Koban: The Mark of Koban (43 page)

“Warn all fleet elements to watch for a ball
to White Out south of the system plane, moving north. If that happens,
calculate a possible target as soon as possible. Connect me to the orbital
transfer station’s manager or commander, whatever title Rhama gave him or her.”

“Commander James Nelson is in charge. Please
standby.”

In less than a minute Mauss heard a man’s
voice. “James Nelson here, Admiral Mauss. What do you want us to do?” He
obviously was aware of the Krall presence.

“I recommend you start an emergency evacuation
as quickly as possible. Has the Gauntlet and the other ships with wounded off
loaded their patients?”

“Yes Mam. There are numerous shuttles here for
them already. Should we use those to take them down now?”

“Gentle Sir, I suggest you pack those shuttles
with as many bodies each of them can hold as quickly as possible and get them
away from the station. Then get every shuttle you can find and direct them to
dock there to take people away with maximum speed. You have escape pods, so
fill them
right
now, and wait to see if you need them. I believe the
Krall may destroy the station.”

He sounded puzzled. “The whole fleet is here.
Can’t you stop only four of them?”

“Sir, not what’s coming your way. We just
fought three of these weapons at K1, and they are apparently unstoppable. Get
your people out now, no delay. I’ll see that you have as much warning as
possible if we see they have you targeted. I have other calls to make, good
luck. Admiral Mauss out.”

“Josie, instruct all of the ships at the
repair docks to get away from them. I expect them to be targeted.”

“The Captains of each of them have all
confirmed that they are recalling crews. They will cast off as soon as they
have them recovered.”

“Tell them that Admiral Mauss orders them to
button up and leave immediately if an Eight Ball has the docks targeted. Losing
the ships along with the docks and some of their crew members will not help our
war effort.”

“Eight Ball White Out, south of the system.”
Broke in Josie. “Course altering towards the main transfer station.”

“Tell Nelson, and warn our ships docked there.
They need to get away. How much time?”

“The Eight Ball emerged a hundred fifty
thousand miles from Rhama, and is accelerating. It should arrive in just over
ninety seconds. It is adjusting course for a direct hit.”

“Damn. Link me to Captain Caruthers, on
Gauntlet.” She knew it was too late.

“Ready, Mam.”

“Captain Caruthers, Mauss here. Do you see the
ball?”

“We do. I can’t get my people off, and from a
near stop I probably can’t get clear in time. Plasma isn’t ready, not that it
does any good. It was a good fight and I feel honored to have served and fought
with you Admiral. Goodbye and good luck. I’m going out to meet the enemy.”

“I understand. The honor was mine. We will
carry on the fight as long as we can. Goodbye.”

****

What none of the humans knew was that the
hammer pilot had informed Telour that his air was not going to last long enough
for the Clanship to match speeds and recover the pilot. They could not let the
hammer fly off for the humans to eventually track down and capture. The
Gatrol’s order was explicit. The hammer must be destroyed, for clan and the
Path. He continued acceleration.

****

From Invincible’s distant perspective in a much
higher orbit, what looked like an explosion of confetti raced away from the
station, as escape pods and shuttles fled to safety. Gauntlet separated, and
engaged her Normal Space drive too close for comfort to the huge orbital
structure. She started south, towards the onrushing Eight Ball at the full
eighty-four real gravities a battleship’s mass permitted. There were not many
seconds available, but at eighty-four g’s she still made it from a standing
start to over six thousand miles per hour, and was several miles out when she launched
escape pods, and fired all of her laser pods that could bear on a point dead
ahead of her. The defiance was magnificent.

The impact happened at such a high velocity
that the incoming small Eight Ball wasn’t actually visible to the human eye,
but the two opposing masses had an impact that rivaled a nuclear explosion in
the energy invested. The combined velocities and masses easily exceed the
binding energy of the partly collapsed dense crystal of the Eight Ball, as
Telour intended. The battleship and Eight Ball became a small nova of vaporized
heavy elements, expanding in a gaseous sphere that retained much of the
momentum of the ball towards the station.

Fortunately, the expansion rate of the
fireball was great enough that much of the material missed the station. What
did strike had greater than stellar heat, fused the surface of the station’s
skin, and ruptured all of the many view ports on that side. However, the heat
and particle sleet did not penetrate very deeply. Most of the people not
directly on that side of the station survived to brag that they had lived
through the “Rhama novae.” A brag that would soon lose its allure.

The other two hammer balls had been boarded by
pilots later in the attack on K1. They had a little more breathing time
remaining. They decided they had another few passes they could make before bad
air forced a withdrawal.

That was time enough for them to destroy both
of the repair docks, which they did at slower and safer velocities, shrugging
off the laser, and eventually plasma fire of the Navy. They were unable to
“catch” any of the nimble Navy ships that knew how to avoid them. One ball also
picked off a civil cargo ship that had been in a parking orbit, awaiting a
place at the repair dock, with a minimal crew aboard. Then the two balls Jumped
to the outer part of the solar system, as revealed later by their gamma ray
bursts when they made their White Out.

The Clanship Jumped there as well, fought to match
velocities with each as they slowed down, eventually relieving the two nearly
asphyxiated pilots. On one of the hammers, Telour replaced the pilot, and transferred
food, water, and extra oxygen tanks for the fresh new operator. Telour furnished
that pilot with computer coordinates for K1, fed from the Clanship’s
navigational computer, and sent the hammer back to base.

Telour gave the last hammer ball a temporary
pilot, who accelerated it on a new course at a velocity certain to exceed the
binding energy of the collapsed matter shell if it hit a human ship. However,
that was unlikely to happen. The Clanship remained docked with it for almost an
hour, monitoring the projected track.

Then, using the towing method of using a very
large Jump Hole radius, Telour micro Jumped both the Clanship and the ball deeper
into the human system, performing a White Out at one hundred seventy three
thousand miles from Rhama. Then he made the broadcast Kanpardi had instructed
him to send. It was short and to the point.

“Humans, we will not accept new attacks on
our bases from space. You now know we can follow your ships back to your worlds.
We will teach you another use for a hammer ball. Think how hard this lesson
would be if it arrived at half the speed of light, over your home world.”

He then undocked his Clanship from the empty
ball, and Jumped for K1, as over thirty thousand tons of unstoppable collapsed
matter dove towards Rhama. At two thousand nine hundred sixty six miles per
second, one hundred seventy seven thousand miles per minute, or over ten
million six hundred seventy thousand miles per hour. Rhama was about to
experience an event that would exceed the dinosaur’s extinction on Earth, sixty
five million years ago.

****

Admiral Mauss listened to the broadcast, stunned
at her ultimate failure, ignoring Josie’s calm voice as it described the track
and velocity of the oncoming juggernaut. There was no ship in position to intercede
in so short a time to try to save the planet, as Gauntlet had defended the orbital
station.

She experienced a brief selfish thought. Her
life had been devoted to the Navy, and her career was over. There was no doubt
in her mind that the Navy’s lead role in the war was finished. She had done her
job so well that the Krall would not permit her, or a successor, to repeat even
that small measure of success. She had only slowed the Krall, not crippled
them.

She couldn’t stop her lifetime of strategic thinking.
There were counter measures for the Eight Balls; she had seen Gauntlet explode
one before it did the damage it had intended to deliver to the transfer station.
There would be other ways to trigger that self-destructive explosion, short of
a heavy ship ramming them. An ultra-high velocity railgun slug of depleted
uranium might work, triggering a release of a ball’s binding energy at some
small crack created on its surface. However, that would not be tried now.

President Stanford, or it would surely be her
successor when she lost the election, would yield to public pressure. The Hub
government would not risk Earth, or any heavily populated world for a naval
attack that could not guarantee victory, nor block Krall retaliation.

Sick at heart, she watched helplessly as death,
for probably tens of millions of people, approached Rhama, the dense ball
shrugging off the futile laser and plasma beams that deflected from its near impervious
skin. Only the planet’s mass could oppose it now, triggering a blast that would
unbind the energy used to compress its matter as it penetrated deep into the
crust.

The white flash of the silent blast, dimmed by
electronics on the Admiral’s screen, blossomed against the night side of Rhama.
It was oddly beautiful in its horror.

Mauss fervently wished she had been in command
of Gauntlet, vaporized in a heroic blaze of glory.

The two eight year olds were hunting. It was
Carson’s turn to play bait, and Ethan was in the spider hole, jazzer ready, the
grass covered lid held open on one side about two inches. Carson had bagged a
skeeter earlier with a jazzer, as it hovered over Ethan as the bait. They had
propped the skeeter corpse up with sticks now, as if it were feeding on its
victim. The only time a skeeter held its wings still was when feeding or asleep,
so it presented a plausible scene.

The boys were after larger game now. A
squadron of five wolfbats was circling ever lower. The bats commonly let
skeeters claim the blood reward earned when they stunned some prey or another.
However, after allowing a suitable time for sucking blood, the wolfbats would swoop
down to drive the smaller fliers away and claim the flesh of the kill for
themselves.

It was awkward lying on his back, limbs
twisted in an unnatural manner, as if stung and paralyzed in midflight by the
scorpion skeeter. Carson’s right hand, holding his own jazzer, was now a lump
of uncomfortable pressure against his kidney. He couldn’t so much as even twitch
or the wolfbats would see the movement. His Dad had told him their sharp eyes
could actually see his breathing. When an orbiting squadron reached about
twenty-five or thirty feet, one wolfbat always separated from the squad and
swooped down with a screech, to chase the skeeter away. That was their window
of opportunity. When the skeeter failed to fly away, the wolfbats would
withdraw in suspicion, so they had to spring their trap on the swoop.

The boys previously had used a fresh gazelle carcass
and another dead skeeter, two days past, and they had expected the wolfbats to
land on the gazelle to feed. The two hiding boys had hoped to stun two wolfbats
at once. Except the single screeching low pass, which failed to drive off the
“feeding” skeeter spooked them, and they all left. Ethan told his dad what they
had seen, and he explained that the Krall had once used bait like that to draw
in and shoot wolfbats for sport.

The Krall? That was a
really
long time
ago, before the
almost
nine year olds were even born. If wolfbats knew of
these things now, they apparently passed the stories on to their young. That
was why they wouldn’t attack anyone with a weapon displayed, they knew about
guns. They were smart animals, and the boys wanted to catch one or two, to see
if they could turn them into pets. They hadn’t told any adults about their
plans, because they would just say no. Both youngsters thought their mothers were
especially over protective. The boys applied a universal child’s philosophy.
Don’t ask permission, so then you aren’t disobedient.

Today they didn’t have a fresh small animal
kill to borrow from any of the hunting teams, so they thought of the bright
idea to use themselves as bait.

Right now, only Ethan was in a position to risk
a whisper. He had placed a small mirror in front of the lid of the spider hole,
giving him a narrow view of the sky above Carson. “They’re getting lower, be
ready for the scream,” he stage whispered across the ten feet of short cropped
teal colored grass.

Thirty seconds later, there was a loud screech
and both boys flashed into motion. Carson whipped his gun from under his back,
not wasting time to raise it for a careful aim, pressing the firing stud while
the small weapon was still close to his side. Ethan had instantly slid forward
from under the lid via a push against the opposite side of the pit, twisting as
he did so, and fired his jazzer simultaneously with Carson.