Koban: Rise of the Kobani (79 page)

“Tabora, do your best. They’re probably pouring warriors inside our lower deck right now. Go or we’ll die here!”

He first felt the vibration then he heard the thunder of the thrusters through the open portals below.

Longstreet easily picked off two more grey-heads in midair, as they leaped up two stairwells simultaneously.

The acceleration wasn’t as hard as he had expected, or had hoped it would be. Perhaps that was out of consideration or proximity of the other ships or because of the drag of portals that were apparently locked open.

Several plasma bolts were fired up stairwells before the inevitable happened. The automatic airtight doors activated in typical Krall fashion. No gradual closing here. They slammed shut in an instant, trapping the Krall below. Those on the lowest two decks would be exposed to near vacuum in thirty seconds at the present acceleration if the portals remained open. No air at all in forty-five seconds.

Let’s see how good they are at holding their breath
, Longstreet thought happily.

Any Krall left on the still pressurized decks three and four would have to be cleared the hard way, once the humans or the Krall figured out how the airtight doors were reopened. Since they still had pressure on both sides, there had to be a release. The other two members of the flight crew joined Longstreet and Blitman, to help them cover the hatches when they were finally opened. While not experienced with firefights, the Spacers had received Mind Taps of what to do, and they had the reaction speed required. It wasn’t a clean operation, but they had gotten off planet with their prize.

****

Trakenburg and his teammate, Sergeant Jenkins, had just reached the command deck when Mirikami’s warning came.

Jenkins, reacting instantly, used his radio to call to their flight crew, whom had been enroute from the Mark, and the portal below had been left open for them. Radio silence was pointless now. “Lieutenant Badar, you heard that. How close are you?”

“Too late I think. I see two Krall in the hold now and more are running towards it.”

Trakenburg intervened. “Badar, the Mark is too far from us for you to return there, and this boat is your only way out of here. You three are TG2’s, you’re fast, invisible, and you are well armed. Jump in and kill the ones in the hold, and shut the door behind you. Trust your Mind Tap training sessions.”  He looked at Jenkins and shrugged, as if saying what else could he tell them?

Jenkins thought of something else. “I’m on my way down to help, you get your asses on this ship any damn way you can!” In a Krall-like move, the sergeant leaped over the rail by the stairwell and dropped to the deck fifteen feet below.

Trakenburg activated all four consoles, using what he’d learned in reciprocal Mind Taps done with various flight crews they had trained. “I’m working my way through the startup sequences for the launch. When you get up here, all you’ll have to do is fly this bitch.”

Jackie Bader was not an aggressive person, which explained why she had remained a lieutenant with her former cargo haling company for six years before her capture and stranding on Koban. However, she’d since had over twenty years of life on Koban under her belt now, and afraid of Krall or not, she hated them enough to have volunteered to help on this mission. She took command of her flight crew.

“Annie, Pieter, both of you think of how to fire the weapons you want to use. I’m choosing plasma because I want to blow their heads completely off. The Krall won’t know where we are until we shoot, so move to the side as soon as you do, just like they taught us.”

She turned away from the two ghostly figures on her visor, and started a dead run at the open portal a hundred feet ahead of her. In the low gravity, she was covering ground in long leaps at a respectable speed any sprinter would have envied. The other two in her crew scrambled to match her speed. Fear of being left behind here exceeded the fear they felt of the Krall ahead of them.

Bader, as she closed with the ship, no longer saw the two warriors that had already entered, but three more were coming towards her at a dead run. She finally noticed that they were moving slower than she was, not lifting as high from the ground with each step, and two of the three were armed only with long knives. The lead warrior had a plasma rifle, but it was slung across its back to permit more efficient running as it pumped its massive muscled arms, which were larger than her thighs.

She wasn’t going to let it beat her to the ship, and she increased her speed as adrenaline pumped her ripper-derived muscles to new effort. Her improved vision and fast adrenaline driven super conductor thoughts saw the heavy breathing of the three Krall, and the strain on their muzzles and lips as they labored for air. They had been running all-out from the trees she saw far behind them, which was a considerable distance. They were tiring! It was uplifting to see that they had a level of weakness she could actually see.

It was as they drew within fifty feet of one another that her racing thoughts recalled the advice she had given her two friends. She thought of the weapon she wanted to use, and then how to make it fire. She locked her eyes on the fearsome gapping maw of the lead Krall, open to get more air, revealing its yellowed teeth and a purple tongue.

Plasma, 100, fire
she thought, and was startled when a bolt of blue instantly shot from in front of her own face, and an expanding ring of fine red and gray particles appeared where her vision had been locked. The brute actually seemed to take another step as its momentum propelled it towards her on a leg that only
looked
as if it moved the corpse forward.

It fell forward in seeming slow motion, the arms making no move to catch the heavy torso from slamming onto the pavement, and finally sliding to a stop. The warrior to her left side, with a long machete-like blade raised, looked down at its dead trainer in what had to be the only look of surprise Bader had ever seen on any picture of a Krall. It was short lived, literally, when a red laser and a blue plasma bolt hit it simultaneously, originating from behind her.

The laser carved the shoulder off where the arm attached, that held the big blade. The surprised expression vanished with the same crimson particulate ring as Bader had just admired for her own target. She had continued to run for the ship, and because her attention was morbidly on the two dead Krall she and her companions had just produced, she almost forgot to jump up through the open and beckoning portal.

That wasn’t all that she forgot. The third warrior, with a knife, leaped at the same opening. In their inexperience, her two companions had not split their firepower between the two remaining targets, and they had managed to double-kill just the one.

She slammed into the leaping lizard at full tilt, and her armor protected her from injury, but her mass, compared to that of the novice she hit, was roughly one-third. Bader was knocked sideways, and the Krall, unaware of what unseen thing it had struck, dropped its knife and grasped blindly at the hard feeling object, pulling it to the deck of the hold as it fell.

It rose to its feet quickly, holding onto what proved to be Bader’s left arm, and she hung there suspended and terrified. She knew what had
her
, but
it
had no idea what it held. It reached for the unseen object with its other large hand; talons extended, and unknowingly appeared to be going for her face.

In a panic, Bader brought her right hand up swiftly to protect her face, and grabbed with desperate strength at a finger, which was small enough for her smaller-than-average woman’s hand to wrap around
the digit.

It was quite desperate strength. The bone of the finger first snapped, and then the pressure pinched the digit until it crushed. The Krall naturally screamed its pain and tried to pull its hand away. This had the effect of leaving the thick detached finger evidently floating in the air. The Krall dropped whatever it had hold of, and the finger fell to the deck as Bader let the gory thing drop.

This provided Bader with the first inkling of just how her strength compared to that of these extremely large, fearsome monsters, which had given her a lifetime of nightmares. She looked at the hand that had just ripped a finger off her nemesis. With growing confidence, she stepped towards the now unarmed creature. It heard the step, and backed away from…, what? Something it didn’t know and couldn’t see, but it feared.

She looked it in the eye, and knew that unarmed as it was, she could tear it apart with her hands if she chose.
Why waste the time?
Therefore, she thought,
plasma, 100, fire.

As it fell backwards, its head missing, she had another justifying thought.
Why should I mess up my pretty armor with his gore?

Her two companions had now joined her, and Annie tried pressing the keys to close the portal, only to discover that it wouldn’t respond. Some alternate code had been used to force it to stay open until the proper counter code was entered.

They heard some firing above them, and in a moment Sergeant Jenkins dropped through a stairwell opening, prepared to fight off more Krall. He found his flight crew instead, and messy, dead Krall inside and out.

“Lieutenant Bader, please go help Colonel Trakenburg, before he tries to fly this thing himself. Your two buddies and I will keep the Krall out.” Even as he said that, he used his plasma rifle to blast a warrior in mid-leap as it tried to enter on the fly.

Bader raced to a stairwell and started her rapid scramble upwards. “Colonel, I’m on my way.”

The three people staying behind spread out and continued to knock Krall back out of the hold, or dropped them in their tracks as they entered.

There was another broadcast from Mirikami. “You need to get that damn thing airborne. I’m about to blow the support legs off six other clanships. I didn’t see a need to carry all the boxed explosives away with us.”

Jenkins knew now what the other six spec ops men had been doing while the last two ships were boarded. They had removed explosives from the cases on the Mark, planting remotely detonated packages on other clanships.

Bader’s voice sounded on the radio. “Thrusters in fifteen seconds, people. You had better get a few decks higher with that portal locked open.”

They scrambled to get to deck four above the second set of depressurization doors, and made it just as the thrusters fired. It felt good to be lifting, having accomplished everything they came here to do. The first eight “prizes” had cleared atmosphere and had Jumped, and three others would reach that point in less than a minute. There were two more ships to go, themselves, and then the Mark would follow.

Watching the last one of the newly captured ships rise, engine roaring, reaching two thousand feet, as if to thunderous applause for a successful mission, Mirikami ordered Jakob to launch the Mark, with instructions to trigger the six mines they left behind after they reached a thousand feet. He never quite forgave himself later, for not risking the blasts
before
they lifted. The six toppling clanships would not have been
that
close to the Mark, or have fallen over
too
fast.

****

Gotrak had heard a clanship land near the nesting dome, and assumed it was one of the clan’s sub leaders returning from some political requirement. Perhaps, returning from the recent joint council meeting on Telda Ka. If so, it would most likely be Dorkda, sent there as the clan leader’s representative. He had been gone since before the gathering of pre-novice cubs had started. Others were left to begin the arduous and impatient work of their training, over a year ago. Their clan leader could not leave their nest world at such a critical time, just to meet their status obligation to Dorbo clan, simply to vote as they instructed on clan council matters.

The debt to Dorbo clan could be fully paid in one more breeding cycle, when Maldo, a finger clan that Dorbo had spawned a thousand years ago, gained enough status and proven warriors with battle tested skills, to demand the council grant them mature clan status.

After that, they would remain allied with Dorbo but more independent, and allowed to form finger clans of their own when they could afford the status points and furnish the material needs. One day they would vote to elevate Dorbo to Great Clan status, a success that would also indirectly benefit Maldo. However, without a status debt to pay to keep them poor, they could soon demand a greater participation in future invasions planned for human worlds.

In the meantime, they had to support their parent clan with their voice in council, and in private conversations outside the joint council. Dorkda had been sent in place of their clan leader to be that voice in the inefficient, self-serving pack, dominated by the existing Great Clans. It was apparently time to hear the results of the meetings, to know which clans had major parts in the new invasions. If Dorbo was one of those, it meant they had gained status, and in turn would offer more fighting to their finger clans.

If it were not Dorkda returning, then even a courier ship would bring more warriors to help in the task of training ignorant novices in the skills of combat. There needed to be much more culling to find the physically best performers out of the mass of angry, young meat they had to teach.