The Battle of Titan

by Sudipto Majumdar

  This is what the Hàoqí did right now, pointing itself downwards towards the plane of the solar system, and the thrusters pointed up the plane of the solar system. It however did not fire up its thrusters, it continued sedately towards the approaching zombies offering them a target.

  All the four zombies were forced to bunch up together to try to hit the one target, and this was the intention of the human planners. When Hàoqí had reached the correct distance from the zombies, it started firing the shotguns one by one.

  Hàoqí had only two missile ports, each of a different caliber. One was meant to fire the shotguns. It fired all the six missiles stored inside it. There was no point holding back now. The alien ship will not have time to fire and position more zombies.

  The missiles streaked towards the zombies at fast clip accelerating in the empty of space without any encumbrances of atmosphere, and quickly put a fair amount of distance between itself and the Hàoqí. Still the Hàoqí held its nerve and continued forward on an apparent collision course with the zombies, not veering a bit.

  The zombies had no option but to continue on the same course if they wanted to hit Hàoqí, despite them being aware of the missiles approaching them. If they tried to avoid the missiles, their weak ion thrusters may not be able to get back on a collision course in time.

  A few milliseconds before each shotgun reached the zombies, it burst open its canister of pellets in a small controlled explosion designed to spread the pellets as evenly as possible in a circular fashion around the missile.

  The shotguns were timed to spread their pellets across a radius of 100 meters so that even the worst case targeting of the missile will ensure that the edges of the blast of the pellet catch the approaching zombies. In the end the targeting was not that bad.

  All of the four zombies were forced to bunch together in a radius of 10 meters to be able to hit Hàoqí which was about 10 meters in diameter. All the six shotgun’s pellets caught the zombies fairly square and hundreds of pieces of one of the densest man made material ripped through them. All four of the ion thrusters of the four zombies went dead.

  Hàoqí meanwhile had waited for the shotguns to fire, and then lit up its main thrusters. The distance between Hàoqí and the point of collision of the shotguns and zombies was not very much, and the collective approach speed was very high.

  If Hàoqí had to put the Kilometer or so safe distance between the approaching path of the debris of the zombies and some of the ricocheting pellets, then only the larger thrust of the main thruster would do. It fired the thrusters for only few seconds before the debris crossed its path and Hàoqí had survived the encounter safely.

  It now turned and got back to the path of its main quarry. The alien ship had still been decelerating. Once it realized that Hàoqí had survived unscathed, it shut down its thrusters and started turning at an angle to repeat the same trick it had performed on Sentinel.

  There is an old saying in Chinese – “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” The Chinese were in no mood for being fooled twice. They had learnt from the experience of the Sentinel, and they had not left their big guns at home like the Americans had.

  The Chinese had decided not to be subtle with their nukes. They had packed two thermo-nuclear missiles into Hàoqí. Each warhead weighed about 350 Kg. The Chinese were however under the similar weight restriction issues as the Sentinel had been, so they had compromised on the rocket and propulsion of the missiles.

  They had custom designed the missile by reducing the amount of fuel it would carry, and reduced the size of the missile rocket to a third of the normal for such a warhead on earth even for a short range missile. This had enabled them to keep the total weight of the missile just under 500Kg or half a ton. This had still busted their weight budget, but they had managed it somehow by stripping weight off rest of the spacecraft.

  The missile could burn for just under five minutes before it ran out of fuel, and its acceleration was far lower than what would be expected of a human missile in space. This missile was however not meant to build speed to ram or chase enemy.

  It would already be at a considerable relative speed as it approached its target. More speed was bad for its targeting. This missiles rocket was meant to position it in the right place as it approached its target at a high velocity. In many ways the missiles’ rockets were meant to act as a very powerful lateral positioning thruster.

  For all the trouble the Chinese went to accommodate their heavy warhead, the reward was a yield of over two mega tons. That should hopefully give the aliens a pause.

  The alien ship was depending on one advantage of physics which no human trick could negate. By angling itself from the direction of approach of Hàoqí, it would ensure that the vessel ramming into it could only deliver a glancing blow at it, no matter which direction it was pointed at the moment.

  Hàoqí could not change the direction of momentum it had built up over so many months travelling towards the alien craft. The Hàoqí unlike the Sentinel was not depending on its momentum to deliver the death blow.

  At the pre-calculated time, which would ensure that the thermo-nuclear missiles would not run out of fuel, no matter which direction the alien ship pointed its ion thrusters, the two missiles were launched one by one at an interval of one minute. The nukes chased down the alien craft inexorably towards their terminal approach.

  The alien craft didn’t seem to bother with trying to evade or make any reaction at all. It was perhaps confident of the tiny mass of the missiles doing no damage at all to the ship. At the worst, it thought that the missiles might be carrying primitive chemical explosives like the one it had seen from the previous human space craft.

  Contrary to what is shown in popular movies, a nuclear explosion in space is one of the least spectacular events. To the humans watching the feed from Hàoqí, it looked positively disappointing.

  There was no sound possible in space. There was no pressure wave because there is no air. There is no debris flying away faster than the speed of sound as there is nothing lying around in space to fly around. There is hardly any gas ejected either like in a conventional explosive, which would give a halo and enhance the visual effect of a nuclear explosion. There certainly is no mushroom cloud.

  All Jason and the people gathered in the control hall saw was a brilliant flash of light lasting about 2 seconds before it faded, followed by the faint glow of the alien ships for a few seconds. The alien ship had heated up so much in those few seconds of exposure to hard radiation that it glowed in the visible light for a few seconds and was red hot in the infrared.

  The effect on its port side was nothing short of devastating. There was a neat large roundish hole cauterized on the side of ship closer to the aft section. Most laymen would have been amazed that the ship was still in one piece after a 2 megaton nuke had blown next to it.

  However any physicist would tell you the innumerable inefficiencies involved in throwing a nuke at space ship. Still 2 megaton was a lot of energy to throw. Anything made out of materials known to humans would have melted the ship completely by now.

  It just went to show how tough a material this alien ship must be made of, and proved that it was some material not known to humans. The other effect of the nuke blowing up next to the ship was that it had been pushed into a tumble by the kinetic energy released by the blast.

  It was not a huge uncontrollable tumble, but large enough to be noticed by naked eyes. The amazing thing was that the ship was still functioning. This was apparent by the fact that its main ion thruster was still lit, and the attitude stabilization thruster on the other side, which was undamaged were firing to control the tumble!

  This was a supreme testament to the toughness, resilience and perhaps redundancy of the ship. No human ship would have been able to continue functioning after taking this kind of damage.

  The humans however were not finished yet. The second missile had been timed with a delay of one minute for a purpose. If it had w
anted to slam the alien ship in a quick one-two punch, it could have gone in a few seconds after the first one.

  Since there is no blowback in space nuclear explosion, it could have followed the first within a few seconds distance at this speed which would have ensured it is safe from the previous explosion. It was anticipated that the tremendous energy released in the first explosion would change the course of the ship.

  The second missile scanned the changed trajectory of the alien ship, made calculation and adjusted the direction of its thrust accordingly to aim at the ship. That is the reason it was given a minute’s delay to have the time to make the adjustments.

  It was not yet possible with the kind of computing power available to humans, to exactly aim at the hole created by the first explosion. It may not have been possible either, since the ship was spinning and tumbling now, and the hole was coming in and out of view of Hàoqí and the incoming missile. If that could be achieved, then it would be game over for the alien ship as the nuke exploded inside the ship, and no amount of engineering could prevent it from blowing apart.

  The second missile blew up in a similar anti-climactic blast, and it was a few more seconds before they could make out the result. They had not been that lucky. As expected the second blast had hit the ship on a different side, almost at the opposite end to the previous strike towards the bow of the vessel.

  This explosion also had created an equally large hole, and now the main ion thrusters had gone dark. They could also see some kind of venting from the second hole which spouted out like a geyser and turned to ice as it cooled in space.

  It could be some kind of coolant or the atmosphere itself. The ship had gone into a further tumble, which while still not wild was very noticeable. The alien ship was over 10,000 tons heavy. It took a lot to get it into a wild spin.

  The whole control hall erupted in unison into a wild cheer. Jason could faintly hear the din of similar cheers from the split screen of the control rooms of Darmstadt and Beijing. Everyone was clapping each other’s shoulders and had taken their eyes off the screen, congratulating each other when there was a scream and a shout from someone in the room. “Look! Look! On the screen!”

  Hàoqí was still a few minutes away from a collision course with the alien ship. That is why they were still getting the feeds from it. While the missiles had accelerated towards the space craft, Hàoqí was coasting towards it.

  To the collective amazement and gasps in the room. The attitude thrusters of the alien ship came alive and started firing trying to stabilize the spin and the tumble of the ship! Someone was still alive on that ship, and it was trying to revive the ship! They say that if you hunt a tiger, you better kill it good. Never leave a wounded tiger alive, for it is more dangerous.

  The aliens inside must now be bitter with hatred. They had nothing to lose and must be screaming for vengeance. Even if they did not have a single weapon on that ship, the ship itself was a weapon. Even if their main thrusters were dead, just their attitude and lateral thrusters were enough to aim it towards the earth from so far away.

  It was still going at such a huge speed and had so much mass, that no power on earth could stop it. It may not cause an extinction level event, if it crashed on earth, but it would definitely wipe out hundreds of square kilometers with the kinetic energy it would unleash on the impact site. Any city it chose to fall on would be molten slag with just a large crater left.

  And they had no more bullets left to kill the wounded tiger with! It would be little use to bombard the ship from earth orbit with nukes. It would not change its momentum enough for it to miss earth. The impact would raise so much ash and dust into the atmosphere, that there would be a mini nuclear winter triggered.

  Many years later the US and its allies would learn about the innovation that the Chinese had pioneered with the Hàoqí craft and refined with subsequent designs. It was really a simple thing which anyone could do, but the US would never adopt it even after learning about it. It just did not conform to western safety standards or moral/ethical code.

  Since the 1970s all space crafts that could not or would not depend on solar radiation and solar cells for power carried a block of plutonium as their source of power. The plutonium would slowly release heat in a radioactive decay which would be converted into electricity using thermal-electric conversion.

  The waste heat was used to keep the craft warm enough for the electronics and the sensors to function. This was a dirty solution, as plutonium is toxic and highly poisonous to humans in addition to being highly radioactive. However the risk was considered acceptable for spy satellites and long range missions which would never return to earth.

  Humans didn’t have any better technology to generate power on a continuous basis over a long period of time without carrying hundreds of tons of conventional fuel and oxygen. Neither did they have a small enough conventional nuclear reactor which could be launched into space to power up the craft. It would neither be feasible from a weight nor cost perspective.

  The plutonium ball was considered a quick and cheap but dirty solution. It was usually a few kilograms of plutonium, less than the critical mass, so there was no danger of fission explosion at all. All craft that went beyond Jupiter, which could not rely on solar power carried one. Sedna -1 had one and so did the Sentinel.

  Hàoqí had as similar solution but with a twist. It carried sub-critical mass plutonium for power, but with a special shape; and it did not carry just one of them, but five. This was not just to supply it with extra power and heating, of which it had enough. The special shape was designed for a purpose.

  The five segments of sub-critical plutonium were shaped as hollow concentric tubes that would fit into each other if pushed together, with the last one a solid cylinder fitting at the center. They were sheathed in a single long stainless steel tube along the mid spine of the craft, and placed pulled apart at the common axis.

  An explosive powered piston could slam all of them together into one another to create a single cylindrical block of super-critical plutonium and slam it to the other end of the stainless tube cylinder, which was packed externally with a few kg of conventional high explosive.

  The slamming action would trigger the conventional explosives turning the whole device into a simple fission bomb similar to the first atomic bombs made a hundred years ago.

  This was a state secret which Beijing had not let anyone but a few in the inner circle know. Thus Jason and his team watched in despair as the brave and feisty Hàoqí plunged towards the alien ship, in what they thought was a vain attempt to slam into it and stop it. Sentinel had tried that and it hadn’t helped much.

  The two big holes created by the nukes only covered about 20% of the surface area of the still tumbling and spinning alien craft. The rest of craft had its hull intact. So there was only one in five chance that Hàoqí would find one of the holes and be able to slam inside the craft.

  Probably it was not yet humanity’s time to die, because it beat the odds and found one of the holes and exploded inside the ship.

  Compared to the previous two thermo-nuclear explosions, this nuclear explosion was tiny. Its yield was only about 12 kilotons, half a percent of the previous two explosions, and smaller than the first atomic blast at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However this nuclear explosion happened inside the alien ship, and that made all the difference.

  While the previous explosions could only deliver a few percent of their yield on the hardened surface of the alien craft due to the geometry, the entire energy of this nuclear explosion was absorbed by the soft innards of the ship. Nothing but molten slag was left inside. It was completely, thoroughly and conclusively dead. Today human kind had dodged a bullet!

  Chapter 14

  Shaitan

  Early summer of 2039

  It was in the summer that Ramesh returned from Tampa bay Florida, where he had been interning with NASA. It was a few month since the fateful encounter with the alien ship. Some thought the alien ship was unmanned
, or unaliened as one would like to think. So it should be called an alien probe. It had also meant the destruction of Sedna – 1, and Jorge’s best hope of finding the alien home world.

  They all decided that in celebration of Ramesh’s return, they would spend the day on the famous Waikiki beach, and take a much needed break after the intense activities of the last few months. Jorge was a bit amused and gave a smile, when he saw Fluentez arriving with Ramesh, instead of with her inseparable friend Mischa.

  “These two are becoming quite a couple I see.” He mentioned to Mischa, who was comfortably ensconced in his arms. “Umm…” sounded Mischa absently. She was just too comfortable right now in his arms.

  “There… I can add another thing to my resume.” Jorge said with a smile. “Jorge, the cupid matchmaker par excellence!” He said with a wave of his hands in a theatrical voice. “I wonder if that would help in getting me any research grants later.” Mischa just giggled and didn’t bother to reply.

  After their greetings, they decided to settle down in the shade, it was too hot in the sun. They sipped on their coconut water and discussed all and sundry that had happened in the last few months. They even caught up on gossip around the campus. Jorge shared what he had learnt about Heidi and Dr. Herman Heinz.

  The ladies were full of sympathy for Heidi, which puzzled both Jorge and Ramesh. “Hey I think you ladies perhaps didn’t get the facts I told right. It is Dr. Heinz who is the aggrieved party out here. She ditched him, not the other way round.” Jorge couldn’t help saying.

  “Oh shut up Jorge. You have no sensitivity or empathy. You men don’t have any idea what hard choices a woman has make and to go through in life!” Mischa said forcefully and stood up clutching her towel. “Flo, want to get into the water?” She said to Fluentez without really waiting for her and turned towards the water.