The Mark, receiving no challenge or calls, continued its orbit. In thirty minutes, a fourth dome, on what proved to be the largest continent came into view. It was a coastal location, and was the size of Hub City, the largest dome on Koban, and capable of housing twenty thousand Krall without any crowding. It also probably meant that there was a Torki lodge nearby, and a Prada village in the local forest and an underground manufacturing center below the dome.
The most interesting and exciting observation was the twenty-six clanships parked on the mile wide tarmac ring around the big dome. That was a bonanza of ships, if unwatched and unguarded. They made several orbits to observe for a time.
Finally, Mirikami decided he didn’t want to make another orbit if he didn’t need to do so. “Frank, you’ve seen the main assemblage of ships. The dozen we want are there, and we have crews to fly them. There hasn’t been a launch or landing of a clanship on the entire planet since we entered orbit two hours ago. Jakob reports intensive training activity in camps on all four continents, located within a hundred miles of each of the four domes. It appears the Torki and Prada predictions of extensive novice training were accurate.
“The choice of where to get the ships is obvious, Frank. My question to you is do you want me to shuttle you and the flight crews over from a remote location, or land near the dome and you walk across the ramp?”
“My men and the forty-five crew members would require five or six round trips total, divided between your two shuttles. That would increase the chance of being noticed anyway with so much ground activity. The big novice training camp is only ten miles from the main dome, and they have octet level activity spread all around the area. The novices might not be suspicious, but their trainers could be. Even if armed with only pistols and plasma rifles, there has to be ten thousand trigger happy, young warrior hopefuls running around, with an equal number of trainers.” The decision was obvious.
“Take us down to the dome. Right in the middle of the hornet’s nest.”
“I’ll set down in the center of a cluster of clanships, and only open the portal on the side away from the dome, with the ramp left retracted. They probably won’t question why no one got out if they don’t see a door open. Your people will have to clear multiple ships with just your five two-man teams. I’m assuming you and Joe are on a team?”
“We’ll be paired with one of the other men, not with each other, in case one of our two leadership teams went down. But yes, we get to work a ship or two ourselves. Ideally we won’t fire a shot.”
The Mark twisted to drop down from orbit, using power as a Krall commander might do, rather than follow a more energy efficient slow descent using atmospheric drag. The dome came into view on the screen as an icon, from around the curve of the planet. They soon flipped to a tail first approach and powered their way down in a typical waste of fuel most Krall pilots employed.
At this low level of acceleration, only four g’s, Trakenburg unstrapped and went below, to join his men and the flight crews on the lowest deck. When he trotted down the last flight of stairs, Joe handed him a plasma rifle, which he attached to the power and targeting umbilical cord. On his command, everyone in the hold activated their armor’s stealth mode, and all of the men going outside rippled into invisibility, including the ten rifles the spec ops carried.
Then Joe Longstreet’s disembodied voice on speaker called out, “You six gawkers down here with us either need to climb up a level, or activate your stealth! Even if they can’t see us when the portal opens, you’ll stand out like sore thumbs. You can’t plan to stay hidden behind one of the Dragons the whole time. Pass the word. So long as a portal is open, nobody moves down here unless stealthed.”
Suddenly, the hold looked largely empty, except for some cases stacked to the sides and strapped down to deck anchor points, and the four equally secured one-man Dragons they brought for the raid on CS1. Joe’s voice returned. “If we call for any of those cases to be carried out, don’t forget to plug your umbilical into them before you move them, to make them invisible.”
Mirikami’s voice came to the entire ship’s complement. “One mile up. I’m sending everyone a feed from the scene outside, channel two. I’ll keep that channel visual active after landing, looking in the same direction of portal three, which is the one you will be opening for the exit. That one faces away from the dome.”
There was a sound of the landing jacks absorbing the ship’s weight as the thrusters were cut, and their weight cut to .85 g’s in the lighter gravity.
Trakenburg stepped to portal three, and looked around the hold before pressing the codded keys. He saw the ghostly images of every suit of armor on his visor, with a designator that could provide specifics on each person if he thought about their icon. He pressed the four-digit combination, which they kept simple, but different from what the Krall typically used. The Torki had ensured that keypads on human ships wouldn’t work for a Krall. Quantum encryption had favored them long enough.
The heavy door whisked up in its usual manner, revealing a pale pink sky with the red sun hidden around the curve of the hull. The nine clanships in view had a ruddy pallor from the reflected light, and all seemed closed and deserted. There were no Krall in sight, and less than a quarter of a mile away was pale orange-red grass at the edge of the tarmac, with red and orange leaves on clumps of shrubbery sprinkled around. Despite appearing to be the advent of sunset, here it was actually early morning, with the local sun still low on the horizon.
The ten spec ops jumped lightly the fifteen feet to the ground in pairs, each man pivoting to cover the side away from his partner. They left their plasma rifles hanging from the straps that supported them in front, and used their helmet target designators to look for threats and zoom in on anything of interest. The flight crews would stay in the hold until cleared to disembark.
Trakenburg quickly designated a team for the closest five ships that his range finder picked out. He and Sergeant Jenkins went to the left-most ship of the five, as the other pairs headed for their assigned targets.
Longstreet and his team partner, Private Blitman, went towards the far right designated clanship. As they cleared the bulk of the Mark and a landing jack, the dome could be seen a half mile away. The sun was just barely above its top, with the Mark almost within the dome’s shadow. There were lights on for most levels of the dome, which were a lighter color than the ambient solar light. The Krall preferred a slight rose tint to their light, but this sun was apparently dimmer and a bit redder than that.
Resisting the temptation to crouch as he trotted, Longstreet reveled in the freedom this armor gave them to march right into the enemy’s stronghold. He saw that his invisibility extended to not creating a shadow. The incoming light from one side was redirected or reproduced on the other side. He wasn’t sure which term was right. Nevertheless, it resulted in no detectable shadows.
He glanced left to see that Blitman was crouching low, as he also maintained his head on a swivel, covering his side of the approach to the designated ship. He briefly considered using their secure tight-beam lasercom system to ask him why an invisible ghost would crouch low to make a smaller target.
Instead, he reached over to place fingertips on his shoulder and sent a mental Tap image of Blitman standing vertical and more comfortable, having a higher viewpoint, and a larger field of view when his head had a wider angle in which to turn.
He sensed the man’s slight embarrassment in his return thought, as he assumed an upright posture. “Sir, it’s hard to ignore the work habits that got my ass kicked when I forgot them in training.”
His hand still on the shoulder, Longstreet thought back, “They still aren’t bad work habits, but we need to be able to flex to use what our new capabilities give us. I personally feel as exposed as you did, but I believe I have a small but definite improvement in scanning the area with my head held higher, and no shoulder to block as much of my side peripheral vision.”
“Yes Sir. I don’t see anythin�
�” The thought cut off as Longstreet removed his hand, as a deliberate act, to see if it was noted. It was.
Without missing a beat, Blitman finished by lasercom, “Don’t see anything moving but our people, and the orange grass waving in the breeze.”
Also switching to lasercom with a thought to his suit, Longstreet said, “When we reach the ship, you jump up and open the portal, I’ll be right behind to move through the door as it lifts. Don’t overshoot and splat on the wall.”
The latter comment was a flash of humor, because Blitman was wearing a Booster Suit under his armor. The running joke was that the users wouldn’t judge their own strength properly, and over react.
Longstreet allowed Blitman to gain a step and a half on him by the time he leaped to the left side portal keypad. As preplanned, they had circled around the clanship to use a portal facing away from the dome. As light on his feet as a high leaping dancer, the private reached out to press the standard keys to open the portal even before his suit’s toes touched the narrow rim at the base.
Longstreet, now also airborne, ducked slightly as he passed under the rising door panel, the timing seeming in slow motion to his senses now. His eyes adapted to the darker interior in less than a second as he stepped into the hold. His ripper vision, fed the full spectrum of light his new eyesight was capable of using. He saw the outlines of equipment in the dark hold of empty Krall armor hanging on supports around the central thruster shaft, and storage cases stacked against the walls. No movement was detected, and he and Blitman, both looking up now, split to reach the base of a set of stairs on each side of the portal.
They each promptly jumped to the next level, performing the flip and ceiling rebound, to land with hardly a sound on the soft flexible soles of the armor. They could clearly see each other, by the ghost image and designator on their visors, and the area had ambient light from the open stairwells. Some residual heat permeated the ship, but it was evenly distributed, showing no signs of warm spots from recent footsteps or any activity where life would have made one spot significantly warmer than any other spot. It was at thermal equilibrium, a strong indication the ship had not been occupied for days.
Longstreet made the hand gesture Blitman was expecting. Make a rapid ascent to the top, performing cursory checks as they passed through each deck on the way there. They found themselves standing on the empty command deck in under a minute. Longstreet sent the simple double click pulse signal on the frequency assigned to his first flight crew, waiting at the Mark of Koban. The double click in reply told him and Blitman they were on their way.
Longstreet activated a console and the external view screens to show them what resembled a glade of fat, red icons for clanships around them, and his visor saw the ghostly image of three forms rushing towards this ship. He saw two other crews on their way to two different ships. They were on schedule, and he and Blitman needed to get down quickly on the same assigned stairs, so they would not run into the three people rushing on their way up different stairs.
It was only as he was headed down that Longstreet questioned how he had seen the ghost images of the flight crews through the ship’s screens, using his helmet visor. He understood how he might see them directly from his own helmet, with the ID feature activated. However, his view from the command deck was second hand, relayed through the ship’s viewports. That suggested there was some information about the stealthed suits passed through those viewports that his helmet visor detected and displayed. The implication was that some sort of a signal was also picked up and repeated through the view screens. He’d have to make sure that information reached Mirikami and the others, and some of the Torki.
In thirty minutes, they had flight crews on the command decks, or quickly ascending there, on ten of the twelve clanships they had selected. These were the closest ones to the Mark. The last two spec ops teams were about to enter the final two clanships as their new flight crews were already running across the tarmac from the Mark, even before the ships were declared unoccupied. The empty status of the first ten seemed a forgone conclusion for all of them.
Trakenburg and Longstreet had saved those final two ships for their own teams, as their right to capture, and the other three pairs of spec ops men had returned to the Mark, to perform a secondary task that Mirikami had requested of them.
It was during the occupation of the last two ships that Mirikami suddenly broke radio silence and made a transmission, encrypted of course, but a flag to any Krall that intercepted it that someone was transmitting on their ramp, and didn’t want to be understood. It also wasn’t on a frequency that the Maldo clan generally used in raids.
“There are a large number of Krall coming in fast on foot from the woods, and some are now on the tarmac. They stayed concealed behind other ships from the Mark’s line of sight as they approached. They obviously knew we were here from our landing, but probably didn’t see anyone moving around and didn’t react at first. Not until they saw the portals open and close on their ships. We expected any attack to come from the dome, so they got close before Jakob spotted shadows moving under the bases of ships on the tarmac.
“Button up your ships, but remember, they can manually operate your portal keypads. One or two of each flight crew needs to guard the doors on the bottom deck until you can lift. I think most of you should be ready to go. Launch the instant you can. The Mark’s doors have been recoded and are safe from entry, and we have the most defenders. I’ll wait until all of you have launched.”
Over the next minutes, Mirikami continued to urge every ship to launch as soon as possible. Eight of them responded within thirty or forty seconds, the exhaust blasts burning and vaporizing the warriors that had rushed towards their bases. Warriors actually made it inside four of the ships, two of which had previously closed their portals when the spec ops team had left. The lead warriors manually reopened a portal, and they and a few others jumped inside as quickly as they could get close enough. There was a belated response from the dome now, with trucks loaded with warriors streaming from the closest two entrances.
Two of the ships the crews had taken possession of had only the flight crews on them, and managed to get airborne with only a few warriors inside. Per the flight crews after they lifted, the airtight doors shut and kept the Krall below the critical deck levels, where the thruster engines were located, and far below the Jump Drives. They would be able to Jump to the nearby rendezvous system, only a half day away, where those Krall could be rooted out.
The final two ships were in more imminent danger. Longstreet’s third ship take-over was farther from the dome, which after hearing Mirikami’s warning, assumed that probably placed them closer to the Krall attacking on foot. He and Blitman were less than half way back down to the base, so he called up to the woman that was the leader of the flight crew, Tabora Saldivar. “Tabora, close the portal now and launch with us as soon as you can. We’ll guard the lower decks.”
There was a brief pause, “OK, Joe. I just activated a console and…, I found the portal controls. I closed it.”
“Good, we’ll try to keep them closed.” However, even as he said this, he heard screams of rage from more than one indignant Krall somewhere below him, already inside.
Staying on that same frequency, he spoke to Blitman, knowing the flight crew would also hear. “Blit, I hear warriors already inside, and they can manually override the command deck to open the portals. We’ll continue down. You take deck three, and I’ll drop to deck two. Try to kill any that can get past me, and Tabor’s two extra guys can take any out that slip past you.”
He had only reached deck four when he caught motion at a stairwell a quarter of the way around that deck. He used one of the trigger thoughts he’d worked out for his suit. Red, 10, shoot.
A full-power, red laser lanced out and burned through the face of the Krall looking around as it ran up the other stairwell. He saw a blue flash from the far side, where Blit was descending, and knew he had fired a plasma pulse, from suit or rifle
he couldn’t tell.
Another head appeared over the deck at the same stairwell he’d just fired on, which was not a smart move for a Krall warrior to make. It also was left a smoking ruin as something about those warriors registered in his mind, and how easy the two kills were. Then he heard a high-pitched sound from directly below him, and he moved aside just as a pulse bolt came up and singed his suit. It had to have been a blind shot as he heard the rifle’s power pack activate, but the choice of which stairwell to fire a bolt up would have been determined by the assumed origin of the two lasers shots he’d just made. He needed to move away from that stairwell for a moment.
He jumped to the side and removed the sling and umbilical from his plasma rifle. He activated the power pack as he set the now visible rifle down and stepped away. He heard the faint ultrasonic whine as it came online, using his wolfbat hearing. He also heard the Krall below order a warrior to look over the deck at another stairwell. Just as he anticipated, a head popped up at a different stairwell, but he didn’t fire at that head. Instead, he thought blue, 10, shoot, as he put his target designator on the edge of the stairs next to him.
A warrior with a rifle surged into view, ready to kill whoever had shot at that other warrior. He aimed towards the rifle on the deck but had no target, at least that he could see. He died as his head ruptured from the excessive heat from a suit bolt that entered his left eye socket. Not waiting for the spatter to hit the walls, Longstreet dove to pick up the charged rifle and placed a shot through the head of the other warrior that had foolishly continued up that third stairwell. It shared the same characteristic of his first two kills.
“Blit, some of these warriors are grey head novices, with trainers wasting them to get a shot at us.” The grey head reference was about how Krall started life with grey-colored skin, and turned a ruddy color as they matured.
Koban: Rise of the Kobani Page 63