Swiping the air with talons extended on one hand, Pendor made a com set call to a sub leader, located on the surface, “Hothdis, we will receive more missile damage in three sectors to the north and northeast in minutes. Send damage control there, and route sixteen mobile plasma batteries and four laser defense systems to that area.” He was preparing to plug holes about to grow larger in his defenses. Shortly, although he wouldn’t know the human analogy, he was going to be like a boy with his fingers in dike that had too many holes. The waves of equipment failures would become a flood he couldn’t halt.
The next failure report came from the commander of their heavy plasma cannons. “Gatlek Pendor! Of our six hands of cannons, less than two hands responded to remote commands when I ordered them fired.” He was telling his leader that of twenty-four batteries, fewer than eight sent their powerful star energy plasma bolts aloft when he sent the signal for them to fire at their designated targets.
“Fire them manually. You have K’Tals for that out there. What’s blocking your remote commands?”
“The K’Tals informed me the signals were properly received, and the control consoles display the coordinates sent, and register that a firing command was received. Despite that, the mounting gimbals and their drive motors did not respond, in order to aim the cannons. The firing commands did not trigger bolts on those units, nor did the preheated plasma chambers receive injections of fresh plasma in their magnetic containment chambers. The K’Tals say manual control also does not function.
“Why was I not told of this failure?” His voice was pitched dangerously; the red pits of his eyes seething with barely contained fury.
“It was not recognized until I sent the firing commands, and no one tried manual operation before then. Only seven cannons fired, but because they were not matched with any other cannons for maximum energy delivery, at three hundred miles the single bolts caused no serious damage to those seven clanships, of the eight we selected for destruction.”
“While you fix the other cannons, combine what does work and kill at least one of these demon possessed enemy clanships!”
In the background, he heard a simple announcement, which conveyed considerable threat. “Missiles about to impact…” After a pause, the warrior said, with a curious tone in his voice. “No detonations. All of the missiles fired at us seem to be defective.”
The commander of the heavy cannons was speaking again into his shoulder-mounted com set. “I have three more batteries that just became unresponsive, leaving four that are so far apart that coordinated concentrated targeting on a single target will have less precise focusing. Anti-ship missiles crashed harmlessly near those that just failed. They visibly quit moving on their gimbals as they tracked their targets, when the impacts came within ten leaps of their locations. Hands of K’Tals, previously dressed in armor for protection from the heat-pulses when the cannons fired, have reported to me. When they approach a cannon’s console to see if it will fire manually, their helmet visor displays quit, and the powered assist for the suits switch off. They now only have radio and air recycling functioning.”
Pendor, still furious, also managed to look worried. A difficult feat for the minimally expressive Krall face. “I don’t think the humans wasted time firing thousands of defective missiles at us. They may have worked exactly as intended. This could be some sort of Electronic Counter Measure they are using, to shut down the electronics built into our weapons.”
One of his aides approached from the communications consoles. He’d heard the comment. “My Gatlek, their electronic weapons are disabling clanships, armor, plasma rifles, and any of our heavy equipment. Even the keypads on clanship doors and portals will not respond. The clans at the fronts, those that were under the PDC missiles that you though they shot down. They say they were unable to hit anything that fast and high with their shorter-range ground combat weapons, but the debris did fall around them, scattering many small pieces that did not look like missile casing parts. After that, their equipment began to fail.”
“Did we destroy any of the false supply ships?” Pendor asked this with little hope of an encouraging answer.
“My leader,” his heavy battery commander said, standing well away from him. “They landed well beyond the Mordo clan’s inner defensive perimeter, and outside my ring of batteries. As you commanded, the heavy batteries held fire until the clanships were clear, believing they were from K1 at that time. When you ordered their destruction, they were too low to the horizon for targeting by orbital defense cannons, and they were landing. Wherever any of them have touched down, there is a spreading region of equipment that suddenly becomes unresponsive. Starting with the closest clanships.”
Another sub leader started with a report of good news, “We have bands of thousands of warriors converging on those enemy ships.”
The good news didn’t last. “But suddenly their armor shuts down and their rifles will not fire when they approach. Our mini-tanks, mobile plasma cannon carts, and armored transports will not start, or if already operating, they soon quit responding to steering or firing commands. Those warriors with projectile pistols say they continue to fire normally. What are your orders?”
His voice appeared to harden with grim resolve. “Gather all of our old projectile weapons and ammunition, and prepare to face a worthy enemy. I’m confident human weapons will continue to work properly. It will be a brave and honorable battle for our warriors. And for us.” He added.
Pendor wondered if he should have stayed behind on Poldark as Gatlek, refusing Telour’s offer of reward for their joint treachery in helping him to kill Kanpardi. He wanted to be far away from this current vexing set of problems, which offered a possibility of much more than simply a loss of status.
****
Manwell took a different tact at New Dublin than Thad Greeves had followed on Poldark. Thad had adhered to Mirikami’s instructions, to avoid intense Kobani involvement in fighting the entrenched Krall forces, and allow the PU military to carry the brunt of the fighting to come. After all, General Nabarone had command of eight long established armies, with their supply and command infrastructures solidly in place.
On New Dublin, in the early months of the invasion, General Ellen Masterfem’s troops and equipment had been posted on distant colony worlds, and were rushed here to form an opposing fighting force before the Krall could roll over a large amount of territory nearly unopposed. That was what the Krall had done on Greater West Africa (now called K1), Bollovstic's Republican Independency, and to a lesser extent on better prepared and forewarned Poldark.
Some of Masterfem’s heavy equipment and arms were still arriving and desperately needed. Items that were in short supply for a successful assault she now discovered was possible. The local industry was rapidly gearing up to build and provide material such as housing, food, military vehicles, and new factories to manufacture small arms, tanks, artillery, and ammunition. They were still building roads and bridges, railway lines, airfields, and organizing the things that could get the raw materials to the factories, and deliver the finished products to the army. That all took time and the lack of an established planetary infrastructure to support a war was keeping Masterfem from fully exploiting her new advantage. The Krall were consolidating their positions, and they had conducted surprise raids to capture human made small arms, and some heavier weapons and ammunition, such as mortars and mobile artillery batteries. They were limited on how much ammunition they were able to steal along with the weapons. They used them poorly, but at close range, they were dangerous.
Fortunately, a Krall was physically too large to fit into the hatches of any of the three human models of tanks in use. These were now seeing their first use in an assault into Krall held territory, having been of more survivable use on defense when the Krall attacked.
The stealthy, plasma-bolt-resistant, ceramic coated Panther, with a combination of light tracks that could be raised or lowered, had fans and skirts for hovercraft capability. In motio
n as a hovercraft, stealth was pointless. It mounted twin medium Plasma canons, and an independently rotatable medium power, multi-spectrum automated laser cannon.
A medium tank, the B3 Maxwell, was tracked and fast, with a three hundred sixty degree field of fire from eight fixed medium powered lasers, two per side. Those could take out Krall body armor and mobile plasma cannon carts. It featured a plasma cannon that could punch through the hull of a clanship up close, but they could rarely risk getting that close. Its own armor was unable to sustain repeated hits from a clanship’s plasma cannons. The Panther had amphibious capability for surface flotation via an inflatable ring, which was not suitable for battle conditions. It simply eliminated a need for a bridge to ford a river or lake.
The PU’s main battle tank, which a Krall warrior might have fit inside if the hatches were larger, was the B1 heavy tank, tracked versions only, with the river fording modification as an add-on. Made by Brunto manufacturing, its long range massive plasma cannon protruded from the domed bulge above a large plasma injection chamber like a long neck. The dome fed it heavy bolts at a relatively high rate, and the dome shape and barrel, along with the company name, earned it the obvious and unofficial nickname of Brontosaurus. It had heavy armor, and they added ceramic plates over that on all sides. It could engage in long-range duels with a grounded clanship, or with hilltop stationed laser or plasma batteries, but if a clanship lifted and flew over, it was too vulnerable. Most often, the heavy tank attacked from some reinforced and prepared elevated position, on a hillside or mountain face, where it retreated to cover after firing a number of accurately aimed heavy bolts downrange in only ten seconds. That was a cycle rate better than for a clanship, even though those craft mounted four, but slower cycling cannons.
For the first time they could enter into combat with Krall ground forces without fear of the clanships heavy firepower and mobility being a threat. Unfortunately, New Dublin’s lack of advance war preparations meant bringing human forces to bear quickly was a problem, which gave the Krall more time to prepare for the coming fight. They now had possession of thousands of human plasma rifles, which were awkward in their large taloned hands. They had no problem firing them, but their legendary accuracy suffered. They were also limited on replacement human power packs, but their K’Tals had adapted the fusion bottles from their own power pack recharging stations to keep a flow of power packs returning to the warriors with the stolen rifles.
For these reasons, Manwell elected to permit any Kobani that volunteered to participate in the fight to disrupt the Krall opposition from deep behind their lines, while the PU army started their frontal assaults. This time, as a group, the hundred thirty four rippers that came with the New Dublin fleet, reminded their human comrades that being from Koban, sharing the genes the humans said made them Kobani, that the rippers were obviously Kobani as well. They didn’t ask to participate. They said they were going to do so.
The Kobani ships on the ground had become rallying points for the Krall, and when warriors ringed them with barricades, the ships could still blast and hold them at bay with lasers and plasma cannons. But with the encirclement, the Kobani crews had to be concerned for those teams already outside.
The single and four-ships could come and go at will, but the instant a launch bay opened, projectile fire started at them, and even rocks hurled from improvised catapults rattled off the hull and into the open bays. Sensors also detected vibrations from tunneling. Krall construction equipment didn’t have Denial chips in them, although they made useless assault equipment. It seemed that the enemy had decided to tunnel under the Kobani ships, either to attack from a direction the ship’s weapons couldn’t fire, to undermine the landing jacks to topple them, or as Sarge reminded them from Poldark, the enemy’s explosives and detonators didn’t require keypads.
Manwell elected to move his ships beyond the shrinking Krall lines. They had landed with tachyons in their Trap fields, so this could have been done smooth and quietly using Normal Space drive. Instead, most ships elected to use the conventional thruster engines for their heat and blast effects. The powerful exhaust plumes punched through some of the tunnels being dug, filling them with a deadly combination of heat and fumes.
Once the ships had relocated beyond the reach of the Krall, Manwell allowed his stealthed small ships to return and land teams where they could cause the most damage and create the most disruption to enemy plans.
Using suit stealth and stealthed equipment cases, it was a simple matter to steal explosives from enemy depots, located by Mind Taps of captured warriors. They would carry them unseen to where they wanted a nice crater. Get back a safe distance and send the detonation code, and watch the pretty debris and body parts fall back to earth.
The rippers, even though they had their Chameleon Skins for daytime stealth, elected to do their terrorizing in the darkest hours of the night. It had less to do with stealth ability than with the effects their marauding had on Krall nerves. Their flexible suits totally negated the IR vision ability of Krall eyesight, and the rippers could see quite well with the low levels of ambient light their night vision was adopted for using.
Krall hearing a warrior near them suddenly being dragged away, screaming in rage, pain, and fear, as unseen growls and snarls sounded loud and close, was unnerving. In a short time, each event was inevitably followed up with a nearby, ear damaging and blood-curdling roar of a victorious kill. Mangled remains would be found later, with organs missing. Such as hearts, lungs, and the Krall equivalent of liver and kidneys. Often, the moist and tender tongue was ripped out.
It seemed the rippers hated to waste an entire kill, but the rangy tough flesh with its fast clotting blood was too lean and dry for enjoyment or complete consumption, but organ meat was acceptable. It also provided the rippers the benefit of a suitably terrifying end for this kill-for-pleasure species, that when frilled before their deaths, their dark and twisted minds inevitably yielded their past enjoyment of slowly killing human soldiers or civilians they had captured alive.
The more heinous and greater the number of their crimes of genocide, the longer they were kept alive and sent mental images that terrified them, causing them to experience a fraction of the suffering of their own past victims. Despite this, the abnormal Krall thirst for causing pain and death exceeded even a ripper’s tolerance for inflicting it on them in return.
Nevertheless, after granting them a more merciful death than they probably deserved, the rippers often would arrange the corpse with dismembered limbs and exposed entrails, to suggest the agony had been more prolonged than the quick and more merciful deaths they had delivered to the Krall. The cats recognized the benefits of false advertising.
The distinction to a human Kobani, as to which deaths were less merciful, those rendered slowly by a Krall’s cruelty, or that which also came with the mental terror delivered from a rippers mind. It was a subject avoided by most Kobani.
Humans hadn’t been selected via survival advantages to be carnivorous predators, required to be indifferent to their prey’s desire to live, or by the nature of their superconductor nerves and a unique genetic mutation long ago, able to experience and even to desire the mental “taste” of their prey’s final thoughts and terrors.
The frilling ability had originally provided an obvious survival edge for rippers by solidifying their social structure, sharing a pride member’s memories and feelings, and learning hunting skills from experienced rippers. Then this mental ability, already of evolutionary benefit, was applied to a different purpose, to provide additional motivation for successful kills, to go beyond just that of the urges of personal hunger, generating an emotional inducement to persevere a bit longer in a difficult hunt, beyond the need to obtain a personal meal, by also craving the prey’s final thoughts. Not so coincidentally, this helped to feed more of your cubs, and made the macabre seeming mental enjoyment of sensing your prey’s dying thoughts and fears of some benefit to your species survival.
Gantor,
and Krit, two wild pride young male cats came upon a sizable gathering of the red ones, perhaps thirty of them. They knew they were called Krall, because they had been hunting and stalking with several human pride rippers a short time ago. Their own mental description of this prey was the traditional image of these creatures from shared wild pride memories, which the cats raised with humans had not previously experienced.
They were far from the center of the region where their long hunt had begun, and they frilled what they each had scented and seen as they stalked and scouted this herd.
“The human pride’s not-live flying things…,” began Gantor.
“No,” Krit interrupted his thought stream. “We should use the true thought words, if we need to frill a human pride member about what we learn here. The flyers are called ships.”
“I was not going to speak of the ships, but of their departure last night. They are no longer close to send help if we attack so many. We can hunt a smaller herd, or wait for some of these to break away from the rest. These are normally predators and should behave like a pack, not like a herd. I do not think they will stay clustered so close, as if for safety.”
Krit wasn’t so sure. “The fear I scent isn’t that of hunters, but of the hunted.”
He explained why he thought this had happened. “Without their long distance fire sticks…, I mean their most dangerous guns, they have begun to behave more like prey animals, huddling together, moving where the human pride hunters push them. After two nights of ripper pride attacks, I can smell their fear of the coming darkness. They surely heard the roar of Kutter a short time ago. He must have made another kill after we parted from him and his pride mates. That was when the smell of fear drifted from this Krall herd.”
Koban 5: A Federation Forged in Fire Page 16