Koban: The Mark of Koban (53 page)

In that second or two, none of the three
warriors had a chance in the lighter Fjord gravity to drop all the way to the
floor, where fewer of the pellets might have found them. That was because some
of the deadly little balls would hit the floor, only to rise again to strike a
higher target, and others went directly and randomly, to find what obstacles
they might encounter.

The three Krall
were
the nearby higher
obstacles for the balls to encounter. Two of them would not live to see their
next birthday, if egg-hatching anniversaries were a Krall tradition. Probably
not.

A grenade was knocked spinning across the
floor a half second before it exploded, with two very aware Krall looking
straight down at it between them, from less than two feet away, with their
finely tuned senses, keen vision, and their (almost) instant reactions useless
while suspended in air, falling. Their two faceplates looked more like food
strainers when they hit the floor. The ichor that strained through didn’t look
very edible.

The third warrior, Gondat, was shielded from
that nearest blast, by the inadvertent selfless shielding provided by his now
deceased clan mates. Not that he escaped entirely without injury, with multiple
new limb penetrations to match those it had earned at the last door. The heavier
torso armor deflected or shed the pellet strikes again. Nevertheless, he wasn’t
going to be running after their attackers, not with a shattered knee on the
right side, and a half torn open ankle joint on the left foot. The blood would
stop quickly, of course, and he would ignore the pain.

The low status novice warrior had let his
surviving octet members down, both with his failure to stop the attack, and
then not to warn the others of the impending grenade assault. He had received
not a scratch. The higher status wounded warrior promptly assessed their
situation, and ordered the novice after the humans, before they could again
delay his burning through the door.

Even in armor, a human could not hold out very
long after he burned through, and hot charged plasma would play havoc with the
electrical systems of the gun controls. All Gondat needed was a little more time.
His new raid leader, Trudok, said that these guns were preventing the remaining
mass of warriors from quickly swarming the trapped humans. They had discovered where
most of them had apparently retreated. They were trapped on the docks, with no retreat
possible. He would earn his higher status by completing this task, and
silencing the cannon.

He wasn’t so sure about the remaining novice’s
ability, but if he could chase the humans guarding this door away, the warriors
at the previous gun would be finished shortly, and one of them was mobile
enough to limp here. They reported there was a second door visible through the
first hole, but simply holding a rifle to the hole continued the burn into the
second door. Measured by the time to get through the outer door, the next one
should be penetrated at any minute.

He resumed his impatient burn on the outer
door, confident the small hole would be through soon despite the slower
progress with a single rifle. He tried holding a second rifle in the other
hand, but a fragment had entered and broken it at the original trap, and even
ignoring the pain, it refused to close tight enough for steady aim.

He heard repeated booms from this big human gun,
and from the more distant gun down the corridor. He was looking forward to the
satisfaction of the silence following their destruction. Then he suddenly
received part of what he wanted. The other octet leader reported they had
penetrated the second door, and were firing one of the two remaining plasma
rifles with a partly charged power pack into the inner chamber. The relentless
heat buildup and conductive plasma would end the talk of that gun soon. The
octet leader could not walk, but a warrior, using two charged plasma rifles for
assistance in walking was limping his way to this other door.

For Gondat this was the third battle with
humans, and the fiercest by far he had experienced. However, the humans had
again used remotely controlled weapons to spring a trap. It was cowardly! Why
wouldn’t they die properly, at the hands of a superior foe?

He would be content when his small clan joined
a full-scale attack on some world, where small traps that worked on the scale
of an octet would be of no use on a larger army. The humans had been punished
for delaying the Gatrol’s next phase of larger, longer attacks. After the near
destruction of an important human world for their attacks from space, they
changed their strategy, arming more warriors of their worlds to fight on the
surface, as the Krall would have forced them to do anyway. Dorbo was a small
clan, and this raid was a test of their readiness to fight a protracted battle.
It wasn’t proceeding well so far, but if they exterminated the humans of this
city despite high loses, they would earn enough status to be included.

When the blowback of plasma suddenly ceased,
he knew he had breached the outer door. He continued to fire, as the power pack
ran down. He only had two more partly charged rifles, and he might need a third
one to finish. The reinforcement from the other door would bring a good rifle,
or he could always recall the novice, whose name he had not learned. It would
be a good day.

****

To Henrik, it wasn’t looking like a very good
day. The lone Krall warrior had leaped up to a second floor balcony, and then another
jump reached the third level, between himself and Agneta. They were separated
now. The Krall could be suckered sometimes, and whittled down with preplanned
ambushes, but their toughness made it hard for even two humans to win against
one in a straight up combat situation, not without one or both dying in the
process.

They were out of grenades, and on his visor,
he saw the image of one Krall burning the door to reach his friends. Nord had
said the warriors at gun 3 had breached both doors, and one of them was on the
way here. Waiting wasn’t going to improve the odds. Nord couldn’t find a camera
image of the pursuing Krall, because it had not entered the outer corridor, and
wasn’t visible on the balcony it had entered.

“Agneta, I’m taking a shot at that Krall below
before the other one finds us.”

“Henrik shoot at his rifle. He only has one
spare left, and it may not be enough.”

“Won’t help. A warrior is coming up the
corridor with two more. He’s using them as crutches, but I’ll bet they still
work. I’ll try a head shot.”

“Won’t penetrate from the back of the helmet
fast enough. He or the other one will get off a return shot.”

“Then wish me luck, love. Here I go.”

He confirmed the position by camera, stepped
to the balcony, aimed down and fired. The pulse had just left the rifle when
his left elbow was blasted by a bolt from two apartments away.

He nearly dropped his rifle before he could
step back out of sight. His elbow was burning, and the suit’s emergency cooling
was routing liquid nitrogen to the joint, which had fused and would not
straighten. He screamed from the pain, and the suit injected him with a fast
acting
analgesic.

“Henrik, my God, are you OK?” Agneta was in a panic.

Through gritted teeth, he managed to get out, “Elbow hit… by
the one after us… I don’t know if I hit the target.”

“No. He’s still burning.”

Crap!
He’d exposed
himself for no gain.

Nord calmly told him, “The warrior that shot
you fired from a balcony three apartments to your left and he has now entered
the outer corridor, and is approaching your position.”

Suddenly he heard a sound in the corridor, and
a crash of a door being smashed. He brought his rifle up right-handed, assuming
the Krall would be crashing through from the other room. Instead Nord started
to speak, but instantly was overridden by Agneta.

“I hit him in the back of the knee and he
smashed through an apartment door across the hall, one door short of you to
take cover. Get back down the stairs, quick.”

His bride had given him a reprieve, shooting
the Krall from behind as it charged down the hall. He wasted no time getting to
the stairway in the corner of the bedroom, and awkwardly pulled the door closed
behind him one handed. He could hold his left arm across his chest, but it was
clumsy going down the narrow stairs. He was able to leap to the landing, then
again down the last flight. Unlike a Krall normally moved, he was making a hell
of a lot of noise. However, the warrior had learned exactly what apartment he’d
been in when he took his failed shot. Henrik crashed through the door at the
bottom, and raced towards the still open front door. He heard a crash above him
as the warrior entered the apartment from the upstairs hallway.

As Henrik burst into the lower hall, he damn
near shot his wife out of sheer surprise, seeing an armored form coming right at
him. Agneta had beaten him down the stairs, and she was halfway up the hall to
join him.

She was relieved to see he was still able to
function and prepared to fight. “How’s the arm?”

“The suit has me feeling no pain. Let’s get
moving and find an unlocked door to get out of the hall.” There was another
crash behind him, from the direction of the stairwell door. Fortunately, the Krall
was too thick in the chest to fit down the stairwell, and was bashing and
blasting his way through the walls and floor. They stepped into another
unlocked apartment.

“Eric, Greta, we can’t stop them and they’ll burn
through pretty soon. Take your last shot and get down the rabbit hole.” The gun
platforms all had a heavy armored set of floor hatches, opened manually from
the inside. The slides led to ground level, with an exit tunnel into the inner
corridors, or one went to the outside.

Eric opened the hatches as Greta fired and
returned the gun to Nord’s control. Eric brought them up to date with bad news.
“Guns 3 and 2 are down. Alf’s still firing his, but says the Krall disabled his
outer defenses, just as they did here. His camera over the door was shot out,
but another one up the corridor shows three warriors burning at his door. The
worst news is that there are two warriors on second level balconies across the
way. We have been unable to Link to Jarl or Elin, and we can’t see their suit
icons either. Nord has not heard from them since just before you took your
first shots. They never did that, and were supposed to shoot when Alf fired his
cannon.

Henrik had been so focused on his own
situation that he’d lost track of his other outside team. He sucked as a
leader. He was an amateur militia member, not a trained professional soldier.
The Krall octet on the west side had the advantage of hearing of the first ambushes
Henrik had arranged. They were not stupid. They must have sent two warriors
inside to catch Jarl and Elin from behind. They could be fooled by a particular
trick once, but it wouldn’t work twice. It was time to own up to the gun loss
to their boss.

“Commander Hendricksen, we are about to lose
all four guns Sir. I’m sorry. I also believe we lost Jarl and Elin.”

It was almost fifteen seconds before
Hendricksen answered. Henrik was afraid he’d too had been killed, and was about
to Link to the second in command when he answered. “Henrik, I’m sorry about
Jarl and Elin. Tell the other gunners thanks. They have done what we needed and
held out just long enough. The majority of Krall have finally infiltrated onto
D and F. They are using the cover there, moving down the centers against our
sporadic fire, moving closer to the docks. Over a hundred of them on each
avenue. Your people can help close the back door if you’re fast enough.”

“Thank you Sir. The others are Linked up and
heard you. We’ll make our way over. Out”

Henrik’s next words were for his teams. “Leave
the guns under Nord’s control for as long as they keep working. Rabbit out now!
Eric, Greta, we’ll meet you on the outside. Alf, I’m so sorry, but you’ll be on
your own for a short distance, but there will be other militia outside, waiting
to seal off the exit on this end of D and F. Let’s meet there.”

Henrik and Agneta went all the way through the
unlocked empty apartment they had found, reach another hall, went down a level,
and cut over to an outside exit. There was no sign of the warrior that had been
after Henrik. He couldn’t use his nose to follow their scent very effectively
in his armor.

They linked up with Eric and Greta, just as
Nord demonstrated that both guns 4 and 1 were still answering his control. Twin
pulses lanced out from opposite sides to knock down structures that previously
had furnished cover for the Krall to reach Avenues D and F in relative safety.
Now those wrecked building would shelter the militia members that would try to
block any Krall from retreating towards the city.

With powered armor to help, and painkillers to
block the sensation from his burned elbow, Henrik asked Eric and Agneta to help
him pull his left arm straight, breaking free the weld that held his left arm
bent.

As they paused to do that, the former gunners also
observed the total devastation of the buildings on the edge of the wide parks. They
had only seen it via helmet visors, or on video monitors in the gun control
rooms. The direct view offered a more vivid testament to the effectiveness of
the plasma cannons in stopping the Krall there. The charred remains of at least
fifteen Krall lay in the open areas on this side of the city, where some had
foolishly thought thick tree trunks or a stone park bench provided cover from a
plasma cannon.  Those parks had been attractive additions to the downtown area,
but their real function was to provide an open gap the Krall couldn’t cross.
They had seldom lived to reach the streets the militia didn’t want them to use.