Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire (11 page)

“Sarge, I didn’t know you were linked in,” answered Nabarone in pleased surprise. “Sure. Frigging rats are everywhere. Dead people, dead Krall, and dead animals rot where it’s too risky for us to recover or bury them. Hell, the Krall don’t even bury their own dead on their side of the river. They just toss bodies in piles and partly burn them, or throw them in the river. The rats have thrived. Years of war and no exterminators has given them good lives. The Krall actually seem to enjoy playing at killing them, with throwing knives, or even rocks. They don’t make a dent in their numbers. Why?”

“The Denial chips are the size and thickness of our little finger nails, tiny backup battery included, and they hold a charge for months after removed from a power source. They’re also physically tough.”

Thad said, “So tell me, oh rat master, what the hell has that got to do with our Krall problem?”

“Operation Hot Pest. Remember that Henry?” Reynolds asked.

“Early in the war? Sure, I remember. Right after they overran some of the first towns and cities as the invasion got started. The tactic didn’t really bother the Krall. They didn’t want the property or buildings anyway. Why does that come to mind?”

Thad didn’t know what they were talking about, and reminded them. “I wasn’t here, remember? What was Hot Pest about?”

Sarge filled him in. “I’d just finished my guerrilla warfare training at Camp Greeves. Don’t let that name go to your swelled head again.” The last was added for Thad’s benefit, since the camp had been named for him years after he’d gone missing, presumed dead after his ship’s capture by the Krall.

“Anyway, we knew the Krall never kept anyone alive in a captured town, other than a few stupid collaborators for a short time. We thought the enemy was making use of the shelter, and possibly raw materials and food supplies we left behind. We wanted to destroy it all. A scorched earth policy in captured territory, since there were no human lives there worth saving.”

Henry picked up the narrative. “We tied small thermite packages with timers onto rodents, mostly rats, and some Poldark bush-tails, and used extremely low flying drones to carry hundreds of them to the outskirts of the fallen towns, where they were released.

“Being urban dwelling pests, they naturally ran into the towns and hid, or ate the dead bodies in houses and buildings. Three days later, the time expired and thermite packs ignited, starting thousands of fires that burned the dead towns to the ground. The Krall didn’t give a crap or even try to put out the fires. After warming their butts against our colder climate, or roasting dried Raspani meat, they simply moved on. It had no impact on the course of the war, so we stopped doing it after four or five tries.”

“Now’s the time to try again.” Sarge urged.

“What good will house fires do us now?” Nabarone questioned.

“I think I see.” Thad came back, in a surprising word of support. “Tie Denial chips to them.”

“There ya go.” Sarge agreed. “The rats will run around the Krall pretty much ignored, and their weapons and armor will stop working.”

Henry had a rebuttal. “As I recall, most of the fires started in the outskirts of the towns because that’s where many of the rats paused to chew off the plastic ties that held the thermite onto their backs. They won’t carry those chips very far or for very long.”

Reynolds also had an answer for that. “I was a new Greeves Camp graduate, so I was one of those low rank flunkies who had to try and tie the damned thermite packs on rats and bush-tails. It was hard to hold them, they bit, and it was slow going in general. “That’s why you won’t tie them on this time. Let them do what they like to do naturally. Eat. Feed those small chips to them in food pellets, perhaps cover ‘em in tasty grease, or shove them down their throats or up their butts, where they can’t get rid of them. They eat damn near anything, and after that they’ll become our little electronic warfare pests.”

“Hey,” Henry exclaimed. Proving why he had the stars on his collar. “If rats will eat things that small so easily, we can coat thousands of chips with something rats find tasty, and pack them into mortar or smart artillery shells. We can fire them towards enemy positions set for a soft airburst charge, same as we use to drop spy bots over their lines. We’ve noticed their counter battery laser systems don’t always go after shells that are aimed well wide of any target of value. Intelligence thinks the laser defense batteries have digital maps of Krall positions and equipment, which get frequent updates. That’s because if a force has left an area and we fire on that spot, they let most of the shells through to waste our ammo. They focus those laser defenses on shells that might do actual damage.”

“Henry, that operation won’t be started before we arrive overhead, but it’s a good way to pull the teeth of their forces when you start your own assaults.” There was a noticeable lapse before they received his answer.

“Gentlemen, I just sent a Comtap to one of my aides. He’s been overseeing the KK chip replacements. We even have kids and old folks helping pop out the KK chips and shoving in the Denial chip. No circuit connections needed. There are piles of the new chips in bins, which they easily removed from infected Krall weapons. We had many more of them than we can load very fast by hand, one bullet at a time. Captain Gilford will take a bin or two by shuttle to deliver them to artillery ammo dumps. He’s going to ask a mess hall sergeant to send some men over to the shuttle with tubs of grease and finely ground up food scraps. The chips will be mixed with that, and stuffed inside the shells.

“Hell, even if rats don’t eat and spread all of them, if we do the airbursts high enough, on trajectories that will pass over good targets that the Krall think we’ve overshot, we can scatter chips where they will cover a lot of clans and their equipment. I’m moving up the schedule for my assaults anywhere we can spread these chips. Every ammo dump we capture gives us more Denial chips.” His sense of euphoria was palpable, and grizzly in its expression.

“God. I may get to enjoy this hideous damn war when it’s finally the Krall bodies that start to pile up.”

****

Approaching the mass White Out, Thad questioned his friend. “You sure you want to go down in a four ship Sarge?” Thad had assumed he would operate one of the weapons consoles with him, in their low orbit version of a Combat Air Patrol. “We don’t want a single clanship to get aloft if we can stop them.”

“Thad, I hired on with the PU Army to be a devious kind of ground pounder. I’d like to see this rat trick work this time, up close. With an opportunity to finally push the bastards back, instead of managing somehow to live through another rout of our troops, where they overrun our lines. I want to see our rippers wade through some of them. I’ll be down there to look after Ethan and Kit. They might decide to do something rash.”

“Hell, that’s
your
specialty. They’ll be pulling your bacon out of the fire.”

“Maybe, but I want to be down there.”

“Fine, leave me up here with an expanded navy squadron as backup that can’t tell most of our ships from the damned Krall. Only fifty of my captains have IFF equipment installed, and my Ripper is new so it isn’t equipped. Tet sent most of the IFF equipped ships to New Dublin, because that squadron has never worked with us. I may get friendly navy fire up my ass. You could watch my backside.”

“Quit whining. Foxworthy knows what she’s doing. She promised to fire only Denial anti-ship missiles at clanships rising towards your formation. You’ll have the missiles equipped with actual warheads if needed. I’ve seen you in combat, and you ain’t all that careful. The navy has more to fear from you shooting their asses off.”

“Get below you jackass, we White Out in ten minutes. Watch out for my boy and Kit, and be careful. Wish I could land with you.” The last remark revealed the true nature of his complaint. He wanted to be part of the ground assault, and had to play at being a paper admiral because Tet had put him in charge.

The four hundred Kobani ships performed their Comtap coordinated White Outs, barely above two hundred miles, spread over the Krall occupied continent. They had maneuvered prior to the Jump to emerge with a matching velocity with Poldark. They arrived with only Krall standard style stealth active for the large ships. Each ship promptly spewed their better stealthed four-ships and single-ships, which descended towards the central Krall defensive perimeter. The Kobani ships, only fifty of which had the new stealth systems, tried to look like typical Krall clanships, to gain any time delay they could for their more secretive small craft to get away undetected.

Ten minutes after they sprang into existence over Poldark, the sixty-five heavy cruisers of Foxworthy’s reinforced squadron appeared another five hundred miles above them, making their Jump from the other side of Poldark.

“Welcome home Admiral Greeves.” Foxworthy sent. She’d been kept informed of the exact timing of the arrival by Nabarone’s staff, who she believed had a Kobani Comtap specialist with them. That was true in a sense, for Nabarone’s staff, but they let her think Chief Haveram had left a Kobani behind.

“Thanks Admiral. I wish you’d call me Colonel, a rank I’m more comfortable holding. Admiral sounds…, forgive me if this sounds offensive, I don't mean it that way, but it’s too lofty a title for a simple army man like me. This temporary fleet command is the result of special circumstances.”

“Well,” she chuckled at his discomfort. “I could also call you Captain, since you command from the bridge of your own ship.”

“Good Lord. That would confuse me more Mam. By the way my ship’s called the Ripper, in case you hear that name from one of my other captains.”

“See? You call
them
captains.”

“Most all of them were really Spacers before we captured these ships, and a few of them were actual captains of commercial vessels, even if that was over twenty years ago. By the way, we just released at least eight hundred small craft to descend on Poldark. I’m sure even stealthed like typical Krall clanships that we show up on your low frequency radar systems, but I doubt that our small boats do.”

There was a pause as she checked. “No, we don’t see them at all, Admir…, I mean Colonel. General Nabarone told us you’d launch them. Presumably the Krall can’t see them either.”

“We hope not. They didn’t at K1. We sent several thousand of them down there, and they were right on top of them before they knew we were coming.” 

“You really took down the whole planet?” She asked in an incredulous tone. She’d seen the Kobani fight with their ships, but this was unbelievable.

“Not the whole planet Mam. We disabled most of their clanships, much of their heavy war material, right on down to plasma rifles, body armor, and simple door keypads. Anything that uses the quantum-coded keypads that only let Krall use them. There are a hell of a lot of pissed off Krall on the surface that we never came near. Obviously, we brought some of the newly captured ships with us. We captured roughly two thousand two hundred at K1, and we started the attack there with only a hundred seventeen. They don’t have as large a fleet left to them now, and about a third of it is right here, where we hope to disable them.”

“Mirikami went against KI with only a hundred seventeen ships? Pretty damned gutsy or overconfident.”

“Definitely not overconfident. We were damned desperate though, because Telour had discovered our home world, and we only intercepted and stopped the ships he sent to scout us because we discovered we had some unexpected technology at our disposal. Tet knew Telour would send much of his fleet after us when his scout ships failed to return, so we had to strike first, before they expected us.”

“Excuse me? You just happened to discover you had some new technology that disables Krall clanships and equipment. How does something like that happen?”

“It’s actually a kind of software list of species that are not allowed to use things designed by the Olt’kitapi. I think Tet has mentioned that ancient race’s role in the Krall’s early development. Anyway, the list to deny Krall use of such equipment was passed like a virus to one of our own clanships when we met and intercepted one of the Olt’kitapi ships. The one that tore apart the gas giants at Meadow and Bootstrap. Afterwards, all of our ships were changed the same way, so the Krall cannot operate them but we can. We didn’t notice at first, because the list shared between those chips does not exclude our DNA pattern. That’s the source of the action of Denial chips, as we’ve started calling them. It’s how the Olt’kitapi intended to clip the wings of the Krall, but they were ineffective at war and were wiped out, letting these barbarians free to rape the galaxy.”

“Huh,” was her numb acknowledgement of a potentially war winning bit of serendipity. She snapped out of her daze when she received a report from her weapons officer.

“Colonel. While we were talking, six of my cruisers fired those doctored missiles at three clanships that were already on station well above you. We were told how to strip the missiles down, and Nabarone provided us the new ECM circuits, as he called them, which must be another name for the Denial chips your people gave him. I have to tell you, firing those without warheads made me nervous. The three clanship targets are still intact, but after their initial laser attempts to knock out our smart missiles or acceleration to avoid them, they’ve simply continued on their way, inert as can be. No other reaction. I’d expected them to launch everything they had at us, and at you.

“Yesterday, we had one of my cruisers lightly damaged by Plasma cannons when the clanship we were supposed to allow through suddenly arrived. We weren’t fired on by that craft, but the bolts came from one of the defensive clanships they now keep aloft, constantly moving and Jumping around. The joint attack on K1, your ships and ours, has made them more conservative about protecting their clanships. As Mirikami figured out, logistics was their Achilles heel, and now the Denial chips will cut their hamstrings. If crippled enough we can win this thing.”