Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire Read online

  She thought of the eight-digit code, which Ethan automatically remembered, including the pattern of keys to press. However, there was a longer and different code, which she did not know, to summon and operate the elevator. Her mind faded as her second heart, next to the gaping chest hole, quit its beating, and he let her hand drop.

  Calling Reynolds, he also activated the radio channel to Kit, so she could hear what was said. “Sarge, use voice reply for Kit. I have the outer door code, but my source didn’t know the other code to run the elevator. Here’s the code she knew.” He sent the mental image of a keypad and the Krall number script as the keys flashed. Some numbers were used twice.

  “Got it…” there was a pause. “All right! The front door is opening…, oops...” A longer pause, before he resumed.

  “Had a blue suit trapped just inside, waiting for me. From a Mind Tap I discovered he couldn’t get back outside, or call for the elevator. The three black suits guarding the outer doors all sort of died, unexpectedly. They didn’t all chase after your butt, and these three had those Krall grenades they started making, after we showed them how effective they were in an assault.”

  “Sort of died?” Ethan inquired.

  “They inadvertently blew their own asses off after I winged them in their wrists or hands before they could throw the grenades. I foolishly jumped down from a ledge above them and kicked up some dust, which they saw immediately. I’d intended to take at least one of them alive for a Mind Tap. Their pistol bullets were no threat, but those big grenades have heavy uranium pellets like ours do, and they can penetrate helmet armor or joints. I had to shoot first and get flat fast.

  “After that, there wasn’t any info to get out of three piles of shredded meat. I thought I was going to be stuck outside before you called. I just got the second code from blue suit I found, and I’m calling up the elevator. Why don’t you hurry over and join me?”

  When they raced to join up with Reynolds, there were now five dead black suited warriors in front, a blue suit by the blast doors, and another dead brown suit just outside the elevator.

  “Took you long enough.” He said. “Had two visitors come calling, and a K’Tal was apparently stuck inside the lift, unable to send it down or open the door. There’s a lot of company coming our way now.” He gestured.

  From the direction where the previous Krall had been turned back, there were now hundreds running their way. They had shed their useless armor, but were flourishing pistols and more grenades, or in some cases short swords if they didn’t have anything else.

  Reynolds summed it up. “We can run the hell away using our stealth, before they close with us and see our foot prints form and the crowd stumbles into us. The alternative is to take an elevator ride.” He sounded calm enough, having faced hordes before, but those times he’d had more shooters with him, and more options. He wanted to hear what Ethan thought.

  Ethan looked at the pack of warriors, closing in on a broad front, barely more than a half-mile away. The trio was invisible to them for now, so there was no wasted shooting, and only Krall screams of rage were being aimed in their general direction.

  The young man shrugged, invisibly so because of stealth. “Too many of them to stand and fight, and if there are others coming around from the sides where we can’t see, avoiding them might be impossible. Why did they turn back after being ordered away earlier?”

  Reynolds repeated the invisible shrug. “The shutdown of equipment reached the hill side and front door anyway, so I suspect the clan leader down in the bunker has cameras that can see this front door area, even if it doesn’t show us. The bodies falling everywhere, grenades exploding, and blast doors opening are really great clues for him that someone is here that isn’t a Krall. They do have radio communications. I’d say he called for all of the reinforcements. You better decide son.”

  “Crap, Sarge. You already decided, and asking me that while they closed the gap was you testing me. I saw them coming when we arrived, and there was only one place left to go. I’ll bet Kit even knows, and she didn’t have to frill that blue suit you left alive about the elevator.”

  Kit, listening to their words, and occasionally looking out at the stampede coming their way, had casually stepped inside the entry way, demonstrating she was waiting for her human pride members to arrive at the only decision possible. Get inside the outer entry with its limited frontal access. She wasn’t sure if they could close the outer door against the onslaught or operate the elevator, but fighting where the rhinolo couldn’t flank or get behind to trample you seemed to be an obvious strategy.

  The first shots rang out at a quarter mile, when the massive double doors started sliding together. It was apparent then where the invisible enemy must be located. That enemy wasn’t dumb enough to be standing in the center of the elevator foyer, so the slugs all struck the back rock wall of ancient basalt, throwing chips everywhere, which rattled off the armor and Chameleon Skin, and into the open elevator compartment to the right. Then the doors closed, and the overhead lights furnished the slightly red tinged light that was the Krall’s preferred spectrum.

  Reynolds, pulled a live bush-tail from where it had been shoved, kicking, scratching, and biting at the armored fingers, from inside the empty grenade compartment. It was squeaking loudly in twisting protest now, held by its brush of a tail. “I think the front doors will hold for a time, so perhaps we could send our fearsome little friend down first?”

  Kit was puzzled now, since she was unaware of the purpose of the feisty little morsel. Ethan asked, “Do we have that much time Sarge? It has to drop at least a hundred feet and return for us.” He was thinking of the elevator round trip time of course.

  “Per the blue suit, it’s about two hundred feet down, as measured in Krall body lengths.” He indicated the broken backed, one eye missing blue suited sub leader, leaned against a sidewall and safe from the previous bullets.

  That Krall periodically clawed at where he thought they were, and he could faintly hear Standard spoken. The latter was spoken by the two men over radio for the benefit of Kit, and the cat’s ear buds leaked some sound that the Krall could detect. He swung again at the sound and raked talons along a section of Chameleon Skin. Kit’s rumbling deep growl caused the Krall to instantly draw back his hand, as his eyes darted around, seeking the source of the fearful sound.

  “That’s twice as far as I was estimating Sarge. Perhaps we better go down with it now.”

  “Well, this is a Krall elevator, and it works like those in the domes. The door whisks open, it whooshes up and down from the top, and travels fast. It’ll drop fast enough to scare you then slow quickly near the bottom.”

  There was hard thumping and scratching heard at the front doors. The pack had arrived.

  Ethan had a sudden thought. “Sarge, the Krall have explosives and detonators that are not quantum keypad operated. They might have some of that with them, and they don’t have many other weapon options now.”

  “Right you are. I didn’t think of that. Drag the dead K’Tal along and I’ll grab blue suit. Let’s all get in the elevator. We can use them as shields when we get down. I can close the elevator door without selecting a floor, to give us a moment to plan.”

  The elevator was roomy for humans, since it could hold more than two octets of armored warriors. They placed the two Krall across the center of the door opening just inside. Reynolds tapped into a circular slot at the top and the door practically slammed down to close. It was actually cushioned in some fashion just before it bottomed out, but the movement seemed ridiculously fast and dangerous to a human.

  Reynolds took a moment to think and dredged up an old pre Kobani transformation memory. “I was in one of these command bunkers when I was first captured on Poldark. They’re about two hundred feet long and over a hundred feet wide, and some have three levels, as the Gatlek’s bunker did where I was held. The Denial chips will act fast on any Olt’kitapi quantum coded control device within a hundred twenty feet of the
bottom of the elevator shaft. Anyway, the Krall might cluster as far from the elevator as possible to preserve use of their plasma rifles, provided they’ve figured out the short range of the effect. There’s also a timed self-destruct system if they have to abandon a bunker. Fortunately, that device is coded and located in the bunker at the commander’s control console, only about fifty feet from the main entrance, which is where this elevator shaft goes. That would be well within range of the chip’s fifth force effect, passing through soil and rocks as we near the bottom.”

  Ethan looked over the heavy door and around its top and sides. “So our initial risk is when the doors first open. If the Krall down there are backed against the far wall, barricaded and ready to fire, their weapons and armor will be out of range of our chips and even from that chips of the command console, only fifty feet from the elevator. Even if they can’t see us when the door flies up, they can’t miss.”

  Ethan was looking all around, but there was where to take cover besides behind the two Krall, because the door was nearly as wide as the compartment. He asked a question. “The door goes up the instant we arrive?”

  “I told you. Just like in the domes. You can close it and not move the lift, but when you arrive, it automatically opens and stays that way until you deliberately close the door as I just did. I’m sure they will focus fire towards that control panel to keep us from reclosing the door.”

  “Just like in the domes.” Ethan repeated in a distracted tone, thinking. “Give me a moment and then we can go.”

  “Don’t take long. They may be setting explosive outside the front doors.”

  “Carson and I did this when we were six. Stand in the front left corner and bend over so I can mount you.”

  “What? That sounds kind of dirty.”

  Ethan explained, and thirty seconds later as he jumped down from Sarge’s back, he said, “Let’s stack these Krall on one another. They aren’t much against plasma fire but we won’t need much. Select the floor level and jump towards Kit and me. We’ll grab you. Hand me the bush-tail.”

  Reynolds leaned towards the panel and muttered, “I didn’t notice before, but there’s three levels here. This may be a larger clan than I thought. The bunker commander’s console will occupy the center level.” He inserted a finger in the center slot, and faster than the elevator could start to drop, he leaped back and grabbed Ethan’s hand just as the floor of the elevator practically fell out from under them.

  ****

  Gatlek Fistok was alerted quickly in his bunker when hundreds of clanships executed White Outs over the continent where his invasion forces held over eighty percent control. It had been ninety percent in his control, before the partial force withdrawal ordered by now dead Tor Gatrol Kanpardi. The humans had taken advantage of knowing the transfer of forces was about to happen, and had orchestrated a strong counter attack afterwards, to recover territory they initially yielded with little resistance.

  Fistok had been appointed as the new Gatlek from a midsized clan, the Hakdo, a longtime supporter of Kanpardi and his Graka clan. This command was a just reward for that loyalty, but it came at a price of slight status loss, shortly after the transfer of control.

  The heavy counter attack pushed back his newly acquired forces from the just acquired territory. That counter attack followed a massive Krall assault that gained that territory, which by design was done to hide the sudden withdrawal they had expected to be a complete surprise to the human military. The departing Gatlek, Pendor of Mordo clan, didn’t properly support the forces he was leaving behind for his successor, Fistok. The departing Gatlek was only concerned with taking enough material with him to support the New Dublin invasion he would next conduct.

  Later, Telour, appointed Tor Gatrol after Kanpardi’s death, had experienced his own series of setbacks. Recently however, he had increased the rate of delivery of replacement equipment from K1 to Poldark and New Dublin, since the third invasion was delayed indefinitely. One surprisingly large shipment had arrived at Poldark on nearly a hundred clanships, loaded with arms and supplies. Even so, this was but a fraction of the material removed by Pendor, and Fistok had requested much more. His first thought today, and that of his staff, was this was four times as much material as with the previous delivery. It seemed to be good news.

  This was despite a bizarre claim by a single clanship pilot, who had arrived a half day earlier, reporting that the humans had again attacked K1, with just over a hundred ships, and was winning the battle. Outnumbered eighteen to one, or a bit more, by the Krall fleet still at K1, this was a wild and unbelievable assertion. This pilot, Phordot was her name, said the attackers were somehow shutting down any clanship they attacked, without blowing them up. What warrior would spare the warships of their opponent if they rendered them helpless to fight back?

  Making her story less reasonable was her assertion that she had escaped from human captivity, and had stolen the damaged ship on which she arrived. Why was this isolated clanship supposedly immune to the claimed new human technology? It was also a clanship conveniently loaded with small arms, and power packs. Exactly the type of material Fistok’s arms master said this same clan’s pilot had delivered from K1, five hands of days ago. She had requested to remain on Poldark on her last trip he said, to participate in the assaults she knew were being planned. Instead, her own clan sub leader on Poldark had ordered her back to K1.

  She seemed more like a frustrated warrior who wished to stay on Poldark and fight. If her clan leaders found that she had made up her story, and lied to remain on Poldark, she would be subject to a Death challenge from within her own clan.

  When the mass White Out was reported of many clanship signatures, there was no reason to believe they were not carrying supplies sent by Telour, mostly because of the high numbers of the arrivals. The humans only possessed close to a hundred clanships at last report, even if you accepted Photok’s claim of slightly more now. None of these clanships were displaying the modified human stealth capability, which had been applied to their other stolen clanships. For those reasons, there was no urgent order issued to launch all of the clanships sitting on Poldark. Some of Fistok’s clanships were to be sent aloft, as a matter of defending the arrivals from the navy squadron that might possibly attempt to destroy heavily loaded and thus slower supply craft.

  Soon, seemingly unrelated reports arrived within after two hands of minutes, all from ground forces, about malfunctions of numerous rifles and sets of armor, then of inoperative mini-tanks and armored transports. All of this equipment was located far from any active front, and not at risk of enemy action. It was unexplainable, but Fistok decided this new problem didn’t expose his forces to a sudden attack deep inside the territory they controlled.

  When a number of clanships he’d ordered aloft to guard and escort the supply ships down reported they were unable to launch, and the Krall commander in charge of the new arrivals had not communicated with his command bunker and didn’t reply to hails, his attitude dramatically changed. He had an alert broadcast to launch every clanship, and for every clan to safeguard their stocks of weapons and equipment, and prepare for a human assault. He ordered the circle of heavy plasma cannons to be ready to fire on the clanships over the continent if they displayed hostility.

  The sub leader in command of the batteries had a question for Fistok. “How do I decide who the hostile force is if you send all of our clanships aloft to mix with them? If anyone fires beams or missiles, they will look hostile to our gunners. The smaller human squadron has just appeared farther out, well above the new arrivals, and their radar emissions show they are tracking and capable of attacking any of the clanships below them. I can fire on the heavy cruisers, and be sure they are the enemy, but at that long range they are at little risk of serious damage.”

  In a frustrated snarl, Fistok told him, “Anything that fires at rising clanships or at the surface is also an enemy. Shoot at them.” He disconnected. He’d never heard of a battlefront where determining
who the enemy was being so uncertain.

  An avalanche of other strange reports arrived soon to his communications staff, from clan leaders in their bunkers, of events entirely within the most tightly defended center of the continent. There were sporadic attacks reported on warriors, clanships that couldn’t be entered or exited, because the doors were locked, or would not respond. More cases of body armor becoming inoperative, heavy transports that would not start, or in motion crashed because they could not be steered or stopped. Strangest of all, a number of just launched clanships had pilots, who had reported to their clan bunkers, that their craft had suddenly become uncontrollable.

  One pilot reported that shortly after liftoff she had been fired upon by an anti-ship missile from one of the clanships she was rising to defend from the human cruiser squadron. The unusually fast and agile missile had evaded her weapons master’s laser fire and had struck them at midship, but it had failed to detonate. It was apparently disarmed by the warrior that fired it in error, although Krall don’t make such firing mistakes. It was thought to be an equipment failure of the missile, or in guidance and tracking.

  Despite the lack of an explosion, the missile that glanced off the hull had somehow damaged their flight controls, because the pilot couldn’t change course or adjust thrust. Her weapons master was unable to return fire or even to target the clanship that had fired on them. They were passing through the newly arrived clanship fleet, on a trajectory towards the enemy cruisers, which inexplicably, so far, had also held their fire.

  Clanship commanders from Fistok’s clan, of the craft he kept parked around his bunker for a fast reaction mobile defense, were claiming their vessels, in a brief period, had gradually become unresponsive, forming a ring of deactivated clanships completely around the bunker. It clearly had not happened all at once, because the communications network linking the craft had remained intact, and the pilots had exchanged reports as the problem spread.