Otherwise understand this. Every time you indulge in Ka-ma-khya, we will double our retaliation and double the force of impact our retaliatory Ka-ma-khya, till your home world is cracked at the core and it disintegrates into millions of pieces.”
A whole planning sub-committee had been formed in the USC Admiralty’s planning process just to put together this message. Every major government had to be consulted, back and forth multiple times and every sentence and word was parsed to debate the meaning the Shaitans would interpret and how they were likely to act.
One of the compromises and accommodation made to the diehard hopefuls in the various governments was the call to the Shaitans to respond back if they wanted peace. Most did not expect to hear from the Shaitans. The USC actually hoped not to hear back from the Shaitans, for that would put them in the dilemma of whether to trust the Shaitans or not. It would also severely curtail human first strike options.
As LTKS was broadcasting the message to the Shaitans, it was getting ever better pictures of AS-j itself as it got ever closer at the frightening speed of 6.5% speed of light. It was transmitting everything back to Earth simultaneously. AS-j however was not the only moon that was getting recorded in a high degree of detail. The remaining two mini probes of LTKS had been launched an hour ago to get into impact trajectory with AS-d and AS-k.
AS-d for obvious reason, and since the LTKS, still had one mini probe left, it used it to probe AS-k, which had displayed two surface installations. The LTKS had carried a total of 4 mini probes. Two of the mini probes had been launched many months ago. They had used up almost all of their small rocket fuel meant for maneuvering to decelerate. As a result they were travelling behind LTKS at a very minutely lower speed than their mother probe.
These months of travel at a slightly lower speed had created enough separation that these probes would reach the Shaitan system a few minutes after the LTKS had impacted AS-j. Their job was simple. To track the LTKS and record its impact on whatever moon it hits. The engineers were certain it would be able to do that. What was uncertain was whether the weak radio and laser communication system aboard the mini probes would be able to reach the inner solar system.
USC had dedicated a special satellite for this purpose, but the outcome was not certain. In theory it was possible to detect the signals, but such weak signals had never been detected before. There was nothing the software engineers could have done in any case, the mini probes were of the specification they were. It had been designed for a very different purpose. To communicate with the mother ship. However in this case the mother ship was no longer available.
LTKS was a very different beast compared to the Shaitan scout probe that had been repurposed for Ka-ma-khya. LTKS weighed only 500 tons. It was now basically a shell with an empty tank and the weight of the engine and instrumentation. It had never been designed as a kinetic kill device. In contrast the Shaitan KK ship had weighed nearly six thousand tons.
However the lower weight of the LTKS gave it one small advantage. Although it carried far less fuel than the Shaitan KK ship, it had travelled faster than the Shaitan one. The Shaitan ship had travelled at 2.6% speed of light when it impacted Earth. The LTKS was at 6.5% speed of light, although the Shaitan ship had carried over 3 thousand tons of fuel, while the LTKS had carried only one thousand tons. Since kinetic energy increases at the square of speed, that speed advantage gave a lot more bang for the buck.
The LTKS had not been designed for killing like the Shaitan ship, so it could not divide its impact into many pieces to affect a large number of places on the surface, instead it would hit one point on the surface of AS-j and create a tremendous impact. The composers of the message to the Shaitans had crafted their message to make this limitation appear as a gesture of magnanimity.
Still 500 tons of mass impacting at 6.5% the speed of light is nothing to laugh at. That is nearly 1020 joules, or the equivalent of about 23 thousand megatons of TNT, a figure so large that it boggles the mind.
When LTKS hit the surface of Jehannum, centered on whatever its rudimentary AI could figure as the largest land based installation, the violence unleased was unimaginable in human terms. The probe itself did not penetrate beyond a few hundred meters before it completely disintegrated into constituent atoms in a matter of pico-seconds.
However the entire energy was now converted into thermal energy from the pure kinetic energy of the probe. It turned everything it touched – rocks, ice, and crust into plasma. Stripped off even its electrons, these atoms expanded into a shockwave that spread across the surface of the moon at several times the speed of sound. The impact was so great that the rotational period of the moon AS-j was slowed down by 0.007 seconds.
Beneath the initial layer of the surface which turned into plasma and radiated out in all directions and space, the next layer was only just slightly cooler and turned silica into gas and liquid, which spewed out clear into space due to the lower gravity of the moon. The ensuing fireball spread across the face of the entire planets, the moon AS-j for almost an hour became the brightest thing in the Kuiper belt.
Its surface oxygen burnt to emit visible light, otherwise not seen in the Alpha Shaitan system, along with UV and even traces of X-Rays, as anything combustible on the surface burnt. The mini-probes following behind the mother ship were able to record the effects on the surface only because they were recording in all of the EM spectrum. The fireball occluded the surface visibility, but radar frequency showed what was happening to the surface.
The point of impact looked like a piece of glass through which a rock had broken through. It had a deep jagged crater at the point of impact, and radiating out from that point was cracks in all direction. It was the first proof that the geologists would have of the enormous stress they suspected the crust of the Shaitan home world bore. When given enough force of impact the surface of their home planet tended to crack a long way, unlike the surface of Earth.
All this would have been missed if the planners had not taken the precaution of using two mini probes instead of one, for they finally received signal from only one of them. The videos had some dropped pixels due to poor signal quality, but the scientific data had enough redundancy to come through intact, using which the video editing programs could fill in some of the gaps.
This event had the potential to be the biggest PR coup or the biggest PR disaster for USC. This was the first big event of the tenure of Admiral Wen Xian, who had taken over just a few months ago from Admiral Daniel Cloutier in a generational change effected by the USC governing council. Admiral Xian may not have been as legendary as his predecessor or even Admiral Fabi Kalinin, but he was diligent, disciplined and technically competent, everything you can expect from a good military man.
Admiral Xian’s greatest strength however was people management. A lifetime of working and rising through the byzantine labyrinth of the PLA and the communist party makes you good at it, or you don’t survive the race to the top. The other thing you cannot afford to have in such a setup and hope to rise is a big ego. In most other countries generals and admirals can rise to the top despite big egos, as long as they show strategic or tactical brilliance. Not in China.
Admiral Xian knew exactly what he was not good at and what he did not understand. While he understood the need for PR intellectually, he could never appreciate its importance in selling the work of your government and its departments to the tax payers in democracies. There was rarely such a need in China. He resigned to the fact that he would never understand PR, but being a good HR manager, he identified the perfect people to handle it for him.
Admiral Xian chose two of his rising stars to handle all media affairs for him. The newly minted commodores Gerald Shannon and Hamid Dar. Two men who were diametrically opposite in many ways, and had forged a friendship in the crucible of a two year long epic campaign. Fortunately for the Admiral both these men were articulate and came from two of the most boisterous democracies, where all the senior administrators seem to be doing is
managing media. If there was anyone who would feel right at home, it would be these two men.
Throughout his tenure Admiral Xian rarely made public statements in the media, and only when it was officially required of him to do so personally. Otherwise Commodores Shannon and Dar were the public face of USC. When the next generational change would happen and Gerald would succeed Admiral Xian, the public would hardly notice the change for they had been seeing Gerald all the time anyway.
For the moment though, the newly minted commodores Shannon and Dar were nervous. They had devised a media strategy based on underplaying the event as much as possible. The fact that project Kali was reaching its concluding phase had been buried within fine print in a deluge of routine USC press release. That way the USC performed its duty of keeping the public informed.
If the outcome of ‘Project Kali’ went south or was underwhelming, then they could just hide it in routine press releases and make no big deal out of it. If the project went well, then they could always stream it ‘live’ and shout about it on the official USC handle on the internet. Every opinion maker, journalist, and blogger worth his or her salt followed the official USC handle and would pick up the stream and forward it further to billions within minutes.
There was nothing live about what was being streamed right now. The events had had happened over 3 months ago, and the light signals had reached only now. The streams had been edited and made slick and presentable to the lay person by a California production firm, which Gerald had hired, and only then had it been released. The videos were not however released as a single file, so that it would not appear as a recorded event.
Instead it was released as multiple streams of live video, each stream showing a different camera and electromagnetic spectrum view as if the whole event was being shared with the people of Earth as it happened. The cognoscenti would know that it is not possible to stream live from Shaitan, but for the vast majority of the people of Earth, they were seeing events as it was unfolding.
It was four years since the Holocaust, but the people of Earth had not forgotten. The emotions were especially raw amongst the people of the Pacific Rim. They were still grieving loved ones. Within the first minute of the announcement on the handle, a billion people were watching on their scrolls, table tops or wall screens.
As the shockwave of fire spread across the entire surface of the moon AS-j, the home world of the Shaitans on Alpha Shaitan, the entire planet seemed to have been engulfed in the hell fire, as it appeared on the streaming video. There were shouts and tears of joy as humanity saw their fellow humans avenged. People read out verses of retribution from the Bible, Koran and every other holy book ever written. The images appeared more devastating than it actually was to the Shaitans.
USC professionals knew that it was just the atmosphere and its combustibles that had been engulfed in the fire. From their interrogations they knew that almost all Shaitans were deep underground as was most of their production base. Very little of their combat capability had been degraded, except perhaps at the immediate site of impact.
However the images provided closure, satisfaction and a sense of retribution for billions of humans around the world. That was very good for the morale of humanity and the continued budget funding of the USC. Gerald and Hamid sat in the full dress uniform inside the virtual press room of the USC headquarters in Bronx. They had handpicked 50 ‘friendly’ bloggers and journalists from across the world to join in the virtual press conference, which was also to be streamed live.
As the streaming video finished playing, the two men braced for the barrage of questions that was going to come from the journalists. It had been mutually decided that Gerald would make the formal announcement, and Hamid would field most of the questions. Gerald went about laying out the event as clinically and professionally as possible using words like ‘retaliatory strike’ instead of ‘retribution’, and described the objective in dry words like ‘demonstration of second strike capability as a deterrence to the enemy’.
Gerald played parts of the clip to explain events in detail, which was a dead giveaway to media professionals that the entire event had been prepared and rehearsed, but the public didn’t care. They loved it and lapped up every word of it.
When it came to the Q&A section of the press conference, a preset list started connecting bloggers and journalists one by one to the conference as they asked their questions. Hamid tried to answer them as much as possible, with Gerald chipping in whenever Hamid got too harried. While answering one of the questions, Hamid mentioned a word which caught the journalist’s attention.
“Commodore you mentioned the word Jehannum. I don’t believe I am familiar with that term. Could you please explain it sir.” The journalist asked.
Hamid replied with a smile for a change. “It is not a term. It is a name. It is nothing if not a divine providence that the Shaitan home world was classified as AS-j. If Shaitan is the name of Satan in the tongue of my country, then the home of the Satan is called Jehannum."
Chapter 9
A shining beacon
Solar System
2096
It was generally accepted by historians that one of the biggest mistakes made by humanity in the 21st century was committed in the closing years of the century. The historians could understand the context. They could appreciate the terrible fear and the desperation of the people who designed and executed it. What those people could not have known was that the cure would turn out to be worse than the disease in the long term.
Humans still did not have a solution to prevent a Kinetic missile likes the one the Shaitans had unleased in the Holocaust. However every military and scientific establishment in the world, worth its salt was working on the problem. The only solution that the humans could see was to wipe out the species that sent those missiles in the first place.
One could be sure that solution was on the top of the agenda of the USC in particular and the world in general. However with two known worlds of the Shaitans, that were incredibly far away and the possibility of more Shaitan worlds existing, no one thought that it could be achieved in the short to medium run, if at all.
So the humans needed a defense against such Kinetic weapons. While strategist and scientists worked on a defense, everybody agreed that humanity needed an early warning system against such an attack. It looked like a good idea at that time. The earlier humans knew, the more prepared they could be. Even if the longer warning did not help in defense, it would at the least help in getting as many people out of the way in shelters and in the air or space as possible.
Warnings against a kinetic weapon that is purely ballistic, with no engine or heat signature of its own is very hard to detect. The only way to detect such a missile is through reflected light, or some other reflected electromagnetic wave like radar. The Shaitan kinetic weapon had been detected only because of the direction it came from and the fact that this particular direction that was scrutinized minutely.
If the missile had come from any other random direction, it would not have been detected until it hit the Earth. It would have been far more disastrous in terms of loss of human lives. Humans were determined to never let that happen to them. They would never be caught off guard. So they started the ‘Lighthouse project’.
In many ways the name ‘Lighthouse’ would be more apt than the humans thought; as they would realize to their grief much later. It was named ‘Lighthouse project’ by its planners due to the analogous imagery with an ancient maritime navigational lighthouse.
Since a kinetic missile could only be detected through reflected light, and space in general was a dark place, the only solution was to shine a light on the object by lighting up space. Earth already has such a light shining brightly in its neighborhood – the Sun. It was using the sun’s light that the Shaitan Kinetic Kill ship had been detected a few hours before impact.
However if one wanted to detect an incoming dark object light days in advance, when it was still in the Kuiper belt, sunl
ight wasn’t going to be enough. Enough sunlight was not available in the Kuiper belt to illuminate any object. The sun looked just like any other star, shining starlight, when seen from the Kuiper belt. So how does one outshine the Sun! Surely humans cannot be that audacious?!
The answer was not to outshine the sun, but use light intelligently. To detect an incoming object moving at a few percent the speed of light from that far, one does not need to have continuous image of the entire surroundings of the solar system. A time lapse image of all the sectors of space around the Earth was good enough, as long as the time interval was short enough.
This was what the Lighthouse project set out to do – to shine a light and monitor the entire neighborhood of the solar system, to provide an early warning system against Kinetic attacks on Earth.
The system was based on 6 integrated space stations. These were satellites of the Sun, not Earth. They orbited the Sun. Three of them orbited in the plane of the Sun, i.e. in the same plane as all the other planets orbited. The other 3 satellites orbited the Sun in a polar orbit, i.e. at a 90° angle to the plane of the Sun, going over the poles of the sun.
They resembled a cross between a space station and a space craft. This was because each of the space stations had independent thrusters, which ran on the same engine as a Nautilus class ship. The space station cost as much as a Nautilus class spaceship. The space station had a fusion reactor, needed for the tremendous power it pumped out into space. It was meant for long term unmanned operation, but it had quarters where 15 maintenance and research crew could stay for years if needed, as long as their food lasted.
The space station had two major pieces of equipment. One was the first knock-off copy of the Shaitan death ray laser. These were the absolutely first production system lasers made by copying the death ray laser recovered from the damaged Shaitan warship. Humans had laser systems for over a hundred years by then, the most powerful of them even came close to the output of Shaitan death ray lasers. However there had been no human laser system that was as efficient and compact as the Shaitan laser systems.
Retribution (Shaitan Wars) Page 15