious, for more than a full minute.

As Reynolds led them along the same corridor as before, Mirikami checked his Link with Chief Haveram. “Chief, have you heard from Ethan or Richard, or anything of interest from Conrad at the valley entrance?”

The reply was comfortingly prompt, and sounded strong, even underground. There was probably a Link repeater built into the base, since the PU Army also used transducers. “Conrad has seen no Krall activity,” the chief told him. “Ethan has checked in as they topped each ridge. Those boys are
fast
. Up one side and down the other in five minutes. If the cliffs are like these around us, they must have goat genes in them as well. They saw nothing in the first three valleys, but could hear sounds of machinery rolling on gravel from beyond the next ridge they had to climb.”

Mirikami thought for a moment, mentally counting the number of ridges between them and the Krall clanship, which he recalled from the aerial images recorded as they landed. “Chief, that would be two valleys closer to us than where the clanship landed. They may be threading their way through the valleys to reach us, using some sort of transports they carried with them. I want to hear what Ethan reports as soon as he can see what’s happening.”

“Will do Sir. Shouldn’t be more than another fifteen minutes.”

When Mirikami was obviously finished listening to his Link, Thad asked what he’d heard. “Ethan and Richard find some activity?”

“They heard some sounds from a valley located well before they reached the Krall ship. It was described as mechanical, like rolling trucks on gravel or rocks. We might have company coming, with transports or Dragons. Let’s see the tunnel ahead, and then head back. We were not setting off towards Novi Sad right now anyway.”