Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire (3 page)

None of the forty-two Krall clanships managed to respond with missile launches or laser cannon fire. The two anti-ship missiles assigned per ship was possibly overkill, but the Denial chips removed control of every system from the crews inside, except for radio use. It was theorized that the Olt’kitapi had left communications and life support active, free of the chips that could block their use, probably as a gesture of mercy, to permit a call for an evacuation by an otherwise disabled clanship, where the crew inside couldn’t even open an airlock to make an exit.

The other three ECM systems the Kobani had available to them were on ships that emerged within a cluster of five or six clanships, shutting all of their radios down. If the radios were repowered manually, the ECM continuously sent the shutdown command. At least those ships in close formation would be unable to warn of the boarding process happening on each of their neighbors. Kobani were leaping across the gaps as their host ships moved in close to the now drifting enemy craft. They used magnetic footpads to swarm over the hull to enter by the four airlocks at the lowest hold level, by two shuttle bay airlocks, and by four small maintenance airlocks near midship.

Simply removing the clanships from active Krall control and moving off wasn’t enough to preserve them indefinitely. A resourceful enemy crew, even without plasma rifles to make it easy, would find a way to rupture the reaction mass fuel tanks for the thruster engines, and the binary fuel would detonate on contact, preventing the capture of that intact clanship. The Kobani wanted these craft in operating condition, and Mind Taps ensured that every one of the boarders knew how to operate their newly acquired transportation and its internal systems.

It was expected that the Krall would have minimal crews aboard the watch standers, enough to handle reloads in the thirty-two anti-ship missile bays, and perhaps one to three posted on the command deck. A commander of a hand or more of clanships would probably be on one craft, with a pilot, and perhaps a K’Tal or weapons master. Typically, about thirty-four to thirty-six warriors was expected. Therefore, ten Kobani boarders, facing more than three times their number of Krall, seemed like an unfair advantage. For the Kobani.

After the denial list propagated at near light speed between every quantum lockout on the clanships, the Krall would have only the use of standard pistols and personal weapons, mostly knives, and unpowered armor (if they tried to put that on) which would furnish only basic life support. Some of the fighting would be at talon and tooth level against Kobani suit weapons, but it wasn’t as if a Krall warrior expected or would accept any mercy. They
never
granted that to opponents, considering surrender a sign of a weak bloodline. Many strong bloodlines were about to end today. There wasn’t time for so-called fair play, by facing warriors in hand-to-hand combat, unless that was forced.

Each Kobani ship aloft, including the newest captures, had to be prepared to take on any clanship that managed to lift from the surface. The ships that had paired to intercept the forty-two orbiting defenders joined the rest of the Koban fleet in trying to maintain a blockade, until the additional newly captured ships were able to help. That made for only a hundred fourteen blocking ships against possibly thousands of potential lift offs. The ten boarders per enemy clanship would find themselves on their own, as the other Kobani ships spread out to enforce the blockade.

Obviously, the White Outs above K1 would be noted on the surface, but the Krall and clanships on the ground quickly discovered they were having problems of their own to solve. There had been just over five hundred domes, large and small on K1, from the clusters belonging to Great and Major clans, down to a hundred or so smaller isolated domes built for minor or finger clans. That was a significant habitat reduction from the nearly seven hundred domes there prior to the previous human attack, but rebuilding domes took a backseat to repairing clanships. Large domes with wide tarmacs and a hundred or more clanships received the most attention from the small ship infiltration force.

Two four-ships and one or two single ships landed right on top of all of the large domes. Stealthed, one would settle on the crown of each dome, as several others were positioned closer to the roof edges, where their shooters had unobstructed views of parked clanships. The mere act of landing on the domes disabled remotely controlled laser batteries and hand held plasma weapons near the highest level, as well as blocking coordinated fire control systems in the command centers in the center of the top levels. The short range of the Denial chips didn’t often spread fully down to the base of the domes, past roughly eight of the fifteen-foot high levels.

Quantum locked compartments were spaced too far apart, so unless there were personal plasma weapons and armor, randomly distributed, to relay the electronic virus lower, the spread was halted. Below where virus transmission was interrupted, body armor and plasma rifles functioned just fine.

Stealthed Kobani in armor leaped out of their small ships, equipped with rifles, mostly of the .50 caliber variety but some older .30 calibers, which all could fire ammunition with the KK chips replaced with the fingernail sized Denial chips. They rapidly fired shots out towards the parked clanships closest to the domes. Not to hit the ships, but to find a trajectory, or a lane, through the randomly parked craft where a single slug could pass near as many clanships as possible. The denial list transmitted by the fifth force had a short effective range, but its spread through an entire clanship happened nearly at the speed of light.

The Olt’kitapi had designed these tools of war for their “police force,” with this key disabling transmission in mind. They simply were unable to fight their way close enough, and often enough to do that, and the Krall ruthlessly destroyed occupied infected clanships and weapons, as soon as they figured out what was happening. That had happened over the course of weeks of the revolt. The Kobani were not so tentative, or slow to act.

A single shot could disable five or six ships if the right angle could be found through the maze, and with tarmacs about a mile wide, no clanship was out of range.

At the outer perimeter of the largest and most crowded tarmacs, the bulk of the small ships were disgorging Kobani and rippers, many of which didn’t have long-range weapons with Denial chip ammunition. There had been a limited number of those rifles, and they went to the dome top landers, where they could block clanship access to warriors already pouring from the domes to reach the closest parked clanships. The spatter of White Outs had triggered alarms at domes and in parked clanships all over the planet. None of them knew that there were infiltrators literally on top of them.

An awkward aspect of the Denial chips was that they froze a clanship in whatever mode of operation it was in when the lockout was activated, preventing a Krall from changing settings of anything with a lockout, or from shutting that something down.

A number of clanships already had crews aboard, prepared to relieve clan mates in orbit soon, or were prepared for some unrelated mission, such as a resupply run to Poldark or New Dublin. Around the planet, at least nine clanships at major domes managed to initiate a launch sequence. Eight were using the typical Krall pollution filled fiery plasma exhaust blast off, which they seemed to thrill in doing manually. Fast snap shots from dome-top shooters prevented fully
successful
launches, but they did lift.

Set to employ manual steering control by the pilots, the uncorrectable trajectories made for rather high and spectacular blue-white plasma arcs that ended with lovely, and tragically fatal, orange and black fireballs hundreds of miles away.

Except one clanship lifting from a crowded tarmac, which ended a bit differently. It not only had a tachyon in its primary trap for use by the reactionless Normal Space drive, but it also apparently had a single warrior on the command deck. That was the surmise for what happened anyway. A pilot alone, anticipating the need to operate a weapons console when he met the enemy above, activated the autopilot for liftoff at maximum Normal Space thrust in atmosphere, surely intending to operate a weapons console and to change course to attack the enemy that had just arrived in orbit.

A passing slug, fired just as the clanship lifted above the rim of the nearby dome, left it locked with a high Norman Space drive thrust and on autopilot, when the ability to change settings was suddenly denied. The last they heard from that pilot was a Doppler shifted radio call a half day later as the clanship, at an appreciable fraction of the velocity of light, was passing the edge of the local Kuiper belt, still accelerating. It already had the velocity to escape the Milky Way. A Krall had finally gone exploring.

At smaller domes, which received only a few single ships or a four-ship, there were a few launches of clanships by warriors of finger clans, and which actually achieved orbit. Not understanding what was happening they attacked the enemy, and fell victims to Denial chips in anti-ship missiles, which had greater speed and maneuverability than should have been possible.

Mirikami and Noreen left behind boarders of their own to take control of the two ships they had disabled. They had work yet to do observing the planet. “The ships that sent boarders will stay in orbit to watch for and intercept possible inbound traffic from outside the system. As soon as any captured Krall has been Mind Tapped, we should be able to learn which domes hold the clan leaders. Now the hard task will be to power down the domes, locate isolated operational clanships, and find out where Telour is located. I want him in particular.”

This had been proceeding far better than he’d expected. The Krall had no planned rejoinder for clanships and major weapons being shut down like this. It had been twenty-two thousand years since the Olt’kitapi had tried and failed in this same tactic. Clearly, the failure of that ancient race had been in a lack of aggression by the near-pacifists, unable or afraid to get in close to their enemy, and a reliance on the natural spread of the “virus” by simple proximity between clanships and weapons once “infected.” The Kobani were hardly timid, cautious, or patient, once they had a technology that if applied fast and up close, essentially neutralized the enemy assets, and made them theirs.

The clanship boarding taking place in orbit was ironic to Mirikami. They were making the craft defenseless and unable to flee, which was a complete reversal of fortune for the Krall. They had used similar tactics for thousands of years, when they first encountered a new species they wanted to conquer. Initially, they disabled the Jump capability of a new race’s ships, and sent in young novices to kill the occupants if they resisted. They then extracted information about the enemy from the captives.

He was certain every warrior would resist violently, and the Kobani would only capture injured sub leaders for Mind Taps. Payback in kind.

****

Phordot had been bored with sentry duty for days. She wanted to be at New Dublin. Either fighting the newly aggressive PU navy cruisers, infiltrating the planetary defenses to deliver more supplies, or for her greatest desire, to be there to participate in a ground offensive being planned against the human forces. Because of the distraction of recent events at Telda Ka, that invasion force had gone without the supply support they needed, to force the enemy to retreat fast enough that the clans there could overrun a nearby large nesting area before it could be fully evacuated. There would be many kills per warrior when that happened, and good fighting before that to beat back a desperate enemy.

With the supplies she’d recently helped deliver, that fresh surge was sure to happen soon. Another hand of a hand of clanships had departed for New Dublin just as she had returned here. Expecting to load more supplies and return promptly, she was disappointed when told her status points were less than the level set by her clan leader for warriors to engage in the upcoming ground fighting. As a member of Mordo clan, and Gatlek Pendor of her clan being in charge of that invasion, she’d assumed even a lower level Mordo warrior would be allowed to participate.

That’s when she made a miscalculation, and complained. “I have served the Gatlek and the clan better than those that have remained on Telda Ka, who merely point to what I should carry to the battle, and then I have to fight my way down to the planet.”

The sub leader she was addressing was one of those who “merely points,” and he was not going to New Dublin either. He could have sent her back with a load of mini-tanks, where she might have talked her way into a combat situation as the clanship was being unloaded. Instead, he found a duty for her that he said suited her present skills and status.

“The sentry clanship posted above the northern pole will be departing to join Gatlek Pendor’s forces soon. You will go to relieve him. He has a surplus of status points, so perhaps he will pay you if you allow him to depart early.

“The duty will give you the opportunity to display piloting and space combat skills. Something that those of us who merely point seldom can practice. If the human navy returns for an attack, you can show them what you learned.” He snorted his amusement.

It was known throughout the clans (because Telour bragged publicly), that the human leader called Medford had bowed to the Tor Gatrol’s demands to stay away from Telda Ka, on pain of additional worlds to be destroyed. Telour used this bluff well, and the PU leader was afraid to test him. She had even promised to lead them to the base of the humans who had stolen the clanships used against the Krall, at least when she learned where it was.

Now, after sitting well above the pole for two hands of days, her crew was resentful of her rash words that left them stuck here with her. Phordot was able to observe all of the supplies leaving to support the two invasion forces, secure in the knowledge she would be kept far from the fighting. Her luck, and that of her crew, was about to change.