Retribution (Shaitan Wars)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  It was a discarded empty plastic crate with writings etched on it. This left the Shaitans in no doubt about the fact that they had stumbled into a rear and hitherto unknown entrance of the human camp. The four advance scouts immediately went squat and pressed their round torso to the floor in order to reduce their profile. This time the four scouts waited for a long time, over 15 minutes at the same spot, awaiting instructions.

  Alex’s hands had started aching again as it hovered over the trigger button. The first indication Alex got that the Shaitan commander had taken a decision did not come from the visual image of the scouts. They stayed put in the squatting position. It came from the count of Shaitans on the top right corner of the screen. All of a sudden, it started increasing at an alarming rate, and the cameras dispersed near the mouth of the unplugged tunnel started showing a flurry of activity.

  The number of Shaitans inside the tunnels stabilized at 128. The new arrivals inside the tunnels started going over the walls and ceilings of the tunnel explored so far all over again. This time touching with their limbs and holding them there for longer time and more frequently.

  Human knew that the heavy Shaitan suits contained all the equipment that a Shaitan needed in battle, including electronic and explosive scanning equipment. The sensors were embedded in the skin of their suits, so the Shaitans were sweeping the tunnel now with a fine toothed comb for suspicious objects. Their limbs were scanning for electronics or explosives planted in the tunnels.

  The Shaitans were making sure that this was not a trap, or that the humans didn’t have surveillance equipment inside the tunnels. So far the Shaitans were behaving exactly as the Marines would have, which was both a relief as well as a pain for Alex. Relief, because he had anticipated this and had a plan for it. Pain because he had to now take a decision.

  Does he show his hand and be satisfied with what he has got till now? Or does he go blind and raise the stakes, either winning big or risk losing it all? Alex decided to play on. “Operator instruct the spiders that can withdraw to do so, and the ones trapped between Shaitans to do completely dark.” Alex instructed over the com.

  The spiders embedded in walls that could not slink away would now shut down completely. The spiders could no longer be switched on remotely. The only way to switch them on would be to do so physically. The spiders were now just a cold piece of plastic with some trace amount of metal hidden in some niched inside the walls of the tunnel. It should not be detectable even by the Shaitans. Even if one was found, with no active component working on the spider, it should look like just another piece of human junk.

  It was not the spiders being found that he was worried about. It was the other thing hidden within the tunnels that worried Alex more. He would just have to hope and keep some faith in the engineers and scientists that they got it right.

  Alex was essentially blind as to what was happening within the tunnels behind the 4 scouts who were holding their squat position at the exact spot where they had found Exhibit 3. Spiders were fully active beyond that point and kept a vigil on the 4 advance scouts. If they ran back towards the entrance of the tunnel, it would be one indication that the Shaitans had smelt a rat.

  However Alex was not depending on only that indication. He had sent spiders over the surface to creep in on the Shaitans from the outside and keep a watch on their activities at the mouth of the tunnel. The tiny spiders had crawled and fanned out within tens of meters of the tunnel opening on the surface. The best view that Alex had was from a spider, which had managed to climb up the Shaitan shuttle. It was able to give a good top down view of the tunnel opening. If the Shaitans started pouring out in numbers, Alex would know and he would press the button.

  After 20 more minutes, the advance scouts got up and to Alex’s relief started proceeding further inside the tunnels. In all likelihood the Shaitans had not made any suspicious discovery. The advance scouts reached a fork. One led to the Shackleton base, while the other led eventually to the only other opening in the tunnels. The scouts waited for only a minute or so at the fork and two each ventured into the two tunnels.

  The sweep team followed the advance scouts and Alex decided to take a chance. He asked the operator to put one of the spiders in a standby mode instead of going completely dark. It would not be visible in a casual scan, but if the sweep team put their limbs very close to the place where this spider was hidden, there was a risk of the tiny amount of electrical current active within the spider to keep it in the standby mode being detected.

  The sweep team seemed to have grown in confidence. They were less thorough in their sweep and scanned at greater intervals. Luck was with the Marines and the standby spider was missed. Once the Shaitan sweep team had passed it far enough, the spider woke up from standby and commenced to perform a singular dedicated task. It scampered to the first spider near the mouth of the unplugged tunnel and one by one started switching them on. It would follow behind the sweep team and keep switching on the spiders back again.

  The Shaitan sweep team had also split into two and followed the two advance scout teams. As a result their scanning had also grown less intense. When one of the scout teams encountered Exhibit 4, it barely stopped to report the find and continued its journey deeper inside. Both the Shaitan scout teams were reaching the first point of human habitation.

  The first Shaitan scout team in the tunnel leading to the Shackleton base was reaching a large opening in the tunnel that formed a pot shaped cave. Four and a half billion years ago this would have been a magma chamber storing lava before it spouted out intermittently to the surface. Now it was Shackleton base’s storage cum discards room.

  Being the rearmost part of the Shackleton base, this huge cave of a magma chamber was rarely visited by humans. It did not have air, or atmospheric controls. This chamber was not even originally part of the Shackleton base. Neither had there been any plans to build the base this deep into the tunnels. Shackleton base was still 400 meters further, where the first airlock had been installed.

  Over the years though, the base had accumulated a lot of unused items, spares and other discards. This chamber had been the ideal space behind the base, where such items could be dumped. There were some empty crates, others half full with unwanted or outdated supplies like a box full of older generation space helmets, or another box full of broken parts of various machinery. There was even a disassembled first generation shuttle inside the cavern that had been cannibalized liberally for parts.

  The second Shaitan scout team was in the tunnel that also opened up, but to no particular a place further down. This scout team was also reaching a critical place. Although this tunnel didn’t lead to the Shackleton base itself, it held a very critical piece of equipment for the survival of the base. It housed one of the two dirty nuclear fission reactors humans had been using for their off Earth bases ever since it was pioneered on Titan.

  It had been a big gamble letting the Shaitans come this close to the nuclear reactor uncontested. The reason the Shaitans had been allowed to come this close to the reactor was because it was one of two. If this reactor got damaged, the base would not immediately get into any power shortage. There would be no redundancy left for the base, but other than that risk it was an extremely good bait. Any military scout team is thrilled when they reach an enemy power station.

  The cave housing the reactor was not particularly big, nothing like the storage area where the other Shaitan scout team had reached. Normally a scout team does not try to sabotage an enemy power plant the moment they discover it. However nothing could be said about how an alien thinks, so the Marines needed to be on standby to protect the reactor in case the Shaitans went on a rampage.

  There was a platoon of Marines waiting on the other side of the tunnel to rush in towards the reactor if required. Col Ma had however insisted that there needs to be some protection hidden within the reactor chamber itself which can slow down the Shaitans in case they get suicidal and try to destroy the reactor by hand instead of planting
a delayed timer bomb.

  That insistence from the CO of the base had put the Marine lieutenant in a piquant situation. There wasn’t enough space for a Marine to hide in the reactor chamber, and it would not be very good for the Marine to stay there for more than a few minutes in any case without heavy lead lined gear. So the lieutenant had used what was available to him – the maintenance robots.

  Humans had not been able to cart robots all the way to Titan, but on the Moon, the dirty reactors were handled almost exclusively by the robots for most of the day to day maintenance. Humans in lead lined protective gears would only enter the chamber occasionally for delicate or dexterous work, which couldn’t be managed through the maintenance robots.

  The maintenance robot was basically two mechanical arms mounted on a heavy sturdy base that moved on twin track similar in design to a tank. The heavy lumbering machine was built to carry load, including the heavy fuel rods and the lead lined containers. The mechanical arms’ brute strength could crush an iron pipe and the inbuilt pliers in the arms could cut through those pipes if required.

  The robots did not have any intelligence. They were not self-operated machines. An engineer would operate those mechanical arms by wearing virtual reality gloves that recorded the movement of the hands of the operator and mimicked it on those mechanical arms. At that moment though, a Marine and not an Engineer was looking through that VR equipment. The robot was standing right in front of the Shaitan scouts immobile and staring right at them.

  The two Shaitan scouts entered the reactor chamber gingerly and then quickly withdrew back into the tunnel. Most likely they would have tasted the radioactivity level inside the chamber and decided to withdraw. Tests on Shaitan cells had indicated that radioactivity was as harmful to them as it was to humans. The scouts went into their usual squat position and waited, reporting back to their command. The other two scouts had also gone into a similar holding position near the large storage chamber.

  Alex knew that this was the moment of truth for his strategy. What would the Shaitan commander do? Now that the Shaitan commanded had incontrovertible evidence of having reached a backdoor entry into the human habitat, what would he do? Would he continue pushing his scouts further inside, while another set of Shaitans swept the tunnels for booby traps or surveillance?

  If the Shaitan commander decided to do that, then the human deception game was more or less at an end. The Marines would have to put up resistance at this point to ensure that the Shaitans got no further. How would the Shaitans react when they find a bunch of well-armed and well prepared Marines resisting them? Would they realize that they had been had? Would the Shaitans then decide to get the hell out of dodge, sensing a trap?

  It would never be known whether the Shaitan commander was extra aggressive, imprudent or plain desperate, having lost his ride back home. Whatever be the case, it became obvious to Alex from the sensor reports that the Shaitan commander had made his decision. He would lead his main invasion force through the tunnels and shatter the human base in a surprise attack.

  The scouts were ordered not to go any further, lest they alert the humans. The Shaitans already inside the tunnels were ordered to join the scouts and fortify those positions. The shuttles went back to the point where the main contingent of Shaitans had been offloaded, and almost everything including the Shaitan warriors were loaded back and brought to the opening of the tunnel.

  In addition to the 128 Shaitans already inside the tunnels, about 900 more Shaitans went in, such that there were now 512 Shaitans heading for each of the two destinations being defended by the humans – the reactor and the storage space. There was no more time to wait. The scheme had already been more successful than Alex could have hoped for. No point being greedy. He carefully selected the buttons he wanted to activate on his touchscreen, and then pressed the ‘execute’ button.

  If the Marines had to rig up explosives to bring down a section of the tunnel, it would have been fairly simple, almost trivial. However things had been a lot more complicated than that. The Marines had to rig up explosives that would have to be undetectable by the Shaitans. The Shaitans would suspect treachery and would specifically look for such planted explosives. The Marines’ explosive plants had to be good enough to evade such determined Shaitan detection.

  Hiding the planted explosives was not even the hardest part of the job. Those explosives needed to be reliably triggered exactly when needed. If those explosives didn’t go off then it would sign the death warrant for every human on Shackleton base, for the two thousand Shaitans would enter from this back door and there was no way the four hundred odd Marines and a hundred civilians on the base could hold them back.

  Radio control was out of the question in a convoluted tunnel system like this, especially when some of those tunnels might be blocked with debris from one of the blasts. Running wires on the walls would be a dead giveaway, not even considering the fact that if a section of the tunnel was brought down, then it would sever all the wires extending beyond that point.

  The Marines had used an experimental new machine that the techies at USC had sent over to the Moon base for testing. It was a prototype for a planned drone to assist the Marines in their field work. The machine sent to the Shackleton base was essentially a very small tunnel boring machine that could drill a hole just a few centimeters across. The techies had lovingly given it the nickname – Mole.

  If this small prototype was successful, they intended to make a larger version of it, which could dig holes big enough to accommodate a suited Marine. It could be used in the field to dig for shelter or to bore into enemy defenses. The biggest problem the engineers faced was to give the damn drone enough power. Human batteries had not yet reached the energy density to run a drilling drone on batteries, which is why this prototype was not a drone, but a machine that needed wired power. Still the engineers had sent it to test how the drill operates in the hard soil of the Moon, and to iron out kinks with reliability and speed of digging.

  The drills had come as a god sent for the plans of Alex. One had to run a long power line to operate it, but other than that, the drills operated fast and smoothly without breaking down even once. The Marines had drilled 4 meter deep holes in the ceiling of the tunnels at strategic places and filled them up with explosives.

  The issue with explosives is that by necessity they have to be unstable material if they have to explode vigorously. This means that molecules of the unstable explosive material are constantly evaporating from the explosive, even in the vacuum of the Moon. Explosive detectors can very easily sniff these molecules, a technology that the Shaitans were sure to have, since humans have had that technology for well over a hundred years.

  So each hole had to be carefully filled up again with the same material that had been excavated in drilling the holes. Binding the lunar regolith into a cement like goo and sealing the holes such that it felt no different to a Shaitan who would check it by touching, took far more time than drilling the holes for the Marines.

  What took the most amount of time though was the long hole tunneled almost a meter below the floor of the tunnel, which ran back all the way to storage chamber. Wires had to be pulled through this hole by the digging machine to hook up with the trigger of the explosives. From the storage chamber onwards the wires ran back to the operational center out in the open tunnel.

  The first two explosions happened closest to the Marines, right near the mouth of the tunnel that opened up near storage chamber and the reactor chamber towards the side from where the Shaitans were entering. These two explosions were designed to protect the Shackleton base, while all the subsequent explosions to come were designed to trap the Shaitans.

  Thus the Marines had planted extra explosives to bring down almost a 20 meter section of the ceiling along with over a thousand ton of rock and soil down to completely plug the tunnel with no possibility of breaking through even with power tools, which the trapped Shaitans were unlikely to be carrying.

  The explosives
had been planted 30 meters away from the mouth of the tunnel to prevent the falling debris from causing any damage to the reactor or anything in the storage area. No one had given the placement of the explosives too much thought beyond this consideration. It would turn out to be a mistake.

  The 128 Shaitans who were holding position at the mouth of the two tunnels, 64 in each, were all inside that 30 meters distance. A few unfortunate Shaitans at the absolute rear did get crushed in the falling rocks and debris, but in the low gravity of the Moon a majority of the Shaitans were able to escape from under the falling rocks. As far as these Shaitans were concerned, they were now trapped on the wrong side of the tunnel, and the only exit route was through the human base.

  The 900 odd Shaitans who had been rushing through the tunnel to join up with their comrades holding position were scattered in a long line that stretched for over a kilometer, since the tunnel did not allow more than two of the wide bodied Shaitans to run side by side. Explosives triggered at regular intervals trapping these Shaitans in compartments. Each compartment held 20-25 Shaitans. Some of the Shaitans were unfortunate to be under the falling rocks and got crushed.

  Alex was aware of the 128 Shaitans, who were trapped on the wrong side, and who could and would assault the base. He was not too worried about the fact. A platoon of Marines each was waiting on the other side of the tunnel with more in reserve, who should be able to stop the Shaitans without taking too many casualties. The Marines had heavy weapons mounted for defense.

  Cuifen herself had insisted on leading the Marines protecting the reactor, but Alex was not worried about her. He was supremely confident of the Marines’ ability to easily stop those 128 Shaitans. He did not even consider that it would be necessary to trigger any of the emergency explosives planted on the tunnel near the base in case the Marines got overwhelmed. Alex concentrated more on the data and images coming from the mouth of the tunnel that the Shaitans had unplugged.