Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  By the time he finished his suit repair, Swiftness was feeling much better. The effect of the stimulant shot, coupled with the partial suit repair had done the job for now. He had to make a decision. Should he help his warrior struggling for his life, or should he go back to the second pilot and finish the job. He decide on the later. If the second pilot managed to start the engines of the shuttle with his remaining two limbs, then the mission would fail. His warrior would be blessed by the prophet if he dies in doing his holy duty.

  Thankfully the second pilot being a novice didn’t have the presence of mind to use his two functioning limbs to control the ship. Instead he was writhing in panic, as some of his limbs were no longer in his control. It was an easy job for Swiftness this time round as the poison had taken effect in all the four limbs, and he had to deal with only two of the limbs of the second pilot. After administering the second pilot, Swiftness quickly turned towards the first pilot to check on him. He was in a squat position, very still.

  On a whim, he decided to give the first pilot a command from the special program – “Do not harm anyone whose taste you are not familiar with, but shred your comrades from the academy whom you know, to pieces near the exit of the pilot chamber.”

  Despite all his fantasies about how a poisoned being would behave, when Swiftness actually saw the effect he was shocked and surprised. The first pilot bolted out of his squat position straight towards the exit of the pilot chamber. Swiftness followed him as he jumped into the melee of the Shaitans that had been fighting at the exit. Swiftness could taste that his warrior was dead. One of the non-believer warriors was mortally wounded and dying while the other non-believer warrior was repairing his own suit. The first pilot jumped on this warrior and started literally shredding the warrior to pieces. The warrior was so shocked and surprised at someone whose taste he knew intimately attacking him this way, that for a moment he did nothing but stood still. By the time the non-believer warrior attempted to offer defense, it was too late. The first pilot had literally shredded the hapless being’s suit in a frenzy that no sane being could have executed.

  Swiftness decided to use the zombie as his bodyguard, as he started heading back for the hatch through which he had entered the shuttle. On the way he met up with another of his own warriors who was repairing his suit. He asked the warrior. “How many of our warriors have made it to this shuttle?”

  “At least sixteen Master Taste of Swiftness, perhaps as many as thirty two. I am not very sure, I have been engaged in continuous fights with the non-believers. I would have been overwhelmed by them if not for the fortunate fact that these are all novice with little experience of a fight. They used pathetic tactic, and attacked without coordination one by one, even when they had numerical superiority. I think now our numbers are about even on this shuttle. There seem to be fewer non-believers entering the shuttle now. I think the Ka-Baal warriors have reached the space station and have managed to ebb the flow out of the space station.” The warrior replied.

  “Excellent news!” Swiftness replied. “Check for me that all four entrance hatches to the shuttle are being blocked by our warriors, and that no new non-believer can enter. And spread the word that the magic poison works even better than we imagined. Ask the warriors that whenever possible use the poison on the non-believers rather than killing them. A poisoned non-believer would be of much more value to us than a dead one.”

  The situation seemed to be in control, and things were going broadly according to plan. Swiftness had to admire the presence of mind of Master Offspring of God for adapting and using an unforeseen event to their advantage. Now all he had to do was to either kill or poison the rest of the non-believers still on the shuttle, and his part of the job would be done. He proceeded inwards into the shuttle with gusto, with his newly acquired zombie slave in tow.

  ---XXX---

  Things were not proceeding well. That much Lt. Pimenta could tell as he approached the entrance hatch to the shuttle. The heretic warriors were using the standard issue Shaitan space suits, although there had been modifications made on them for this mission. Externally though, the suits looked and felt exactly as any other Shaitan suit would. The only difference was that the heretic suits were coated with a thin layer of reflective fluorescent paint. The paint was for the benefit of the marines to be able to visually identify friend from foe. To the blind Shaitans, the layer of paint was not noticeable, but to the humans, the paint glowed slightly in the orange hue even in infrared light.

  Lt. Pimenta saw one of the heretics was being mobbed, strangulated and slashed by three non-believer Shaitans close to the entrance hatch. There was no other heretic warrior in sight to help this hapless heretic warrior, who to his credit was being able to fend off most of the slashes from those deadly claws of his opponent fairly deftly, despite being outnumbered three to one. By now things should have been fairly in control right at the entrance. This heretic warrior should not have been outnumbered at this position.

  This meant the operation was definitely behind schedule. Whether the operation was foo barred, one couldn’t say, but things had not proceeded smoothly and according to plan, at least on this shuttle. The only way he could find out would be to ask the heretic warrior who was fighting for his life. For that he would have to save the heretic’s life, which meant that he would have to jump into the fray and help the heretic warrior.

  A human getting into the fight for the shuttle was to be avoided as per the original plan. It was felt that the heretics would have a lot easier access to the shuttles, and most likely the heretics entering the shuttles would not be contested by the other Shaitans, mistaking them for their own, or at the least letting the heretics enter before asking questions. Lt. Pimenta figured, that deception was moot at this point anyway, with the non-believer Shaitans attacking the heretics, so he wouldn’t give away much more by joining the fight.

  The heretics had informed the humans, that Shaitan ships may be designed tough on the exterior, but they were just as easy to damage on the interior with firearms as any human ship was. The Shaitans never designed the ships with the possibility of a firefight ensuing in the narrow corridors that consisted of the interior of a Shaitan ship. If the shuttles were damaged, they would be useless for the mission, so such a chance could not be taken.

  Thus firing his weapons was not an option for Lt. Pimenta. Instead he deployed his service daggers that were embedded in the top side of the forearms of his suit, and strapped internally to his forearms and palms with braces to give the firmness of grip and to be able to thrust it inside the suited flesh of a Shaitan. On his mental command the blades flashed out about twenty five centimeters beyond the gloved knuckles of Lt. Pimenta. The blades were similar in shape and size to a Gladius, the roman short sword, and its purpose was similar to the Gladius as well – thrust, stab and parry.

  This was the melee weapon that the marines had found particularly useful and effective against the Shaitans in the Alpha Shaitan campaign. Usually if a Marine was using his melee weapon against a Shaitan, then it meant that the marine was in serious trouble. Either his ammo had run out, or he had been jumped by a Shaitan at close quarters. Whatever be the case, if a Marine was using his melee weapon on a Shaitan, it was the first few seconds of the fight that determined which of the two would walk out alive.

  If it was the marine who had ambushed the Shaitan then, if the marine was quick, he got two stab opportunities before the six limbs of the Shaitan would be able to restrain the arms and legs of the marine and start squeezing him in a death grip, while at least one of the Shaitans limbs would still be free to stab the marine armor and find the weak spot to reach the flesh and puncture the suit.

  If it was the Shaitan who ambushed the marine, then the end result would still be the same, but the marine usually got no chance to stab the Shaitan. The fighting instincts of the Shaitans, who themselves stabbed with their limbs was such that they usually went for the limbs of the enemy first and restrained them before trying to sta
b or squeeze the enemy themselves. That is where the capability of the service dagger to flash out of the forearms with stored energy came handy.

  Unless the marine was unlucky to have both his knuckles pointed toward his own body, while being restrained and crushed by the Shaitan’s limbs, the marine could simply give a mental command for those long daggers to flash out with force and stab some part of the body of the Shaitan. In fact the marine could give command to keep retracting and deploying the daggers, inflicting multiple stabs either in the same position or if there was any play of the arms possible for the pinned marine, then in multiple close by locations on the Shaitan body.

  Only the most seasoned and hardened of Shaitan warriors could ignore such multiple stabs. Most Shaitans would loosen their grip, if not release their prey momentarily. If the marine could keep his wits despite whatever injuries he may have suffered himself, and could be quick enough, then he would have a chance to inflict serious stab damage in some of the more vulnerable parts of the Shaitan anatomy, like the underbelly, or the neural nodes on the armpits of each limb. The worst thing the marine could do if he got the temporary reprieve from the Shaitan warrior, was try to run. You cannot outrun a Shaitan. Your best chance was to try and stab one of the vulnerable spots of the Shaitan in those first few second.

  If a marine was able to do that, and provided he was not too badly injured himself from the Shaitan stabbing him, then he would have to parry the stabbing and grabbing attempts of the Shaitan for the next few seconds. If the marine managed to do that, then and only then, would he slowly start gaining the upper hand over his adversary, as the movements of the Shaitan limbs would start getting more uncoordinated, less precise and increasingly sluggish. If the marine didn’t manage to do all this, then he would find himself being quickly crushed and simultaneously stabbed to death.

  All of this happened in the first few seconds of the fight, and that determined whether the human or the Shaitan walked out alive from the fight. It was usually the later. Lt. Pimenta knew all this. He had trained for hand-to-limb combat with the Shaitans. He had even fought ‘Guinea Pig’ Shaitans on Mars as part of his training. Despite various, pacifists, humanists, xenophiles and other bunch of assorted idiots, who had taken leave from all common sense and basic survival instincts innate in any living being, the USC-GCF had gone ahead and incubated Shaitans for training and experimentation purpose on Mars.

  It was with extreme foresight or short sight, depending on your perspective that the original USC charter had drawn up the boundary of individual national influence only till the orbit of Mars, but excluding Mars. This meant that USC didn’t have to listen to any particular nation’s dictates on Mars. It only needed the approval of the USC council, its governing body. If not for that, the USC could never have incubated the ‘Guinea Pig’ Shaitan, who were bred for the sole purpose of research on their body and psychology, or as sparring partners for Marines in training.

  Lt. Pimenta knew that fighting those Guinea Pig Shaitans was not the same thing as fighting out here. Those Guinea Pigs were untrained Shaitans, fighting only on instincts. That would not be the case here on a Shaitan military academy. He was likely to be facing student of combat training, or given his luck, one of the instructors.

  In the fraction of a second, that he had decided to jump into combat and use his already existing momentum to both stab as well as inflict an impact shock on the nearest non-believer Shaitan, he did not get a view of any of the Shaitan’s vulnerable parts. So he went for the next best thing. The top carapace of the creature, which was in plain sight. The combat daggers were sure to fund some of the organs of the Shaitans, but these aliens had a distributed body plan. Unlike humans they didn’t have any organ that was a singleton inside their body.

  Their circulatory system included multiple contracting muscles spread across their body that pumped the equivalent of blood around the body. There was no single heart to stab literally and metaphorically. Same with all critical organs of the Shaitan. The only single point of failure was their central brain, embedded deep inside their body. Being able to hit the central brain with your first stab was a matter of chance and luck, and the chances of that happening were pretty slim.

  Lt. Pimenta did the next best thing. He withdrew his fists slightly, which had impacted the body of the Shaitan fairly forcefully after the daggers had gone in all the way. He drew out the daggers from the body of the Shaitan till he could no longer feel the resistance of the flesh on the blades. The blades were now between the Shaitan body and its suit. He turned his arms slightly towards each other and ripped out a fairly large V-shaped section of the suit. Lt. Pimenta knew that the tear in the suit would not diminish the fighting ability of the Shaitan straight away, but he had learnt the Shaitan suit mechanics from the heretics. He knew that right now a fairly insistent tasting alarm would be blaring from the Shaitan’s suit computer all over his skin, insisting that he repair the suit. Lt. Pimenta hoped that this would make the Shaitan fight more conservatively.

  It had taken Lt. Pimenta just about a second to do all this, but within that time, the ambushed Shaitan had recovered from the surprise, disentangled himself from the heretic he was fighting and managed to get a few of his limbs to turn backwards in an attempt to stab him. Lt. Pimenta had seen this kind of move before from the Guinea Pig Shaitans. He knew it was an instinctive reaction to fend off an attack from the top, which was the only part of their anatomy where the Shaitans didn’t have sensory inputs, and where their limbs couldn’t curl back and reach well to fend off an attack or hit back at the attacker. So if you could get on top of a Shaitan somewhere in the middle of their carapace, you could hit a Shaitan blind spot, where their dangerous limbs couldn’t reach easily to stab back at their attacker.

  Despite his instincts screaming at him to get away from those limbs trying to stab him, and some of the scratching or denting his armor, his training took over. He hung on to the exact enter of the carapace and stabbed the Shaitan multiple times, each time tearing off a part of the suit. Then the Shaitan below did something unexpected. He ignored the stabbings of the lieutenant, brought back all its six limbs back on the nominal floor of the passage, and with all the force that his mighty limbs could muster pushed himself off the floor!

  Lt. Pimenta would later find out from the grateful heretic he saved from a certain death, that just as he had predicted, he had been unlucky to find an instructor of combat at the academy. This was a Shaitan who was trained to ignore pain, the blaring alarms of his suit and other distractions of a battle to concentrate on the only thing that could keep him alive – throw his attacker off balance. That is exactly what the Shaitan had done. In the weightless environment of space, the Shaitan lifted his body up with all of the considerable force he could muster, with Lt. Pimenta on top of him.

  Lt. Pimenta crashed into the nominal ceiling of the passage, and then was crushed with momentum of the massive body of the Shaitan. It was only the rigidity of the suit armor that kept Lt. Pimenta’s ribs from cracking and his spine from snapping. The suit couldn’t however, prevent the wind being knocked out of Lt. Pimenta’s body. Neither could the helmet completely pad his head from the blow. There was a sharp ring in Lt. Pimenta’s ears. One good thing about the dark environment and having to see in the infrared, Lt. Pimenta realized was that his blurred vision didn’t make much of a difference in the combat. His infrared picture was fuzzy in any case. Acute vision didn’t play that big a part in a combat in the dark anyway.

  The only positive part of the surprise leap of the Shaitan had been that the Shaitan had gotten stabbed with an equal amount of violence because Jesus Pimenta’s arms were in a stabbing position when the Shaitan had leaped. So when they bounced back from the ceiling, Jesus stayed stuck at the exact center of the carapace of the Shaitan. The two blades embedded into the flesh of the Shaitan acting like anchors. Jesus decided not to push his luck any further. If he got slammed to the ceiling once more with the same force, he would be done for.

>   So Jesus rolled away from the top of the Shaitan. This time Lt. Pimenta did something that the Shaitan was not expecting. He jumped and floated away, out of the hatch into space! Jesus Pimenta was wearing a suit with thrusters powerful enough to slow him down to orbit this moon. Getting back into the hatch was no big deal for him. It was a matter of seconds. What he wanted to see was the reaction of the Shaitan. Jesus knew that the Shaitan suits had thrusters too. That is how this Shaitan would have gotten to the shuttle from the space station in the first place. Jesus just hoped that the Shaitan’s warrior instincts would get the better of its rational brain.

  The Shaitan was either unaware or had forgotten why the human had chosen hand-to-limb combat in the first place. The Shaitan followed his warrior instincts just as Jesus had hoped, and jumped after Jesus to finish the job. Jesus put his hand on his hip, retracted the blades and thought clicked the plasma pistol. The palm of his glove turned on a strong electromagnet, which latched onto the plasma pistol handle. It was now impossible for Jesus to lose his grip on the pistol and thus lose the weapon in space. Simultaneously the pistol which was magnetically and mechanically attached to hip of his suit, lost its magnetism, detaching the pistol from its magnetic holster. Jesus couldn’t hear the click of the release of the holster in space, but he could feel it through his suit.