Retribution (Shaitan Wars)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  Once the main spine cables have been joined at various points to give the whole structure a look similar to a spider’s web, the nano-machinery continues making every smaller grids across this web, until the grids are just a few millimeters in size. This whole process takes just over 4 days as per the manual.

  Then a different nano-machinery is pumped through the cables which grows the collection cells on the grid superstructure that the previous nano-machinery had created. This process of growing the collection cells takes another day. So in five days ladies and gentlemen, the whole harvester has literally been grown into place.

  The nano-machinery and the collection cells between the spine cables are gossamer thin. The ship pumps just 9 tons of nano-machinery to complete the entire structure. So other than the cables, which are self-supporting anyway, the weight of the harvester is just 9 tons. These 9 tons is all the 12 spinal cables have to support with their ion thrusters. That is less than a ton per cable, which they are able to manage fairly easily even under high acceleration conditions.

  The beauty of this design is that when a small surface area of this harvester encounters a micro dust particle or a micrometeorite, being gossamer thin, it cannot transfer energy along its surface before it disintegrates. So only a small hole is punched into the surface without much damage to the neighborhood. The nano-machinery along the support structures is continuously repairing such damage and hardly affects the efficiency of the overall system.” Benedict paused to see if he had been able to answer the chairman’s question satisfactorily.

  “Put that way, the whole contraption seems plausible, though I still have to see it in action to really believe it. I will wait eagerly to see a prototype. However there is still one question that you suggested to answer later but haven’t yet. Why did the Ka-let have to fill the goddamn ship with water?” The chairman asked.

  “Fair question Mr. Chairman, the answer to which lies surprisingly with the vulnerabilities of organic life. No… the water was not used for drinking or showers. They had separate tanks for those purpose. In fact the water contained in the tanks covering the entire ship is not recommended for consumption by organic life, at least those on Earth. For these tanks were designed to carry not normal water but heavy water.

  Heavy water, like normal water is H2O, but the hydrogen is not the normal hydrogen with just one proton, but a Deuterium with one proton and one neutron. We have this water in trace amounts in nature and on Earth. Human body carries about 5 grams of heavy water inside them. In such low quantities, it has no effect on the body. However if 50% of the water in our body were to be heavy water, then our organs would shut down and we would die.

  Heavy water feels and tastes exactly like normal water. One would not be able to make out the difference normally. It is slightly heavier due to the extra neutron in the hydrogen – about 12% heavier than normal water. Where heavy water acts very differently however is when exposed to radiation. The extra neutron in the hydrogen atom is very effective in blocking a huge amount of radiation which normal water and most non-heavy metal substances would not be able to block. Weight by weight, the only other substances that are as effective in blocking radiation are heavy metals like Lead.

  Why is such heavy radiation shielding required, when our vessels have been going to space for over a century now with much thinner radiation shielding? It has to do with the speed at which a ship travels. Our ships have till now travelled at speeds, that are insignificant compared to the speed of light. Even a Shaitan ship travelling at 2% of light is not travelling fast enough to make any difference.

  The Ka-let ship however traveled at 20% the speed of light, and more importantly is designed to go much faster. In theory, that ship can go at 99% the speed of light, given a far enough distance to go. At such speed, ordinary electromagnetic rays hit the ship at much higher frequencies. This is a basic principle of Doppler Effect, which we also know as blue-shift.

  UV rays can become X-Rays, and X-Rays become Gamma-Rays. Free floating protons and other such particles start hitting the ship with such velocity that they become harmful radiation, penetrating the skin of the ship and harming the organic creatures inside. That is the reason why extra radiation shielding is required on these ships, especially up in the front nose of the ship.

  Why did the Ka-let use heavy water instead of Lead? I frankly don’t know Mr. Chairman. Maybe the Ka-let world is Lead poor, or maybe Heavy water is not harmful to the Ka-let, so it acted as an extra reservoir of both fuel as well as water for them. What we do know however is that during the voyage to the Solar system, the Heavy water is not filled into the tanks, since they knew that they were going to travel at only 20% speed of light, which did not present too much danger of radiation.

  This made the ship lighter, and thus able to reach here faster and at greater speed. That in itself is an advantage of heavy water shielding compared to Lead. You can configure your ships weight according to where you are travelling and reach there faster. On reaching Mars though, the Ka-let used the ship’s shielding as a water tank, filled with ordinary water for their daily use. This is another advantage of the design. The downside to the design is that it makes the entry and exit into the ship and the overall leakage engineering a lot more complex.”

  The European councilman stuck to protocol unlike his Japanese counterpart and asked for permission from the chair before asking the question he was bursting with. “With the permission of the honorable member from USA and the Chair of this committee, there is an issue that I am very curious to know about.” He looked at the Chair, who nodded and he continued. “From the now famous Ramses logs, what we have learnt is that the attack on the Ka-let home world in Proxima Centauri happened 80 thousand years ago.

  The logs mention that all that the Ka-let knew about the Shaitans before their final destruction had been uploaded to this Ka-let ship on Mars. My question to you Mr. Parsons is this. Have you studied the state of Shaitan technology at that time 80 thousand years ago, and do you have any comment on how far they have advanced in this ensuing time till today?”

  “A very insightful and pertinent question Mr. Councilman. The answer to which might hold a lot of value in our fight with the Shaitans.” Benedict paused to acknowledge the insightful question. “To answer the first part of your question, yes we have studied almost everything that had been uploaded to the ship. This data was stored in the main computers of the ship. Unfortunately entropy has taken its toll in this computer, and there were many instances of data corruption, which is hardly surprising after 80 thousand years. What is amazing is that we have been able to retrieve 79% of the data even after all these thousands of years.

  While I have not personally studied every piece of the Shaitan data transmitted, persons more competent on Shaitan technology have studied every byte of data about the Shaitans that could be retrieved. A few broad points stand out from those analyses.

  First the Shaitans did learn a few technologies from the Ka-let. Major amongst them was the stasis technology, which was not present in the ships that fought the Ka-let. We have to remember that while we talked about their harvester technology, the Ka-let are first and foremost masters of biology. There are other details of engineering they refined by learning from the Ka-let, like control systems etc.

  Second the Shaitans were unable to learn about the harvester technology because the first and the only prototype was on its way to the Solar system when they attacked the Ka-let. The Ka-let in turn had assiduously wiped as much of their technical knowledge as they could, so they never got hold of the plans of the most advanced Ka-let ship. We should be thankful for that one lucky break.

  Third beyond the few things that the Shaitans learnt from the Ka-let, everything else in their technology seems to be exactly the same as it was 80 thousand years ago. That is amazing if you think about it. We humans went from primitive Stone Age tools to a spacefaring civilization in less than 10 thousand years. Yet here we have a species that has essentially remained static fo
r 80 thousand years. It is possible that that have remained static for a much longer period of time.

  It would be too hasty to pass judgment on the Shaitans. If one is not under existential threat, then there is no great value in trying to innovate and improve technology. However having said that, it makes me wonder how well will the Shaitans be able to respond if they were put under existential threat, if they have gotten used to staying static for so long. It gives me hope that we may be able to beat them if we throw enough surprises at them.”

  The deposition continued for some more time with supplementary questions, but what stayed with the council and the millions who watched the recording was the last words that Benedict had spoken. “If we throw enough surprises at them, we can beat them.”

  Chapter 8

  Jehannum

  “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.” – Genesis 9:6

  Alpha Shaitan System

  December 2088

  It had been just over 4 years since the Holocaust. It would be the first time that the humans would get a glimpse of the home world of the perpetrators of that holocaust. It would be a glimpse into the liar of humanity’s most reviled enemy and tormentor. ‘Glimpse’ was an accurate word in more ways than one, for all the long journey of just over 7 years of the LTKS aka ‘Project Kali’, it would get a glimpse of the Shaitan system for just under 2 hours.

  Most of those two hours of view would be a long range view from telescopes with grainy, pixelated pictures and scans. The probe would be able to manage a close up view of the system for only a few minutes. A lot had to be achieved in those few precious minutes. ESA and USC engineers had been programming and then updating those programs almost continuously for the last 4 years to get the maximum out of those last few minutes.

  The biggest challenge the programmers faced was the fact that the quantum computer inside the probe would have to make decision on its own. There was no way for the humans to instruct the probe. Light signals took quarter of a year one way to reach Earth. A round trip instruction would take half a year, which would not do when decisions had to be taken in fractions of a second.

  Quantum computers are incredibly fast, immeasurably fast actually, when it came to computations. However information retrieval still happened through silicon technology. The pace of retrieving information from an information store like solid state information crystals, or the old style hard disks was glacial compared to the computation speed of the CPU.

  This was a perpetual problem of computer science for one and a half centuries now, from the first computer that had ever been built. Any practical Artificial Intelligence algorithm depended 99% on information retrieval, and only 1% on computation. Thus humans had not made much headway in AI despite having incredibly fast computers, although purely computation intensive tasks like missile targeting had improved drastically in the last few decades due to the quantum computers.

  The human AI programs were still not able to pass the ‘Turing Test’, laid out by the greatest of the computer scientists, Alan Turing 150 years ago. It could fool a few people for a short time into thinking that they were having a conversation with a real person, but almost 99% of humans could make out within a short time that it was a repetitive and non-creative entity they were having a conversation with, which could not be a human.

  This was one area where the Shaitans were still ahead of the humans. Their use of non-deterministic biological memory for their AI computers helped their computers retrieve information. It worked using fuzzy logic, very similar to our brains, which worked far better than out deterministic digital computer memory. Humans would have to tear down everything they knew about computer architecture and build from scratch ground up, if they want to replicate the Shaitan architecture.

  So the engineers had to work within those limitations of human computer architecture to program LTKS such that it could make a few critical decisions as it approached the Shaitan system. It had to look at a fuzzy picture of the Shaitan system, from billions of kilometers out and make a decision about which moons were important, and which were not. Particularly, which of them was the home world of the Shaitans.

  This was a tough decision to make even for a seasoned human analyst. The system was dark. There was no sunlight to light up the moons of Alpha Shaitan. The entire system could only be seen in the infrared that reflected from the emissions of Alpha Shaitan. To say that infrared lighting is poor in terms of detailing the features of a moon, is an understatement.

  Given the Shaitans doctrine of keeping radio silence and EM silence in general, which most humans were coming round to the view was a wise doctrine, it was likely that none of the moons would emit any kind of electromagnetic signals that would distinguish it from the others.

  The only saving grace was that LTKS didn’t have to be stealthy. It would go in blaring loudly at the Shaitans, so it had no restraints in going into active scanning mode. That is what really made the difference and helped LTKS make the right choices. The first thing that the probe was able to determine is the number of moons Alpha Shaitan had – 16.

  This did not include a large amount of free floating rocks of huge size, which did not have a roughly spherical shape. Such rocks, which were too small to form a spherical shape were classified differently and filed along with millions of astronomically significant data that it was recording, like the faint wisp of a ring that Alpha Shaitan possessed, which most probably had been a moon or a large rock that had ventured too close to the gas giant and had been shattered into trillions of pieces to form the ring.

  The moons were labelled AS-a through AS-p, with the closest being AS-a, and the furthest being AS-p. The relative distance from Alpha Shaitan was only as had been captured at this specific point of time. It was possible that some of the moons further out right now, could actually get much closer than others at a different point in their orbit, but there was no way to figure that out in this mission.

  LTKS slowly started eliminating moons and assigning priorities to the ones not eliminated based on nearly a hundred thousand different criteria that the programmers had uploaded into its memory. It narrowed down to two moons which met the maximum number of criteria - AS-d and AS-j. Both these moons had parameters the programmers had inserted as the signs of a space elevator.

  LTKS had shone high power lasers and sampled the reflected light, and the space elevator parameters matched with 99% accuracy. The reflected light had shown other things about these two moons as well. Surface installations which had more than 90% probability of being artificial. There had been two more moons whose surface had shown artificial surface installations, but they had been only one or two such installations on those moons.

  AS-d had over a hundred such installations, and AS-j had over two thousand. The other things that had helped in narrowing down the choices was the descriptions that had been gleaned from the Shaitan prisoners. Shaitan doctrine ensured that not a single mention about the home world system existed on an invading ship, but they couldn’t wipe out the knowledge from the brains of the invading Shaitans.

  Thus LTKS made a decision. AS-j it was. That was going to be its target. It opened up its broadcast channels to broadcast in frequencies and language that the humans were now fairly sure the Shaitans would be monitoring and would understand crystal clear in their meaning.

  The humans now had a fairly detailed understanding of the Shaitan language thanks to the hundreds of Shaitans that had been captured alive on the Moon. They were fairly certain about the frequencies and encoding as well due to the aggressive ‘questioning’ that the military had performed on these captive Shaitans.

  There was no greetings or any other human niceties in opening the message. Not out of spite, but because anthropologists specializing in the Shaitans now were fairly certain that the concept of greetings do not exist in Shaitan terminology. Instead they had added what a typical Shaitan long distance message would start with. An odor a
nd slime signature. They had recorded those signatures from the captured Shaitans themselves as they came into contact with humans.

  It clearly and unambiguously told the Shaitans whom the message came from. The message was simple, repeated over and over again.

  “This is a message and a demonstration of intent from the beings you mistakenly call the ‘spawns of Ka’ in the heart of the Kalshuk system. Your seers have been mistaken in terming this system Kalshuk, for there is no influence of Ka in this system. We are not the spawns of Ka, but beings that were ordained by the natural order of things just like your beings. Your seers were mistaken in believing that only one being, namely yourself could be created in the natural order of things. There are many beings possible in this universe and have existed over time, including the Ka-let, whom you exterminated wrongly.

  Be advised that you will face terrible consequences if you persist on attacking us, including the extermination of your beings. You have indulged in the worst possible action (the humans had wanted to use the word ‘crime’ instead of ‘action’ but there was no equivalent word to ‘crime’ in Shaitans, since it was an unknown concept). You have attacked our home world with Ka-ma-khya. This is the worst possible defilation of our being’s sanctity, and we cannot accept this at any cost. To give you the message that this is unacceptable to us, we retaliate in kind, but not to the same extent. Do not take this reduced response as a sign of our weakness or our inability to inflict more damage. You do so at your own peril.

  We know your world is far lower in resources and beings than our world, and we can outlast you, if you persist on Ka-ma-khya. If you agree to refrain from further Ka-ma-khya and further conflict by coming into the heart of the Kalshuk system, then send us a message indicating so. We understand your holy language completely and we will have no problem in understanding your message.