Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire Read online

  “Right. Waiting for your signal.”

  “Jakob has the helm. It will be any…, second.” The last word, still received instantaneously via Comtap, was uttered a second slower because Mirikami was suddenly forty-one light minutes farther away, and a jagged and heavily shadowed moonscape suddenly filled half of his view screens.

  “Damn. That seemed closer than it actually was.” He said, checking his instruments. “Came out a half mile above a crater rim. I’m moving down to a quarter mile before I send you your coordinates. Any sign that I was noticed?”

  “Tet, I won’t see a reaction for forty one minutes.”

  “Oh crap! We can talk instantly but not see instantly. I’ll know before you will, but I can’t go peek around the edge right now. Doesn’t matter. If we’re seen, we charge in anyway. Here’s the coordinates Jakob just fed to my Comtap’s database. Come on…, down.” The last word came a second delayed, because the Avenger instantly appeared a thousand feet away from the Mark as he spoke. It loomed large in a side view screen.

  “Hi!” she said brightly. Certain the skip in his words indicated surprise again.

  “How did you enter the coordinates so fast?” After his warning to the other captains, he expected there to be at least a ten second delay as she entered and rechecked the numbers, to be sure she had them right.

  “Why would I do that? I have Karl for dumb drudgework. He’s linked to us.”

  “Right. You don’t mind hurting Karl’s feelings with that remark?” He asked jokingly.

  Karl, in the link, answered the question for himself, as if it were serious. “My model AI series does not display anything but simulated feelings, Sir. An emotional simulation was not triggered by such an obviously true statement.”

  “Then you’re an insensitive clod.”

  “I’m hurt by that allegation, Sir.” Karl replied blandly, to prove it could pretend emotions.

  “That you’re insensitive, or a clod?” he asked.

  “Clod, Sir. I actually am insensitive, as I thought I explained. Having said that, I am not a lump of dirt or clay.”

  “Then you are an insensitive lump of electronics.”

  “Yes Sir. Thank you for accurate clarification.”

  Back to business he said, “Jakob, you equally insensitive lump of electronics. Can you link through my Comtap and deliver the proper coordinates to the other hundred fifteen captains, after I tell them it’s safe to jump here?”

  “Yes Sir.”

  Mentally selecting the group link to the full complement of Comtaps, Olts and mind enhancers, he alerted everyone. “The Mark and Avenger are safely behind Cheetah, and we have about another forty minutes of complete gamma ray shadow time from the two outlying observers. The AI will transmit individual coordinates to each ship captain for your Jump to join us, and for matching the moon’s orbital velocity. Double-check the numbers before you Jump. Here are the up to the second accurate numbers. Jakob, send them.”

  The response wasn’t instant as it had been for Noreen and the Avenger, but from the first to the last arrival, it was barely fifteen seconds. There was a storm of gamma rays from that tight cluster of White Outs.

  Mirikami was thinking it was fortunate the Olt’kitapi had considered gamma radiation when they designed clanship hulls and stealth coatings. Any living thing unshielded would have been fatally irradiated. The dead moon below voiced no complaint.

  He gave the word, "Deploy the small ships." The assault of K1 was under way.

  Like deadly pollen from killer flowers, the spores shot out of launch bays located around the perimeters of the Kobani ships. They spread in all directions, staying low to the surface and its radar clutter, ready to sling shot around the circumference of the eight hundred mile wide moon towards K1.

  The four-ships had four times the internal volume of a single ship, but because humans, even in armor, were much smaller than four Krall, they typically could hold six people. Today they held five, and a ripper. That made it rather tight quarters, with the big cats quivering and eager to start the hunt. They didn’t purr like Earth house cats, but a low breathy rumble served as an indication of anticipation. Except for the thrill of visiting Haven, none of the rippers had been off the home planet. They had shared the frill images from Kobani, of alien worlds and combat, certainly for long enough to crave the experiences for themselves.

  Kobalt had pushed his way into the front of the four-ship, next to his “brother” Carson. Flying close to them, destined for the same dome complex, was Ethan with Kit by his side. Alyson was headed for the same domes in the same flight, and she had Kandy as her ripper escort. She and Carson’s infant son, christened Calvin, were back on Koban with friends who were prepared for an evacuation. If this attack proved unable to stop Telour from sending a Krall fleet there, the relatively small population would be forced to flee.

  The rippers were finally getting to defend friends, family, and home from wanton Krall savagery. Jorl breaker had Kopper with him, Danner was with Kally, and Bradly flew a four-ship with Kayla. This would be the first time rippers had faced the Krall other than on the open savannas of Koban around Prime City, and at Hub City, on those two hunting grounds of many others. Except for frill memories passed down from wild prides, they only had Kobani contact with the Krall to guide them as to what to expect in combat. The Krall had been gone from Koban longer than the age of any living ripper.

  Just over three thousand small ships streaked around the craggy rim of the moon and turned in towards K1. They were spreading towards their designated surface targets, some of which were on the opposite side of the planet. There was no sign from the ships in orbit or the polar station keeper that they had been detected. The main Kobani ships closed the launch ports, and prepared for Jumps to intercept the various clanships in low orbits, with the Avenger and the Mark assigned to take out the two farther out watchers first. All they waited on to initiate the orbital attacks was the small ships reaching their targets, or an indication they had been detected by the watchers.

  The ships on the near side of K1 initiated their deceleration before entering atmosphere, while the other half of the little armada swung around the limb of the planet, flying below the debris fields but staying above atmosphere. Thanks to Comtap, Mirikami would know when those with the longest distance to fly had reached the vicinity of their target domes. It took another tense twelve minutes before they also had slowed and entered atmosphere.

  “Noreen, switch ECM on, and we Jump together.” They had already entered the coordinates for their two targets. Mirikami would take the nearly stationary polar sentry clanship, and Noreen the wide orbiting sentry. The AI’s coordinated their dual Jumps precisely.

  The two ships winked out from behind the moon, and instantly did White Outs less than a mile directly behind the two watchers. Each fired a single anti-ship missile, using no radar pre-guidance data. A precise hit on a vital component wasn’t required, merely a near miss.

  The relatively small missiles, fast even in their normal configuration, had less than half their usual mass because there was no warhead, and they carried less than a third of the standard high energy, dense and heavy fuel. Greater speed, maneuverability, and short range were their advantages now. They simply needed to reach the target as quickly as possible.

  Both missiles actually managed to hit the hulls of their targets, but from so short a distance, they didn’t achieve the hypervelocity they were capable of, so they didn’t have the momentum to penetrate the hulls. They glanced off the sides and continued accelerating away.

  ECM was used to suppress any communications from the two ships, but there was no attempt initially to transmit from either of them. Mirikami sent the Comtap signal to the hundred fourteen Kobani ships that were waiting to go after the Forty-two low orbiting clanships.

  “Go! These two are disabled and silenced.”

  One of the lower orbiting clanships was. It made a call to the pole watch clanship, the only one of the two it could se
e from its equatorial location. “Phordot, there was a gamma ray burst near you.”

  The ECM was relatively short range by design, the effect weakening over about ten miles, and its effect was originally intended to deactivate Krall communications systems in domes, not to block them with signal jamming, which would reveal the presence of the intruders. The Krall radios simply switched themselves off. A clanship within the ECM envelope wouldn’t hear an incoming call, or be able to make a call out of its own.

  Abruptly, one hundred fourteen White Outs appeared around K1, appearing behind the forty-two low orbit watch standers, their positions and clustering having been accurately relayed from the passing small ships by Comtap as they descended to the surface. The flash of detected White Outs was the signal for the small ships to go into action on the surface.

  None of the forty-two Krall clanships managed to respond with missile launches or laser cannon fire. The two anti-ship missiles assigned per ship was possibly overkill, but the Denial chips removed control of every system from the crews inside, except for radio use. It was theorized that the Olt’kitapi had left communications and life support active, free of the chips that could block their use, probably as a gesture of mercy, to permit a call for an evacuation by an otherwise disabled clanship, where the crew inside couldn’t even open an airlock to make an exit.

  The other three ECM systems the Kobani had available to them were on ships that emerged within a cluster of five or six clanships, shutting all of their radios down. If the radios were repowered manually, the ECM continuously sent the shutdown command. At least those ships in close formation would be unable to warn of the boarding process happening on each of their neighbors. Kobani were leaping across the gaps as their host ships moved in close to the now drifting enemy craft. They used magnetic footpads to swarm over the hull to enter by the four airlocks at the lowest hold level, by two shuttle bay airlocks, and by four small maintenance airlocks near midship.

  Simply removing the clanships from active Krall control and moving off wasn’t enough to preserve them indefinitely. A resourceful enemy crew, even without plasma rifles to make it easy, would find a way to rupture the reaction mass fuel tanks for the thruster engines, and the binary fuel would detonate on contact, preventing the capture of that intact clanship. The Kobani wanted these craft in operating condition, and Mind Taps ensured that every one of the boarders knew how to operate their newly acquired transportation and its internal systems.

  It was expected that the Krall would have minimal crews aboard the watch standers, enough to handle reloads in the thirty-two anti-ship missile bays, and perhaps one to three posted on the command deck. A commander of a hand or more of clanships would probably be on one craft, with a pilot, and perhaps a K’Tal or weapons master. Typically, about thirty-four to thirty-six warriors was expected. Therefore, ten Kobani boarders, facing more than three times their number of Krall, seemed like an unfair advantage. For the Kobani.

  After the denial list propagated at near light speed between every quantum lockout on the clanships, the Krall would have only the use of standard pistols and personal weapons, mostly knives, and unpowered armor (if they tried to put that on) which would furnish only basic life support. Some of the fighting would be at talon and tooth level against Kobani suit weapons, but it wasn’t as if a Krall warrior expected or would accept any mercy. They never granted that to opponents, considering surrender a sign of a weak bloodline. Many strong bloodlines were about to end today. There wasn’t time for so-called fair play, by facing warriors in hand-to-hand combat, unless that was forced.

  Each Kobani ship aloft, including the newest captures, had to be prepared to take on any clanship that managed to lift from the surface. The ships that had paired to intercept the forty-two orbiting defenders joined the rest of the Koban fleet in trying to maintain a blockade, until the additional newly captured ships were able to help. That made for only a hundred fourteen blocking ships against possibly thousands of potential lift offs. The ten boarders per enemy clanship would find themselves on their own, as the other Kobani ships spread out to enforce the blockade.

  Obviously, the White Outs above K1 would be noted on the surface, but the Krall and clanships on the ground quickly discovered they were having problems of their own to solve. There had been just over five hundred domes, large and small on K1, from the clusters belonging to Great and Major clans, down to a hundred or so smaller isolated domes built for minor or finger clans. That was a significant habitat reduction from the nearly seven hundred domes there prior to the previous human attack, but rebuilding domes took a backseat to repairing clanships. Large domes with wide tarmacs and a hundred or more clanships received the most attention from the small ship infiltration force.

  Two four-ships and one or two single ships landed right on top of all of the large domes. Stealthed, one would settle on the crown of each dome, as several others were positioned closer to the roof edges, where their shooters had unobstructed views of parked clanships. The mere act of landing on the domes disabled remotely controlled laser batteries and hand held plasma weapons near the highest level, as well as blocking coordinated fire control systems in the command centers in the center of the top levels. The short range of the Denial chips didn’t often spread fully down to the base of the domes, past roughly eight of the fifteen-foot high levels.

  Quantum locked compartments were spaced too far apart, so unless there were personal plasma weapons and armor, randomly distributed, to relay the electronic virus lower, the spread was halted. Below where virus transmission was interrupted, body armor and plasma rifles functioned just fine.

  Stealthed Kobani in armor leaped out of their small ships, equipped with rifles, mostly of the .50 caliber variety but some older .30 calibers, which all could fire ammunition with the KK chips replaced with the fingernail sized Denial chips. They rapidly fired shots out towards the parked clanships closest to the domes. Not to hit the ships, but to find a trajectory, or a lane, through the randomly parked craft where a single slug could pass near as many clanships as possible. The denial list transmitted by the fifth force had a short effective range, but its spread through an entire clanship happened nearly at the speed of light.

  The Olt’kitapi had designed these tools of war for their “police force,” with this key disabling transmission in mind. They simply were unable to fight their way close enough, and often enough to do that, and the Krall ruthlessly destroyed occupied infected clanships and weapons, as soon as they figured out what was happening. That had happened over the course of weeks of the revolt. The Kobani were not so tentative, or slow to act.

  A single shot could disable five or six ships if the right angle could be found through the maze, and with tarmacs about a mile wide, no clanship was out of range.

  At the outer perimeter of the largest and most crowded tarmacs, the bulk of the small ships were disgorging Kobani and rippers, many of which didn’t have long-range weapons with Denial chip ammunition. There had been a limited number of those rifles, and they went to the dome top landers, where they could block clanship access to warriors already pouring from the domes to reach the closest parked clanships. The spatter of White Outs had triggered alarms at domes and in parked clanships all over the planet. None of them knew that there were infiltrators literally on top of them.

  An awkward aspect of the Denial chips was that they froze a clanship in whatever mode of operation it was in when the lockout was activated, preventing a Krall from changing settings of anything with a lockout, or from shutting that something down.

  A number of clanships already had crews aboard, prepared to relieve clan mates in orbit soon, or were prepared for some unrelated mission, such as a resupply run to Poldark or New Dublin. Around the planet, at least nine clanships at major domes managed to initiate a launch sequence. Eight were using the typical Krall pollution filled fiery plasma exhaust blast off, which they seemed to thrill in doing manually. Fast snap shots from dome-top shooters prevented fully success
ful launches, but they did lift.

  Set to employ manual steering control by the pilots, the uncorrectable trajectories made for rather high and spectacular blue-white plasma arcs that ended with lovely, and tragically fatal, orange and black fireballs hundreds of miles away.

  Except one clanship lifting from a crowded tarmac, which ended a bit differently. It not only had a tachyon in its primary trap for use by the reactionless Normal Space drive, but it also apparently had a single warrior on the command deck. That was the surmise for what happened anyway. A pilot alone, anticipating the need to operate a weapons console when he met the enemy above, activated the autopilot for liftoff at maximum Normal Space thrust in atmosphere, surely intending to operate a weapons console and to change course to attack the enemy that had just arrived in orbit.

  A passing slug, fired just as the clanship lifted above the rim of the nearby dome, left it locked with a high Norman Space drive thrust and on autopilot, when the ability to change settings was suddenly denied. The last they heard from that pilot was a Doppler shifted radio call a half day later as the clanship, at an appreciable fraction of the velocity of light, was passing the edge of the local Kuiper belt, still accelerating. It already had the velocity to escape the Milky Way. A Krall had finally gone exploring.

  At smaller domes, which received only a few single ships or a four-ship, there were a few launches of clanships by warriors of finger clans, and which actually achieved orbit. Not understanding what was happening they attacked the enemy, and fell victims to Denial chips in anti-ship missiles, which had greater speed and maneuverability than should have been possible.

  Mirikami and Noreen left behind boarders of their own to take control of the two ships they had disabled. They had work yet to do observing the planet. “The ships that sent boarders will stay in orbit to watch for and intercept possible inbound traffic from outside the system. As soon as any captured Krall has been Mind Tapped, we should be able to learn which domes hold the clan leaders. Now the hard task will be to power down the domes, locate isolated operational clanships, and find out where Telour is located. I want him in particular.”