Now if only his moderate force could close the door on the rest of their massive retreating army, and hold their huge numbers boxed in these mountains for the next half day. It would be worth arriving at the next invasion world a week or two late, for the fine combat this prospect offered. Holding so many back could only be done for a short time, and they needed to take advantage of the close confines of the valleys, and make use the ridge tops to shoot down into the mass of transports and troops, slowing or stalling the columns.
He was imagining how quickly his best octets would have closed with those that fled, if the clanship had been able to carry even one of the big armored transports. The choice was made to take more warriors to fight, and not bring bulky machines that could not. Their powered armor would permit them to keep a steady running pace, as they started after those human cowards that had fled in a panic. However, they could not catch them before they merged with their army’s main body, which would be trying to stream though a narrow gorge that branched away a short distance west of here.
His predator’s instinct truly wanted to catch the cowards that had fled so quickly that they abandoned many of their own; leaving them without the support needed to be able fall back yet again. Their blood would be pleasurable to shed, even if not as valued. The first to run had not laid down any suppression fire for the front line, to help them make another orderly pull back, which he’d seen them do twice before. Instead, they were observed piling into some of their transports, some half empty, and leaving their clan mates to die. They all would have died if they stood and fought, of course, but they would have died with honor.
He was, as he was expected to be, leading from the front of most of the warriors that filled the smooth four-lane roadway as they ran. He and his best octet leaders were deliberately setting a slower pace, one better suited for endurance than speed. With no further opposition expected from the enemy that broke and ran, his remaining one thousand seven hundred sixty three warriors would reach the main human force in perhaps twenty minutes.
Even if fresh, they couldn’t confront so many troops head on, although the thought of that sort of a fight was enticing. However, he had a higher priority than the thrill of a fierce fight. He was ordered by the Gatlek to put the enemy in a pincher, unable to retreat fast enough to escape the clans pressing into the mountains from Novi Sad. This was the only human army, of the eight they faced, which could be trapped in this way.
He would send a third of his warriors to scale the ridge on the right, where they could look down on and attack the two columns of transports and equipment that would be trying to slip past them on the opposite side, squeezed into the narrow two-lane canyon road.
Gofdar would use the remainder of his warriors to try to block the main body from passing down the larger valley road for the rest of today. The human sub leaders would certainly know that there had to be an intact clanship blocking the way, since the attacking warriors had not simply popped out of the ground.
The clans from Novi Sad were already pushing back the defenders on the west side of the mountains, and soon they would be pressed into the rear of the mass of the slowed retreating army. Some of the enemy could surely get past Gofdar’s small force and move down the main valley. However, the stealthed clanship with powerful long-range weapons and missiles was there. No doubt, the enemy could eventually destroy that ship, and fight their way past that barrier. However, he had just instructed the warriors from the other clanships to move west to intercept the humans, no matter which valleys and canyons they fled through. There would be fine hunting and killing for days.
It was after that pleasant thought that he received odd reports from warriors moving along the ridge tops to either side. Some other human force had directed heavy plasma and laser fire in front of the retreating cowards. Their transports were now stopping and forming yet another defensive line. There was a sizable structure on the right side of the valley, built against and into the steep rock face of the ridge. The same ridge the Krall needed to scale and dominate. That was where the beams and bolts had originated.
His warriors were exposed out on the flat part of the valley, but today’s experience had proven that human suit sensors were rather poor, and couldn’t easily locate the Krall suits. Particularly when they were running directly at them and not laterally, because the sideways motions caused slight ripples in the background objects, which they were a little better at detecting.
That misplaced confidence was why the sudden splatter of scorched blood and brains from the helmets of two octet leaders to either side of him was so surprising. At nearly the speed of light, there was no possibility of ducking a plasma bolt, not when you no longer could see a bolt forming a couple of hundredths of a second before it left the weapon’s muzzle. The humans had learned to shield their weapon muzzles from advertising the heat of forming plasma bolts. What was most surprising is that the two warriors killed were only a half a step more advanced than he was, close to the center of the roadway with him. Gofdar immediately dove to his right, just before a heavy bolt passed through where he had been.
Someone in that structure knew the preference of Krall leaders to lead from the front, and if invisible, why not the middle of the front? Obviously, their armor wasn’t as invisible to the defenders of that human structure as they thought, and that enemy knew where to expect Krall sub leaders to be positioned. Two of his octet leaders had paid the price for Gofdar’s lesson in caution.
He continued to move, in a crouch, shifting from point to point, now off to the side of the roadway and among larger rock rubble, bulldozed there when the road was built. He, like other warriors around him, moved to keep boulders, shrubs, or trees between him and the structure. Foliage wouldn’t block a laser beam or plasma bolt, but would hamper someone sighting on you. Hundreds of plasma bolts were directed back at the building, where the enemy had fired at them. More of the heaviest bolts came in rapid clusters of three, like the ones that almost struck him. They came from two places inside the cliff above the structure, and from two places on the top of the building itself.
The gunners in the side of the ridge had made the attack more personal to him. He’d escaped the random death of a chance battlefield hit only by luck. He wasn’t foolish enough to think his mission depended on his personal survival. His warriors needed only general guidance for particular objectives. They didn’t need a leader to tell them how to fight. That was why warriors were allowed to fight as they wished. To develop the instincts their very survival permitted them to pass along with their genes to the next generation. Gofdar wanted those gunners for his own status points, if he could get to them first.
There were only four of the triple firing heavy plasma guns, and they had the hallmarks of the weapons on the mobile tracked gun carts the humans had been using for several months. He didn’t know how they had moved them to the roof of the structure or placed them in those cliff side bunkers.
There were dozens of less powerful beams striking warriors often. The damage inflicted by a hit from them wasn’t as significant as from the bigger guns. However, it would mount up if repeated too often, especially when the distance became less, as the beams underwent less spread and attenuation. The accuracy of those long-range individual shots was much higher than they had experienced from the enemy they had fought earlier today, or even in any prior Poldark assault that Gofdar had experienced. There was a sharp difference in what these shooters could achieve. It was more than accuracy.
He saw a nearby warrior that fell and tried to roll over low brush, to reach better cover, after her right knee joint was hit and flash welded in place. That warrior discovered that smashing down brush drew too much attention. The truth of that discovery was evident in the instant enemy reaction. She was fried by a half dozen different beams, both plasma and laser, originating from several points and levels on the structure. The various shooters were cooperating, and reacting extremely fast to any opportunity another shooter created. These were not like mos
t of the opposition Gofdar had encountered on Poldark, or on previous raids to other planets. They were as accurate at long-range shots as the best warriors Gofdar had ever seen, and because of their extremely fast reaction speed, they were more efficient killers than the Krall they faced. These fighters were few, different, and in a class of warrior all their own.
His visor told him he’d lost another thirty-four warriors as they covered only half the distance to the structure. The enemy kept moving from spot to spot on the various upper levels, but he concluded that the total number of shooters there was apparently between fifty or sixty. He’d lost only two hundred forty one warriors versus the nearly ten thousand troops his sensors suggested he had faced all day. Close to six thousand of the enemy force had died before they turned and ran. Thus far, he had no idea if they had killed even a single one of the new defenders in that ferrocrete and metal building. They had suits with superior stealth to his own, because he could catch no signs of ripples from their motions, and it was effective over the full frequency spectrum that his suit was designed to detect. All of this intrigued him greatly.
He could not afford to underestimate their capability against his much larger force. After all, his comparatively small force was capable of seriously affecting the huge human army they were sent to delay. These effective fighters could possibly hamper his warriors from occupying the heights of the ridge above their nest.
As the Krall worked their way closer, they spread out wider, and the left flank, their attention focused mainly on the deadly shooters in the structure, suddenly discovered they were receiving fire from the human cowards that had previously fled. Disdainful of those broken spirited animals, and following their instincts, several hundred warriors moved to wipe them out, or force them to run again.
To their surprise, the accuracy and resilience of those same fighters had suddenly magnified greatly, forcing their attackers to take cover and proceed more cautiously. They showed considerable fire control skill now, shooting and moving frequently. The most disturbing aspect was their sudden greatly improved accuracy. They were making difficult shots through heavy brush, when only a portion of a warrior was exposed from behind their hard cover, yet obscured by underbrush. It was as if they saw the enemy better now, even shooting through obscuring foliage, and suddenly able to aim precisely.
As a result, there were three hands of warriors killed in a few minutes of a reckless rush towards the cowards. There were dozens of warriors that suffered minor foot, knee, elbow or ankle wounds, when a limb was exposed to a line of sight shot. This, despite the appendage being fully concealed visually behind underbrush, and stealthed. Admittedly, every warrior knew that a plasma bolt wouldn’t notice a few bushes as it blazed through to reach its target. Except, how did the previously inept shooters even see the stealthed limbs from their low-level concealed positions at the edge of a rocky creek bed? They suddenly had achieved greater accuracy and vision, it seemed.
Gofdar knew that somehow the efficient fighters up in the human nest were involved. A rabble could not suddenly turn into a more effective fighting force in such a short time. The high performing fighters in that structure were somehow helping direct the several thousand men along the center of the valley floor. If the fighters over by the cliffs were eliminated, those concealed in the creek bed would fall apart, as they had before, making them easy kills. Particularly now that they had no way to retreat.
The bridge they needed to drive over had been destroyed, apparently by those in the structure. Clearly, this had been done to force those fleeing to stay and fight. He was berating himself for his original decision to land all of his ships so far east in the canyons. They’d not known how far the humans had retreated at the time they launched, and Gatlek Pendor would not permit him to wait for new orbital surveillance.
He ordered his octet leaders to pull their warriors away from the central roadway and its defenders ensconced in the small waterway. First, he wanted those four tri-barrel plasma guns silenced, and all of the efficient fighters in that structure killed. Then they would easily sweep those creek defenders away.
****
Spartan, signing off after talking to the commander of the artillery unit located in the adjacent canyon, said, “The artillery barrage will start to land in two minutes, with one minute flight time. It won’t be as heavy and long as we need to hold them back. Using our visor detection capability for spotting clusters of targets will help them, but the Krall always keep moving.”
“Ya take’s whatcha can get.” Reynolds quipped, as he remotely fired his tri-barrel. “Gotcha!” He added, with fierce satisfaction as the three bolts flashed down towards a cluster of boulders, almost a mile away, downing two warriors.
Greeves had been linked to Nabarone’s war room for several minutes. “Major Caldwell says the Shadow fighters have launched. It’s only a single wing, so we won’t have many of them detailed to make strikes out here, and I don’t know when they’ll get here. They are spread thin, trying to support all eight armies. Nabarone is trying to get the navy to commit space planes from their two carriers parked in the outer system. Enemy single ships will be up in force as soon as they realize the nearly invisible Shadows are causing all the new damage they suffer. I hope our aircraft are as good as we expect. I know the Kobani pilots will be.”
Spartan nodded in acknowledgement of this new bit of news. “The artillery captain I spoke to said we should watch the first impacts closely. He had about twenty of the new sabot shells with new armor penetrators. I sent him the coordinates of the largest clusters of enemy I could find. Most of them are located behind five collections of large boulders, moved by the original road building work. He said they didn’t waste the new rounds on the waves of attacks earlier because no one could see the Krall well enough to tell them where the enemy targets were thickest.”
“What’s different about the new shells?” Greeves grunted as his tri-barrel missed the running, dodging Krall he’d spotted. The snicker from Reynolds told him his miss had been noted.
“At between two and six feet above ground, they blast apart a twenty inch high cylinder, containing two hundred tungsten-carbide sabot style slugs, stacked in a circular pattern, ten rings high twenty slugs per ring. Slugs are launched down a short rifled tube by the central blast wave, which destroys the cylinder and tubes behind them, forming added shrapnel. A plastic sheath spins the slugs passing through the rifled tubes, then the plastic sabots fall away as the now spinning, and nearly diamond hard slender slugs tear through nearly anything they hit. He told me they would punch completely through any part of the Krall’s new armor, and that we need to take cover ourselves. These slugs aren’t as dense as the depleted uranium pellets we have been using, but the sharp hardened tips, with spin stabilization and high velocity does the trick.”
“Are these also smart slugs? Self-directing or proximity detonated?”
“Not yet, but that is supposedly coming if these prove effective at penetrating the Krall suits. They’re dumb killers, so we have to keep our heads down and observe with spy bots in case any hit close to us. Up this high, and as far away as we are from the targeted area, I hope we don’t have to worry.”
The distant “whumps” of the mobile batteries firing in the next canyon was heard, announcing to all that the rounds were on their way. Because of the time delay for the sound to arrive on this side, that meant the shells had probably already reached or passed apogee, and were on their way down.
Spartan issued an order on a general push. “Everyone fire on the enemy one time now to pin them in place, and drop flat behind hard cover for incoming dumb rounds. After the first twenty blasts, the dumb rounds are done, and the remainder will be smart rounds, so fire at will after that.”
From each level of the battered, now windowless pastel blue and white colored resort, there was a dazzling spread of red and green lasers faintly seen in the smoky air, and the bright blue-white actinic plasma bolts lancing out towards their targets, none s
triking closer than a mile from the building. The flaming arc of burning brush thus created, served to define the closest the Krall had managed to infiltrate thus far.
Five seconds after they finished firing and dropped flat, the low-level blasts and concussions started, just as the Krall started to rise and move again. The blasts were simultaneously accompanied by a high pitch whining sound, as if thousands of angry bees had been released, often accompanied by a brittle crack when one of the slugs hit and shattered rock. In addition, a few of them hit the decorative pale blue and white ferrocrete of the resort’s outer walls and balconies. Those passed right through six-inch outer walls, the next wall, and sometimes several thinner walls after that, before spin stabilization was lost and they tumbled and stopped with a loud crack, against a final wall.
Reynolds looked up and poked an armored finger into a brand new half-inch hole, only a foot above his head. Then focused his attention on his visor image from his tri-barrel, and picked off three Krall in quick succession that exposed themselves as they sought better cover from the continuing barrage of smart munitions, or had to stand up to knock away thermite bomblets that had attached to joints or helmets. He shot one motionless Krall whose stealth had failed. He was probably already dead from a sabot penetration, but why not be sure?
With part of his attention, he saw Greeves doing the same, and was aware of the spec ops troops now picking off any exposed warrior, and they too shot some that clearly were seriously wounded, based on their slowness or twitching movements. There was no longer a thought of surrender or mercy when fighting the Krall, not from the human side. It had never been considered by the Krall.
Even the men spread out along the creek appeared to be taking their share of shots at the enemy, as the suit AIs of the Kobani armor fed them a target rich environment for almost a minute.
Koban 4: Shattered Worlds Page 26