Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (23 page)

Crager hoped that the purported and completely unexpected withdrawal was actually the case. If not, their mission here could be better used to disrupt the rear elements of the attacking forces on the eight main fronts, to try to slow them down. Destroying these plasma batteries would not take pressure off the front line human forces.

It had been apparent for over a year that the Krall had more than enough warriors and equipment on Poldark to easily run over and crush the eight PU army commands opposing them, if they chose to do so. Instead, they rotated clans in and out of the fighting, choosing to only gradually push back the human lines. This corresponded with their stated strategy of slow attrition, by selecting the best warriors for breeding the next generation. However, even at that slow pace, they already had control of nearly seventy five percent of this largest landmass.

To the east was a narrow land bridge leading to another large continent, the presumed next target for the enemy when this continent was fully occupied. The other two continents on Poldark had oceans for isolation, but there was no doubt the Krall could get to them when they wanted to do so.

The destruction of a dozen adjacent orbital reaching plasma batteries would make the parked clanships somewhat more vulnerable from that side. However, the clanships had potent defenses of their own, so placing charges and destroying the plasma batteries didn’t seem to be wreaking enough harm on the Krall, at least to Crager’s mind. If the Krall didn’t actually pull out any of their forces, then this particular mission would have minimal impact on helping the soldiers that were about to be crushed. Crager had no idea that General Nabarone, the overall commander of the eight armies on Poldark, was part of the Kobani cabal fighting the Krall, and doing it right under the PU’s nose.

Oh well, he had asked to lead a platoon in combat, and this was the task his platoon was given. He thought of one of the pet phrases he had used to sand blast the ears of his many past training candidates, when they were overheard griping.
Shut up and soldier, soldier!

All of the team members had the new version of the Chameleon Skins, employing the new technology transfer from the Kobani’s alien allies. He didn’t know if this came from the Torki or the Prada, or both had contributed, but the even lighter weight, flexible, finely plated armor was draped over him much like a sniper’s ghillie suit, with the ability to make him vanish. The nickname of chamie or chamies had unofficially stuck to them.

The suits had much of the medium laser and low energy plasma beam resistance of the hard suit armor, and all of the improved invisibility camouflage, which now also diffused even radio wave reflections. The radio wave reflections of the hard suits had been discovered by the Krall, and used as a means of detecting the armor at ranges of less than a mile or two. The newer suits better prevented that low level of radio wave reflection.

Like any advance in war technology, the new camouflage capability for the flexible suits came with pros, cons, and trade-offs. A con was that it required a lot of power to operate, so the mini Trap Field emitters, which tapped pervasive low-level tachyon energy, was an uncomfortable hard heavy lump strapped around his lower back. A pro was that it powered the new quantum-controlled surface of the plates of the so-called Chameleon Skin. A negative was that there were no built-in energy weapons for the flexible chamies, as there was with the hard suits.

However, there were ample new pieces of equipment and weapons being produced to use the portable, moderate level and effectively inexhaustible power they now had available. There was a thick retractable power cable provided from the back mounted power supply, with a universal plug compatible with a number of portable man carried weapons or tools, with many more under development.

Half of his men had human designed new heavier plasma rifles, with rapid-fire plasma regeneration, and pre-flash suppressors on the muzzles. They had greater power per bolt, and a higher fire rate than the Krall rifles did at present. The high hundred-pound weight wasn’t a serious problem for troops with the Kobani mods. The weapons had the same quantum surface material to keep them mostly invisible. Until they were fired, of course. An invisible troop that shot searing blue-white plasma bolts at the enemy obviously revealed his position.

There were lighter rifles and pistols with various squad members that used infrared beams, and some that used microwaves. It was said an X-ray spectrum energy weapon was under testing. All of those energy spectrums could in principle be detected and traced to their source by an enemy.

Crager carried a newly developed weapon that was predicted to be nearly impossible to pinpoint by the Krall, at least visually when it was used. They would be able to hear the sharp crack sound it made when fired, and the projectile itself created a narrow hypervelocity shock wave through atmosphere. A Krall could localize the general direction from which it was fired, but could not see the projectile’s exact origin as it passed through clear air, unless they were fatally downrange and in the rifle’s sights. It didn’t have the light speed arrival time of lasers or nearly the same velocity for plasma bolts, but within the effective range of the projectiles, not even a Kobani could react quickly enough to avoid being struck.

It was a prototype weapon based on the railgun concept. It fired a one point five gram, slender tungsten carbide and cobalt covered sliver of metal. The small projectile contained a bit of cobalt to provide the magnetic fields a better means to shove the sliver at an unbelievable rate down the ridiculously narrow barrel. The tungsten carbide prevented it from melting from air friction on the way to its target. Only about the diameter of a thick sewing needle, and an inch and a half long, it had barely perceptible groves at the butt, which imparted a stabilizing spin. The weapon’s users had started calling it a sliver gun, because it accelerated the small projectile along a tiny tube placed between two superconducting magnetic rails, exiting the barrel at hypersonic velocities with an essentially flat trajectory for its usable practical range.

The specific exit velocity could be varied, depending on the current fed to the rails. The maximum of nearly one million amperes of spiked current could easily be handled by the high temperature superconducting material of the power cable and rail material. The strong length of slender ceramic that held the rails steady against the pulse of energy, also helped dissipate the heat of repeated shots of the semiautomatic weapon. So long as the rifle’s length was kept inside the extra draped material of the chamie, its heat and electromagnetic pulse was redirected and radiated towards the ground by the suit, rather than radiating in all directions for an enemy to detect.

Like the new plasma rifle, the slightly lighter sliver gun was still a bit on the weighty side, but not an objectionable burden when that trooper was a Kobani. However, despite the tiny size of the projectile, the short barrel length for acceleration to reach the maximum velocity of ten miles per second could deliver a surprisingly hard kick. A scaled down inertial compensation circuit, similar to that used on ships with tachyon powered Normal Space drives, kept the kickback to manageable levels, and a sniper could return his gun sights to the target quickly.

At max sliver velocity, roughly 36,000 miles per hour, the range at ten miles per second was surprisingly short if fired horizontally in atmosphere. The sliver might not survive to reach a too distant target if it overheated from air friction, or struck a raindrop, leaf, or larger explosive debris dust particles. It had a melting point of over 2,800 °C, but grew softer and lost some of its penetrating power before reaching that temperature, after roughly a mile and a half.

Factors such as barometric pressure, air temperature, wind, humidity, and even atmospheric particle density (or dust) was measured by the gun sight’s small computer. The shooter’s stalking ability, deployment, tactics, and their decisions to shoot or not were all their own.

At times, a lower velocity shot had a greater practical horizontal range. If fired nearly vertical at max power when up in the mountains, a sliver could punch through the thinning atmosphere and retain gravitational escape velocity from a terrestrial mass planet. Orbiting ships and stations would probably frown on celebratory firing into the air.

One of the proposed uses of the sliver gun was to penetrate the new heavy armor the Krall were now using. A precision shot could easily penetrate one of the flexible armor joints at considerably lower than maximum velocity, at speeds of one or two miles per second. However, a Krall hit with one could easily continue fighting after such a wound, even if the limb were disabled. That was why there were partly hollow slivers provided, selectable from within the dual projectile magazines.

The rear third of a partly hollow sliver version contained the active neurological component of the Death Lime extract. The leading part of the sliver would disintegrate as it punched and melted its way through an armored joint, or even through the thickest part of armor at higher velocities. In tests, the toxin would usually survive penetration, with the trailing portion of the sliver making the delivery through the small opening.

Outside of a native Kobani, nobody knew where the toxin had originated, and it was no longer extracted from the wax on the thorns of Death Limes, once it could be produced artificially. Less than one minute after being wounded with one of those slivers, a warrior would collapse in agony, progressively unable to move its limbs as the toxin spread. It wasn’t directly fatal to them unless they were shot multiple times, but the effects could last for about thirty minutes from a single hit.

If a quick kill were required, and the sniper was less than two miles mile away from an armored target, a solid, faster moving sliver could penetrate the helmet for a head shot to the brain. The slivers would often spall off deadly metal fragments from inside a Krall’s helmet, and even if it didn’t, penetrating hypersonic carbide tungsten slivers tended to ricochet and make a mess once inside. However, because of unpredictable sliver fragmentation and internal spalling, it might require second hits on a helmet to kill the tough warriors. The toxin version of the slivers on armor was generally ineffective at over a mile for the highest velocity shots, because air friction and intense heating of the projectile caused the chemicals to breakdown before it arrived.

Crager had asked for two of the new weapons for his platoon, for evaluation. One of them was issued to corporal Dalton, their school trained sniper, a rating that Crager had once held in his bygone days in field operations, but using a very different weapon. Crager kept the second rifle, confident he had retained enough of his old skills. The fifty caliber rifles formerly used against the old style Krall armor would seldom penetrate the new heavier armor. Prior to there being fast reacting Kobani troops, failed kills on any Krall seldom allowed the shooter a second chance to take out the target.

Each one of the twelve plasma batteries the team was assigned to spike was watched over by a single brown suited K’Tal technician. The six platoons of the full team had two batteries each to knock out, using charges carried by two squads armed only with stealth, and small hand beam weapons powered by the mini Trap fields. This deep inside Krall lines, with the offensives happening hundreds of miles distant, the Krall clearly thought this ring of one hundred and twenty eight cannons was safe from any human ground threat, and could detect and ward off any atmospheric or space attacks. That confidence was about to be proven misplaced.

Ideally, the K’Tal at each battery could be taken out quietly, without an alarm or warning given to the other K’Tal’s, located just over a mile away to either side, at the next battery. The Gatlek’s bunker was under a low mountain peak roughly thirty miles distant, near the center of the defensive ring. Preventing a radio warning to that bunker was vital, because that would trigger the Krall to initiate backup cover fire for the gap made in the defensive ring. At a designated time, each platoon would activate the ECM modules provided by the Torki, to switch off Krall radio communications within a two-mile radius of each of the twelve plasma batteries.

The K’Tals might happen to see a neighboring warrior go down, or perhaps escape their own initial attack, but they weren’t going to give a radioed warning to anyone. A K’Tal was apparently only present at the remotely operated batteries for taking manual control if needed, or for onsite repair with spare parts. Eliminating those redundant warriors might go unnoticed for hours, but destruction of the remotely controlled cannons would be detected instantly by computer link. The plan was simple. Kill the K’Tals as quickly and quietly as possible, plant the stealthed charges for remote detonation, get several miles away and wait until it was time to blow them up.

With a dozen batteries destroyed there would be a seventeen-mile gap in the southern part of the defensive ring, located near a mountain pass three miles away. South was the direction from which terrain following cruise missiles would approach, shielded from detection in a string of connected mountain passes, with no defensive fire available from the closest destroyed batteries. The missiles would be inside the defensive ring quickly, to wreak havoc on the parked clanships.

Crager had video feeds to his eye implants from other squad members, showing him where his two targets were at all times. He had assigned himself the role of taking out the two K’Tal for the batteries seven tenths of a mile to either side of his position, midway between them. The other sniper was placed between the next pair of batteries, two miles around the circumference to the east.