Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (32 page)

The lead trucks slowed, moving along the sides of the creek off the road, the drivers obviously seeking some way past the bridge and across the drop off. However, the rough terrain, and steep sided rock faces of the creek bed near the bridge made that unlikely. The sturdy rocky foundation had been why the bridge was built there, to avoid a washout when heavy snows melted. The men needed to get out and set up what was going to be their final defensive position today, one way or another.

Two of the trucks near the rear of the pack of sixty-three turned into the lodge drive. The suit monitors showed most of those inside were wounded, with eight or nine having expired after being loaded. These were probably the last vehicles to pull out, trying to carry as many wounded as possible. Those lead trucks, which avoided coming to the lodge, likely held more men with guilty consciences, who were not willing to face higher authority.

Greeves didn’t have time to be concerned with that problem. He had set them up for this last stand as coldly as a Krall might have. Fight or die. Except he would be here fighting with them. There was no way he was going down any of those tunnels to escape, and leave those men behind to cover his retreat. His visor saw the first of the rippling movements of the stealthed Krall suits as they started down the center of the road at the curve.

Time to start whittling them down,
he thought. He remotely activated the two ladybugs, emplaced above them in the cliff face.

“Hey Sarge, You take control of the higher gun, I’ll use the lower. You probably need the range advantage.”

The response was just as polite as he’d expected.

The Krall can move fast on foot, but they couldn’t run as fast as the trucks that had raced away from them as they overwhelmed the last of the collapsing enemy line. Besides, the warriors had status points to earn against the desperate fighting of those that had been left behind. Those final two hundred or so humans traded their lives at a much more favorable ratio than they had been doing just two hours ago. Those that stayed to the last, when the Krall were finally able to close with them, fought well. Perhaps only three or four of them died for each warrior they killed.

Good fighting,
Gofdar thought. This was what a worthy enemy was like when you had them trapped. Not every status point was equal he noted, not for the first time, and killing a dozen lightly armed animals did not feel nearly as valued. The last human he’d claimed here had just killed his own pilot with a remarkable double head shot, using a rifle in each hand. That same human also came close to welding the sub leader’s left knee joint in place, with fast and accurate plasma shots when he’d carelessly exposed the thinner shielding of the back of his leg to the man, after he dove and rolled behind a rock for cover. It still burned.

Now if only his moderate force could close the door on the rest of their massive retreating army, and hold their huge numbers boxed in these mountains for the next half day. It would be worth arriving at the next invasion world a week or two late, for the fine combat this prospect offered. Holding so many back could only be done for a short time, and they needed to take advantage of the close confines of the valleys, and make use the ridge tops to shoot down into the mass of transports and troops, slowing or stalling the columns.

He was imagining how quickly his best octets would have closed with those that fled, if the clanship had been able to carry even one of the big armored transports. The choice was made to take more warriors to fight, and not bring bulky machines that could not. Their powered armor would permit them to keep a steady running pace, as they started after those human cowards that had fled in a panic. However, they could not catch them before they merged with their army’s main body, which would be trying to stream though a narrow gorge that branched away a short distance west of here.

His predator’s instinct truly wanted to catch the cowards that had fled so quickly that they abandoned many of their own; leaving them without the support needed to be able fall back yet again. Their blood would be pleasurable to shed, even if not as valued. The first to run had not laid down any suppression fire for the front line, to help them make another orderly pull back, which he’d seen them do twice before. Instead, they were observed piling into some of their transports, some half empty, and leaving their clan mates to die. They all would have died if they stood and fought, of course, but they would have died with honor.

He was, as he was expected to be, leading from the front of most of the warriors that filled the smooth four-lane roadway as they ran. He and his best octet leaders were deliberately setting a slower pace, one better suited for endurance than speed. With no further opposition expected from the enemy that broke and ran, his remaining one thousand seven hundred sixty three warriors would reach the main human force in perhaps twenty minutes.

Even if fresh, they couldn’t confront so many troops head on, although the thought of that sort of a fight was enticing. However, he had a higher priority than the thrill of a fierce fight. He was ordered by the Gatlek to put the enemy in a pincher, unable to retreat fast enough to escape the clans pressing into the mountains from Novi Sad. This was the only human army, of the eight they faced, which could be trapped in this way.

He would send a third of his warriors to scale the ridge on the right, where they could look down on and attack the two columns of transports and equipment that would be trying to slip past them on the opposite side, squeezed into the narrow two-lane canyon road.

Gofdar would use the remainder of his warriors to try to block the main body from passing down the larger valley road for the rest of today. The human sub leaders would certainly know that there had to be an intact clanship blocking the way, since the attacking warriors had not simply popped out of the ground.

The clans from Novi Sad were already pushing back the defenders on the west side of the mountains, and soon they would be pressed into the rear of the mass of the slowed retreating army. Some of the enemy could surely get past Gofdar’s small force and move down the main valley. However, the stealthed clanship with powerful long-range weapons and missiles was there. No doubt, the enemy could eventually destroy that ship, and fight their way past that barrier. However, he had just instructed the warriors from the other clanships to move west to intercept the humans, no matter which valleys and canyons they fled through. There would be fine hunting and killing for days.

It was after that pleasant thought that he received odd reports from warriors moving along the ridge tops to either side. Some other human force had directed heavy plasma and laser fire in front of the retreating cowards. Their transports were now stopping and forming yet another defensive line. There was a sizable structure on the right side of the valley, built against and into the steep rock face of the ridge. The same ridge the Krall needed to scale and dominate. That was where the beams and bolts had originated.

His warriors were exposed out on the flat part of the valley, but today’s experience had proven that human suit sensors were rather poor, and couldn’t easily locate the Krall suits. Particularly when they were running directly at them and not laterally, because the sideways motions caused slight ripples in the background objects, which they were a little better at detecting.

That misplaced confidence was why the sudden splatter of scorched blood and brains from the helmets of two octet leaders to either side of him was so surprising. At nearly the speed of light, there was no possibility of ducking a plasma bolt, not when you no longer could see a bolt forming a couple of hundredths of a second before it left the weapon’s muzzle. The humans had learned to shield their weapon muzzles from advertising the heat of forming plasma bolts. What was most surprising is that the two warriors killed were only a half a step more advanced than he was, close to the center of the roadway with him. Gofdar immediately dove to his right, just before a heavy bolt passed through where he had been.

Someone in that structure knew the preference of Krall leaders to lead from the front, and if invisible, why not the middle of the front? Obviously, their armor wasn’t as invisible to the defenders of that human structure as they thought, and that enemy knew where to expect Krall sub leaders to be positioned. Two of his octet leaders had paid the price for Gofdar’s lesson in caution.

He continued to move, in a crouch, shifting from point to point, now off to the side of the roadway and among larger rock rubble, bulldozed there when the road was built. He, like other warriors around him, moved to keep boulders, shrubs, or trees between him and the structure. Foliage wouldn’t block a laser beam or plasma bolt, but would hamper someone sighting on you. Hundreds of plasma bolts were directed back at the building, where the enemy had fired at them. More of the heaviest bolts came in rapid clusters of three, like the ones that almost struck him. They came from two places inside the cliff above the structure, and from two places on the top of the building itself.

The gunners in the side of the ridge had made the attack more personal to him. He’d escaped the random death of a chance battlefield hit only by luck. He wasn’t foolish enough to think his mission depended on his personal survival. His warriors needed only general guidance for particular objectives. They didn’t need a leader to tell them how to fight. That was why warriors were allowed to fight as they wished. To develop the instincts their very survival permitted them to pass along with their genes to the next generation. Gofdar wanted those gunners for his own status points, if he could get to them first.

There were only four of the triple firing heavy plasma guns, and they had the hallmarks of the weapons on the mobile tracked gun carts the humans had been using for several months. He didn’t know how they had moved them to the roof of the structure or placed them in those cliff side bunkers.

There were dozens of less powerful beams striking warriors often. The damage inflicted by a hit from them wasn’t as significant as from the bigger guns. However, it would mount up if repeated too often, especially when the distance became less, as the beams underwent less spread and attenuation. The accuracy of those long-range individual shots was much higher than they had experienced from the enemy they had fought earlier today, or even in any prior Poldark assault that Gofdar had experienced. There was a sharp difference in what these shooters could achieve. It was more than accuracy.

He saw a nearby warrior that fell and tried to roll over low brush, to reach better cover, after her right knee joint was hit and flash welded in place. That warrior discovered that smashing down brush drew too much attention. The truth of that discovery was evident in the instant enemy reaction. She was fried by a half dozen different beams, both plasma and laser, originating from several points and levels on the structure. The various shooters were cooperating, and reacting extremely fast to any opportunity another shooter created. These were not like most of the opposition Gofdar had encountered on Poldark, or on previous raids to other planets. They were as accurate at long-range shots as the best warriors Gofdar had ever seen, and because of their extremely fast reaction speed, they were more efficient killers than the Krall they faced. These fighters were few, different, and in a class of warrior all their own.

His visor told him he’d lost another thirty-four warriors as they covered only half the distance to the structure. The enemy kept moving from spot to spot on the various upper levels, but he concluded that the total number of shooters there was apparently between fifty or sixty. He’d lost only two hundred forty one warriors versus the nearly ten thousand troops his sensors suggested he had faced all day. Close to six thousand of the enemy force had died before they turned and ran. Thus far, he had no idea if they had killed even a single one of the new defenders in that ferrocrete and metal building. They had suits with superior stealth to his own, because he could catch no signs of ripples from their motions, and it was effective over the full frequency spectrum that his suit was designed to detect. All of this intrigued him greatly.

He could not afford to underestimate their capability against his much larger force. After all, his comparatively small force was capable of seriously affecting the huge human army they were sent to delay. These effective fighters could possibly hamper his warriors from occupying the heights of the ridge above their nest.

As the Krall worked their way closer, they spread out wider, and the left flank, their attention focused mainly on the deadly shooters in the structure, suddenly discovered they were receiving fire from the human cowards that had previously fled. Disdainful of those broken spirited animals, and following their instincts, several hundred warriors moved to wipe them out, or force them to run again.

To their surprise, the accuracy and resilience of those same fighters had suddenly magnified greatly, forcing their attackers to take cover and proceed more cautiously. They showed considerable fire control skill now, shooting and moving frequently. The most disturbing aspect was their sudden greatly improved accuracy. They were making difficult shots through heavy brush, when only a portion of a warrior was exposed from behind their hard cover, yet obscured by underbrush. It was as if they saw the enemy better now, even shooting through obscuring foliage, and suddenly able to aim precisely.

As a result, there were three hands of warriors killed in a few minutes of a reckless rush towards the cowards. There were dozens of warriors that suffered minor foot, knee, elbow or ankle wounds, when a limb was exposed to a line of sight shot. This, despite the appendage being fully concealed visually behind underbrush, and stealthed. Admittedly, every warrior knew that a plasma bolt wouldn’t notice a few bushes as it blazed through to reach its target. Except, how did the previously inept shooters even
see
the stealthed limbs from their low-level concealed positions at the edge of a rocky creek bed? They suddenly had achieved greater accuracy and vision, it seemed.

Gofdar knew that somehow the efficient fighters up in the human nest were involved. A rabble could not suddenly turn into a more effective fighting force in such a short time. The high performing fighters in that structure were somehow helping direct the several thousand men along the center of the valley floor. If the fighters over by the cliffs were eliminated, those concealed in the creek bed would fall apart, as they had before, making them easy kills. Particularly now that they had no way to retreat.

The bridge they needed to drive over had been destroyed, apparently by those in the structure. Clearly, this had been done to force those fleeing to stay and fight. He was berating himself for his original decision to land all of his ships so far east in the canyons. They’d not known how far the humans had retreated at the time they launched, and Gatlek Pendor would not permit him to wait for new orbital surveillance.

He ordered his octet leaders to pull their warriors away from the central roadway and its defenders ensconced in the small waterway. First, he wanted those four tri-barrel plasma guns silenced, and all of the efficient fighters in that structure killed. Then they would easily sweep those creek defenders away.