Many beings of the space station evacuated on the shuttles. They searched for survivors on the moon surface after the attack but could not find any. The survivors are now on their way back to the core worlds on the two interplanetary shuttles that were docked with the space station. They should be back within a cycle, and to safety.” Scent of Vigor finished his report.
“Were the survivors able to throw any light on the strange attack pattern? Why did the Ka-Baal use so many missiles on that moon, when all they required were just two?” Aggression asked Vigor.
“The survivors said that after the first hit on the academy, the missiles were basically hitting nothing but the empty surface of the moon. The guess of the survivors is that the Ka-Baal expected many more installations on the moon than just the academy. My conjecture Warmaster, is that the Ka-Baal may have some information about this system, but their information may not be as detailed or accurate as we fear. I think their information about our system and its infrastructure has been pieced together from those small spy vessels, which probably flew past this moon at some distance to avoid detection, and hence didn’t have a details of the exact number of installations.” Vigor replied.
“That might explain the strange tactics of the enemy so far after having entered the system. The Ka-Baal had no need to attack that moon, it had no strategic value. The Ka-Baal have not displayed wasteful or wanton violence in their encounters with our beings in any of the previous battles. Everything they do, is for a purpose. Even when they are being cruel, it is for some ultimate purpose. I had been surprised at the vindictive bombardment of that unarmed and helpless moon. Perhaps the Ka-Baal didn’t realize that the moon was of no value to our beings.
“Still, keep track of the situation out there for me, and let me know if anything new is discovered about the incident. Ask the survivors to send a download of all electronic records that have been captured by their shuttles and suits. Have them analyzed, and send me the synopsis.” Aggression ordered.
---XXX---
“Shuttle 2667, you are straying from your assigned course. Rectify immediately!” Lt. Pimenta heard his suit translate the input feed that the heretics had provided. The feed was from the navigational and communication controls of the shuttle, which the heretics had interfaced with human software protocol, with the help of instruction that had been provided to them earlier.
Lt. Pimenta was back into his suit. It had been like heaven to be out of his suit in the last three days, being able to eat solid food, and be able to take a crap outside his suit. The heretics had designated a nook of the shuttle as human toilet. The Marines as well as the heretics had recharged their suits, and topped up the suit propellants from the reserves of the shuttle. The septic tank of the suit, where all the undesirable excrements of the human body were stored, was emptied. Some of the suits that had been damaged were field repaired as best as one could. The Marines had a hard time patching up their suit in the dim light that they had managed to rig up inside the shuttle. The suits however, were battle ready once more.
The suits may be battle ready, but they were certainly not pleasant to get into the second time. Lt. Pimenta was acutely aware of the overwhelming stench inside the suit, which hadn’t been there the first time he got into it aboard the Hercules. Lt. Pimenta knew that it was the stench of his own body and his own excrements that lined the insides of the suit, but that didn’t make it any more bearable. He knew from his training that he would have to wait a few hours before his olfactory senses got used to the stench, and he stopped noticing it. One of the best ways to forget about the stench was to be in a tense situation, and this was as just the tense situation to get his mind off the odor of his suit.
“Void Master, I am aware that my vessel is straying from the path designated by traffic control. Unfortunately the lateral thrusters of my vessel are not responding according to their calibration. I am trying to compensate, but the computer will have to first calculate the amount by which the lateral thrusters are misfiring, before I can compensate. Otherwise I might overshoot or undershoot the designated path if I try to do it by myself. I feel that the lateral thrusters have taken some damage from the explosion that ripped our space station. We were fairly close to the explosion, and barely managed to get away. We didn’t need to use the lateral thrusters for such precision maneuvers on our way till now, and we weren’t aware of this problem before. My vessel should be back on the designated path in a milli-cycle.” Lt. Pimenta heard the long winded explanation of the heretic pilot, and hoped that the traffic control would have some sympathies for this shuttle as the survivor of a human attack, buy the explanation and cut them some slack.
The other cause of nervousness for the entire crew was the voice of the pilot itself. To be more precise, the digitized taste of the chemical signals that was being sent from the tasting station of the pilot via radio to the traffic control. That was the Shaitan equivalent of the pilot’s voice, because it also carried the taste signature of each individual, which for Shaitan was a unique as the iris pattern of humans were distinct for each individual.
The pilot being a zombie didn’t help, because with the zombie drug, one could only control the peripheral brains of the Shaitan responsible for physical movement. The central brain, although disconnected, was still lucid and very much in the control of the victim. It was from the central brain that a Shaitan performed the task of communication. So the pilot couldn’t be forced to say anything. In fact if the pilot was allowed access to the tasting station, then he would surely raise the alarm with traffic control.
A different tack had been taken for the purpose of impersonating the pilot. The heretics, who understood the anatomy of their own kind far better than humans, had performed a procedure on the pilot. This procedure had not been tried in such a situation ever before. But then again, no Shaitan had ever betrayed his own kind ever before! The procedure was used on very old Shaitans or any Shaitan with brain damage or brain disease. As the brain of an old Shaitan degraded, they fired spurious signals across the body. These spurious signals caused the muscles to twitch randomly, which was the typical sign of old age. In the most extreme cases, the limbs would have bouts of uncontrollable random movement, which were dangerous to the being and those around him, due to the sharp claws that the Shaitans possess.
Shaitan cultural sensitivity meant that those claws couldn’t be removed from the errant limb. Even if the Shaitan was never likely to fight with that limb again, the claws couldn’t be removed. It was just as sensitive an issues as proposing to remove the testicles of an old man who is unlikely to procreate any further. The claws is what defined him as a Shaitan, just as a testicles defines how a man sees himself.
So the Shaitan performed a surgical procedure, which simply cut the nerves connecting the central brain to the neural node at the armpits of the limb. With no connection to the brain, the limb wouldn’t twitch and move uncontrollably or violently. The downside was that the limb would hang uselessly. It could no longer function, but the flesh and the muscles would be alive because nutrition had not been cut off. It didn’t matter much to an old Shaitan who had five other limbs to move around.
This was the procedure that had been done on two of the limbs of the pilot. One of those limbs had been placed on the tasting station and the heretic pilot, who was in reality flying the shuttle was sending his own chemical signals by placing his own limbs on the limp limb of the pilot. The Shaitan skin chemistry allowed for such a form of transmission of communication. In fact this form of second hand tasting of skin slime was a staple part of the ‘Mingle’, which was one of the social rituals of the Shaitans used for large group discussions and for quickly disseminating ideas to a large number of beings simultaneously. The skin chemistry of the Shaitans may have even evolved to facilitate this kind of second hand communication because it bore evolutionary benefits.
When such second hand communication took place in a ‘Mingle’, there was no confusion about who was really speaking because in
the analog real world, the chemical signals transmitted via the body of another creature still retained traces of the original speaker’s chemical taste signature, although it would be attenuated. In a radio signal though, according to the reckoning of the heretics, it would be hard to distinguish the fact that the communication contained two chemical taste signatures.
This was because the tasting stations were designed as a one to one communication equipment, which also had the constraint of trying to reduce the bandwidth needed for communicating the message. So the tasting station digitized the chemical signatures with far less fidelity, just keeping the essence of the message, but losing all the subtlety of the chemical signature. It was akin to human radio voice communication or phone signals, where the sound quality was deliberately down sampled to reduce the bandwidth required. It resulted in a tinny voice, but the meaning of the words could be perfectly understood at the other end.
The tasting station should in theory retain only the chemical taste signature of the being whose limb was touching it, and along with it encode the chemical signals being transmitted through that beings body. That was the theory, whether the operator at the traffic control was buying it was unknown. This was the acid test for the theory, and every sentient being on the shuttle, both human and heretic Shaitan were on the edge trying to make out the slightest hint of doubt or disbelief from the operator of the traffic control. They had contingency plan B if their deception didn’t work, but it would mean that their mission was foo barred and their chances of survival would become slim at best.
It was a bit disconcerting for the humans when the operator cut off the radio communication without saying anything further. In human society that would be seen rude at best and as a sign of suspicion at worst. The heretics weren’t perturbed by it though. It was normal Shaitan behavior. There were no petty greetings or courtesies of verbal acknowledgement.
Lt. Pimenta knew that a cycle in Shaitan parlance was a bit more than 3.65 days. Which meant that a milli-cycle would be a thousandth of that time. He wasn’t particularly good at math, so he let his suit computer calculate – just about three hundred and twenty seconds or five and a third of a minute. Exactly after that amount of time, the operator was back on the radio, insisting that the time the pilot had asked for was over, and the shuttle was still not back on the designated course approaching World #2.
“Void master, request you to grant us permission to stay at the current height for one orbit. The diagnostics show that the damage is more than we had anticipated earlier. We may need to go out in our void suits to repair on the outside.” The heretic pilot replied as per his prepared script.
“Request denied shuttle 2667. The current orbit will bring you dangerously close to the orbit of the building stations, if you don’t crash into one the counterweights of the space elevators first, that is. You cannot stay in the current orbit. It is dangerous for our shuttle. Since your main thrusters seem to be working fine, use them to move to the higher orbit that I have just sent you. I will check back after one orbit.” The controller replied and cut off the channel.
Lt. Pimenta was delighted. This is exactly what the heretics had predicted the controller would ask them to do. It would have been great if the controller had allowed them to stay in the current orbit, for that would have made their job far easier, but there wasn’t much chance of it happening. What they got was good enough. From a higher orbit, it was easier for suit thrusters to reach a lower orbit, because one got the assistance of gravity. It was far more difficult to go from a lower to a higher orbit using suit thrusters as one had to fight the gravity well of the moon.
The pilot maneuvered the shuttle to the re-designated higher orbit, while the Marines got busy doing the last minute check on the equipment they had installed on the one of the exit hatches of the shuttle in the last few days. With the higher orbit, this equipment would be critical in getting their package delivered. The countdown clock on Lt. Pimenta’s faceplate showed that the first package was to be delivered in just over ten minutes. He queried the Marine who was going through the last minute checks, and the Marine replied with a thumbs up.
Lt. Pimenta looked behind him and saw the two heretic warriors ready and waiting. He felt the need to say something to these two brave souls. Fanatic, they may be, but brave nonetheless. What they were about to do would be considered immoral if ordered by a human military leader to his subordinates. But technically he wasn’t the military superior of these two heretics, and he didn’t give the order. That Lt. Pimenta knew was a technical fig leaf that he was wearing. He prayed to Jesus, that he would be forgiven for this sin he was about to commit, though he knew he would be haunted about this for the rest of his life. The only redeeming thing was that the rest of his life may not be that long anyway, and he might soon join these beings and thus not have to lead a guilty life.
Lt. Pimenta touched the first heretic’s suit and through induction opened up a channel and said, what he had heard Sandy say often to the heretics in her conversation. “May you always follow the path of the Truth, as shown by the prophet!”
Jesus Pimenta couldn’t figure out the emotions if any of the reply. The translator was incapable of conveying such subtleties, but from the words of the reply, Jesus suspected that the heretics was saying it enthusiastically. “I am following the path of Truth, Master Offspring of God! I am helping spread the word of the True believers and the prophet in this world below of the unbelievers. In fact I will be meeting the prophet very soon. There can be no more fulfilling or glorious death than mine. I feel lucky and privileged!”
Jesus Pimenta withdrew his hand from the limb of the heretic in recoil. He had heard those words before, in a different context in a different world – Earth!
The first Shaitan came next to the equipment. He was moving a bit clumsily due to the massive package strapped to his back. Even though it didn’t have weight in this zero G environment, it still had mass. Any movement in any direction was pulling the heretic warrior in that direction with extra momentum, making his motion clumsy.
The heretic warrior let the Marines pick him up slowly as they muscled him into position on the specially designed pad of the equipment. When they got the positioning right, the package strapped on top of the carapace of the heretic warrior snapped into place, and the warrior stayed in the awkward position, where the pad, which covered a good part of the hatch held the box like package. The package held the warrior in the air in a horizontal position with all its six limbs sticking out of the hatch.
The mechanism would be triggered by the computer attached to the navigational equipment of the shuttle. It would calculate the exact time and force of the launch. The Marines simply had to load and watch. At the appropriate moment, the pad launched with such violence that if there had been a human on that pad instead of a Shaitan, he would have damaged most of its internal organ, probably broken many bones due to the sudden launch impact, and would definitely have been knocked unconscious, if not dead.
The heretics had done a dry run with the mechanism themselves when the mission was being planned, and the Shaitans despite their hardiness and sturdiness compared to a human, were pushing their body to the limits of its endurance. The Shaitan body also suffered internal damage due to the massive kick it received, but having multiple redundant organs meant that they could continue functioning, although most Shaitans had reported feeling disorientated for some time.
The mechanism that had been rigged up by the marines to launch the heretic warriors was nothing but a modified pneumatic missile launcher, scrounged up from the spare stores of USC Hercules by the engineers, and modified for the purpose of portability and being able to quickly bolt it to any surface. The pneumatic pistons had been removed from their launching tube and given an external frame, which the Marines had installed. Instead of the massive air pump that powered the pneumatic ejectors of a human ship, this one was rigged to work with a much smaller air pump attached to the frame, and drawing power from the Shait
an shuttle.
Due to the smaller size of the air pump, it could not fire as rapidly as the pneumatic ejector on the ships, but it wasn’t necessary. It took the Marines more than a minute to place the next heretic warrior in place anyway, just about the time the pneumatic mechanism needed to build up the requisite air pressure. With the second heretic launched, the Marines took a break and moved away from the hatch area. The next batch of two heretic warriors were scheduled for ejection only after about twenty one minutes.
The second round of launches went off without any incidence as well. The next wait time was the longest, forty three minutes. It would also be around that time that the other shuttle would begin their operations, but not on this world. That shuttle had headed towards the origin world and would indulge in similar operations around the orbit of that world. That shuttle over the origin world had four targets. Each target was covered by two heretic warriors, so that shuttle had eight launches.
Lt. Pimenta’s shuttle had five targets, and hence ten launches to conduct, and hence their operations had started about an hour before. Both the shuttles had synchronized their arrival on to their respective target worlds, such that they could time their strikes simultaneously, because once the cat was out of the bag in any of the worlds, the shuttle on the other world wouldn’t be safe either. Message would reach the other world at the speed of light by radio. So both the shuttles had to make their escape simultaneously, which meant striking simultaneously.
While the third batch of two heretics were being launched, Lt. Pimenta heard the computer translated voice of the traffic controller. His heart jumped! The traffic controller wasn’t supposed to be contacting them till they had finished orbit. Had the Shaitans seen through their game?! “Shuttle 2667, vessel building yard number three report that they have spotted a being floating in the void slowly approaching them. Yours was the only vessel that crossed vessel building yard 3 recently, and you had mentioned that you would be doing some Extra Vehicular Activity to effect repairs. Have you lost one of those beings?”
Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4) Page 32