Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (24 page)

Other team members were positioned to get up close and personal with their targeted K’Tal. They didn’t intend to use the new heavy plasma rifles, to avoid the associated flash and bang effects on the receiving end. While it was true that a dead Krall told no tales, one that was brightly blown to pieces by plasma fire was a message of another type that couldn’t be suppressed by ECM. They intended to step up behind them and sort of
break
their metal shells open, and kill them by hand. Just the way the Krall liked to fight. They had been asked to bring back several sets of functioning armor for some use or other.

When the window opened for the kills to start, Crager was sighted in on the flat side of the helmet as his first selected Krall target was about to turn around in his predictable pattern of pacing around the outside of the protective revetments. The hypersonic crack was somewhat muffled by the brush around the shooter. The ten mile per second sliver had already left a pinprick hole and a brief flash of white light on the K’Tal’s helmet, even before the weapon completed its recoil and was back on target. Crager saw the warrior sagging and decided a follow up shot wasn’t needed. His concealed sappers would be there in seconds anyway.

Turning around, he knew from his data feed that his second previously motionless target had moved into the opening of its revetment just before Crager had fired at his first target. The Krall now was looking farther east, towards the next battery. Something had caught his or her attention from there. Crager had a shot only at the thick armor of the left shoulder and upper arm because his view of the warrior’s helmet was blocked by a duracrete wall the K’Tal was leaning around to see to the east. He was likely trying to radio to that warrior at the next battery, and receiving no reply because of the ECM suppression. The K’Tal used its left hand to reach back and check its power pack at the small of its back, confirming a secure connection, and briefly shifted a leg so that the backside of the left knee joint was visible.

In two hundredths of a second, Crager had thumb selected a hollow sliver from his magazine, sighted a line along the back of the knee joint with his optics and fired. Before the sound of the crack even reached his target, the Krall had jumped as the needle with toxin penetrated the weak point. A space only three inches wide and a half-inch high on the back of the knee, where a thinner armor layer was briefly exposed.

Exposing a bare hand from under his chamie he signaled with fingers to the sapper squad that he knew was near that battery. One man, designated to watch his position, saw his signal directly, and the others saw it via the repeat in their eye implants of Crager’s hand from his own eye’s view. Target hit with a two, not down.

A number two hit was a toxin sliver. The warrior would be capable of activity for two more minutes. With ECM suppression active, they knew he couldn’t transmit. However, if he figured out he had a radio problem he might start shooting plasma bolts high towards the ring’s center and draw attention from warriors there.

Crager cursed his decision to try the long-range solution, just to try out the new weapon. It worked, in as much as it assured a soon to be disabled warrior, but the toxin sliver wasn’t effective quickly enough when you had simultaneous targets to eliminate immediately. He had intended to use two quick headshot kills. He’d let his new ability and new rifle convince him to take an unnecessary risk. He’d been out of the field for too long.

He checked his data feed, and saw that the other sniper had signaled two targets were hits with a one, both targets down. They would be headshots like his first one, with solid slivers and quick kills.

Crap!
I’ll hear about this one.
He thought.

Suddenly fate smiled, and the obliging Krall sought the enemy that had given it what it presumed was a minor wound. Crager, his eyes never leaving his still mobile target’s hiding place, had already chosen a solid sliver for a possible second shot. He was rewarded as the edge of the Krall’s helmet peered around the side of a duracrete wall, looking for him. It required only .07 seconds for the next sliver to cover the seven tenths mile, and penetrate the helmet face, where the Krall’s right eye was directly behind the impact point. The warrior quickly slumped to the ground.

He shook his head.
Doesn’t matter,
he thought.
I’ll still hear about this! He knows the old geezer f’ed up.

The troops didn’t cut each another any slack after the action was done, even if they would give their life to protect your sorry ass. The sliver rifle certainly had its use, but not in a poorly controlled situation, such as he had forced on himself. The chance that his second target would move out of position had been too great for the risk to the mission. Two perfect and vital shots had been needed in rapid succession, and little predictability for achieving both.

He wondered how Dalton, the young sniper with the other sliver gun had managed. He told his AI to play back the recorded image from the younger man’s eye implants. He found his answer to what had drawn the attention of his second target. Dalton, unlike Crager, had had a clean easy shot on a Krall helmet for his number two target, dropping him instantly at the farther battery. Dalton’s first target, the one closest to Crager’s second shot, had been made ultra-easy because, incredibly, the Krall had removed its helmet and was grooming its deployed ultrasonic ears, squatting in front of the revetment. Presumably picking the Krall equivalent of earwax. He was like a sitting duck.

A duck that, despite a sliver passing through the tempting exact center of the deployed ear, screamed its rage and pain loud enough that, without a helmet to muffle the sound, drew the attention of Crager’s second botched hit. That helmetless K’Tal had only lived to scream because a Krall’s ultrasonic ears were placed on their upper necks, inches lower than their brainpan. The first shot had passed through its ear and upper neck. Only a rapidly triggered second shot had created a shock wave passing through the skull, which literally scrambled the Krall’s brain, and silenced the scream.

The sergeant grinned sourly.
At least the kid isn’t going to offer me any shit tonight. There were two screwed up shots made today.

Uh…, nope.
He thought through it farther. Dalton could remind him that it was the sergeant’s idea to use the sliver rifles on two targets instead of one man per Krall. Damn. That training slot looked better right now than it had fifteen seconds ago.

Anyway, the K’Tal’s at the other eight batteries had been eliminated the more reliable and proper way, and the stealth coated charges were being placed on and around the big guns. Crager’s platoon soon pulled back, and the team waited for developments. If the dead warriors were found and the charges were about to be discovered, the spy bots left behind would let them know. A burst signal to the commander of the waiting ranks of cruise missiles would launch them even before the cannons were blasted into rubble.

Fully loaded clanships in liftoff mode would be juicier targets, but even empty and sitting on the ground they were still valuable targets, all clustered closely for convenience. It was obvious the Krall had never planned a retreat under fire in the past. No time like now to learn some hard lessons.

****

Two days before Crager’s unit had planted their charges, the assaults on the eight cities had begun. The Krall came roaring though and over the abandoned barricades to enter the industrial city of Perm. By use of animated holiday figures and remotely operated, turntable mounted tri-barrel heavy plasma guns and auto-load mortars, the PU army here had maintained the pretext that the barricades were still manned.

Enough Krall fell on that assault to piss them off when they discovered the ten percent culling had produced no kills for those that had fought through. These finger clan warriors, granted their first opportunity to lead an attack, were enraged to discover they only had machinery to destroy. Bad tempers make for poor decisions. They tried to tear the tri-barrels down using their powered armored hands, and blasted at the still firing mortars with plasma rifles, up close. 

Warriors of major clans, more experienced with tricky human methods, had fought human forces on initial assaults more frequently, by virtue of their clan’s political power in the Joint Council. They would have known not to make the destruction of automated weapons such a personal revenge. The blasts of all the stacked mortar ammunition, detonating at one time, accompanied by the planted charges along the berms where the tri-barrels were located, proved highly educational to the minor clans. Adding another five percent to the culling already experienced.

For a change, the humans were treating their territory and property much like the Krall did. As something worthless, and not dying to preserve every precious inch or building. However, rather than measuring fighting success by status points earned for kills, the humans valued the lives preserved of their troops and civilians, who had quietly pulled back a day before the attack started.

The warriors from the big clans that were to follow the first wave were smug as they passed the wreckage of body armor and the mini tanks of the lesser clans. They estimated the racial gene pool was improved, and decided that the small clans could still use more culling.

The warriors in front were encouraged by the major clans to pursue the retreating soldiers of the human army and take revenge. It was their turn to learn that open roads and clear plazas were
always
mined or set as traps, that well lit and apparently occupied human family nests had a third of them rigged to explode if entered. In the past, these small clans had only entered a newly assaulted zone after the large clans had cleared the way, and then they joined in the killings in the less well-defended areas deeper inside the new human territory. This week they would learn to destroy a family nest without entering, and then check for bodies to add to their status points after.

However, it was obvious that this “surprise” assault was expected, and there would not be many easy status kills of what humans called civilians. Their so-called soldiers were not overly tough individually, but in a group, they cooperated well, and drew in rash warriors for an apparent easy kill, only for them to find that it wasn’t that easy when the ambush came. True, many of the ambushers didn’t get away, but they were killing more warriors than they once did in the process. The kill ratio had shrunk from twenty to one in the early days, to ten to one here on Poldark, and so far today it was down to three to one, because they had not managed to close with the enemy in larger concentrations.

The humans were making a far more rapid retreat than usual, and didn’t appear to be panicked or in a rout, as sometimes happened. They had what seemed to be an unending string of fallback positions, where the retreat of those under direct attack always seemed to have heavy covering fire, and waves of that cursed artillery protection as they retreated. The highly mobile artillery was the most annoying, because the heavily armored Krall repeatedly ranged well ahead of their laser defense systems. The thermite loaded anti-personnel bomblets would explode from the delivery shells, scattering among the Krall, and then they would be occupied with frantically knocking off the blazing little “joint killers” before the limbs of their armor froze in place, partly immobilizing them.

That was exactly when nearby humans, driving fast little tracked transports appeared, immune to the same little bomblets because their own weapons knew friend from foe. They used heavy tri-barrel plasma guns to burn through the armor of any warrior that was exposed and preoccupied with the thermite bomblets. Then heading for cover before their targets finished knocking off the one or two clinging bomblets, which might have time to weld the attacked joints, or cause a severe burn.

However, permitting hits from the heavy plasma bolts would cost a limb, or your head, even if you took one or both human gunners with you as you went down.

Telgrad had lost one of his octet to a pulse cannon mounted on one of the two man little all-terrain tracked vehicles. Those had a driver, who fired his personal plasma rifle through a six-inch opening, using powered armor and his visor sights to hold it steady from behind a curved shield, using a view screen on the inside, so he could see to steer the vehicle. Another shielded and armored gun operator crouched in the back and handled the powered weapon that fired triple pulses of vaporized metal. He kept the three barrels supplied with the copper and iridium alloy rods of metal, which were incrementally vaporized at the back end of the three barrels, to form the heavy plasma bolts that were accelerated at the targets in rapid succession. The operator selected targets by eye, using his helmet visor and outside sensors that covered 360 degrees. The AI on the gun mount continually slewed the cannon to place the sights on the eyeball chosen targets, and fired three bolts in less than a second after a target was identified, when the gunner bit down on the trigger mouthpiece.

Artillery quickly came after Telgrad’s warrior suffered a fatal head shot, as she beat off three burners at her knees and one elbow. Telgrad and another warrior’s return plasma bolts were deflected by the rounded shielding as the gun cart retreated.

Soldiers had nicknamed the little transports ladybugs, because it was partly round in circumference on the back part, due to a humped back for the rotating turntable, which shielded the gun and gunner. The driver’s own shielded compartment resembled a bug’s head, with two rifle holes for eyes. Low armored skirts protected the tracks that moved the lightweight gun platform at high speed.