Koban: Rise of the Kobani (6 page)

“Rafe made cripples out of multiple pigs, goats, and even one of those darn kangaroos, trying to implement the superconductor nervous system connections to the carbon muscle tissue, and linking them to the brain at the other end. It was intermittently successful, and inhumanely painful. If you recall, we ate the barbequed results of each of those failed experiments, to avoid the waste of meat.”

“I remember.” Tet, nodded, a smile touching his face. “Maggi wouldn’t eat the meat of the butchered test animals. Claimed it made her feel as callous as a Krall. Then she ate a rhinolo steak cut from an animal Thad had shot the day before. Strange how we dole out our personal definitions of hypocrisy.” He waved his hands dismissively.

“We can’t do anything about it here, on this mission right now, if at all. Our experts and equipment are on Koban. Perhaps if we can get more advanced med labs and nanites, as Sarge here has said was developed for battle casualties and limb regrowth, our folks can adapt them for our own use.”

He carefully raised himself up to reach the control console, and activated the full ring of screens for an external view of their surroundings. The canyon walls rose in gray and tan sheer cliffs on three sides, a few hundred feet higher than the Bridge level. There was a slight narrowing of the cliff walls as the valley floor curved out of sight around a bend in the other direction, about a quarter mile away. There were quite a few large to medium boulders, hundreds of craters from the artillery bombardment Sarge had described, and a few scattered white ceramic pieces of the Krall mini tanks that Sarge called Dragons.

“I don’t see any sign of a base out there, or ways to get inside.”

“Hell, secrecy was the point when spec ops had it built. There are several tunnel openings hidden among some of those boulder groups, unless the Krall blew them up as they passed this area by. I don’t see two big holes in the valley floor, where the hidden down ramps are located. They lead to the underground parking garage, and if the Krall blew the whole place apart, they’d be blown open. Let’s go down and take a look.”

Tet turned to Chief Haveram, who had arrived by elevator as they had talked. “Chief, keep watch for any activity, human or Krall, and Link to me or any of us right away if you see a threat. If we go into the base, I’ll leave someone near the entrance for relay, in case the Link is blocked.”

Mirikami reached over to the console and selected a display to show him the location of the still stealthed other clanship. “That ship followed us to these foothills, so we could have visitors. I’m sending some TGs to scout them. We may have to take them on if they get curious about us. I don’t want to leave the ship vulnerable. At least you can fly her if necessary, and use the weapons.”

“Yes Sir. I’d be more comfortable fighting her than I would be flying her, Captain. But I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Me too. We won’t get too far away right now. As we discussed before, Sarge wants to see what was left behind after the final evacuation. We can also verify if the tunnels leading away are intact. I’ll be down below with Thad and Dillon, as they choose the scouting team to look at the Krall ship, and we pick a team to go into the base. We’ll also have a perimeter set up down near the canyon entrance, and at least two people watching on the cliff tops.”

The chief nodded, but had a question. “You left the stealth skin active, but opening a hatch partly negates that, from aerial or space based radars. Do you want the hatches left open for a quick retreat, or closed?”

“Good point. Close those after the teams are out. They can be opened in an instant by you, or manually by keypad if needed. I see the Krall kept their ship in stealth, perhaps because we are near to the human battle lines and more subject to attack.”

****

Hortak railed against what he considered offloading inefficiency, as his K’Tals and warriors struggled to unload the equipment stored in the clanship quickly enough to please the sub leader.

They were wise enough, and of low enough status not to voice their counter opinion, that
his
rushed landing of the ship on a slope, close to a cliff face, had rendered one of the four hatches and its ramp unusable for use by their heavy equipment, tanks, and transports. Only light, hand-carried supplies could go down and navigate the sharp turn at the bottom of the ramp closest to the cliff, carried by the reduced complement of one hundred twenty-eight Krall on the heavily loaded and cramped clanship. The large armored troop transports, one-warrior mini tanks, excavation and bunker construction equipment, had to wait slightly longer for lowering to the bottom deck, reassembly, and being driven down one of the three unobstructed ramps.

The assembly process was frustrating, because Hortak had sent
all
of the Prada slaves on the second clanship, now located over a thousand miles away. His K’Tals knew how to train the warriors in the
operation
of the tanks and armored transports. However, the assembly of the equipment, and particularly the operation of the construction equipment, was normally slave work. It was demeaning for a warrior or a K’Tal to perform this task, not to mention the forced admission that even a K’Tal did not know as much as a slave about how the heavy pieces should fit together, and in what order.

After mounting the plasma cannons on all of the ceramic turrets for the mini tanks, they had to remove them all. That was because access through the cannon barrel’s turret opening to the adjustable fine tolerance slip ring, inside the turret, was blocked. The tank turrets could not be mounted on the body of the small tanks with the cannon barrels attached.

When the first turret was properly attached to its motorized base unit, its cannon in place, it had to
all
be removed again in order to insert two fusion bottles. The hatch opening at the rear, sized for a warrior to enter or dismount the mini tank, would not pass the two bulky power generators. One bottle for the electric drive motors, another for preheating the plasma chamber and magnetic confinement coils of the ceramic cannon barrel. They needed to go down into the tanks through the wider top opening before the turret was attached. Time was lost.

“Move our tanks and transports farther away from the clanship,” Hortak ordered harshly. “If the humans see our radar profile, because the portals are open so long, they are close enough they can launch a missile attack on the clanship before we have safely moved our supplies and equipment away. Our warriors and slaves from the other clanship will require days to arrive here. We cannot successfully defend our position because the slaves need to set up and adjust the two automated laser control consoles, and their mobile batteries. You must work faster.”

The Krall, following his orders, were perfectly aware that moving the equipment farther away from the ship and to another nearby valley took more time. They would then have to return a greater distance, and Hortak would blame them for how much that longer trek slowed the unloading.

They knew his attempt to elude the pursuing human missiles, by drawing them after their speeding ship, was intended to divert the human weapons targeting onto another clan’s ship. The two K’Tals on the command deck had described the clever plan, and then told how it had unraveled when the second ship performed a near suicidal high acceleration maneuver, outrunning them and the human seeker missiles.

After the missile diversion idea had failed, the necessary extended travel to the “wrong” side of the mountain range brought them closer to human forces. An attack by humans now could disrupt their training mission, before they learned the proper tactics for this new style of war. His clan mates were not particularly pleased with their sub leader at this moment, as he blamed them for his less than optimum decisions. A fatal change in leadership was not out of the question.

That was why Hortak had stationed the next highest status warriors of the new finger clan on the second clanship. They were unavailable for a prompt challenge for the overall leadership role of the mission if he made too many errors. If the small training base were already well under way when they arrived, there would be no grounds for a death match challenge at that time. The sub leader had made some sloppy decisions, although individually none of them was detrimental to his continued higher status, or his life. The day was young, however.

****

“General Nabarone, the two clanships this morning split up, and based on satellite imagery, both appear to have made it down safely, Sir.” Major Caldwell, his aide de camp, had made the decision to provide this unsurprising detail to his boss.

“Howard, since you don’t normally pass trivia along to muddle my mind, please get to the damned point. What was unusual this time, of the hundred such penetration events every month?” He was grumpy this morning. A battle for a hilly section of territory on the northeastern front was lost last night, and he’d stayed up late to see if the reinforcements he’d sent could help hold the heights. They had not, and now the enemy could fire down on his troops below as they retreated, and they were firing down on supply depots, which also had to be moved back, under fire. Retreat was an unfortunately well-practiced process by now.

“Sir, A third ship, apparently another clanship based on its later  turbulence trail size, was detected already deep in the atmosphere, and it probably had slipped in slow and low, using the same line of weather that caused the rain and mud slide problems we had on the Crager Heights last night. If one of the two clanships this morning had not flushed it out, as it swooped towards them with six Seeker Missiles following, it’s likely the sneaky one would have landed thirty miles from our eastern lines, close to Novi Sad, completely undetected.”

“Just one ship? That isn’t a lot of extra force to apply in that region. We are well dug in around Novi Sad. Could there have been more of them we didn’t see, you think?”

“Sir, we doubt there could have been many more concealed ships in the fast moving narrow front, but both ships disappeared within a five mile radius of one another. They could link up forces.”

“What makes you think they will join forces? You implied the hidden ship was revealed because of the actions of the second arriving ship. That means they didn’t sneak in together, and therefore may be from different clans. Although, I’m curious as to how many other sneaky ships may have landed. How many prior to that clumsy commander revealing their operation got past us? We may have a build-up we didn’t know was happening. Some of them have started showing a bit of human cunning recently. What is the terrain like, around where they landed and towards Novi Sad?”

The major, having anticipated this, called up map overlays and satellite images of the area, feeding them from his wrist computer to the large tactical screen in the war room.

“The two red dots are the estimated landing areas of the two ships. We lost Turb trails on them when they went below the mountain peaks, and they stayed stealthed, of course. We assume they are within two or three miles of the red dots on the map.”

Nabarone expertly assed the terrain. “The foot hills area could conceal a lot of forces, but there isn’t a good fast approach to Novi Sad that would let them mount a surprise attack from there. We would see them coming for twenty miles. A heavy artillery barrage would cause them too many losses over that distance. A steady accumulation of massive forces to the south of there, like they used at Crager Heights would work better.”

He asked Caldwell a question about something he saw on the map. “That black symbol for an abandoned base of ours, it’s within the ring of uncertainty for that first clanship’s landing. What kind of base was there before we pulled out?”

The major put a pointer on the icon there, and the AI popped up a long list of details of the former Special Ops base, unglamorously but humorously named SOB-23. The boundaries of the base were superimposed on the map, and the central hub wasn’t very impressive in size, but the spider work of tunnels under
, and along the ridges and foothills revealed it had a much wider area of influence than the central base otherwise indicated. The outpost was designed for infiltration, as the enemy lines pushed closer, and even shoved past the base. It finally had been completely overrun and abandoned.

Nabarone tapped the transducer behind his ear to activate his Link capability. He spoke to his AI system. “Carla, answer on speaker. How large a diameter are those tunnels leading from the selected base? Could Krall Dragons and armored troop transports be moved along them? Several tunnels extend towards Novi Sad about ten or fifteen miles in length. That could give them avenues to roll up on us a lot closer before we saw them. They’d also have protected underground supply lines.”

Of course, her bland reply was instantaneous. A clearly female AI voice was something Nabarone had insisted on being programmed into his system. The subservient roll of men had ended in this war as far as he was concerned, and this was a small symbol, with a woman’s name from out of his past added to annoy his superior officers, all of them female. He wasn’t bucking for a third star on his collar anyway. That would promote him above his present command, and entail a transfer to wherever that lofty assed rank would take him. He wasn’t leaving Poldark.

“Sir, the height of the tunnels is too low to accommodate the armored Krall warrior transports. Any standard Krall truck or halftrack would fit, and Dragons are low enough. However, the mini tanks would fit only with their plasma barrels depressed, and pointed forward or behind. The turrets, with barrels attached, would be unable to rotate more than 40 degrees and the firing elevation is…”