Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (26 page)

Juanita Jansky, the newly minted PDF Lieutenant, and not a young woman, merely a promoted former sergeant, confirmed what they’d been hoping to hear from her PDF troopers, posted as forward observers. “The last of the riggers are off the ridge tops, and their trucks have just cleared Ridgeway Road on the north end. They’re completely clear now. If this stunt doesn’t work, we’d all better get our asses out of New Caledonia. This is the only place we can possibly keep them from tearing the city a new asshole.”

The four mining company supervisors, whose crews had cooperated on the work along Ridgeway Road, still sounded adamant that their impromptu proposal would work.

One of them pointed out the precedent, again. “This isn’t the first time ordinary people have done something like this, although not with tanks, since the Krall were on foot.”

Another of them had a question, a scar faced woman named Carly. After the hurried initial introductions and explanations, done a half day and an eternity of work ago, Jansky was surprised she remembered the name.

“Lieutenant, if they don’t stop at that wood barricade to read our sign, which the Kobani showed us how to make, what then?”

Jansky exaggerated her shrug, so it would be visible with her body enclosed in armor. “My troopers were told not to wait if they busted right on through. I’m just hoping we can get them all bunched in tighter, so the front and tail of that long column is between both choke points. The bastards dropped off twenty-six armored units along the way, and I don’t have any good ways of defeating them if those isolated units regroup. I hadn’t expected them to leave anyone behind them. We’ll know in a minute if we’ll have all of these in the main column bunched together and all of them stopped. If we can’t pin them here, we’ll Molotov as many as we can before they get out of this valley.”

“What about those big laser batteries you had tilted halfway over on their sides? Can’t they burn the ones they left behind or that get by us?”

“We only did that with six batteries placed in the three biggest valleys, and unless the enemy drives through the center of those valleys, we can’t hit them if they take alternate routes, such as the one we diverted them through this time. The main purpose of those tilted over batteries was to shoot down low flying Stranglers if they attacked the valley populations. The Ragnar held them back, apparently worried they might fly over some of them if we hid them between ridges. They surely want the ground attack to knock the lasers out first, so they can move in and zap anyone not protected by armor and wire mesh, like me and my hundred troopers. If we can stop these tanks, we’ll stop or slow down the Stranglers. At least long enough for the Kobani to break the hold the Ragnar fleet has on the planet.”

“Hey, the lead tank just halted a hundred feet from the sign.” One of the miners had been watching a screen in the improvised combat center, displaying one of the images available from prepositioned cameras on the ridge tops, or from some placed inside the parked cars.

“He’s looking at that big damn sign. Do you think he can read it? It looks like squiggly gibberish to me.”

The Lieutenant answered frankly. “I don't give a shit. The front of the column has stopped, and that will allow the break in the middle of the column to catch up to the twenty lead tanks. If we get the last tank beyond the rear chokepoint, we go hot.”

They had received a printed transcript of what was allegedly on the sign, their version written in Standard, naturally. That had been provided to them by one of the Kobani captains fighting the Ragnar fleet. Athena Christopoulos, via her ship’s AI, had relayed the text of the message in Standard, along with an image of exactly what the alien Thandol markings on the sign should look like.

They had used a home decorator bot to paint the sign’s background color white, and overlaid it with the supposedly decorative pattern of bizarre black squiggles, curves, and dots of the Thandol phonetic script, which the bot had used as its design. They hurriedly placed the finished sign on the road as the rigger crews finished their rough shallow bores, and completed their work. It was a hell of a job for only a half a day notice, and several riggers were hurt as they bypassed normal safety procedures. Their work, and those volunteers that had parked and positioned the cars on the side of the road, was what was important. The sign was an amusing afterthought, which might or might not produce some benefit. Knowing what it said had clearly boosted the spirits of those trying to save their city and world.

They placed the sign on the roadway at the end of the riggers work area, in the hope it would pause the advance of that armored column briefly. They wanted them to bunch up more tightly in the narrow confines of the canyon, where they had been hurriedly diverted.

There were very few defenses on the entire planet against the Ragnar’s massive mechanized armor, powered by fusion generators that gave them unlimited range. The Ragnar’s lack of experience with human ingenuity, and human ability to adapt, might only work for this first encounter. These weren’t Krall barbarians, who would repeatedly charge an enemy heedless of consequences.

An audio pickup on a camera mounted at the top of the twenty-foot high sign, detected amplified rough vocalization sounds and guttural grunts, originating from the lead armored unit. It actually seemed to be issuing from a chest speaker on the armor of the ape sticking out of a hatch, sitting on the turret of the largest tank. He had removed his helmet and was glaring at the sign, his mouth not moving, so he wasn’t speaking.

Based on previously recorded Ragnar speech, this untranslated message sounded like the Ragnar language to the human listeners, but it was pronounced with a distinct Thandol accent. As if spoken using their two flexible trunks, producing the Ragnar words. To Jansky and the others with her, who spoke only Standard, it seemed much like gibberish as did the written script on the sign.

Carla glanced down at a printed transcript of the same message, which was presumably being translated into spoken words for the apes. Only the three words at the end would be spoken in a replica of Standard. All of them were waiting to hear those words, and expecting some reaction. She read the text while it was being spoken in Ragnar.

We know you hate your Thandol masters, and they despise you. Your failure here will not be forgiven by them. Join with us to defeat them, or kiss your hairy butt goodbye.
Remember Gribble’s Nook!

There was a prompt reaction from the lead tank. It lurched forward and fired its main gun as it did so, blowing the sign to smithereens. When it covered the short distance to the splintered remains, hundreds of remote detonators along the rock walls were triggered, just as the massive tank reached the intended choke point. A powerful string of explosions erupted along the middle of the ridge walls on both sides of the lead elements, bringing down tens of thousands of tons of rock on them, blocking the road ahead, and burying the entire twenty units of the leading Legion under ten to fifteen feet of rock, depending on how the walls crumbled onto them. Almost half of the Legion’s tanks had their Ragnar commanders still sitting on their turrets, the top hatches open when the blasts came. They were mowed down by fast moving heavy rock fragments sprayed from the sides. Legion Commander Forton barely had time to register what was happening, before a multi-ton boulder helped him lose interest.

The PDF troopers at the rear of the column watched the last of the tanks continue ahead for almost another ten seconds, before the linked reaction registered on the rear drivers that the forward units were suddenly slamming on their brakes as the gaps between units suddenly decreased. It was enough. The rear choke point charges repeated the blasts just unleashed at the front. More thousands of tons of rock buried the rear dozen tanks under mounds of rubble. Nearly two miles of armored might was now trapped in a narrow steep walled valley, unable to move in either direction.

Lieutenant Jansky was still faced with almost 290 functional tanks that were clear of debris, with eight or ten others that could be cleared of rock in short order. In fact, the laser-armed units promptly started sweeping their scorching beams along the ridge top edges on each side. Several more, with Debilitater antennas tilted well back, swept tightly focused beams of invisible radiation at ridge tops. She noted that this didn’t happen until the tanks positioned below a beam’s aiming point had buttoned up their hatches, and the crews who had been poking their heads out of hatches had hurriedly donned their helmets as they sealed their tanks.

She warned her troopers. “The Ragnar have shielding against the Debilitater radiation, probably for the hulls of the tanks as well as their own body armor. It makes sense, if you intend to use that weapon and risk collateral exposure of your own troops. I want you observers to stay back, and use the cameras to keep watch on them. I don't want any of you testing out our mesh suits just to see if it works. Shit is hard to scrape out of those copper undies. They’ll be using lethal power, with narrow focused beams.”

Then a different defensive measure was taken by the tanks with the largest smoothbore guns. They fired timed fragmentation rounds that burst once they were above the rims of the rock walls, and far enough from the edges that the fragments didn’t rain back into the canyon. They were trying to keep anyone from standing above, and firing down at them. Not that Jansky’s command, a hundred PDF troops with plasma rifles, were a serious threat to one of these heavily armored beasts. Unless, they could concentrate multiple rifles firing on individual tanks, of course, which the Ragnar tactic was making extremely risky and unlikely.

It was soon apparent that many of the big guns were concentrating their fire over the ridge tops at the front chokepoint. There were rounds fired from nearly a mile back, the rounds arcing over a gentle curve in the road, to add their suppressive fire to an area they couldn’t even see.

A remote camera inside the windscreen of a beat up old truck revealed why. The Ragnar had many of the forward tank crews moving around outside the safety of their units, but they had activated their stealth. Their suit stealth had fooled the simple commercial video cameras, so their emergence had gone unnoticed. Jansky still didn’t know how many were outside working. It was the material they were working with, which revealed their presence. Rocks. They were moving rocks.

At first, she thought they were trying to extract trapped crews of tanks covered by the lighter boulders. Only they weren’t removing all of the debris, merely using their powered armor to shift it, and shove the rubble towards the back end of the least buried units at the rear of those covered.

It was the falling rocks that she’d first spotted, and realized it wasn’t the natural settlement of the piles of rocks, or the buried tanks trying to pull free. The steadily increasing mounds of smaller rocks, immediately behind the last two partially covered tanks that provided the clue she needed. They were building a rock ramp over the backs of their buried units, and leveling out the piles on top as best they could of those fully covered. They intended to drive over them, when the ramp slope was long and gradual enough.

The notion she might find a way to talk to the Ragnar commander in charge here, to convince him into surrendering was no longer an option. Not if he had a way to extricate most of his armor and continue to the spaceport. An unpalatable and grizzly alternative was now the only remaining action available to her. It had been their secondary plan if they couldn’t trap the column here, a method to deliver as much damage as possible. The backup threat, used against a fast moving string of tanks, might not have been very effective.

With the column of tanks trapped, she hadn’t seen the need. But, needs change with the circumstances. She made a general broadcast, to dozens of people posted along and above Ridgeway Road, kept well back from the edges and under cover against the expected orbital attacks that never came.

“Attention, all of you cocktail makers. Pull out your remotes. The enemy is going to try to break out by making a ramp of rock debris over the forward tanks, and climb over them. We’ll need to use your Molotov’s after all, but wait for my command so we all act together. We can't to do this by eyeball as they drive by now, so keep the hell away from the edge of the ridge top, and stay safe. Report to me when you’re poised to go hot.”

That’s a fitting phrase,
Jansky thought, as the eighty-two people, civilians and PDF combined, called to verify their remotes were active and linked to their receivers. Her own device, unclipped from her suit’s waist showed green when the transmitter linked to the receiver.

A glance at the four mining supervisors with her showed three of theirs were green and ready. Poor Carly looked crestfallen. Her remote’s light had stayed red, unable to link. She’d been a workhorse, nearly a slave driver to her riggers, working on the walls alongside them, pushing them to get their bores done in time to set their charges. She’d even provided her own truck for this part of the operation.

Jansky handed the woman her own remote. “You folks worked your asses off today, and a lot of you provided your own vehicles, as I know you did Mam. You deserve a personal shot at these assholes.”

The woman beamed, the scar on her cheek pulling at the side of her mouth. Jansky hadn’t asked why she’d not had it surgically corrected, but noticed a number of riggers seemed to bear scars of their explosives setting trade as badges of experience, or perhaps of courage. The woman accepted the remote gratefully. “Thanks. My ride’s a piece of shit, but it was paid for. I wish I could give it a big send off, but I parked too close to the sign. It must have been crushed by the rock fall.”