Retribution (Shaitan Wars)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  The Shaitan commander by now surely knew that he had been tricked. There were still a thousand Shaitans up on the surface of the moon. What would be his response? Would the Shaitans mount a frontal assault on the base over the surface in the hopes of rescuing their comrades? That was the most likely response in Alex’s estimation. He was wrong.

  A number of small machines were seen scampering into the tunnel the moment the explosions started happening. They seemed to be the Shaitan equivalent of the spiders the Marines used for intelligence gathering. The Shaitan spiders reached the first point of cave-in within no time and assessed the situation. Then the drilling/digging drone that humans engineers had always wanted to build, but didn’t have the technology to build, emerged from one of the Shaitan shuttles.

  The Shaitan drilling drone moved nearly half a kilometer out on the surface in the direction towards the Shackleton base, and coordinated with the Shaitan reconnaissance spiders below in the tunnels. Having fixed the correct position, the drone started drilling.

  The Shaitans were digging a relief tunnel! It was a brilliant and sound strategy. The drone was digging at an alarming rate. At this rate it would be a matter of hours if not less before the drill would reach the first of the trapped Shaitans. Shaitan anatomy being like that of an octopus or a jelly fish, could squeeze out of the tiniest of holes.

  The relief hole was guaranteed to be booby trap free. It would have been dangerous for the drilling drone to have entered the tunnel to dig through the fallen debris. There would have been no telling how many more booby traps the humans had. Drilling the relief tunnel would ensure that the Shaitans would be able to rescue all the trapped Shaitans safely without falling victim to any more traps.

  Once inside the first compartment, the drone could then start drilling further inside the tunnel through the collapsed tunnels to free up more Shaitans. Since the explosives here have already been triggered, there would be no more way to stop the Shaitans from drilling and releasing their comrades.

  The Marines had to somehow stop that drill. Unfortunately it was being guarded by the remaining thousand Shaitans on the surface. In one fell swoop the Shaitan commander had turned the tables. The Shaitans were was now in a defensive position and had compelled the humans to attack their position, charging in on the open lunar surface with no cover at all.

  It was a brilliant tactical move from the Shaitan commander. Unfortunately for the Shaitan commander, he had no way to know the battle objectives of the humans. The moment the Shaitan warriors had moved away from their shuttles to the position where the drone was drilling, humans were free to bombard. With a thousand Shaitans trapped, the humans had no use for the other thousand on the surface for intelligence.

  On Alex’s command the ships hovering in space above the Shackleton base as well as the missile launchers installed on the base itself started a coordinated missile bombardment of the drill point. The Shaitan radars picked up the missiles immediately and sent out counteroffensive missiles towards the base. The shuttles began to rise up at about the same time as the first missiles hit the drill point.

  The shuttles had a fairly competent point defense system, which tried bravely to save the Shaitan troops out in the open from the missile strikes. There were however too many missile coming in from both space as well as the Shackleton base for them to be able to stop all of them. A few hundred Shaitans bunched up near the drill point were slaughtered by the missiles, while also burying the drill with the missile impacts. The rest of the Shaitans on the surface scattered.

  The few Shaitan missiles launched towards the Shackleton base managed to destroy almost all of the external human habitats built out in the open. These external habitats however were non critical to the survival of the humans. All non-combatants were inside the lava tube habitats of Shackleton base. The combatants on the other hand were racing towards the drill point from their positions.

  Three Company of Marines Stopped over 2 kilometers short of the drill point. Some of the scattered Shaitans were closer than 2 Kilometers. Going any further would be extremely hazardous for the Marines. The pulse plasma guns of the Shaitans would be extremely accurate and effective in the airless environment of the Moon with a clear line of sight.

  The two sides were in an effective standoff. The Shaitans couldn’t dig further without assembling at the dig point and thus becoming an easy target for the missiles, while the scattered Shaitans ensured that the Marines couldn’t approach the dig site to ensure that the digger didn’t get through to free the trapped Shaitans inside the tunnel.

  The biggest wildcard in this game were the two shuttles which could easily have flown over the Marine positions and pounded them. The shuttles however had actually withdrawn further from the Marine positions and were hovering in the air. From the Shaitan point of view, it was understandable. The Shuttles were the only asset that the Shaitans had left. They would not want to endanger them. What the Shaitans didn’t know, and couldn’t have known was the humans were equally eager to protect the shuttles, and would have tried their best to avoid destroying them.

  Meanwhile 128 Shaitans trapped on the wrong side of the tunnels, predictably did what they were expected to do. They rushed forward and were promptly met with the bullets of the Marines. The storage area was an ideal kill box. A heavy machine gun was mounted on the other side of the tunnel joining the storage area to the Shackleton base. It cut down a large number of the 64 Shaitans who jumped into the storage area.

  The rest of the Shaitans who managed to survive and were trying to find cover behind the various objects dumped there, discovered that they had jumped into a trap. Every conceivable hiding area was booby trapped with remote detonating explosives. Between the explosives and the Marines manning positions at various niches on the base side of the tunnel, almost all of the Shaitans were picked off. Only one Shaitan bullet managed to find a Marine’s suit, he died almost instantly.

  The story in the tunnel opening on to the reactor did not go that well. In fact it all went horribly wrong. Marines were not the only ones who carried a scientific and engineering reference library in their suit computer for field reference. The Shaitans did too. Being a more advanced civilization than humans, their reference library was far superior to anything that the Marines carry.

  The Shaitan warriors had immediately recognized the type and the general design of the reactor the moment they had stepped into the chamber. That was one of the primary reason they had withdrawn post-haste from the chamber back towards the tunnel whence they came. Their library indicated the fission reactor was a very primitive energy source used by their beings in antiquity before the ‘Great Awakening’. It further highlighted the extreme radiation dangers of this kind of a reactor.

  The Shaitan reference library listed hundreds of ways in which such a reactor could go wrong and cause a catastrophe. To the Shaitan commander the reactor was a gift. He realized that the warriors trapped were dead anyway. It is obvious that this was a trap and the warriors would meet their end with whatever the enemy had prepared for them further down the tunnel. The Shaitan commander was going to take as many spawns of Ka along with him as possible.

  The Shaitan commander ordered the warriors not to go towards the other side of the tunnel, where he was sure humans were waiting. In fact he ordered the warriors not to even go near the line of sight of that side of the tunnel. He asked the Shaitans to spread out in the relatively cramped reactor chamber and gave them specific instructions on what needed to be done.

  The first surprise the Shaitans got was when two seemingly inanimate pieces of machinery moved their articulated arms and gripped two Shaitans, crushing them as well as cutting their flesh with the mechanical grip of the robotic hands. The remotely operated maintenance robots were able to kill four Shaitans and more critically delay the designs of the Shaitans for a few seconds before they were overwhelmed by a large mass of Shaitans swarming over them and toppling them from their anchors, after which they were immobile and useless.
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  At that time, it seemed like the time bought by the maintenance robots for the Marines to rush in and try to protect the reactor was a good thing. It would turn out to be otherwise. In a few moments, the Marines would wish they had not rushed in, but rather had sealed the tunnel on the other side, as was the contingency plan.

  The sensors on the limbs of the Shaitans suit could sense the exact composition of each rod that had been inserted into the reactor. The Shaitans knew exactly which rods were nuclear fuel rods, and which ones were inhibitors meant to slow down the nuclear reaction and prevent a nuclear meltdown. While Marines fought some of the Shaitans in the tight confines of the chamber, in what was hand-to-hand combat rather than a gunfight, other Shaitans carried out the exact instructions of their commander.

  They removed every inhibitor rod from the reactor, while inserting fuel rods lying in storage nearby. It only took 90 seconds for the boiling water inside the reactor to burst out in a violent explosion that killed many Shaitans and Marines nearby instantly. The Marines close to the tunnel retreated back into the tunnel, heavily exposed to radiation. When they were far enough, the Marines triggered the explosives to plug the tunnel, which they should have done in the first case. 20 Marines were dead and/or sealed with the Shaitans in the radioactive reactor. The rest were alive for the moment, but exposed to life threatening levels of radiation.

  Alex was on the surface crouched along with the Marines facing off with the Shaitans who were similarly crouched behind cover over a kilometer away. Both the sides were in a stand-off waiting for the other to make a move and come out in the open. Alex was running various possibilities through his mind in order to find a way to break the stand-off. Time was not on his side. While the missile strike may have buried the digger, it was unlikely to have been damaged given that it had already burrowed a significant depth. Once the digger had dug into the tunnel, the trapped Shaitans could simply turn it around and dig themselves out.

  Alex could not think of a single plan that did not involve the slaughter of his Marines or the destruction of those shuttles. The shuttles had withdrawn back a few kilometers and had been hovering for some time, but had landed eventually, most probably to conserve fuel. In an epiphany of sorts, Alex realized that the shuttles were being conserved in the hope that if the humans on Moon could be killed off, then the shuttles could be used to try and set up a habitat for the Shaitans to survive.

  It was a forlorn hope of course. Even if every Marine was killed on the Shackleton base, ten times more Marines would arrive from Earth to finish of the Shaitans if required. Alex couldn’t however laugh at the hopes of the Shaitans. If he had been in the position of the enemy commander, doomed as such, he would have also hoped for such an outcome, hoping against hope, as would any human being. The Shaitans were also living beings, who were hoping to somehow survive.

  Knowing how the Shaitans must be thinking and hoping, Alex decided to try out a tactic in the hope of taking the shuttles relatively intact, and at the same time remove the air support of the Shaitans. He chose two fire teams and gave them a transport along with their orders. He was going to time it with the arrival of the 1500 Marines arriving in lunar orbit in less than an hour, just in case his plans went awry.

  “Lt. Lehigh to General Parkinson.” Alex heard on his com, and gave a smile. Some military traditions just don’t seem to fade. It has been decades since the Marines used digital one to one communication. Lt. Lehigh was connected directly to Alex, and both the parties knew it, yet the junior officer still followed the ancient open radio protocol of hailing ‘x calling y’, to signal whom he wanted to speak to. The protocol was more a request for permission to address a senior officer, rather than of any practical value.

  “Go for it lieutenant.” Alex replied.

  “Sir, the fire teams are in place and waiting for your go-ahead.” Lt. Lehigh replied.

  “Understood. Standby lieutenant.” Alex replied, as he watched his faceplate display. He still had to wait for 15 minutes before the marine reinforcement would be in the correct orbital position for him to give the go ahead. When the time came, he gave the go ahead to the fire teams.

  The fire teams had been able to crawl to within half a kilometer of the parked shuttles without being detected, primarily because the shuttles had parked half a kilometer away from a shallow crater. The Marines had crawled most of their way inside the crater, after leaving their buggy behind. The Marines stood up and fired 6 shoulder launched missiles, while others painted their target with lasers.

  The missiles would take roughly 10 seconds to reach their target. It all depended on the response time of the Shaitan pilots, because in theory the shuttles could take off within 10 seconds if the pilots reacted immediately. If the shuttles took off, then it didn’t matter whether the missiles hit their target or not, for the objective would not be met. Even if the target was hit before the shuttle took off, the Shaitan pilot could foil the human objective by taking off anyway. This is where Alex hoped, that the Shaitan hopes of living through this would prevent the pilot from taking off and trying to save the shuttle.

  Shaitan shuttles were massive, and they were designed to land on planets and moons of every kind, including ones with heavy gravity. Hence the landing struts of the shuttles were thick and massive, even thicker than those of standard airliners. They were easy targets to paint and hold for the Marines, as long as the shuttle didn’t fire back while they had their heads stuck out.

  All six missiles hit their target, but one of the shuttles had taken off by that time and was a few meters over the surface. The other shuttle had been slow to react, and blowing up three of its landing struts tilted it, just as it was taking the load off those struts. The tilt cause it to start moving sideways and drag one part of its fuselage on the surface. The pilot immediately ceased thrust to prevent damage to the shuttle, and it sank back on the lunar surface relatively unharmed, with possibly minor scratches and dents.

  “Be advised. One shuttle has taken off, while the other is grounded… Request permission to fire in self-defense if attacked by the airborne shuttle.” Lt. Lehigh shouted his warning.

  “Permission granted lieutenant. Get the boys back out of there alive.” Alex then switched to the other channel he had put on hold and said. “One bird down, the other flies. You are free to take down the airborne shuttle. It cannot take off again if it lands, so it is going to be suicidal. I don’t want any Marine sacrificed to try to take this one intact.” Then Alex switched channel and spoke to the commanding officer of the Marines waiting in orbit. “You may proceed colonel, best of luck to all of us.”

  As Alex had anticipated, the airborne shuttle scrambled at a manic pace towards the position of the Marines, firing missiles even as it was barely airborne. It was obvious that the shuttle pilot intended this to be his last hurrah. The shuttle had no chance of surviving the next few minutes. Eight missiles from the lines of the Marines and twenty more from space streaked towards the shuttle. The shuttle’s point defense system had no hopes of stopping them all. It went down in a fiery crash, but not before it had launched 12 missiles of its own.

  The Marine lines had been scattered and under cover for this eventuality, but the cover on the lunar surface was not enough. 33 Marines died on the spot from being hit by shrapnel, while nearly 20 more were saved by their buddies being able to repair their suit before they asphyxiated. Most of them would probably survive.

  The Shaitans on the opposite side were not having an easier time either. They were pounded from space with missiles, and they had nowhere to take cover. The Shaitan warriors decided that the best cover they would get would be right next to the Marines. The ships from space would not dare pound them with missiles if they were intermingled with the Marines, so they charged towards the Marine lines.

  Running out in the open without cover inevitably meant that the Shaitans took heavy casualties from the Marines’ guns. Still the Shaitans were too numerous to be shot down before they reached the Marines line
s. What really broke the backs of the Shaitan line was when they started getting shot from top. Unlike humans, the Shaitans presented a fat round profile for anyone coming towards them from the top. It was actually easier to shoot a Shaitan from the top.

  The 1500 Marines jumping from orbit to join the battle were not too accurate while trying to maneuver themselves to land right behind the Shaitan lines, but it didn’t matter. The sheer volume of fire the 1500 Marines could muster meant that very few Shaitans were actually able to reach the Marines holed up behind their covers.

  When all was said and done, every single one of the Shaitans was dead, with just over 15 more casualties suffered by the Marines. The battle of the Moon was over, all that the Marines needed to do was to open up the tunnel plugs one by one. The Shaitans had been compartmentalized into multiple sections, each holding 20-25 Shaitans each, a fairly manageable number to capture alive for nearly 1800 Marines now on the Moon.

  At the height of his triumph, Alex got a call he would remember all his life. “Sir… I… I think you should come to the base immediately sir. It’s… It’s the colonel, sir. It’s Col. Ma sir… I think you should come immediately.” The speaker on the other end was crying.

  “I don’t want you remember me like this. I wish you hadn’t come and seen me before I was…” Cuifen trailed off her words and shifted her gaze from Alex towards the ceiling, staring at it in an unfocussed and glazed manner. She had woken up when Alex sat next to her bed and held her hand. A nurse came over and wiped the blood that had seeped from the corner of her mouth.

  “Nothing is going to happen to you Jojo. The Nautilus is here, we will get you shifted to Earth, and you will be healed in no time, Jojo. Nothing is going to happen to you…” Tears were flowing freely on Alex’s cheeks.