Koban: Rise of the Kobani (90 page)

****

The Beagle was four hours ahead of the rescue ship flotilla, and accompanied by one of their two new clanships, the Thunder. They emerged close to the orbital station, and Marlyn was pleased to discover only two shuttles docked there, and no clanship. The shuttles were only lightly armed with medium powered lasers, and sometimes carried four anti-ship missiles in two external pods. These had no pods. Except for a possible ramming threat, they offered no significant defense for the station. She could ignore them for now, and would leave the gravity projectors tethered next to the station alone as well. The projectors and station couldn’t get away.

Of greater interest was a partially completed Eight Ball, positioned next to a maneuverable work habitat, orbiting nearly ten miles from the main station. This separation was protection against a sudden spontaneous crystal matrix rupture, or a mistake by a Torki
technician as the collapsed matter was sculpted with one of the Raspani atomic bond disrupter tools to make it hollow. She had been told by the Torki to expect to find one or two of the weapons under construction near the station, but far enough away that the main structure or the gravity projectors were not endangered.

She contacted the Thunder. “Captain Ralston, we can leav
e the station alone for now, those two shuttles have little offensive capability. I’ll let you dock there with the assault force after we make certain there are no clanships that will come up here to interrupt you. Follow me down to the planet, and I’ll target the dome next to the sea. If we spot clanships there, or at any other domes, we can split the targets. For now, provide me with cover in case any clanship is already aloft. I’ll drop down to a hundred miles, just above the fringe of atmosphere. I want you at two hundred miles, and trailing a thousand miles behind me.”

With Ralston’s acknowledgement
, Marlyn took the Beagle twenty-two thousand miles lower, leaving the station behind, in its geosynchronous orbit.

There was, as
anticipated, no Krall challenge to the two arriving clanships. No matter which clan they represented, they
had
to be “friendly” because interclan fighting was now forbidden, with a worthy enemy to fight. This would probably be the last time the Krall displayed this level of laxity. After twenty-five thousand years of history, another species had come hunting
them
.

Once again, a dome was found with unattended parked clanships. Eleven this time. Tossing an opportunity to Captain Ralston, Marlyn told her, “You take all of the clanships, and launch five seconds after my salvo for the dome is away. I’ll launch in thirty seconds when we are nearly overhead, to make the travel time short. I might catch more of them in the upper levels, t
hus fewer to fight later if we return to rescue workers.”

The Beagle launched four of the ground attack missiles, and five seconds after that, eleven hypervelocity anti-ship missiles streaked from the Thunder. With the different missile travel velocities, the smaller and faster anti-ship missiles nearly caught up to the much larger rockets from Beagle. The bigger missiles were set for detonation twenty feet after initial penetration, which would be into the second level of the dome. They would destroy the top three or four levels
of the dome, along with the clan leadership and most high status warriors.

The eleven clanships, almost simultaneously, went up in their orange and black fireballs, shattering the armored windows where they were parked close to the dome, on a smaller tarmac built for this undersized dome. Fuel cells spewed propellant and oxidizer alike into the gaping holes. The dome was going to receive more fire damage than Marlyn had expected.

The smaller landing area and fire might make evacuation from the factory below difficult for the Prada, at least when coming up through the dome. As she looked at the wreckage of broken clanships and dome debris still falling back to the ground, there didn’t appear to be a safe place to set a migration ship down. They may have to land in the sea, close to the dome, and somehow get the Prada out to the ship. That would considerably slow the loading.

There was only one
other clanship located on the planet by the AI, parked at a strip-mining pit where the red tint probably indicated iron ore was obtained for the factory. Marlyn destroyed that one herself. Thus far, this raid had been nearly flawless. They had control of the system, and now needed to destroy the Eight Balls, and rescue the workers in the orbital station first, and those down here if they could.

Marlyn led the Thunder back up to the orbital station, where the Krall there certainly knew they were coming now. As they drew within five miles, the shuttles launched, firing their lasers at the gun ports on the Beagle and Thunder, probably hoping to weld some of the ports shut from the heat.

Kap, Beagle’s AI, immediately rolled the ship to distribute the heat over a larger area, and fired the heavy lasers, Marlyn having released control. The first shuttle struck started drifting in a sideways twist, as its attitude thrusters on one side were damaged. As its side was presented to the larger ship, Alyson fired double plasma bolts at the rear hatch, where the seam made the weakest point for the star-hot energy to force an entry. A jet of air proved the shuttle had been holed. The Krall pilot would have been in armor or a pressure suit anyway, so the loss of atmosphere wouldn’t be fatal. The next shots from Alyson, at the exposed cockpit, as the craft continued to rotate, did prove fatal. The plasma bolts penetrated the forward view ports, and gutted the interior.

Captain Ralston, without an AI to shoot for her, knew her
newly designated gunner was inexperienced and had not benefited from Mind Tap training yet. In a bit of overkill, she used another anti-ship missile for the second shuttle. It exploded in a smaller orange ball than from a clanship, and the flame faded swiftly in vacuum.

Marlyn sighed.
Now there was a small debris field to navigate through, and it posed a slight risk to the TG2’s as they boarded the station. No point in complaining now, it could wait for after action discussion.

“
Alyson please put a half dozen bolts into the gravity projectors attached to the side of the station. If we take the Torki with us that know how to use them, or can build replacements, the Krall should be out of business to make more Eight Balls.”

They had been told that the gravity projectors were of Botolian design, and one-of-a kind devices left from that species defeat. However, the Torki had resourceful engineers and scientists, and they might have figured out the alien design.

One minute later, Marlyn told Ralston she could close with the station to offload the seven hundred-fifty member assault team. They were presumably another example of overkill, but overwhelming force didn’t seem like a bad idea. Sarge was in overall command of that force. A first for the reluctant leader.

Marlyn was now free to check on how many of the dense Eight Balls Kap had found with the
ir gravity sensors, parked close to the planet and its moon. The partially complete object had four siblings detected so far. Two were in widely spaced ten and fifteen thousand mile orbits around the planet, and two were circling the moon, itself nearly three hundred thousand miles away.

Marlyn had the lower two decks manually sealed with the airtight doors at the four stairwells and the four elevator shafts
at deck two. The pumps removed most of the atmosphere, so the Kobani in armor could open a portal. A small amount of atmosphere was vented, but now the heavy rail gun could be rolled close to the opening, and locked securely into the clamps installed just for that purpose. The heavy slugs exerted a strong kick when the powerful current built the magnetic field, which pushed the ferrous jacketed, depleted uranium filled, diamond-tipped projectile along the thirty-foot acceleration track.

Despite the pleas of Jorl Breaker to let him fire the gun, all he would be allowed to do was place a “stick” of ten slugs in the autoloader, activate the telescopic camera, and switch on the Link to Kap. The AI also could position the ship, accelerate towards an Eight Ball, pivot and steady the ship as it moved sideways at almost a thous
and miles per second, and fire a cluster of five precision shots at the target from over a thousand miles away. Then Kap would instantly apply acceleration at right angles to their motion to increase distance before the slugs could hit.

They started their first pass at a ball in the ten thousand mile orbit. The people in the hold were not even allowed to watch the weapon fire, in case a round fractured or a coil cracked. Fragments could penetrate the suits. Jorl had to settle for a suit visor image from behind the protection of the main thruster shaft through the hold. With Kap in control, it proved possible to track the slugs and zoom faster than he ever could have done
manually. He had a good perspective down the length of the barrel as it fired.

If he had not been a TG2, he would have missed all but the result. As it was, the one point two seconds of flight time, and the intense light
installed at the base of each slug let him see the projectiles close with the target in a beautifully straight line of white dots. The suits automatic dimming feature protected his vision, as the slugs all appeared to vanish in the same instant in an intense blue flash, which released a huge burst of gamma and x-rays.

The gun worked spectacularly well. After that
one flash, the ball’s material itself expanded in an invisible sleet of atomic particles, moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. The hull of the ship was adequate defense against the particles, and in the second before the blast, Kap had rotated the ship to present its thicker base plate and blast shield towards the passing rain of mildly radioactive particles. The yield was a significant amount of energy, even if there were little matter around it for it to react against. For what was nearly equivalent to a small thermonuclear explosion, it was not terribly spectacular in the emptiness of space.

In analysis,
Kap, who had faster and more precise visual processing than any organic being, even a TG2, announced that the first slug had done the deed. The other four backup rounds proved redundant. He didn’t need to be that close for the next shots, or use so many.

The Eight Ball
, in a fifteen thousand mile orbit was triggered by a single slug from two thousand miles away. The next one orbiting the moon proved the AI had limitations. The first shot struck a glancing blow from three thousand miles, and the Eight Ball failed to crack. The next shot at two thousand miles worked. The fourth one followed.

“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.” Sarge transmitted from the Thunder, as it approached the orbital station. They had held off the assault until the nearby Eight Balls were vaporized, as a precaution against the sphere of penetrating particles and radiation from the explosions. Now they were about to
knock on and open some doors.

They used a Krall strategy to
cut their entrances. Attaching ten-foot diameter semispherical and pressurized domed devices at a half dozen places on the station’s hull, they set remote actuators to activate thermite style, ring-shaped charges, which would burn through the bulkhead. It was a method of doing what the Krall did from single ships when they boarded human vessels or orbital stations.

The
Torki had told them where there were internal compartments that would auto-seal with airtight doors if pressure were suddenly lost.  However, the small domes they were using also sealed airtight to the hull plates, and they would not allow full depressurization in case the doors failed. They didn’t want to kill the Torki inside the station by pressure loss. They merely wanted it to drop enough in the compartments to trigger the airtight doors to close.

Sarge had his
entry teams positioned. He radioed on an encrypted channel. “I’ll trigger the burns in, 3, 2, 1, now!” He thumbed the transmitter button.

****

Force Leader Therdak had his twelve hands of octets ready for them. Whoever was trying to capture this large orbital station had already destroyed the habitat dome on the surface, and all of the clanships in the system. One of those had been scheduled to retrieve his warriors tomorrow. His force had participated in a week of training exercises up here, in preparation for a raid into human territory, to take control of an orbital weapons factory that had Jump capability.

The
Stodok clan’s plan was to Jump the entire weapons factory to K1 for study by their K’Tals, and to let the Torki study how humans produced so many weapons so quickly. This worthy enemy was clever, and there were things they made and did quickly that the Krall could order the Prada and Torki to learn to emulate, such as greater computer control of manufacturing.

The capture of
one of those automated manufacturing stations would restore some of the honor that Stodok clan had lost in the last thousand years, before this new enemy was discovered. They were now a small clan that spent much time training on an orbital station, and therefore were well suited and experienced to conduct the raid they had planned.

This
act would earn them respect and a larger role in the new war. Apparently, one of the vengeful clans they had previously fought had learned of this plan, and they were now in violation of the joint council’s order to end interclan warfare. The intent was obviously to steal the hammers, the technology, and the workers. A pragmatic joint clan council might excuse them for this violation, if that clan had control of these powerful weapons, and could still produce them and make them available.