Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (36 page)

Level five was then blown a second later, as a few of the large number of upward surging Krall spotted ripples in the air on the east side. They didn’t have the time to act on that observation when new explosions tore through the support beams. A few warriors were killed or injured by the blasts, but for most of them their armor was sturdy enough, as were their bodies, to accept the stresses. However, the explosives were not intended to kill the Krall directly.

The level four charges blew a half-second later, and another one followed a smaller fraction of a second after that on the third level as the Kobani fell faster. The third floor explosives detonated with reduced effect. It was a smaller explosion because the full set of charges had never been placed on level three, due to pressure that had forced them to retreat upwards too soon.

There were no charges set at all on the lowest two floors, and the swiftly dropping Kobani, now over thirty five feet out from the structure, raised their wounded compatriots higher as they used their own leg and arm strength to cushion themselves, and their injured comrades from  too severe an impact. All of them were forced to roll onto their sides, doing their best to protect the injured. Not that it didn’t strain the muscles of every one of the healthy men, and surely hurt each of the wounded. However, thirty-two of them were alive and had made it out of the building.

Without a moment of hesitation, they picked up the wounded and streaked towards the cover of the creek bed, and the fire support of three thousand regular army troops. There would only be a brief time before the Krall understood what had been done to divert their attention, and they would come under fire out in the open. The plan to prevent that return fire was having the upper floors of the building to start collapsing down on one another, trapping most of the Krall between levels as they sandwiched.

Reynolds looked back as they sprinted for the cover of the creek bed. The sixth level had sagged to the top of level five, which had unexpectedly held the weight. The fifth floor had partially sagged on only one side onto the fourth floor, but there was no general collapse as they’d hoped to trigger. There had been too little time to rig enough demolition charges.

Experts, who demolished buildings as a profession, always weakened selected support members before trying to bring the whole structure down. Perhaps they should have allowed the Shadows to shoot up the building a bit more on their strafing passes.

“Thad, take this guy. The damned building is still standing.” He lifted the unconscious man he had slung over his shoulder and offered him to Greeves. Thad, without a burden, had periodically looked back and sent high powered, yet invisible, microwave beams towards any movement he saw at the edges of the clouds of dust, still billowing from the battered ramparts of the lodge. Spartan had cautioned everyone against use of traceable lasers and plasma bolts, at least until the Krall definitely knew they were out of the building and exposed.

Accepting the limp armored form, Thad asked, “Whatcha thinking of doing Sarge? You gonna go back and kick down some walls?”

“No, I’ll take cover here by these rocks and wait. Perhaps until I see warriors on the roof and starting up the cliff face for the ridge top. It’s time to see if I can bail your ass out, after your clever stunt to trap the Krall in a falling building didn’t work.”

Greeves could see the ghostly image on his visor of his friend slipping into one of the piles of rocks that had concealed the Krall earlier. “Sarge, we can pick them off from the creek just as well. If they dust off their armor while they have a spare moment, you can’t see them any better from these rocks than from a mile away. Besides, the main valley is open now, so our troops don’t all have to fit down that small canyon.”

“I doubt the Krall know that yet. Anyway, they can still make a great deal of trouble for the columns that have already been routed through the northern pass. I
want
them to head for the roof of the lodge and up the cliff. The more of them in the upper half of the building the better. I have to wait here, because I can’t remotely control the tri-barrels from out by the center of the valley. That’s beyond their designed one mile control range.”

“Sarge, even with the limit pins out, the ability to shot almost straight down won’t help because the gun mounts aren’t close enough to the outer cliff face. All you can hit is the rock floor or your own cart if you fire straight down.” He knew Reynolds had someone remove the down-limit pins from the mounts, so the guns could be fully depressed.

“Ye of little imagination. I just might bring the house down for you yet.” With that cryptic remark, Sarge went silent and dropped out of sight between two large boulders.

Their luck held, and no bolts from the half-ruined lodge flew in their direction. Jumping from the sixth floor, a height too high for the Krall to attempt, even in their powered armor, had left the warriors believing the weaker humans must have continued their retreat to higher floors under the cover of the obscuring dust and debris. The stairwells and elevator openings for the collapsed level six still permitted access for warriors, who continued their upward pursuit.

****

Gofdar was determined to destroy the remainder of this small, extremely troublesome group of humans, who had cost him so many warrior losses. One cowardly trait that even these better fighters displayed proved to be typical of human behavior. Falling back when the Krall attacked fiercely.

Retreat had been a pattern the Krall had seen this entire day, from every human force they had faced on the planet. However, these highly effective fighters had nowhere to go now, when they reached the top floor of this nest. He wanted to be in the forefront of that desperate fight, and then he wanted to find the humans that had operated the heavy guns up inside the cliff, who had nearly taken his life. They would not die quickly.

The blasts inside the building triggered on levels six and down through level three, had left his force of warriors covered in dust, but largely unharmed. He had lost barely more than a hand, although there were two hands or more of armored warriors temporarily trapped on a half collapsed level, who would work their way free when he assigned warriors to assist in cutting through the debris. He recognized that this action was actually a failed trap, because the staggered explosions had been intended to collapse the building down on Gofdar’s entire remaining force.

In a flash of admiration for a worthy foe, he realized if the full nest had fallen, it could have been a fatal strategy for them as well. It was fortunate his warriors had not given them time to complete their demolition placement work. It was vital to maintain the same relentless pressure now, and close with them before they could weaken the nest even more.

“Do not give them time to plant explosives. Attack!” This order, broadcast to every com set, was hardly needed to stimulate his nearly berserk warriors to greater effort. However, it made him sound and feel as if he was directing the action, which he would have been unable to halt had he chosen to try.

He was only the seventh warrior to reach the rooftop landing pad, and the first
lucky
three lay dead at the top of the stairs. They had been burned down as they arrived, and their flesh was smoldering inside the large holes burned through the upper parts of their suits. However, there was none of the ripples visible here from human stealthed armor, or even traces of plasma or laser fire. The prey must have left through the open large doors, built into the side of the cliff from the roof.

The three dead had been killed only seconds before Gofdar arrived behind them. It took a more powerful bolt than the humans fired from their suit mounted beams. There were two gun carts parked at the edge of the roof, the damnable weapons humans called ladybugs.

He and the four surviving warriors instantly fired on both tri barrels, and their bolts struck the now strangely silent gun barrels, ensuring they were too damaged to fire again.

The unknown truth was that these weapons, abandoned here when the Kobani raced down to the lower levels, had used up the last of their preloaded ammunition fuel rods some time ago. The rods were vaporized and incrementally consumed to create those powerful triple plasma bolts. Even as the Krall fought for entry on the ground floor, these guns had fallen silent. They were left unmanned because there was no need to reload them if there were no longer any warriors to target below the building.

The four Krall crouched and raced to the sides of the gun carts, positioned where they would be safe from a weapon that could not aim down that low and that close to its sides. Two warriors per cart, using brute force and assisted by powered armor, they reached under and lifted one side, tipping them onto their sides, the gun mounts protruding out of the top of the clamshells resting against the parapet, above the ten-story drop.

Gofdar called for more warriors to help shove them over the side of the building. He’d lost enough octets to these weapons, and the sound of their crash and crumpling on the ground below was pleasing to his ears. He’d realized as they shoved them over the side, that they contained no crews. His infrared vision told him that the barrels were too cool to have fired so recently. Those two guns had not killed the first three warriors to arrive on the rooftop.

That left only the two higher guns that could have done this. He looked up the side of the cliff, and saw the two crude improvised firing ports as he raced to reach the rock wall below them, where they couldn’t possibly target him that close below them. Perhaps they were reloading, or had not wanted to draw attention. Perhaps those two gun crews were also now in retreat. He ordered all of the warriors to use their suit’s antistatic dust repel system to make their suits cleaner, and then they brushed and wiped at any dirt that remained. The antistatic system couldn’t be used when stealth was active. Now they needed to climb the exposed rock face, and stealth was their best protection from snipers.

The upper emplacement was the gun that Gofdar knew had nearly killed him previously. He could still see heat radiating out of the higher opening, which meant that was where the shots had originated that killed the first three warriors to reach the top. He had again been a potentially helpless target on the roof, without even being aware of the threat, and had survived due to luck yet again. The humans obviously had tunnels bored into these cliffs, as they did many places in mountainous terrain on Poldark. Their warrens were usually mined to explode if entered by the Krall, unless there were living humans still present to be protected.

There had to be perhaps twenty or thirty humans in the tunnels right now. That must be where these fighters had retreated, he reasoned, carrying their wounded, since none but their dead had been found. He sent five octets after them. His personal goal was to scale the craggy cliff face to reach the improvised gun ports, safe from any shots from that source when he was so close to the wall under them.

The rooftop was crowded with warriors now, looking up where they knew they needed to go, and some looked out over the valley, where the other humans remained clustered in that small stream bed. Gofdar chose the personal path he could follow, which would keep his story in the histories of the clans that advanced along the Great Path. He would lead forty of his octets up the outside of the cliff to the ridge top, while the octets in the tunnels used their sense of smell to trace the humans to their den. He would ensure that the main human army had no escape path through the adjacent canyon. When his warriors caught up with the humans in the tunnels, surely hampered by foolishly carrying their wounded as they always did, they would be killed or captured. He requested some live prisoners, if possible, for slow interrogation.

If the tunnels had sensors that recognized there were no longer any living humans present, and contained only Krall, he might lose those forty warriors if the tunnels were destroyed. His remaining seven hundred twenty seven warriors not going with him would be sent to wipe out the cowardly humans on the valley floor, after first salvaging all of the weapons and power packs they could find, taking them from their own dead. His force of two thousand twenty four had dwindled to eleven hundred and twenty seven, per his visor count.

This was an honorable attrition rate, worthy of high status awards when earned in fierce fighting against a force with so many more than their own numbers. The one fact he would conceal in his report to his clan leader, and to the Gatlek, was that a disproportionate number of his losses had happened against only about fifty of the enemy in this building, where half of this enemy appeared to have survived, thus far. He hoped they would be found.

He started up the cliff, after wisely permitting a full octet to precede him, awarding them what he termed was an honor, which he said was due to their fighting skill today. If there were any long range sniping at the first to start the climb, he’d have a bit of warning this time. He was conscious now of how important his role today could be in the history told of how he had led the forces that trapped a large human army, leaving them ripe for destruction. He believed he would earn a second name for this action, and he wanted to be alive to relish that accomplishment. His seed was already frozen, and ready for reproducing his line, but he wanted rewards that he could enjoy personally.

He instructed the octet leader to stop to examine the lower gun emplacement for occupation, although he was sure the crew of that gun must have departed, because there was no heat from that opening from a recently fired heavy weapon. Only the higher gun had fired in the last few minutes. He would check that upper gun, just to catch the scent of the crew, so he would remember them if they were taken alive.