Initially the habitat would become the forward base for Marines, and would make the task of capturing World #4 completely a lot easier for the USC. Going forward, this base was envisaged as the largest USC base outside the inner solar system. This was the world that would be most suitable for human soldiers and navy to live and get some rest on long forward postings.
When Charlie had woken up a few months ago, he had been briefed that things were going well for the humans in World #4 in particular, and all across the Shaitan space in general. Charlie had grown up hearing the stories of the legendary defeat of the Hadean fleet at the hands of the USC defense fleet let by Admiral Josephine Duvall, and how it finally broke the back of Shaitan resistance and counter offensive. Some argued that the Shaitans were really defeated a few years prior to that battle with the Hadean fleet, when their core system had been attacked and captured in a surprise attack that sent shock waves across the Shaitan worlds.
Charlie was a baby when those events had occurred, and he had no conception of a time when humans were the underdogs and on the defensive. He had only known a time when humans were slowly advancing into Shaitan territory with the Shaitans on the run, slowly losing world after world to the humans. To Charlie and his generation, the Shaitan wars was all about fight for land and resources, it wasn’t about a fight for survival of the human species, as it had been for the earlier generations.
Charlie had been told that the humans had reached all but two of the worlds of the Shaitans. The ten worlds of the Shaitans that humans had reached were in various stages of conquests. Some like Alpha Shaitan and World #8 had been completely conquered and freed of non-heretic Shaitans. These two worlds were completely in human control and acted as support bases and generated revenue and resources. Other worlds of the Shaitans were in different stages on conquest.
Some like Beta Shaitan were not attractive to humans because of their unsuitability. These worlds hadn’t been assaulted on the surface by humans yet. USC was concentrating mainly on containing such worlds to the surface by destroying their space infrastructure. That would effectively neutralize the threats from those worlds. Those worlds could then be monitored from space. At some future point, when human resources were not stretched by the current Shaitan war, USC could spend some amount of resources to send and support heretic Shaitans to the surface. Those heretics would do the dirty work of sanitizing the world of the Shaitans with enthusiasm and gusto, knowing that they would inherit the world exclusively, since the humans weren’t interested in it. The typical modus operandi of the heretics involved mass murder and genocide of their non-believer Shaitan brethren. For the moment, USC could get away with turning a blind eye to this fact. One day though, public opinion might turn against it.
There were other worlds of the Shaitans, which humans were definitely interested in, such as World #4. These were the worlds where USC had put most of their resources in trying to conquer not just in space but also on the surface. The USC along with their heretic allies had slowly gone about the task of degrading the space infrastructure of the Shaitans in those systems, and once that objective was accomplished, and human ships could enter the system with impunity, then start the surface assault. It were the surface assaults where the heretics played an invaluable part. The surface campaigns lasted far shorter than the first human campaign that had taken place on Alpha Shaitan, and the campaigns caused a lot less human casualties than the Alpha Shaitan campaign. The heretics didn’t just bring muscle and fighting power along with them on those surface campaigns. Most crucially, they brought knowledge and intelligence about the world along with them. They had copies of layouts of the system, along with the location of critical infrastructure. That insider information made the task of conquest easier and more efficient.
The two worlds that the humans hadn’t yet reached were the furthest from Earth in the direction of the Alpha Centauri triple star system. One of those worlds was a typical Shaitan type dark world orbiting the Oort cloud of the Alpha-Beta-Proxima Centauri triple star system. The other was the planet Ka-Let, the home world of the Ka-Let, which the Shaitans had taken over, when they had exterminated that species.
Reaching the Ka-Let world was the holy grail of human space ambition, and also the most difficult. If the humans could reach Ka-Let, they would have access to the most inhabitable and Earthlike planet of them all. It was the richest of the Shaitan worlds in terms of resources, which was both an attraction for the humans and also a threat for the moment. As long as the Shaitans controlled the richest single world of theirs, they would be a treat to the humans. If on the other hand, humans could take control of the planet Ka-Let, then humans would gain access to the richest world other than Earth.
Reaching the Ka-Let planet was a challenge even for the most committed of Navy and Marine personnel of USC. The Ka-Let vessel had reached the inner solar system from their world in just over twenty years. That was perhaps fine for the Ka-Let. No one knew that species’ tolerance to long voyages. It would certainly be fine for the Shaitans who regularly undertook such long voyages. Humans now had engine technology at par with the Ka-let and far superior to the Shaitans. Humans could make the journey from Earth to Ka-Let and Proxima Centauri in about twenty years, the same as Ka-Let.
Unfortunately it was too long a journey for most humans to undertake. Even with hibernation, where the humans would spend most of their time asleep, a round trip would be close to fifty years, assuming that one spent at least a few years in a campaign. For most humans returning back to Earth after half a century was inconceivable. Even if a set of humans were found who were willing to undertake such a campaign, it was unlikely to happen.
USC was known for its long term planning horizon, and campaigns that spanned a decade or two, but even the USC or any government couldn’t possibly plan a campaign that would last half a century. No human institution had that long a term of planning or foresight. A campaign to the Ka-Let world would only be possible when humans were able to surpass the technology that they had inherited from the Ka-Let, and able to make the journey to Proxima Centauri in five or six years, which was the maximum endurance that a human crew could take, and the maximum campaign time that USC could plan for.
Proxima Centauri was 4.2 light years from Earth, so to reach in five to six years would mean that human ships would have to travel close to the speed of light. In theory, there was nothing stopping the current crop of human ships from reaching the speed of light, it just took those ships time to build up speed and reach the kind of speeds required. The problem was not with the power of the engines or the thruster to be able to generate the kind of acceleration required to reach close to the speed of light quickly.
A ship needed to accelerate at just 1G continuously for just over ten months to be able to reach close to the speed of light. The engines on the modern human ships with the Ka-Let engine designs had the capability to do close to 1G acceleration on a continuous basis. The problem was not with human endurance either because a 1G acceleration would feel perfectly normal to humans inside, as if they were back on Earth. With a 1G acceleration, a ship could reach Proxima Centauri in just over five and a half years.
The problem human ships faced was fuel, or rather the lack of it. Ever since human ships had adopted the Ka-Let harvester technology, the norm was to carry a bare minimum fuel in the tanks of the ship to get the ship started at a reasonable speed, after which the harvester collected adequate fuel to last for the rest of the acceleration during the trip.
That strategy worked fine as long as one wanted to reach somewhere where a peak speed of about 15% or so was required. The ship would accelerate slowly, consuming the fuel collected by the harvester to reach a speed of about 15% the speed of light in two and a half to three years, then spend an equal amount of time decelerating to its destination. If humans had more endurance in space, then that strategy would work for longer trips as well as the ship kept on slowly building up speed over ten to fifteen years to reach close to the speed of li
ght.
If a ship needed to accelerate fast to reach the speed of light in less than a year, then it would have to expend fuel at a rate greater than what was collected through the harvesters. One strategy was to increase the size of the fuel tanks and top up the fuel at the start of the journey. This would enable the ship to initially build up speed at the desired acceleration rate of 1G for some time till the fuel in the tanks lasted. The ship would build up initial velocity quickly, which would help increase the fuel collection of the harvester as it would travel through a larger volume of space in the same time, thus increasing the fuel collection rate.
The problem was that, there was an upper limit to the amount of fuel that could be carried by a ship and yet hope to accelerate at a reasonable rate. It was the same limit that prevented the Shaitan ships, which don’t have a harvester, from carrying incredibly large fuel tanks to increase their range. That is what limited the Shaitan ships in having to hop from world to world to reach anywhere far. The more fuel that a ship carried, the greater would be its initial mass, and the harder it became for the ship to start off at a reasonable rate. At a certain point, adding more fuel to the tank made no difference at all.
So the strategy of topping up the fuel tanks to get greater initial acceleration had a limit, which was not good enough to reach Proxima Centauri within five to six years. Engineers and scientists were working on the problem, but there hadn’t been a breakthrough yet. The day humans found a solution and reached the Ka-Let home world, humans could truly claim to be an interstellar species. For the moment humans like Charlie had to be satisfied with colonizing cold dark worlds like World #4.
Not that it bothered Charlie too much. He wasn’t into intellectual musings. He was a practical man, who took what could be had, and right now it was the orb glowing in the infrared on his screen that was his destination. World #4 had been taken in space by the humans with the use of minimal violence. There had been just three Shaitan warships and an equal number of migration ships guarding this system, which was close to the core of the Shaitan world and assumed to be safe by the Shaitans. It was just one hop from the core world and the heart of the Shaitan Empire.
As a result, the navy didn’t need to resort to wanton violence in space, and most of the infrastructure of world #4 was left intact, including the space elevator. The space elevator on World #4 was of particular interest to humans for many reasons. The gravity of World #4 was as close to that of Earth, as had been discovered on any of the Shaitan worlds. Beta Shaitan was a super Earth and had 2.1 times the gravity of Earth. It was too massive for even the Shaitans to engineer a space elevator.
World #4 on the other hand with 0.8G or 80% the gravity of Earth was fairly massive and yet the Shaitans had managed to build a space elevator. World #4 also had a fairly thick atmosphere, just slightly less dense than that of Earth. Although the atmosphere didn’t have as much flux, and hence didn’t have as many storms as that of Earth, but still the space elevator cable had to withstand the atmospheric shearing forces of World #4. If a space elevator could be built on this moon, then it was only a slight stretch to build one on Earth. Human engineers were extremely curious to study the space elevator and its material on World #4 to be able to build a space on Earth. That one feat would truly open up space for humans like no other single piece of infrastructure.
To the USC the space elevator had represented a far more practical and immediate value. Getting in out of the gravity well of World #4 to make an assault on the surface would pose a significant challenge to the logistics of USC, given the gravity of the moon. The space elevator, if it could be taken over and operated by the humans, it would represent the single biggest asset and advantage in their campaign.
For whatever reason, the Shaitans below on the surface of World #4 hadn’t sabotaged or destroyed the space elevator the moment the Shaitans lost the battle in space over World #4. Militarily speaking, that would have been the most logical thing to have done the moment they lost the battle in space. Perhaps the inhabitants of this world couldn’t bring themselves to destroy something which had to be the pinnacle of their beings’ engineering, and something that would have been their pride and their lifeline.
The first sector that the USC and their heretic allies had attacked on the surface had been the base station of the space elevator. The Shaitans defending the surface hadn’t caught on quickly enough why the enemy had attacked that particular sector. In fact at one point in the battle, the Shaitans had defended the base of the space elevator thinking that the enemy was out to destroy it. It didn’t occur to the defenders until it was too late that if the attackers wanted to destroy the space elevator, they could have done so with a single missile from space.
Charlie was watching the space elevator through the one of the large viewports of MV Peerless. They had just arrived in orbit, and the ship had gone into a geosynchronous orbit around World #4, just a few kilometers from docking hub of the space elevator. Humans had made minor additions to the elevator to suit their needs. Primary amongst those additions was light! The docking ports of the space elevator were well lit on the outside, and Charlie could view the entire structure clearly, including the massive counterweight floating a few kilometers above the docking port.
This space elevator was truly a marvel of engineering. It was massive. Charlie had seen and used all the three elevators humans had made on the Moon. He had also seen pictures of the elevator that had been built on Mars. This elevator was massive in comparison, as it needed to be. This elevator pulled things out of a gravity well that was over two and a half times as strong as that of Mars. That sense of awe and scale of the elevator only enhanced as the shuttle took Charlie closer to the docking ports of the elevator.
The thing that truly brought home the scale of the elevator to Charlie, was when he got a glimpse of the tether of the elevator. He knew that the tether of most space elevators tapered with the thickest part somewhere around the mid-length of the tether, which meant that he was not seeing the thickest part of the space tether. Yet the tether was thicker than he had imagined any carbon nanotube could ever be weaved together. Not being a tech head, he could not get an accurate reading of the diameter, but his estimation was that the tether had to be at least six meters in diameter!
The ride down was anticlimactic. There wasn’t anything to see. In fact the large elevator bogie in which he was riding down to the moon didn’t have any windows at all. That was to be expected. Shaitans had built that bogie, and they didn’t have any use for windows. Even if there had been windows, there would have been nothing to see in this dark world. Charlie settled into his assigned bunk for the week long journey down to the surface. Lowly civilian workers like Charlie and much of the construction equipment and supplies brought by MV Peerless was destined to take the slow train down to the surface, while top brass of the company and USC who had made the journey along with them on the ship, took the fast trip down to the surface by shuttles.
It was on the third day of his travel down the space elevator, that Charlie heard the bad news, as an alert chime rang persistently in the elevator bogie, informing the passengers of an important announcement to be made. The very traditional form of sound alert with an automated voice repeating the alert was unusual for USC, but was common for civilian crews. A large part of the crew were not full tech heads, and on some ships it was not even required for everyone to get at least a spinal implant. As a result, alerts had to be broadcast in a very twentieth century manner to ensure that all the crew got to hear it.
Charlie didn’t have a neural interface implant. Neither his parents could afford it when he was a child, nor could he as an adult. He did have a spinal implant in place. Working in space and in the low gravity, airless environment of the Moon meant that he had to work in suit a lot. It was almost impossible to work in such environments without at least a spinal implant. Charlie rushed to the nearest screen near the viewing area to hear the address about the emergency.
What could have h
appened he wondered? He had been told that there were no signs of hostiles in space anywhere in this system, and even on the surface, the humans-heretic coalition was winning the war. So what could have happened that had caused this emergency? His question was answered a few moments later when a General spoke on the screen, addressing all humans, both military and civilians on World #4.
“Good evening to you all. First of all, I want you all to relax. There is no immediate emergency, as the alert message may have implied. The damn announcement is automated, and it was just announcing canned words. There is however an impending crisis that has just appeared on the horizon. The impending crisis may be a few years away, but its impact will start being felt by everyone on this moon immediately. At Oh-six-thirty-three hours UTC, the navy orbital observatory detected the ion plasma signature of thirty two Shaitan warships decelerating on its approach to this world.” Those words brought out gasps of disbelief and fear around Charlie from the rest of the privateer crew, who were also bunched up in front of the screen.
“I don’t believe this! The Shaitans are supposed to be finished! Aren’t they?! Where the hell have thirty two warships appeared?!” Someone shouted in dismay. He was shushed, as the General was still speaking.
“… and we believe that this is the splinter fleet that had broken away from the main Hadean fleet and returned back towards the Shaitan core worlds over four decades ago. Unfortunately, the splinter fleet had been gone for so long, that it fell off the radar for all of us. That was clearly a mistake. From what we have been able to determine of their direction of approach, it is almost certain that the splinter fleet is approaching us from the direction of World #5.
Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4) Page 43