Koban 4: Shattered Worlds
Read Koban 4: Shattered Worlds Online
Authors: Stephen W. Bennett
Koban: Shattered Worlds
Text copyright © 2014 Stephen W Bennett
Cover art designed by Misha Coutinho Richet,
www.facebook.com/pages/The-Book-Cover-Realm/559333740763541
This is the fourth book in the Koban Series.
You can review all books currently available at:
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http://www.kobanuniverse.net/
This eBook is licensed for your personal use and enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the many months of long and hard work of the author.
This book is written in “American” English, so there may be some differences in spelling and usage than in other countries use of the language.
This is a work of fiction and all characters are fictitious or are portrayed fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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My thanks to Paul Benkert and his wife Vicky for becoming super fans of my stories. Paul offered invaluable help in proofreading, spotting my many typos, odd phrasings, and story inconsistencies. I’m sure the length of this book has hidden more mistakes than several readings can find, by a hoard of readers, myself included. I’m sure I’ll post new editions when that prediction is proven right. (Again.)
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Chapter 4: Not For the Feint of Heart
Chapter 5: The Hills are Alive
Chapter 7: Parting is Such Sweet Destruction
Chapter 10: Convincing the Navy
Chapter 12: Consolidation and Revelation
Chapter 13: Operation Forestall
Chapter 14: Teaching the Krall Chaos Theory
Chapter 15: Traces of Krall Order
Chapter 17: Plowshares into Swords
Chapter 19: Travel Time to Destruction
A Raid Less Easy
The two ships of operation Fast One winked into Normal Space in the outer reaches of the Krall occupied star system.
Noreen Renaldo, captain of the Avenger and in charge of the raid, tersely instructed the second ship to start their passive scans. “Slasher, focus on the southern hemisphere region of the planet and the area below the plane of the ecliptic. We’ll cover the northern half, and above the ecliptic plane. I’ll check out the moon myself.”
“Roger,” Was the only reply. They had discussed this previously.
Noreen had taken a page from the Krall’s playbook. Stopping in the outer solar system for a look around before Jumping the final billions of miles to their next intermediate stop, a moon, on their way to the real target. The range out here was too great to wait the many hours for
active
scans to return information that would be out of date before the return signal arrived. The speed of light round trip would require just over two days, and radar and laser scans at this range would contain too little detail anyway. Besides, actively scanning and then waiting that long for the signal to return would alert the Krall that someone was conducting surveillance well before the raiders arrived at the planet.
Instead, Noreen wanted to conduct passive observation of the inner system as it appeared a day ago, using the superior Olt’kitapi view screens on the converted clanships. If their plans went as laid out, the raid should be over by the time their gamma rays from the dual White Outs reached the inner system. Their next Jump inward, faster than light, would pass up their gamma ray wave front “announcement.”
The Avenger, and the Slasher under Captain Anna Retief, carried four hundred Kobani each, all of them with spec ops training. Indeed, some of them were actual spec ops troops from Human Space, who were now fully gene modified Kobani. With their Mind Tap abilities, the level of training of everyone on the mission went beyond the specialties of spec ops troops, but the mission was one that was closer to that mode of operation. In theory, each one of them could pilot a shuttle, one of the new four-man ships, or even a clanship. They all had the knowledge of how, if not the actual experience of piloting each of those.
Their mission today was to try to slip in close to the Krall planet undetected, assault the intended dome and the weapons factory under it, using relatively few raiders and then extract them as quickly as possible. There would be no attempt to rescue the Prada factory workers on this mission. They would do their best to spare them any harm, but it was impossible to sneak in and land a huge, slow, migration ship for an evacuation.
Wister, one of the elder Prada on Haven, had said convincing these Prada to climb aboard quickly, before the enemy rallied to knock the nearly defenseless tubs out of the sky, was highly unlikely if not impossible.
Not to belittle the value of the lives of the Prada slaves here, it was nevertheless recognized that they didn’t have special skills that wasn’t also available on dozens of other clan worlds. Evacuated or left behind (killing them was never considered), their absence or continued survival would not affect the Krall nearly as much as the loss of the underground factory. That facility would require a year or two to replace, and more time to bring it back up to its present productivity. The workers would be of even greater use to the Krall after the destruction of their workplace, to prepare for the new factory’s arrival, so they were considered relatively safe from Krall retribution.
It had been slow to sink in for Captain Mirikami and his other planners, just how important the theft of the migration ships had been, as well as the destruction of those much older migration ships stored in parking orbits at Toborkiti, a former Torki colony world.
To replace a factory, a modular starter factory would have to be produced by Prada, usually on some other world, for replacing any that the Kobani raiders destroyed. Because there were no giant ships to deliver the bulky things already partly assembled, at least twenty clanships would have to haul the components for delivery in one shipment, and then they required lengthy ground assembly. A successful Operation Fast One would have a greater impact than simply halting the weapons now being produced by this particular factory.
Clanships, in shorter supply than before, had to be taken from fighting and supporting various combat needs, and used to make supply runs deep into their own territory. Logistics problems were not something the clan leaders had needed to think about in their past wars of conquest, of weaker, less aggressive species. When you found a worthy enemy, they presented you with new problems.
The Krall had time to notify all their major clan worlds, and most of their medium status clans, of the human raids that had knocked out four crucial manufacturing sites. Those were planets responsible for most of their strategic weapons manufacturing, and for the ships that delivered forces and supplies. They had needed those production sites in order to expand their war with humanity. They lost the two most significant shipyards for clanship, shuttle, and single ship production, and the only yards that built the Torki designed giant migration ships, which were used to move supplies, large warrior forces, and slaves. In the case of the Hammers (humans called the partly collapsed matter weapons Eight Balls, because they were black spheres), the Krall lost a tremendously effective means to punish entire human worlds. Accelerated to a significant fraction of the velocity of light, an Eight Ball could slam into a world with a near extinction level impact.
This was hardly the first time a foe had ignored restrictions or rules the Krall had imposed on them, of course. All of them did that at some point. However, it
was
the first time a foe had been so effective against them, and humans had forever destroyed their second most devastating weapon, the Hammers. They couldn’t replace the Botolian designed gravity projectors since they weren’t available from a species they had made extinct. Even if they could find fresh Torki slaves that could learn how to produce the Hammers using those projectors. The partly collapsed matter balls the Torki had laboriously completed over centuries of labor had been placed in storage orbits for future need. The humans had somehow destroyed them in place, despite their being tough enough to batter their way through heavily armored human battleships, resisting lasers, plasma cannons, and missiles virtually unscathed. The method of their destruction had yet to be determined by the Krall. That was because the high velocity, diamond tipped, depleted uranium railgun slugs were also destroyed on impact, and the near misses had left that stellar system at escape velocity.
The problem now was that the Krall didn’t have a quick and convenient means (for them anyway) of rapidly punishing human worlds, to make them regret these acts. There certainly were plans to make human worlds suffer, but all of them required time and some level of unprecedented Krall sacrifice. Such as limiting the scope of new invasions, being less able to focus some special level of intense mass suffering on entire human worlds. Radiation would make those worlds worthless for war by their Great Path breeders, and would encourage use of nuclear weapons by humanity, which was also detrimental to the Great Path. Pity the plight of the poor genocidal warriors, with fewer opportunities to earn status point kills.
The most devastating reply possible to humanity presented the Krall leaders with a great level of difficulty, a material sacrifice of one of their most cherished super weapons. The highest leadership levels were in a dispute over what was the best course to follow. In the meantime, preventing additional human raids was imperative, and the more important clan worlds were on a high alert. Minor clans and new finger clans would eventually learn of the human raids, as successful warriors returned home from combat to breed the clan’s next generations. However, those small clans could fend for themselves until word spread to them. After all, they only represented yet unproven bloodlines for the Great Path.
The most damaging three raids by humans had happened in a single, well-coordinated day a couple of months ago, when simultaneous attacks destroyed the irreplaceable Hammer making facility, and the two shipyards that produced or repaired the majority of their workhorse fleet of clanships. In the process of preparing for these raids, a matter of days earlier the humans had captured or destroyed all of the huge migration ships used to move supplies, slaves, and factories to the war fronts. They also captured eleven more intact clanships to use in the larger raids. In the process, they destroyed hundreds of undefended parked clanships on dome tarmacs, and leveled many domes themselves. It was a humiliating experience for the clans that were attacked, and it represented a loss of status for each of them.
In a final insult, the humans used the stolen giant Torki ships to remove the most critical workers for building these complex pieces of war equipment, and destroyed the factories. At least clanship production could be slowly ramped back up within a few years. In the meantime, an unpopular requirement that the Joint Council of clan leaders and the Tor Gatrol war leader was promoting, was for clanship pilots to be more conservative in risk taking. They were asked to avoid excessive damage to their ships and to be more on the defense.
In order that the joint clan council could approve Tor Gatrol Kanpardi’s plan to expand invasions to two new human worlds, the edicts went out that limited some of the more aggressive clan styles of attack, which placed clanships at greater risk. Kanpardi promised to rigorously pursue the fight on Poldark, to push the nearly thirty million men in the human army back on their heels, so that half of the four million Krall force could easily and suddenly withdraw, for starting a new invasion on another more vital and populous human world. This request produced a great deal of resentment among high status warriors and leaders, to be told to limit their aggression to protect mere
equipment,
and for a
withdrawal
on Poldark
.
No matter if it was to expand the war, the reduction in resources that made this necessary went against the instincts of these warriors.
Fortunately, there was ample production of less strategic but nevertheless, essential war material such as mini tanks (or Dragons as humans called them), anti-artillery laser batteries, counter battery rockets, plasma canons, and the heavy armored battlefield transport trucks.
The particular Krall world being scouted by the Kobani today had a high capacity production facility of exactly those types of essential war materials. Noreen’s concern was that the midsized Sudok clan, who controlled this world, might have placed clanships in orbit around its sizeable moon, located in a relatively close orbit to the habitable planet. It was expected that there would be clanships in orbit around the planet itself, but they hoped not around that moon. The clan could also have brought in orbital defense platforms, like those five that had survived the two PU Navy attacks around K1. It had been over a year since the passive Planetary Union navy scouting mission had observed this system, and that was before any Krall world had been placed on alert. The unstaffed, slow reacting orbital platforms were not as great a worry to Noreen as clanships stationed around that moon.
The moon was the intended “shield” for the Avenger and Slasher, to White Out behind its bulk to prevent the Krall from detecting their close-in arrival. Evidence of random Krall White Outs around the planet or moon would suggest they were doing micro Jumps to make undetected infiltration such as that harder to conduct.
The two human ship’s sensors should be able to detect the presence of clanships in orbits around that moon, and certainly random White Outs. Noreen only intended to use an hour of observation before making her decision to Jump inward, or leave here if not. The two ships had quietly departed a previous target star system, located much closer to Human Space, because of a high level of watchfulness. This alternate target was deeper into Krall territory, and protected by a smaller clan with fewer resources.
Anna Retief was from the Old Colony of Suid-Afrika, and had fought her newly captured clanship once before, backing up the Avenger when the CS2 shipyards were attacked. Her aggressive nature and competence made her a natural to participate in this next raid. The Slasher, as she had christened her purloined ship, had been partly modified for greater human comfort (no slow sissy elevators needed for the fully gene modified TG2s), and she had an AI similar to the Avenger’s, delivered from Human Space by the Falcon.
Chief Haveram had surprisingly kept his command of that former smuggler’s ship, now turned into a Koban freighter. The former Flight of Fancy’s Drive Room chief made regular Jumps to Human Space from Koban, carrying precious metals to convert to currency for purchasing things the Kobani needed, such as AIs for captured clanships or for use on Koban. The chief-turned-captain, surrendering to the physical temptation, was a TG2 now. The age regression he had undergone, curtsey of the Prada longevity genes, the new med labs and nanites, transformed him socially, and he had become something of a dashing figure around the rough Rim world black market ports he visited. He also had a reputation as someone you
did not double cross in a deal!
He was apparently much tougher and experienced than the very young man he appeared to be.
After almost an hour of watching the day old inner system activity, Noreen thought they had seen enough. “Anna, I’m not observing anything moving close to the moon, and Carson has so far spotted only a single clanship in a polar orbit around the planet. Do you see anything unusual?” She was on view screen with Captain Retief.
