Koban: Rise of the Kobani (87 page)

This ship could Jump from where it sat, in a gravity well, to any place it was directed to go. It reached distant destinations in hours, not in days. It would materialize without the revealing, and dangerous, burst of gamma rays to announce its presence.

It would do none of those things for Telour, or for any Krall. However, as
every Krall had ever thought about when they were inside one of these ships, a true warrior would do anything required to a soft Krall, to force them to make the powerful ship do what the warrior wanted.

No wonder the joint clans kept the use of these ships under such tight control. Their use had to be conserved
for the greatest need of the entire race, as they moved along the thousands of years of the Great Path still ahead. There would be many other enemies in the galaxy.

Telour
collected Parkoda outside the ship, effused with the sense of power this craft placed in his mind. “Follow me. I will now go to complete my primary mission for the Tor Gatrol, so that he can increase the number of invasions we can support against human worlds. We can force the worthy enemy, which I have helped make of these animals, to speed our breeders along the Path. At least for those breeders that have earned the right to spread their seed, to make new warriors able to travel the Great Path faster.”  A fresh dig at Parkoda’s sinking status felt good to him.

For the first time,
Parkoda realized he wasn’t being returned directly to his former posting. “Where are we going next?”

“To Graka clan’s old base world, where we produce the most clanships
of any clan. We need them built faster, to take the war to additional human worlds. The Prada and Torki have become complacent with the slow pace we allow them to work. They can do more, and my clan can earn status by making more ships available before the joint council even decides they are required. That is how a smart Krall warrior faces a worthy enemy.”

That last boast to Parkoda would
come back and kick him in the ass.

****

Mirikami looked stern and resolute, and then a slight smile touched his lips. “Gentle Men, we are ready to start kicking Krall ass, in a major fashion. In fact, I don't think the word
gentle
will ever apply to us males again, not as society has used it for the last three hundred years. The Ladies from Koban will also seem a lot less the genteel gender than women were once considered to be.” That pulled a round of laughter from the mixed crowd of TG2s.

“I’m leaving a Tachyon Space message for the migration ships and clanships that I expect
to arrive here shortly. I’ll ask them to transfer what supplies they can by tomorrow evening, and then all of them will Jump to join us, with a White Out millions of miles from the planet. This keeps them out of danger, lets them see what is happening, and the supply transfer can continue as they drift inwards until we have made their landing sites safe.”

From the stairwell,
poised between decks 1 and 2, he looked over the assembly below him on the bottom deck, and over to those he could see on the second deck. They were already in armor, helmets under their arms. The four Dragons were opened for entry, and the explosives holding cases no longer secured to the deck for quick movement. All he had to do was get them on the ground and they would take the dome and factory. The Mark had a particularly short Jump from the binary brown dwarf star, which orbited the larger star of the nearby Krall system they had designated CS1. They would arrive in less than thirty minutes. The Avenger and Beagle should already be in transit, from their more distant holding positions.

“We Jump in
five minutes. Good luck.”

The three attacks on Krall war making capability were finally under way.

The Avenger emerged at two hundred fifty miles above CS2 on its night side, and Karl informed her, “Mam, as expected, the main Krall habitat dome is close to the approaching horizon.”

They had ten
of the new ground attack missiles loaded, transferred from one of the supply clanships. As soon as the number of clanships parked there could be ascertained and targeted, the attack would be initiated.

The second clanship, with another complement of missiles
ready, did a White Out a hundred miles higher than the Avenger. It was the newly named Slasher, with Captain Anna Retief of the Old Colony of Suid-Afrika at the helm. Without the precision of an AI to help, Retief didn’t try for as close a reentry as the Avenger. The Lady had been newly retired from a Rim world freight company when the mass ship capture by the Krall, done twenty-three years ago, had interrupted her flight home and left her on Koban. Definitely out of retirement now and rejuvinated, Captain Retief was ready to put as many Krall into early and permanent retirement as possible. She had been first and fastest to beg to make the Jump with the Avenger when Noreen made the offer, even though two other of the four clanship captains also wanted to join the attack Jump.

In an update, Karl said,
“Fifteen clanships are on the tarmac of the main Krall dome, Mam. There is a hot spot on the ramp that indicates a recent launch, and contrails drifting away at high altitude confirms that a clanship recently departed.”

Noreen immediately called Retief. “Anna, Karl says a clanship
has launched and may be either nearby in space, in orbit, or enroute to the shipyards. Kindly power ahead in a low orbit to see if you can find and kill it, and any other targets we discussed. I’ll hit the dome and the ships here.”

A quick acknowledgement and the Slasher used its Normal Space drive to surge ahead
.

Noreen gave her firing order to the AI. “Karl, launch all ten ground attack missiles at the dome, and then
launch fifteen anti-ship missiles as the last of those leave the tubes.”

The most likely source of communication would com
e from the dome, and taking the leadership Krall out first would reduce the chance of their warning the guards at the shipyards. The parked ships would probably be empty. Some were positioned relatively close together, and a single missile might destroy its primary target and damage others. However, clanships were tough and modular, and even serious damage could be repaired. The decision had been made to ensure complete destruction, so each would receive a missile.

As they
rockets left the launchers, Dillon put the plot of missile streaks on the main view screen, ten in the front wave, fifteen trailing a short distance behind. Suddenly Karl made an unanticipated hurried report.

“Mam,
a clanship has ignited thrusters and is about to lift.”

There was little
possibility that at a low velocity and altitude it could escape the hypervelocity missile that had it as a target. However, even as the warning was spoken, TG2 reaction time came into play.

Carson fired
the only plasma cannon that could bear, directly at the bow of the rising clanship, and exactly in step, Yilini lanced two of the heavy lasers on the nose of the same target. At such a low angle to the target, the additional atmosphere the beams had to traverse would diffuse them slightly, but their purpose wasn’t to try to down the clanship, a difficult task even at close range. The ship would probably try to use its instant-on lasers to target some of the incoming missiles. The two Kobani gunners intended to make that a problem for a Krall gunner, by putting a great deal of energy on the enemy gun ports, with the potential to damage them.

O
nly five more seconds were needed for the first volley to hit the dome, and one second after that the clanships would start to add their own flames to the fireworks display.

Either the Avenger’s gunnery foiled the clanship’s counter fire, or the pilot never managed to get the weapons on line in time. The clanship flared orange a half mile above the huge billows of debris rising from the dome, as ten strikes hit evenly around its top and sides. The rise of the dome fragments were quickly joined by the comparatively larger balls of orange of the fully fueled and undefended clanships, which surrounded the dome.

Then, Captain Retief, passing directly overhead the destruction on the dark planet below, offered a paraphrased fragment of poetic comment, as she witnessed the orange and black conflagration.

“Ty
ger! Tyger! Burning bright, in the forests of the night.”

Carson
’s nearly eidetic new memory supplied a reference. “I doubt William Blake had this sight in mind, although in a sense, the stars threw down their spears.”

The Avenger passed o
ver her victim, the mushrooming cloud billowing with traces of orange flame still visible. Compared to the billion or more humans the Krall had already killed, this was but a beginning of the retribution they hoped would follow, in battles to come.

As Slasher was about to pass around the limb of the planet,
Retief called out, “Tallyho, and missiles away. The missing clanship had just landed at the shipyard, its heat and descent contrail were visible. There is another one sitting on the tarmac. We sent two more bullets at the top floors of the dome. I’ll finish a full orbit and look for other targets. Good hunting, Avenger.”

Noreen increased speed to get the shipyards in direct view
sooner. She was using a repeat image, relayed from a Slasher screen, but she wanted to be able to zoom and study the area directly.

The
direct image on screen, when she powered around the curve of the planet, revealed two black mushrooms of smoke still rising above the shipyard dome in the early morning light, as they left the night terminator behind. The roof of the dome had collapsed in the center. If this had been a human facility, there would have been a chance they might find no watch standers on night duty away from a combat zone, or inattentive this early. Except Krall never slept and were always alert. Even if watch standers had been unable to escape the explosions on the top dome levels, there would still be an unknown number of Krall prepared to repel their assault. From Torki and Prada estimates, it was predicted there would be roughly four thousand warriors on the ecologically ruined planet, but many should have been in the main dome and were now busy escaping the flames. They would have some shuttles available to them and the usual ground transports at their disposal, and all of them would certainly rush towards the fighting. Partly to defend the shipyards and factories that produced clanships and parts, but even more for clan honor. Mordo clan was a storied great clan, and they would likely fight with reckless abandon to defend their place in Krall histories.

Noreen swooped down into the atmosphere, rotated the sh
ip tail first, and then let it fall at a rate that built a plasma envelope around the rear of the Avenger. Hot spots developed on the thick footpads of the four recessed landing jacks and the heat resistant main thruster port. The eight large attitude thrusters were folded into their nacelles for now, with only the eight small fixed thrusters keeping the ship in line with the desired trajectory. They were a falling, flaming, armored gray watermelon shape for the moment.

She was taking full advantage of the TG2’s ability to accept higher stresses than the Krall. The friction of reentry was slowing them, but without a controlled burn, they would take out a part of the complex via the
sizable crater they would make on impact. Except for the weather penetrating radar and sensors, the landing point was obscured by clouds. The atmosphere around the dome was full of smog particles, generated by the industry around the shipyards, and today was a rainy day.

At an altitude where any
Krall observing would be forced to assume it was too late to save the ship, Karl sounded a loud warning horn once. Then he blasted the main thruster at maximum, pinning the humans to their acceleration couches, breathing with difficulty, and employed the Normal Space drive as well. This level of deceleration was calculated to put a Krall into unconscious. Because the enemy warriors didn’t normally use acceleration couches, and held onto posts on command decks, or lay flat on the decks, some wouldn’t have survived.

When velocity bled off enough, the movable eight main
attitude thrusters rotated out of their protective slots slightly, and fired to rotate the ship into a vertical descent. They were still dropping fast, but under the control of the AI. On screen it was a frightful rate of last moment slowing, the column of blue thruster plasma blasting pieces of the tarmac away from directly below the ship as it grew close. The landing jacks extended later than the half mile height typical for a Krall pilot, when they were mere yards from the surface, and the ship settled deeply onto them, as all thrust shut off.

The bounce
, as the jacks lifted the ship slightly, with less weight to support than the gravity field here required, made the upper decks sway with an alarming motion. However, it was exactly as they had practiced previously, all four lower portals slammed up into their recesses, and the ramps deployed automatically, all under Karl’s control.

The TG2’s were already in stealth mode in their armor, including the four inside the Dragons
(in the event their tops got “popped,” as Sarge described it). The mini tanks were not stealth capable, so the first four hundred Kobani poured out of the ship from each opening, and leaped past the ramps. The ramps were only for the Dragons, which would follow.

The only sign
s to Krall watchers that anyone or anything had made an exit from the ship would be the fast moving smoky, bipedal shaped holes in the steam and vapors lifting from the ramp.

The Avenger was
mere yards from the closest garage entrance of the dome. Because of the two clanships still burning on the opposite side of the dome, they had relatively little debris to avoid as two hundred of the TG2’s rushed the entrance in the first wave. Lying randomly around, there were dome struts, joints, and clear pieces of the shattered transparent window material, similar to human plazsteel, which had been blasted from the upper levels.

Two
separate groups of seventy-five split away from the second two hundred in the assault force, and raced in opposite directions to the next two entrances, each located a quarter of the way around the sides of the dome. The final fifty Kobani troops jumped right up onto the sides of the dome, grasping struts, joints, and finger and toeholds on small ledges, to scale directly up the six hundred-foot sides of the gradually inward sloping structure.

The plan was to trap as many Krall inside the dome as possible, cutting off any
easy exit point they could use to come out and attack the raiding forces. There was no consideration given to the possibility the enemy might look for an opening through which to retreat. These were the Krall!

Fire and debris from the two
destroyed clanships sealed one entrance, saving them the trouble of having to use a missile to close that one before they descended. Kobani were going to seal the other three entrances with troopers, and fifty more were going topside to pick off any warriors that attempted to get out via the upper levels, which were now open to the cloudy, gray sky and dirty rain.

The Dragons roared down the four ramps, and one each went to the entrances, to provide heavier plasma cannon support inside the dome
, and eventually down in the factory levels. The large garage doors would easily pass them, as would the wide internal corridors.

The Dragon with the greatest distance to drive would cover the entrance near the still burning clanships,
since they wouldn’t burn forever. It had three stealthed TG2’s riding on top, as mobile support elements.

The first four hundred
in the assault force didn’t carry plasma rifles, intending to rely more on agility and mobility, to execute lightning fast attacks with suit weapons, chosen over the slightly heavier firepower of the more cumbersome rifles. Four hundred of the Kobani behind them would carry rifles; a hundred of those would stay behind as a defense force for the ship, and establish a wide perimeter in a semicircle. They commandeered and drove a number of Krall trucks and tractors from inside the dome garages, to draw the attention of the attackers they expected from inside the dome. With their superior stealth capability, they would be waiting for the Krall some place they wouldn’t expect them to be.

Three hundr
ed troops with rifles, shoulder-fired single-shot tube rockets, and grenades, would provide cover and a way down into the factory levels for the one hundred two-person demolition teams. They were carrying stealthed-coated cases of explosives between them, to plant on equipment that might otherwise be salvaged later, even if exposed to salt water. Some of the explosives would be used to rupture the large coolant lines that ran from the nearby sea, and kept the temperatures in the factory and foundries comfortable.

****

The lone warrior on duty at the top of the dome, next to the main communications console and monitoring system, was less curious than was a typical warrior. He saw the double White Out signatures on a display, which were clearly labeled as two clanships. They were both on the night side of the planet, and apparently headed for the main habitat dome.