Mirikami asked Marlyn to work with the Raspani and Torki when she reached Haven, and learn how the combined technology worked. If the Philodor Olt technology could be made to work in the new type chips Cal and Mel had, then any Kobani would have live, instantaneous communications with any other distant Kobani when both were in a Jump Hole.
When Mirikami next Jumped he had intended to continue to K1, but the transit delay presented him with a new opportunity. There was a recent message left floating in Tachyon Space, from Joe Longstreet at Poldark. The contents convinced him to go to Poldark before scouting K1. Joe said a Krall prisoner, one they’d had held for several weeks, had finally proved to be a source of intelligence about K1 that Mirikami should sense first hand, and perhaps pass on to the navy.
On his White Out at Poldark, he placed the Mark in high orbit in stealth mode, and arranged a rendezvous with Nabarone’s shuttle, surprisingly piloted by Longstreet. He’d brought the Krall prisoner up with him. The results of the following interrogation would expand Tet’s original plans, to try to involve the PU Navy in an even greater action.
Letting loose of the drugged Krall’s limp hand, Mirikami admitted it had been a detour well worth his time. “Hothdat here knows the code to safely enter orbit at K1, and the different clan codes required to land at several allied clan domes. She had no idea at the time she was captured that the invasion fleet she was part of was eventually going to strike New Dublin. However, she did know Pendor had intended to Jump to K1 first, even before he lost some of his clanships and equipment. They went to load some of the vast stock piles of equipment that they couldn’t risk stripping from the forces remaining on Poldark.”
He looked back to the motionless blue suited prisoner, and in near flawless low Krall, he said, “I thank you for being so helpful, Harzax Kopandi. As your clan title says, you have measured your enemy, and now he has measured you in return. I will be sure to pay the nest near your clan’s dome on Telda Ka a visit someday. Your clan’s eggs will be carefully measured, as you have measured humans.”
Her present title within her Dorbo clan, Harzax Kopandi, was the same title granted to the now dead Parkoda of Tanga clan, who had also been tasked with learning how well humans could fight. This Krall had mental images of her studies of captured human troopers on Poldark, to determine how their newer human weapons and armor measured up to what the Krall were using. The “test” subjects were inevitably dispatched in the most violent and cruel manner possible. Mirikami felt no sympathy for this ruthless Krall, and when he had the chance, he’d make certain to visit this one’s clan dome on K1, called Telda Ka if you used the Krall’s description of it as Base 1.
She had revealed incidental knowledge of a huge buildup of war material at K1, which was not destined for use by the invasion force that Gatlek Pendor led. Clan rumors suggested there would be another invasion on a Hub world. Apparently, the plan was not yet ready to be announced by Tor Gatrol Kanpardi, to avoid advance political infighting between the major clans for leadership, when the Gatlek for this even larger invasion would be named.
Mirikami pulled at his lip. He needed to get this information to the navy, and convince them of its accuracy and urgency. It might be possible to head off a second new invasion. He’d have to reveal how some of this data was obtained. He could use when and where this particular prisoner was captured, since the navy had participated.
****
Hothdat had been “rescued” by the navy and a spec ops team. She was the commander of a clanship that had been destroyed by the human navy in space above Poldark, during the Krall partial withdrawal. Held upright now only by being strapped to a metal frame, she glared at her interrogators in helpless fury, unable to move her muscles to break free of the flimsy restraints, or to will her own death because of the paralyzing agent administered. A couple of weeks ago she had been minutes from an honorable death, via a plunge into atmosphere as she was falling back towards Poldark. How had she let this happen?
Her armor-clad body had been dumped into space when the clanship she commanded was ruptured and ripped open as it climbed away from Poldark. She, along with many of the warriors she’d carried, and the clanship debris, were destined to form firey streaks in the night sky a day or two after the massive launch of clanships. A last minute daring effort on the part of several humans had preserved her for this interrogation. She cursed her failure to kill them, and after that, her disgrace and inability to end her own life.
Worse, she now knew those three humans were examples of the mystery people that had attacked multiple Krall production worlds. They represented a new type of human warrior, who had somehow become physically superior to her species. They were obviously a minority within their own multitudes on so many worlds, or Krall successes in the war would have been reversed by now. They needed to find where these stronger animals lived, and use their greatest weapons against any worlds where they were found.
The Claw, a navy heavy cruiser in Admiral Foxworthy’s squadron, was assigned to work with Poldark’s Planetary Defense Command the day after the Krall fleet had departed. Their AI had noted multiple Krall warriors adrift in space, many still alive. However, one of them had a different colored armor, visible only because it had its stealth switched off to conserve power. It was blue tinged, which had marked it as at least a translator, and possibly a sub leader or clanship commander. The scans for Krall survivors had been conducted at the request of the PDC, and they were only interested in higher status warriors. The human’s had more luck than expected. She was a ship commander, with moderately high status within powerful Dorbo clan.
The Claw’s report to the PDC was deemed of enough value to capture this Krall, despite the risk of attempting that for any personnel assigned the task. She was clearly conscious and alert as she fell towards Poldark, and had had fired a wrist gun at the large ship when it approached. The rescue/capture was only attempted at General Nabarone’s insistence, and the navy said they didn’t have the means to safely pull a live warrior aboard, or a means to control it without blasting it with a laser or plasma beam. Nabarone then offered to provide a capture team, and the Claw’s captain explained why they had better hurry. The Krall was about an hour from reentry into the atmosphere.
The general told the Claw he’d found a recovery team, and they would be launching in a rush, to perform the operation when there was less than forty-five minutes until the Krall burned up. A shuttle raced up to meet the cruiser in low orbit. More precisely, the cruiser was allowing itself to free fall vertically out of orbit, keeping pace with the probable high status Krall.
Captain Danforth was surprised when she learned it was the general’s personal shuttle sent up, and its pilot asked to park in their main cargo hold. The man talking on frequency said there were speck ops soldiers aboard. Everyone knew that spec ops had an independent command structure from the PU Army, and that the general didn’t have a history of pleasant relations with past commanders of the spec ops units on Poldark. In fact, his relations with the navy hadn’t been stellar for that matter, at least before this past week. Now he seemed to be a golden boy.
Danforth came down from the Bridge to meet the capture team in the hold, where they had rapidly settled the shuttle in a slick bit of pilotage. She and her security chief had needed to suit up and airlock into the hold, wearing soft suits so they wouldn’t need to use valuable time pressurizing and depressurizing the compartment. They didn’t have time to do that if the team was to bring in the live and hostile Krall before it became a red flame streak in the sky.
Using her suit radio, Danforth greeted and accepted the salute of the first person out of the shuttle’s airlock, who was wearing a different type of black and white, form fitting body armor, which the naval officer had never before seen. His face was totally obscured behind his helmet, which instead of a clear faceplate had odd blue glowing lights on protrusions on the front. He realized she had no idea who she was meeting. The other two figures that came behind the first had
the same unusual armor.
“Welcome aboard, uh…” she left the name hanging, since in the rush of the initial communications and hurried rendezvous, no names had been exchanged before the shuttle entered the open hold’s hatch.
The lead figure saluted crisply, and said, “I’m Captain Longstreet Mam, of Special Operations. Thank you for your prompt response. Sorry to rush you Mam, but how much time do we have left?”
Danforth returned the salute and answered the question. “Eighteen to twenty minutes, captain, depending on how high the atmosphere extends just below us today. On the night side as we are, it should be cooler and a bit lower. We’re moving down, parallel to the Krall’s freefall, but we rotated to place it on the other side of the ship from this hatch. It took several shots at us with a wrist gun, so we pointed the open hold away from it while you docked.” She looked at them dubiously.
“Excuse me Captain Longstreet, but how do you three intend to capture and subdue a live and armed Krall wearing their newest powered armor? I certainly don't want it getting loose aboard my ship. Are the three of you are all that General Nabarone could send? My Chief here is the entire security force on my largely automated ship, he isn’t normally even armed with the hand gun he has now, and he definitely is not prepared to face up to a Krall warrior with you, nor would I permit him to try.”
The ship’s security man hadn’t even placed his pistol belt outside his soft suit, and the bulge of the inaccessible weapon showed under the fabric at his right hip.
The skepticism Danforth had expressed when her superior ordered her to comply with the general’s request had returned now, when she realized the team appeared to contain only these three men. If they were spec ops, all of them would be males. There had to be more people inside, or some weapons, or a containment net or cage, since these men carried nothing like those items that she could see.
Longstreet reassured her. “Mam, we were the only spec ops troops that were present near the General’s command bunker when your report arrived. We can definitely handle this operation ourselves. However, I do ask that you and your security chief go back inside the pressure hull, and simply rotate the ship to where we can see our target. Out here you’ll both be targets in your soft suits, and someone we can’t properly protect.”
Trying to look into the windscreen and side ports of the shuttle, Danforth still couldn’t believe only three unarmed men had come to take on an armed Krall in powered armor. “You don’t appear to have a pilot. Did one of you fly the general’s personal shuttle? I wasn’t aware your training was so, uh…, versatile.” She wondered if there were more men inside that were staying out of sight.
“Mam, we all three are qualified shuttle pilots, although I flew here. I’m sorry Mam, but we do need to hurry. I don't wish to be rude or insistent. This is your ship Mam. However, I will have to explain to General Nabarone and Admiral Foxworthy why my team let this potential source of intelligence burn up, Mam, if we don’t move fast.” He was as polite as he could make it, but time was running out so he made his point by dropping names.
“Right you are, captain.” Danforth keyed the channel to her first officer on the Bridge and ordered her to rotate the ship, to face the open hold towards the Krall. As she prepared to return a salute she expected to receive from Longstreet, she realized that the three spec ops had already turned and rushed to the open hatch sides, ready to do whatever they thought it was they could do.
She touched the shoulder of her subordinate. “Let’s get inside Chief. Before we find ourselves with bullet holes in these soft suits.”
They hurriedly cycled through the airlock, and once inside they were unable to see much through the two small observation portholes of the double hatches. She’d have to get to the Bridge if she wanted to see what they did, using camera feeds. If these three men got themselves killed, or cast off into space well away from the ship, they’d probably burn up with the Krall. She locked and dogged the airlock hatch from the inside, in case the Krall did get free in the hold. At least it wouldn’t get inside the ship.
As she rode up in the lift with her security chief, she suddenly thought of some questions. “Chief Grant, did you see any ropes on them, jet packs, or weapons?”
“No Mam. I did not.”
“How the hell are they going to get out to the Krall, and then bring it back if it doesn’t want to come? How will they get back here in any case without any lines connected to the ship?”
The chief had no answer to what seemed to be rhetorical questions, and ground pounder problems were not his problems. Their captain sounded confident, so he’d let them resolve the matter on their own.
Longstreet was discussing the exact same issue with his other team members, on an encrypted tactical frequency, with Sergeant First Class Bill Crager, and Corporal Eddie Condor.
“Hey, Top, Big Bird, you ready for this stunt?” He asked them.
Crager replied first by right of rank. “Sir, I’d prefer you not call me Top anymore. I’m not going back to run a camp on Heavyside. Just plain Sarge, Bill, or Crager will do. This propulsion trick worked fine in practice, when we tested the new armor, but we didn’t have a live Krall to wrestle with while floating over Heavyside, and we didn’t have a short time limit to finish the test.”
“Well, just plain Sarge, we’ll have to adjust.” Technically, Longstreet and Condor had been reported as missing and presumed dead for the last year, and only Crager was still active duty in speck ops. He’d just happened to be at the command bunker when this mission arose and at least three Kobani were needed.
“Big Bird, are you ready?”
Condor said, “Sir, I told my suit to set the Trap field as Sarge told me, and I cut power to weapons and stealth, but inside the artificial gravity of the hold here I can’t feel any thrust at all. I don't like not having power for my weapons either. The Claw’s captain said that this Krall has a wrist gun, but what if it has a better weapon it didn’t use earlier?”
Longstreet did an exaggerated shrug, so it would be seen by the movement of his armor’s shoulders. “Life’s a bitch, and then you die. If it had better weapons, I think it would have used them, and the captain would have told us if they saw any. I also should have asked her to kill the gravity here in the hold, since I’m sure they can do that. Except we didn’t anchor or tie down the shuttle, and I didn’t even think to activate the magnetic skids to hold it to the deck. I can fly the damn things, but I’m not really a space swabbie. I didn’t think of those details when the internal gravity took hold.
“Anyway, when we kick off and leave the ship, we’ll quickly be in free fall and out of artificial gravity influence. Our thrust will be effective then. Remember, you can’t kick off as hard as it feels like you need to, based on your present weight, and we don’t want to hit that Krall moving too damn fast. The Trap fields and inertial forces we can control are very weak. It’s only a fraction of a pound of continuous thrust, which can build up to a considerable velocity over time, but time is something we don’t have a lot of today.”
He rehashed what they had discussed on the way to orbit, when the details of this rush job was actually worked out. They were using a feature of their Tachyon powered suits for gravity and inertial control. A miniature application of a Jump ship’s Normal Space drive. A strap-on jet pack would have done the job perfectly and faster, if they’d had time to hunt for some of them at a spaceport. They only had the general’s shuttle immediately available to them at the command center, in the forty-three minutes they started with, which didn’t carry jet packs of course. It didn’t even have any lines aboard.
They checked, and learned the jet propulsion packs were also not routinely carried on the Poldark based heavy cruisers that provided orbital protection here. They had to do this recovery by the seat of their pants. Almost literally. The armored suit’s weak tachyon Trap fields were generated by a unit located close to where their butts were, and built into their armor.
These devices produced a
mple weapons and stealth system power by trapping low energy tachyons to generate the electrical current and magnetic fields needed to power their energy beams, radios, and stealth systems. However, gravity was an immensely weaker force than electromagnetism. Once out of reach of the magnetic ship hull, and beyond its local artificial gravity field, their full power, when diverted to producing a reactionless inertial force effect, would only enable them to propel themselves gently in free fall.
Longstreet added one last reminder, as the star field outside slowed its rotation and the slowly tumbling and free falling Krall came into sight. “We jump out, grapple with and immobilize the Krall as we decided, then point our asses away from the ship to let the three of us overcome the outward momentum of our combined mass, and start thrusting gently back towards this hold.
“The Krall’s mass will slow us some when we hit it, but we will then all be moving slowly away from the cruiser. We have to stop that motion and start back, so conserve your power for the return push, and avoid weapons use if possible. We don’t need a dead Krall to interrogate.
“If it looks like we can’t make it back in time with the prisoner, I’ll give the order to kick off from the Krall, using its inertial mass to help get us back here faster. Then we wave a fond farewell as it burns up, and we look stupid and ineffective to the swabbies.”
Naturally, they had fast Kobani mental processes, and each man was using their senses and range finders to estimate the optimum time, from each of their positions at three sides of the open hatch, to initiate their push off to intercept the Krall without bumping and glancing off each other on the way. Except for the slow tumble the warrior had initiated when it had previously fired its projectile wrist gun, it was now keeping pace exactly with the free falling cruiser. The rocket-propelled caseless ammunition did have some slight back reaction on the gun barrel, triggering a slow spin. The Krall, accepting its fate, had not bothered to counter the slow roll.
Koban 4: Shattered Worlds Page 37