Koban 4: Shattered Worlds (98 page)

Moving along cross-corridors, and ducking down a deck, following a mental map they were creating and sharing of the makeshift shortcuts, Mirikami received a flash image from a Kobani that briefly saw a smaller gray Krall with two stealthed shimmers. Mirikami recognized the clear envelope and “helmet” bubble of a Krall basic pressure suit. He’d not seen one used since the body disposal on the Flight of Fancy the day they were captured. There was a heavy metal chain visible around the waist of the smaller Krall, and it jerked as it walked as if being pushed. That could only be the soft Krall.

He promptly shared the image with the entire assault team, now down by six added deaths, versus the confirmed or presumed killed seventy-one Krall losses. The team was running slightly more than a ten to one kill ratio, a lot of that favorable balance was owed to the Torki and Raspani enhancements to their stealth. Not to mention the think-to-shoot energy weapons they had built into their suits. The trouble was, the Krall were growing accustomed to their improvised stunts, and opening walls and decks as a means to bypass their strong points. The two most recent Kobani deaths had come when the Krall waited for openings to be made where a flanking attack or one from the rear was most probable. The methods that had worked best were becoming more predictable. The enemy gradually learned what to expect.

Massed charges along a corridor had produced the largest warrior body counts, but they had stopped doing those. Will Horst had risked his neck to drag a dying Krall around a corner to remove gauntlets, his and the warrior’s, to get some Tap information. It seemed the Krall didn’t expect the fight to last much longer. Will caught a flash of a dying thought of their victory at Telda Ka. 

That seemed like wishful thinking, but he passed it along anyway. “Tet, Maggi, I got this thought from a Krall I killed before he expired. It’s from his imagination I think.” He sent it via Comtap.

Neither Mirikami nor Maggi, having the longest history with how Krall thought, believed that a Krall would have unrealistic and fanciful thoughts like that.

Mirikami asked, “Will, you Tapped his mind firsthand. The thought you sent us could be shaded by your interpretation. Did it seem the help he anticipated was here, delivered
from
K1, or was
he
at K1? What was in his mental image as background?”

Horst considered a moment. “Uh, the reinforcements he envisioned came swarming through the main hatches. That could happen here or there in his thoughts, I guess. Either one seems a fantasy. Why?”

“Were the warriors in armor in his vision?”

“Oh. Good point. No, they weren’t. That makes it his imagination, since they came in through an open airlock.”

“I think it might mean he thought the ship would be back at K1. These ships are self-maintaining according to the Raspani. If it repaired its outer hull as we’ve seen it do, could it also restore the lost Trap emitters? I didn’t see emitter antennas on any part of the hull when we were out there, so they may be even smaller and less noticeable than the little bumps on single ships, or those on our own armor, which are later generation technology than clanships, and are barely visible.”

Mirikami thought only a second. “All hands, we need a Mind Tap of a live Krall. Don’t get killed getting it, but try to take one down. See if another one expects to leave here soon. They
have
become a bit less aggressive in the last thirty minutes, and defense or caution isn’t their natural inclination. You all saw the image of what must be their captive soft Krall, being moved towards the center area of the ship. That’s the only one aboard that can direct the ship. If they can Jump soon, he’s the one that will order it done, and he was being moved towards the command deck.”

It was only a few minutes later when he had a hurried call. It was from a young Hub City girl he didn’t know very well. “Captain, this is Marinda Bethune. I have a quadriplegic Krall Sir. Oh…, Jorl says that isn’t the right word. It’s a
quadruple amputee, he says. He and I shot off its limbs.” She sounded like such a sweet girl.

“Marinda, if he’s alive I don’t care. Were you able to Mind Tap him?”

“It’s a female Sir.”

This was exasperating. “Just tell me if it expects the ship to be able to Jump soon.”

“She thinks so Sir. A major self-repair would take weeks, but it was told by a sub leader that the hull repair includes restoring Jump capability. That was expected to take three to four hours after we caused the damage, if I’m translating their units of time correctly.”

Mirikami glanced at the elapsed time of this assault on his visor, and factored in the time from before it started, right after the Mark had done its White Out with the disabled Olt’kitapi ship. “People, it’s been three hours and twenty two minutes since the Mark Jumped the Dismantler ship over here. It may soon be able to repair itself enough to Jump to K1.

“Our options are to get out fast, and blow it to hell with missiles, stay and finish the capture in the next half hour, or focus our attention on the only person that can order the ship to Jump. I’m going to try the latter, since we know where the soft Krall was less than five minutes ago. You have the same image I do. If you can move in the direction of the control room fine. If not, make as much of a distraction as you can, to cover the shift in our focus. I’m starting after him now.”

Maggi was practically in lock step as he moved towards where his mental map said was a hole in the deck that would take them higher, and towards the center of the ship. Many of the Krall had been in middle to lower decks for much of the fighting, so going higher seemed to offer a faster and less opposed route. He had nine other Kobani with him and Maggi. Behind them, and on lower levels, he heard grenade explosions, and the increased snap of suit fired plasma bolts, distinct from a rifle’s sound. The lasers were silent, of course, unless they created a low bubbling hiss in plastic or flesh, but he had no doubt they were more active as well. He looked behind him when he heard rapid whoosh-BLAM sounds of Krall explosive pistol rounds, a weapon that a Kobani in armor rarely carried. No room for it inside, and no stealth if outside.

Maggi answered his unasked question. “The older spec ops guys stripped some dead Krall, which usually carry pistols inside their roomier armor. Some old fashioned folks like things that go boom better than hiss, sizzle, or crack.”

“Ahhh,” was his expressive comment.

Each time they reached a corridor or intersection held by an octet, they immediately sent someone into an adjacent compartment to start laser burning an opening through a sidewall, deck, or ceiling, seeking a way around the Krall, rather than to whittle the defenders down with Kobani faster reaction times, and clever tricks. Although tricks still played their part.

At one heavily defended wide corridor intersection, knowledge of how the Krall had learned to react to grenades was useful. Maggi and two others slid three of them down a long corridor, while four others fired heavily to keep the Krall from trying to take shots at them to blast them well short of the intersection. Two of the oval spheres had spin placed on them, so that they curved left and right from the center towards the sidewalls, timed to detonate just as they reached the wide cross-corridor. As usual, the Krall leaped away with their flat wide armored suit toes down and pressed as flat as possible towards the explosions, so the thick footpads could deflect low trajectory fragments upwards. Missing toes or a foot, or a pellet up the the cloaca didn’t prevent them from continuing the fight.

Immediately after the blasts, they spun and rushed back to defend their corners, wounded or not. The new trick was Maggi’s third grenade, which was tossed harder and passed completely through the intersection ahead of the other two. A jerk on its tough thin clear monofilament line brought it back to the intersection from an unexpected direction. Its second and a half longer timer expired just as the more vulnerable helmets of several warriors returned to the corners, intending to take blind shots around the corners to suppress any foolish humans trying to advance.

Seeing a protruding plasma rifle drop to the deck at the left corner, and hearing a heavy thud to the right side, Maggi cheered and teased her spec ops collaborators via Comtap.

“Damn, that was neat. Thanks for letting me try that idea. You muscle men had all the fun for too many years. Obviously, one handed pushups with a heavy log stuck up your ass isn’t the only qualification for killing Krall.” She laughed at her own cleverness, drawing their amused chuckles as well.

Mirikami, listening as he helped burn a bypass hole said, “I’m waiting to see if she figures out how to smack grenades into their crouches. She’s always been deadly at that game.”

Horst, who had been burning with him, jumped up to punch the nearly thirty-inch circular ceiling cut on one side, allowing it to hinge up and open on a final thin attachment point. He and Mirikami were ready to fire through the hole if there was any movement, a grenade also at the ready. The compartment was empty.

“We have a bypass,” he told everyone. “I’m going up, fall back and follow me.”

A rear guard would watch for a Krall follower for a moment, but their big bodies couldn’t fit through that small of a hole without additional enlarging, and they didn’t appear to have laser weapons or cutting torches aboard. Enough plasma bolts could widen the opening, but that wasn’t as quiet or fast a process as a laser.

This next level was eight decks higher than the center deck and few Krall were expected here. Because the Kobani had pressed attacks on the Krall, and where there was no Krall presence, the humans hadn’t gone previously. This deck wasn’t very far below where the Mark was resting, somehow held firmly pressed against the upper hull. Before the boarding began, half the Krall had been clustered near this and higher decks, until the humans had suddenly spread out, pulling all the defenders down away from here. Now they were able to move farther faster, and when a descent ramp appeared, it was about where the geometrical center of the ship was. With a hundred feet missing from one end, Mirikami had not needed to travel as far from the sliced off section, where he and his Kobani team had started their part of the assault.

Mirikami cautiously looked down the roughly ten foot wide ramp, which took half the corridor’s deck space, a long ten-degree walled slope descending fifteen feet to the next level. “It’s confining and subject to an ambush if the Krall are waiting below. We still need eight more down ramps to reach the central deck. It isn’t as fast, but I say let’s burn our way down deck by deck. We’re less likely to encounter an ambush away from the ramps, and the corridor hatches for empty compartments stay shut unless someone walks up to them face on. At least a Krall running by won’t see us.”

With more lasers helping, they were eight decks down in eleven minutes, with each closed compartment a well-lit rectangle, with pale pink walls sporting light gray speckles, approximately thirty by twenty feet. There were absolutely no furnishings ever seen in any of these side rooms, but based on the flow of hull material previously observed, it was probable there was extrudable type configurable furnishings available for various species to use.

Mirikami knew there were two other small teams, one with eight members, the other with six members that had also worked their way unobserved to levels close to where they believed the central control room was placed. Two more groups had been pinned down when they encountered warriors that detected their movements.

With his eleven people, and the other two teams, he had twenty-five Kobani to try to take over the control room. However, that wasn’t the main goal, since human AIs could accept orders from a person in authority from anywhere in the ship. They needed to locate the soft Krall, and the command deck as the Krall called them, seemed the best place to seek him.

They had noted that the longitudinal corridors were all aligned the same, parallel and stacked vertically one above the other, for the length of the ship. Some of the major cross-corridors did the same, but smaller cross passageways, suitable for easy two-way traffic in between the larger routes varied greatly between decks. Mirikami estimated there were two major corridors they needed to traverse. On other decks, the two central corridors were the widest passageways on each level, going from end to end, along both sides of the control room on the center level. A Krall anywhere along one of the longitudinal corridors at each level could potentially spot any movement from one end of the ship to the other. If the movement were unstealthed.

Therefore, the logical thing for wearers of high tech Kobani armor was not to cause any detectable movements to be made, and that was typically the case. However, if you are in a closed room, as Mirikami was now, and the corridor you needed to cross is on the other side of a compartment door that is irised closed, you can’t open that door without making a hole appear along the corridor. Then you still need to get inside the next compartment on the other side, opening another closed door. It was a sure fire Krall magnet, and one could be right on the other side of the hatch and you wouldn’t know until the door opened.

Mirikami tossed the ideas around to see what their combined heads could contribute. “We can go down or up a level, dash cross the corridor on that other level, and then return to this level so we aren’t seen here. However, while we take time to burn the next hole to go back up or down, a Krall is certainly going to arrive at that compartment and go
knock knock
.”