Koban: The Mark of Koban

by Stephen W Bennett

  He didn’t much like Gertrude’s father, who had been too critical of Branko over the years as he grew up, as the clumsy boy from across the street. However, she also lived in that house, so Branko decided to wave and call out to him. “Mr. Mazowitz, something landed at the old quarry just now, I think. And the Tri-Vid said a Krall ship might be near here.”

  “That’s what I was checking on, Berzinski. You heard something that direction?” He pointed up the road to the quarry a half mile away, just as the front gate fencing ruptured outwards at the drive way entrance, as if hit by a truck.

  “Get out of sight and switch off the lights, Sir. I have my gun with me.”

  Mazowitz turned and went inside, but he first let his dog out into the yard, a large mixed breed animal that the other neighbors complained about when it barked. It was why he kept it inside at night.

  A light breeze was blowing down the road, and the dog quickly started barking, running up and down the fence along that side of the yard, looking through the pickets of the fence, to try to see what it scented.

  Branko ducked back into his pillbox, and placed his short gun barrel on the slit ledge that faced towards the quarry. He caught a glimpse of swift movement, from shadow to shadow, staying close to the edge of the pavement. Whatever it was, it never passed under any of several widely spaced streetlights that glowed in bright amber ovals on the roadway. The sky was just beginning to lighten in the east, but sunrise was still quite some time away.

  Suddenly the Krall was faintly visible, silhouetted against the glow from the last street light it had passed. Dressed in a black uniform this was clearly one of the savage beasts he’d seen in Tri-Vid recordings from previous raids on other worlds. It was looking around everywhere, even his direction, but appeared mainly focused on the barking dog.

  That’s when he realized it was moving towards Gertrude’s house! Shifting to the left side of the front slit, he aimed up the street where he knew it would appear when it approached her yard. He wanted it close and well within his ability to hit it as many times as possible. He’d heard the Krall were very hard to kill, but he’d die before he let this one slaughter Gertrude.

  The Krall was moving surprisingly fast on its short legs, and it covered more distance than he expected when it came into view. Nevertheless, he centered the alien in his sights and pulled the trigger, unleashing a barrage of bullets at the killer, the noise deafening him within his enclosed space. The Krall appeared to be hit on the left side, but it instantly dropped and rolled as it fired back, using its right hand pistol to shoot at the pillbox. Numerous explosive rounds detonated harmlessly on the outside, but one shell found its way through the slit and detonated on the wall behind Branko. The fragments stung his back, but the noise seemed deadened by the effects of his own gunfire. His clip ran empty and, as he had practiced, he yanked it out and threw it aside, grabbing one from the slit ledge and slammed it home.

  As he pulled and released the slide again, the street light next door revealed the Krall leaping high over Gertrude’s fence, also reloading, but with a pistol in its mouth and using its right hand to insert a clip. With a thrill, he knew he had hit its left arm and it was wounded! He started firing at where it had dropped behind the wood fence, splintering the pickets.

  The Krall was scrambling along the side yard’s fence line in his general direction, trying to get closer, and raised its right hand higher than the fence to fire back at him. Damn! It was accurate even on the run. Shells were splattering all around the outside of the slit, spraying his face with rock chips. These were not explosive shells now, and seemed to do more damage to the thick blocks. However, even the armor penetrating slugs were not getting through ten inches of granite.

  Branko fired blindly in the Krall’s direction, unable to stop blinking and flinching away from the debris flying through and around the slit. Suddenly there was a brief pause in firing, and he heard the snarls of the Mazowitz dog attacking the Krall. Taking advantage, Branko looked through the slit. He saw movement by the fence just as the dog, howling in pain, flew into the air and the Krall shot it before it hit the ground.

  Now Branko had a target area behind the fence and fired the rest of his clip, hearing a satisfying snarl of pain from that direction as he apparently scored one or more hits. He was changing clips again when he saw the alien dash into Gertrude’s house; or rather, it smashed a shoulder through the solid wood door on the front porch.

  After an instant of shock, followed by a scream of rage, Branko bolted out of the rear of his pillbox and charged around it towards Gertrude’s house, firing recklessly as he ran. He never once thought of the risk he took of hitting her or her parents, just of shooting the Krall and keeping it away from her. That reckless act actually saved their lives.

  With bullets whizzing through the windows and thin walls around her, Borkdol continued out, or rather through, the rear door of the human nest. She had wounds to each arm, her left leg and side, with one of her two pistols hit and smashed by a bullet and discarded. The shattered left elbow would not bend but she ignored that pain, as she did the deep penetrating bullet punctures in her left side. However, she needed a bit of time and distance to make a brief recovery and assessment, then come back to finish this fight.

  Borkdol couldn’t wait to return and skin this surprisingly lucky prey. Her briefing had warned that humans liked to spring ambushes, and this one had surprised her like a cub, waiting for her inside a prepared strong position. She had spare weapons at her ship, and more ammunition. It wasn’t even light yet. There was plenty of time, she had this prey’s scent now and would return to hunt it down.

  Branko found Gertrude safe with her parents, all of them crouched on the floor behind a door barricaded with a heavy chest and a bed’s thick headboard. Two bullet holes in that door attested to his fierce onslaught on the Krall. He figured he might work up the nerve to talk to Gertrude about his feelings for her now.

  ****

  Captain Krysinski, communicating with the city’s Civil Defense center, was aboard the shuttle with first platoon, at the command and control console behind the cockpit. He updated Lieutenant Margold, and Lieutenant Cranston of second platoon, using reports of citizen calls about a Krall single ship seen landing on the roof of an office building. He passed the two Lieutenants the coordinates for the building.

  Lieutenant Margold directed his shuttle to land in the street on one side of the office building, and Lieutenant Cranston chose to land on the top of the building’s attached three story parking garage on the other side. The intent was to seal the Krall inside. Captain Krysinski would take first platoon’s shuttle back up, and block the Krall’s retreat path back to his single ship on the roof.

  “First platoon, move out!” Margold had given each squad leader their holding positions on three sides of the building, using any cover they could find.

  Second platoon was spreading through the garage, one squad each covering two short pedestrian bridges and a squad at ground level.

  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 weigh
t 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.