Koban: Rise of the Kobani (92 page)

When the personnel door slid open, two of the warriors on this side of the cargo area saw and heard it instantly. Sarge was around
to the side of the wall the door slid into, several other stealthed Kobani with him. They were pressed against the wall in case there were shots fired in reaction. There were not, so with trepidation, he mentally selected his weapons, and peeked around the edge. With another thought, he put a red laser through the eye of the closest warrior, and a green one through an eye of the other. It happened in barely five thousandths of a second. Once he told the suit to fire at the two eyeballs, target’s which he’d locked into the new tracking system. It hardly seemed sporting.

Sportsmanship went out the window when plasma bolts started flying in his direction from the other two Krall. They had seen the now collapsing dead warriors suddenly pivot and point their weapons, but hold their fire when they saw no target. Suddenly, two lasers
had lanced out from a spot just six feet above the deck, and killed them both. It didn’t take a long analysis to deduce that the diverging red and green beams, seen faintly in the air, originated from the same spot.

The other two warriors started blasting at the place where Reynolds head was. Or rather where it would have been if the TG2 behind him hadn’t been told to cover the other two warriors. Without an angle for a shot from inside the airlock door,
Jason Sieko shouldered Reynolds out of his way to get his own shots off. The shove probably saved Sarge’s life. The three bolts the Krall got off passed inches behind his helmet as he stumbled forward.

Sieko, a former steward from the Flight of Fancy, picked both warriors off deftly and said, “Sorry I spoiled your aim there, Sarge. No doubt you were going to shoot them just as soon as you finished introducing yourself.” He could hear laughter over the frequency, so he knew the other squad members saw and heard what happened.

“Nah. I hate to be a hog and kill ‘em all myself. I signaled those were yours, and I meant what I said. I was setting them up for you. However, thanks for shoving my dumb fat ass out of the way, Jason. I owe you” He owed him big time. Feeling invincible didn’t mean you were.

“Sarge, nobody thinks your ass is fat.” Jason was careful not to contradict the “dumb” part.

Maude Klinger had listened to the two of them talk long enough. “Hey boys, I may look younger now, but I’m still an impatient old fart. Is it safe to open the damned main airlock yet or not?” Another two hundred Kobani were waiting to get in, since the small personnel airlock would take too long to cycle them through.

“Cycle the lock, Maude.” The large cargo airlock would have made more noise and taken too long. It would have alerted the Krall that someone was coming. The way they had diverted the Krall to the breech points allowed them to sneak squads in by the personnel locks, so they could clear the way to open the main doors. Now, a third of the force was waiting to enter. They had selected three of the six airlocks for bringing in their assault forces. Sarge’s group was probably running late now, and the Krall would know they had been duped.

The larger volume airlock would be five minutes cycling, so Sarge divided the eight of them up to cover the three approaches to this airlock. Because the outer circular corridor is where the breeches were made, any Krall covering those points would be in that outer corridor, and would come running this way now. The radial corridor straight into the cargo area was probably less likely to be an avenue of attack. After all, how wide could the Krall spread their small force?

There were distressingly few places for concealment along the corridors. Invisibility was fine if you didn’t shoot back and advertise where your head was located, as Sarge had just discovered. There was a corner at each branch to stand behind, but your back or side was exposed to any warriors coming from the other two directions.

The airlocks were the choke points, and just a handful of warriors could bottle them up here until the larger forces could get inside. If the airlocks were damaged and the inner doors jammed, they would have to be blasted open. The depressurization might kill any Torki not inside an airtight compartment. The squad only had to hold for about five minutes. That’s an awful long time for even a few Krall to do damage.

What their external speakers were picking up, from both side corridors sounded like more than a
few
Krall. They had given up any semblance of a quiet approach and the padded feet of their armor was thudding heavily, and they were noisily scraping against the sidewalls in the packed advance wave that filled the halls from side-to-side.

Reynolds had four small grenades in stealthed compartments on his armor. He pulled two out and calling to Maude and Jason, each at another hall entrance, he tossed one to each of them. They deftly snatched them out of the air, such pitifully underwhelming help as they represented. They had left their pulse rifles with the main force, so they could crowd eight of them into the small airlock. All they had to help them now were suit weapons that negated their stealth capability when fired.

That gave Reynolds an idea. He activated the squad frequency. “I’m going up the hall to meet the ones running this way. They can’t see me. I’ll be in their midst before they know what hit them, and I can toss my grenades into the pack.”

Before anyone could tell him what a stupid, suicidal notion that was, their visors showed his ghostly outline running up the corridor, leaving Kredman, his partner at the same corner holding the tenuous fort.

He pulled the two grenades out, and thumbed them for a two-second delay when released. He’d overlooked the fact that the devices themselves were not stealthed, and could be seen “floating” in air in his invisible hands. Before he moved so far around the curve of the ring corridor that Kredman couldn’t see or cover him, he stopped, and placed both fists against the wall, side by side of a recessed light fixture.

“Hey Sarge, whata ya doing?”

“Kreddy, I’m making like a wall decoration. Get ready, they just came into sight.”

Indeed, there was quite a mob rushing his way. Reynolds had no way to know this, but the surviving Krall forces had split again to cover all six large airlocks. There were thirty-two running right at him, not that he was counting.

He actually saw the eyes of multiple warriors glance right at him, as they automatically took in everything in the corridor. With relief, he knew his pose with the grenades had disguised them as part of the light fixture. In seconds, they closed to within twenty feet, and he lifted his thumbs, activating the timers.

With a flick of each wrist, the powerful little bombs flew well over the heads of the lead warriors who saw them coming.  One rolled to the floor trying to bring her rifle up to bear, to try to shoot
one of the unknown objects out of the air as it passed over her. While not Kobani fast, it was likely any Krall could have made that shot, had not the timers expired.

Reynolds, well past his former feeling of invulnerability, but still invisible, had dropped to the floor to reduce his exposure to the depleted uranium pellets about to fly.

The dual blasts rained perforating pellets through a dozen faceplates caught looking right at the two former wall decorations, which inexplicably had flown over their heads. The wounded or dying warriors in the forefront were falling, and several others had failed to clear the now dying warrior, face-up on the floor with two holes in her faceplate. The warrior, a pellet through an eye and into her brain, spasmodically pulled the trigger of her plasma rifle, the bolt tearing into the helmet chin of a warrior leaping over her.

Ten or twelve Krall fell either wounded or dead, and others, their headlong rush encountering fallen bodies were being tripped, and tried to leap over the tangle. The speed and momentum of the Krall caused bodies to slide into Reynolds. He used the confusion to pull a still living Krall over his own torso, and he looked up at four different helmets
higher than he was, and commanded the suit to lock onto the quickly designated targets. He staggered the two lasers, and the microwave pulse to fire first, then the energy-hog plasma bolt. This distributed the energy released more evenly.

The two lasers penetrated the faceplates he’d designated and blinded or seriously wounded those two warriors, the heat of the microwave beam didn’t kill its target, but the sudden red-hot heat of the helmet made it scream and tear it off and fling it away. The plasma bolt dropped the Krall standing next to him. In the distraction of three more warriors suddenly going down, and the strange action and scream of rage and pain of a fourth, had them looking about wildly for where the grenades and lasers came from.

Kredman, amazed at the havoc Reynolds had caused, took down four more Krall before they recognized the firing came from around the corner at the junction they had been trying to reach. They fired back at the edge of that corner to keep whoever was there from firing back again. Except, as his Mind Tap training had taught him, Kredman was already gone, moving towards the opposite corner, his motion invisible to the warriors.

Sarge, still under the weakening struggle of the wounded Krall that covered his body, positioned his own head under an armpit, and fired another microwave burst at another warrior. He realized that this intense microwave beam weapon, which he had distained previously, didn’t leave a visible trail back to him. Another Krall ripped off a blistering hot helmet in a rage.

Over half of the former thundering horde was down, dead, or wounded, and their momentum dissipated. Kredman added one more dead to the mix, as he put a red laser beam through the toothy gap of the partly open mouth of the Krall that had just ripped off his helmet. Five plasma bolts promptly passed through the point midway across the open end of the corridor, where the beam had originated just a few feet above the floor.

Kredman had continued his crouching move to the other side, so his helmet was no longer at the apex of the concentrated return fire. Unfortunately, his left hip had not cleared that area. One bolt missed too high, two glanced upwards off the armor, and two hit and burned deep pits, which transmitted intense heat to the inside. Kredman fell to the deck, short of the cover he was seeking, and the burned spot on his armor lost its invisibility.

His scream of pain in his helmet was only heard by him, and he started crawling to reach the cover of the corner, only a couple of feet away.

Reynolds saw his icon flare
yellow in his visor, indicating Kredman was wounded. He couldn’t see him from where he was laying, but he could offer a distraction. He reached around the front of the weakening warrior he held over his torso, and grasped the plasma rifle hanging there on a sling. It was point blank range so he didn’t need to aim. He pulled the trigger and shot one of the warriors in the side that had fired on Kreddy. Another trigger pull and he hit the knee joint of a second warrior.

Both turned towards the source of the attack, but saw only their clan mate, who didn’t even have hold of his weapon. He appeared to be dead or dying. While looking directly at the downed warrior, a laser passed through the faceplate of one, and the other one’s faceplate suddenly sagged with the heat it had absorbed.

Unfortunately, this didn’t save Kredman. The other three warriors, not certain what they were seeing, put multiple bolts into the mysteriously moving spot that was a foot above the deck. He died in a blaze of agony as his suit was shredded at the hip. The suit’s stealth capability failed, and the compact black and white armor suddenly shimmered into view. Their target was dead, but to be certain this unknown type of enemy was definitely dead, the three warriors engaged in overkill, and cut the suit in half with their fire.

Reynolds saw the icon turn red and fade, and he suddenly saw another one turn yellow. Jason was hit. He had been so busy here he had no idea what was happening in the other corridor. They had been fighting in quiet desperation within their suits. His attention was suddenly yanked away from the action elsewhere.

The Krall were less flexible in their thinking than were humans, and not quite as smart on average, but in combat they did pay attention. One of those warriors farther back in the corridor, having seen the body of some strange looking opponent suddenly appear out of thin air, looked for signs of other invisible enemies. A dead Krall hovering eighteen inches above the deck, which had somehow just shot two clan mates with his rifle, and then launched a laser beam from a type of weapon the Krall didn’t carry, was a clue even the thickest headed lizard could absorb.

The armored body of the now dead Krall was suddenly snatched away, and the business end of plasma rifle was jammed down into the area where the corpse had been supported. The smart thing to do would have been to shoot first and probe later. Reynolds taught him that lesson swiftly. He snatched the rifle with one hand as his other grabbed and broke the
armored arm that had extended the weapon. He tossed the weapon up and released it as he slammed down with both of his hands while he used his back to flip up from the deck, bringing him to his feet in one motion. He grabbed the rifle in midair, reversed it and put a bolt through the dumfounded warrior’s faceplate.

He tossed the weapon up again as he dove away. The rifle became the focus for shots from the three warriors that had killed Kredman, and from two others farther back in the corridor. While they wasted multiple plasma bolts on a discarded rifle they had just seen kill one of them, Reynolds moved down the passageway, looking back.