Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (23 page)

Greeves was skeptical. “I saw the standard PU made laser batteries on Poldark. They don't have azimuth settings physically possible that can be set lower than forty-five degrees from vertical. That’s a limitation designed into their heavy steel gun mounts. A ninety-degree depression would be needed to fire at ground targets. That capability wasn’t provided for in orbital defense lasers, because long-range shots at spacecraft at such low angles are severely attenuated when passing through moisture laden and dust filled atmosphere, and seldom cause much damage. Unless these four cities all happen to sit in deep valleys, with the only roads into them passing over extremely high mountain passes, the enemy is going to be under those gun’s ability to aim low enough to hit them. I guess a Strangler might foolishly fly low over a city with those batteries, but only once. Approaching low, from a distance, the laser batteries can’t hit those low flying ships ether.” His voice sounded skeptical of Gaffigan saying he’d be repurposing any of the batteries.

“Hey, Thad, I’m just Gaffigan’s messenger speaking here. I’m no ground pounder, but that was once your bailiwick. At least before you grew into the famous Kobani admiral-like figure Admiral Foxworthy dubbed you at Poldark, when you went there to infect Krall equipment with Denial chips.” She knew he always reacted a bit defensively when teased about that brief rank.

It worked this time too. He sighed. “Like I told Foxworthy, I asked her to call me Colonel. I only learned space warfare strategy and techniques via Mind Tap. But as a militia infantry soldier on Poldark, we didn’t have laser batteries prior to the Krall war, so I was never involved with space defenses. Perhaps Gaffigan thought of something new to do with them. Frankly, I don't know what the hell he has in mind, but I hope it works.”

****

The PDF captain shouted from his truck at the woman supervising the construction crew. She was running one of the four crews from Morrisville; sent to do the urgent defensive position modifications the PDF said was needed.

“No. You aren’t done yet. Weld two additional support struts on the underside of the chassis. The battery falling back upright onto its tracks would be as damaging to it as falling over onto its side would be. The laser’s focal mirrors and gimbal mounts are only protected when secured for travel. When we unlock them for rotation and beam collimation, the chassis of the gun platform needs to be braced to stay canted at forty-five degrees. Tipping over and slamming to a sudden stop, in either direction, would damage the mirrors and their alignment motors. After that, the battery would be useless.”

The woman wasn’t giving in just yet to this added requirement. “But, Sir? We sure as hell aren’t staying out here when the fighting starts, because we don’t have body armor or guns like your troopers do. If you decide to drive these lasers to another firing spot, you’d have to cut off the underside support struts to set them gently upright with our crane. We’re not coming back out here under fire to do it for you.”

The officer shrugged. “Lady, if we can’t stop the apes from taking the city, we don’t have any place else to put them where they’d do any good. The Federation is supposed to keep the enemy ships in orbit from firing on the city. Besides, we’ll still have over half our lasers sitting upright, on the other side of Morrisville, to fire at orbital targets. The other three cities might try the same thing, provided they have favorable terrain. There are tank columns driving toward each of them. We don’t have many options for fighting mobile armored forces like this. The Krall didn’t use their small, one warrior Dragons in massive assaults this way.

“Anyway, Mam, I don't need you to agree with the decision. Just hurry up and do what I asked. That’s why you have the stacks of extra I-beams on that flatbed towed behind the derrick. There are four more pits assigned to your crew, so get them done before the enemy armor reaches firing range. The dozer is done digging the pits, and the derrick will go with you, to tilt the batteries over while you weld on the bracing. I need to check on the other work crews, so get a move on.” He drove off, to verify the rushed work of the other teams was proceeding without a similar glitch. He had fifteen mobile space defense batteries to turn into fixed ground defenses in a very short time. He hoped it would work

****

At the city of New Caledonia, the capitol city of a semi-mountainous mining region on Tanner’s, some of the orbital defense laser batteries were also being repurposed at the edge of the city. But the terrain there provided enemy armor more shelter than did the flat plains that surrounded Morrisville. An early slogan from the war with the Krall had been revived at New Caledonia, remembering how civilians on Gribble’s Nook had fought back with what they had available.
Remember Gribble’s Nook
and the history of that very first raid provided ideas for supplemental defenses, to counter what the protective ridges could offer to an advancing enemy in their massive armored units.

****

At Ashland, a city on a bluff at the end of a long lush and verdant valley, with a midsized and well controlled river meandering through it, had suitable highway approaches and bridges for the Ragnar armored column, where it could travel on roads placed on either side of the river. The roads periodically passed behind low ridges that followed the river valley, the terrain having been cut over millions of years by a formerly wilder waterway. This terrain offered shelter for the Pillagers from the orbital defense lasers around Ashland, most of which were higher than the valley approaches to the city. A few of the batteries, placed below the city’s bluffs, could be angled to provide firing angles down the valley. However, the off-road capability of the tracked Ragnar armor would be able to evade them. There
was
another defensive option, but it required evacuations, and years of lost productivity in this agricultural dependent region. It would entail sacrifice and expense, but the Thandol Empire, in the form of their Ragnar proxies, intended to exact that sacrifice and cost anyway. So why wait?

****

Fort Bradford was the home of the former training base and armory of Tanner’s wartime PDF troopers, and they were going to try a more traditional military response. Most of the recalled troopers were there, and they had nearly all of the planet’s anti-armor weaponry, which consisted of a few thousand hand-held rocket launcher tubes, nicknamed Dragon Killers, or DKs. Of course, it wasn’t known how well they would work against the various types of Ragnar tanks and tracked vehicles, since the short range rockets were specifically designed to blow the turrets off the smaller, white ceramic-coated Dragons.

The Ragnar appeared to use two types of base units for their heavy tracked armor. They were externally identical except for size, and were generically referred to as Pillagers. The largest was the massive eighty ton, thirty-five-foot length of the main battle tank hulls, and the smaller units were slightly over twenty-five feet long, at sixty tons. Each model held a crew of three of the large bodied Ragnar, normally in body armor. A commander, gunner, and a driver.

To face them, the PDF had fifty of the pitifully inadequate ladybugs, with their track driven two-man gun carriage, with rear tripod mounted tri-barreled plasma cannons. They also had ten heavy laser equipped troop transport shuttles, and a large storeroom full of a white elephant sort of weapon, which had never found a combat use against the Krall. The unproven weapons cache was a supply of magnetic limpet mines, for maritime targets.

The improbable weapons had been the bright idea of one poorly informed, but politically influential former merchant seaman on Tanner’s world. At the start of the Krall war, he’d suggested the enemy might decide to invade them by unopposed sea landings, far from shore. On a planet with a surface seventy-three percent covered by water, it sounded reasonable at the time to manufacture some of those mines. Reasonable only if you didn’t know the Krall disliked deep water, because their bodies were too dense to swim, and they enjoyed the thrill of blasting through space defenses before landing on their enemy’s doorstep. Nevertheless, there were uses for nearly anything, if you had imagination.

****

Group commander Sorvus Gontra rode at the head of Group 4’s Pillagers, his head protruding from the hatch at the top of the big gun turret. He’d used a bunker buster on the largest building in each of the four small towns they had passed through. There seemed to be one near the center of each of them, where the road split to arc around a less than impressive structure. It always seemed to be some local government center, with pointless tall columns in front of many of them. There were seldom any of the frightened residents visible. Lucky for them, since his instructions to the commander of every mechanized unit in the column was to shoot them on sight.

From time to time, he’d hear the sizzle crack of a heavy plasma bolt or the hum of a Debilitater’s transformer when a maximum power beam was fired well off to the side. The lasers were silent when fired, except for the thermal cracks of the heat-shattered structures they might strike. The pom-pom sound of the air defense units was heard less often, since they seldom depressed their twin barrels enough to hit nearby targets. Their fragmentation shells were hazardous if they exploded close to the double column of equipment. That was because helmetless heads of commanders and drivers were protruding from nearly every unit, relishing the smells and sights of this nearly treeless plain, where the main crops appeared to be various grains, which had a pleasant fragrance to the Ragnar.

There had not been a single hostile act against them thus far, after their landing, which accounted for the removed helmets. Most of the mechanized units held just three of the large Ragnar in their body armor. Only the gunners and technical specialists remained entirely inside, being required to use their helmet visors, and observe sensor screens at all times, monitoring what the sensors of their own unit detected, and scanning the data shared from the entire group. They were constantly alert for threats.

Possibly, the silence of the small communities was the product of the earlier passage of low altitude Stranglers, using wide beams to induce what was expected to be a fully disabling state for any human radiated, if not fatal for many. It certainly had put down their livestock, which initially laid kicking and squealing in pain, before falling silent when the beam passed close. 

The column had been advancing rapidly for a quarter of a cycle, and this oddly exotic, flat and never-ending plain, appeared to be perfect for the assault Gontra had planned. It was terrain nothing like the typical jungles and low mountains of home. Here, he would be able to spread out his units to the flanks unimpeded, to advance in a formidable line, with a clear field of fire for each unit, approaching the outskirts of the city in a wide line when still far out. Their first task was to destroy the orbital defense batteries, which were located around the city, and then secure the modest spaceport.

He sent the two columns behind him off the perfectly straight paved roadway to either side. They spread to form a wide line, tearing through the fields of amber grain, which would soon yield to urban sprawl.

Accordingly, Gontra asked his gunner for the stored coordinates of a firing pad for a laser battery ahead of them, having it overlaid on his hand held viewer, which displayed the city’s image taken from orbit. He wanted the privilege of triggering the first shot, to destroy the first of those damned laser defenses. They had wreaked havoc with their fleet, and forced this alteration in their landing plans. Killing the first one would be gratifying in its symbolism.

The large triangular bottoms of twenty Stranglers were drifting overhead of his Pillagers, actually slightly behind the line of Gontra’s tanks, hovering lower and slower than normal, staying below the ability of the powerful laser batteries to depress and fire on them. At this short range there would be little attenuation of beams designed to be deadly against speeding orbital altitude targets. This close, the X-ray lasers could burn though a Strangler’s reinforced hull in under ten seconds. Although it took multiple such beams to seriously damage a speeding ship two or three hundred miles overhead, a single battery could focus its beam to carve most ships open quickly at short range.

Gontra sought the outline of the target he wanted to hit. The circular reticle centered on the image of a flat smooth square pad, where the large mechanized laser battery was parked. Except, the dark silhouette appeared lower than he expected, almost truncated and flat. Its vertically pointing black laser tube wasn’t seen in his long-range view. The overhead picture of the firing pad had been obtained a half-cycle ago from orbit, with the laser’s bore pointed up, a series of images captured by a camera on an orbiting Ravager as it passed over.

He pressed the bottom right corner of his viewer screen, and the Pillager’s turret rotated smoothly towards where the reticle had been placed on his targeting viewer. There was merely a hum of the electric motor, drowned out by the sound of the tracks on the pavement. The tube of his gun rose in elevation, preparing to fire a guided bunker buster the distance required, with constant course corrections if wind was a factor, or if the target started moving. A different tap, and he elevated his tank’s forward imager higher, which rose on a slender shaft, with a motion-stabilized mount at the top. The camera zoomed in on the firing pad he’d select as his target.