Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire (16 page)

He couldn’t be certain if the level where it stopped would be where the command console was placed, although that was the most probable stop. Therefore, he sent five warriors up a level, and five to the lower level, with twelve on this level to fire the instant the door sprang up. There was nowhere to take cover in the elevator compartment, and even stealthed, a heavy stream of plasma bolts would kill anything inside, seen or not.

He watched with resignation as he witnessed the keypad outside the blast doors being depressed. It was a simple code of eight digits, but there was only one attempt to gain entrance, and impossibly, it worked the first time. The sub leader inside had been warned to be ready, but when he leaped through the opening doors, pistol in hand, he was slammed powerfully against the door frame, where his back seemed to fold at an impossible angle. His gun flew from his hand from some unseen blow, and his body fell to the floor, obviously paralyzed from the waist down. That was a recoverable injury, but Fistok doubted he’d be granted the months to live for that to happen.

He had already ordered one of his underlings to call for every warrior within proximity of the bunker to rush to its defense. When the blast door stood open for a time, he hoped the invisible intruder had decided not to try to descend. In fact, two other warriors arrived around the side of the hillside, but they were dispatched efficiently by laser beams to their exposed heads before they could fire a shot. The beams originated from near the floor, next to the sub leader. Astonishingly, there was an exposed human hand grasping a finger of the sub leader, who struggled ineffectively to pull his hand away.

The human hand released the finger, and abruptly vanished as stealth was restored for the appendage. Fistok tensed, and issued a warning to his warriors as he prepared to retreat to the far wall, where his plasma rifle was safely placed out of range of the entry door. On the video screen, the keys on the wall panel beside the elevator illuminated as they were being pressed. He sent a com set message to the K’Tal trapped inside, warning him to be ready.

The door whipped up, as it did on all standard elevators, and the K’Tal was instantly shot and killed. Fistok expected the elevator to descend, so he prepared for that and backed away from the monitor, picking up his weapon. However, he saw more dust spurts created in front of the blast doors, but nothing was happening in the elevator. In the distance, the camera and microphone registered the sight and sound of the stampede of raging screaming warriors, running at top speed toward the bunker door, stretching in a front as wide as the camera could detect.

Shortly after that, he saw the body of the still living sub leader pulled into the elevator with the dead K’Tal, immediately after the blast doors were closed. The mass of berserk warriors slammed into the outer doors, as the elevator door came down. There was a slight delay, before the invisible occupants of the elevator placed the bodies of the two Krall in a stack against the inside of the door. They were apparently intended to provide shelter for what he assumed to be two or three humans in the elevator, when the door whipped up as it arrived at the bunker level. Fistok raced to a position behind the barricade, as the other two levels were also warned that the elevator was about to descend.

Tough as they were physically, the two Krall bodies wouldn’t last more than a few seconds under concentrated plasma bolt fire, which was about to turn them into fly ash and scorched meat. Too bad the wounded sub leader had to die this way, but it was an honorable combat death. The increasing pitch of air whistling around the sides of the dropping elevator car told the waiting ambushers that their prey was on the way.

The pneumatic sounds of the braking system told them the car was slowing its drop, and exactly when it stopped, the heavy door would whip up to expose the entire interior. Invisible or not, behind flesh shields or not, they were doomed. It was justice that the two Krall being used as shields were not wearing their body armor. Humans, having disabled the armor with their software virus, caused the warriors to discard the suits. That armor would have given them perhaps two minutes of survival time, and a chance to shoot back.

As the car halted, the exact instant the door started its rise, twelve plasma rifles simultaneously fired their bolts, directed under the narrow opening as it appeared, and promptly fired their next volley six inches higher, just to maintain a continuous and high rate of fire as the opening enlarged.

The second volley unexpectedly splattered its bolts on the base of the metal door, and something black shot out from under the left side gap, vanishing behind a long console of combat and communication stations that formed one side of a wide pathway leading away from the elevator. Fistok, his eyes dazzled by the bolts and from the flash of those that had splattered into starbursts of star hot particles, thought it might have been a grenade. It was a reasonable assumption, but wrong, and not his greatest concern anyway, because a grenade exploding behind that sturdy console represented no threat to them. His concern was reserved for the stunned recognition that the door was not opening, at least not beyond the initial four inches, where it clanged loudly to a halt. They resumed firing at the gap that was available, but they had to fire over their barricade and down at the base of the door, preventing them from seeing what was farther back in the elevator compartment.

Two sub leaders, without hesitation, threw themselves over the barrier to land prone and completely exposed, and started firing under the base of the door. One of them shouted, over the cracking sounds of the dozens of bolts traveling down the wide corridor, that he could see the smoking ruin of the bodies of the two Krall. Bolts deflecting from the floor were striking them, but the two warriors firing from floor level could hit them directly.

One yelled back, “My Gatlek, the enemy must be standing on the bodies of our warriors, but they will lose that elevation when the corpses disintegrate.”

Fistok issued an order to eliminate the meat platform faster, just behind the somehow blocked door. “Shoot near the center, to burn away their support sooner.”

As all twelve rifle’s bolts concentrated towards the center third of the gap, another dark object flew out from under the bottom right side of the elevator door this time. It too slid behind a console, on the other side of the passage.

Fistok realized there had been no explosion from the first presumed grenade, and his eyes had better adjusted to the intensity of the plasma bolts this time. The dark object didn’t look like a grenade. It was longer and more irregular shaped, and all of the newer grenades used by the PU army were silvery colored.

He was about to order two warriors to move, one left and the other right, to look down the backside aisles of the two long rows of consoles, when a frighteningly loud roar of a large animal’s challenge was heard from under the elevator door’s four-inch gap, reverberating and echoing within the sealed bunker.

“What in a demon’s nightmare is behind that door?” One of the black suited warriors asked nervously, of no one in particular.

The firing paused almost a second, while the nerve jangling raw sound poured from under the elevator door. Just before the beast’s challenge started to lower in intensity, there were bursts of red and green laser fire, and blue flashes of plasma bolts from under each side of the elevator door.

They instantly fired back at both sides now, with the two warriors on the floor still firing at the burning wrecks of the dead Krall bodies. Those bodies were already cut into smoking pieces, where the limbs had separated. Fistok didn’t understand how the return fire was so badly aimed. Humans didn’t display the skill of a Krall in combat, but none of those shots even traveled down the wide passage between the combat consoles towards their attackers. The two sub leaders on the floor in front of the barricade were completely exposed. Even poorly aimed shots could have struck them, or at least come close. Instead, they were angled off to the left and right sides, directed at upward angles that struck the ceiling close to the elevator, above the consoles.

To the left and right, again,
he thought. He had a premonition.

“Toldrak, go left and see what is behind the consoles near the elevator. Kertda, check on the right side.”

Both warriors moved the instant they heard his orders, at the same moment that Fistok, who was firing bolts under the elevator door, saw that the flickering light from a large video display at his commander’s console had suddenly stopped flickering. The screen he noticed was one he’d placed in an alternating display of the view from eight external cameras, placed around the bunker entrance, two of them inside the entrance and the rest were outside cameras. The alternating views had quit alternating. The light from the display was steady. From his shallow angle, so far down at the end of the bunker, he couldn’t see the screen images, but they were no longer following the sequence he’d set for that surveillance system.

He called to Kertda, “What do you see on the right?”

“Debris that fell from the ceiling when their beams struck.” Then in an excited tone. “Something black is moving behind the row of workstations. It could be a spy bot.

“Shoot it!”

He instantly raised his rifle and fired off a snap shot.

“My Gatlek, the way it flew apart and burned, I think it was one of those pests we see all around this area. It was alive and not mechanical.”

Fistok knew Kertda well, because he was from his own Hakdo clan, and he had called to him first because of that instinctive sense of connection. Toldrak was from Maldo, a small finger clan that was left behind on Poldark by Gatlek Pendor when the Great and Major clans left with him. Even if allied now with Hakdo clan because of Pendor’s action, Fistok naturally relied more heavily upon his own clan mates.

That generally wise choice, to place your greatest trust in one of your own clan mate’s word and observations, led him to speak first to the second warrior he’d ordered away from the elevator firing line.

“Toldrak, is there a small animal on your side?”

“A local rodent is running this way; it came out from under one of the consoles.”

“Kill it!”

Serious outcomes often depend on small decisions. The Maldo warrior instantly raised his rifle and squeezed the trigger button. Instantly, the Gatlek knew he should have spoken to Toldrak first. The left side was where the first bush-tail had been thrown.

Toldrak looked puzzled when his rifle failed to fire, and Fistok, with both his hearts trying to climb into his throat, instantly noticed that the steady stream of firing at the elevator had fallen silent.

****

“Okey-dokey,” Reynolds said when the firing under the door stopped. “Let’s get down, and when I close the door, you pull the locking rod back.”

The two men and the ripper, precariously gripping the narrow metal reinforcing ribs on the backside of the door, let go and dropped to the floor, which was covered in smoking cauterized remains of two very dead Krall. Pressing the button to reclose the door, it settled four inches and sealed them off from potential pistol fire. Which was less risky for their armor, but better if avoided.

“Bend over Sarge.”

“Right.” He went into a crouch, knees slightly bent, hands on his knees so Ethan could jump up and stand high enough to reach the small access panel in the ceiling. It easily slid open, and he reached inside and pulled on the handle of the inch thick steel rod. The rod had prevented the door from opening all the way, but its normal function was to hold up a fully opened door, preventing it from accidentally closing during routine maintenance.

“How did you know about that locking rod and that it would do that? I’ve been in dome elevators of course, but I stopped using them after I had my Kobani mods. Most Kobani do and I know you avoid them.”

“Sarge, you got your mods soon after you reached Koban. I had seventeen years of growing up in a dome, as practically a Normal with only clone mods. People used the elevators a lot in those years, and they sometimes needed maintenance, which is when Carson and I learned about them. We discovered that we could use the rods to prop open all eight elevators doors in a dome, and make people have to climb to the thirty-second floor to unlock them. It seemed a funny joke to us. We found they could also prevent the door from opening all the way, but you had to be inside to do that, and then you were trapped there.”

“What the hell sort of dumb juvenile stunt was that, to even learn how to do it?” Reynolds demanded.

“Six year old boys are huge fans of juvenile stunts. That’s when Carson and I did that. Came in handy, didn’t it?”

Sarge grimaced. “I never once thought of holding on to the reinforcing strip with finger tips and toes, or for Kit to do it with just her claws. I wasn’t sure if we could grab and hang on when we jumped off the two Krall. Then stay up there long enough that our delivery rats did their jobs. If they kept firing at the doors instead of at the bottom crack, they could have burned through at various points, assuming they ever figured out we weren’t standing on the floor or hiding behind their pals.”

“You and dad always told me they don’t have friends, and that mess on the floor proves that. Besides, you said we could always close the door.”

“And do what? Go back up and deal with that pack at the front door? I figured we could get some use out of the two bush-tails we had. One must have finally done the trick. Kit’s roar surely scared the hell out of them, but I wasn’t sure they’d run far enough away to infect them.”

“Perhaps those shoots we risked under the door to scare them again paid off. I was afraid one of us would catch a random bolt in the face when we did that.”

“Calculated risk. Enough chat, and time for another calculation. Get ready to rush them when I reopen the door. I’ll go right, you go left, and we’ll catch us a Gatlek. Hope I don’t get an arm blown off again when I catch this one. Once was enough.” He turned to Kit.