Retribution (Shaitan Wars)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  It was more than likely that an important installation like the dam on Lake Emmanuel would be guarded to some extent by the Shaitans. Humans would have done so, and the Shaitans till now had not shown any propensity to be careless or foolish in such matters either. Yet this possibility had been glossed over by the mission planners. The planners were counting on being able to approach and lay out demolition charges in a stealthy manner.

  Lt. Odoyo had been worried about all these aspects of the mission, but what could he do? Orders were orders. All he could do was exercise abundant precaution and follow standard operating procedures. As part of those standard operating procedures, he sent out the drones next into the hole. The Brigadier had been generous with drones for this mission, and Lt. Odoyo had 18 at his command.

  The intelligence probes, of which every Marine usually had an ample supply had indicated that GC-1 was almost dry, with patches of water here and there. It indicated that the canal was not in use at all at that point of time. That was good news and would speed up their journey. The probes had further confirmed the construction of the canal which had been hinted in the seismographic surveys.

  The canals were constructed such that even when it carried lots of water, there was ample space for many Shaitans to run side by side on either side of the canal. On an average there seem to be 10 to 15 meters wide walkway on either side of the canal, which in itself was uniformly 30 meters wide. That walkway could however be flooded if the dam was busted, or the sluice gates were allowed to flood the canal uncontrollably.

  The probes also gave an all clear for a distance of over two kilometers on either direction of the hole on GC-1. The probes were on carbon nanotube wires which could extend much further if Lt. Odoyo wanted, but 2 Km of clearance was more than sufficient for his purpose. He had to set up a defensive perimeters a lot closer than that. Still he followed standard operating procedure and sent in the 18 drones first.

  Unfortunately for the 6th company, the Shaitans after fighting humans for so many years on Jehannum, had also become quite familiar with the Marines’ SOP. They kept hidden and let the drones pass unmolested. When Lt. Odoyo had no more excuses to delay the entry of his Marines, he ordered them to enter in squads of four. The marines followed their training and set up defensive perimeters as they entered to cover their comrades who followed them.

  When all hundred Marines of the 6th company had entered the hole, they went about their task of splitting into two groups to go in the two opposite direction. It was at this point that the hidden Shaitan commander must have realized that no more humans were going to enter the hole, and he sprung his trap.

  GC-1 and GC-2 ran roughly parallel to each other most of the way from Lake Emmanuel to New Babylon. Each of the canal had been constructed inside a natural cavity below the surface of Jehannum. The natural cavity was due to the stress of the outer crust of Jehannum, and the stress lines were roughly parallel in most parts of the surface of Jehannum, except at the poles, where they met up like the longitudinal lines on a globe.

  While in most places GC-1 and GC-2 were separated by a kilometer, there were points in the canals, where the two Grand Canals almost touched each other. One such point existed just a few hundred meters away from the point where the humans had dug their ingress hole. That point was in the direction of New Babylon.

  The Shaitans had not dug a connection between the two canals at this point. They had merely weakened the wall separating the two canals and planted explosives around the weakened wall. Once the Shaitan commander gave the signal after watching the humans enter GC-1 through remote Shaitan probes, the weakened wall was blasted, and through the resulting opening poured out Shaitans from GC-2, where they had been hiding.

  It was a perfect trap. A hundred Marines were trapped inside a dark tunnel with no defensive positions for a hundred kilometers in both direction, and no way out except the narrow hole they had dug up above the tunnel. If they tried to climb out using the rope they used to slide in, they would be picked off easily as they manually and slowly climbed up. The Marines could retreat as much they wanted, but there was no other exit in any direction.

  Lt. Odoyo did the only thing he could have done. He ordered his Marines to retreat towards the Lake Emmanuel direction, and put his drones in front as the only cover that the Marines had. Lt. Odoyo could see a lot of flashing reds in his IFF display inside his head, a lot of marines were down. He ignored the display for the moment and concentrated on saving the Marines still alive, and rallied them behind the drones into firing position.

  His alarm was rising by the second as he watched the volume of Shaitans pouring out of the passage made between GC-2 and GC-1. His HUD was keeping an automated count after he had given that command to his suit CPU to do so. The count had already crossed 100 and it showed no signs of slowing down. The Shaitans must have been preparing for a major invasion, which meant there could be thousands of Shaitans waiting behind the ones emerging. Things were going from bad to worse for the humans, and they were going just fine for the Shaitans.

  Then the Shaitan commander made a mistake. Perhaps it was a Shaitan engineer who had made the mistake. It didn’t matter, for it gave the 6th Company a break and a lease of life, just a temporary lease of life, from getting mercilessly slaughtered within the next few minutes.

  The Shaitan commander decided to close the hole that the humans had dug. Perhaps he was trying to go by the book, or following some preset orders given by a superior, or making absolutely sure that not a single human escapes. No one knew, but it was totally unnecessary, for not a single Marine was trying to climb out of the hole, for it would have been suicide.

  The Shaitans did not know the exact location where the human dug hole would open up, just the general area. Hence they had embedded explosives in a wide enough zone around the expected area where the hole would open up. The Shaitan demolition engineer, who must have planted those hidden explosives screwed up big time. He did not analyze the soil and the rocks of the area, neither perhaps did he do a proper structural integrity test of the area.

  The same brittle igneous rocks in the geology around the area, which had caused the depression in the surface and brought the canal just 10 meters below the surface came into play. The entire brittle rock structure around the canal in this area was stressed out due to the constant stress faced by Jehannum as a result of gravitational pulls. All it required was a push, and that push came in the form of the explosives planted by the Shaitans.

  The explosives were designed to collapse the area around the hole and thus close it. However the entire roof of the canal around the hole collapsed due to the fragile and brittle nature of the rock structure in this area. Thousands of tons of rocks and soil came crashing down crushing one unfortunate Marine but many more Shaitans, who were closer to the hole pursuing the humans.

  The cave-in completely blocked the canal with large rocks and rubble, creating a loose wall nearly 10 meters thick. What the wall also did was to cut off the Shaitans advancing towards the humans, giving them an immediate reprieve. Lt. Odoyo could hear multiple shouts of ‘Medic’ around him. The shouts were more out of the anxiety of the comrades of the injured Marines, rather than out of necessity. The Medics had the exact status of health and injury of each Marine inside their head, and at this very moment, their specialized software would be doing triage and assigning Medics to the most urgent cases.

  Lt. Odoyo let the Medics do their work while he concentrated on their tactical situation. That the operation had gone south was a no-brainer. It had turned out to be the cluster-fuck that he had feared it would be. It was obvious that the operation had no hope of succeeding and would have to be abandoned. Now his only objective had to be to get his Marines out of this hellhole in one piece as fast as possible.

  He tried communicating with the outside, and as he had expected, even the boosted signals from the drones could not reach out. They were well and truly sealed shut and cut off from backup and rescue. Even if the Marines outside star
ted digging with power tools at this very moment, it would be 24-48 hours before they would be able to clear the rubble and get inside. Hours that the 6th Company didn’t have.

  If Lt. Odoyo had been the Shaitan commander, then he would be looking at alternative routes to reach the 6th Company at this very moment. The Shaitans would be assessing the feasibility of clearing the rubble and punching a hole through it, or perhaps there was some other point in GC-2, from where they could punch a hole and enter GC-1.

  Who knows how many Shaitans had been waiting in ambush? It was entirely possible that there may be more Shaitans down GC-1 itself who had been waiting in ambush and at this very moment might be rushing in to finish off the 6th Company. Even if there weren’t any Shaitans in GC-1 right now, they would soon be there, entering from the opening at Lake Emmanuel.

  There were too many imponderables. There were too many options and ways for the Shaitans to slaughter the 6th Company. There was no way to take a decision on the best course of action, unless Lt. Odoyo had more intelligence on what the Shaitans behind that rubble wall were up to. So he shouted to his NCO. “Sgt. Omondi, I want a few Garter Snakes inside that rubble wall. Let them try to find a way through. I want to know what’s happening on the other side.”

  ‘Garter Snakes’ were one of the three variants of probes the Marines carried on their person. As the name suggested, the coiled up probes, when opened up looked like a common garter snake. Slightly less than an inch thick in diameter, its skin was flexible and could be compressed such that it could squeeze itself flat almost to a tape-worm shape if required.

  The Garter Snake had less capabilities than the ‘Spider’ probe which was the standard workhorse of the Marines. The ‘Snake’, as the probe was fondly known to the Marines, was limited by the requirement for everything inside it had to be either squeezable, liquid or very tiny. The Snake was a special purpose probe designed to squeeze into the tiniest of cracks.

  The Snake even had some limited capability to squeeze itself thinner but longer, if required to get through a particularly tiny hole. The Snakes also came with a small scraping drill and a little reservoir of acid to burrow, drill or corrode through a small amount of soil, rock or metal as long as it was just a few inches thick.

  The Snake moved startlingly like an actual snake. It was the most energy efficient motion possible for an object the shape of a snake. The Engineers hadn’t tried to re-invent the wheel. Millions of years of evolution had given the snake near perfect bio engineering for the purpose of motion, given its configuration. The human engineers simply copied and mimicked the same.

  While the Snakes were trying to find a way through the rubble wall, Lt. Odoyo asked Sgt. Kairu Omondi to send two spiders ahead towards the direction of Lake Emmanuel to scope out any advancing Shaitans from that direction. All probes could go 10 kilometers on the thin carbon nanotube wires. Since stealth was no longer a requirement, they could go even further on wireless, as long as radio signals could be bounced off the wall.

  The probes ran on batteries without wires, which limited their useful time to just a few hours of active movement, but many days of stationary scanning. If put on passive scanning, the probes could last weeks on a single charge. The range of the probes could be further extended by chaining them wirelessly or through wires. The furthest probe would scan, while the other probes would relay information at regular intervals.

  Within minutes the first Snake had found a way through to the other side of the rubble wall. The Snake was on passive scan, to avoid giving itself away. Since it was pitch black inside GC-1 and the Shaitans didn’t use light, the probe started its scan in the infrared. A thick fog was all that was visible in the IR. It was the dust from the rubble pile.

  The Shaitans had raised up further dust by initially trying to clear the wall with their limbs, but the snake could make out that the Shaitan had given up the futile exercise. There was a small pile lying where the Shaitans had started dumping cleared rubble, but at that moment no one was trying to clear any more. The Shaitans were simply standing around.

  From his briefing about the Shaitans, Lt. Odoyo knew that if the Shaitans wanted to have an intense discussion, then they preferred to touch each other in a ‘Mingle’. There was no sound recorded on the ultrasonic frequency either, so they were not talking either, but there was intense activity on the radio frequency.

  Someone was talking over the radio. Probably the commander, reporting and getting new instructions. The Shaitan radio frequency encryption was incredibly good, far superior to humans. The Shaitan radio communication had not been cracked. Most communication scientists back on Earth who had been tasked with cracking the Shaitan code were of the opinion that the Shaitans used a new branch of Math unknown to humans or quantum entanglement for encryption. The secret of Shaitan communication encryption itself was a prize worth fighting for.

  Needless to say Lt. Odoyo did not have a clue as to what the Shaitans were talking about. Suddenly on cue, all Shaitans started running towards the opening in the wall between GC-1 and GC-2 that they had blasted initially to ambush the Marines. “After them! Send the Snake to follow the Shaitans. Find out where they are going.” The Lieutenant shouted.

  The Snake slithered out of the rubble wall and entered the opening through which the Shaitans had left. It scanned both the ends of GC-2 and found that all the Shaitans were running towards the Lake Emmanuel side. “Follow the Shaitans at a discrete distance, and send a few more Snakes to chain if needed. I need to know at all times what those Shaitans are up to.” Lt. Odoyo instructed Sgt. Omondi.

  Lt. Odoyo had a fair idea of what was happening, and what the orders for the Shaitan commander were. His Spiders had already scanned a few kilometers by now and there were no sign of any Shaitans yet. If the Shaitans had been waiting in ambush in GC-1, the spiders should have encountered them by now. A few kilometers was far enough inside this winding canal to be waiting in ambush. There was no point waiting tens of kilometers away.

  Most probably there were no Shaitans inside GC-1 at that moment. The Shaitans may not have been sure how far the humans would scout with their probes and drones before entering the canal. In their eagerness to lure the humans into their trap, the Shaitans must have ensured that GC-1 remained empty till the ambush began. They must have been confident, and with good reason that once they shut the hole dug by the humans, then the marines would be trapped anyway and could be finished off at leisure by the Shaitans entering from GC-2.

  With the slight wrinkle in the Shaitan plans because of complete collapse of the ceiling, the Shaitans had decided to do the next best thing. Let the Shaitan troops exit GC-2 at Lake Emmanuel and enter GC-1 from that end and finish off the trapped Marines. That told Lt. Odoyo two things one good news and one bad.

  The good news was that most probably there weren’t too many Shaitan troops, if any at all at Lake Emmanuel itself at that moment. If there had been, then those troops would have been ordered to enter GC-1 to confront the Marines, while the troop who were now running towards the exit of GC-2 would have been told to hold fort to ensure that the Marines don’t manage to dig out.

  The bad news was that if the Shaitans beat the Marines to the exit of the canals and were able to enter GC-1 before the Marines had exited the canal, then the reprieve of the roof cave-in would have been for nothing but to postpone their slaughter.

  The Shaitans were considered physically superior to humans in every aspect – strength, agility, stamina and speed. No sane human would ever bet that a bunch of humans could outrun a bunch of Shaitans in a race, especially a hundred kilometer race! The other choice was to hunker down, and prepare defenses near the current point and wait for their rescuers who must surely be drilling at this very moment.

  Almost any human Lieutenant would have taken the later choice. It was however the prerogative of Lt. Odoyo to make that choice, and a choice he did make. It was a choice which would enter his name and that of his ‘Marathon Marines’ of the 6th company in the popula
r folklore of the military and civilians alike. Lt. Gakere Odoyo chose to run!

  “Sgt. Omondi! Headcount of effectives please!” Gakere said in a voice settling down into grim determination.

  “83 effectives, 6 wounded, 9 deceased and 2 missing presumed deceased, sir!” Sgt. Omondi said in his best drill sergeant voice.

  “All right Marines. Listen to me good, for I have time to say this only once. As of now, we are in a race. Not just any race, a race for our lives. Actually it is not so much a race as a marathon – a hundred kilometer marathon. This time you are not running for the honor of your tribe or your nation, but for the honor of humanity itself, for this time we race the Shaitans. The prize that awaits you at the end of that tunnel should you reach first is that you get to keep your life. There is no silver medal, only death for the species which comes second.

  The spiders are scouting far ahead of us, so they will give us ample warning, if we encounter Shaitans on the way, so you don’t need your armor right now, and you don’t need your weapons. I wish we were wearing powered armor, but that was not part of our mission profile, so our suit and armor are just dead weight right now.

  We have 6 mules with us. Unload anything from the mules that you don’t need to stay alive for a day. Load your armor and your weapons on them, and the mules will follow us and deliver that burden when they catch up wherever we stop.

  I am sending the Predators and the Boas ahead of us. They will be our vanguard and sentry stopping any surprise attack, giving us enough time to either double back to the Mules and retrieve our weapons and armor or wait for the Mules to catch up with us.

  Feel free to run as unburdened as you like, but I will recommend that all of you carry that emergency oxygen bottle strapped on your suit. There is only 70% oxygen here, a lot less than even the highlands of our home, so that is one extra weight well worth carrying. It will make all the difference. You have 3 minutes to get it done, remember that the Shaitans have already been running for one minute now. Dismissed.” Lt. Odoyo finished and started stripping down to his underwear.