Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire (22 page)

Aside from an entertainment value, the human might know when and where another convoy would be coming, and she could surely tell them the destination of this convoy, and describe the forces that would be present there. Gathering intelligence and enjoying enemy weaknesses. That had been a favored warrior pastime in the field, from the war on Poldark, or for any war anywhere.

Hadthot twisted and pulled on the dented helmet to remove it roughly, disabling his prisoner’s communications. He’d been the leader of two hands of octets, but with their armor only a dead weight in combat now, they had all removed the bulky unpowered suits. That was the proximate cause of most of his warrior loses, when the huge rockslide swept across the wide road and crushed nearly half his force of sixty-four. Two more warriors were killed by some of the surviving pairs of drivers and he was now down to a command of thirty including three octet leaders, and he was number thirty-one.

Now, after losses, they had enough human plasma rifles for every surviving warrior, with seven spares, and enough salvaged power packs for most of them to carry eight replacements. The humans of course used their number system to measure how many maximum energy plasma bolts they could fire using their lighter weight power packs. The base ten number system humans used only gave them one hundred such shots per power pack. Krall rifles and their larger power packs would fire two hundred bolts in the Krall octal number system. That converted into a hundred twenty eight decimal shots for a warrior that stayed at full power for each bolt.

When using the human rifles, his warriors repeatedly used up the power packs earlier than they expected, counting instinctively in Krall numbers. That had cost him the two warriors that charged at the desperate human drivers that fought back. The two warriors didn’t have a replacement battery pack ready to swap, when the ones they were using were drained sooner than they anticipated. The bloodlines of the two dead novices were no loss to the species, but Hadthot needed all the fighters he could preserve when the masses of the human army tried to roll over them.

He roughly dragged the human by one armored sleeve as they ran away from the botched ambush. It was certain that some radio messages had been sent for help. With every one of the Krall single ships disabled, the unopposed navy space planes would eventually arrive to strafe and fire rockets at any enemy targets they could find near here. He led his diminished command back to a barricaded and concealed position, under a highway bridge of a side road a few miles away. There he could practice his interrogation methods, which had worked so well on the soldier from the platoon they had killed.

All of the warriors stayed under the overpass, to avoid their heat signatures from revealing them to aerial surveillance that they assumed would be sent over the general area. In anticipation of the entertainment, many of them faced inward, to watch as Hadthot sharpened his slender bladed skinning knife, doing it where the frightened prisoner, being held down, could see him. Her look of fear turning to terror.

He had plenty of time. They would stay concealed until it was fully dark, and the light was dimming faster in the mountain passes because the sun had already dropped below the distant horizon. Hadthot worked like an artist at his cruel trade when he had time. A luxury he didn’t have with the last soldier. This time he started by removing her armor, prying it open without using the powered release system.

He bared her arms first, as the easiest suit parts to remove. Then he used a heavier short sword to insert its tip in the jointed sections below her hips to pry apart the seams. He and the watchers enjoyed the look she gave the shining blade, afraid he was about to saw off her leg at the top. He wasn’t going to allow her to die from blood loss that quickly, he knew what he was doing from practice. He wedged the blade tip under a cylindrical plate where her suit rotated for the right leg near the hip, and twisted the blade to bend apart the metal. She squirmed, and tried to kick, but he used his weight to hold her legs down, and a warrior to hold her arms, placed in a sitting position so she could observe his progress.

He repeated the operation around the entire leg joint, severing control and sensor lines to the built in layer of the strange carbon fiber inner material, which amplified a human’s strength in these suits, like an extra layer of muscles.

He was on the verge of pulling the armor from her right leg when there was a huge bellowing roar from some large beast, and it reverberated along the canyon walls. The savage sound reflected even more under the overpass, reaching a painful intensity. The powerful deep notes of that cry of victory lasted long seconds. From their experiences of the last two nights, each of them knew that somewhere at least one warrior had just been killed. More than merely killed. Torn asunder, gutted, and partially eaten. The tingle of unfamiliar fear crept into the hearts and minds of each one of the warriors. It wasn’t to be reasoned with; it was triggered at an instinctive level, buried so deep in their primitive past and hindbrain that they didn’t even have stories of the things that once preyed on their smaller early ancestors, on that lost home world of Kratar.

The warriors at the outer edges looked outward and unconsciously pressed slightly deeper under the overpass, and all of them for an instant forgot their prisoner. Taking advantage, she broke free of the relaxed grip on her arms and, knowing she couldn’t escape, she pressed the suit’s torso release, and as the chest plate opened, she leaned forward, and grasped the hand with the short sword and tried to impale herself. She succeeded only in stabbing herself above her left side chest, almost in the hollow of her shoulder, because she couldn’t lean far enough forward or lift herself enough to run it through her own heart. The sub leader’s hand and thick muscled arm may as well have been made of rust tinged gray iron for all she was able to move it towards her body.  

He snapped his head back around and lightly slapped her backhanded, causing her to fall back into the clutches of the warrior that had loosened his grip. Blood started to flow from the inch deep wound she had managed to inflict, but Hadthot’s experience with dismembering humans told him this was not a fatal wound, or even very serious. In anger, he snarled and yanked the loosened leg of her armor from her right leg, thus causing a long gash along her thigh from a sharp edge he’d not finished breaking free. She screamed.

Hadthot mimicked a sneering yellow-toothed imitation human smile he’d learned was hideous to his prisoners. He bent to remove the left leg of the suit, since the torso was opened at the front, releasing the leg. Her scream, when her thigh was gouged a moment ago, had again drawn the attention of the observing warriors, and they smelled her blood. The other suit leg was removed, and the suit’s open torso was pulled away and tossed clear, leaving only her uniform to cut away and the questions and skinning could begin. That marked the point at which the evening’s entertainment sharply shifted its focus.

From the opposite direction in the canyon, from the previous remote victory roar, came a differently but still deeply pitched roar that sounded like a challenge, loud and clearly very much closer. Roars such as this had to originate from deep within a massive chest, raging outwards through the beast’s powerful jaws.

Talons were instinctively extended and every rifle quickly powered on if previously on standby, and thirty-one warriors, talon tips poised inside trigger guards, watched and waited for any sign of movement in the brush and trees of the darkening narrow canyon, leading downhill from the even darker overpass. All eyes focused in the wrong direction, because of a survival instinct that overrode any military training.

Silently, a huge teal shaded killer rushed from concealment behind an abutment, his long black, steel hard claws fully retracted, to avoid any clicking on rocks and concrete. It rose up on hind legs, towering over the three closest warriors, facing away from imminent death, and with front claws suddenly extended several inches and huge jaws open. It literally tore the undersized heads from the heavy shoulders of its two outside victims, using simultaneous inward swipes of large paws, the slender necks tearing loose as the claws penetrated deep. The center victim’s head crunched slightly as the closing upper and lower fangs penetrated as the jaws descended over it, and a quick twist of the thick muscled neck tore the head free. Other than the crunch of bone, and tearing flesh, the three warriors made no sound. It was doubtful if they would have been heard by the others anyway, due to a repetition of the previous roar of challenge.

As the sound reverberated under the overpass again, the warriors strained harder to see what sounded so close to their front. Krit leaped onto another five warriors, tearing, ripping, slashing, and biting in a fury of speed that made his limbs and snapping jaws a blur, and he had yet to make so much as a snarl. This time he didn’t allow the corpses to simply drop. Instead, he flung the bodies forward into the center of the other warriors, as he used their resisting masses to propel his leap in reverse, racing to clear the underpass. He made his first sound just as he leaped to the side to use the abutment for cover. He uttered a victory roar, but on the run, he felt annoyed that it took away a bit of the power that he knew he could have put into that effort. He’d have to concede that Gantor’s roar had delivered more power, but his own effort, made from under the overpass, produced exactly the effect it was intended to have on the present
herd-behavior
of the Krall.

The rattled warriors, now realizing the attack was coming from the rear, turned in time to see numerous mangled dead warriors, many decapitated, and some had abdomens ripped open and were spilling intestines and lungs. Their bodies had been thrown forward hard, as Krit used them to push off as he left. They had tumbled into others that were alive, but by being knocked down and covered in gore, it made the carnage appear doubled.

The roar of that attacker as it departed drew all eyes to the rear flanks of a large four-legged creature that virtually glowed with IR heat, before it vanished around the edge of a bridge support. A crackling fusillade of plasma bolts blasted out from under the overpass in the same direction, and a large number of blinding actinic blue-white bolts shot out from under the bridge, glancing or splattering in brilliant sun hot sparks from the abutment or from rocks of the streambed. The Krall cautiously advanced towards where the beast had vanished, stepping over the dead, still afraid in their minds, but a monster seen is less fearful than one imagined.

The next Krall death was also silently accomplished, but it was followed by a slight whimpering sound shortly after that. Some of the warriors turned around at that sound, but only some of them did that this time. They did learn from their mistakes. Twelve of the twenty-two that were still alive continued to guard the direction in which the beast they saw had retreated mere seconds ago. Ten whirled to cover the downhill approach, from which the original roar had originated. That had obviously been a distraction. Now it was possible the departing roar had been another.

The roars, and the cracks of the plasma bolt weapons reverberating under the low bridge, had an effect on Krall hearing, and the hot, bright bolt flashes within the darker overpass had left lingering streaks for a short time in their vision. They immediately saw their twenty-third member, of the sixty-five they had started with yesterday, freshly dead. Hadthot, who had stayed with his torture victim, had been decapitated. His body was still slowly slumping down as muscle memory held him up, and his two hearts pumped rapidly clotting blood from the arteries in his neck. His head lay by his side, with a startled look frozen in his wide-open eyes. What they didn’t see was the prisoner, only her discarded pieces of armor.

The whimper they heard seemed more likely to have come from the human, but a careful examination, weapons at the ready as they searched along both openings of the overpass, revealed two unknown scent trails. A similar but different scent trail was found on each side of the overpass, apparently marking the paths of two different beasts. Another recognized scent trail, with visual identification, was verified by its bad taste as being human blood. It was an extremely fresh dripping line of blood leaving the underpass, which exactly coincided with the scent trail of the unseen second beast.

It had all happened fast, and the escape of a human, as slow as they were, was inexplicable. She should have been seen before getting clear of the streambed under the bridge. They could elect to follow the distinctive scent trails into the deepening darkness, with at least two large unknown killer beasts out there, to try to recapture the human, or leave her to be eaten by those same beasts.

The surviving octet leader decided the latter choice would be the more efficient course of action, and ordered the remaining warriors to collect the extra weapons and power packs, and they would rejoin the Krall forces closer to the Gatlek’s bunker, after daylight, sharing the better weapons with them.

****

Adrianna, knowing a terrible death awaited her, was as startled as the Krall were at the first roar. She had been posted on New Dublin for nearly a year and a half, and she didn’t know there were any predators like that here. Her armor removed, she was seated facing the sub leader when the second bass roar sounded, almost as if it were at the mouth of the overpass behind him. As one, they whirled to face the threat, the sub leader snatching up his rifle in favor of the short sword, which he sheathed. She didn’t see a way for this distraction to help her, because the warriors behind her could see any move she made.

The roar was repeated, and the Krall closest to the front crouched and aimed their weapons out towards the half-dark canyon seemingly nervous, as if not confident that a plasma bolt would be adequate for what they might face.

The echoing sound of the beast’s second deep base bellow was still ringing in her ears when she was bumped hard from behind, struck by a falling warrior. There was another roar, only now it seemed even closer, and it was behind her. It had a galvanizing effect on the warriors. They seemed to know they had been distracted from the real attack, and rushed towards the threat. She glanced back to see dead or dying Krall, headless or entrails hanging out as they died, bodies scattered about. A deafening clash of plasma bolt fire rang out under the bridge, nearly all the warriors having moved behind her now, leaving her ears ringing painfully.