Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire (21 page)

A medium tank, the B3 Maxwell, was tracked and fast, with a three hundred sixty degree field of fire from eight fixed medium powered lasers, two per side. Those could take out Krall body armor and mobile plasma cannon carts. It featured a plasma cannon that could punch through the hull of a clanship up close, but they could rarely risk getting that close. Its own armor was unable to sustain repeated hits from a clanship’s plasma cannons. The Panther had amphibious capability for surface flotation via an inflatable ring, which was not suitable for battle conditions. It simply eliminated a need for a bridge to ford a river or lake.

The PU’s main battle tank, which a Krall warrior might have fit inside if the hatches were larger, was the B1 heavy tank, tracked versions only, with the river fording modification as an add-on. Made by Brunto manufacturing, its long range massive plasma cannon protruded from the domed bulge above a large plasma injection chamber like a long neck. The dome fed it heavy bolts at a relatively high rate, and the dome shape and barrel, along with the company name, earned it the obvious and unofficial nickname of Brontosaurus. It had heavy armor, and they added ceramic plates over that on all sides. It could engage in long-range duels with a grounded clanship, or with hilltop stationed laser or plasma batteries, but if a clanship lifted and flew over, it was too vulnerable. Most often, the heavy tank attacked from some reinforced and prepared elevated position, on a hillside or mountain face, where it retreated to cover after firing a number of accurately aimed heavy bolts downrange in only ten seconds. That was a cycle rate better than for a clanship, even though those craft mounted four, but slower cycling cannons.

For the first time they could enter into combat with Krall ground forces without fear of the clanships heavy firepower and mobility being a threat. Unfortunately, New Dublin’s lack of advance war preparations meant bringing human forces to bear quickly was a problem, which gave the Krall more time to prepare for the coming fight. They now had possession of thousands of human plasma rifles, which were awkward in their large taloned hands. They had no problem firing them, but their legendary accuracy suffered. They were also limited on replacement human power packs, but their K’Tals had adapted the fusion bottles from their own power pack recharging stations to keep a flow of power packs returning to the warriors with the stolen rifles.

For these reasons, Manwell elected to permit any Kobani that volunteered to participate in the fight to disrupt the Krall opposition from deep behind their lines, while the PU army started their frontal assaults. This time, as a group, the hundred thirty four rippers that came with the New Dublin fleet, reminded their human comrades that being from Koban, sharing the genes the humans said made them Kobani, that the rippers were obviously Kobani as well. They didn’t
ask
to participate. They said they were
going
to do so.

The Kobani ships on the ground had become rallying points for the Krall, and when warriors ringed them with barricades, the ships could still blast and hold them at bay with lasers and plasma cannons. But with the encirclement, the Kobani crews had to be concerned for those teams already outside.

The single and four-ships could come and go at will, but the instant a launch bay opened, projectile fire started at them, and even rocks hurled from improvised catapults rattled off the hull and into the open bays. Sensors also detected vibrations from tunneling. Krall construction equipment didn’t have Denial chips in them, although they made useless assault equipment. It seemed that the enemy had decided to tunnel under the Kobani ships, either to attack from a direction the ship’s weapons couldn’t fire, to undermine the landing jacks to topple them, or as Sarge reminded them from Poldark, the enemy’s explosives and detonators didn’t require keypads.

Manwell elected to move his ships beyond the shrinking Krall lines. They had landed with tachyons in their Trap fields, so this could have been done smooth and quietly using Normal Space drive. Instead, most ships elected to use the conventional thruster engines for their heat and blast effects. The powerful exhaust plumes punched through some of the tunnels being dug, filling them with a deadly combination of heat and fumes.

Once the ships had relocated beyond the reach of the Krall, Manwell allowed his stealthed small ships to return and land teams where they could cause the most damage and create the most disruption to enemy plans.

Using suit stealth and stealthed equipment cases, it was a simple matter to steal explosives from enemy depots, located by Mind Taps of captured warriors. They would carry them unseen to where they wanted a nice crater. Get back a safe distance and send the detonation code, and watch the pretty debris and body parts fall back to earth.

The rippers, even though they had their Chameleon Skins for daytime stealth, elected to do their terrorizing in the darkest hours of the night. It had less to do with stealth ability than with the effects their marauding had on Krall nerves. Their flexible suits totally negated the IR vision ability of Krall eyesight, and the rippers could see quite well with the low levels of ambient light their night vision was adopted for using.

Krall hearing a warrior near them suddenly being dragged away, screaming in rage, pain, and fear, as unseen growls and snarls sounded loud and close, was unnerving. In a short time, each event was inevitably followed up with a nearby, ear damaging and blood-curdling roar of a victorious kill. Mangled remains would be found later, with organs missing. Such as hearts, lungs, and the Krall equivalent of liver and kidneys. Often, the moist and tender tongue was ripped out.

It seemed the rippers hated to waste an entire kill, but the rangy tough flesh with its fast clotting blood was too lean and dry for enjoyment or complete consumption, but organ meat was acceptable. It also provided the rippers the benefit of a suitably terrifying end for this kill-for-pleasure species, that when frilled before their deaths, their dark and twisted minds inevitably yielded their past enjoyment of slowly killing human soldiers or civilians they had captured alive.

The more heinous and greater the number of their crimes of genocide, the longer they were kept alive and sent mental images that terrified them, causing them to experience a fraction of the suffering of their own past victims. Despite this, the abnormal Krall thirst for causing pain and death exceeded even a ripper’s tolerance for inflicting it on them in return.

Nevertheless, after granting them a more merciful death than they probably deserved, the rippers often would arrange the corpse with dismembered limbs and exposed entrails, to suggest the agony had been more prolonged than the quick and more merciful deaths they had delivered to the Krall. The cats recognized the benefits of false advertising.

The distinction to a human Kobani, as to which deaths were less merciful, those rendered slowly by a Krall’s cruelty, or that which also came with the mental terror delivered from a rippers mind. It was a subject avoided by most Kobani.

Humans hadn’t been selected via survival advantages to be carnivorous predators, required to be indifferent to their prey’s desire to live, or by the nature of their superconductor nerves and a unique genetic mutation long ago, able to experience and even to desire the mental “taste” of their prey’s final thoughts and terrors.

The frilling ability had originally provided an obvious survival edge for rippers by solidifying their social structure, sharing a pride member’s memories and feelings, and learning hunting skills from experienced rippers. Then this mental ability, already of evolutionary benefit, was applied to a different purpose, to provide additional motivation for successful kills, to go beyond just that of the urges of personal hunger, generating an emotional inducement to persevere a bit longer in a difficult hunt, beyond the need to obtain a personal meal, by also craving the prey’s final thoughts. Not so coincidentally, this helped to feed more of your cubs, and made the macabre seeming mental enjoyment of sensing your prey’s dying thoughts and fears of some benefit to your species survival. 

Gantor, and Krit, two wild pride young male cats came upon a sizable gathering of the red ones, perhaps thirty of them. They knew they were called Krall, because they had been hunting and stalking with several human pride rippers a short time ago. Their own mental description of this prey was the traditional image of these creatures from shared wild pride memories, which the cats raised with humans had not previously experienced.

They were far from the center of the region where their long hunt had begun, and they frilled what they each had scented and seen as they stalked and scouted this herd.

“The human pride’s not-live flying things…,”
began Gantor.

“No,”
Krit interrupted his thought stream.
“We should use the true thought words, if we need to frill a human pride member about what we learn here. The flyers are called ships.”

“I was not going to speak of the ships, but of their departure last night. They are no longer close to send help if we attack so many. We can hunt a smaller herd, or wait for some of these to break away from the rest. These are normally predators and should behave like a pack, not like a herd. I do not think they will stay clustered so close, as if for safety.”

Krit wasn’t so sure.
“The fear I scent isn’t that of hunters, but of the hunted.”

He explained why he thought this had happened.
“Without their long distance fire sticks…, I mean their most dangerous guns, they have begun to behave more like prey animals, huddling together, moving where the human pride hunters push them. After two nights of ripper pride attacks, I can smell their fear of the coming darkness. They surely heard the roar of Kutter a short time ago. He must have made another kill after we parted from him and his pride mates. That was when the smell of fear drifted from this Krall herd.”

Gantor didn’t understand the Krall reaction.
“They fear us more than the human pride hunters, yet many more Krall die from human attacks than from our pounces. The new non-pride humans of this world are said to be attacking now, and their numbers are too many to for me to count. The Krall should also fear them, but they do not.”

Krit was the deeper thinker of the two.
“Humans do not eat this prey, or seek to instill terror in them as we do. These Krall animals, when acting as predators, do this to humans, and many of them think all humans still fear them. The pride humans do not, but they want these killers-for-pleasure stopped from having any future hunts. They find no enjoyment in this hunt, and they do not relish the fear they might taste from terrifying these wrong thinking former predators. Humans would go hungry on the savannas of home.”

Gantor countered.
“At home they eat the prey from the herds they hunt, and share the organ meat with our pride. I think they do enjoy those hunts.”

Additional ripper philosophical discourse ended when a scream and a fresh scent of blood reached their noses, downwind of the Krall, which themselves had better noses than most prey. It was instantly recognizable as a human scream and human blood. Not a pride human’s blood, with a trace of ripper smell, but of a female human of this world.

****

Adrianna was going to die, and it was going to be horrible and lingering. The Krall sub leader that had snatched her from the wrecked cab of the supply truck she was driving had handled her roughly, retreating to a barricaded position under a small highway bridge in a canyon. This was close to the major highway where her convoy had been hit by a rockslide, triggered by explosives planted in the cliffs above the road.

The enemy had wanted power packs for the human made plasma rifles they had stolen earlier, from a platoon of troopers that had gotten careless, thinking Krall without armor and plasma rifles were not much of a threat. Their corpses, riddled by grenade pellets, would be a valuable lesson to the soldiers that stumbled on their remains.

One wounded trooper unfortunately survived, briefly, before suffering fatal complications from the process of being skinned alive for information, and for pleasure. He managed, between screams, to tell the octet leader why he and his dead platoon members were down to single replacement power packs for their rifles. The soldiers had gotten ahead of their supplies, and this platoon was scouting the area’s roads to try to locate some misdirected supply trucks, the latter caused by a last minute change in unit’s bivouac site by their unit commander.

Subsequently, the trucks were indeed met early, by the Krall. That was well before reaching the small mountain town, located at a crossroads where the larger PU army unit intended to spend the night, after unloading the fresh supplies.

The mortar tubes and their ammunition, which the Krall would very much have liked to have, was in the lead trucks, buried under too many tons of rock for the Krall to dig out by hand. Inexperienced at the art of ambush, versus head on assaults that they understood perfectly, the Krall warriors had used at least three times the amount of explosives required, and had brought half a mountainside down, right on the convoy, rather than merely blocking it for their concealed warriors to attack. They even buried half of their waiting warriors when they underestimated the results of their handiwork. Even so, there were several trucks with salvageable plasma rifles and power packs to loot, and food supplies, which except for fresh meat, was burned by the warriors.

The senior driver, Adrianna Boudreau, was so stunned by a blow to her suit’s helmet from a crushed cab roof that overlay her armor, that she recovered her senses too late to try to fight to the death, or to take her own life rather than be captured. In fact, it was the loud crack and flare of her alternate driver’s plasma rifle that had roused her. He’d assumed she’d been crushed, and he was pinned by the legs with no hope of avoiding capture by the charging Krall, so he removed his helmet and escaped that fate the only way he could.