Koban 4: Shattered Worlds

by Stephen W Bennett

  The humans had placed flimsy wood barricades where the six-lane bridge, the one he was assigned to cross, first extended over the dark swirling waters of the river below. It was less than fifty transport truck lengths to reach the other side of the river, and he was slightly ahead of the five tucks with him, four to his left and one on his right. The lack of heavy opposing fire added evidence that the humans were either unprepared for the massive scale of the assault, or had pulled back early.

  That second possibility nagged at Photok. An early pullback would suggest there was less surprise than expected. Having no respect for human fighters as individuals, he had nevertheless learned to expect their cunning and planning. When they had captured the part of the human nest area on the Krall side of the river three months ago, there were other elevated land bridges to cross. Those bridges had become killing zones of the warriors that used them, targets for human plasma batteries and lasers. The warriors exposed on the high bridges paid for the easier and faster passage. That was why the armored transports were being used to lead the way across the river this time.

  The octets in these trucks would attack plasma batteries and laser emplacements near the river from the flanks, after they crossed over. They would clear the way for warriors on foot to cross in greater numbers and speed. It would seem logical the enemy would try to stop the transports while they were still on the bridge. However, there was only light projectile fire, and plasma rifle bolts striking their front armor. It was like driving through a rainstorm to these heavy vehicles.

  This was not very like the clever cowards. There had to be something more forceful waiting for them on the far side. He relished the chance to test whatever fight they offered. He was disappointed.

  Roughly three transport lengths from the end of the bridge, his seat bucked him upwards as the roadway lifted beneath the truck, and then he saw the entire width of the roadway slab in front of him start to drop below the edge of a wide support at the end. His speeding transport hurtled down the increasing slope towards that flat wall. He knew the river was below them and they would end up there, but only after the first six speeding trucks smashed into that wall, and then eighteen others piled into them in three quick waves.

  Located at the front of the impending pileup, he would either be crushed or trapped in the wreckage. He needed to get out before that happened.

  As the truck dropped with the bridge section, he opened the door to his left and snatched at his plasma rifle. He could see that the warrior by the right door was already jumping clear. It was obvious the transport would smash into the wall before the roadway reached the water. The warrior on the right side had tried to drop to the ground, but she was still moving forward with the truck and falling. Her body would be mixed in with the crushing about to happen, when the vehicles behind piled on top.

  Photok instantly saw the best chance was to go up over the top of the cab and to the right, to try to leap clear of the bridge and the other transports. He quickly pushed off the weapons pocket of the door with his left foot, retaining a grip with his right hand on the doorframe, in order to maintain contact with the top surface of the truck. He swung onto the roof, tucked booth feet under him, his short legs helping do that, and shoved powerfully to the right and slightly backwards. He was passing over the cab of the slightly trailing truck to his right as he heard the impact of his cab.

  The right side passenger of that adjacent transport was belatedly electing to get out, and was trying to climb to his cab’s roof to leap clear. He was looking towards the river, away from Photok.

  Reaching out with his right hand, Photok kept a firm grip on his plasma rifle with his left, and grasped the other Krall’s helmet top. He pulled back and shoved down as hard as possible using the powered assist of his armor. Using that Krall as leverage, he threw himself farther, and cleared the second transport when it was still a body length from striking the wall. The clan mate, who so conveniently helped him along, was flung back into the disaster and wouldn’t be around to offer a death challenge later.

  Barely clearing the right side edge of the support pier, Photok stuck the dark water and tumbled over several times as he rapidly slowed and sank. The sounds of repeated impacts thudded clearly through the water to his helmet as he settled quickly through the inky waters. He tongued on his external suit lights, but the three narrow beams, one on the helmet crown, and two at the wrists, were swallowed by the murky depths. He struck bottom feet first, and felt the surface firm up after reaching ankle depth. The bottom mud wasn’t very thick, and his suit’s navigation told him which way to continue.

  He started plodding his way up the slope of the river bottom when he felt as much as heard another two explosions in succession. He knew it wasn’t from the plasma rifles or power packs in the transports because those were designed to be nearly fail proof. This was more distant, and he assumed that other spans of the bridge were being blown down as the trailing foot warriors tried to cross.

  The majority of them would be unharmed and could complete the trek just as he was doing, walking on the river bottom. It appeared that the privilege of first direct engagement with the enemy today might go to the warriors crossing by shuttlecraft. However, the contingency plan required they assist and protect the K’Tal that would assemble segments for the portable bridges that had been brought forward if needed. If Photok could get out of this cursed river quickly enough, he could still score early kills, which his suit would record and automatically report for him.

  He had accumulated considerable status points over the last orbit fighting here, and he was close to a breeding award within his clan. His seed was stored in the event he was killed, but if he earned the right in this battle to propagate his line, then his name might be spoken in the small clan’s history for years. His genes would eventually be added to the future of his entire race. A form of immortality every warrior craved.

  When his armored foot claws scraped on a flat hard surface, he knew he’d reached the paved erosion protection of the riverbank, and he scrambled up that quickly. He activated the power pack of his plasma rifle as he climbed. The inductive coupling to the plasma heating coils wasn’t affected if moisture infiltrated the fine gap between the power pack and the slot where it attached to the weapon. All he need do was lower his barrel to drain moisture, to avoid a preheat steam gush before he fired his first bolt.

  Human plasma weapons no longer emitted the infrared pre-flash they once did, which gave a warrior a slight warning of an impending shot in their direction. However, human accuracy was still less than a Krall’s was, and they often missed their shots at fast moving targets. Initially it was believed the flash suppression of their newer plasma weapons was due to a chance design change. After all, humans couldn’t see into the infrared, and their visual perception reported to their brains much slower than a Krall’s did. The brief flash before a plasma shot was fired should be imperceptible to them. Extensive testing on captured prisoners confirmed they still could not detect a crippling shot that was about to blow off a limb. Even when the captive was told in advance it was coming.

  However, there soon was evidence that human weapons makers did know about the plasma pre-flash. That proof came when their vulnerable weapons ports, on tanks and space planes, would briefly slam shut just before being hit by Krall plasma fire, or a protective mirrored surface would activate just prior to a hull being struck. The humans couldn’t see the warning flash, but their technology could, and their AIs took action for the slow reacting operators.

  As a result, the Krall slowly were adjusting to use more of the instant-fire lasers, but those beams had less penetrating power than did a star hot bolt of charged plasma. Warriors were reluctant to give up the power offered by their plasma rifles for a laser weapon.

  Except their opponents appeared to adjust quickly, and they seemed to develop new technology almost as quickly as they needed new weapons or defenses. The Krall could make their distant slave operated factories produce a later genera
tion of weapons, or add improvements to what they already had, simply by using the designs borrowed from many past wars, fought against many opponents. The Krall conducted no weapons research and development, but did have a reservoir of existing high tech designs to use, taken from multiple species, over thousands of years of fighting.

  However, humans were seemingly able to make the next step in adaptation before the delivery of new Krall weapons improvements even reached the warriors on the front lines. The production and logistic problems causing the slow delivery was not something that had ever concerned the average warrior. They were accustomed to using tactics where they wantonly wasted what supplies and weapons they had, and expected rapid replacements to arrive, with gradually improved weapons as they were needed. The Kobani had caused production limitations and slower delivery methods, which were starting to matter at the sharp end of the talon.

  As soon as Photok’s helmet broke the surface, he scanned the upper riverbank in front of him. There was a wall, which ran the length of the river as far as he could see, where humans and vehicles had once moved on a roadway beyond that low wall. There was no sign of defenders now, nor had there been before his transport had dropped into the water with the bridge section.

  He quickly looked back across the river, and saw that four different spans on the bridge he’d drive over had fallen from their support piers, dropping not only the transports into the river, but the warriors on foot behind them. He had first assumed some sort of heavy artillery had destroyed the other bridge sections, but that would not explain the mere handful of heavy explosions he had heard. Artillery would have left parts of the spans intact between the supports, with holes in the road surface. These spans were all knocked down by planted charges.

  When he looked at other bridges up and down the river, they had suffered the same sort of destruction. This meant that the humans were apparently expecting the “surprise” assault. The spare ammunition and weapons for the lead waves of warriors was now resting on the river bottom. On the other side, he could see the K’Tal’s driving the large tracked machines, bringing forward the lightweight folded bridge segments, which they would join and use to span the river. They would complete that quickly, and the mass of warriors still waiting over there from the larger clans, and not walking on the river bottom as the finger clans were, would then rush over. It was a race to see if the portable bridge would be completed before the mud walking warriors reached the enemy side of the river first.

  Photok was already here, so he needed to take advantage of his lead position while he could. There were others of his and other clans rising from the dark waters along the riverbank, like amphibians coming out to bask in the bright morning sun. They too had managed to climb clear of the wreckage. He’d have to split kills with them, so he needed to hurry to reach the mass of civilians he’d seen earlier in the top nest levels.

  He completed his twenty-foot climb to the wall, and leaped over that waist high obstruction, rifle at the ready. The four lanes were empty of vehicles and people. He heard the distant whumps of the human mobile artillery firing, and knew they would probably have anti-personnel rounds with the depleted uranium pellets, and some of the thermite charges that would self-guide to his suit’s joints, in an effort to punch through or make them seize up and lock. However, the couple of hundred warriors first across the river were not the targets of the artillery. Nor were they targeting the shuttles he saw landing on this side, tasked with defending the K’Tal construction teams building the portable bridges.

  The rounds came in just above the human nest buildings, almost recklessly close, using them as protection from the laser defense batteries now dotting the opposite riverbank. Perhaps a quarter of the low trajectory ballistic rounds were exploded in the air by the heavy tracery of red and green beams. However, Photok instantly knew the shells had never been targeted on him or his fellow warriors emerging from the river.

  For one thing, they were being destroyed too high to have been aimed at this bank of the river, and another was that they didn’t appear laden with the smaller cluster bombs, some of which would have survived to fall among them. His heavier armor was largely impervious to the pellets, and he would have to protect only his weapon and suit joints, if he could. What his helmet detection system was telling him was that these were all high explosive rounds, which were definitely a threat to his armor, but had a lower likelihood of one landing near to him than if they contained bomblets. The shells missed by the defensive beams were falling into the river, concentrated near the destroyed bridge. Splashes at the other bridges showed the same was happening at all of them. It made no sense. The bridges were already down.

  The laws of hydrostatic pressure and underwater shock wave effects were about to be taught to the heavily armored Krall in the river.

  The high explosive rounds were set for detonation on the river bottom. The destruction of nearby armored suits, and its contents, was an obvious and forgone conclusion, just as it would be if the HE rounds exploded near any Krall on the riverbanks. However, the incompressibility of water, compared to that of air meant that armor farther away from the exploding shells still was still compressed by greater force than they were designed to accept, and crushed or ruptured, opening seams for water to enter. Those warriors closest were already dead or unconscious from the shock wave, so drowning was irrelevant to them.

  The ones located hundreds of feet away had suits that sprung leaks, and the warriors inside were so stunned they couldn’t react as the suits filled with water, and they slowly drowned. At two hundred and fifty feet, the armor leaked, but the warriors were able to activate the releases and remove the weight.

  Unable to swim much better than a human wearing a weight belt, many of the dense bodied aliens pushed off the bottom, and flailed their way to the surface to suck in multi-lobed lungs full of air, before sinking and starting a faster walk to the shore. Most of them would have completed the crossing, even if they needed a second breath, except that the barrage continued intermittently for ten minutes, as the mobile human batteries repositioned to random locations, and fired again before relocating.

  Without even armor to absorb the next shockwaves, the bare Krall bodies littered the floor of the river near the bridges. The finger clans had learned the meaning of the term “cannon fodder,” even if they didn’t know the human words.

  ****

  Gatlek Pendor was as caught by surprise as those finger clans crossing the human bridges. He had not believed the humans were aware of the scale of the planned continent wide assault. He had sub leaders watching the bridges here at Novi Sad for the last two weeks, before the gathering of warriors near them even started. The enemy must have mined them even earlier, with what his K’Tal’s told him were remote detonators, or perhaps they sacrificed some of their simpler Artificial Intelligent devices.

  He had not wished to sacrifice any of his own forces, but some clan’s had to determine if the easier and faster routes over the river were open to them or not. The small clans were eager for the chance to lead the attack. Now he would send the bulk of his forces over their own portable bridges at Novi Sad. There had been no other large city located on a wide river like this one, so the losses here would be the only assault force where the small clans would feel as if they had been abused by Pendor.

  The four portable bridges were being formed rapidly. Each amphibious tractor held three segments of unfolding lightweight mesh bridge spans, with stabilized flotation to support them on the water. The first unit would park on the riverbank, and quickly unfold its three segments, as the next tractor trundled out to the end of the last unfolded segment. The tractor rolled off into the water, the back of the floating tractor already locked onto the last section it had passed over, and it then unfolded and extended its three lightweight mesh segments, as the flotation devices of all of the sections were equalized to make a level roadway.

  Every tractor and its three mesh segments it carried, added four new lengths to the flo
ating bridge. The amphibious tractors used their fusion bottle powered underwater jet propulsion units, and held the extending bridge in place against the current as the next tractor crossed to the new end. Inflatable supports expanded out to the sides to make the floating bridge less likely to rock to the sides, and the mesh surface stabilized at a constant height above the water for its entire length. If any tractor was disabled, by artillery or plasma beams, or a section became too damaged, the entire unit would be released from the structure, and one of several replacements tractors would race out to drop into the water and replace the lost link. Pairs of K’Tal were stationed along the length of the pontoon bridge, to facilitate and guide such repairs.

  Every second tractor also had a section of side mesh and pontoons that a pair of K’Tal manually unfolded on the downriver side of the flat tractor. Between tractors moving out to add to the pontoon bridge length, a laser defense battery would roll out to park on the side platforms, furnishing additional defense from enemy attack, either aerial or artillery. Thus far, the space planes of the humans had not been sighted at Novi Sad, although they were in action against advances at multiple other fronts.

  Pendor was suspicious at the lack of aerial support for the humans at Novi Sad, and held his single ships back from that battle, so long as the humans held their own air support in reserve. Many of the single ships were slated to be withdrawn with the clanships, and he was ordered to conserve them if possible. Besides, he fully expected to be making use of the resources he conserved here on some other world, as that invasion commander.