Animal life or wind blowing the trees would represent a diffuse return if its motion were detected, and because there was no moving mechanical antenna involved, the Krall computer could instantly return a synthetic aperture beam to scan any signal return in more detail. At least until a warrior monitoring the alerts was convinced it was harmless, or that it required longer observation. There were eight conventional beam-scanning antennas built into the hull and spaced around the bow of a clanship, and they could be used to maintain continuous coverage of a small area, where radar returns of interest were detected. This permitted the wide area scan to resume searching for other potential moving threats.
Such ground level scans had passed over their path several times, initially when they were much deeper in the trees. Once they picked up a deer-like pair of animals, which were startled when a twig snapped from a footstep. The animal’s motion as they ran away from the sound was directly towards the dome, and a random scan picked them up. Afterwards, a dedicated single beam antenna took over monitoring them as the animals turned away from the tarmac and ran in an arc around the open ground. These various radar signals were detected by the Kobani sensors, and the origin of the signals and specifics of the radiation was displayed and interpreted for them on their helmet displays.
So long as they remained stealthed, none of the Kobani or that box would be detected by that higher frequency radar. Mirikami was aware, however, that if the seven of them frightened too many native creatures into fleeing, that their collective motions would form a pattern that could draw too much attention to their approach. If that happened, all Mirikami needed to do was stop. The others were keyed on him and they too would stop.
Giving a Krall on duty an advanced warning of them via disturbing native animals wasn’t as likely to happen as first feared, due to the Krall’s preoccupation of killing anything sizable, either for sheer pleasure, or sometimes for food. Low status Krall flunkies that were excluded from clan meetings often roamed these woods in boredom, killing for entertainment. Most local animals knew to avoid the region.
As the seven cleared the trees, they continued over the tarmac, the soles of their armored feet forming into a softer, noise absorbing surface. Mirikami used his zoom and heat sensing systems to sight traces of four Krall moving on the tarmac between the parked clanships on this side of the dome. One was going towards the dome, and of the three moving away, one of them followed a course that was only a bit off to the left of where he paused with the team under a clanship.
He extended an arm, palm held down, in an obvious Mind Tap ring invitation. They were avoiding any transmission, encrypted or not, to avoid drawing attention to their presence. They had heard a number of Krall transmissions, which were all encrypted and unintelligible. Mirikami didn’t know if this was because of mutual distrust in this political clan leader gathering, or they had learned that humans could have spy bots listening to unguarded communications.
He explained what his plan was now with respect to the closest Krall, and they split apart and followed his lead, staying several steps back. Mirikami detached the tiny little hand held railgun from his waist clip, the extendable lanyard providing power and keeping the gun’s stealth coating functioning.
He waited next to a landing jack ahead of the path the Krall was following, who moved at an oddly slow pace for most warriors. He could manually trigger the gun if he wished, but he preferred to trigger the firing signal mentally for a single round, when it was time. There was no alternate projectile type to select from tonight. He’d only loaded one type, and expected to use only one shot.
When the warrior passed fifty feet away, he sighted for less than a second on the Krall’s neck, where his IR system revealed the warmth of an artery below the scaly tough skin, and fired. The round was utterly silent when it left the rail gun, at a far lower velocity than the maximum possible. The needle struck softly and penetrated, and as designed, the heat and mechanical stress of even a low velocity impact liquefied the short, thin projectile. Kobani hearing had been used to test these new needle hand guns, and they made no noise a Krall, or a Kobani for that matter, could hear.
The Krall swiped at the spot where it was struck, and whirled around in obvious irritation. After a glare all around, it resumed its original track, only at a faster normal pace now. Good, that would increase blood flow to his brain. All they needed to do was follow for ten more seconds, until the paralyzing agent started to take effect.
When the Krall nearly ran into a landing strut of the next clanship, Mirikami knew they had him. It sat down, obviously disoriented, and leaned forward. Walking up to him, he crouched and looked directly into its face. The red pits were blazing against the black orb that held them. The mind was active, and the eyes were able to move, but not the head. The warrior appeared to be looking right through Mirikami, which in a sense he was, since the background scene was routed faithfully around the stealthed armor.
Standing up, Mirikami pushed with one index finger between the Krall’s eyes, and shoved it over onto its back. As he did this, Mirikami received a dim flash of the Krall’s thoughts. He was thinking that if he failed to complete this task for his clan leader that he would lose status. He wasn’t fearful for his life, only his position within his clan.
The six TG1’s approached, and Drake and Tara set the cargo box down beside the limp Krall, whose eyes were rolling around in agitation.
Mirikami looked around for any possible visual observers, and knew that directly under this clanship no random radar signal could reflect out from under here either. He released the catch on the box lid and opened it wide. The inside wasn’t coated for stealth, and when opened it made a hole in space above the tarmac with rectangular sides only seen on the insides. Then Drake and Tara, one at the shoulders, one at the taloned feet, lifted the Krall to position him over the hole in space and lowered him inside. Mirikami closed and fastened the lid, which cut off what outside visible light the Krall could receive.
Having tested the inside of the closed box himself, Mirikami knew outside sound would reach the warrior. He mentally toggled his external speaker, leaned over the box and said softly, in Standard, “I’m afraid your clan leader will have to walk to the council to vote.”
Then, using a high frequency audio module built into his suit, said in the high Krall language, “You can say goodbye to your cloaca, because it belongs to humanity now.” The words were shifted from the human speech range into the ultrasonic range of high Krall.
When he stepped back, switching off his speaker, the four kids that came empty handed each clipped their power chords to the side of the long cargo box to power its stealth coating, allowing Drake and Tara to disconnect. Tara took a position ten feet in front of the box, with Drake taking the tail end Charlie spot, while the four others grasped the side grips of the box and lifted. They followed Mirikami back to the Mark at a fast trot.
Dillon quickly opened a hatch for them when he saw their returning suit icons on screen. There wasn’t enough time to interrogate the prisoner right now, so they stowed the paralyzed prisoner safely in a locked compartment, keeping him under continuous watch.
While they were gone, Dillon reported there had been no problem calls from any of the scout teams, which would have broken radio silence if made. They had left several stealthed relay satellites in low orbit, just in case any of their teams had called for an emergency extraction.
The Mark, lifting silently on gravity control of their Normal Space drive, flew away from the council dome, staying low and slow, until over the horizon. Then they climbed slightly and retraced their original drop-off route to start recovering teams in the order they had been dispatched.
Mirikami stayed below to speak with the teams as they arrived, and to confirm they had all managed to return less heavily loaded down than when they left. They only needed to wait briefly for three of the teams to make a delayed rendezvous, and then the Mark rose cautiously to low orbit from over another ocean, avoiding any atmo
spheric turbulence. At two hundred miles, they caught a Jump Tachyon, and headed for Poldark.
The Jump required almost a week. Mirikami and Dillon shared some quality time with Kartok, who proved to be a fountain of news. Some good news, with an undercurrent of potentially very bad news.
****
“Henry, we need to think about this before we push the navy very hard to do this. I think it’ll be better to let them come to the decision on their own. You know the probable repercussions if we hit the Krall so hard. They’ll hit back, and they show no mercy or restraint.” Mirikami wanted to hold Nabarone’s enthusiasm down a bit. The general wanted the navy to mount an attack on K1 as soon as possible.
“Pah! The navy has acted like pantywaists for so long they forgot how to be aggressive. If we don’t present your evidence to the president, the navy might sit on it until another invasion fleet launches. We don’t know where this invasion is supposed to go either. Only that it will be a Hub world. We need to prevent it from even lifting off this time.”
“Henry, the timing needs to be carefully done. If we strike the stockpiles of material sitting on the surface of K1 now, that will only delay another invasion, probably by less than a year. The Krall would ramp up production of those easier to replace weapon systems at dozens of domes on dozens of planets. Because we can’t use nukes, we have to destroy the underground factories from the inside, and only our Kobani forces can do that. There aren’t enough of us yet, and they are guarding the factories better now.
“Furthermore, they’ll never cluster supplies so foolishly close together and out in the open again. After one sample of what we will do, they’ll disperse and hide their stockpiles and protect them better. It’s only because no one has ever attacked them like this that we have this one time opportunity.”
He asked Nabarone a string of leading questions, forcing him to think deeper than eagerly hitting them right now. “How will the Krall move all of that equipment? How did they do it here? When is the best time to hit them? That’s what you have to sell to the navy.”
Sighing, Nabarone conceded the point. “You’re right. We have to let them land clanships and start loading. We have to hit them with a mass White Out, Jumping from stars near K1, to prevent their detecting what’s coming, and hit them as they lift off.”
It was hard for him to let go of his ground command instincts. To deny the enemy weapons that could be used to pound another planet as they had done to his home planet.
“Damn! All that gear is so exposed in those images. Such tempting undefended targets, with the bulk of the clanships that could guard it located far from K1. That’s more equipment than was initially used against us on Poldark, and I knew they were coming here next, after Bollovstic fell. I asked the navy to bomb them there before they came here, and they did nothing.”
Mirikami’s point was that the best time to strike would be when thousands of clanships were loading on K1 or lifting in atmosphere. At a known time and place, where the navy had a chance to destroy as many clanships as possible, as well as the supplies. If his luck held, and the Krall stayed as unsuspecting of human tricks as usual, at least until they experienced a new one, Mirikami might cause as much damage as did the navy.
They went to talk to Admiral Bledso, who had recently returned to Poldark from Earth, where she had successfully been lobbying for more purchases of technology from the mysterious Rimmer faction, who had aliens helping them.
The one detail Mirikami preferred to leave out of the briefing was what the Krall joint clan council meeting was discussing. Kartok’s mind held the information that a new Tor Gatrol was about to be appointed. He personally had heard proposals from four candidates to use an Olt’kitapi ship. One was to attack a planet in an empty star system in Human Space, as a demonstration of Krall capability, causing no deaths and preserving the ship for later use. Two other more vengeful options were to do it to an inhabited human planet. A third option was to conduct massive raids on multiple cities on Hub worlds, leaving before the humans could bring in heavy reinforcements.
The only drawback, from a Krall’s viewpoint, of destroying a planet in an uninhabited system wasn’t related to mercy. It was the possibility that it might still be a onetime use of that ship this way, if they didn’t follow up and make constructive use of the material created. The ships were never intended to do this type work without a specific beneficial goal in mind.
In the past, the ancient Artificial Intelligences operating the ships had refused to obey future orders from the Krall or rather their orders as relayed through the soft Krall, if the expected results were contrary to the ship’s proper use. The Krall didn’t know exactly what the ships expected be done with the aftermath, since the Olt’kitapi never completed the work the ships were designed to do. The ships never obeyed another soft Krall’s command after that if they found the use, or requested use to be immoral or even highly improper and wasteful.
The older versions of the original Krall genotype referred to themselves as Krall’kitapi. They were initially given that suffix to indicate disparagment by the standard Krall, thus connecting them to the permanent changes to their minds they had allowed the Olt’kitapi to make. However, the soft Krall believed Krall’tapi was a description they should be proud to bear, because they had ceased to be trapped forever in the role of barbarians. Instead, they seemed to be imprisoned forever, by those same barbarians.
In all of those previous weaponized uses for the ships, the Krall had used their capability to kill enemies on inhabited worlds, to impose their demands on their prey to obey the limits the Krall set on warfare. Krall opponents were told to use no weapons of mass destruction, never to use radiation or biological weapons that would mutate Krall genetics, and told to fight predominately ground wars, which provided for the best warrior selectivity.
A follow up threat was always made, that they would destroy even more of the enemy worlds. That threat was executed on occasion, despite the loss of the irreplaceable ship each time. The ship had to be duped into doing what it believed was a beneficial task.
The Krall’s opponents had no way of knowing how limited these weapons were. A home world being lost was normally enough, and a second heavily populated one destroyed had proven to be more than enough of an object lesson. Now it appeared to be the turn for humanity to learn this lesson.
However, they didn’t know if only a demonstration of destructive ability, used as a threat against an enemy, might also trigger the ship to cease to obey. It was possible that even a demonstration could cost them a precious weapon, and humanity still might not react as expected. This worthy prey was proving more unpredictable than any other they had fought. The large number of human worlds, and their vast population could make the lesson more difficult to drive home. A single ship, or even two or three might have to be sacrificed, and doing so on an empty world even once had seemed wasteful to the Joint Council.
However, Mirikami was sure one of the proposed options was apparently going to happen, no matter who was chosen as the new War Leader. Telour was his greatest concern, because he had proven his cunning in the past, and was willing to try risky tactics to advance his ambitions. He suspected the number two leader’s involvement in Kanpardi’s unusual battlefield death. A shuttle in flight, designed to survive impacts of debris from exploding spacecraft wasn’t an easy thing to destroy with a single artillery shell.
Mirikami, when he learned that Telour was a top candidate for war leader, he felt confident that his ambition and political shrewdness would lead him to be selected. Kartok didn’t have high enough status to know exactly how the Olt’kitapi ships did what they did, or how many remained operational. There were rumored to be few of the ancient ships remaining, and Kanpardi had refused to use one of them, in favor of punishing humanity via two new planetary invasions. That strategy was about to change, no matter who became the new war leader.
The strike against K1 shouldn’t take place prematurely, before the greatest damage could
be done to the Krall as they clustered to launch heavily loaded and slower clanships. However, it couldn’t wait until a new Tor Gatrol had ordered a human world destroyed. After that, with the Rhama disaster as a predictive guide, the politicians from the politically dominate Hub worlds would again capitulate to Krall threats and demands. The war would continue exactly as the Krall wanted, and eventually humanity would grow so weakened they wouldn’t have the means or the will to fight effectively.
No matter what the cost, Mirikami wasn’t going to follow that course of appeasement. That path led to the eventual eradication of civilization in Human Space, and possibly human extinction. A settled world was probably targeted for destruction, no matter what anyone did anyway.
****
“Admiral Bledso, you surely don’t believe the Krall just like having these huge stockpiles of weapons merely as property for show, do you?” Mirikami was exasperated at Bledso’s previous comment, suggesting that the massive amounts of war material on K1 could be a case of individual clans hoarding supplies and displaying their status.
He reminded her of what he knew she must already know. “For over twenty years we’ve seen that the hallmark of every Krall warrior is their desire to be a great fighter, to earn high status as a warrior and leader, to continue their personal bloodline with an equally high status mate, and to earn mention by name and clan in the long history of their advancement along their Great Path. Property, as such, has no value to them, and weapons that are not being used in battle are wasted. I know that they intend to use this material in another invasion, and soon. They don’t procrastinate like we humans do.”
As some over cautious admirals do, he thought.
She used his nominal rank in her reply, rather than his nickname of Tet as she had done previously, a pointed reminder of his lesser paramilitary position, relative to her own.
Koban 4: Shattered Worlds Page 43