Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (46 page)

Using her suit radio, Danforth greeted and accepted the salute of the first person out of the shuttle’s airlock, who was wearing a different type of black and white, form fitting body armor, which the naval officer had never before seen. His face was totally obscured behind his helmet, which instead of a clear faceplate had odd blue glowing lights on protrusions on the front. He realized she had no idea who she was meeting. The other two figures that came behind the first had the same unusual armor.

“Welcome aboard, uh…” she left the name hanging, since in the rush of the initial communications and hurried rendezvous, no names had been exchanged before the shuttle entered the open hold’s hatch.

The lead figure saluted crisply, and said, “I’m Captain Longstreet Mam, of Special Operations. Thank you for your prompt response. Sorry to rush you Mam, but how much time do we have left?”

Danforth returned the salute and answered the question. “Eighteen to twenty minutes, captain, depending on how high the atmosphere extends just below us today. On the night side as we are, it should be cooler and a bit lower. We’re moving down, parallel to the Krall’s freefall, but we rotated to place it on the other side of the ship from this hatch. It took several shots at us with a wrist gun, so we pointed the open hold away from it while you docked.” She looked at them dubiously.

“Excuse me Captain Longstreet, but how do you three intend to capture and subdue a live and armed Krall wearing their newest powered armor? I certainly don't want it getting loose aboard my ship. Are the three of you are all that General Nabarone could send? My Chief here is the entire security force on my largely automated ship, he isn’t normally even armed with the hand gun he has now, and he definitely is not prepared to face up to a Krall warrior with you, nor would I permit him to try.”

The ship’s security man hadn’t even placed his pistol belt outside his soft suit, and the bulge of the inaccessible weapon showed under the fabric at his right hip.

The skepticism Danforth had expressed when her superior ordered her to comply with the general’s request had returned now, when she realized the team appeared to contain only these three men. If they were spec ops, all of them would be males. There had to be more people inside, or some weapons, or a containment net or cage, since these men carried nothing like those items that she could see.

Longstreet reassured her. “Mam, we were the only spec ops troops that were present near the General’s command bunker when your report arrived. We can definitely handle this operation ourselves. However, I do ask that you and your security chief go back inside the pressure hull, and simply rotate the ship to where we can see our target. Out here you’ll both be targets in your soft suits, and someone we can’t properly protect.”

Trying to look into the windscreen and side ports of the shuttle, Danforth still couldn’t believe only three unarmed men had come to take on an armed Krall in powered armor. “You don’t appear to have a pilot. Did one of you fly the general’s personal shuttle? I wasn’t aware your training was so, uh…, versatile.” She wondered if there were more men inside that were staying out of sight.

“Mam, we all three are qualified shuttle pilots, although I flew here. I’m sorry Mam, but we do need to hurry. I don't wish to be rude or insistent. This is
your
ship Mam. However, I will have to explain to General Nabarone and Admiral Foxworthy why my team let this potential source of intelligence burn up, Mam, if we don’t move fast.” He was as polite as he could make it, but time was running out so he made his point by dropping names.

“Right you are, captain.” Danforth keyed the channel to her first officer on the Bridge and ordered her to rotate the ship, to face the open hold towards the Krall. As she prepared to return a salute she expected to receive from Longstreet, she realized that the three spec ops had already turned and rushed to the open hatch sides, ready to do whatever they thought it was they could do.

She touched the shoulder of her subordinate. “Let’s get inside Chief. Before we find ourselves with bullet holes in these soft suits.”

They hurriedly cycled through the airlock, and once inside they were unable to see much through the two small observation portholes of the double hatches. She’d have to get to the Bridge if she wanted to see what they did, using camera feeds. If these three men got themselves killed, or cast off into space well away from the ship, they’d probably burn up with the Krall. She locked and dogged the airlock hatch from the inside, in case the Krall did get free in the hold. At least it wouldn’t get inside the ship.

As she rode up in the lift with her security chief, she suddenly thought of some questions. “Chief Grant, did you see any ropes on them, jet packs, or weapons?”

“No Mam. I did not.”

“How the hell are they going to get out to the Krall, and then bring it back if it doesn’t want to come? How will they get back here in any case without any lines connected to the ship?”

The chief had no answer to what seemed to be rhetorical questions, and ground pounder problems were not his problems. Their captain sounded confident, so he’d let them resolve the matter on their own.

Longstreet was discussing the exact same issue with his other team members, on an encrypted tactical frequency, with Sergeant First Class Bill Crager, and Corporal Eddie Condor.

“Hey, Top, Big Bird, you ready for this stunt?” He asked them.

Crager replied first by right of rank. “Sir, I’d prefer you not call me Top anymore. I’m not going back to run a camp on Heavyside. Just plain Sarge, Bill, or Crager will do. This propulsion trick worked fine in practice, when we tested the new armor, but we didn’t have a live Krall to wrestle with while floating over Heavyside, and we didn’t have a short time limit to finish the test.”

“Well, just plain Sarge, we’ll have to adjust.” Technically, Longstreet and Condor had been reported as missing and presumed dead for the last year, and only Crager was still active duty in speck ops. He’d just happened to be at the command bunker when this mission arose and at least three Kobani were needed.

“Big Bird, are you ready?”

Condor said, “Sir, I told my suit to set the Trap field as Sarge told me, and I cut power to weapons and stealth, but inside the artificial gravity of the hold here I can’t feel any thrust at all. I don't like not having power for my weapons either. The Claw’s captain said that this Krall has a wrist gun, but what if it has a better weapon it didn’t use earlier?”

Longstreet did an exaggerated shrug, so it would be seen by the movement of his armor’s shoulders. “Life’s a bitch, and then you die. If it had better weapons, I think it would have used them, and the captain would have told us if they saw any. I also should have asked her to kill the gravity here in the hold, since I’m sure they can do that. Except we didn’t anchor or tie down the shuttle, and I didn’t even think to activate the magnetic skids to hold it to the deck. I can fly the damn things, but I’m not really a space swabbie. I didn’t think of those details when the internal gravity took hold.

“Anyway, when we kick off and leave the ship, we’ll quickly be in free fall and out of artificial gravity influence. Our thrust will be effective then. Remember, you can’t kick off as hard as it feels like you need to, based on your present weight, and we don’t want to hit that Krall moving too damn fast. The Trap fields and inertial forces we can control are very weak. It’s only a fraction of a pound of continuous thrust, which can build up to a considerable velocity over time, but time is something we don’t have a lot of today.”

He rehashed what they had discussed on the way to orbit, when the details of this rush job was actually worked out. They were using a feature of their Tachyon powered suits for gravity and inertial control. A miniature application of a Jump ship’s Normal Space drive. A strap-on jet pack would have done the job perfectly and faster, if they’d had time to hunt for some of them at a spaceport. They only had the general’s shuttle immediately available to them at the command center, in the forty-three minutes they started with, which didn’t carry jet packs of course. It didn’t even have any lines aboard.

They checked, and learned the jet propulsion packs were also not routinely carried on the Poldark based heavy cruisers that provided orbital protection here. They had to do this recovery by the seat of their pants. Almost literally. The armored suit’s weak tachyon Trap fields were generated by a unit located close to where their butts were, and built into their armor.

These devices produced ample weapons and stealth system power by trapping low energy tachyons to generate the electrical current and magnetic fields needed to power their energy beams, radios, and stealth systems. However, gravity was an immensely weaker force than electromagnetism. Once out of reach of the magnetic ship hull, and beyond its local artificial gravity field, their full power, when diverted to producing a reactionless inertial force effect, would only enable them to propel themselves gently in free fall.

Longstreet added one last reminder, as the star field outside slowed its rotation and the slowly tumbling and free falling Krall came into sight. “We jump out, grapple with and immobilize the Krall as we decided, then point our asses away from the ship to let the three of us overcome the outward momentum of our combined mass, and start thrusting gently back towards this hold.

“The Krall’s mass will slow us some when we hit it, but we will then all be moving slowly away from the cruiser. We have to stop that motion and start back, so conserve your power for the return push, and avoid weapons use if possible. We don’t need a dead Krall to interrogate.

“If it looks like we can’t make it back in time with the prisoner, I’ll give the order to kick off from the Krall, using its inertial mass to help get us back here faster. Then we wave a fond farewell as it burns up, and we look stupid and ineffective to the swabbies.”

Naturally, they had fast Kobani mental processes, and each man was using their senses and range finders to estimate the optimum time, from each of their positions at three sides of the open hatch, to initiate their push off to intercept the Krall without bumping and glancing off each other on the way. Except for the slow tumble the warrior had initiated when it had previously fired its projectile wrist gun, it was now keeping pace exactly with the free falling cruiser. The rocket-propelled caseless ammunition did have some slight back reaction on the gun barrel, triggering a slow spin. The Krall, accepting its fate, had not bothered to counter the slow roll.

The looming night side glow of Poldark was below them, partly illuminated by dim reflected sunlight, coming from the large moon. An occasional atmospheric fire streak was visible far below, as debris from the recent space battle made a reentry, or perhaps it was from Krall warriors making their final return visits.

Longstreet checked the distance to the Krall. It was less than sixty feet, and he had the exact timing worked out for their arrival. “OK. We’ll make the trip out to intercept it last two minutes eleven seconds. That should let us hit it slow enough avoid too hard of a push to overcome to get back, and its rotation will have its back turned to us. Sarge, I’ll try to go high, you take the middle. Big Bird you get the feet, unless you and I have to swap ends if the Krall alters its roll rate.” They had previously discussed how to grapple with the Krall in freefall.

Only fractions of a second separated the gentle push-offs of the three armored figures, as each calculated the exact trajectory they needed to intercept the Krall in two minutes, eleven seconds. The target was fifty-seven feet away based on their helmet target ranging systems. Whoever was flying the ship had done an excellent job staying this close, and halting the ship’s rotation exactly as the open hatch centered on the warrior.

As the three unstealthed humans slowly closed with their target, the target in turn watched them coming as she slowly rotated. She observed that this style of armor was different from what human ground forces on Poldark wore. She attributed the lack of active stealth on this design as armor intended only for use by their separate space forces. Space based soldiers didn’t need to blend into the terrain.

They will wish they were invisible soon,
she thought.
I’ll let them get very close.
 

The earlier pot shots at the cruiser had been merely a show of defiance, as a warning to leave her alone to die. Hothdat now saw an opportunity to take these humans with her, either to burn up, or to kill them by decompression. There were choices to be made. She could shoot at the weak spots of their elbow or knee joints to cause a leak, but that was not very sure. The alternative was to shoot their weaker joints when they were in her grasp, or grab them and force open their suits to the vacuum, or simply fling them away from their ship to flare across the sky and burn up when she did.

The more personal touch was the one she preferred. Tearing open their helmets and watching as decompression made their eyes and tongues bulge out of their faces appealed to her the most. Unless of course they had energy weapons with them, which she couldn’t see.

She had already fired five times from her eight-slug magazine of armor piercing rounds and had seen no reason to reload with another full magazine. She had a spare eight round magazine clipped to her suit’s left forearm, next to the wrist pistol. She couldn’t tell if her spare ammo pouch, originally attached to the back of her armor, had been ripped off when she was violently ejected into vacuum or not. She didn’t want to move now to check if it was there, thus clearly revealing that she was still conscious. She shifted slowly within her armor without moving her suit limbs, to be ready to shoot or grasp them when it was time. She had withdrawn her taloned fingers from the freezing cold metal gloves after the cruiser had seemed content to leave her alone.