Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (36 page)

A day and a half earlier, the fleeing civilians had taken advantage of excellent public and personal transportation, managing to stay ahead of the armored columns. The large Pillagers with the big smoothbore guns that could fire the bunker buster shells, proved to have a slight vulnerability to the small but powerful little Dragon killer rockets.

Four of that largest class of tank, traversing their turrets side to side, always looking for potential targets, encountered brave, or foolish, PDF soldiers who were stationed on lower floors of the tall downtown buildings. With the precision aim provided via their visors, these gutsy troopers let the big gun’s traverse until they were practically looking down the nearly five-inch or 126 mm muzzles. The self-steering rockets still couldn’t blow off the turrets, or even detonate the shockproof explosives in already loaded shells, which were normally a bunker buster or a kinetic armor-penetrating depleted uranium slender sabot shell, or whatever type was loaded. However, it damn well meant the big gun wouldn’t fire again until its barrel was replaced. Unfortunately, for one of the four brave troopers, the secondary medium powered laser on the same turret was the one that was actually ready to fire. The Pillager’s commander or gunner quickly avenged the big gun’s loss.

The dragon killers also made certain none of the three crewmembers in a mechanized unit ever opened a top hatch (again) once they entered the city. The eighteen-inch long, self-guided, ultra-fast missiles could zip through a two-inch-wide opening from a quarter mile away in about a second. While that was fatal for the careless crewmember, in combat the sealed compartmentalized fighting sections left the Pillager largely operational, if shorthanded and in need of a messy clean out.

After the trailing mechanized units worked their way past the disabled leading twenty-one Pillagers destroyed initially, a hurried check under the damaged units revealed there was one small penetrating blast marks under them, directly below the front personnel compartments, with a half-inch hole burned through the armored composite, which included dense depleted uranium plates. A faint, head sized ring around each burn area, suggested a wider disk had been present on the metal hull at the time of detonation, and some of the escaping hot gasses left their mark as the disc was disintegrated. There was no clue as to how the disks got there, and there was only non-magnetic dust found under them, with wider burns on the pavement from the back blasts. Thond held up the columns while all of the Pillager bottoms were checked, with nothing found by direct hand sweeps, or seen visually.

After that, they proceeded more cautiously through the city, encountering the ladybugs that took random pot shots at the smaller Pillagers, at stolen human trucks, or clusters of careless Ragoons that forgot their combat zone discipline in the city, clustering together to make an irresistible target from the highly mobile gun crews.

The Hoths were reporting significant losses, but
only
when they went hunting the gun cart crews. The same was true when a Strangler advanced on the city, and came under relentless missile, plasma, and railgun fire from a nearby but unseen airborne enemy, which left swirling air in their wake. It wasn’t a large enough turbulence wake to be from one of the human’s larger and stealthed spacecraft, nor was the power of the weapons used as great. In fact, they seemed to be similar in scale to their own Hoths. It was as if an invisible protector in the sky attacked only when a Hoth or a Strangler represented a threat to the few ground defenders. It was an oddly restrained method of attack, and had both Thond and Hitok scratching their rumps in a Ragnar display of confusion. Previously they had wiped out three tank forces in massive, non-traditional ambushes.

Very few of the Hoth flights, once engaged with this mysterious airborne defender, returned to the swarm of those circling and waiting for an assignment. The harried pilots, while in combat, reported some things that seemed improbable for a human operated stealthed craft to do, just before communications were lost with the reporting pilot. Reports of impossibly hard and agile turns, sudden rapid stops in midflight, or bursts of acceleration suggested the craft were stealthed robot fighters. Although, that would require a highly flexible organic level of decision making, which had not been demonstrated by any AI system previously encountered in fights with the Federation.

Unseen, as the Pillagers advanced more cautiously than before, empty-handed Kobani in stealthed armor stepped off the curbs into the street. The Pillagers obligingly stayed in the center of the roads, straddling the sewer lines to avoid collapsing them. When the tank had passed, the invisible Kobani rose and moved away.

The Pillager surveillance systems, feeding visual and infrared images or magnetic anomalies to the combat AI in the mobile Command Post, repeatedly reported what the AI now considered innoxious manhole covers, having a familiar design pattern on each. AI’s not only lacked a sense of humor, they weren’t very imaginative either.

****

A day earlier, it had been Sergeant Reynolds, a long-time purveyor of dirty tricks and ambush tactics, who had carried a bag of what the PDF had decided were useless limpet mines out of their armory storage room to the street. He was trying to figure out a way to use a maritime floating mine against a landlubber tank.

The mines were hollow around their rims for flotation, and just light enough to float in water at preselected or changing programmable depths, by adjusting the water displacement of their rim collars. They would attach themselves magnetically to a passing ship or submersible metallic craft, provided the object didn’t broadcast the sonic pattern to keep the mines inert. The limpets had an active chameleon pattern and coloration coating, which would closely match whatever it contacted.

Reynolds laid one of them on the pavement on a lane stripe, and watched a matching white stripe appear on its top side, although the half-inch high circular edges made it visible on one side, because of a thin shadow at that edge, depending on where the sun or source of light was positioned.

He walked over to a nearby sewer cover, and saw what he was looking for in the raised embedded pattern on its surface. The city’s sewage department had a logo placed inside a center circle, which had a diameter only a quarter inch wider than the disk of the mine. Placing the flat base of the limpet on the center of the cover, it replicated the color of the metal, and a representation of the lettering and company insignia underneath it appeared on the top surface.

Internally, its slightly rounded smooth topside held a series of quarter inch thick concentric rings inside, forming bands of high-energy explosive charges. When triggered, the mine used rapid multi-staged detonations from the outside in, to feed sandwiched rings of copper alloy in a disk towards the center of the mine. There, the now molten metal, in a state of superplasiticity, met in the void of the final shaped charge, where the most intense detonation shaped the blob into an incandescent molten
spear
that burst from the center of its flat base. That so-called
spear
could burn through and penetrate multiple stacked plates of solid armor.

Reynolds noted that the mine was indistinguishable from the color of the manhole cover, and if centered, it had a reasonable facsimile on its top of the cover’s logo pattern, including normal wear and tear scratches and blemishes. He tested the concealment effect on a half dozen unsuspecting PDF troopers, who on casual glances all failed to notice the slightly thicker object with the familiar logo on the manhole cover.

When he explained his idea to Colonel Gaffigan, the officer was dismissive. “The mine will only activate to attach to a magnetic material if it’s floating in water, and even then it must be within a foot and a half or less of the magnetic surface.”

Sarge, lifting the mine, and careful to avoid arming the device, used a test feature along the edge, and activated the non-metallic electrical super conductors that its internal power used to magnetize the mine, as well as power the circuits that controlled detonation. He let the device clamp solidly to the manhole cover’s center, attached so tightly it could be used to lift the heavy disk. At least it could when his Kobani muscle powered suit fingers got a grip on the half-inch edge of the limpet.

Gaffigan offered additional discouragement. “Sarge, we already thought of trying this, you know. Placing the mines base side up directly on the streets, or on these metal covers, made them more noticeable because of the slight dome of the tops. For the hell of it, we command detonated one when it was magnetically stuck to a cover, upside down, the opposite way of the one you have there. The flat base side is what should be in flush contact with the target when detonated.

“Even if they aren’t detected visually, the strong magnetic field from an active mine in front of a tank will surely be detectable if it’s already on. Nevertheless, using command detonation, the trial explosions still propelled the slender molten spear of metal up at the test target. However, we barely even damaged the thinner bottom armor of a spare ladybug chassis. We placed one over an upside down mine on the street, only a foot and a half above the mine. Its magnet didn’t pull it up to attach from that distance, and a Pillager’s bottom is even higher.

“We also laid one on a manhole cover for better pattern concealment. It was stuck to that cover when magnetized, so it couldn’t possibly jump up to attach. The thicker bottom armor I expect on their tanks is located at least two and a half feet high, and it isn’t going to be punctured if a ladybug’s bottom wasn’t. I’m telling you, the mine has to be in contact, with its bottom side flat against the tank. That can’t be done if it’s already magnetically stuck to that cover.”

Sarge thought for a moment, and then made a proposal. “Haul that spare ladybug out of the Amory, and place it over this manhole, with the inert mine lying right on the center, just like it is now. And I do mean don’t detonate it before I say so. I’ll radio to you when to blow the mine.”

“It won’t work.”

“Humor me. I think it will work better than you expect.”

Shrugging, Gaffigan went inside the nearby Armory warehouse to get some help moving the spare ladybug’s rear shell. When he returned, with four PDF troopers in powered body armor carrying the heavy part, Reynolds couldn’t be seen, but he was heard on radio.

“Colonel, ask your people to adjust the four maintenance jacks built into the ladybug’s base, to raise it two feet above the ground, then set it down over the inactive mine, and step away towards the Armory.”

Gaffigan didn’t see him when he looked around, but instructed his people to do as the man had requested. They stepped well away, and suddenly, in their midst of the group of five, Reynold’s body armor rippled into view. That startled them, since even their suit visor systems hadn’t seen him, as they could faintly see each other if stealthed.

Opening his helmet like a clamshell at the sides, he showed a smiling face as it was lifted off. “You and your people should probably step farther back with me, Sir. I’ve never seen what these mines can do. I have unit number one-seventy-eight under that chassis, and it’s in active receive mode for detonation, with its electromagnet active for attachment. Do you happen to know the command code for that unit? I forgot to ask about that.”

“Corporal Ennis here does, he did the other tests.” The colonel gestured to a figure with the proper external insignia on an armored upper arm, as they walked a bit farther away.

The corporal opened his front faceplate. “I’ve set some of these off before, so this is a safe distance. Say when Sergeant.”

Reynolds looked over at the rear clamshell of the ladybug, sitting on its maintenance jacks about fifty feet away. “OK,
when
.”

There was an instant bright flash and a surprisingly muffled blast sound, as a searing and fragmenting white-hot thin spear of molten metal erupted through the clamshell over the ladybug. The chassis jacks lifted a bit on one side in reaction, before dropping back level. The rapidly cooling metal stream coalesced into briefly glowing droplets before the dark pellets rained back down on their “dead bug” victim, bouncing off its top with a clinking and clattering sound.

Gaffigan was shocked. “How’d you get it to penetrate from so far below? It should have sent molten splatter out to all sides like our tests did if it was upside down. Except I saw the mine was still bottom down on the cover, aimed the wrong way, since the top side is slightly rounded. It should have burned through the cover into the sewer, not the ladybug. I thought I’d be saying, “I told you so’”

Sarge looked smug. “It worked, because its base side was actually in direct and firm contact under the ladybug when it went off.”

“It wasn’t when I watched the damned chassis being set down. How’d you manage that?”

Grinning, and pulling another limpet mine from the bag hanging from a utility attachment at his waist, Reynolds demonstrated, without needing a manhole cover. He placed the mine base down on the pavement, put on and sealed his helmet. Then he lay down on the road on his back, the top of his head roughly a foot from the mine. He reached his arms over his head to grasp the mine at its sides, and suddenly his suit rippled into invisibility. The mine lifted from the ground, flipped over to position its base up, and it rose smoothly two feet. Then the actuator for the internal electromagnet activated briefly, causing a slight whine, before being switched off. Then the suit returned to visibility.