“Yeah. Even the Sarge didn’t know about it till it was announced a week back. The first supply drone arrived 3 weeks ago, called HMS Barnaby.” Michael said. “Notice that it is not USC, but HMS. It is not a USC ships, but owned by the British. It is part of some experimental shit the US and EU have been doing for a few years. They are now churning out ships from the Moon base, and the space elevator out there is fully functional.
We are going to see a lot more ships and people heading towards Alpha Shaitan very soon. Sarge said that we have increased out ship production capacity more than 5 times after the commissioning of the two space elevators on the Moon. This experimental ship HMS Barnaby is not a giant ship like we were told would be churned out by those Moon bases, although Sarge says that those will be coming soon. This one is a very small ship.
It is an unmanned drone weighing just 100 tons, with very little fuel in its tanks. Since this one was experimental, the HMS Barnaby was loaded with only a few hundred tons of supplies, but it can carry a lot more. They have built a long 5 Km rail next to the Moon Elevator. It is a long triangular thingy… and they put this drone inside that.
They pump power to the rail from the nuclear stations below on the Moon base and shoot the drone out of the rail at some serious speeds. The drone uses up the little bit of fuel that it carries to build up some additional speed. From there on all the fuel comes from the harvester. Since the drones are light but the harvester is almost as big as our ships, they can travel a lot faster than our ships.
Sarge says that this one made it here to Jehannum in five and a half years. They are making improvements to the design, so that drones will be able to make it here in less than five years soon. Each of them can get in almost as much supply as an Avenger class ship ay less than a tenth of the cost and do it faster. Sarge says that within a few years we will have a mule train running between here and Earth bringing supplies every month or so.
When we win the war, and get our entitlements, we can produce our goods and send it to Earth on the Mule trains, and make some serious money man. That is what the Sarge thinks. I can already see the dollars piling up man!” Michael was very animated and excited at the prospects of making money and one could almost see the dollar sign in his eyes.
“And exactly where are you going to spend that money you stupid grunt?! They don’t even have a Wild West style bar out here for you to waste your money on drinks, gambling and women.” Hua Hin asked Michael laughing.
“Hey! The Wild West didn’t have those bars either. When stupid grunts like us started making serious money, then the bar keepers, gamblers and hookers followed. Why should it be any different now? All we have to do is to win the damn war.” Michael retorted.
“Talking about women, I had those dreams about those Go-Go bars in Bangkok all throughout…” Yusuf saw the smile on his buddies’ face and said. “Yeah go ahead and make fun of ‘poor virgin Yusuf’. I don’t care about it any longer. This time though the dreams turned to nightmares. The women turned to Shaitans, but I think I now understand why I keep having those dreams and the nightmares.”
“Pray enlighten us, Oh wise one.” Hoja mocked his friend.
“All my life, all I had wanted was to run away. Run away from my home and from the oppressive Royals who persecuted my people. I joined the program and was glad to be going away from Earth forever. I had nothing to look forward to in a life on Earth. You remember how our drill sergeants at boot camp had told us that the 6 months on Earth was not training time, but wash out time. How the only purpose of that time was to get rid of most of us.
All through those 6 months of hell and torture I had kept reminding myself about why I was there at the boot camp in the first place. How this hellish torture at the boot camp was nothing compared to what I could look forward to in my life back in Saudi Arabia. That had kept me determined not to wash out of the boot camp, and I didn’t
Yeah I was sex crazed, but that moment in Bangkok, was the first time I could look forwards to something that the Earth offered which I cared for. It was the first reason I had found to want to stay back. It was the first time I wished I had washed out at boot camp. I guess that stayed in my mind.” Yusuf said and then there was contemplative silence, as each of the men recollected their own miserable lives on Earth.
“So you think they will keep me in the Marines?” Yusuf asked softly.
“Keep you? Are you crazy man? The Sarge is asking for volunteers to get their arms crushed so that he can have marines with superhuman strength! Just kidding… but really… you are going to be the star of the show when you return. You can be sure that you are going to hear a lot of ‘Pvt. Bin Talash, could you please lift that?’
Mark my words Yusuf, you may be one of the first, but you are definitely not the last of humans who would soon possess various superhuman capabilities. What did the doctor say? Damn… he used a lot of big words which I can’t say. Here… I recorded it into my tech-head memory because I was so impressed with his shit. Listen to it yourself.” Michael transferred the data to the screen in front of Yusuf and they heard the clip.
“We are entering a new phase of human evolution, where we human beings will be able to transcend the limitations set by our body. We made a start a few decades ago with the neural interface, but with these re-generation techniques now becoming practical for almost every human being, the day is not far when any human who so chooses can have superhuman ability.
We will go faster and further into the unknown pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and possibility. We may evolve our species from Homo Sapiens to a new species Homo Supremis.”
Chapter 24
The Marathon
Jehannum, Alpha Shaitan System
September, 2112
When all would be said and done, and the history of the Alpha Shaitan campaign would be written by later historians who could take a more objective view, one of the more interesting chapters written would be about a battle that simply came to be known as ‘The Marathon’. Although it was an important battle, that helped speed up the human conquest of Jehannum, it was not one of the most critical ones.
The battle was often quoted in military colleges, and glorified by story tellers because it demonstrated something about the human character. It demonstrated our grit and determination. It demonstrated how a determined mind could overcome physical odds and limitations. It was a dream story for a drama or a soap opera because it was a story with a ‘heart’.
The story began a year after the first ‘Settler Marines’ started arriving. Emboldened by the swelling of their ranks and the regular mule train supplies, the brass planned on a major offensive. The strategic objective of the plan was to cut off a large section of the Shaitans from the rest of the planet. The cut off section would be too large to be assaulted frontally, but it could be slowly starved off resources and conquered.
If the Shaitans tried to break the blockade to the cut off section, then they would be forced to fight either at a pinch point underground that was flooded with water, which could be relatively easily defended by the humans, because at the pinch point, the greater numbers of the Shaitans counted for nothing. Else the Shaitans would be forced to fight on the surface, where humans held tactical superiority.
Like every advanced civilizations, the Shaitans had molded their home world according to their convenience. This included management of resources, and primary amongst them was water, which was relatively scarce on Jehannum compared to Earth and hence had to be managed more assiduously. Like humans, the Shaitans had built dams, canals, reservoirs and sluice gates. The only difference was that all this was below the surface of Jehannum.
One of the larger reservoirs of water managed by the Shaitans was called Lake Emmanuel. The cartographers had been busy the last decade. They had made detailed map of almost the entire surface and below the surface of Jehannum by direct survey, wherever they had access or through seismographic means where they could not go underground. Like all reservoirs this lake
supplied a wide swathe of underground land with water through a complex network of canals.
Unlike lakes on Earth, where the supply of water is by rain precipitation, this lake got all its water from boiling geysers. The Jehannum hydrosphere cycle was a bit different from that of Earth. Just like Earth the same pool of water was cycled over and over again using energy. Unlike Earth, where the Energy came from the Sun, the energy used to cycle the water on Jehannum was geothermal energy.
Liquid water flowing underground, where the temperature was above freezing, would eventually drain lower and lower driven by gravity, into the lower part of the Crust of Jehannum. This water would eventually reach the interface between the Crust and the Mantle of the planet and get superheated, just like they do on Earth with the sea water seeping between Tectonic plates.
Just as in the case of Earth, where the water is forced back as superheated steam from volcanoes and geysers, the water in Jehannum is forced back up from superheated geysers, where it accumulates either on the surface as ice, or in depressions underground as lakes and ponds. This completes the cycle and the water starts flowing down again assisted by gravity.
Lake Emmanuel was such a reservoir of water almost a hundred square kilometers in area and at places possibly as deep as a kilometer. It was one of the great lakes of Jehannum. No human had set sight on the lake, but it must be an amazing sight if someone could have lit up the lake, for that vast reservoir of water was almost a kilometer below the surface.
The surface of the water of the lake was nearly a hundred meters below the roof of an unimaginably large cavern which was Lake Emmanuel. It must have been a natural reservoir at some time, but the Shaitans had built dams to bolster the holding capacity of the lake, and built sluice gates at various points to release water to canals radiating in all directions.
Lake Emmanuel was also the Achilles heel for a sector of Jehannum named New Babylon. This sector of Shaitan settlement of over 20 thousand square kilometers was almost exclusively supplied by the canal system radiating from Lake Emmanuel. Only a small amount of water trickled down from the ice on the surface. The geology and town planning of New Babylon was such that, not only did canals crisscross this Shaitan settlement, but large canals surrounded entire New Babylon.
If those canals were to be flooded uncontrollably, then this sector would be totally cut off from rest of the underground settlements of Jehannum. The only way to reach New Babylon would be through two large flooded underground canals which would be completely filled with water and submerged like an underground water pipe. Otherwise New Babylon would have to be reached from the surface.
A large section of New Babylon itself would get flooded, but the Shaitans were competent civil engineers. They had flood control gates at regular intervals along the canal, so most of the settlement would be saved. Unfortunately for the Shaitans of New Babylon, the very flood control gates would also become their prison gates.
Hence the military planners had figured out that if certain sections of the dam and certain sluice gates could be blown up, they would be able to flood and isolate not just New Babylon, but cause major water supply disruption to a large area around Lake Emmanuel, further degrading the morale and defense capability of the Shaitans. That was the theory.
However executing it was easier said than done. There was no access to Lake Emmanuel from the surface or anywhere close to it. The rock over the lake was hard granite mostly, so drilling a kilometer deep hole was out of the question, especially when Shaitans listen for drilling all the time and respond to thwart such attempts.
The closest feasible access to Lake Emmanuel was from a point on one of the two main canals supplying water to New Babylon. The geology of this particular point was such that the surface was covered with brittle igneous rocks at this place, which had cracked and sunken due to the continuous stress that the surface of Jehannum experienced. This meant that one could blow a hole just about 10-15 meters deep at this point and reach the canal.
The problem was that this point was over a hundred kilometers from Lake Emmanuel and the dam. There was no way any vehicle could ply the canal, so Marines would have to leg it all the way, most probably under hostile fire. The bigger tactical problem of approaching from this point of breach was the terrifying possibility of the Shaitans opening up the sluice gates and flooding the canal to drown and prevent the Marines from reaching the dam.
The planning for the operation unimaginatively called the ‘Dam Buster’ at that point, was not as thorough as it should have been. An important historical side note of the operation often missed by storytellers romanticizing the ‘Marathon’ was that many senior officers received official admonishment which went into their service records, for the lack of planning. The only reason no one got court martialed was because it became a legendary operation thanks to the blood, sweat and tears of ordinary Marines fighting on the ground, who displayed not just extraordinary valor, courage and sacrifice, but a steely determination, never losing heart while facing impossible odds.
Operation ‘Dam Buster’ was planned almost entirely to depend on stealth for the protection of the Marines. There was hardly any backup plan made to extricate the Marines safely in case of trouble. That was the root of the problem, which got the Marines into trouble in the first place.
The first mistake done by the planners was in thinking that if the 10 meter ingress hole was dug by hand instead of power tools, they would be able to avoid detection from Shaitan listening equipment. They were not just wrong, for the Shaitan equipment was for more sensitive than human ones, but it was worse than that. Digging by hand took so much time, that it gave the Shaitans a long time to plan and prepare an ambush.
The only thing that the planners got right was their choice of the Marines for the mission. 6th company of the 17th regiment was chosen for a specific reason. The 17th regiment was the newest of the USC-GCF regiment raised after the spurt in demand for a branch of the USC service, which had started initially as an afterthought.
When the USC had been formed nearly half a century ago, Ground Combat Forces (GCF) or popularly known as space Marines, were thought to have a small ancillary role whenever USC landed on some rock or in the rare cases of boarding. USC had been designed primarily as Space Navy. At that time no one had thought that 50 years later USC would be fighting a decade long ground war on an alien moon, trying to defeat an entire world.
That is what the campaign of Alpha Shaitan had come down to now, and the USC-GCF was ramping up faster than USC regulars meant for space combat. The number of personnel in USC-GCF now far outstripped the number of regular Space Navy personnel. One of the latest addition to this burgeoning numbers of USC-GCF was the 17th regiment. It was made exclusively out of Settler Marines. Young people who had joined the fight with the promise of making a better life for themselves.
In keeping with the general profile of the Settler Marines, almost 40% of all the Marines in the 17th regiment were from Africa. In keeping with the human military tradition, the regiments, companies and platoons were organized around the place of origin the Marines, which gave the fighting units better cohesion. The exception to this rule were specialized or elite units, where Marines were handpicked from any region of the world for their specific talents.
The 6th company of the 17th regiment was composed almost entirely of Kenyan men and women. The few who were not Kenyans were from neighboring Ethiopia. A large percentage of the 6th company came from a single tribe – Kalenjin. While the believers would call it providence, others would simply call it dumb luck. Whatever it was, no better group of humans from the human gene pool could have been selected for the grueling physical contest with the Shaitans that was to ensue.
Lt. Gakere Odoyo had just sent in the last of the probes into the 10 meter deep opening, that his men had been digging for the last few days. Everything looked nice and quiet and exactly as expected. Too nice and quiet for this liking. Something deep inside his gut kept telling him that the picture wasn’t
right. Things never looked exactly as expected when you dug up a hole.
However he could not just go on an unsubstantiated feeling. He had his orders. The 6th company was to be the exploratory force inside GC-1. They would be at the vanguard of this audacious operation entering as quietly as possible. The task of his company was to enter and set up a perimeter a few hundred meters on either side of the hole along GC-1.
GC-1 and GC-2 were the two ‘Grand Canals’ that connected Lake Emmanuel to the New Babylon sector. 50 marines each would take up defensive positions on either side of the hole, just in case the humans were discovered and they had to beat a hasty retreat. Once the 6th company was in position, the rest of the invasion force would make their way down and start its long march towards Lake Emmanuel.
If everything went well and according to plan, then the force would be able to reach Lake Emmanuel quietly without being detected, where the demo squads would wire up the explosives. If their luck held, and they were still not detected, then the demo squads would run back to the entry hole. Upon reaching back to the hole, they would detonate the explosives remotely and get out of the hole before the canals flooded.
The plan was simple, but also simplistic. It hinged heavily on the fact that no identifiable habitat structures had been detected by seismograph along GC-1 or near Lake Emmanuel. The operative word here was ‘identifiable’. Seismographs were notoriously unreliable in detecting small structures like a small guard post underground. How would it be even possible to identify a small habitable structure one kilometer below the surface from a seismograph, when one was not even sure how the structure was supposed to look?
It was unlikely that there would be any habitation on the canal itself, as it would be prone to flooding all the time. However there was a lot of construction next to the dam on Lake Emmanuel, and there was no certain way to tell what those constructions were, other than the fact that they were symmetrical and hence constructed by the Shaitans.
Retribution (Shaitan Wars) Page 41