Jagort was not simply standing around, using a talon to scratch the back portion of his lower torso. He had promptly tapped his shoulder com set to announce on a common frequency that the main dome was under massive attack, as were the clanships parked there. He lost his long-range feed on the incoming anti-ship missile tracks when the other dome and its sensors were destroyed, leaving a hole in his coverage.
He noted that the clanship piloted by Gethok, which Colwat had mentioned, had come into view over the horizon. It was flying low for the sub orbital trip, and his sensors could track it now. Gethok had significantly higher status than Jagort, or the now likely dead Colwat. He listened to the report from Jagort, of two unknown clanships that had just arrived, and of one’s attack on the main dome.
When the out-of-favor octet leader, serving punitive duty, passed along Colwat’s demand that Gethok immediately return to avenge the attack on the dome, he ignored him and told him what he would do instead.
“The ship that fired on the dome is far enough behind ne that I was below the edge of the planet. It cannot see me and I cannot see it either. It does not know I am here. I have two experienced pilots with me and there is another clanship parked next to your dome. The two clanships that you reported arriving together would have an advantage in our fight. I will hurry to land and transfer a pilot for that other clanship. Together we can defend the honor of Mordo clan.”
On this small miscalculation was Gethok and the other clanship lost. Captain Retief’s Slasher had surged ahead to seek him out, because he had overlooked the clues of his recent launch leaving a hot spot on a tarmac, and atmospheric contrails. He was caught committed to a breakneck landing of his own, as close to the second clanship as he could manage. The forces being exerted on Gethok and the two pilots with him, were too great for them to move to activate defensive weapons. One of the two hypervelocity missiles found him before he could complete his nearly amazing landing.
Jagort took small comfort in the demise of this particularly arrogant warrior, because he was delayed in delivering his own second warning to the warriors in his dome. He’d seen his own fate approaching in the form of two more of the larger ground attack missiles. Not that he simply waited for them to arrive. He scrambled out of the watchstanders compartment at the top of the dome, enroute to the nearest stairwell, prepared to hurl himself down, trusting that his body would heal if he survived. Hurled he was, but not down. The blast behind him helped move him along. He impacted one of the transparent armored windows, leaving a large red splat before the concussion blew the window and his remains out over the tarmac. At least his day was over, and he wasn’t bored any longer.
****
Dillon expressed his first sense of relief. “We caught them flat footed. I’ve had this dreaded impression they were invulnerable.”
“Why?” Noreen was puzzled. “You and Tet caught them by surprise on your first combat team. They had no idea how different things would be, and they sent in an octet from a finger clan that had never seen a human, and was known for their brashness and aggressiveness. It meshed with the booby traps and remotely activated weapons we had built and you left for them to trip over. Tet has surprised them again, by brashly attacking them where they couldn’t conceive we had the ability to do so, in a place they were sure we didn’t know existed. They had their pants down…, if Krall wore pants.”
“I guess. Anyway, Carson has already started his teams down the stairs into the factory production complex under us. Yil is following a corridor towards the section where the stamp mills, foundries, and smelters are located, and Fred’s teams are headed for the hull assembly site, and weapons mounting stations. The only Prada they’ve seen have run from their voices, back into the labyrinth of the factory levels. Calling to them in low Krall has no effect, not when it came from an invisible person. Yil said he had to make himself visible to get any response at all, which then was running away in fear.”
Noreen had been following the progress of the fighting in the dome. “The teams inside have been killing Krall on sight. There appears to have been between fifty or sixty survivors that either were not on the top levels, or made it down ahead of the missiles. They encountered three that had donned their armor. It appears that we stay invisible to their visors, but we see them as ghost-like images, just like we see our own people with our helmets.”
“How have the Prada in their housing areas been handling the fighting? Without a forest to live in, they don’t have any trees to climb to get out of harm’s way.”
Noreen grimaced. “They don’t dare come out of their compartments. The larger rooms were subdivided to hold multiple families. We have more living in the dome here than we expected. I hope that means there are fewer in the factories.
“The Krall, unable to see our people, killed a few of the Prada that dared expose themselves in hallways. I called for the migration ships to start down. The two coming to load the Torki will be out over the water, and won’t have Krall to bother them. The Olts will let the Torki on the ships communicate with those in the lodges.” She reminded him of that unnecessarily, because she felt nervous that the plan was on track.
“It’s the Prada here that will be hard to convince to come out. They don’t know who or what we are, they understandably fear us, and the damned Krall shoot them on sight when they move, since they can’t see us. We need those elder Prada to talk to them.”
“Hon, I was busy talking with the factory teams and didn’t hear you make that call to the rescue ships. How many migration ships are landing total? Not all five of them, right?”
“No, only four. One is staying in high orbit as backup, and I called for two to land here by the dome, on opposite sides, to speed the loading of Prada. Their population will outnumber the Torki by a factor of four or five. Presumably, fifteen to twenty thousand if the number of workers per factory stayed at close to three or four thousand, and then we add in their normally small families. We’ll have room to spare using two of those big ships, if we can just get them enough food. Two of the clanships Jumped to Haven as soon as I released them to go. We didn’t have any more targets for them after they shot down six shuttles, and we’ll need a lot more of those nasty looking grub worms.” She shivered, much as a Prada did when a human bit into a rare piece of rhinolo steak.
He was down in the “catacombs,” as Carson continued to think of the factory levels he was prowling, directly below the dome. He had seen and “greeted” three Krall. One managed to shoot him in the back, before he whipped around and put a plasma bolt through his screaming mouth. The Krall’s plasma bolt had hit him in the center of his back, but at a glancing angle, which at first thought made Carson question the notoriously deadly aim of a warrior. It had deflected from his armor, and another TG2 confirmed there was nothing more than a faint scorch mark left behind.
“Yolanda, I was stealthed. Even if the bolt was to the center of my back and not my helmet, how did he even spot me?”
She looked back to where the dead Krall lay and noted steamy vapor jetting from an outlet valve of a press, which used heat and pressure to shape a hull or deck plate, and then used water to cool it down. “I think you walked through that stream of vapor. He saw the outline of your torso, and fired at the center of mass. If he’d used his head, and shot where yours is, we might not be having this conversation.” The grin wasn’t seen, but her tone certainly implied one was attached to her remark.
“Thanks.” He offered her a high five. Her visor saw his ghostly move and she reciprocated.
“No problem. Alyson asked us to keep you from doing anything stupidly heroic today. Shot in the ass isn’t heroic, so this doesn’t count.”
“It was in the back…, not my…” he trailed off, because she had turned and walked away. He wondered how Alyson was doing.
He selected a team channel and cautioned everyone to be alert for ways they could still be seen, such as the steam jet he’d passed through. Then he checked with the other team leaders, and pa
ssed that tidbit along. The catacomb thought he’d had earlier wasn’t very accurate. It was actually well lit down here, with thirty-foot ceilings, except where a larger piece of machinery needed greater height. The entire place was set up for Prada to climb over the machinery, using ropes and aerial walkways, similar to how they did it in the forest villages. They were trying to keep working as the intermittent fighting went on around them, as faithful servants of the “Rulers.”
However, the Prada couldn’t help but observe the mysterious plasma bolts that suddenly flared into existence from a point in space whenever a Krall appeared nearby.
Sometimes, it was a red or green laser, which briefly flashed in the humid air. Those beams also originated from a point in space, and then came again from a new point located a short distance away. The sound of faint footsteps might be heard between the shots. It didn’t require a leap of genius to know there were nearly invisible and aggressive intruders inside the factory. The intruders were behaving aggressively toward the Rulers only, and the Krall often fought clan-to-clan. The Krall that the workers could see, the particular clan of that “wiser” species they served, chose to kill some of the Prada today, for a reason their servants couldn’t understand.
Carson’s teams were placing their tamper proof explosives on the machinery Wister and other Prada on Haven had identified as critical for producing complex and vital clanship components. Such as thruster engines and fuel control modules, Jump Drive components, weapons consoles and weapons, and other parts that made a clanship more than an armored shell.
If the flooding with corrosive seawater proved successful, some of the planted explosives would be redundant. Other items, like giant presses, might be salvaged after the salt water was pumped out, so they were to be explosively converted to scrap.
Yilini and Fred were progressing even faster than Carson’s teams, because there were a fewer number of things to destroy in a foundry and smelter, and the ship assembly work had apparently slowed recently, due to a shortage of large metal hull and deck sections, built as replaceable modules. Yil said that must have something to do with the low ore piles by the various crushers near the smelters. There was a shortage of raw material, which perhaps explained the lower activity in all three factories.
Yil was still explaining his theory of a temporary supply shortage, when Carson interrupted him. “Yil, I’m hearing one hell of a loud thundering sound, and the floor and walls are vibrating.”
“I hear a roar too,” he replied.
Fred had the answer they needed. “I’m outside, on a hull cradle in the assembly area in the shipyards. I can see two of those migration ships coming down near the dome. I can’t believe fat tubs that huge can actually land on a planet. I see two more in the distance, coming down off shore. Those are the water landings for the Torki. Anyone hear from the teams sent out there?”
Two teams, in four ground transports, had raced out to see if there was a Krall presence around either lodge. Two of the fast moving Dragons had gone with them, since there had been less Krall resistance at the shipyards than expected. A convoy of over a hundred trucks and halftracks was on the way from the destroyed main dome, but they were at least two hours away. The roughly one thousand warriors crammed in and on them would have to be intercepted at some point, because the loading of the migration ships wouldn’t be completed by then, even if the Prada all agreed to drop everything and come quickly.
Noreen had been speaking with Wister’s older sibling, Nawella, before the descent. The fifteen-hundred-year-old Prada had experienced four previous moves by migration ships over the centuries, but was nervous. She knew of how some landings ended with a crash when the Krall pilot collapsed several landing struts coming down too hard, or off slightly from a near perfect vertical touchdown. On one of her landings, the pilot had allowed two of the ten landing jacks to come down off the edge of a tarmac into soft ground. The ship nearly toppled before the two jacks, at full extension, finally found solid enough support.
This time the landings were deftly handled, and delicately executed by Torki pilots. The first landings they had ever performed, but exactly as it had gone in the simulators they used for practice. The five large thrusters used ionized water as their reaction mass, once they cut out the Normal Space gravity drives at about one mile of altitude. Most of the remaining water in their tanks would be used for the departure, but that was far less than what they generally carried.
The departure weight of the ships by the domes would be far less, because they didn’t need to retain a large and heavy volume of water for their Prada passengers to soak in, as did the Torki, to reduce acceleration stress. The Torki pilots assured Noreen that they would lift swiftly and lightly, much like a Haven insect that flew similar to a butterfly. How that description fit with a ship that more resembled a giant, silvered Earth pumpkin than a fragile winged fluttery insect, Noreen chose to ignore.
Nawella, true to her word, was among the first off the migration ship, accompanied by ten TG2s, in a Krall armored battlefield transport. The big trucks had ample room in the lower hold of the ships. It could be driven in and out using the wide sturdy ramp. In planning, they had allowed for possible sniper fire after the ships sat down.
The elder spokesperson, technically a “spokesprada,” had to be protected if they hoped to convince the workers to come along quickly. Or even to come along at all. Once inside the factory, surrounded by TG2’s, Nawella directed them to where she needed to be taken. There was an overseer room, which monitored all sections of a factory, and had a communications system. For the joint factory complex like this one, she could link all three public address systems together. The dome, as housing for the Prada, was included.
The problem Mirikami had seen was that they needed to disseminate the information widely, to every Prada, but after so many thousands of years, the Prada now spoke only low Krall. Any Krall in the dome or factory would hear and understand what was said.
The solution they wanted to try was to ask representatives of the various work sections to go to the “gathering” rooms, used during shift changes, to exchange information each day. Each division of workers had elder members that were tasked with learning what problems or issues had come up on the previous shift, and that was then passed along to the next shift of workers by the next shift’s elder representatives. Wister and Nawella both believed that if the elder division members could be convinced to evacuate, the others would listen and follow them. The multiple gathering rooms, or conference rooms as the humans would call them, could be addressed privately, and via video link from the overseer room.
Nawella expertly activated the PA system for the entire complex. She’d done this many times as an elder Prada project manager. Her first announcement, audio only, was to request all elder division members, of every shift, to assemble in the gathering rooms.
They knew this would be a time of risk for the Prada that exposed themselves, and moved through the interconnected factories. The main avenues in the factories would have invisible TG2s guarding the way, watching for any Krall activity. Nawella identified herself and stated her age. She explained she was of Sither clan, a widely spread clan after thousands of years of migration moves. She knew not to reveal any detail that could identify her as currently residing in the Koban system. Her name and clan were matters of interest only to other Prada, and the Krall had never taken notice of them.
The Prada relied on honesty within their ranks, and accepted an elder’s claim of age until proven wrong. If it was part of a deception, and revealed as such, that Prada was shunned and would die alone. Such a penalty was so severe to them that none could recall it being applied in over a thousand years.
There were several hundred Prada seen climbing down from the ceilings, or crawling out of hiding places. They were cautiously looking for any threat from their so-called Rulers, who displayed notoriously random violence at times. A Prada normally would obey any order from a Krall, but in the case of berserker rage, they
felt justified to run and hide if no order was given specifically to them by name. It was convenient that few Krall knew any slave’s name.
As they hurried along the corridors, some taking an “overland” route on machinery or elevated walkways, their long tails were constantly twitching at any sound. Three times the sound was from a sudden Krall attack scream, and a plasma bolt or laser cut it short. A few warriors were still prowling the factories, seeking a fast and potent hidden enemy that struck them down without warning or challenge. Three more completed their hunt with finality.
When the division leaders were in the gathering rooms, they were able to see the Prada female that had called them on screen. They were prepared to take her age on faith, and the social structure on this harsh world meant that every single one of them knew that her claimed age was centuries greater than the next oldest Prada among them. Dangerous work and poor living conditions had kept many elders from reaching truly advanced ages. They were prepared to listen.
After discussion with Wister, Nawella, and other elders, a strategy of avoiding the identity of the “alien” invaders was considered best. The location where they were “migrating” was to be another Krall world that was to be repopulated and factories rebuilt. Not mentioning the planet’s name was a no-brainer, and hardly suspicious. The Krall didn’t use them for places, merely a description of them, or the clan that controlled them. Those details weren’t provided.
Without stating this was interclan warfare, something many Prada had experienced in the past, or certainly knew about, Nawella reminded them that sometimes the Rulers made war on themselves for practice. She told them that production was now being ended on this old and worn out planet.
“Four great migration ships have landed,” she told them. “All Prada and all Torki workers will be efficiently moved. Today. Right now. Go tell your divisions, those on duty and those out of rotation in the dome, and their families, to take nothing with them and board the two migration ships you heard land above, and are parked on the tarmac. We will direct the flow to which ship has more room remaining. Food will be provided for you, and some is already present. Try to avoid the places of fighting. The Rulers do not need us to hinder their activity. The ships have been ordered to leave if fighting comes too close. Go now, as quickly as you can pass the word. Do not be left behind on an abandoned world.”
Koban: Rise of the Kobani Page 72