Koban 6: Conflict and Empire

by Stephen W Bennett

  The other two escorting Ravagers had also suffered damage, but both were easily able to stay with the ship they were assigned to protect. This particular command Pounder had been assigned three Ravagers as escorts, two more than any other Pounder in Group 1 received, which marked it for greater Kobani attention. The Pounder was likely to be blasted from the sky within minutes from the multiple attacks, and the two massive warheads on the pursuing missiles were the greatest threats because of the Pounder’s slow entry.

  Thond, having been provided an acceleration couch at a backup console, one configured as a communications position for him, used his access code to reach Acting Space Force Commander Grudfad through the flagship’s AI.

  “Grudfad, Group 1’s command Pounder is about to be lost. If the Ravagers are unable to intercept the incoming missiles, I will order Commander Hitok to enter escape pods with his staff. I will remain with the ship. You will continue as Space Force Commander for the duration of combat here, and Commander Hitok will assume Ground Force command.”

  He was clearly placing the preservation of the commander of a Ground Force group ahead of his own safety, and knew he was putting Grudfad in a tight spot. This was, of course, a recorded call. Failing to protect his superior, who had voluntarily exposed himself to greater risk wasn’t anything he would be disciplined for, but his future in the Space Force would stall at a level somewhere below his present acting position.

  Grudfad, engrossed with how the overall fight was being waged, was forced to focus for a moment on one small aspect that he’d neglected. He instantly understood what was about happen. “Sire, I have a possible solution. Standby.”

  He linked to the flagship AI, and authorized it to assume emergency control of the Pounder’s two escorting Ravagers, via their ship’s AIs, thus taking total control from both of the Captains and their crews. This was a step normally reserved for a functional craft with a dead or disabled command crew. He’d have to justify his actions later, but an inquiry would clear him of wrongdoing if what he did succeeded, and advanced the goal of the mission.

  Suddenly, the two damaged but mostly operational Ravagers fell back from the command Pounder, turned nose on to the incoming missiles, firing their forward laser and plasma weaponry, and decelerated their reverse tracks via their Normal Space drives. That swiftly narrowed the gap with the enemy missiles. The ploy saved the Pounder, but sacrificed the two Ravagers and crews. Therefore, the commander of Group 1, and coincidentally the Force Commander, both survived. Grudfad knew he would now receive a positive recommendation from Thond, which would say he was a competent combat leader, with a willingness to do whatever was required to assure a mission’s chance of success.

  Hitok, who in his own sealed armor was unaware of Thond’s communication, had never once considered using an escape pod, certainly not to leave his beloved Ragoons to die as he fled their destruction. It was unlikely that Thond or Grudfad would ever mention their conversation outside of a closed inquiry, if one were held. Thond had clearly said he was staying with the doomed ship, and intended to save the valuable life and skills of the experienced Ground Force Commander and his staff. But Grudfad knew that the Force Commander knew exactly what the result of his words would be. Therefore, Thond knew he would survive if Grudfad valued his future in the Space Force.

  Hitok, when told the two Ravagers had been destroyed when they turned to fight a valiant defense on their behalf, complemented their crews for their presumed sacrifice. He mixed his words of praise with the bias of a Ground Force soldier’s terminology, for an action fought in space.

  “Our brothers held fast and fought nobly against this unpredictable and brash enemy. None of the human ships have yet stood their ground this way and fought to the death, as our two brave escorts just did. The humans appear, launch a missile, fire a plasma bolt, and flee in a swift Jump. Then, appear on the other side of the same target, launch another missile, fire a laser. And then Jump to a far distant ship, to repeat their frantic hit and run attacks. Another enemy ship soon appears behind the target the first attacker just abandoned, and hits and runs again. They do this repeatedly. It isn’t a way I chose to fight.”

  No, thought Thond, but it’s a way they can inflict considerable damage on an enemy that outnumbers them.

  He reconsidered how this relatively small and weak looking species had defeated the hordes of large Krall warriors, which the Thandol had avoided meeting for so many millennia. Perhaps the humans adopted strange tactics when they were forced to win against great odds. After all, what was the purpose of a war, if not to win?

  ****

  “Athena, your method of attack has proven to be a winner, so I’m all for staying with what works.” Greeves fleet was only minutes out from joining her. They’d been discussing the randomized Jumps and slashing attacks her small force been using for the last few hours.

  “Thad, it wasn’t without casualties. I lost five more ships, and suffered eight with enough damage to their stealth that they can’t go in and mix it up with the apes.”

  “But you told me you took out twenty-one of sixty three previously damaged Pounders, and thirty-one Ravagers in the process. That’s over ten thousand enemy soldiers that didn’t reach the ground alive, and eighty armored vehicles they won’t have.”

  She still wasn’t happy with what she’d achieved. “It appears they still managed to deploy close to a hundred eighty thousand Ragoons, as they call their soldiers. And are now forming up four columns of their armor, each with about three hundred fifty to three hundred seventy units, depending on each group’s losses. Those have started advancing towards four cities, three of which have negligible ground defenses. They also have sent down at least several hundred space-capable atmospheric fighters in support, with hundreds more probably on the eight large carriers, which promptly Jumped out of harm’s way when we started our attacks. They’ll be back, if they capture spaceports where they can be based and maintained.”

  “When we join you shortly, their space bombardment of the planet is going to end,” Greeves assured her, “because that part of the enemy fleet will be trying to stay alive. You’ve proven we’re better at this sort of fighting than they are. Shortly, the PDF forces will be able to focus mainly on the ground attack. I hope they can tackle those damned Stranglers, which will be advancing with their armor.”

  “Colonel Gaffigan, who’s in charge of the PDF here, says they can repurpose some of their heavy lasers from orbital defense if we remove that pressure. They’ve lost about twenty percent of the three hundred batteries they had deployed at the four cities targeted for occupation. That must leave them with about two hundred forty potent heavy weapons to oppose the armored columns.”

  Greeves was skeptical. “I saw the standard PU made laser batteries on Poldark. They don't have azimuth settings physically possible that can be set lower than forty-five degrees from vertical. That’s a limitation designed into their heavy steel gun mounts. A ninety-degree depression would be needed to fire at ground targets. That capability wasn’t provided for in orbital defense lasers, because long-range shots at spacecraft at such low angles are severely attenuated when passing through moisture laden and dust filled atmosphere, and seldom cause much damage. Unless these four cities all happen to sit in deep valleys, with the only roads into them passing over extremely high mountain passes, the enemy is going to be under those gun’s ability to aim low enough to hit them. I guess a Strangler might foolishly fly low over a city with those batteries, but only once. Approaching low, from a distance, the laser batteries can’t hit those low flying ships ether.” His voice sounded skeptical of Gaffigan saying he’d be repurposing any of the batteries.

  “Hey, Thad, I’m just Gaffigan’s messenger speaking here. I’m no ground pounder, but that was once your bailiwick. At least before you grew into the famous Kobani admiral-like figure Admiral Foxworthy dubbed you at Poldark, when you went there to infect Krall equipment with Denial chips.” She knew he always reacted a bit defensivel
y when teased about that brief rank.

  It worked this time too. He sighed. “Like I told Foxworthy, I asked her to call me Colonel. I only learned space warfare strategy and techniques via Mind Tap. But as a militia infantry soldier on Poldark, we didn’t have laser batteries prior to the Krall war, so I was never involved with space defenses. Perhaps Gaffigan thought of something new to do with them. Frankly, I don't know what the hell he has in mind, but I hope it works.”

  ****

  The PDF captain shouted from his truck at the woman supervising the construction crew. She was running one of the four crews from Morrisville; sent to do the urgent defensive position modifications the PDF said was needed.

  “No. You aren’t done yet. Weld two additional support struts on the underside of the chassis. The battery falling back upright onto its tracks would be as damaging to it as falling over onto its side would be. The laser’s focal mirrors and gimbal mounts are only protected when secured for travel. When we unlock them for rotation and beam collimation, the chassis of the gun platform needs to be braced to stay canted at forty-five degrees. Tipping over and slamming to a sudden stop, in either direction, would damage the mirrors and their alignment motors. After that, the battery would be useless.”

  The woman wasn’t giving in just yet to this added requirement. “But, Sir? We sure as hell aren’t staying out here when the fighting starts, because we don’t have body armor or guns like your troopers do. If you decide to drive these lasers to another firing spot, you’d have to cut off the underside support struts to set them gently upright with our crane. We’re not coming back out here under fire to do it for you.”

  The officer shrugged. “Lady, if we can’t stop the apes from taking the city, we don’t have any place else to put them where they’d do any good. The Federation is supposed to keep the enemy ships in orbit from firing on the city. Besides, we’ll still have over half our lasers sitting upright, on the other side of Morrisville, to fire at orbital targets. The other three cities might try the same thing, provided they have favorable terrain. There are tank columns driving toward each of them. We don’t have many options for fighting mobile armored forces like this. The Krall didn’t use their small, one warrior Dragons in massive assaults this way.

  “Anyway, Mam, I don't need you to agree with the decision. Just hurry up and do what I asked. That’s why you have the stacks of extra I-beams on that flatbed towed behind the derrick. There are four more pits assigned to your crew, so get them done before the enemy armor reaches firing range. The dozer is done digging the pits, and the derrick will go with you, to tilt the batteries over while you weld on the bracing. I need to check on the other work crews, so get a move on.” He drove off, to verify the rushed work of the other teams was proceeding without a similar glitch. He had fifteen mobile space defense batteries to turn into fixed ground defenses in a very short time. He hoped it would work

  ****

  At the city of New Caledonia, the capitol city of a semi-mountainous mining region on Tanner’s, some of the orbital defense laser batteries were also being repurposed at the edge of the city. But the terrain there provided enemy armor more shelter than did the flat plains that surrounded Morrisville. An early slogan from the war with the Krall had been revived at New Caledonia, remembering how civilians on Gribble’s Nook had fought back with what they had available. Remember Gribble’s Nook and the history of that very first raid provided ideas for supplemental defenses, to counter what the protective ridges could offer to an advancing enemy in their massive armored units.

  ****

  At Ashland, a city on a bluff at the end of a long lush and verdant valley, with a midsized and well controlled river meandering through it, had suitable highway approaches and bridges for the Ragnar armored column, where it could travel on roads placed on either side of the river. The roads periodically passed behind low ridges that followed the river valley, the terrain having been cut over millions of years by a formerly wilder waterway. This terrain offered shelter for the Pillagers from the orbital defense lasers around Ashland, most of which were higher than the valley approaches to the city. A few of the batteries, placed below the city’s bluffs, could be angled to provide firing angles down the valley. However, the off-road capability of the tracked Ragnar armor would be able to evade them. There was another defensive option, but it required evacuations, and years of lost productivity in this agricultural dependent region. It would entail sacrifice and expense, but the Thandol Empire, in the form of their Ragnar proxies, intended to exact that sacrifice and cost anyway. So why wait?

  ****

  Fort Bradford was the home of the former training base and armory of Tanner’s wartime PDF troopers, and they were going to try a more traditional military response. Most of the recalled troopers were there, and they had nearly all of the planet’s anti-armor weaponry, which consisted of a few thousand hand-held rocket launcher tubes, nicknamed Dragon Killers, or DKs. Of course, it wasn’t known how well they would work against the various types of Ragnar tanks and tracked vehicles, since the short range rockets were specifically designed to blow the turrets off the smaller, white ceramic-coated Dragons.

  The Ragnar appeared to use two types of base units for their heavy tracked armor. They were externally identical except for size, and were generically referred to as Pillagers. The largest was the massive eighty ton, thirty-five-foot length of the main battle tank hulls, and the smaller units were slightly over twenty-five feet long, at sixty tons. Each model held a crew of three of the large bodied Ragnar, normally in body armor. A commander, gunner, and a driver.

  To face them, the PDF had fifty of the pitifully inadequate ladybugs, with their track driven two-man gun carriage, with rear tripod mounted tri-barreled plasma cannons. They also had ten heavy laser equipped troop transport shuttles, and a large storeroom full of a white elephant sort of weapon, which had never found a combat use against the Krall. The unproven weapons cache was a supply of magnetic limpet mines, for maritime targets.

  The improbable weapons had been the bright idea of one poorly informed, but politically influential former merchant seaman on Tanner’s world. At the start of the Krall war, he’d suggested the enemy might decide to invade them by unopposed sea landings, far from shore. On a planet with a surface seventy-three percent covered by water, it sounded reasonable at the time to manufacture some of those mines. Reasonable only if you didn’t know the Krall disliked deep water, because their bodies were too dense to swim, and they enjoyed the thrill of blasting through space defenses before landing on their enemy’s doorstep. Nevertheless, there were uses for nearly anything, if you had imagination.

  ****

  Group commander Sorvus Gontra rode at the head of Group 4’s Pillagers, his head protruding from the hatch at the top of the big gun turret. He’d used a bunker buster on the largest building in each of the four small towns they had passed through. There seemed to be one near the center of each of them, where the road split to arc around a less than impressive structure. It always seemed to be some local government center, with pointless tall columns in front of many of them. There were seldom any of the frightened residents visible. Lucky for them, since his instructions to the commander of every mechanized unit in the column was to shoot them on sight.

  From time to time, he’d hear the sizzle crack of a heavy plasma bolt or the hum of a Debilitater’s transformer when a maximum power beam was fired well off to the side. The lasers were silent when fired, except for the thermal cracks of the heat-shattered structures they might strike. The pom-pom sound of the air defense units was heard less often, since they seldom depressed their twin barrels enough to hit nearby targets. Their fragmentation shells were hazardous if they exploded close to the double column of equipment. That was because helmetless heads of commanders and drivers were protruding from nearly every unit, relishing the smells and sights of this nearly treeless plain, where the main crops appeared to be various grains, which had a pleasant fragrance to the Ragnar. />
  There had not been a single hostile act against them thus far, after their landing, which accounted for the removed helmets. Most of the mechanized units held just three of the large Ragnar in their body armor. Only the gunners and technical specialists remained entirely inside, being required to use their helmet visors, and observe sensor screens at all times, monitoring what the sensors of their own unit detected, and scanning the data shared from the entire group. They were constantly alert for threats.

  Possibly, the silence of the small communities was the product of the earlier passage of low altitude Stranglers, using wide beams to induce what was expected to be a fully disabling state for any human radiated, if not fatal for many. It certainly had put down their livestock, which initially laid kicking and squealing in pain, before falling silent when the beam passed close.

  The column had been advancing rapidly for a quarter of a cycle, and this oddly exotic, flat and never-ending plain, appeared to be perfect for the assault Gontra had planned. It was terrain nothing like the typical jungles and low mountains of home. Here, he would be able to spread out his units to the flanks unimpeded, to advance in a formidable line, with a clear field of fire for each unit, approaching the outskirts of the city in a wide line when still far out. Their first task was to destroy the orbital defense batteries, which were located around the city, and then secure the modest spaceport.

  He sent the two columns behind him off the perfectly straight paved roadway to either side. They spread to form a wide line, tearing through the fields of amber grain, which would soon yield to urban sprawl.