Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (24 page)

He was waiting to see the unmistakable silhouette of the heavy tracked chassis, and the tall laser tube of the battery to appear, prepared to tap the firing command when seen. He was aware that fifty other bunker buster gunners were doing the same, some on this same target, but most were aimed at other batteries, all waiting impatiently for him to fire first. There would be multiple hits on each firing pad on this side of the city.

On his command, the camera image zoomed in yet again, with some shaking until the focusing software stabilized the scene on his hand held viewer. His thick finger poised, he hesitated, confused by what he saw. Or rather, what he did not see. The smooth flat slab of the firing position was empty, and there was a dark flat object just beyond the slab. As they had charged towards the city, although his eyes couldn’t see the coherent and collimated X-ray laser beams directly, the atmospheric reaction when one was fired left a brief fuzzy visual trace of ionized air. Those traces, formed at various angles from vertical as the laser tubes followed a target, had been visible from a considerable distance as they approached. They saw them repeatedly, when the city’s defenses fired on Ravagers passing over. Far out on the plains, it wasn’t possible to determine from which side of the city they were being fired. A quick check of images from other units showed that all of the firing pads on this side of the city were bare.

He assumed they had driven the ones closest to his column away, to preserve them. He thought that only until he noticed that the flat dark shape on the other side of his designated firing pad was repeated behind every empty firing pad. They were flat on top, and had the same dark brown color of the soil the tank treads were tearing up in the fields of grain, seen behind the parallel tracks of Pillagers to either side of him. In a flash of insight, he realized that the low ridges were berms, made of the same type of rich dark soil.

The humans had placed the batteries in pits, behind the thick ferroconcrete firing pads, to conceal them longer from his tanks. Clever, but it wouldn’t save them. He could command guide his bunker buster to a spot above that pad, and set its detonation for precisely when it would pass overhead. As he started to enter the new commands, his line of tanks moving inexorably closer, he caught a slight movement at the top of the berm in his image. It was a dark circle, and it had suddenly lifted just high enough to be seen.

Too late, he recognized what he was seeing, however improbable it seemed. He rushed to jab his thick finger towards the firing spot at the image center. He never completed that action, it being impossible for him to move faster than the arrival of ravaging X-ray photons, emitted from that black circle, the business end of a laser tube aimed at him by that battery.

The beam vaporized Gontra, as well as a two-foot wide cylindrical hole through the turret of his tank, which included the barrel of his beloved big gun. The expanding, explosively vaporized material blasted the massive turret completely off, and left no trace of the organics inside the base unit, which an instant earlier had held a crew confident of victory.

Thirty-one other Ragnar armored units shared a similar fate, as the thirty-two orbital lasers, mounted on mechanized bases that were tipped to a forty-five-degree angle, were now able to fire horizontally over the flat and open plains, at the fully exposed enemy armor. There was nowhere for them to hide, so the Pillagers continued on, but now firing back, zigzagging to make themselves more difficult targets. The next laser blasts only killed fifteen of the enemy tanks, because seven of the laser batteries were disabled by detonations above them, from bunker busters fired from surviving units of that type. That left ten beams unaccounted for of the thirty-two batteries tipped part way over.

That was because not all of the beams stayed aimed so low. Ten batteries had elevated slightly, and a salvo of ravaging beams tore into half of the Stranglers, which were using their Normal Space drives to stay just above the line of tanks. In seconds, the beams ate through the slightly angled and leading corners of the ten ships being targeted and the deadly X-ray energy vaporized and burned through inner bulkheads and decking like cardboard. Any Ragnar bathed in even the reflected radiation was either scorched to death instantly, or doomed to die within minutes, their fur in flames.

The beams, with power enough in their second bank of rapid discharge capacitors to remain on for fifteen seconds, reached deeper into the ships, destroying equipment and drive engines. A Strangler, because of their missions at low altitude, moving slow and subject to damage from ground defenses, had reaction thrusters that kicked in automatically, to allow them to land, or even travel horizontally for some distance. They would have survived to be repaired, except when the beams cleared away the intervening bulkheads, they ate through the containment housings of at least one of the three fusion generators positioned near their centers, which were the true intended targets of the batteries. The loss of containment on even one of those released a sudden blast of stellar-like plasma at the heart of the Strangler, and it was doomed, suddenly falling out of the sky.

Then, ten other batteries, using their second bank of capacitors, repeated the act on the other ten Stranglers, which had belatedly reacted by starting to lift and turn away. Too slow for big ships in atmosphere, with so much inertia. Seven of the second ten also lost all power, and crashed with a thunderous series of ground shaking impacts and explosions, as they followed their brother Thandol made ships to destruction. The damaged three Stranglers limped away on their reaction thrusters, not targeted again because the remaining Pillagers were still closing with the line of twenty-five surviving batteries, placed at the outskirts of Morrisville.

As soon as the danger from the large bore bunker buster weapons was recognized by the PDF defenders, the remaining versions of those style tanks were quickly destroyed, removing the most dangerous threats from the line of advancing Ragnar tanks. They were leaving glowing and molten remnants to cool in the fields of burning wheat. The Pillagers equipped with plasma bolts and lasers had line of sight weapons, unable to hit the normally below ground batteries, which briefly exposed only their tubes when firing. The Debilitater equipped tanks had no effect on the remotely controlled batteries. The Ragnar anti-aircraft units were inaccurate at the longer horizontal range, and were low priority targets. The PDF troops controlling the laser batteries were stationed well clear, and wore copper mesh protection inside their body armor.

Hundreds of smoking wrecks, with Stranglers forming seventeen huge mounds, thoroughly demonstrated the fallacy of thinking the enemy couldn’t alter their own plans, after the Ragnar had changed theirs. Battles constantly evolve, and these Ragnar forces had previously faced only the less aggressive and less innovative subservient species within the Empire. This security force had grown complacent.

The ends of the laser tubes stayed well below the berms until target tracking predicted where the next shot should go. In less than a second the powered gimbaled mounts, which could track the motion of an orbital target, could raise and aim the tubes, fire, then lower them. There was no need to drain the huge capacitors to destroy a Pillager, as they had to do on the Stranglers. The two fusion bottles of each battery were busy recharging both capacitor banks constantly, but a Pillager had an insignificant mass compared to a warship. A few seconds of the X-ray lasers rendered them molten.

There were fewer enemy targets to seek the next time a battery fired. They had fired in coordinated salvos the first three times. After that, to avoid a predictable pattern, they changed to independent fire. There had been three hundred fifty-seven enemy mechanized units when they started, and eight to seven percent of them were destroyed with each volley.

The cycle rate of the defensive lasers, firing at what was only half power for them, for a shorter beam time, resulted in an X-ray beam generated every ninety seconds, as their fusion bottles pumped energy into their rapid discharge capacitors. They could fire more frequently initially, but after that, it was the rate of heat dissipation in the laser mirrors and tubes that held repeat beam generation to a minute and a half by a battery.

Once the Pillagers capable of firing the bunker busters had been destroyed, there were only a few additional batteries lost to shots by plasma bolts, which managed to hit their briefly exposed barrels.

Over the course of a twenty-mile advance, the Ragnar line would be better described as an extremely ragged line, with huge holes in the original force, where only forty-three units reached the
visual
shelter of structures in the business sections of the suburbs, where there were larger buildings than suburban homes to conceal them. The emphasis being on visual, not actual shelter.

The PDF troopers, not being dimwitted, and having faced Krall that sought similar shelter to continue their relentless attacks during raids, had prepared in advance.

It required sacrificing the sturdiest buildings, but where would the armored units logically go for shelter? The tanks had to avoid being seen and targeted by the X-ray lasers, which could not only burn right through them, but through the buildings that were hiding them. Their best chance was to flank them and get on the other side of the fixed line of lasers. They clearly were only able to fire out over the plains.

Conventional explosives had been planted at the corners of the largest, most substantial buildings. Places where the enemy would likely hide, in preparation for a quick dash to the next building to hide behind. They would pull up to a corner of a building, where a drone or surveillance camera could see them. The remotely detonated blasts often killed the crews from the shock wave, or the crater and falling debris would trap them there, where a mobile plasma cannon, or repeated plasma rifle fire could broil any living Ragnar inside.

A few tanks elected to stay motionless and hidden for too long, and an X-ray laser, using coordinates from drones, proved that a mere building shell was no protection. None of the enemy armor survived to reach the line of batteries, let alone the spaceport, which had been their goal.

****

Faldor Culpa was a first time Group commander, envious of the wide-open vista the more experienced Sorvus Gontra had secured for his armor’s swift and easy assault, granted to him based on seniority by time in rank, earning him the right to select second of the remaining target cities. Commander Hitok had exercised first choice, of course, and had shown combat wisdom by choosing a city where there appeared to be a small concentration of military units. His Group 1 would probably encounter actual enemy military forces, which would serve to enhance old Head Basher’s reputation. Thond, the Force Commander was with him, and he surely intended to break some bones today.

What urged him to greater, almost reckless speed was the thought that Sorvus would soon be securing his designated spaceport, while Culpa’s Group 3 would still be advancing along these winding valley roads. He needed to thread his three hundred sixty-two units in a double column along occasionally narrow valleys with steep, mineral and metal rich rocky ridges often looming above them. Even using what was obviously a four-lane road used for two-way traffic, Pillagers were large, and they maintained only two columns. From time to time, they passed through wider valleys, with what appeared to be homes well set back from the traffic, and small businesses were placed close to the road, with obvious parking for personal vehicles.

In fact, there soon were several cases of older looking, somewhat battered models of such personal transportation, which were pulled across all of the lanes of the road, parked two deep from side to side. At the first such roadblock on a straight stretch of highway, the two lead tanks, using Culpa’s big gun and the heavy laser of his column mate to his left, stayed well back and blasted them into smoking ruin. A brief inspection by a demolition team revealed there were no explosives that their hand held sensors recognized, or any sign of booby-traps. Even their fusion bottles were deactivated, which could have been a source of risk if one exploded very close. Another identical roadblock was encountered in a few miles.

The civilians here were simply trying to slow him down, to give them time to evacuate. After that, he barreled through or over two other such blockages, crushing the bodies of the cars nearly flat by the passage of repeated sixty to eighty ton tracked mechanized units, until the former obstacles had separated into thicker pieces that contained their motors or fusion bottles that powered them. Those hunks of thicker wreckage were soon bumped, and shoved to the shoulders of the road. Without slowing, Culpa simply smashed them aside at speed. He was in a hurry to match what his linked systems told him was Gontra’s progress, out on the plains half a planet away. He needed to move faster!

The modest spaceport, which it was his task to capture, was built on an artificial plateau, formed by shearing off the tops of several modest mountain peaks by mining them, extracting the minerals, and using the debris and tailings as fill in the valleys, to form a large enough flat space for a spaceport tarmac and terminal facilities. The city of Caledonia was a rambling affair, spread along three main intersecting larger valleys. Most of the orbital laser batteries here were placed on flattened places on ridge tops around the city, with winding roads leading up to them.

Culpa intended to bypass the batteries for now, driving the bulk of his column through the largest valley of the three-pronged city, to reach the spaceport’s plateau and take possession of his prize ahead of Gontra, who would have to pause to destroy the batteries there, before reaching the spaceport. Only after that would he dispatch three or four mechanized units to advance up the ridge roads to destroy or capture each of those mobile batteries. He wasn’t concerned that the mobile lasers would descend and elude his hunters, since the narrow and winding roadways to their firing pads precluded rapid travel, and they would have to descend cautiously to the wider valley roads, where he periodically left blocking units behind, to prevent their escape.