Retribution (Shaitan Wars)

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Retribution (Shaitan Wars) Page 25

by Sudipto Majumdar


  “4th company be advised, we are a ‘go’. Repeat, we jump in 6 minutes. The countdown is now active. We are the tip of the spear, Marines. We drive this point into the flesh of Shaitans. Today is that day we were all waiting for, today we payback the Shaitans. Today we kill them with our own hands. Today we avenge our people.” There was a chillingly cold and hard tone in her voice.

  Her steel gray and otherwise beautiful eyes had a deep burning fire inside them, which scared even this hardened company of Marines. The new model of armored power suits they were wearing, enabled the hundred odd marines of the 4th company to have a clear view of their LT’s face. It was hard as stone, which was saying something, given how good looking that face otherwise was.

  At 5 and a half feet, the LT was not particularly tall, or big. She was dwarfed by the primarily African Marines who were twice her size in bulk. Yet this Caucasian woman radiated an aura of intensity and hatred towards the enemy, which scared the shit out of every Marine under her command in the company. She may not have been physically as strong as any of her marines, but in the age of powered suits, it was not that much of a disadvantage.

  The PLSS-1 was the latest iteration of USC-GCF standard issue armored suit for general purpose use. The jump they would be making would not involve landing into a moon with atmosphere, so no special purpose suit or attachment was required. The PLSS-1 (Powered Life Support System) was the first of its kind in having some amount of powered assistance for the marines.

  When switched on, the marines could divert power to servo assisted controllers on the legs, arms, gloves, torso and many other strategically places spots on the suit. This enabled the Marines to add to their own strength when running or gripping if required. Contrary to expectation however, the powered suit did not impart superhuman strength to the Marines.

  The Marines could use power assist to run with lesser effort and hence for longer than would normally be possible, but it did not enable them to run much faster than they could have done naturally. Even if the suit had enough power and machinery to make a Marine run faster than normal, the human body would have suffered damage and tear of ligaments and muscles if the hip joints were forced to move faster than is normal by human standards.

  Similarly the power assist enabled stronger grips and larger lifting capacity in the arms of the marines, but only about twice of what they could do with their own strength. Any more pressure on the grip might burst capillaries inside the human hand. More load might strain the back muscles or damage the human skeleton. The PLSS-1 by design did act as a basic exoskeleton, which took up some of the load, but the need to keep the joints flexible meant that it could not be made to bear too much weight.

  The biggest reason for keeping the powered assistance on the suit low was power consumption. Human battery technology had improved since the last time they had fought the Shaitans. PLSS-1 was rated to work for 70 hours on a charge, compared to only 24 hours for the suits used in the last Shaitan battles. However powered assistance depleted the batteries very fast, so they were normally turned off, to be used only in case of emergency.

  The biggest improvement as far as the marines were concerned however had happened in the armor of the suits. The LT could not even imagine how Gen. Ed ‘Nutcase’ Bassinger and his Marines fought the Shaitans on Mars with suits which had no armor to speak of. Almost any hit on those suits was a death sentence. The next generations of human armored suits had the advantage of being aware of the weapons of the Shaitans, which the prior generation suit makers did not know.

  The PLSS-1 had hardened overlapping armored plates for protection against projectile weapons. It added to the weight of the suits because despite the liberal use of carbon materials and Kevlar, metals could not be avoided altogether. There were titanium meshes, and carbon steel fibers that were woven into the suits. That was one of the reasons that powered assistance was required for the marines to move around in normal gravity places like Earth or even Mars. On their target moon AS-d however, which was estimated to have less than 20% of Earth gravity, the marines would be able to move around unassisted.

  The protection the marines were most thankful about however was the plasma dissipater. It was the Shaitan pulse plasma gun that scared the Marines more than anything, although they were in reality less fatal than the Shaitan bullets to the human body. Part of the reason was psychological. The pulse plasma wound looked ghastly and large, burning a large part of the body and exposing flesh, tissues and even organs.

  The other reason was that the Shaitans wielded their pulse plasma weapons a lot more accurately than their guns. After the last battle, when the humans studied the captured Shaitan weapons, they realized why. The small plasma nozzle was mounted on the top of the carapace of the Shaitan. The nozzle was servo controlled and targeted by the Shaitan suit computer.

  All the Shaitan had to do was send a neurochemical signal to the suit to aim at a particular target and the suit did the rest. The Shaitan anatomy however was not as suitable for carrying a gun as the human anatomy was. The barrel of their projectile weapon was strapped to one of their limbs. To prevent the barrel from impeding mobility, the barrel was kept short, which in itself reduced accuracy.

  The bigger problem for the Shaitans was that they could not take advantage of their omnidirectional sight with a gun. It was strapped to one of their limbs, so they had to turn that limb in the direction they had to fire. The gun obviously could not be computer targeted. The Shaitan had to lift its arm and manually aim in the direction and fire, and the Shaitans were lousy marksmen. However at close range, where they were unlikely to miss, the large caliber bullets meted out sure death, literally blowing out the guts of a human.

  The PLSS-1 hard armor could take a glancing blow from a bullet at short range or a more direct shot at a longer range. However it could not protect against a Shaitan bullet in all circumstances. That would require armor as thick as an armored personnel carrier.

  The PLSS-1 plasma dissipater could protect a marine against Shaitan pulse plasma fired from almost any distance, since the damage was caused by heat rather than speed of the pulse. However closer shots caused more damage to the armor. This was because the plasma pulse degraded with time, especially through atmosphere.

  The plasma dissipater was a layered affair pasted on top of the hard armor. The bottom layer was a heavy insulator, while the top layer was made out of Graphene, which has excellent heat conductive properties. Both the layers had one common property. When heated beyond a certain point, they would puff off the surface as a gas instead of running off as a liquid.

  When a milder plasma fired from afar hit the surface of the dissipater, the conductive layer immediately started spreading the heat across the entire surface of the suit, trying to even out the tremendous heat of the plasma. At the same time the insulating layer below prevented the heat from reaching deeper beyond itself. Within a few seconds the heat was dissipated across the entire surface area of the suit, with no damage to the armor or the marine inside.

  If the plasma was hotter and fired from close range however, the external conductive layer could not even out the temperature fast enough to prevent itself and the insulating layer underneath from overheating. In that case both the layers would turn into smoke and puff out, taking some of the heat along with it. In such a case, it may not be able to prevent some damage to the hard armor layer underneath and in the worst case might even breach the suit.

  However the amount of damage would be far less, and in most cases the marine inside would be able to survive. The hit portion of the plasma dissipater armor however was now permanently damaged and could not take another hit in the same area. A Marine thus could only take a limited number of plasma hits on their armor before they have to refurbish their suit.

  The Marines went about the business of doing a check on their suit diagnostics, as had been drilled into them over countless practice jumps. AS-d was an airless moon, so it wouldn’t have been a particularly difficult jump otherwise, bu
t for the speed at which they were being forced to jump. It was a tradeoff between being shot and going splat on the surface of the moon.

  Sarah went about the task of running her own suit diagnostics one last time. She could do it much faster than most of the marines under her command. She was a proper tech-head, unlike most of the marines in the company who were mini tech-heads. No one could accuse anyone in the Tyagi Legion of lacking commitment, after all every one of them had committed most of their adult life to this one single mission.

  Few in the Legion were however as committed to the business of killing Shaitans as Sarah was. She had committed to this cause her entire life from the age of eight. There were no half measures for her when it came to fighting Shaitans. She had gotten the neural interface implant inserted in her skull the day she was eligible for it on joining the USC. She didn’t care about personal cost or inconveniences, as long as it helped her kill Shaitans.

  It took Sarah just a second to run through her suit diagnostics. Then she decided to check on the readiness status of the rest of the company. To her dismay, there were still a few laggards who had not gone through their diagnostics. The mini tech-heads were painfully slow, and patience was not one of her virtues. She decided to take their platoon commanders to task. Within fractions of a second, she had set up a conference and said in an impatient voice.

  “Sgt. Nwosu, Sgt. Jalloh, what the fuck is going on with your Marines? Why the hell have they not finished their diagnostics? I don’t even have to throw them out of the air lock, they are going to jump out of it, to their deaths in a few minutes if they keep up this pace. I want your platoons ready NOW!” She screamed in her best drill sergeant voice.

  “Aye LT.” Both the big marines shouted in unison. The big Marine Sergeants feared their LT’s discipline more than any Shaitan they might face.

  All USC personnel who did not have a full neural interface implant, were required to get spinal control interface attached to their spine when on active duty. War machines’ controls were now too elaborate to be operated by just human hands, especially when split second response times were required. In many cases, equipment needed to be programmed on the fly, something that is impossible to do in the middle of a battle with your fingers and thumb.

  While full neural interface implant solved that problem, most humans were reluctant to have an invasive surgery which inserted bioelectronics into the base of the skull. While medical complications due to implant insertions were rare and there had been just two fatalities amongst the millions of implants, there was still a visceral fear amongst most humans of getting something inserted into their skull.

  The halfway compromise solution was to have spinal control interface attached to the spine. Lay persons called such devices and their users, mini tech-heads. This was however a misnomer, for spinal control interface was not a smaller version of the full-fledged neural interface. It was very different in many ways.

  The neural interface was a high bandwidth two way interface which could feed the brain with information directly. Images, sound and even olfactory and tactile information could be fed directly to the brain from machines. At the same time the brain could send back signals to the machines directly to control them.

  The spinal control interface was a one way low bandwidth interface. It could not feed information directly to the brain. You still needed to see your screens and hear the computer speak alerts the old fashioned way. The only feedback this interface could give was a dumb electrical signal which felt so weird in the lower back and the legs that most marines set it only for emergency alert.

  The spinal control interface could however be used to send signals directly to the computer. The control signals sent were fairly simplistic which could select options on menu or drive a pointing device or a virtual keyboard on the screen. With some practice, the user could work very fast at selecting those menus, just by thinking.

  It was nowhere the speed of a tech-head, but it was far faster than what any human could do with physical controls of a computer. The big plus point of the spinal interface was that it had no side effects of prolonged use like the tech-heads had pumping images into their head. There were no headaches or disorientation, unlike the tech-heads who usually needed a few seconds of recovery time after use of their implants.

  The neural interface technology had also improved in the last few decades, and no longer was as disorienting and gave fewer headaches compared to the first generation of implants, but those side effects had not been completely eliminated.

  The biggest attraction of the spinal interface compared to the neural interface implant however, which made it widely acceptable amongst humans was that it was not an implant into the body, especially not into their skull. It was a relatively less invasive procedure, although still squeamish for a lot of people.

  A needle was inserted into the spinal cord between the vertebrae of the spine, and a connection established with a very small device usually attached to the skin on the lower back. It could be inserted fairly easily by a local surgeon using local anesthetics, and removed just as easily if required.

  This spinal control interface was what majority of humanity and USC personnel used, which made them painfully slow as far as Sarah was concerned. She bristled at their slowness and their lack of commitment in going through a neural interface implant procedure. The platoon commanders came back fast enough to report back to Sarah. “All platoons are 100% and ready LT.”

  Sarah reported up her chain of command to her immediate superior, Capt. Song. “All platoons ready sir.” Capt. Kim Song acknowledged and let the operations chief know that the Marines were ready. The ‘Chief’ as the deck operations chief was known, gave a green signal to the operations, and six large portals started opening up on the sides of the Avenger.

  The principles of a marine jump operations had not changed in the last two decades since Nutcase and his marines had made the legendary jump from the Resolute on Mars. The Avenger was a far larger ship however and it had six portals, corresponding to the 6 shuttles that it carried. The shuttles had been moved and were on standby, floating close by.

  The shuttles had been moved not just to free up the portals for a jump, they were to remain on standby for rescue or any other unforeseen tasks. This was going to be the first human jump assault on Shaitan territory, where the enemy was fully aware and probably ready to defend. If fact this was the first human attempt to take Shaitan territory period. There were bound to be unforeseen gotchas.

  Capt. Brogan gave his customary address over the com to the Marines. “Marines of the 4th Company, I take this opportunity to not just wish you luck, but also to remind you that your objective is to make a beachhead for the shuttles to land safely. Any Shaitan you kill below is a bonus, but that is not your objective on the mission. Sanitize the LZ, kill the big guns, keep your heads low and stay alive. You will get more opportunities to kill Shaitans than you can handle, once the shuttles land.

  We have killed any transport ship or research space craft plying between the moons that we could lay our eyes on, ever since coming into the system in the last 2 weeks, but that does not mean we got each and every one of them. There is also likely to be surface to space missiles down below. Keeping these in mind, we will be giving ourselves some room high above and supporting you from very far. Our missiles and KK rounds will take a frustratingly long time to reach their target, which means you will have to be just that extra cautious.

  Lastly, there is no way for us to know if and how many shuttles or other surface air assault equipment lie hidden below. We had observed a lot of transportation activity between Jehannum and AS-d, as we were entering the Alpha Shaitan system while coming in from the Watering hole, so we assume that this place may have been reinforced. Other than troops, shuttles and other air assault equipment may also have been left behind on the surface.

  You have the wisest commander in the battalion in the form of Capt. Song, and I need not tell you anything about your LT, who would s
urely have told you that you are the sharp end of the spear, which you are and that means you will face more challenges than anyone else. Trust your excellent leadership and you will come through. Good luck Marines.”

  Sarah smiled at the reference made to her, by the only man who had a place in her heart… other than her foster father. There was place for no more men in her life. If she had been standing in front of the captain in private, she would have punched him in the ribs, and he would have rolled over in mock pain and mock hurt. The two of them had been playing that game for a long time now.

  As the countdown reached zero, a hundred marines of the 4th company, 7th brigade of USC-GCF pushed out of the 6 portals of the Avenger. Immediately on exit, their suit retro rockets oriented the marines in the right direction and their backpack strap on rockets went into full burn to slow them down.

  The marines were facing away from their destination AS-d, to let their strap on backpack rockets burn for several minutes to slow them down enough before they were discarded and the suits own retro rockets took over the delicate job of placing the marines in the right direction and speed for the landing.

  This landing should ideally have been done by shuttles at this speed, but this was the vanguard force making its first assault on the surface. There was no knowing what kind of surface to air defense mechanism the Shaitans may have on the ground. Shuttles were very vulnerable to such fire from the surface. The shuttles didn’t have heavy armor or that kind of speed to evade ground to air fire.

  This far from home, the humans could not afford to endanger any of their assets. There would be no replenishment coming their way. Individual marines were much smaller and harder to hit targets with very little metal on them for electronic targeting. Sarah thought with a hint of bitterness that Marines were more dispensable than the shuttles. There were over five hundred marines on every ship and only six shuttles.

  She dismissed the thought and the bitterness. She knew the logic as well as any Marine. This is what she had signed up for. This is what she had been burning for her entire life – revenge. She did not care if she was cannon fodder, as long as she got to kill one Shaitan with her bare hands before she died.

 

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