Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (94 page)

One of the eight guardians spoke from the back wall. “It speaks true. I heard the ship tell him that. It said it prevented a Jumping clanship from merging with us. Then the enemy formed a Jump Hole and pulled us away from the protectors, and the death ship was damaged and part of it was left behind. The enemy tried to enter the death ship, but have failed. This must be the humans using our clanships as we were told when we were at Telda Ka. They would be who destroyed the protectors at the last star. We need to attack them before they cut a way inside, to protect the ship’s secrets from them.”

Even the guardian with one arm had risen to his feet, and another one stood with a broken leg, a bone protruding. All of the Krall were on their feet, as were the two unarmed aides. Combined on the ship, there were five hundred twelve guardians, and two unarmed representatives of the Tor Gatrol. The latter requested and received spare weapons. The true enemy was at hand and had to be repelled, and then destroyed at any cost.

Dolbor exerted his questionable authority again over the guardians own sub leader. “Pildon, tell the ship to guide us to where we can reach the enemy quickly.” Then in words directed to the guardian holding the prisoner.

“Bring him with us, to speak to the ship for us.”

What choice did the Krall’tapi have but to obey?

****

Knocked briefly unconscious from the severe jolt that had suddenly slammed them back and sideways, Mirikami soon recovered and called to Jakob. “What did we strike?” His ability to ask that question meant they had not ended in a blaze of blue-white light, as he’d half expected, or suffered a collision so violent the hull ruptured.

“Sir, we nearly intersected with the ship we Jumped to meet, because my estimate of the correct safe arrival coordinates was inaccurate due to our large separation. I don’t understand this, but we are somehow at rest in space, in physical contact with the Dismantler’s hull. We should have collided quite hard with it after we were in Normal Space, and would have rebounded sharply, assuming we did not penetrate their hull. Only two enemy clanships are able to see us this close to the side of the larger ship, and they can’t easily fire on us while we are attached to the object they want to protect. They have started spinning to absorb the plasma and laser hits I have been firing, and they are moving in to safely fire back at us from closer range.”

Mirikami realized he’d been hearing the Mark’s plasma cannons thrumming as they fired and cycled, that it wasn’t from the throbbing pain in his head. Fred and Jorl were also moving now, raising their heads to look at their console displays. Maggi looked very still, secured in her couch.

Jakob sounded almost apologetic for an AI. “I couldn’t launch any missiles because the squadron will arrive…,” All five Kobani ships promptly winked into existence at that moment, immediately firing from positions behind the four clanships, and
they
could and did launch missiles. Some of their missiles would be destined for the Dismantler, if it were still there. It should have been gone by now or destroyed. Jakob couldn’t automatically launch their anti-ship missiles previously, not without a human’s order, when the AI knew that Kobani ships might be hit when they suddenly appeared in the middle of the battlespace, resulting in human deaths.

By now, the Mark should have Jumped if it had survived, but that too was only to be done on Mirikami’s order. If the Mark had emerged too far from the target to take it out by intersect or by a ramming impact, Mirikami wasn’t about to Jump away and leave the fight. He’d been stunned for vital seconds, and Jakob had made the best decisions he was permitted to make. Mirikami had deliberately assigned the other ships arrival points that were not too far out and a half-minute later in time. If the Mark happened to emerge inside the volume of the much larger ship, the intercept blast wave wouldn’t destroy the squadron, because the high velocity debris would have spread
beyond
their arrival points when they appeared. The Krall clanships would have already been shredded in that case.

If there was no intercept, a hard ram could still wreck the Dismantler, and the squadron would soon arrive to kill the clanships, and rescue any survivors on the Mark. None of that had happened, so the backup plan was needed. It was needed
fast
, before the squadron’s missiles reached them to destroy the Dismantler.

In contact with the Dismantler, the Mark wasn’t able to rotate to spread out energy beam hits from the two Krall ships, and Mirikami didn’t dare try to increase separation to make them an even safer target to hit. Besides, where they were was perfect for implementing the backup plan.

“Jump Jakob.” Mirikami was almost quick enough.

Just before the large Jump Hole formed, using the high energy tachyon in their secondary Trap, the Mark took a heavy laser beam and two plasma bolt hits on a single missile launcher port at midship. Krall gunners were good, and knew the weak points of a clanship.

In the fraction of the time it took the plasma bolts to penetrate the hull and spatter their star heat inside the penetrated missile compartment, the Mark of Koban completed a White Out six AUs away, on the other side of Pittsburg II’s star. That occurred a half second before an exploding missile in the firing rack blew away enough of the hull and Trap field emitters on that side of the hull to dump all of the tachyons. A quarter-second earlier and both ships would have vanished in a burst of energy inside Tachyon Space, when the power to the Trap fields failed and they would have opened.

As it was, without tachyon power for Normal Space drive, and a blazing inferno of internal flames, which near the center of the ship threatened the binary fuel tanks. Several severed fuel lines had automatically shut down all of the attitude thrusters and the main engine because of an active internal fire. The two main fusion bottles provided power to the weapons, sensors, and for weak gravity control.

However, that was only a summary of
equipment
problems. The human side of the equation was worse.

“I’m on fire! Help me, we’re trapped!” The panic and pain sent in that Comtap link from Jala Kentra was tremendously painful for everyone on the Mark. More so because there wasn’t any way to help her or the three people with her in time to save them. The blast had opened the hull for fifty feet around the missile bay that was directly hit, tearing open multiple compartments.

The crew in those compartments nearest the blast died outright, or had their armor punctured or torn open and then they died in the resultant vacuum. A couple of “lucky ones” were ejected into space in their sealed armor, unconscious but alive. Plasma from the large bolts ignited a secondary fire from ricocheting fragments, when some passed through a torn open bulkhead and started a blaze when they embedded in stacked small arms ammunition, kept in a storage locker on a deck below the explosion. That happened before the airtight compartment door slammed shut, and automatic foam sealant sprayed over and covered the compartment’s bulkhead breech.

There were four acceleration couches bolted to the deck in that storage locker, placed in a smaller compartment intended to protect the occupants from sudden vacuum in the wide-open outer deck area, or to protect the outer deck from a breach in the smaller compartment.

Now, in armor that kept them breathing, the four occupants couldn’t open the heavy sealed door to get out, as the heat of burning Krall pistol ammunition propellant raged. Even their suit energy beams were inadequate to cut through, at least quickly enough against bulkheads and doors designed to resist powerful clanship beams on outer compartments. Krall pistol ammunition didn’t require external oxygen to burn. A gaseous fire suppression system, quickly activated, and prevented flames from spreading farther from that compartment, but caseless ammunition already ignited would burn its propellant until it went out. The link mercifully went silent well before then.

When the four suit icons went red, Mirikami halted the frantic rescue attempt by half of his surviving crew down below. That half was only the four people he’d devoted to a rescue that he knew was hopeless from the start. He had sent another four to focus on their strategic problem. How damaged was the Dismantler ship, did it look capable of a Jump, and were the Krall coming out to fight? The ship supposedly had no offensive weapons, per the Raspani.

Tell that to the people on Meadow and Bootstrap,
he thought. To the Olt’kitapi this ship was a tool, but not to the Krall. What other tool function did the ship have that could be used as a weapon? He realized that if he could capture this ship, it should offer a treasure trove of technology, but he couldn’t let it get away intact.

Anyway, a shitload of armed Krall inside her could be very damned offensive, particularly when you’re attached to that ship without any propulsion to separate from them. He knew there were Krall inside, and at five times the Mark’s volume, there could be plenty of them. His original complement of twenty-four was down to twelve, four on the Bridge and eight survivors below. A Comtap link told him the squadron had made short work of the four clanships, and would Jump over to join him, just as soon as they figured out exactly
where
the random coordinates were that his hurried Jump had taken the now broken down Mark.

Based on Jakob’s assessment of the Dismantler ship, the radius of the Jump Hole they’d been able to make with the tachyon they had hurriedly caught, had sheared off nearly a quarter of the far end of the ship. Whether it was missing the bow or stern he didn’t know, since both ends had looked identical before they had sliced one end off.

He was relieved when Maggi had come around, almost a full minute after they’d nearly rammed the other ship. He left her on the Bridge while he, Jorl, and Fred, leaped down past the stair landings to join up with the four Kobani that had been clambering about on the surface of the Dismantler, seeking entry through its presumably cut open hull. The four from the rescue team were withdrawing from within the Mark’s internal wreckage, and would join them.

Mirikami detoured to the other side of the Mark, away from the damage, to avoid the smoke and warped decks and bulkheads on the side by the explosion. It looked as if the human designed fire suppression system they had added to the one all clanships had, managed to protect the fuel tanks, which were close to the missile launcher that had exploded.

Mirikami was receiving an image of the hull of the Dismantler by Comtap, and it was from the other side of the big rounded sausage shape of a ship. The hull, like a clanship’s, was magnetic so their armor’s feet could stick securely. The idea had been that where the Dismantlers hull was severed, they would gain easy entrance. It didn’t appear there was a breach after all.

The four Kobani had bypassed some circular shapes that might be hatches, but they didn’t appear to have hinged or sliding doors. Besides, they assumed the Krall might be waiting at hatches, so a sliced open hull section should offer more options. Now, Mirikami was seeing an image of what seemed to be continuous gray sheeting that covered the sharply defined shear plane of where the Jump Hole had cut through the end of the ship. It looked as if a tight gray membrane had been stretched across the opening with the underlying walls and deck edges outlined, as ridges along the material, as if elastic fabric was stretched tautly over the gaping hole.

Jason Seiko, a former Steward from the Flight of Fancy was showing him by Comtap how springy yet tough the material was. “Tet, I can push it down slightly with my hand so it has some flex, but I can’t pinch it to lift it, and it resisted cutting, it seems like flexible metal. I hit it with both a red and a green laser, and it left a brief IR glow, but it didn’t separate or burn through easily. The stuff seems to have extruded from the other adjacent hull material, because there is no line where it starts, but the original hull near the cut seems thinner, implying it provided the material for the sheet that now covers the opening. It’s sort of like an extruded Smart Plastic cover, but stronger, and has the toughness of a single ship coating.”

“OK. I’ll be there in a few minutes. We’re almost at the lower deck airlocks.”

The main portals were shut to retain atmosphere, so the three men intended to use one of four airlocks between the portals that could each pass a Krall octet in armor, leaving it more than roomy enough for them. They were about to cycle the outer hatch open, when Maggi shouted a Comtap warning to all, with a visual from a video screen.

“Krall swarming out of a ten foot wide hatch right next to the Mark! They have plasma rifles and pistols.” There was no need to say they were armored, since it was in vacuum.

Mirikami was torn between opening the hatch or not. “How many and how close to the ship?”

“Jakob counts sixteen, but eight have leaped off towards the Mark.”

Mirikami decided. “Jason, the four of you try to work your way back here. We need to keep them from taking the Mark. Their chain of planet destruction is done for today and they know it, but they don’t want us to have the Dismantler, and I don’t think they can Jump. If they can get control of the Mark, then both ships will be lost to us.”

While he talked, he pressurized the airlock to get back inside the hold. He linked to the entire squadron now, so everyone knew what was happening. “Will, Jump the squadron in the right general direction, then zero in on wherever we are. At least sixteen Krall came out of the Dismantler and eight are trying to enter the Mark. If they gain control of her, it becomes a target for you, even if some of us are inside her. They would use missiles and energy beams to destroy the Dismantler themselves to keep it from us. We need the technology of that Olt’kitapi ship.”