Alex got busy with his sword and shield using the technique practiced. The technique worked quite well. He had lost count of the number of alien limbs he had hacked and slashed. He didn’t have time to see the effect on the alien after having slashed its limbs, for there was another limb upon him by then. Either from the same alien or a different one.
The second line behind Alex was equally busy. They were using their long spear to good effect. With the first line blocking the way, they could not bring their swords into play simultaneously. That was the reason they had the long spear. They poked the spears in between the men of the first line of Marines. In effect they doubled the number of humans attacking simultaneously. While there was place for only 30 humans to stand side by side, 60 humans were attacking simultaneously.
They would jab and stab the aliens where it hurt them most – on their bodies with the long reaching spears, and let the tear in their suits do their work. Many aliens tried to bypass the first line by jumping over them, although it was getting increasingly difficult for them to do so with a heap of bodies, mostly alien in front of the line.
The aliens who managed to jump over the front line, were greeted with outstretched spears that impaled them through their belly. If that didn’t get them, then the aliens were met with vicious slashes from the swords of the second line. Despite this a few managed to get past the second line as well.
Behind the second line stood three soldiers. Takamori and a soldier each from the Scottish regiment and the PLA. These were the only other trained swordsman in the human contingent, other than Cheng who was busy elsewhere. They carried no shields, just their swords, but could cut down the aliens with expert strokes.
The expert swordsmen required more space, and hence preferred to work behind, where there was more space. The three of them were getting really overworked, as more and more of the aliens started getting through. They were really thankful, when many of Leanna’s men from the pike trenches started making it back to bolster their meager rank of three.
Now with the humans from the trenches back behind their own lines or dead, the six soldiers perched on top were free to use their own wicked weapons.
At -179° C temperature, with one and a half times the atmospheric pressure, both oxygen and propane were liquids on the surface of Titan. Propane was freely available on the surface of titan flowing in the rivers of methane. There was no danger of it burning up, since there is no oxygen on the surface.
Oxygen production capability is one thing that the humans had brought down to the surface in abundant capacity with them. Mr. Gupta’s team had been able to rake up nearly a thousand liters of excess oxygen during the time they had to prepare. Propane extraction had been a breeze from the nearby river.
The two liquids had been stored in two spare nuclear fuel containment vessels available to them, and were embedded into a niche dug about 10 meters above the pass just above the pike positions. Sasha and his team had been able to modify standard gas valves meant for regulating oxygen flow into the habitat, into spray nozzles.
They were then attached to simple hand pumps, originally meant for manual CO2 scrubbing. The assembled contraption could spray the liquid well over 40 meters effectively. Perched 10 meters high and in the low gravity of Titan, the fuel could travel even further, but it turned into atomizing spray beyond a point making it ineffective.
On three niches 10 meters above the pass, high enough that no one could attack them by simply jumping up, sat six humans. Two on each perch. The fuel tank lines ran to them and between them they could cover over 100 meters of the pass below.
The entire pass was now clogged with aliens, dead and alive. They had almost come to a standstill now, but their sheer weight was slowly pushing the human line back. The only thing that was keeping the advance in check was the constantly chattering machine gun, still in single mode but firing more than a round every second. It did not lack targets.
The machine gun was the only thing able to reach out and kill aliens beyond the first line, and that created heaps of frenzied aliens in their death throes, which impeded the advance of the aliens further behind. Now however the machine gun fell silent. Even with the constant scream and shout over the radio channel, to the human ears that was a deafening silence. They had expected it, but hoped against hope that the bullets from the machine gun would last forever.
Takamori was the first to recover, and stepped back to avoid a slashing alien and give himself a moment to shout out the orders. “Put the flames on. Takamori here. Repeat. Put the flames on.”
He got three simultaneous replies. “Flame on”.
It was too much to expect the engineers to make a flame thrower nozzle out of the limited equipment they had. What they made was much simpler. Two individual nozzles separated by about 12 inches. One spraying liquid oxygen, while the other spraying liquid propane. The separate sprays ensuring that the flame would not climb back to the nozzles.
The operator simply hosed down the liquid spray, trying to cover the massed aliens below evenly, while the other person used an invention of Dr. Matsumoto. Yusuke had over 2 Kg of solid fuel based cutting equipment, as part of his geological toolkit. These are essentially used for cutting through rocks and drilling into them without using power tools.
A small amount of the solid fuel is wrapped in plastic along with another smaller plastic bag inside it. Just squeeze the small plastic bag to rupture and mix it with the solid fuel and it becomes chemically unstable and even dropping it from hand will cause it to burst into intense flames for a few seconds.
The aliens had already been soaked in fuel and oxygen, all that was required was an ignition source to start combustion. The small firebombs were thrown liberally, and three sections of the gathered mass of aliens erupted in flames, that looked surreal in the cold atmosphere of Titan.
The heat was so intense that the operators started feeling hot in their suits, which automatically shut off their own heating system. Despite the separated nozzles, the operators had to be careful. They could not spray continuously. The fire could still climb back very fast to damage their own suits.
The operators chose spots deliberately, where there was no fire and sprayed those areas. Firebombs were no longer required to start a flame. The heat would turn the oxygen and the propane into gas, spreading around to other areas and igniting unburnt liquid.
One would have thought that the fiery carnage playing in the pass would relieve pressure on the battered and exhausted marines. However for the first minute or so, it only increased their troubles. Frenzied Shaitans on Fire kept running straight and hurled themselves at them. They had to use their shields to try to keep the burning aliens away from them.
It was then, that they found that Mr. Gupta’s foam had one more wonderful, albeit accidental property. The heat of the fire would slowly melt the foam into liquid, which would start dripping off the suit like melting wax, carrying off most of the heat and leaving the suit relatively undamaged.
When the push of the aliens was no longer felt by the marines and it became obvious that no more aliens were coming through the pass, and whatever aliens that remained in the pass were either burnt to death or dying, Alex gave the order to cease the flames. They needed to conserve as much fuel as possible for the next attack.
Even after five minutes when the next attack did not come, he let himself indulge in the luxury of hope. Is it possible that we have beaten the aliens back? Alex would learn later that the aliens had not paused due to their flame throwers. The battle had paused due to the drama playing out in the mountains.
Chapter 30
For Humanity
Cheng knew they had walked into a trap. They were in trouble. Deep trouble. He desperately wanted to call for help and additional support from Takamori below. But he knew, that is what the enemy wanted. That was the entire objective of this trap. He had underestimated the enemy, and now he and his team should be the only ones paying the price. He cannot jeopardize the entire human pos
ition due to his mistake. He has to set this right.
He had stopped thinking of these aliens as mindless beasts. He had started developing that image of the aliens in his mind, after seeing the first two waves of attack. That was a feint, he realized. A ploy to put the humans in a false sense of security and superiority. They had played the exact same game here, and he had fallen into their trap.
He retraced the sequence of events in his mind to figure out where he had gone wrong, and how he could set it right. The enemy had tried to sneak in, with the original objective of trying to flank the humans, and attack from behind. Sgt. Lao had spotted them just as they were reaching the top, just in time so to say.
The eight soldiers of the mountain squad were the only human soldiers who were carrying a gun right now. All the remaining thousand odd bullets had been given to them. That was still just over a hundred per head. They could only use them in single fire mode for distraction and tactical advantage, nothing more. With all the bullets they had, they could only kill 3 aliens per head according to their estimates.
Sgt. Lao had used his bullets well. He got into position and started targeting the aliens as they were precariously perched, and walking over small pitons dug into the sheer cliff wall. They had learnt from Leanna that hurting their body had much greater effect than hurting their limbs, and this was confirmed when Sgt. Lao hit a few on the limbs with little effect.
A few well aimed shots on their body however made them lose enough coordination that they would struggle to stay perched precariously. It would hardly make a difference to them on solid ground, but here balancing on the pitons became a challenge and most fell eventually about 150 meters below to what was hoped would be their death. Even if they had higher tolerance to trauma, it would certainly injure them seriously.
The problem Sgt. Lao faced was that there were still a few of them who were getting through, and some had already gotten through before he had reached here. To make matters worse, he ran out of bullets after dropping about 25 of the aliens. Only Cheng had been able to reach him by then for support, and he was not carrying a gun.
The aliens who had managed to successfully run the gauntlet of the sheer cliff walk on the pitons, were jumping on to a ledge, which snaked in towards the ridge where Sgt. Lao and now Cheng were positioned.
The ridge had a sheer drop on both sides, forcing anyone to cross 20 meters on top of the ridge, before the side towards the caldera started sloping gently enough to climb down to the valley and into the caldera itself. So those 20 meter of the ridge was like a pass which the aliens would have to cross before they could rush into the heart of the human base.
So Sgt. Lao joined Cheng with his sword to defend the pass. The pass was narrow. Two humans could stand side by side, but not fight side by side. The wider alien bodies meant that they had to tip toe over the ridge in a clumsy sort of walk. Cheng was standing right at the beginning of the ridge to defend it with his sword. Realizing that it may be possible for aliens to jump over Cheng in this low gravity, Sgt. Lao took position about 5 meters behind Cheng to stop that possibility.
Cheng was taking advantage of the clumsy positioning of the alien limbs and was constantly swooping down and slashing at them, even while the ability of the aliens to thrust their front limbs at Cheng, and yet maintain balance was reduced.
There were a lot of aliens lined up one behind the other, and some took advantage of Cheng’s preoccupation with the foremost alien, and leaped over him as anticipated by Sgt. Lao. He did not have Cheng’s finesse in swordsmanship, but Lao made up for it with his brute force and speed. He was a big man even by western standards. The humans had the advantage of sure footing which the aliens did not and they made hay while the sun shone.
Between the two of them, they would have dropped 12 to 15 aliens, when the next member of the mountain squad was able to reach them. He had already been instructed to start shooting conservatively at the bodies of the aliens crossing over, and he started the task immediately.
By the time Lt. Ma and most of the squad were able to join them, Cheng thought that they were on a roll. Very few of the aliens were getting past the pitons due to the bullets, and those that did were being easily dispatched by the reinforced line of swordsmen standing guard over the ridge.
Any human commander would have called off the assault in the face of 100% losses, and yet they kept on coming to get slaughtered. Cheng did not give it a thought at that moment, dismissing it as instinctive animal behavior. The squad was on a high, feeling good about the massive kills they were raking up. Some of them were even laughing.
That changed when one of them noticed a Shaitan coming from the other end of the ridge. The ridge on the other end was very different from this end. It started as a large plateau, falling off into sheer cliffs on all sides, except on one side where it extended towards them, on a fairly wide passage comfortable for even three Shaitans to walk side by side.
This wide passage reached the point the mountain squad was defending, where it sloped down gently enough to go down to the caldera. There was one narrow choke point on this otherwise wide passage.
The choke point was really an ice bridge. The large plateau and the ridge they were defending had once been a single mountain, but millions of years ago, a methane river had found a hole in the mountain and over millions of years kept eroding the mountain, progressively cutting it down, until it was 200 meters below now. This is how gorges formed on earth with water, and this is how it happens on Titan with Methane Rivers.
They had to stop the aliens from crossing the ice bridge. It was not so simple to defend the ice bridge, as it was on this end with the pass. A human would just as easily slip and fall to his death if he tried to stand on the bridge and fight.
You had to either cross the bridge and fight before the aliens got on the bridge, or stand on this end and fight the aliens just as they got off the bridge. On Earth they would have stood at their own end, and prevented the aliens getting off the bridge. Thus forcing those aliens to fight on the bridge, and causing them to fall off it.
Titan’s lower gravity however complicated that strategy. The aliens could simply jump before getting off the bridge and fly over the humans to land behind them. There was another plateau on this side of the bridge, with ample space for the aliens to land without the risk of falling off.
Another human could not simply stand behind the first defender to thwart the jump strategy, like they were doing on this side of the ridge. There was too much space on either side. Aliens would be able to jump one after the other on multiple sides of the defender, and be able to overwhelm them.
So the mountain squad had to cross over to the other side and fight them, which meant facing multiple Shaitans from multiple sides. That could not be good for the life expectancy of the mountain squad.
Sgt. Lao asked Lt. Ma to take his place behind Major Cheng, and instructed his mountain squad except the soldier who was shooting to follow him. He also asked all of them to leave their guns for the shooter, so that he could use whatever bullets were left in them.
He crossed the bridge just as the first Shaitan was coming over to the bridge to cross it. Within seconds seven of the soldiers of the mountain squad had crossed the bridge and were engaged in a grim and desperate fight with increasing numbers of Shaitans, as they climbed onto the plateau.
The pressure on Cheng’s side had eased a bit as the shooter was able to pick off most of the aliens walking over the pitons, but not enough for him to leave his post. He however had time to steal backward glances to look at the situation on the other side of the ridge. He knew the situation was slowly turning hopeless. There were more Shaitans climbing in every few seconds, and the humans were not killing them fast enough.
Where were the aliens coming from? If it was possible to come from that end, why had they attempted to come from this precarious end in the first place? That end of the bridge looked far safer anyway. Cheng asked Ma, who hadn’t had a jumper to dispatch in the last minute
, and was relatively free to investigate.
Lt. Ma surprised Cheng by jumping over him towards the ledge where the aliens were coming from, and landed on it as surefooted as a mountain goat, and as graceful as a cat. Women seem to thrive in low gravity. Cheng had seen the amazing flying moves of Leanna before, and now Ma. It seem to come naturally to them. Cheng would never have dared make such a jump himself.
Lt. Ma turned back towards Cheng and peered past him towards the plateau where the aliens were assembling. Cheng shouted out that an alien was coming towards her, from behind her. She simply repeated her jump, this time in the opposite direction, with the same agility and grace.
“I know why they didn’t come from that direction originally. There is no route that leads to that end. The only route is from this end that we are defending. They are jumping off the pitons somewhere before the bend, where we can’t see them. They are jumping and trying to catch hold of a slope on the other side of the ravine.
It is a very slippery and steep slope. After hitting the slope they try to dig their claws to stop their slide. Some of them succeed some don’t. Whoever succeeds then climbs up the steep slope using their claws to reach the plateau. While I stood on the ledge, I counted 6 jumps and 4 of them fell to their deaths.” Ma finished her report.
Things became clear to Cheng now. The sneak invasion of the Shaitans was always meant to be from this route that they were defending. Unfortunately for the aliens, their sneak invasion was discovered before they could actually sneak in any Shaitan. This position favors the defenders so strongly, that it was not possible for a single Shaitan to get in. The alien losses were 100% with no casualty on the human side.
The alien commander must have realized the hopelessness of the attempt immediately. However the alien commander was thinking much more broadly in strategic terms than Cheng was. The primary objective of this sneak attack was to flank and attack from behind.
The Battle of Titan Page 49