Koban: Rise of the Kobani

by Stephen W Bennett

  “I just caught on to that difference, Cap’n. They sent two after me on different stairwells when a red head tried to pop me. He leaped up the stairs, and didn’t shoot when he couldn’t see me. Fatal mistake. I also popped the two rookies.”

  “I can’t see you on this obstructed deck level, Blit, but I can cover five of the stairs. Can you cover all of yours?”

  “Yes Sir. I also see five stairs, and if I move I can see six…, oops.” There was an actinic blue flash and a Krall scream. “I wonder how many of ‘em got inside, Sir? That’s five for me.”

  “I got four. Blit, but by now they may have reopened another portal. Tabora, get us airborne.”

  “Ready, Joe, but two portals are open and won’t close. The lower decks will lose air as we lift or fill with toxic fumes.”

  Longstreet recalled that the ships were designed with airtight doors that automatically closed on alternate decks at the stairwell deck openings.

  “Launch now. We’re in suits, they aren’t, and we’re still on deck four. We never reached the bottom. The airtight doors will lock them out.”

  “There are at least eight ships lifting now, all around us. We might collide.” She sounded frightened.

  “Tabora, do your best. They’re probably pouring warriors inside our lower deck right now. Go or we’ll die here!”

  He first felt the vibration then he heard the thunder of the thrusters through the open portals below.

  Longstreet easily picked off two more grey-heads in midair, as they leaped up two stairwells simultaneously.

  The acceleration wasn’t as hard as he had expected, or had hoped it would be. Perhaps that was out of consideration or proximity of the other ships or because of the drag of portals that were apparently locked open.

  Several plasma bolts were fired up stairwells before the inevitable happened. The automatic airtight doors activated in typical Krall fashion. No gradual closing here. They slammed shut in an instant, trapping the Krall below. Those on the lowest two decks would be exposed to near vacuum in thirty seconds at the present acceleration if the portals remained open. No air at all in forty-five seconds.

  Let’s see how good they are at holding their breath, Longstreet thought happily.

  Any Krall left on the still pressurized decks three and four would have to be cleared the hard way, once the humans or the Krall figured out how the airtight doors were reopened. Since they still had pressure on both sides, there had to be a release. The other two members of the flight crew joined Longstreet and Blitman, to help them cover the hatches when they were finally opened. While not experienced with firefights, the Spacers had received Mind Taps of what to do, and they had the reaction speed required. It wasn’t a clean operation, but they had gotten off planet with their prize.

  ****

  Trakenburg and his teammate, Sergeant Jenkins, had just reached the command deck when Mirikami’s warning came.

  Jenkins, reacting instantly, used his radio to call to their flight crew, whom had been enroute from the Mark, and the portal below had been left open for them. Radio silence was pointless now. “Lieutenant Badar, you heard that. How close are you?”

  “Too late I think. I see two Krall in the hold now and more are running towards it.”

  Trakenburg intervened. “Badar, the Mark is too far from us for you to return there, and this boat is your only way out of here. You three are TG2’s, you’re fast, invisible, and you are well armed. Jump in and kill the ones in the hold, and shut the door behind you. Trust your Mind Tap training sessions.” He looked at Jenkins and shrugged, as if saying what else could he tell them?

  Jenkins thought of something else. “I’m on my way down to help, you get your asses on this ship any damn way you can!” In a Krall-like move, the sergeant leaped over the rail by the stairwell and dropped to the deck fifteen feet below.

  Trakenburg activated all four consoles, using what he’d learned in reciprocal Mind Taps done with various flight crews they had trained. “I’m working my way through the startup sequences for the launch. When you get up here, all you’ll have to do is fly this bitch.”

  Jackie Bader was not an aggressive person, which explained why she had remained a lieutenant with her former cargo haling company for six years before her capture and stranding on Koban. However, she’d since had over twenty years of life on Koban under her belt now, and afraid of Krall or not, she hated them enough to have volunteered to help on this mission. She took command of her flight crew.

  “Annie, Pieter, both of you think of how to fire the weapons you want to use. I’m choosing plasma because I want to blow their heads completely off. The Krall won’t know where we are until we shoot, so move to the side as soon as you do, just like they taught us.”

  She turned away from the two ghostly figures on her visor, and started a dead run at the open portal a hundred feet ahead of her. In the low gravity, she was covering ground in long leaps at a respectable speed any sprinter would have envied. The other two in her crew scrambled to match her speed. Fear of being left behind here exceeded the fear they felt of the Krall ahead of them.

  Bader, as she closed with the ship, no longer saw the two warriors that had already entered, but three more were coming towards her at a dead run. She finally noticed that they were moving slower than she was, not lifting as high from the ground with each step, and two of the three were armed only with long knives. The lead warrior had a plasma rifle, but it was slung across its back to permit more efficient running as it pumped its massive muscled arms, which were larger than her thighs.

  She wasn’t going to let it beat her to the ship, and she increased her speed as adrenaline pumped her ripper-derived muscles to new effort. Her improved vision and fast adrenaline driven super conductor thoughts saw the heavy breathing of the three Krall, and the strain on their muzzles and lips as they labored for air. They had been running all-out from the trees she saw far behind them, which was a considerable distance. They were tiring! It was uplifting to see that they had a level of weakness she could actually see.

  It was as they drew within fifty feet of one another that her racing thoughts recalled the advice she had given her two friends. She thought of the weapon she wanted to use, and then how to make it fire. She locked her eyes on the fearsome gapping maw of the lead Krall, open to get more air, revealing its yellowed teeth and a purple tongue.

  Plasma, 100, fire she thought, and was startled when a bolt of blue instantly shot from in front of her own face, and an expanding ring of fine red and gray particles appeared where her vision had been locked. The brute actually seemed to take another step as its momentum propelled it towards her on a leg that only looked as if it moved the corpse forward.

  It fell forward in seeming slow motion, the arms making no move to catch the heavy torso from slamming onto the pavement, and finally sliding to a stop. The warrior to her left side, with a long machete-like blade raised, looked down at its dead trainer in what had to be the only look of surprise Bader had ever seen on any picture of a Krall. It was short lived, literally, when a red laser and a blue plasma bolt hit it simultaneously, originating from behind her.

  The laser carved the shoulder off where the arm attached, that held the big blade. The surprised expression vanished with the same crimson particulate ring as Bader had just admired for her own target. She had continued to run for the ship, and because her attention was morbidly on the two dead Krall she and her companions had just produced, she almost forgot to jump up through the open and beckoning portal.

  That wasn’t all that she forgot. The third warrior, with a knife, leaped at the same opening. In their inexperience, her two companions had not split their firepower between the two remaining targets, and they had managed to double-kill just the one.

  She slammed into the leaping lizard at full tilt, and her armor protected her from injury, but her mass, compared to that of the novice she hit, was roughly one-third. Bader was knocked sideways, and the Krall, unaware of what unseen thing it h
ad struck, dropped its knife and grasped blindly at the hard feeling object, pulling it to the deck of the hold as it fell.

  It rose to its feet quickly, holding onto what proved to be Bader’s left arm, and she hung there suspended and terrified. She knew what had her, but it had no idea what it held. It reached for the unseen object with its other large hand; talons extended, and unknowingly appeared to be going for her face.

  In a panic, Bader brought her right hand up swiftly to protect her face, and grabbed with desperate strength at a finger, which was small enough for her smaller-than-average woman’s hand to wrap around the digit.

  It was quite desperate strength. The bone of the finger first snapped, and then the pressure pinched the digit until it crushed. The Krall naturally screamed its pain and tried to pull its hand away. This had the effect of leaving the thick detached finger evidently floating in the air. The Krall dropped whatever it had hold of, and the finger fell to the deck as Bader let the gory thing drop.

  This provided Bader with the first inkling of just how her strength compared to that of these extremely large, fearsome monsters, which had given her a lifetime of nightmares. She looked at the hand that had just ripped a finger off her nemesis. With growing confidence, she stepped towards the now unarmed creature. It heard the step, and backed away from…, what? Something it didn’t know and couldn’t see, but it feared.

  She looked it in the eye, and knew that unarmed as it was, she could tear it apart with her hands if she chose. Why waste the time? Therefore, she thought, plasma, 100, fire.

  As it fell backwards, its head missing, she had another justifying thought. Why should I mess up my pretty armor with his gore?

  Her two companions had now joined her, and Annie tried pressing the keys to close the portal, only to discover that it wouldn’t respond. Some alternate code had been used to force it to stay open until the proper counter code was entered.

  They heard some firing above them, and in a moment Sergeant Jenkins dropped through a stairwell opening, prepared to fight off more Krall. He found his flight crew instead, and messy, dead Krall inside and out.

  “Lieutenant Bader, please go help Colonel Trakenburg, before he tries to fly this thing himself. Your two buddies and I will keep the Krall out.” Even as he said that, he used his plasma rifle to blast a warrior in mid-leap as it tried to enter on the fly.

  Bader raced to a stairwell and started her rapid scramble upwards. “Colonel, I’m on my way.”

  The three people staying behind spread out and continued to knock Krall back out of the hold, or dropped them in their tracks as they entered.

  There was another broadcast from Mirikami. “You need to get that damn thing airborne. I’m about to blow the support legs off six other clanships. I didn’t see a need to carry all the boxed explosives away with us.”

  Jenkins knew now what the other six spec ops men had been doing while the last two ships were boarded. They had removed explosives from the cases on the Mark, planting remotely detonated packages on other clanships.

  Bader’s voice sounded on the radio. “Thrusters in fifteen seconds, people. You had better get a few decks higher with that portal locked open.”

  They scrambled to get to deck four above the second set of depressurization doors, and made it just as the thrusters fired. It felt good to be lifting, having accomplished everything they came here to do. The first eight “prizes” had cleared atmosphere and had Jumped, and three others would reach that point in less than a minute. There were two more ships to go, themselves, and then the Mark would follow.

  Watching the last one of the newly captured ships rise, engine roaring, reaching two thousand feet, as if to thunderous applause for a successful mission, Mirikami ordered Jakob to launch the Mark, with instructions to trigger the six mines they left behind after they reached a thousand feet. He never quite forgave himself later, for not risking the blasts before they lifted. The six toppling clanships would not have been that close to the Mark, or have fallen over too fast.

  ****

  Gotrak had heard a clanship land near the nesting dome, and assumed it was one of the clan’s sub leaders returning from some political requirement. Perhaps, returning from the recent joint council meeting on Telda Ka. If so, it would most likely be Dorkda, sent there as the clan leader’s representative. He had been gone since before the gathering of pre-novice cubs had started. Others were left to begin the arduous and impatient work of their training, over a year ago. Their clan leader could not leave their nest world at such a critical time, just to meet their status obligation to Dorbo clan, simply to vote as they instructed on clan council matters.

  The debt to Dorbo clan could be fully paid in one more breeding cycle, when Maldo, a finger clan that Dorbo had spawned a thousand years ago, gained enough status and proven warriors with battle tested skills, to demand the council grant them mature clan status.

  After that, they would remain allied with Dorbo but more independent, and allowed to form finger clans of their own when they could afford the status points and furnish the material needs. One day they would vote to elevate Dorbo to Great Clan status, a success that would also indirectly benefit Maldo. However, without a status debt to pay to keep them poor, they could soon demand a greater participation in future invasions planned for human worlds.

  In the meantime, they had to support their parent clan with their voice in council, and in private conversations outside the joint council. Dorkda had been sent in place of their clan leader to be that voice in the inefficient, self-serving pack, dominated by the existing Great Clans. It was apparently time to hear the results of the meetings, to know which clans had major parts in the new invasions. If Dorbo was one of those, it meant they had gained status, and in turn would offer more fighting to their finger clans.

  If it were not Dorkda returning, then even a courier ship would bring more warriors to help in the task of training ignorant novices in the skills of combat. There needed to be much more culling to find the physically best performers out of the mass of angry, young meat they had to teach.

  Despite Gotrak’s complaints, he knew this was a better group of hatchlings than the previous two breeding cycles had produced. Greater status earned from successful raids had finally allowed them to purchase thousands of eggs from pairings of superior male and female warriors of other clans. They traded with clans with a surplus of high breeder status eggs, sold for status points.

  There was no way for the temporarily isolated Maldo leadership, with all available warriors invested in intense novice training and culling, to have yet learned that on K1 (Telda Ka) that Dorkda had been captured on a raid to steal two clanships (actually he was presumed killed). Not even Dorbo clan, who had been humiliated to lose those two ships, knew that the ultimate shame was that it had been humans from the Mark of Koban performing the theft. Now this Dorbo finger clan was in line for even worse treatment from the same ship. Humiliation, like crap, did appear to obey the law of gravity, and roll downhill.

  The hand of training octets that Gotrak directed was actually composed of nearly twice that number of Krall. There now was nearly one experienced warrior assigned to each inexperienced novice in a training octet. Later, as culling eliminated the poor candidates (the euphemism of “culling” standing in for the more accurate term “killing”).

  Last year, there had been three pre-novice candidates for each warrior to observe and instruct (“instruct” was frequently another euphemism for brutalize and punish). In absence of another clan’s novices to fight with, the warriors forced their inexperienced novices to face low intensity beatings from them, teaching them via the “hard knocks” rule how to defend themselves, first from blows by feet, hands, elbows, knees, talons, and even the head.

  Recently clubs, spears, rocks, then knives and short swords had been introduced. The discipline by now was such that challenge matches were permitted when two novices had a grudge. It was too soon to lose many promising novices in death matches, but death s
ometimes happened. At least the weaker candidates “accidentally” eliminated this way increased the rate of culling.

  It would be months before the culling revealed the one-quarter of the original candidates who were ready to receive firearms training. Those that had physical skills and discipline to survive the temptation to kill so easily would live to enter tactical training and movements, and someday learn strategy.

  However, right now they were mostly a rabble of thuggish club and spear users, with a few having proven capable and disciplined enough to be issued knives and short swords. There were always some that believed this ability to kill with sharp steel weapons gave them the ability to defy an instructor, or challenge them when they saw they had no firearms. They proved to be excellent examples, by their deaths at the hands of the instructor, or from his instructor clan mate if the first sneaky blow was one of decapitation.

  Today, Gotrak had the four octets he was responsible for practicing infiltration through the woods, to find the camp of another hand of octets and attack them by surprise. Gotrak and the other instructors, on both sides, knew where everyone was, and simply acted as observers and advisors. They provided advice such as “don’t step on that dry stick and make a noise,” or “don’t let that branch swish back into your team mate’s face.” This phase of training went much faster, because by now their battlefield memory had developed, and the breeding and instincts of the nine or ten-year-old novices meant they remembered what actions had previously worked well. Some were innovating, and combining ideas that led to a better way of attack or defense in the training scenarios.

  There were hints of the new tactics needed against humans. Cunning and trickery were no longer discouraged when seen, and more of the survivors of the human war had lived by exhibiting some of these traits. Their eggs, in future generations, would gradually become the model for smarter, better warriors.