Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire Page 7

  Whatever the humans had done here, the clans at Poldark were unaware of the risk they faced by coming into close contact with the enemy, as they preferred to do. Fighting at a standoff distance would improve their chances if they knew about the risk in advance. It was settled in her mind. Her duty was to go to Poldark and alert the Gatlek of the threat coming their way in another few days, and then he could send warning to New Dublin. They would be ready with new tactics.

  ****

  Mirikami clapped his hands in satisfaction, as the clanship launched at maximum thruster acceleration, and passed the two-mile mark. “There she goes. I was afraid for a moment she might decide to try to ram one of us. We had missiles and plasma cannons ready, and the transmitter code for the device we put inside the control console, but we don’t have very many Krall accessible clanships left on K1 to use this way. I’m glad it’s on its way.”

  Maggi said, “I’ll link to Henry again, and tell him to warn his Planetary Defense Forces to allow a lone clanship through next week, and make a token effort to knock it down. Should I tell him that Thad and Sarge will Jump for Poldark later today with a four hundred ship fleet, right after their own blue suit makes his miraculous escape to New Dublin?”

  “Yes, do that, and give him the various spec ops activation codes Joe had his boys set up on their remote devices. Ask him to coordinate with Admiral Foxworthy too, so she can make certain Phordot also slips past the heavy cruiser squadron next week. I’d hate to have the navy get lucky and knock out the only supply clanship Henry ever wanted to let land safely. With Admiral Bledso resigning, and President Medford selecting a political ally as Chairfem of the Joint Chiefs, Foxworthy might be wary of cooperating with any Kobani operation.”

  “He doesn’t have to let her know this is our operation.” Maggi suggested.

  Mirikami shook his head. “We’ll want her support after the landing, and when Thad arrives. I think she’s sympathetic to us. She had to be a Bledso protégé to get command of the Poldark squadron, and she won’t be happy that her boss was forced out over politics. If we let her in on the operation she can plan ahead, she can make her squadron look good against the Krall by participating.”

  “Navy personnel can’t board the clanships, Tet. Even if they’re disabled.”

  “No, that’ll still be our jobs. Nevertheless, we can furnish the navy with Denial chips for striped down anti-ship missiles, like those we used. Not all of the small arms going to Poldark and New Dublin have uninfected chips, you know. Thad’s group will be taking loads of infected power packs with their chips ready for salvage.”

  “Hon, you told Haveram and the Falcon to stop at Poldark to see Henry, to pass along some Denial chips, and then Jump to New Dublin. We don’t have any sure navy ally in charge of that other squadron, and the Army forces there were never under Henry’s command. How’s he going to get both the army and navy to work with the Kobani, now that the president has turned on us?”

  “Major Caldwell, Henry’s aide de camp will act as our go between and travel with the Chief. He met Commander Molotov when she was serving as a captain under Foxworthy in the squadron at Poldark, and he believes she’s a Bledso supporter because the New Dublin squadron was given to her by Bledso, after she was Chairfem of the Joint Chiefs. Howard also knows General Ellen Masterfem quite well, having served under her in a Ranger company, years before her promotion and long before Henry hired him as his aide.

  “Howard’s convinced he can get them both to cooperate with us, particularly when he demonstrates the Denial chips in a closed test with a Krall prisoner. No matter what Medford says about us, they want to win this war. He’s worried that he and the Chief may have to capture a live warrior themselves since there are no Kobani spec ops on New Dublin to do it in advance. That might give away his gene mods. Perhaps Chief Haveram can do it alone.”

  Maggi looked worried. “The Chief never trained with our raiders. He’s been on the Falcon making supply runs ever since he became a full Kobani.”

  “Hey, Tiger Lady, all you had was Mind Taps on fighting techniques before you boarded Huwayla with me. You were teaching some spec ops dirty tricks before that was over. Haveram has had his share of scrapes. Ask him about his shopping trips to New Australia and a run-in with gangsters.”

  “Shopping? Doesn’t sound very exciting,” she sniffed.

  “It is the way Chief Haveram does things. He left at least fifteen armed thugs dead along the way, and only used a gun on one of them, and a knife on two others.”

  “I’ll bet he never was trapped underground in the dark with ten thousand feral Krall,” came her defensive retort.

  “Nope. He’s too smart to get his ass in that sort of a trap.”

  Mirikami quickly stepped farther away from his petite wife, just in case she wanted to display some form of displeasure at his impolite characterization of her own misadventure last year. She looked at him with a raised eyebrow, reserving retribution for some probable future provocation due to her husband’s brand of humor. Besides, she privately agreed she’d made a dumb mistake that time.

  Thad’s new ship, which he’d finally named the Ripper, settled on the tarmac near a second damaged clanship, also apparently waiting for repairs, and strangely enough, it too was packed with small arms, it had no missiles, and sported a not so coincidentally damaged command console, with a single control station operational.

  Again, a team of Kobani noisily rushed off the Ripper and headed for the dome, but paused on the tarmac with visual stealth active, simply waiting to watch their prisoner make his escape, and then steal the juicy bait ship left waiting for him. This blue suit had also overheard the news that after completing the capture of clanships on Telda Ka, these spectacularly powerful and effective human fighters were going to travel to New Dublin, to try to capture the roughly five hundred clanships operating in support of that invasion force.

  After ten minutes of standing several hundred feet from the Ripper, with no activity reported from the Bridge observer, Thad said, “I knew I should have used the smarter acting K’Tal I captured, instead of the dumb damn blue suit that fell in your lap Sarge.”

  “Why? He’ll figure it out.”

  “If you managed to catch him so easy, he must have been the moron of the lot. We’ll probably have to go unlock the door for him, then run and hide. Might have to leave him a sign in Krall script saying Please steal the ship next door. If he can read.”

  “Why does his capture make him dumb?” Sarge inexplicably felt like he needed to defend the damn Krall he’d captured, after Thad’s insulting comments.

  “Well, you said he walked backwards down a corridor right into your arms. That’s a stupid Krall move. The numbskull probably can’t figure out how to get the hatch open without power.”

  Still defending his captive, Sarge said, “I was stealthed, and you were so clumsy and noisy wrestling with that K’Tal and the black suit you surprised, that he was focused in that direction. He wasn’t backing up, anyway. He just couldn’t see me coming from behind.”

  “He was standing there, looking dumbfounded at my capturing his clan mates instead of helping them. Not a swift thinker. I told you we should have used my K’Tal prisoner.”

  “Right. Let you win our bet on who captured the best prisoner to use. Pay me pal, you lost! Besides, your K’Tal technician might try to fix the dismantled command console, and he’d find and remove the remote controlled actuator.” He couldn’t see Thad’s face, but he more than suspected he was getting his chops busted only to provoke a reaction. As usual.

  “I have that device so well hidden that…,” Thad’s rebuttal was interrupted by a Comtap announcement.

  “The prisoner is out, and headed up to the bridge.” That was a link from Andrew Johnson, who Thad had left on the bridge, watching monitors from cameras in the corridors.

  “At least he’s smart enough to want to take back control of his own ship.” Sarge muttered defensively.

  Thad gave a Krall sty
le derisive snort. “The airtight deck doors above him are powered and locked. The dumb ass can’t get past those.”

  Sarge pointlessly defended his prisoner again, “Since we’re on K1, why would he expect those atmospheric blowout protectors to be closed and locked? It’s a smart move to see if he can retake control of his ship.”

  Johnson, included in the group link, ignored the two typically bickering friends’ mutual attempts to get the best of the other, part of the time using word play like today (except when they were playing poker, when their nit picking was almost unending). He said, “After trying several sealed deck plates, he’s turned back and heading down towards the hold.”

  “Finally,” Thad said. “I hope the bonehead doesn’t run over to the dome. We didn’t think to lock that.”

  Reynolds ignored him, starting to doubt the cleverness of this particular Krall himself. Suddenly the blue suited Krall appeared at the open portal and quickly leaped out, then exactly as Phordot had done, raced at an improbable speed for the bait clanship. He ran fast, at least for the short bowed looking legs of a Krall. Despite appearances, they could smoothly outrun the best human Olympic runner that had ever lived, in a marathon or in a sprint. That was mainly because no Kobani modified human had ever participated in an Olympics. With their proportionally longer and stronger legs and greater endurance than a Krall, a Kobani could easily outrace any warrior, and of course by implication could defeat any Normal human in probably any Olympic event.

  When the second ship had finally lifted, after a longer wait than for the other bait ship, an AI analysis of its Jump trajectory indicated it was tracking generally towards the coordinates of New Dublin.

  Mirikami formed a link with the entire Kobani complement that had gone to K1. Over thirty seven thousand individuals.

  “Congratulations people. K1 will soon belong to humanity again, and we’ll next help Poldark and New Dublin take down those soon to be ineffective Krall invasion forces. Unless we have badly underestimated Krall numbers and strength on their own worlds, we might end this war soon. I include all of humanity in the term we, because us Kobani are too few to finish this fight ourselves within a reasonable timeframe. Combined with the size of the PU military, we should be able to conclude the war within another year, possibly two. There may be some isolated Krall clans left, but they aren’t going to be the threat they have been, with their Olt’kitapi designed toys taken away from them.

  “You people made it possible, but we have to allow our fellows in Human Space to complete the conquest here, and to join with us in defeating the Krall wherever they have footholds in Human Space. It’s true we could do it here with fewer losses overall, than the PU Army will suffer doing it, but it would take us a long time with the low numbers we have, and cost us too many lives for our limited population. We’ve lost twenty-six people today, even as careful and restrained as we’ve been. This isn’t a proper job for the small sharp tip of the spear. Let the PU hammer finish things here.

  “There are possibility fifteen to twenty million Krall on this planet, and even their clan leaders we’ve Mind Tapped don’t really keep track of their numbers, not within the Great or Major clans. Probably only the finger clans know their own numbers, since those would be only in the tens of thousands.

  “We have other priorities for our forces, and we’ll leave a sizable blocking force here for returning clanships. We now have nearly twenty three hundred ships under our control; including the hundred-seventeen that we had when we arrived. Excuse me a moment, I need some numbers.” He paused to Mind Tap with Maggi, who had been linking with people around the planet.

  “OK. I have new figures from the people Mind Tapping the few clan leaders we’ve captured alive so far. We think the total Krall population on all of their planets is barely more than what humanity has on Earth and Mars. Perhaps fifteen to twenty billion. They are proliferate egg layers, because that’s what they bred themselves to be. That reproduction rate will remain a problem on individual worlds, but without the means to train, arm, and move those young novices to other planets, their galactic conquest is finished. However, they will probably remain a threat on an individual planetary scale for decades.

  “Their most effective weapons have been severely compromised by us, since the Olt’kitapi designed equipment is now easily denied to them. The Krall abandoned most of the habitable planets they won, at least after they used what they considered was most useful for war, and either left them empty to go wild, let them go feral, or kept a few Prada and Torki villages on them without any resources to expand, and came back to make sure they stayed primitive. All of those types of worlds may be easy to reclaim for habitation. If we help them do it, the Prada, Torki, and Raspani might be able to recolonize or reclaim a couple of dozen of their former worlds. Of course, even they don’t have nearly as large surviving populations as first thought because the Krall ruthlessly thinned them out when there were more of them than they needed. Strangely, wild Raspani herds will help those friends of ours recover the most rapidly. Via the millions of personalities stored in mind enhancers, as they ramp up chip production to embed in the wild ones.

  “I suspect we and our allies will wield considerable bargaining power over the hundreds of prime colony worlds we will control when we finish taking them away from the Krall. If humans were to terraform even the slightly marginal worlds, as we did initially in our early expansion, there will be four or five thousand worlds where a human society could thrive, planets which most of our allies wouldn’t even want. The highest gravity worlds might particularly draw future Kobani settlers. We’ll have considerable land and mineral resources to offer Human Space as inducements to accept us with our gene mods. If they refuse, let them try to take what we have won away from us. We’ll share under our terms, but no one will take anything from us.

  “Today, I’m sending five hundred ships back to the Koban system for homeland defense, staffed well enough and supplied well enough to defend the system from any probable Krall fleet they might still manage to assemble. There are roughly five hundred clanships at Poldark and another five hundred at New Dublin, most of which I think we will be able to capture. There are an estimated five or six hundred clanships spread among the clan planets and production worlds. The Krall never engaged in commerce or personal travel, only war, so they only built warships, and kept Torki migration ships for moving bulk material or slave populations.

  “We finally control more warships that do the Krall! Not to mention many more than does the PU navy. We can fly and fight these war birds even better than the Krall do, even in the ones that still have Krall performance limits applied. For those of you going home with newly captured ships, your first task is to have the Prada and Torki teach you how to remove the acceleration and performance limits, so that if you do meet a clanship in battle, you’ll have our physical advantages in your favor.

  “I’m sending three hundred of our new ships, in six groups of fifty, deep into Krall territory to disable and capture more of their clanships, and to kill as many of their dome and factory power plants as they can find. With Krall landing codes taken from the minds of captured clan members, they should be able to fly in without suspicion and conduct fast in and out raids. Once stuck on the surface of a planet, they’re only a threat right there. Given time, they no doubt could get new ships built with slave labor, which would not require or use the Olt’kitapi circuits to operate. So long as they are warlike and aggressive, we won’t let them do that, and we intend to rescue their slave labor.

  “I’ll leave five hundred ships here at K1, to meet and greet arrivals from various places. We’ve had three of those already today, which have kindly consented to donating their craft to our growing navy. Of the remaining thousand ships we have, four hundred will go to Poldark today, and four hundred to New Dublin, to help take those thousand clanships out of service. Since only Kobani can fly them, and we made their capture possible, they will all join our fleet if captured intact.”

>   Noreen had kept a tally, and boldly interjected a question. “Captain, that leaves two hundred ships. Would you like to tell us where those are going?” He sensed her smile through the Comtap link. She’d been part of the planning, and was setting the stage for him.

  “Why certainly, Noreen.” He answered in a cheery tone, pausing a moment, to build anticipation.

  “We’re going after Telour’s little band of nine ships. We might need to spread out quite a bit to search some distant star systems. Based on the helpful information in his aide’s mind, and in that from a couple of Krall sub leaders that made the trip previously, we have to beat him to his final destination. He’ll have to make a diversion first to visit the planet where they have their Krall’tapi prisoners, but that may not take him very long.

  “Then Telour will be going to the Terran sized moon of a gas super giant planet, where the living Olt’kitapi ships are parked. The Krall guardians of that system have an unknown number of clanships, and they are comprised of elite fighters, considered fanatical even among the Krall. As you know, their role is to prevent the Dismantlers from ever falling into the hands of anyone but the appointed Krall war leader, the Tor Gatrol, or his designated representatives. Naturally, they look upon us mere animals with far more hatred than for a renegade clan.

  “I’m confident that Telour will be seeking to gain control of the remaining operational doomsday ships, and there are three of them. He’ll want to destroy as many human worlds as he can, starting with Earth, and that would probably include Koban, now that we’ve been revealed. We’re going to intercept him. We have reason to doubt those ships will function for the soft Krall now, because the Krall’tapi are presumed listed as untrusted. We have to make certain that all of the other Dismantlers know what Huwayla learned about the Krall’tapi. With Mind Tap contact possible with these sentient ships, we can open our minds to them to let them see for themselves.