Retribution (Shaitan Wars)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  The bolts were however attached to strong carbon fibers, which spread out behind the bolts like the ribs of an umbrella. Attached to these ribs was woven carbon ‘cloth’ material, which made the entire scene look like the opening of an explosive umbrella, if someone could follow the unfurling fast enough. However this carbon ‘cloth’ was not plain, but adorned with small thin slivers of aluminum, very much like the adornment on a woman’s designer dress.

  The great momentum of the KK ship meant that it could not avoid hitting this umbrella even if it had the fastest chemical thrusters, which it didn’t. It is not possible to know what the AI might have thought about it. It is possible that it did not worry too much about a flimsy gossamer like obstruction, which would neither stop the ship, nor hurt it as it would easily punch a hole through it and continue forward.

  This is exactly what happened. The aluminum sliver strips however were not meant for ornamentation. They were there to give ‘body’ and mass to the carbon fiber ‘cloth’. All in all, as the reasonably big profile of the KK ship ploughed through the gossamer carbon cloth of the package, it impacted approximately 500 grams of mass that it tore through.

  That might not sound like much, but at over 2.7% the speed of light that is nearly 9 tera joules of kinetic energy getting converted to heat. That is over 2 kilotons of TNT. The high speed recording would show in the next few frames how the bow section of the KK ship glowed in the infrared as its skin heated up by a few thousand degrees. However this in itself would not cause any catastrophic damage to the tough exterior of a Shaitan ship.

  This however was not the end, only the beginning, for waiting a few kilometers behind the first package, was the second one with the exact same mechanism, which had explosively opened up in exactly the same manner. The ship ploughed through this gossamer cloth as well, an additional 9 tera joules of heat was added to the skin of the ship, making the bow glow visibly in the recorded frames, as the heat slowly started migrating towards the stern section of the ship.

  After the KK ship encountered the third package, its bow was glowing white hot and melting. This was also the obstacle that was thought to have killed the AI, for immediately after that the thrusters of the ship stopped whatever pathetic attempts it was making to avoid the obstacles. In its last dying moments the AI would surely have realized the effect the plough through was having on the ship, and why it was not so harmless, before the brains of the AI got cooked in the heat of the rapidly melting ship.

  The quantum computer of the Dragon Scales had an algorithm fed into it, which regulated the force of the explosive bolts opening the packages depending on the measured external hull temperature of the KK ship. Beyond a certain point of external hull temperature, the AI inside was sure to die, and the ship would just become a dumb piece of metal on a purely ballistic trajectory.

  So one did not have to worry about the ship trying to evade obstacles. They had to just worry about targeting accuracy. The second improvement in the situation was that as the ship’s external hull heated and melted, it was less likely to shatter with a more substantive impact from a larger mass. Thus as the hull of the KK ship heated, the force of explosion was reduced progressively, so that the cloth umbrella would open lesser and lesser, resulting in more and more massive impact on the ship.

  By the 16th package, the cloth umbrellas were opening only a few hundred meters, just enough to ensure that all targeting errors are accommodated and the fireball of the KK ship continued to hit the umbrellas. The impact mass was now in tens of kilograms and the heat added with every impact was now in millions of tera joules, reaching yield equivalents of Megaton nukes.

  Even the toughest of metals like Iron and Germanium, when heated beyond 3000° C not just melt, but boil away. In fact they boil far easily in the pressure less environment of space than Earth. The temperature on the surface of the ship, which had slowly started changing shape to a sphere of molten metal, was well above 5000°C.

  The frames of human instrumentation then started capturing jets of metal vapor boiling away from the surface. The good part of metal gas in space as far as the humans were concerned was that once it boiled away as gas, it has almost no chance of recombining and getting into a large solid chunk on cooling. This was because individual molecules just float away into the infinite open of space, without having the chance to meet up with another molecule of the same metal and recombining back into a large chunk of metal. It usually becomes space dust floating in the emptiness of space.

  This space dust evaporating away from the melting ship however still had the same momentum as the ship out of which it had emerged. A large amount of this space dust would hit the Earth, but now instead of causing unimaginable damage to life on Earth, they would provide a spectacular show in the skies. The skies would glow red, blue, green and every other imaginable color of the spectrum, visible to people from equator to the poles on one side of Earth. It would seem like the sky itself was on fire, but no harm would come to life on Earth.

  It was clear that the basic premise of the scientists and the engineers had worked, but the problem was being able to sustain the evaporation of the ship. Despite the outer temperature of the slag (the molten slag could no longer be called hull) having crossed 6000°C, the ship was not evaporating fast enough. The increasing temperature was expelling gaseous metal more violently, which was good, for the rate of evaporation was increasing, as well as the distance the gases went, which would ensure less of them hit Earth.

  However the molten ship was quickly running out of packages to hit. If even a few hundred Kilograms of molten ship remained after the last package, then the molten metal would quickly harden back in the cold of space and cause unimaginable devastation. In the end the final last wisps of the remainder of the ship evaporated with just 28 packages remaining.

  The ship had carried 800 packages, and the Engineers had done their calculations well, albeit cutting it a bit too fine. It was not the Engineers’ fault though. Even after making extra space in these dedicated Nautilus class vessels, 800 was the maximum number each vessel could have carried. The unmodified Shiva for example was carrying only 400 packages by removing all its missiles and emptying its cargo holds. Thankfully the backup would not be required, or so the crew of Dragon Scales thought.

  Just as the celebrations on the Dragon Scales were beginning, the com officer shouted out to the bridge. There was a level 1 warning, this time received even before the ops center had received it, since the lighthouse was streaming directly to the ship, which was more than 2 light hours closer. It came from exactly the same point in space on the line of Alpha Shaitan, timed to impact exactly 36 hours after the first impact. The second one was designed to devastate the other half of the Earth, which would have been untouched by the first KK Ship!

  There was stunned silence in the bridge of the Dragon Scales. Every eye on the bridge had a glazed faraway look of shock. Someone could he heard murmuring “Oh god! This can’t be happening!”

  “Quiet on the bridge!” Boomed the loud voice of the captain. It shook the bridge crew out of their disbelief. “Coms, I want a dispatch to lighthouse ops and Shiva letting them know what we know, although they would probably get to know it around the same time as they receive our message anyway.” The captain then looked at the XO. “XO, I want you to personally oversee the retrieval of as many packages as possible. I know that the packages were never designed to be retrieved like our missiles, but work with the Chief and Scotty and surprise me. You have 36 hours to retrieve as many as you can.”

  Then the captain looked at the navigations officer and hollered. “Navigation, assume we leave this spot in exactly 36 hours, work out the point furthest from Earth, where we can meet up with the Shiva and come to an absolute halt.” Then he looked around at no one in particular and said. “Get Scotty to the ready room now. XO follow me.” With that the captain got up and headed for his ready room next to the bridge.

  When the two of them were in the ready room, the captain s
aid. “Marissa, I know that I am giving you an impossible task, but we need to get desperate right now, and I have a germ of an idea, which only Scotty and the ops center can validate. Since I cannot wait to speak to the ops center Scotty will have to do.”

  “I think I know what you are trying to do sir, I and the crew won’t let you down sir.” Lt. Marissa Waltham said. At that moment the Engineering chief rushed into the ready room. For some obscure reason which no one really knew, the Engineering chiefs of USC were called Scotty, just as the operations chief were called simply ‘Chief’.

  “Scotty, I have many questions, which I will ask you one by one. I want you to answer it as best as you can, before I move to the next one. First, assuming that I got hold of a package out there in space that has already been deployed and used, what is the feasibility of folding it up again by hand and refitting the explosives on the bolt for reuse? Think hard before you reply Scotty, the fate of Earth depends on it.” The captain asked.

  When put the way captain had done, it put tremendous pressure on the timid chief Engineer. He opened his mouth once, closed it, opened it again to speak, and thought better of it. Finally after several moments he spoke. As a child Scotty had a severe stammering problem, which the mild mannered Engineer had never been able to fully overcome. Now with the pressure on him, his speech stammered.

  “I… I am assuming that you are not interested in… in… in… hearing what cannot be done sir… so I will not get into that part… But… But… Let me give you a perspective. These carbon fiber ‘cloth’ were precision folded by machines to micrometer tolerance, which enabled such a huge surface area of many square kilometers to be folded into such a small package. That… That… That is also the reason carbon fiber was used… sir, since it is gossamer thin and yet strong.

  It… It would be impossible to fold it back into the package by hand sir, but… but… but maybe we don’t need to do that. I mean… I mean as long as we can fold it reasonably to be able to somehow transport it undamaged, and… and after that the explosive bolts can somehow deploy them, then… then… then that is all that is needed, sir. My assistant is a geometrical genius, sir. I am sure he… he would be able to figure some way to fold them by hand to… to… to be able to achieve that.” Scotty replied.

  “Thanks Scotty. That answer gives me more comfort than you can believe. The second question is, can you fix back the explosive bolt mechanism?” The captain asked. “Take your time Scotty, we may be in a hurry, but not that much hurry either, we have 36 hours.” The captain reassured the Engineer, which brought a relieved smile on the face of Scotty, and he started speaking with almost no stammer, now that the pressure have been relieved slightly by his captain.

  “The answer to that question, sir is a ‘Maybe’.” Scotty replied. “There would be a few of the packages where the mechanism or the control circuits are damaged, because these were designed to be ‘use once’ mechanisms. These we will have to discard. There would be others however, which can be retrieved. We do not have the same exact grade of the explosives on board, but explosive strength is programmable, so we can reprogram to get relatively similar results.”

  “Last but not the least Scotty. How effective will these recycled packages be?” Asked the captain.

  Scotty beamed cheek to cheek and said. “This is one good news I can give you sir. Since the umbrellas are so large, and only a small area of that would have been hit and damaged by the previous KK ship, most of the umbrella would be intact. The probability of the next KK Ship hitting that exact area is very low. So most of the recycled packages will be almost as effective as the new one sir.”

  “Thanks Scotty. I am not going to put you in an impossible position by asking you how fast these things can be folded. I guess you will know once you have done a few, but any suggestions on how it can be done fast?” The captain asked.

  “I do sir.” He said. Scotty lost his speech for a few moments as he struggled with a particularly bad bout of stammering and then continued. “I suggest we work in a chain gang fashion, sir, with most of the crew working in space. We approach an umbrella by shuttle. The shuttle drops 3 to 4 crew near the umbrella and then proceeds to the next one where we drop 3-4 more. Each Gang folds up the umbrella as best as they can using their backpack thrusters to move around. They don’t have to do a very good job of it, as long as they can fold it small enough to fit into a shuttle. I will make paper folding to show the crew how to do it.

  Once the shuttle brings it back to the ships, my Engineering crew can take over and tie them with strings that will break along with the explosive bolts. These packages will be too bulky to be released by the pneumatic ejectors sir, we will have to release them by hand, sir. We may also have to top up the fuel of the packages.” Scotty finished as he struggled to overcome his stutter.

  “Make it so Scotty. You have 36 hours, the XO and the Chief at your disposal.” The captain said and dismissed them.

  After 36 hours, the overworked crew of Dragon Scales had been able to retrieve and make workable just 100 of the recycled packages. That had to do. Who knows how much difference that 100 recycled packages would make in saving millions of lives on Earth? They would know the answers soon enough.

  The furthest out the Dragon Scales and the Shiva could meet up and yet be ready for the second KK ship was just beyond the Asteroid belt. It was far too close to Earth for comfort, but there was nothing that could be done about it. The 100 recycled packages were literally deployed by hand, although once in space, they were controlled by the quantum computer of the ship to place them exactly where they were required. The 400 fresh packages brought by Shiva were deployed as the first line, and the 100 recycled ones were placed behind.

  The first KK ship had required 770 packages to be completely evaporated. Now they had 500, out of which 100 were recycled, folded by hand and of dubious quality. The engineers had reprogrammed the parameters to try to maximize the effect with a lesser number of packages. First they had reduced the distance between each package deployed, so that the KK ship had lesser time to cool down in the chill of space.

  Then they reduced the size of the umbrellas, so that each of them would be denser and heat up the KK ship more. All this came at the risk of the ship missing and umbrella or breaking up, but some risks had to be taken when they had far fewer packages than what was required.

  It was hard to describe in terms of human emotions, what the AI of the second KK ship felt. It was a sense of fear. Not so much fear of death, since it knew it was hurtling to its death, which meant nothing to it. It was the sense of failure, inevitability and the feeling of helplessness in the face of knowing what its fate would be.

  The AI had kept watch over its predecessor, whom it was following exactly 36 hours behind. It had noted with surprise the method in which its predecessor had been destroyed. Literally evaporated. The AI was prepared for destruction as had been planned by its programmers, but not the fiery melt that had been the fate of its predecessor. The dying AI had almost given out a cry of pain in the last few milliseconds before it ceased to exist.

  This second KK ship AI had faithfully recorded everything and transmitted back to the home world, but its functioning was getting hampered by feelings which the AI could not explain. It was a good thing that these AI could not go mad, for they were not that complex, otherwise it would have gone mad with fear, frustration, confusion and anger as it saw the fate it was heading towards but could do nothing about it due to its own momentum and its programmed task.

  As the second AI gave its final shriek of death, the KK ship was going through the very same fate as the first ship. However there was a very subtle difference. In the case of the second ship, the entire process was speeded up, as had been the objective of the humans. The 100 recycled packages had worked well. Still it had not been enough.

  When the molten ball remains of the second KK ship had passed the last package, there was still a few hundred kilograms of molten metal remaining. It quickly solidified ba
ck into a ball of metal that hurtled towards Earth. A few hundred Kilograms was better than the original six thousand tons, but still the ball of metal would impact somewhere on Earth with the energy of a megaton nuke.

  The Earth is more than two third water on the surface, and keeping with the odds, the residual ball of metal fell in the oceans of Micronesia, creating local mini-tsunami. It would have been completely harmless but for the fact that two very unlucky fisherman got caught in it and died.

  All in all however it was an amazing feat and a spectacular success for the Engineers and USC. The well-oiled PR machinery that Admiral Gerald Shannon had nurtured within the USC, ever since his days as a commodore and head of PR went into hyperactive mode, ensuring that every frame of the destruction footage of the KK ships was broadcast and analyzed ad-nauseum by the media.

  It would ensure that budgetary support for the maintenance of the Lighthouse project, which had started wavering in the last few years would not be questioned for many decades to come. Gerald would often be embarrassed with himself for having to use the media so cynically for achievements that were otherwise incredibly amazing and noteworthy.

  Humanity had banished the indescribable fear of Armageddon that these KK ships held over the people of Earth. Humanity was free once more. Free of fear. No longer cowered down, confident that it could proceed into this universe on its own terms. All because they had stopped what was once considered unstoppable.

  Chapter 26

  Dante

  Beta Shaitan System

  2116

  The stealth approach technique originally pioneered by the Avenger and Kali on Alpha Shaitan had been so successful that it was felt that any Shaitan system could be approached and observed at a close range without the Shaitans becoming aware of the spying ship. The utility of the LTKS probe in providing intelligence on the Alpha Shaitan had proven invaluable in making the Alpha Shaitan campaign possible.