Due to celestial orbital dynamics the two Shaitan worlds of Alpha Shaitan and Beta Shaitan, which they internally referred as home world 12 and home world 11 respectively, would be long distance away from the rest of the Shaitan worlds for millions of years before their orbits returned them close to the orbit of the next Shaitan world closest to them – Shaitan home world 8.
At the time when the Alpha Shaitan campaign was being planned, very little details of the Shaitan settled worlds or their migration history was known. Most had been gleaned from the ‘interrogation’ of Shaitan prisoners. By the end of the Alpha Shaitan campaign humans would know almost all details about the history, geography and culture of the Shaitans.
The decision to embark on the Alpha Shaitan campaign was taken as much because of the combined need of humanity for retribution as it was because humanity for the first time had the capability to attack a Shaitan world. Logic dictated that a retaliatory attack on a Shaitan world would act as a deterrent from the Shaitans from attacking Earth.
However that point had been made within the initial few years of the Alpha Shaitan campaign. The space capability of the Shaitans in this system had been completely decimated. It would take the Shaitans in this system decades to get back to any semblance of their original space capability. A large part of the Shaitan industrial base in the form of the moon AS-d had been captured. Jehannum itself was under siege, although the infrastructure on this moon had not been damaged too much.
It was time to reassess the Alpha Shaitan campaign, take a relook at the original objectives and make an objective assessment of where the humans wanted to go with their campaign. It was becoming amply clear that Jehannum itself would be a tough nut to crack for the humans. It would take decades and tens of billions of dollars at the least to continue this campaign and try to take the moon.
Even if the humans wanted to kill each and every Shaitan on Jehannum, which even the most fanatic Shaitan haters didn’t, it was not a simple exercise. One couldn’t just nuke the population into submission. The surface of the moon awash with radioactivity, meant almost nothing to the Shaitans who lived a kilometer below it.
There was no way to touch them other than sending boots not on the ground, but under it. It would almost certainly take tens of thousands of human lives, and billions of dollars of equipment transported a quarter of a light year from Earth. Was such a price worth it?
What was the endgame of the humans in this campaign? Did they want to conquer entire Jehannum and snuff out the last bit of resistance on the moon? Did they want to triumphantly march into the capital of the moon and force the Shaitans to sign a document of peace and submission? From whatever humans knew about the Shaitans, it was unlikely that such a document would ever be signed or honored.
It wasn’t as if the Shaitans were fanatics. It was just that such human concepts of surrender and peace treaties were completely alien to them. For them this was a simple struggle between two species. A fight to the death. And what would the humans be willing to do, and how far were they willing to go in their pursuit of permanently neutralizing the threat from Alpha Shaitan? Were they willing to commit mass genocide? Perhaps it should be called Shaitan-o-cide, but the point was this… were the humans willing to taint their hands with the pink blood of tens of millions of Shaitans that resided on Jehannum?
The USC in particular and humanity in general also had larger militarily strategic questions to be answered. Things that would affect not just the Alpha Shaitan campaign, but could provoke the next attack on Earth. How were the Shaitans on the rest of their worlds going to react? For that matter, why has Beta Shaitan not reacted yet?
Maybe Beta Shaitan has already reacted, and the humans would find about it soon enough. There was already a probe headed in that direction to gather intelligence. Whatever the probe might find out, the basic question remained, how will the other ten Shaitan worlds react?
Should USC expect Shaitan aid coming to the rescue of Alpha Shaitan from some unexpected direction, form a Shaitan world that humans know nothing about yet? Is there another Shaitan world close to Earth, from where Earth can expect an attack in order to relieve the pressure on Alpha Shaitan? These and many such questions were answered with the first ever memory bank that was captured intact by the Marines.
While the memory banks answered questions about the Shaitan history and geography, especially their migration geography, the decisions still had to be taken by humans based on those answers. Usually it is thought that politicians are the indecisive lot and it is the military which is decisive. Ironically in the case of the campaign of Alpha Shaitan, it was just the opposite.
Cynical historians would later observe that while USC was taking decisions about lives and hardships of its soldiers, politicians were taking decisions on the basis of a balance sheet. In the end, the decision to continue the campaign of Alpha Shaitan was pushed by the politicians on the basis of one of the most powerful human forces – greed. The opportunities for individual nations and large corporation to lay a hand on the immense natural wealth of the Alpha Shaitans was just too juicy to pass over, especially when the only price to be paid was a few tens of billions of dollars and the lives of a few tens of thousands of soldiers.
The captured memory bank came from a sector, which was administered by a seer named ‘Taste of Fraternity’. Humans had learnt that seers were the highest designation in Shaitan society, and would be in a position of responsibility. This seer was possibly the equivalent of a governor of the sector that the humans had captured. Initially the humans were very disappointed with the contents of the memory bank.
It seems that seer Taste of Fraternity’s specialization was history and culture. There was almost no technology or science stored in the memory banks. The memory banks were the repository Shaitan history, culture and their way of life. Human historians would start appreciating the importance of the memory banks soon enough, for it provided a window into the Shaitan thinking process and how they are likely to behave in various situations.
The first thing that amazed and shocked the humans was how old the Shaitans as a species were. It was always suspected that the Shaitans were very old as a species. After the discovery of the Ka-let base on Mars and deciphering the logs of the Ka-let, humans knew that the Shaitans were older than 80 thousand years, since that was when the Shaitans had made the Ka-let extinct.
Fraternity’s memory banks had helpfully included a detailed record of the Shaitan time keeping system, a ‘cycle’, as humans had guessed was the time it took for the Shaitan world to orbit its gas giant. Where the humans had been mistaken was that it was not the time it took for Jehannum to orbit around Alpha Shaitan. It was the time it took their ‘origin world’ to orbit its own gas giant. Curiously the Shaitans never referred to their ‘origin world’ as World 1 ever in all of Fraternity’s document, although the next world discovered and settled was called World 2, just as Jehannum was called World 12.
The first records in Fraternity’s book on the history of the Shaitans starts in their home world with a time marker of about 6.7 billion cycles, which translates into roughly about 66 million years!
The records start with the story of the primitive Shaitans, very much akin to human history during the Stone Age. Just as human history of this period is thin on details, so is the Shaitan history. It was understandable, since most of this part of any species’ history is not recorded formally, and only inferred later by archeologists and historians.
As had been suspected, the Shaitans evolved on a moon very similar to Jehannum. In fact Jehannum was a valued colony of the Shaitans because of its close similarity to their origin world. It was only one of two colonies that the Shaitans had searched, found and liked before settling. The rest of the colonies were all a result of conquest of other species.
Fraternity’s notes did not have details of Shaitan evolution, but it did hint at the fact that Shaitans had descended from a species that had originally been an aquatic species. The records d
escribed the habitat of their origin world during the Shaitan Stone Age.
The Shaitan went through a similar development process as human, going through tools made out of stones and flint. There was some description of the flora and fauna of the origin world, which gave a partial answer to why the Shaitans eat the gooey substance that they do, and why they never developed teeth for eating.
The largest flora on their origin world was the size of moss and lichens, but most of the edible flora was the equivalent of free floating planktons. In a case of convergent evolution, the Shaitans who were primarily vegetarians, had used the same feeding strategy as the Basking Shark. They had short circuited the food chain by going straight to the source of production of energy, the smallest flora on their world, which was the equivalent of the phytoplankton on Earth.
Then the Shaitans learnt farming by cultivating the planktons in shallow pools, from which they would feed directly – a style of eating that they follow till this day. Slowly they learnt how to dry up the planktons and store them in dry powder, to be eaten by simply mixing with water at a later time. As their agrarian economy progressed, and they developed surplus and individual Shaitans had leisure time to tinker and develop new ideas and inventions.
Shaitan civilization progresses surprisingly along similar lines as humans, although specific details were different, largely owing to two facts. One was the difference in anatomy and the environment in which they lived, which meant that there were things which were discovered in a different order compared to humans. For example, extensive use of the wheel happened only after their industrial phase, because wheels were not used in transportation on their origin world, where small streams were a much more efficient method of transport.
The second factor was equally significant. Shaitans didn’t have organized wars within themselves. In fact Shaitans didn’t organize themselves as clans, tribes or other groups of origin at all, so the fight between two groups of Shaitans was inconceivable. The lack of internal war made a significant difference in the way Shaitan society and technology evolved.
In a way, the lack of internal war was also related to Shaitan biology. Shaitans reproduce asexually. In many ways the Shaitan reproduction system can be thought of as similar to that of a toad, or an octopus, whom they resemble superficially, minus the copulation. Shaitans spawn hundreds of eggs a few times during their lifetime.
The savage Shaitan used to lay the eggs in a shallow warm pool or stream, in a further proof of their aquatic origin. They would generally stay near the clutch of eggs to protect them against predators. Most of the eggs would still be eaten, or would be swept away by currents.
The remaining eggs would hatch, but the juveniles would still stay for a long period of time in those shallow pools as they grew to a minimum size before emerging on land. During this time of weaning, a lot of the hatchlings would further die of drowning or be eaten by predators. In the end, just enough Shaitans would survive till adulthood to keep the population in balance.
The Shaitans didn’t have to fight over mates, or mating rights. The Shaitans didn’t have identifiable clans. Their single parent would abandon them, the moment the eggs hatched, and Shaitans would only rejoin society after they emerge onto land and could walk back to the Shaitan nests. Often the hatched younglings would end up in a nest where its parent may not be nesting, so the Shaitans had no family bonds to care or fight for.
In the ensuing millions of years of Shaitan civilization, the process of reproduction had been regimented and strictly controlled, such that for most Shaitans it had always been that way. Shaitans laid their eggs into special tanks, when they got the biological urge. The tanks stored the eggs in special solution, which kept them unhatched but viable for a long time.
Seers and computer algorithms would decide additional population that could be accommodated in nests, and accordingly release a specified number of eggs chosen randomly into growing tanks. The entire process of growth would happen in those growing tanks, where nutrition of the hatchling was controlled exactingly, such that healthy Shaitans would emerge. These younglings would have no idea about their parents, and could end up being hatched on the other side of the world.
Primitive Shaitan individuals did fight for resources occasionally, usually for the choice of nests. They did know how to use those deadly claws, but the claws had evolved primarily for defense against other predators. Once the Shaitans became civilized and had surplus food, and could construct elaborate nests, there was almost no reason for individual Shaitans to fight.
Thus the postindustrial Shaitan civilization had evolved without a conception of swords, guns, battle tanks or missiles. The Shaitans had knowledge of explosives from a scientific standpoint, but had never needed to use them as weapons. This fact sealed their fate for what was to come next in the story of Shaitan civilization. The next episode of Shaitan civilization was to define what the Shaitans are today, and all that they believe in.
Humans had spent a few hundred thousand years in Stone Age, and then taken roughly ten thousand years to reach the postindustrial stage. The records of Fraternity did not mention how long the Shaitans spent in Stone Age, but it took the Shaitans over hundred thousand years to reach postindustrial age compared to just ten thousand for humans. Clearly humans have developed much more rapidly for whatever reason.
Then came the epoch, which in Shaitan history is called the time of ‘Great Sorrow’. It was a time of existential threat to the Shaitan civilization, and the Shaitans nearly went extinct during this time.
Shaitans evolved in an amazing gas giant system. It had not one, but two moons which were not just suitable for life, but had actually and independently evolved life. Each of these moons had not just independently evolved life, but had evolved intelligent life! Unfortunately for the Shaitans, in the race to progress as an intelligent race, Shaitans had lost the race by a whisker.
The records of Fraternity are vague in the description of the species from the other moon in their system of origin, but the name given to them is significant – Ka! In fact most of the description of the race is shrouded in metaphors and metaphysical jargons in the records. Reading the description of the other race in the records of Fraternity, one felt as if the writer is deliberately being vague about it, almost like a religious text being vague about the description of the physical form of God.
What could be inferred from the records was that this species that the Shaitans called Ka were technologically only slightly superior to the Shaitans. The main advantage that Ka held as a species over the Shaitans were that Ka were space faring and had developed reasonably effective weapons, while Shaitans were still stuck on the surface and underground their own moon, and only had their claws to fight with.
At the risk of oversimplification, one could compare the Shaitans at being in the stage where human had been in the early 1900s minus their weapons compared to the Ka who were perhaps somewhere in the human technological scale of early 2000s along with their weapons. It was just a hundred year difference for humans, but perhaps a thousand or more years’ difference for the Shaitans, given the rate at which they had progressed.
The Ka had been landing on the moon of the Shaitans as an exploratory force for a few decades. It was not clear whether they came initially for scientific curiosity and were friendly with the Shaitans or not. The text makes no specific mention of this fact. What the text implies is that the Shaitans gave the Ka an instinctive hostile response, probably out of instinctive xenophobic paranoia programmed into any being that has evolved by Darwin’s principles of struggle for survival.
While the text of Fraternity characterized those first few landings by Ka as heroic defense by the Shaitans of to beat back the enemy, if one read between the lines it became clear how those first interactions must have gone. Whether the Ka were initially hostile or friendly one could not say.
However after the first few exploratory landings were attacked and as the text itself mentions, the Ka crew slaughtered, the
Ka species must have made up its mind about the Shaitans. The Ka would have looked at the Shaitans as a backward, savage and brutal species with whom there could be no peace.
For the Ka to come to the moon of the Shaitans would have been technologically as challenging as for the humans to go to Earth’s moon. The first few expeditions of the Ka to the Shaitan moon must have been similar in scale to the first human landings on the moon in the 1960s and 1970s – very small and fragile, which any indigenous species could attack and slaughter with their primitive weapons.
Within a few decades they had developed large enough ships to come the Shaitan Moon in large enough number with enough guns to be able to defend themselves. Fraternity’s own account suggests that the first such expedition numbered no more than eight of eights, which is an ancient Shaitan way of saying 64. This time the Ka came with weapons and text suggests built a nest on the Shaitan moon, slaughtering countless Shaitans who tried to prevent it.
The Ka had initially come to the Shaitan moon for mining one prize element – Uranium. It was an element, which the Shaitans knew about, since it was abundant on their world, and considered mildly harmful to health. Since the Shaitans had not yet discovered nuclear energy, and used to run primarily on geothermal energy, Uranium to the Shaitans was useless.
While mining the Shaitan moon for its resources, over the decades the Ka realized that the Shaitan moon held a far more precious resource – the Shaitans themselves, as slaves. Over the years, as the Ka would defend their fortified mine territory against the resisting Shaitans, some had been captured. Initially the Ka would have experimented on them and found them completely wild and uncontrollable.
Over a period of time, somehow the Ka managed to find a way to tame and control the Shaitans they captured. Fraternity’s text is not very clear how the Ka managed to do that. It talks about the process in a lot of metaphysical and religious mumbo jumbo. Clearly this topic was painful to the Shaitans.
Retribution (Shaitan Wars) Page 37