Koban: The Mark of Koban (22 page)

Believing they had the Krall boxed, Captain
Krysinski had the shuttle copilot train the craft’s forward laser array on the
roof entrance, as they hovered fifty feet above.

****

Perkta set his anti-tamper device and rushed to the rooftop
entry door. To avoid alerting the humans below, he ripped the door open by hand
rather than blast it open as he approached, with explosive rounds.  One of the
great weaknesses of inefficient humans was that they entered a period of nighttime
dormancy, when they were unaware of their surroundings. This was something that
a Krall never experienced.

That briefing knowledge was partly what guided him to land
on the night side of the planet, and to choose this large darkened nest, so he
could use his blades, and silently kill as many dormant humans as possible,
before they started running, screaming, and hiding. A clan mate had revealed
privately that he had followed this strategy to earn almost four hundred kills
on a recent raid.

Silently, he raced down the stairs to the first door, which
was unlocked. Pulling it open, after a push failed, he stepped into a wide
corridor, with transparent partitions used as walls, and human furniture
visible. There were opaque compartments within, the view blocked by horizontal
thin strips, and doors with translucent panels. That must be the sleeping
areas. The scent of many humans was pervasive, but it didn’t seem fresh.

Perkta forced a double door to open from the corridor,
without breaking the clear material as he broke the flimsy lock. He quietly
went to the end opaque compartment, intending to work his way through the
labyrinth of interior rooms, killing silently.

He first thought the door he tried was locked, but a small
lever released it with a low sounding click it when he pushed it down. Drawing
a short slender blade, he started to slip through the door. His eyes had
adjusted to the gloom inside the building, which was broken only by dim lights
at exit doors in the main corridor.

Suddenly, he was bathed in glaringly white light from above,
and the human that had activated it was hiding. He instantly dropped the knife
and drew both pistols in a blur of motion as he dove to the side of a brown
rectangular box in the rear third of the room, where the human was most likely
hiding. He fired twice through the sides of the box with armor piercing rounds,
having seen the wood grain texture. Perkta assumed it was either hollow, or
shielded the human.

There was no cry of pain, and no fresh human scent. He
looked around the rest of the room before standing. There were several items of
human furniture to see. One was a well-padded stool with a back, placed behind and
partly under a backside opening of the brown box, and two less ornate backed
stools in front. Several examples of artificial plant life were placed in a
corner and on shelves, with a poorly photographed replica of a mountain scene
on the wall. On closer inspection, the photograph was actually revealed as artificial,
made by some human with nothing useful to do.

Perkta, knowing his shots might have alerted other humans
nearby, he retrieved his knife and cautiously made his exit, to sample the next
doorway along the line of five. He was not startled this time when a glaring
white light came on as he entered. These must be motion activated or heat
sensitive detectors, intended to light the room when occupied. That suggested
that darkened rooms might not contain his prey. Unless that was another human
trick. He’d have to check rooms at random on this level, and there were three
parallel main corridors, with smaller connecting ones at the ends and one
through the middle.

Five minutes later, he decided that if sixteen compartments
contained no humans, and there were no fresh scents, he needed to try the next
level down. Perhaps the humans did their work at the top of the buildings, and
lived lower down. The next level was a near duplicate of the last, and he
randomly tried only four compartments. Not all illuminated as he entered, but
many did. Some compartments that he tried, and that lit up automatically, had
an outside wall with large windows. That glare was surely visible for a
considerable distance, marking his passage through the nest. As he passed one compartment
that he’d checked earlier, he noticed the open doorway was dark now. That made
sense if the lights activated because of his presence, and went off after he
departed. He’d avoid compartment testing near outer walls; to prevent the
revealing lights from showing his position to outside observers.

He’d eliminated the top two levels, and he decided to drop
two levels before checking again for dormant humans. It was while he was
looking into other interior rooms that he heard the high-pitched noise of what
sounded similar to a single ship maneuvering thrusters. Krall ships had
thrusters designed to reduce the sound from high-pitched jets, because of their
more sensitive ultra-sonic deployable internal ears. This frequency range told
him it was a small human ship, and what he thought was a harmonic, resolved
itself into a second small craft that was on a different side of the building.
Obviously, humans had noticed either his landing or the lights.

Good,
he thought. Perkta realized he had inadvertently
selected a non-nest building, left uninhabited at night. Nevertheless, the
humans had foolishly come to investigate. Dormant or alert, dead was dead. He’d
kill these, and then fly to a more populated area.

****

“Sergeant Griswold, I have motion on the ninth floor, a
strong heat signature was briefly at a window. There are residual glows from a
couple of windows on the top two floors, as if the lights and air circulation
was active a short time ago.” The sergeant had assigned Private Alicia Gomez to
run IR surveillance for this end of the twelve-story office building.

“Gomez, feed your playback to squads one and two and the
Lieutenant. I’ll send it to second platoon, and get whatever they may have
seen.” He was gone, and back in a minute.

He selected a “push” for all three of first platoon’s squads,
which included the platoon leader. “Second platoon has successive IR returns
from the eighth and sixth floors, all on third squad’s east end of the
building. It looks like the Krall is coming down a stairwell to meet us at this
side.”

Griswold Linked to his platoon leader. “Sir, if the Krall
tries to break out on our end, the top of the parking garage has an oversight
of the area. Good spot for a sniper.”

“Good idea sergeant. Let me call them.”

Griswold checked the positions of his seven people. Gomez
was atop a parked truck directly across the street from the office building, where
she had a clear, but exposed view of the whole east end of the target building.
However, he didn’t want her down from there just yet. He had a man at each end
of the same truck. Slade had the 50 Cal with KK’s loaded, in the front,
Ackerfem was at the truck’s rear, and he had KK’s and grenades ready.

The other four of the squad had to find what hard cover they
could, but the street was sparse in that regard. The green pips on his helmet
display showed Dill was in a midblock doorway, Trevor at the building’s corner
behind him, and DiGeronimo at the far corner of the same building, facing the Binders
Insurance Building, where the Krall had landed.

Except where
was
Castro? His pip indicated he was ten
feet
above
the ground, along the sidewalk of the same facing building.
Griswold looked up along the shadows and spotted the IR splotch on a ledge just
below the second floor windows. Castro must have used the suit to leap and chin
himself up.

Griswold himself was behind a covered public transit system bench,
thirty feet in front of the parked truck. Except for that truck, the entire
squad had a view of the target’s building. He idly wondered if the Krall was in
there buying life insurance. Selecting that building to land on seemed out of
character. There were no apartment buildings for several blocks in any
direction. This was an expanding new business district on Belgrade’s outskirts.

If the Krall came out on this side, from the stairwell
emergency exit onto this east end street, all eight of the squad were ready to
go. The sky in the east was getting brighter, and it looked like a good day was
dawning.

****

Perkta needed to get out of this trap before dawn, or he
might have a bad day. His glances out the windows revealed humans in armor on
all sides of the building, and a shuttle hovering in place overhead, covering
his exposed single ship. He could get away without the ship.

Their armor did not match with the briefing of what humans
had used on Koban for combat testing. This equipment had good active
camouflage, that if not for his infrared vision capability he might not have seen
all of them. Unfortunately, he had not set up his com system to alert him to nearby
human transmitter locations before leaving the shuttle’s master processor. Not
that he could understand their conversations, even if not encrypted. However,
he could have detected where some of them might be hidden behind barriers if he
knew their direction, and form a better idea of how many he faced.

So far, he had counted six hands worth of the enemy, and he
knew there were more. The total numbers were not that important, because only
those on the side were he made his breakout mattered. It appeared that there
was just a single octet on this end. Humans were notoriously slow to react, and
the Koban style armor for humans was of ultra-light weight material derived
from complex Raspani technology. They did not have the means to fabricate that light
substance, and this armor looked heavy, which would slow them even more.

He had just his two pistols for firepower, so he made sure
he had full clips in each, armor piercing and explosive. The human’s weapons were
probably fully automatic, but he could fire manually nearly as fast, and
certainly more accurately. His debriefing from this raid would adjust the
equipment the next raiders brought with them.

He decided that the two humans positioned the highest would
be his first kills. One was on top of a transport, fully exposed, and another a
bit higher and behind, on a ledge of the next building, equally vulnerable.
They would have better shots at him when he was below them in the street than
the others, so he would eliminate them before that.

All of them appeared to be looking most often at the base
and corner of this building, below the stairs he was using. They were virtually
telling
him where they expected him to exit. He wondered why they had
not fired at him as he descended, briefly approaching a window to peek outside
several times. Probably their reaction time was too slow. Nevertheless, he
didn’t look out at every floor as he descended, and used variable locations to
avoid a pattern they could predict. At the third level, based on the distance
remaining when he looked down the stairwell, he risked one final fast glimpse out
a window to see if the enemy was still stupidly poised where they had been from
the start.

They had not repositioned even once, surely knowing he had
seen them. He formed his mental battlefield picture, and backed away from the third
floor window. They were looking at that corner often, so he fired one explosive
round down to that level, to give them a sound and flash to focus their
attention in the wrong place. Then he ran and crashed through the third floor
window feet first, firing at his designated targets in the order he had decided
cleared the most dangerous enemy soonest.

****

Captain Krysinski relayed another update from the city Civil
Defense center, this time it was a more definite report. A Krall had just attacked
a number of houses on the southern edge of Belgrade, and the caller said he’d
wounded the alien.

“Its ship was said to be in a quarry on the same road. Check
your computer, I pushed the map coordinates.”

He considered a moment. They had a single ship isolated on a
roof, so a second one wasn’t as unique a prize. “The Krall disappeared in the
dark, but if it’s wounded, it may be returning to the ship. If you get there
first, blow the hell out its transportation. The quarry is a safe place for a
large explosion.”

Both shuttles altered course slightly and increased speed.
They reached the site in a matter of seconds, banking hard to stay close
overhead. A quick visual scan spotted a half dozen trucks parked near the front
of the extensive property. However, in the back against a wall was a dark
cylinder the right length and diameter. The third platoon shuttle came around
in a hover and used its forward floods to verify that it was a single ship.
Both shuttles pulled back and coordinated their missile attack. Each fired two
brimstone missiles apiece from a mile away. The secondary detonation made them
wish they had been farther away.

Lieutenant Capers, third platoon, called in the results.
“Captain Krysinski, the Krall ship is destroyed. I caution you to be careful
before risking the same thing for the one on the rooftop. We were about a mile
away and the blast wave hit us pretty hard.”

“Roger that, we saw the flash from the other side of the
city. Don’t assume the Krall was inside. Third platoon start at the quarry and
search towards the houses where it was seen last. Fourth platoon land in the
road near the houses for their protection, and see if you can pick up a trail.”

After acknowledgements, he returned his attention to the
situation below, with a Krall trapped inside an empty office building.
Suddenly, the Krall was in the street and first squad, of first platoon, was
fighting for survival.

****

Sergeant Griswold shifted aim from the door as the third
floor glass shattered outwards, the Krall firing with two hands as it fell,
twisting in the air, pivoting for a landing in the center of the street.
Griswold and Slade were firing, as was Trevor, the troop behind Griswold at the
far corner of the building. Gomez, Castro, and Ackerfem were not shooting,
despite having the most favorable angles. Two icons in his helmet turned amber
for Castro and Ackerfem, Gomez was red. Three down, one fatal.