“True enough, which would be bad for him. However, what sits directly behind the driver’s compartment, and even lower that his head?”
“Son of a bitch! That was brilliant!” Greeves would regret his shouted jubilation and compliment, but only later. His brief lapse in guarding his words of praise for the never humble Sarge would return to haunt him.
“What was?” Spartan asked. He’d seen ladybugs of course, but had never operated one. That was regular army grunt work.
Reynolds explained, as his “humble nature” would have him doing repeatedly, to anyone that couldn’t escape his company. “The fusion bottle for the ladybug is placed between the drivers cab and the clamshell that covers the gun. Open the clamshell, remove the limit pins, and you can fire down on your own fusion bottle. They sure make a hell of a bang when they rupture don't they?”
Chapter 7: Parting is Such Sweet Destruction
Two days later, back at their quarters outside Nabarone’s Headquarters bunker, Greeves had some news to share with Reynolds. “I just heard from PU central command that the First will not be pulling back any farther. The Shadow fighters performed beautifully against the Krall single ships. In or out of atmosphere, the Kobani Shadow pilots kicked their asses, five to one for air-to-air kills, and still managed three to one on space kills, where Krall advanced ship technology has an edge over our space plane designs.
“Shadow Wing knocked down enough single ships they were able to strafe some of the loaded Krall convoys preparing to make their withdrawal. Even the Navy sent in some of their space planes to help.
“Their pilots aren’t as good, and they lost thirteen of them, but with the Shadows to take the pressure away from single ship engagements, the navy hit the spread out supply lines of the forward Krall clans hard. Their warriors are now low on power packs and replacement weapons. Because Gatlek Pendor withheld much of the air and artillery defenses for his use in the next invasion, that’s forcing the minor clans to slow their pushes.
“We think they went past the points where they were told to halt their advance coming out of Novi Sad and on a couple of other fronts as well. They thought they were going to pin and destroy the First Army in the mountains, so they kept pushing. They need to pull back out of the mountains now because they can’t get the resupply they need. The Gatlek doesn’t appear willing to share any of what he’s taking with him.”
Reynolds nodded. “I think Pendor is in such a hurry to lift with his invasion fleet that he didn’t want to launch the large reserve of single ships already stowed in the clanships. He’s willing to leave the minor clans here with less material. They still have enough warriors, weapons, and supplies to fight Nabarone’s forces and win, provided they don’t fight as stupidly as they have this time. I hope it was Pendor that was responsible for their screwing up the assaults, letting them get overextended. They never fought that sloppy before, when following their more traditional style of steady warfare. If he’s in charge of wherever they plan to invade next, it may not go well for him.”
“We’ll know where they’re going soon.” Greeves revealed. “SatCom surveillance reports the lines of trucks that have been parked for days on the roads have started racing towards the gathered clanships. Apparently they’re about to pull out their invasion forces before they become bogged down in supporting the continent wide assaults they initiated. Pendor let the small clans get out of hand. Restraint isn’t their style when they see the enemy retreat, and Nabarone really took advantage of that.”
“Aren’t the minor clans still pressing their attacks on our forces?” Reynolds asked.
“Yep. I think that streak of independence in every Krall is exaggerated in a small clan’s ego, pushing them to ignore the preset limits of how far they were supposed to chase Nabarone’s troops. Now, when they discover that their massed clanships are pulling out, taking much of the equipment, they’ll soon get to taste what it’s like to retreat.”
“Assuming they know how,” Reynolds snorted, indicating doubt.
“Oh, I think Nabarone is ready to teach them how. I was just speaking to Henry. He has some excited new supporters in the Navy. They see clear preparations for the predicted partial Krall pull out, and are ready to make it as costly as they can. For today, Henry practically walks on water, so far as prognostication is concerned.”
“Buoyed up there by Tet’s analysis, you mean.”
“Sure, but his superiors don’t know that. Besides, Henry is damned shrewd in his own way. It was his plans that turned Tet’s prediction of a partial pullout into a way to bleed the most out of the bastards. I hope they like how fun the liftoff will be.”
****
“My Gatlek, the leaders of the minor clans refuse to believe the massive amount of supplies they know exist will not be moved forward to them.”
Pendor reared back his head and snorted with amusement. “They were told not to advance so far and so fast. Nearly all have moved beyond the geographical points where they were instructed to halt.”
“Sir, Kothar, the Toldak clan leader, has been heard openly discussing offering a challenge to you, if you proceed with withdrawing so many forces. He says they only pursued the human First Army so deep into the mountains because you sent a blocking force to try to trap them.”
“Tor Gatrol Kanpardi has orchestrated the partial withdrawal to conduct another invasion. I cannot be challenged for obeying an order from our highest war leader. Let him challenge the Tor. It is true I sent a blocking force into the mountains east of Novi Sad, which then failed to contain the largest enemy army as I ordered. The leader of that raid is dead, so let Kothar also challenge him for failing.” Another snort.
He added, “If the small council of minor clan leaders had obeyed the restrictions I placed on their advances, they would not be so far ahead of their supplies. Tell the various command bunkers that their warriors must return to the positions where they were ordered to stand and hold.”
His aide risked condemnation, but had a duty to remind his leader of something. “If the humans counterattack strongly, they may not be able to move enough supplies forward fast enough to keep all of the territory they now hold, even at the positions where you ordered them to wait.”
“That will be after I have relinquished my command here, and have departed on the new invasion as Gatlek on a new war front. Kanpardi will assign a new Gatlek over Poldark, promoted from a leader among the minor clans that will remain here. Remind them of that coming honor. One that only the strongest supporter of the Tor Gatrol’s strategy can receive.”
He suppressed a snort, aware that Kanpardi might not be the one to confer that promotion. Not even his own loyal aides knew of the arrangement he had made with Telour.
“Prepare my clanship for departure. I intend to launch in the vanguard of our brave charge to force a landing on a new human world.” The use of the term charge was in keeping with Kanpardi’s assertion that this action was vigorously expanding the war on humanity, not a redistribution of temporarily limited forces and material, a result of human actions.
****
Crager was standing next to lieutenant Honley, as the young spec ops officer absorbed the intelligence arriving by the second. The rate of loading the clanships had peaked, and was progressing at a steadier level now. It was evident that some of them would need to launch soon, because it would lead to recklessly excessive risk to launch all of them simultaneously, even by Krall standards. Because the war leaders had clearly been conserving resources in the last six months, since the Kobani raids, a reckless surge of launches so close together would risk collisions and waste.
When Crager had reported to Honley that a group of armor wearing Krall had left the main hillside entrance to the Gatlek’s underground bunker, he merely nodded. They had boarded a nearby clanship, of many parked close to that thousand six hundred foot high small mountain of rock that protected the complex. What made this clanship more noticeable was that when unstealthed, it was revealed that it h
ad no hull sections of slightly different shades.
Clanships, or their parts, were often used for a thousand years of lifetime, and repairs from battles, accidents, and ordinary wear resulted in a less than uniform exterior appearance on very old ships, at least when they switched off stealth. The clanship that sub leaders from the bunker had boarded appeared to be genuinely new.
Crager knew the young spec ops officer personally, and assigned as the XO of the company now, he recalled that he had been a good trooper. He’d help train him five years ago. That fact appeared to have intimidated the young officer, and he looked too much to Crager for the NCO’s advice and approval. Listening to his more experienced NCO’s was a smart thing to do, but he didn’t appear ready to act quickly enough now.
“Sir, I think some of high ranking staff of the Gatlek is preparing to depart. Pendor may or may not be with them because we don't know if he’ll continue to command here, or has been promoted to lead the next invasion. We do know those warriors that came out are part of the staff of whoever will command the invasion, and several were aides to Pendor. They’ll lead from the front, as usual.” The implication he wanted Honley to catch was that Krall leaders didn’t stand around and wait. That ship would be leaving soon, and not alone. It would be bad if he had to tell the Captain that his XO was indecisive.
It turned out he didn’t need to. On the common command link, which all of his senior NCO’s were also monitoring, they heard him call the commander of the cruise missile base. “Colonel Dolby, the Krall leadership has just entered their clanship. I believe they’ll start liftoffs within the next five minutes. I request you launch the first wave now, and the next wave two minutes after that. We’ll blow the plasma batteries when your birds exit the passes from the foothills. There’ll be less time for the clanships to adjust and to target your missiles.”
“Lieutenant, I sent the order as you were talking. The first hundred are lighting up now.” Obviously, the colonel, with intelligence of his own, had also been waiting for the young officer to act.
Honley verified that the three signal transmitters, which provided triple redundancy for the detonators, were all online via his suit’s AI. “Sergeant, I think business will be booming around here shortly.”
“Yes, Sir. I think it will.”
The first indication the Krall would receive that their enemy knew that they were pulling out some of their forces, would be when those low-level cruise missiles left the cover of the nearby foothills, three miles from their defensive perimeter. The moment the first missile appeared, a dozen of the heavy plasma cannons in the ring that defended the Krall clanships would erupt in flames and fragments, leaving a gap almost seventeen miles wide for the missiles to pass through.
The missile base was over a thousand miles away, so the time of travel intentionally allowed room for the first successful clanship launches to start. As much as hitting the lead ships, which the high status invasion leaders would occupy, had appealed to Nabarone, he’d ordered that the first strike not arrive until there were numerous clanships lifting, conventional thrusters blazing. The volume inside the sixty-mile diameter circle was expected to fill with a thousand or more simultaneous rising clanships, with another thousand prepared to lift, and another third still closing portals. The maximum opportunities for confusion and success in knocking many of them down would present itself then, when they were fully committed. Mirikami and Nabarone hadn’t deluded themselves into thinking they could get even a quarter of them. The Krall reacted too fast, and their ships and weapons were too sturdy for that.
Besides, killing clan leaders and sub leaders had relatively little impact on how well the Krall fought. Other, slightly lower status leaders were eager to leap in and fill voids, and each clan knew intimately the extensive hierarchy of their own rising high status warriors and sub leaders. Lower status sub leaders and warriors would instantly defer to the orders of those of higher status that survived. If there were two Krall of equal status that both desired the same leadership position and they refused to share, a sudden death match challenge might select the fittest to lead. It was like cutting the individual snakeheads off a medusa-like foe, where an unending number of new heads of similar skill and experience was waiting eagerly for their turn to lead.
Following Mirikami’s strategy, they were striving to reduce the amount of material available for the Krall to make war right now, before the remote Krall worlds could ramp up the production ability of their hundreds of underutilized factories and slaves. After thousands of years of meeting easy and unimaginative, intrinsically unwarlike foes, the Krall had permitted war production to become centralized, controlled by a handful of the most powerful clans. That would not continue, but if humanity could act fast enough, they could force the Krall to regroup and slow their advances, buying time for other worlds.
****
Pendor was of course on the control deck of his newly built clanship, the equivalent of a flagship in human terms. Unlike a human admiral, he was personally staffing one of the four command positions, with a single plasma cannon and one heavy laser linked directly to his station. Not that he anticipated having the pleasure of firing his weapons at the enemy, of course, because this massive fleet launch would completely catch the humans by surprise.
The second and third group of launches, slated to follow on each other’s heels, would see more action, as Poldark’s full set of potent Planetary Defenses discovered this wasn’t just a handful of clanships departing, as was usually the case. They would engage the next launches with more than the usual number of ground missiles, plasma cannons, heavy lasers, and orbital rail guns.
There were two space plane carriers in the system, and their craft had been involved in ground support actions for two days. The complement of thirty heavy cruisers based here would probably engage the ships at the edge of the columns of rising clanships. There had been reports of White Outs of more massive human ships arriving a week ago, however they had not been seen in the inner system, and may have departed. The entry into a Jump Hole wasn’t always observable if you weren’t close by.
Each of the clanships had a full load of anti-ship missiles, and three quarters of their laser and plasma defense systems would be under ship computer control, as distasteful as that was to any ship commander. That was how the slow reacting human crews were forced to fight all of the time. Merely directing the Artificial Intelligences where to concentrate their efforts.
Pendor and his command deck crew, with two backup members present in the event of losses, gripped the posts mounted next to their consoles, for the extra stability they provided if maneuvering was required before reaching a safe Jump altitude. Significant maneuvering would not be a recommended activity, not with the atmosphere to be so crowded with other lifting ships.
The first forty-eight ships to launch were specifically tasked with providing a cap, or perhaps better characterized as a blanket of missiles and plasma fire, aimed at any human threat seen. The ever present rail guns were primary targets, despite being kept in geostationary orbits much higher over Krall held territory, to avoid their being easily destroyed by the ring of space capable cannons in the Krall’s defensive ring. Their slugs were aids to detecting the stealthed clanships in space, after they switched to reactionless Normal Space drives. In atmosphere, their wake turbulence, ion trails, and fiery thrusters gave them away.
When a railguns relatively ineffective slug struck an invisible stealthed clanship, it broadcast the precise location of the hit and the unseen target’s direction of movement. Then missiles and energy weapon batteries instantly targeted the area around a hit with heavy concentrated fire.
A troubling aspect of the fighting the last two days was that many of the human space planes had been as difficult to detect as Krall single ships were. There was apparently a new class of them flying here, which had displayed superior detection capability for finding single ships, and in atmospheric combat had outperformed any of the Krall single ship pilots.
Clanship and single ship stealth coatings were similar, but the smaller ships were of a later technology the Krall had stolen from the Raspani, and their stealth was actually superior to the older Olt’kitapi design for clanships. Those space plane fighters had somehow seen single ships, and with actual wings for aerial dog fighting, could outturn and out climb the single ship pilots. However, even if they could detect the clanships, they didn’t have the firepower to go talon-to-talon with the far larger and more heavily armored and armed craft.
“Send the vanguard now,” Pendor ordered.
Scattered widely within the sixty-mile diameter circle filled with clanships, the twelve hands of the ships in the protective vanguard blasted skyward at maximum acceleration. When they left atmosphere, they were not going to enter a Jump Hole as was normal for the Krall, they would linger and fight off any incoming attacks for all three waves of departures. This was a tactic the humans would never have seen the Krall use, because it was new to them as well.
No sooner than those ships were above two miles, Pendor sent the signal for the full launch of the first wave of nearly a thousand clanships. Some would take advantage of the ion trails of the previous clanships, to provide them a degree of concealment in atmosphere. Pendor’s pilot shifted course slightly, to fly directly up the trail left by a vanguard ship that had been deliberately parked next to them when it lifted.
As the vicious acceleration tested their legs and ability to hold onto the stability posts, they simultaneously entered the concealing ion trail they would follow, and suffered a corresponding reduction in sensor ability to observe the region around them as they lifted. As a result, Pendor had to rely on a radioed report from an unlaunched ship on the perimeter, that there had been a series of explosions on the southern rim of their defensive ring. The heavy plasma batteries there had been destroyed.
Koban 4: Shattered Worlds Page 30
