Retribution (Shaitan Wars)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  I shudder to think what the Shaitan injected with this biochemical must be going through. The main brain of these zombie Shaitans gets all the sensory inputs and is fully aware of what is going on, and yet it has no control over its own body, as those parts of the brain have severed communication with the main brain. Those individual parts of the brain can be instructed to give up any information it has stored, which is a lot, for the information is stored in a distributed manner.

  We have even trained these isolated parts of the brain to go out and kill other Shaitans, and they go out and kill every being of their kind that they come across, and continue to do so until their last tentacle is functioning. The poor confused Shaitans killed by such zombies do not understand till the last moment why a fellow Shaitan is killing them. Most of them do not even put up a fight as a zombie kills them, for they have no concept of one Shaitan killing another like us humans do.

  After fighting them bitterly for 4 years, I never thought I will ever feel sorry for a Shaitan, but I do. Especially for the anguish of the zombies, who are aware of everything that is happening and everything that they are doing against their will.

  That single biochemical developed by the scientists, turned the tide for us Mamma. Within days we knew the beating heart of this moon. It was a place called ‘Nest-of-Nests’, which is like the capital, and the operational and decision making heart of the Shaitans on Jehannum. The Shaitan government, which they call the ‘council of seers’ resides in that place.

  If we could take that place out, the entire resistance on Shaitan would crumble, and we started our offensive accordingly. We started sending out zombie Shaitans first by the hundreds, and using the help of those captured more in their thousands and made them into zombies. We placed these armies of zombies ahead of us in our assault, and didn’t care how many of them died.

  Suddenly our numerical strength on this moon had increased many time over. The icing on the cake is that for the first few weeks, the Shaitans did not even realize or recognize these zombies for what they were. The Shaitans would simply stand there in shock and get slaughtered by the zombies.

  As we started closing in on the Nest-of-Nests, we noticed a new development in the Shaitan tactics. They were no longer trying to actively push us back, but to stall us from taking more territory. This would have been understandable tactics for a force on the defensive, but for the fact that suddenly they would give up the territory and retreat further back, even though they could have held on to the position.

  We realized what they had been stalling before they withdrew from their position. They were destroying every piece of information that existed in that sector before they withdrew. This filled us with a sense of foreboding. Clearly the Shaitans were preparing for something. What were they preparing for? Some thought that they were preparing to blow up the entire moon somehow, which would deny us this world.

  However if they were preparing to do that, then it would make no sense to try and destroy individual information. Might as well blow up the moon right now, if they were capable of doing that. So it had to be something else, which must be bad news for us humans. So the brass stepped up pys-ops and then unleased nerve agents to hasten the pace of advance, to prevent whatever the Shaitans were planning.

  When we found out what they were planning, or rather what they had been doing all the time that they had been stalling us, I don’t know Mamma whether I was more relieved or shocked and horrified. I came face to face with the truth in a particularly beautiful and stunning landscape, even for this world which is incredibly rich in beautiful and stunning underground landscapes.

  We had been pursuing a fleeing bunch of Shaitans, who were performing a rearguard action for a defensive Shaitan force that was trying to withdraw in as orderly a manner as possible in the heat of the battlefield. My fire team consisting of my band of brothers were chasing a group of Shaitans down a tunnel. We advanced in the typical leapfrog fashion of the marines with two providing covering fire, while the other two leapfrogged into an advanced position, so the other two could leapfrog and continue the advance.

  We knew that our fellow marines from the company were advancing similarly along parallel tunnels as we beat back the Shaitans. After one such leapfrog advance, I and Bin Talash had to halt abruptly as we almost fell over the opening of the tunnel which abruptly ended in an opening into a chasm. We called over Michael and Hua Hin, letting them know that the tunnel had come to an end, and there was nothing we could see beyond in any direction.

  Initially Michael and Hua Hin thought that the tunnel had come to a dead end, and that is why we could see nothing beyond. They cursed us and told us to look carefully up and down, for there must be some opening through which the Shaitans we had been chasing must have escaped. It was only when we asked them to come forward did they also realize the truth.

  The reason we could not see beyond the end of the tunnel was that there was a dark void as far as we could see ahead, below and above the tunnel. Only Bin Talash is not a full tech-head due to some weird religious belief he still holds on to, but the rest of us used our full strength active sensors to take the sensor sweep in our head and realized what we were looking at.

  It may have been pitch black in visible light Mamma, but you had to see the beauty of the sight in Radar and Ultrasound. We were looking out to an opening that was more than 2 kilometers deep, and the bottom was fuzzy even in the Radar and ultrasound images. It indicated that molten rock or lava lay somewhere in the bottom deep down that opening more than 2 kilometers below. There was a faint infrared glow coming out of that molten lava far down below.

  Ahead of us the chamber opened up into a hollow sphere over 3 kilometers in diameter, and above us the ceiling was over a kilometer high. This was a huge hollow sphere 3 kilometers in diameter below the surface of Jehannum, which probably touched the edge of the crust, where it met the molten mantle below the crust of the moon. Everywhere along the surface of this hollow bubble were growth of indigenous bacteria, moss or lichens, whatever you want to call them, that glowed in the infrared like a million stars.

  This was an ancient magma chamber, which had carved out an almost perfectly spherical hollow space, once the magma had been expelled. Mamma, it was the most spectacular sight that I had ever seen. Obviously the tunnel we had been chasing the Shaitans through had been one of the lava tubes through which the molten magma had exited sometime in prehistory.

  We instantly became aware that the Shaitans could be clinging on to the walls of the chamber just above or below us, waiting to spring on to us the moment we peeked out of the tunnel opening. We sent some recon-balls out floating into space to give us a 360° view of the surface wall surrounding the tunnel opening that we were standing next to. I also contacted the other fire teams. They were experiencing exactly what we were.

  The walls around the tunnel openings was clean. We could not escape the conclusion that the Shaitans could have gone nowhere but to have jumped to their deaths. After fighting the Shaitans for so many decades, we know a lot about them. Nowhere in our instructions has it ever been even remotely suggested that the Shaitans were suicidal.

  We would have kept wondering, if not for the backup team that arrived and installed a full function laser illumination device that had first been used to light up the Ka-let base in Mars. I am sure Mamma you have seen those pictures. The picture slowly started building up, which I took directly in my head as it kept getting illuminated.

  Slice after slice kept getting illuminated in full color glory showing the amazing enormity and the beauty of that spherical chamber. Nothing however prepared us for the image that started developing as the center of that sphere got illuminated.

  At the absolute center of the spherical chamber was an enormous platform that had been built. The circular platform was 121 meters in diameter according to the sensors and was suspended from cables hanging on the ceiling of the sphere. The platform was probably of some cultural or religious value, for its construction w
as ornamental, and not just functional as most Shaitan things are.

  The platform was connected at one end with a wide walkway. On the platform, and on the walkway were tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Shaitans. Their bodies crammed and packing every inch of space available on the walkway and the platform. I wish I could say that was the most amazing thing I saw in that spherical chamber. The thing that shocked us into silence and numbness was something more.

  From the edges of the platform, we could see Shaitans flinging themselves into the void below, to die a fiery death in the lava below. The imaging computer informed us that almost all of the Shaitans on the platform were the smaller type-A Shaitans, whom we have come to associate as civilians. The images were high resolution, and I wish I had not focused close up to the platform, for I cannot get the image out of my head now.

  There at the edge were a bunch of juveniles, which all of us veterans recognize now. They were being pushed to the edge, and Mamma believe me they were resisting it with all the strength that the little ones had. It was heart rending to see the scared juveniles trying to get away from the edge as the push of the bodies took them further towards the edge. Then the adults would just picked up the juveniles and throw them into the abyss.

  Some of the juveniles wrapped their limbs onto those of the adults in a bid to desperately cling on to something, but the adults simply jumped themselves. We stood there dumbfounded as we saw thousands upon thousands of Shaitans flinging themselves kilometers below into burning lava. There was not a single word that was spoken over the radio Mamma, which is amazing for us. We are a noisy platoon.

  Mamma, the only word we heard over the radio was from our Major, and she said just one word – “Lemmings”.

  Chapter 29

  Eulogy

  Home World #12

  The Last day of the world

  This is the last message from beings of the world 12. I, seer Taste of Harmony, eldest of the council of seers, am sending the final message from this world. This world of our beings, where once lived 43 million souls will be bereft of life of our beings in less than a cycle. The bodies of those millions of beings writhing in agony as they liquefy and die. The minds of those beings still sentient as they watch their bodies slowly melt. The involuntary death odor expelled by the millions inside the chambers so foul and overbearing, that it drives some of the beings insane.

  Once the last of us is gone from this world, all that will be left here would be stomping noises of the spawns of Ka through the great chambers of our beautiful world. We have given these spawns of Ka a name, for if any spawn of Ka our beings have ever encountered in history deserve a name, these spawns have to be the one. We call them Ka-Baal, the stealer of souls.

  How did we come to this? The story of the destruction and tragedy of our home world 12 began with me nearly 12 thousand cycles ago, at the beginning of my lifetime. It seems fitting that it is me, who is now narrating the last episode of the story of my home world near the end of my life. It is amazing to realize that within one lifetime, the Ka-Baal who were discovered by us as a weak and insignificant spawns of Ka, have managed to come to our home world and destroy it.

  The warrior, builder and curious caste have been sending you the factual details of the attack on our home world from time to time. The last of those technical observations from our world are attached with this final message. I will just dwell on the metaphysical, philosophical and emotional message of the council of seers as the final legacy of our home world to you as our final gift, in the hope that our kind will survive in you.

  If you notice, I said ‘In the hope of our survival’ and not ‘to help you defeat the enemy’, for we the seers of the council are far from certain about the ultimate survival of our kind in this conflict. Seer Taste of Fraternity, the most knowledgeable of our kind in the history of our beings assures us that never before in the history of our beings have we faced such an existential threat to our beings.

  The Ka-let and the Ka-Sthaal, the only other two spawns of Ka that our beings have encountered worthy of earning a name for themselves, killed many of our beings but never were we in any danger of being exterminated ourselves. The rest of the spawns of Ka our kind have exterminated were so weak that they have not even been worth naming.

  The Ka-Sthaal were worthy warriors who repelled and destroyed most of our invasion force into their world. The Ka-Sthaal however did not show the capability to travel to our worlds and attack them. As a result we slowly wore the home world of the Ka-Sthaal down especially with Ka-ma-khya, until they could resist no more and we were able to fulfil our holy duty of extermination.

  The Ka-let were capable of reaching our home worlds and did mount a few attack on our worlds, killing our beings. However the act of travelling the long distance to our home world left the Ka-let so spent at the end of the journey, that their attacks were ineffective and easily countered. The Ka-let were unworthy warriors and weak beings. A single instance of Ka-ma-khya broke their will and we were easily able to exterminate them in our next attack.

  The Ka-Baal are nothing like any of the spawns of Ka that we have encountered before. They are not just worthy warriors, but according to the assessment of the warrior seers, there is not a single aspect of warrior craft where they are not superior to our beings. The Ka-Baal are strong willed beings. So strong willed in fact that they brushed aside a Ka-ma-khya and immediately launched a counter attack.

  That in itself would not have discouraged us, for our beings would have done the same. That is what the Ka-Sthaal had also done, but we had worn them down eventually with repeated Ka-ma-khya. What really broke the morale of the warriors was when we saw how they defended themselves against our next Ka-ma-khya.

  The way they evaporated our attack into nothingness, told us that this was no ordinary enemy we were facing, for in the long history of our beings, no one had thought it possible to have a defense against a Ka-ma-khya. Obviously we were wrong. At that moment we realized that there was nothing we the beings of world 12 had, that could threaten, intimidate or even bother Ka-Baal.

  The home world of the Ka-Baal is large and so bountiful that it was not thought possible that such a rich world could exist, except in the realm of metaphysical speculation. This gives the enemy access to resources that no single world of ours can hope to match. Their home world has liquid water on its surface in quantities that are unimaginable even in our wildest speculation, which not just gives them the most precious resource they need, but also makes our Ka-ma-khya less effective.

  The only advantage we thought we had over the Ka-Baal was their technological primitiveness. This notion unfortunately has been shattered by their attack on our world. By all my reckoning as the eldest of the curious caste, I would say that they are technologically at least at par with our beings, and possible slightly advanced in certain aspects. Why did we underestimate the enemy’s technological capabilities so badly? Because they displayed technological primitiveness initially.

  We started suspecting deception when they would raise their technological level every time just enough to thwart our attempts at cleansing them from this universe. It has to be deception, for they could not have advanced in technology during a single lifetime of our beings, surely that is not possible. Our beings took millions of cycles to make such advances. We believe that they are being helped by the Ka-let, who have reached out from their graves to extract a measure of revenge on our beings. We know for certain now that some survived on the 4th planet.

  All this is known to you all my fellow beings, for we have discussed these things with all our worlds over my lifetime. These traits of the enemy may have caused setback, sufferings and deaths amongst our beings, but they are not even the most terrifying thing about the enemy. The truth about the Ka-Baal is so terrifying that my old body shakes more violently than usual, as those thoughts surface inside my brain.

  The Ka-Baal are capable of snatching the soul of a being itself and bending it to their will. The
y don’t always kill a warrior in combat, which had puzzled us initially. During the invasion of our world, we would often find the enemy dragging away our wounded or trapped warriors or other caste beings. This was unnatural, killing the enemy was the natural order of things.

  It was only when our warriors, practicing their craft, would sneak into the enemy held territories to gather intelligence, did we find out the terrible truth. Our beings captured and imprisoned would sing their ordeal loudly over and over again as they slowly lost their mind and their souls. Often they would sing so loudly that their own auditory membranes would get damaged, so tortured would their mind, body and souls be.

  Those songs of pain and misery would echo hauntingly around the passages of our beautiful world until they were audible faintly to our warriors sent for reconnaissance. While those songs of torture pained had disturbed us, what really scared the listening warriors, and has forced us to take this terrible decision about the fate of our beautiful world, was the contents of those songs.

  The Ka-Baal are capable of such terrible and terrifying acts that our beings have not even conceived of such evil in our philosophy. It seems as if these are not the spawns of Ka but, Ka itself. We the dying beings of this world 12 warn you my fellow beings. This is not just the most dangerous spawns of Ka and the toughest challenge of Ka our beings have ever faced. This time all of you my fellow beings are struggling for your very survival.

  We have faced enemies who have harmed us, and who have killed our beings. We have conceived and defended against enemies who can destroy our void vessels, destroy our worlds and bring the life of a being to an end. We never conceived of enemies who could keep our beings alive, and take the free will of the being away. The being would become a slave of Ka-Baal, a machine whom the enemy could order to do anything and tell any secrets of our beings that the hapless being might know. The being becomes a zombie at the command of the Ka-Baal.