Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (110 page)

****

Koldok had never seen Koban up close. She had been a mere novice in Graka clan when Kanpardi led the Krall armada away from here, and Telour was granted the honor of the first raid on the new enemy. She’d only caught hurried looks at the legendary planet from high orbit, as she helped stow supplies and weapons for the fleet’s departure, which were formerly kept at their main compound below.

She wouldn’t dare try a landing now, since the Tor had emphasized this scouting mission did not have prior approval of the new Joint Council. If the visit was later revealed to the Joint Council, because of what Koldok reported to the Tor, there must be no record of her touching down. The ship’s sensors were set on record mode, activated by Telour himself, with a warning that there could be no gaps in the record. This record would prove Telour had not ordered a landing in violation of the injunction to stay off their future home world.

However, a good pilot and navigator such as herself could get quite close to a planet in an assault style White Out, barely a hundred fifty miles from the surface. She could use magnification on her screens to see detail as small as insects on the surface, if she found atmosphere clear enough. She wanted to see rhinolo, and perhaps a ripper pride stalking them. The primitive beasts on the isolated largest continent were legendary for their size and numbers, as were the huge predators of the great herbivores.

The Tor said identifying traces of the last of the human prisoners at the former Maldo clan dome might be impossible from orbit. The native life forms wouldn’t have left anything visible of their remains on the surface after more orbits had passed than for a full Krall breeding cycle. She certainly couldn’t enter the dome to seek their bones. However, she had hunted humans on Telda Ka when they were hunted down to cleanse the new base world, and she had hunted down human stragglers on Bollovstic after resistance collapsed there. She knew the small clues that would reveal where they were, if they had somehow survived here.

Their survival here was a preposterous idea, and she was surprised someone as high as the Tor Gatrol had placed credence in a report that humans had lived here recently. He had sensed her skepticism, and lied that it was a report from a finger clan that lost their clanships in the attack on Telda Ka. He believed they wanted to be given a clanship to investigate for themselves. He assumed they would ask to keep the clanship later when they found nothing. His concern was that they may have shared that story, and it could be repeated in council. If so, he wanted to have an answer in advance, proving he was efficient.

Telour had said the gates had been breached and the electric fence shut down at the prisoner compound, days before he was the last warrior to walk on Koban. Rippers had already killed some humans by then. What he expected her to see was wild growth by the dome with native animals grazing near the tarmac, no signs of agriculture, no new structures, and no cook fires. He’d cautioned her that there were many abandoned and disabled human ships on the tarmac, so that she wouldn’t confuse them for signs of recent visitation.

The navigation timer was nearly expired, and she was experiencing a rare feeling of curiosity. To see the world of legend, where an unarmed Krall, outside of a walled compound with electrified fencing, could seldom survive more than a single day. The native life seemed to seek them out, and the typical speed and strength of the larger prey animals were dangerous, even life threatening for warriors without plasma rifles. The predators of those prey animals, particularly the rippers, were lethal to a Krall. It was more than just the strength of creatures that thrived in high gravity; they also had uncanny speed, and were intelligent. Armed with only projectile weapons and hunting with a hand of warriors, those fiercest of killers were nearly unstoppable. They worked as a team, to draw a warrior’s attention away from the death stalking them from behind or the side.

Like every Krall that had ever heard the stories, she wanted to be a killer like a ripper herself, to be able to pit her abilities against this planet and its life forms. There was no Krall equivalent to the applicable human expression.
Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.

The timer expired and the clanship made its White Out. She was disappointed because her first view was an expanse of ocean, with a swirl of white clouds following a weather flow. There was a coastline visible, and she activated her reactionless drive to move that direction. She could see the traces of teal shades of foliage, the grass a lighter shade than the more nearly blue of the leaves of the presumed forest, the trees set back from the coastal plain.

She dropped to a height of fifty miles as she neared land. The Tor had not given her a lower limit to fly. She eagerly zoomed in on a forward view screen, to observe that there were cliffs with waves breaking at their bases. There were flying things in quantity, but those held no interest for her. On the rolling flat terrain above the cliffs, she spied a herd of large four legged animals browsing. They had squat wide bodies, short necks and long spiked tails, and from the swath of different shaded grass behind them, they were plodding along eating as they went. Plant eaters, which she also had no interest in observing.

She saw other browsers with differing body types, some with long necks eating dark blue leaves or needles from the tall trees. There were many different types of grazers, but she hadn’t seen a predator yet. After more minutes and miles of similar sightings, she increased speed. This had to be the continent with the largest animals, which wasn’t the one she was tasked with scouting. She angled a bit north towards the latitude of the dome she needed to observe. The recording would annoy the Tor if it contained too much of the wrong continent’s terrain.

Increasing speed and altitude to go sub orbital, she still had a view of the ground and animals, if in less detail than before. Another coastline arrived quickly, and a much narrower sea was crossed in minutes, reaching the continent she was supposed to examine closely.

Suddenly, something moving caught her attention. A line of white was crossing her path ahead of her and much lower. She instantly slowed, and descended, flying and manipulating the view screen at the same time. She could see the white line was still forming, but the reason she had not been able to put it at the center of her view screen was that it was changing course from time to time, and descending. That was a contrail she was watching form. It suddenly turned directly away from her and increased speed. The contrail made the shape of the object indistinct from behind, but at this speed and altitude, with the narrow double lobbed trail it left in its wake, she knew this was a stubby winged shuttlecraft.

She activated her radar sensor array, and brought her lasers on line. The radar return had a rear profile consistent with a midsized Krall shuttle, like the two she carried below. However, that wasn’t a unique identification. She wanted a side or lookdown view, which the craft suddenly provided her. It made a hard right turn, and the silhouette was a perfect match for a Krall shuttle.

A shuttle certainly couldn’t perform a Jump, so that meant there had to be a clanship that had brought it here. Her duty was obvious, destroy the shuttle and seek the clanship. Her talon tips activated radar tracking to lock onto the now weaving target. It couldn’t evade a tracking laser, and clearly, their frantic evasion was in recognition of the predator they knew was on their trail.

Just before the weapons console displayed a solid track lock on the gyrating little ship, she debated calling them first to see if she could learn who they were, or to simply to kill them. She should have chosen the latter, and should have done it sooner. The distraction ahead had masked the three predators diving on her from behind, who never considered asking who she was. They simultaneously fired sixteen plasma cannon bolts at her.

As the rear of Koldok’s craft disintegrated, she remembered in the final fraction of a second: The fiercest killers of this planet work as a team, to draw your attention away from the death stalking you from behind. Like the rippers that had provided so many of their genes.

****

Thad, who’d been in continuous Comtap communication with Reynolds, listened to the complaints of the “bait.”

“You just had to see if I could fly as good as I claimed didn’t ya? Nothing like letting the man who gave an arm and a leg for this planet lose his ass too. They can’t grow those back ya know.”

“Sarge, they weren’t ready to fire on you. Our sensors hadn’t picked up the high frequency Doppler pulse increases from a tracking lock. We didn’t want them to pick up our radar either, or else they’d have manually shot your butt off before running. If they climbed out and Jumped, all of our gooses would’ve been cooked. We got in close before they knew we were coming and had an easy visual kill.”

“How’d you know they wouldn’t shoot me manually anyway?” He was still annoyed.

Dillon had to join the fun. “Hmm. Damn, we never thought of that. Besides, you were doing such a fine job wiggling like a worm on a hook. Even we paused to admire your work.”

Noreen ended the teasing. “Sarge, my AI, reported when it activated radar, and it was in auto scan mode. It was logical to think it would first lock on and track you for automatic fire control, just as they’ve always done. It didn’t switch from a scanning Doppler mode to a fast pulse hard lock or we’d have pulled our triggers immediately. You proved to be too fast and twisty for good manual targeting.

“They obviously saw you visually right away, since the clanship quickly turned and dropped towards your contrail. Had it taken long-range manual pot shots at you right then we’d have fired lasers and plasma as soon as they did. We wouldn’t leave you hanging like that. That was a hell of a smart idea of yours, drawing them down into atmosphere where they couldn’t Jump. Brave too. With attention focused on you, it kept them from seeing us sneak up behind.

“Because it didn’t fly and shoot at the same time, I think there was a single Krall on the command deck, and it had its talons full doing everything all alone. Accurate manual shooting while following your zigzag path would have been hard. You had your throttles maxed out I think.”

“Besides,” Thad added, “you received the same Comtap reports from Jura continent as we did. It apparently wasn’t expecting to find us, and it was practically on a damned sightseeing trip initially. It did a low White Out instead of pausing farther out to observe, placing it far below our geosynchronous communications satellites. There was nothing in orbit for it to see at a hundred fifty miles. We were damn lucky that the three of us were out testing the ballistics of the rail gun, and those .50 cal belt fed guns. Any other ships would have had to load crew and launch, and they might have seen them lifting from Prime or Hub City.”

Reynolds, no longer sounding pissed after the praise from Noreen, said, “The back of this shuttle was crammed full of ammo cases for those machine guns too. I had almost finished loading them when that bastard did its White Out. As soon as it was obvious it was headed in the direction of Prime City, I got airborne. Frankly, I didn’t think any ships were close enough to intercept. I didn’t want it blasting the dome before our people could get down to shelter in the abandoned factory. I’d intended to poke it in the eye with my shuttle lasers when it came close. That was before you three let everyone know you were inbound.”

“You know perfectly well those lasers won’t hurt a clanship, right?” Thad asked, knowing his friend knew that.

“Maybe, but I figured I could get its attention for a time, get it to chase me. Just like climbing high enough to make contrails did.”

Dillon eased up and thanked him. “Sarge, you’re one crazy assed man. As you well know, I’m the human expert on crazy, just ask the Torki. We owe you man.”

“Fine. You can make a down payment when we get to Prime City. I heard crashing all around back there when I made those sharp turns, so I assume the unsecured cases broke open and that loose ammo is all over the place. I’ll let you guys repack it, and I’ll drink Death Lime and rum and watch you work.”

Mirikami had been remotely monitoring the Comtap messages, but he and Maggi were out of the system on a test Jump in the repaired Mark. He couldn’t suggest anything that his people weren’t already doing, so he hadn’t distracted them earlier. He’d turned back to Koban immediately, and they were forced to wait anxiously to see if the clanship could be destroyed before it made an escape.

This event was too much like the day the first clanship had arrived on a casual visit. Koban wasn’t as helpless as it was back then, but they couldn’t defend the two-planet system from even a quarter of the Krall fleet.

In a group link with his friends, he called and offered his grim assessment. “We’re on borrowed time. This is only the second visit by a Krall clanship in twenty-three years, and we know the first one was on an illegal hunting trip. Medford has probably tried to offer us up on a silver platter to Telour, but had no solid clues for where we are. Otherwise, this would have been a fleet, or at least multiple ships, not a lone wolf. However, we don’t have a survivor to Mind Tap this time, and that clanship isn’t going to return when expected.

“With the clanship shortages we’ve help create, I don’t think many unnecessary flights are being made, and the Krall don’t take vacations. We have to assume this loss will be noticed when it fails to return, and we can expect a follow up visit. I propose to recall all of our ships back for home defense, and we should consider loading up some of the migration ships for an evacuation contingency. Let me hear your comments and ideas.”