Koban: When Empires Collide

by Stephen W Bennett

  “OK folks. Any armed or armored Finth is fair game, as is the building. If any of our AI’s can determine who seems to be transmitting orders to others, they might be one of the leaders, thus prime candidates for frilling or Mind Taps.”

  She addressed the two Scouts she left in space, over the city of Pack Central. “Seong, Cardoza, if any of their ships approach this city, either in atmosphere or in space, destroy them if you can. None of us can use our gravity projectors down deep in this gravity well, but you also have missiles, lasers, and plasma bolts for low level targets. Give them Hell, and if you need some help, call us. Slobovic out.”

  The team carrying the two captive Finth deposited them at their Scout, and then, like the other four crews, spread out into the jungle to meet their foes, as the grounded Scouts activated stealth.

  Seiko used the Comtap images sent from watchers above to move closer to a column of ten armored warriors, who turned away from the building to enter the jungle preserve, using one of the many trails leading into the undergrowth. Each of them was carrying a long weapon, where half seemed to be plasma rifles because of the thicker barrels with their magnetic coils and the bulge of a plasma chamber near the trigger housing. The other Finth carried slimmer and lighter looking rifles, which had the look of the medium power lasers sometimes used by the Ragnar, and by regular army PU troopers.

  Each of the warriors crouched low just as they entered the forest, as if ready to pounce if a foe was seen. The lower profile might make sense to avoid a shooter, but here they were so low as to suggest they had modified an instinctive predators crouch, despite being armed. It fit with the profile that they hunted natural prey by dropping to all fours, at least until they closed with them as they ran them down.

  From a position above them, stealth activated and sitting on a thick red barked tree branch as they moved along the hard-packed trail, he watched as they used an integrated terrain scanning system, a combination of electronic, visual, and scents. Like on his own helmet, they had small sealable vents opened near their muzzles for smells, and their heads, on short thick necks, turned left and right, alternating between each Finth in line, so the jungle to the sides was under continuous observation. When one looked left, the one in front or back of him was looking right. They all tended to look up briefly, as they looked from side to side, but their postures and necks made looking up difficult without standing upright. Periodically, the Finth in front raised up to peer into large trees just ahead. The last one in line would suddenly turn completely around to check their back trail.

  Something Seiko saw mounted on the backs of their armor was a pair of clamps. One near their right shoulder, and another near their waist on the other hip. There was nothing in them, and he couldn’t decide what their purpose was. Then, when there was sizable movement in the brush to the right of the trail, he discovered the purpose of the clamps. One Finth, second in line, swung his rifle smoothly over his shoulder, and the clamps snapped open, and closed on the rifle, freeing the Finth to drop to all fours, and it creeped quietly into the underbrush, with two warriors covering his back, the others maintaining uninterrupted side to side scans.

  There was a suddenly loud thrashing sound through the brush, moving away from the trail. Seiko’s infrared vison caught a glimpse of the rump of a deer-like creature running through the trees. The investigating Finth returned on all fours, and as it cleared the overhanging low limbs, he rose and reached back to reclaim his rifle, and resumed his place in the momentarily paused file. This was a hunting preserve, and instead of a clumsy alien, they had found the wrong prey.

  That was an item of interest he could share. He used a link to the Scout captains. “The Finth armor has clamps for holding their rifles across their backs when they drop to all fours to chase anything fleeing through the thick underbrush. They can get quite low to the ground when they do that, but they don’t have a weapon immediately available without raising up and reaching back.”

  That datum delivered, he dropped from the limb to land softer than seemed possible from that height, touching the trail lightly, absorbing the drop with his toes, ankles, and knees, as shock absorbers. The rear-most Finth made one of its periodic full turns as the file of warriors resumed their advance deeper into the preserve. To Seiko, prepared to lance a plasma bolt through the Finth’s helmet, saw its eyes through its faceplate, sweep right by him without any hesitation. When it turned forward again, Seiko rose and rushed towards his first target.

  There was no need to alert the Finth beyond his current target by generating a reflected flash of a visible energy beam, and infrared and microwave beams acted slowly enough to allow a radio outcry. Therefore, it would be silent and physical.

  The protruding muzzle of the helmet, and the limited range of rotation of the head on that thick muscled neck suggested its own solution. At least one that a Kobani had the strength and speed to apply to the problem.

  He stepped directly behind the wide chested, armored figure, slightly shorter than its fellow warriors, and waited until it had completed its repetitive scan to the left side of the trail, and started a head rotation to scan the forest to the right. He raised his left arm and started reaching over the Finth’s shoulder and around its neck as its head pivoted to the right.

  He darted his right hand, palm up over the right shoulder, and as his left forearm and hand clamped in a viselike grip on the neck and upper shoulders, his right gauntlet grasped the muzzle of the helmet from below, and pulled backwards and up. Hard!

  He felt, more than heard, the snap of the neck vertebrae as the Finth finally achieved a capability that had eluded her kind in life. She could see her backtrail without rotating her now tightly held shoulders.

  It was a brief glimpse, as Seiko noted when the yellow eyes quickly closed. He stepped to the side of the trail holding the body erect, and laid the corpse behind an orange and red shrub at the edge of the hard-packed path. He knew the Finth was dead the same way he knew it had been a female. There was enough conductivity through their armor that he achieved a limited Mind Tap, which vanished the instant the spinal cord was severed as the fractured vertebrae cut through. He’d overestimated the strength of the Finth’s armor, at least at the neck joint, and he’d nearly pulled the head and helmet away from the torso. That would have changed his timeline, because blood coated stealthed armor needed to be wiped cleaned, and reversing a suit’s static charge could repel some particles, but that would have taken time.

  Now, however, he had information he hadn’t had a moment ago. The Finth armor was even more vulnerable at the joints than his was. He had easily ripped the material from the joint’s clamps and seal to the torso at the front. The next warrior, whom he was closing with, was taller than the female, which had already been a head taller than Seiko. He could jump up on its back to do the same thing to snap its neck, but his feet would be off the ground and he might not catch the body quietly before the two of them toppled over. He reached down to his right thigh, and opened the stealth coated sheath attached there.

  This time, he didn’t need to wait for the warrior to turn his head towards the side, to shorten the motion to snap the neck. He jumped higher, but not onto the back of the seven and a half foot tall Finth. He thrust forward and down, so the molecular thin edge at the tip, with the power of his arm behind it, overcame the flex material of the inch-wide rear neck joint, and he severed the spinal cord more surely than before. He used his left hand to grasp the muzzle and pulled the dying Finth backwards, to catch the body and lay it on the path. No need to hide it, as the next Finth turned a corner in the trail around a large tree trunk.

  Seiko intended to work his way up the line of ten, but as he took down the third warrior, the leader finally selected the icons of his sub-pack, to select five warriors to split off. This ten had separated from the original twenty of the pack-platoon that exited Pack Command together. There was a split in the trail ahead and he intended to split his command to search more of the preserve for the aliens
they knew were here. Except, three icons had changed shapes. They were dead, and one of them was very close behind them. It seemed impossible that any of his Hunters of the Forests had been hunted, and quietly killed. But the AI’s monitoring of life signs, which in this familiar forest preserve he hadn’t thought to check, were seldom wrong.

  He rage-hissed his warning, issued orders to his warriors, and they immediately pivoted and charged back towards the bend around the huge tree they’d just passed. As the first Finth came around the obstacle, he saw the gray outline of the still stealthed body of his dead packmate, rolling onto his side as his body completed its fall. He fired his plasma rifle directly above the body, making a reasonable assumption that the Federation assailant, with superbly stealthed armor, was standing over the body.

  The Finth was nearly correct, but he hadn’t connected the reported high stress flying ability of Federation pilots with their unexpected physical abilities. His intended, even if invisible target, was already twenty feet off the ground and rising in this mere .91 g of Earth standard gravity. Seiko waited until he reached the limb he’d leaped towards, and had pulled himself up, before unleashing a plasma bolt to the Finth’s neck joint. He followed up with a red laser to the face plate of the Finth just behind. That was a mistake, since the faceplates were polarized and AI controlled. The beam was attenuated before real damage was done, although that eye would be dazzled for hours. Another plasma bolt rectified the error, which made recovery from the laser hit a moot point.

  By then, the other five Finth knew the general elevated direction of the incoming fire, and started blazing away towards the upper limbs as they approached the tree. Seiko, considering discretion to be the better part of valor, did his best impression of a classic ancient jungle man he’d read about as a boy, and ran off along tree limbs tempted to activate his speaker to utter a Tarzan yell. The discretion thing won again, over his desire to stupidly taunt the enemy with an annoying sound they might shoot towards. It was time to head back to his Scout.

  ****

  Konar was the only ripper poised near a wider trail that led away from one cliff-like wall of the Pack Command structure. He had been the first to see armed Finth leaving the building, infiltrating into the hunting reserve.

  They were in armor that defeated his hunter’s vision when their stealth was activated. Vision that functioned well under low light and into the infrared. Nevertheless, their careless stealth activation procedures made it possible for him to observe them, as they made their exits through the sliding double doors that pulled apart into the side walls. They tended to activate stealth only as they neared the doorway, seemingly forgetting that the now invisible warriors ahead of them revealed the shapes behind them. He crouched low, concealed in the underbrush, as he counted them until the doors slid closed.

  He reported what he’d seen to all the teams, with certain details intended only for rippers. “Armored and stealthed Finth exited from the center of the northwest wall, the first wall as you count clockwise from the northern wall. I saw the portal open, and as they activated their suit stealth I counted sixty fighters that came out. They each carried rifle length weapons with power cables to their suits, and the weapons have the same stealth coating, although that isn’t as perfect as what is on the suits. A ripper can see the scrapes in the coatings on rifles, causing ripples in their stealth as they move.

  “They spread apart into three equal groups. Twenty moving left, twenty to the right, following the perimeter trail by the wall. Another twenty went straight ahead, on a wide path leading into the reserve. After going stealth it’s hard to see the ripples, but their musk is unmistakable. They must be desensitized to their own excretions, operating in a jungle where it is pervasive from frequent hunts. I could follow them with eyes closed at maximum running speed.”

  Kally, senior pride mate, said, “You won’t do that, I hope. Draw them into the undergrowth, and then their upright posture will move leaves and limbs as they pass. Take them one at time if you can, from the sides or behind.”

  “Of course, Kally. I’m no first-hunt cub, you know.” His young male ego was somewhat dented, as if he’d forget the stalking techniques he’d mastered at home.

  “What we hunt at home isn’t stealthed, intelligent, or armed. And we just learned that a Finth can drop to all fours to run, if in close pursuit of agile prey.”

  “In thick armor, while carrying a heavy weapon in at least one hand?”

  “Seiko says they secure the rifle on their backs when they run on all fours.”

  “OK. Point made. I’ll be careful.” He was unable to suppress his excited and youthful exuberance for the stalking about to commence. Careful wasn’t high on his list of concerns.

  This sudden aggressive development by the Finth had occurred faster than any of them expected, and rather than hunting together in a small pride of four cooperating rippers, they were deployed widely as scouts, unable now to work as a unit. Fortunately, they had the ability to use their tachyon links for communications, and to transmit continuously their location on the dynamic Comtap delivered maps of the reserve, provided by the four Scouts hovering above them. It was unlikely a Finth, even unencumbered with technology, could move as fast and quietly as a sinuous tiger, moving through any jungle.

  Konar was acutely aware of the air currents, and had selected his place of concealment with those factors in mind. Accordingly, he’d rapidly created his “attractants” with the breeze in mind. Now he waited for the distractions to work. This was a strategy that he used exactly opposite to how he’d have done this when stalking rhinolo or blue streaks on Koban. Those prey animals would never turn towards a scent like this, certainly not to investigate a rippers territorial markings. But these were fellow predators, and he believed he understood them even better that he did prey.

  He watched the prepared places along the trail leading into the reserve, that he hoped would draw attention. Those were on the opposite side of the ten-foot wide path from his position, where he crouched thirty feet away, hidden in the red leaves and colorful flowered vines that climbed the smaller trees at the edge of the reserve. He could smell the scent of his own urine, so he assumed they could, while wearing armor with nose vents opened.

  Kobani armor served in the vacuum of space, but in deference to their ripper nasal genetics, they could manually open small helmet vents to allow them to sniff external odors. Surely the predatory Finth, with their prominent noses, did that to follow scent trails.

  His preparation was triply rewarded. All three scent markings drew interest. He saw leaves and limbs pushed aside, as stealthed bodies carefully made their way into the jungle undergrowth. The visual ripples of the weapons they carried was hard to see, because the reduced sun under the thicker forest crown made them less detectable the farther they were from the perimeter path. They were not in hot pursuit, so he knew their weapons would be in their hands.

  He’d spaced his piss spots fifty feet apart, and fifty feet into the heavy growth, and he had deliberately stepped on a few plants as he went in and out, to leave a faintly visible path from each scent marked location. He was estimating how many Finth took each path. Not surprisingly, the path closest to the building, with the lighter urine deposit, drew what he thought was only three hunters. There were clearly more figures pushing their way inwards at the two paths he’d set deeper into the trees.

  Exercising caution, he approached the path’s artificial surface, staying low, disturbing growth as little as possible, and intently gazing at the path, to spot any Finth that could be posted there as back cover. He checked quickly with a Scout he knew was somewhere overhead. Even through the trees, they could detect the shadowy figures that had taken that path. Thirteen had continued into the trees, and three groups had split off to the side of the trail away from him. Three Finth, following the traces he’d deliberately left for them, were cautiously moving away from him. That was the group he wanted, and there were no watchers left on the path.

&nb
sp; He swiftly crept across the surface of the trail and stayed on the now well trampled path, which the unconcerned hunters had left behind them. Without the need to avoid as many encroaching limbs and leaves, he quickly closed the gap with the Finth in the tail-end-Charley position, as named by the Kobani that had explained it to the rippers, in their combat training. Konar needed to ask who this person named Charley was. If he was as careless as this Finth was, never looking back, he must have had a short combat life. He hadn’t factored in the short thick neck a Finth had, with armor added, to grasp that these troops couldn’t turn their heads around as far as a human could, and certainly couldn’t look around enough to see their own tails, as a ripper could.

  This wasn’t a capture mission, so there was no need to take this one down easy, as Kopper had the two prisoners. His questions to himself was how tough was the armor, how flexible, and could it be pulled apart? It was probably bite proof if it was projectile and plasma bolt resistant. That left flexibility and dismantling to determine. So, he did.

  Getting a running start, his young, seven hundred pounds of Koban carbon fiber muscles launched him at his prey. He swiped his right paw at the side of where the highest brushed aside leaves told him the Finth’s head was located, as his left claws pulled backwards below where the left shoulder brushed against a leaf on that side. Both tactics worked, but feeling the left arm snap below the shoulder, inside the articulated armor, proved to be redundant damage.

  That was because the armored helmet, suit stealth failing, separated from the fastenings of the upper torso armor as if a cannon shot had torn it free. The shreds of the thick neck of the instantly dead Finth were all that remained above the sloping armored shoulders. The sound of the head and helmet, smashing through the brush and smacking into a tree trunk, before ricocheting into the undergrown to the left, made a useful noise and shook some leaves.