Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  “As you are aware, World #5 has been under constant attack by humans for the last fifteen years. That Shaitan world hasn’t been completely subdued, but it is in no position to launch a major attack on any other system, let alone with thirty two warships. It however takes the Shaitan warships over twenty three years to reach World #4 from World #5. From what we can make out of the distance of the splinter fleet, they are into their eighteenth year of their journey, with another five years to go before they would reach us at World #4. So the splinter fleet must have departed from World #5 a few years before the first human attacks on World #5, and hence we missed noticing the splinter fleet on its way out here.

  “The good news is that this is the last remaining fleet of the Shaitan Empire. The heretics have confirmed that the splinter fleet consisted of exactly thirty two warships. There aren’t any more aggregation of warships floating around in space anywhere else, according to the heretics. With the appearance of the splinter fleet, all known Shaitan space capability is accounted for. When the splinter fleet is defeated; and be assured that this fleet will be defeated, there would be no more Shaitan resistance in space, and the Shaitan wars would effectively have come to an end.

  “Yes it is possible that the last two remaining Shaitan worlds in Proxima Centauri are building up a fleet, we don’t expect them to come anywhere near here any time soon. If we humans are having such a tough time trying to reach those two worlds with our faster ships, you can imagine the amount of time the slower Shaitan warships would take to reach us.

  “The challenging news for all of us here on the surface is that our mission just got a lot harder, and you will start feeling the effects very shortly. The priorities of the navy have changed due to the appearance of the splinter fleet. Even as we speak, the news is racing towards the naval orbital garrison over Beta Shaitan as well as the USC headquarters at the speed of light. Unfortunately, it will take well over a year for the news to reach Earth and over six years for reinforcements to arrive from there. That is over two years after the expected arrival of the splinter fleet.

  “Our best bet for timely reinforcements lies with the naval orbital garrison over Beta Shaitan. The navy has estimated that they will be able to reach here from Beta Shaitan just in time. The Beta Shaitan garrison typically has a fleet of ten warships stationed in that system. We already have four USC warships in our system, plus there are two more warships on their way to this system to take up rotational duty. In addition two warships that rotated out of this system, are just a year out on their way back. An emergency message has been dispatched to those two warships, and they should be able to make it back here within time. We will have a fleet of eighteen warships to defend us, when the splinter fleet arrives. You know the prowess of our navy. Our fleet will easily beat back that splinter fleet.” The General paused in his address.

  “What bullshit!? Eighteen against thirty two! That is almost two to one! Our fleet is going to get slaughtered! And we on the surface would be next in line after that!” The person next to Charlie exclaimed in panic. “Why don’t we just leave world?! We could be almost back on Earth in five years’ time.” Before the woman could rant any more, others shushed her once again.

  “Quiet! He is speaking about us!” Someone shouted, pointing at the screen. The commotion died down immediately and everyone turned to hear the General continue speaking.

  “… especially the civilians who have just arrived on board MV Peerless. I want you all to keep in mind at all times that you have entered a designated war zone, and you have done so willingly. Just in case any of you aren’t clear about the contract you signed before boarding a ship to come to this world, let me reiterate the following for you. This world is a designated war zone, under the direct martial authority of the United Space Council, and as such the only law applicable here is martial law as enshrined in the USC charter, section 18B.

  “Every civilian on the surface as well as in space on this system is bound by the orders given by the military administrators, just as much as the navy and marine personnel are bound by the orders of their chain of command. The orders are simple and clear. We stand and we prepare our defenses here on this system, and we meet the challenge head on. Any talk or even mention of retreat from any civilian would be treated the same way as we treat a deserter in the military. For those who may have no idea of the punishment for desertion on the battlefield, let me enlighten you.

  “By the authority vested to the administrators by the USC charter, the punishment for desertion on the battlefield can be, but is not limited to a five year term of incarceration. The field commander at his or her discretion can sanction capital punishment, to be executed by a firing squad.” The General paused and gave a half smile, probably taking some amount of sadistic pleasure from the knowledge that some of the civilians would be shitting in their pants after hearing his words.

  “So let us all humans in this system, military and civilians alike work together as a team and kick the collective asses of the Shaitans. While the navy makes its preparations in space, we will ensure that in the next five years, the Shaitan resistance on the surface is finished, and that splinter fleet heading here receives no support or information from here below. Good luck to you all. Your immediate supervisors will provide you with further instructions on any change in your daily work schedules, if any. General Wozinsky out.” The General finished his announcement to the civilians.

  Charlie would later learn that there were almost seven thousand civilians on World #4, and there had been a lot of clamor by them to get the hell out of this world, which had prompted the General to crack the whip. Charlie would go on to live a long and prosperous life. He would eventually become a very wealthy opal mining tycoon, bequeathing fantastic wealth to his descendants. When some of those descendants would study Charlie’s personal long of the next five years, they would come to appreciate the hardships the founding member of their dynasty, and most pioneers had to go through to get where the humans were.

  The next five years were living hell for both the Marines as well as the civilians on World #4. The human-heretic alliance went into overdrive in trying to subdue and defeat the resistance of the Shaitans on that part of the world that they still held. Earlier, the Marines had been advancing in a slow and deliberate manner, after the splinter fleet was spotted, the campaign turned aggressive in its speed, resulting in long and relentless hours of battle for the marines and equally long hours of support work for the civilians. The casualty rate amongst Marines and civilians increased, which cause a lot of morale problems.

  The commanders of USC-GCF were aware of the deteriorating morale, and tried their best to lift up the spirits of the humans. When the splinter fleet arrived in the system, the last thing that the navy would want is for the Shaitans on the surface to be able to aid and abet the fleet in any way. The navy would be facing very unfavorable odds as it is, the Marines had to ensure that those odds weren’t skewed any further by either information radioed by the Shaitans on the surface, or equipment rocketed to space for their splinter fleet.

  The surface Shaitans may have lost the control of the space elevator, but they still controlled over two third the surface of the moon, including sites from where rockets could be launched. Those sites had been used to launch surface to space missiles during the initial human assault on World #4. While the navy had bombarded those sites from space, it was very likely that many of the hardened launch sites remained relatively intact. Those launch sites were the target of frenzied attacks by human-heretic combined assault forces. Some of the sites were taken at huge toll of lives both military as well as of civilian contractors, who worked non-stop building the supply lines to the frontlines.

  The heretic warrior incubation program was given a special sanction to boost their production. Heretics could breed and incubate their warriors and train a new batch within a year’s time. Normally human Generals kept the warrior breeding program controlled, such that they never outnumbered humans in any t
heater. This made common sense most of the time. There was only that much that the humans could trust the heretics. It wouldn’t be prudent to sanction a breeding program, which would enable the heretics to outnumber the human soldiers significantly.

  Caution was thrown to the wind, and the Generals sanctioned unrestrained breeding program for the heretics. The Generals even ordered some of the civilian contractors to assist in the construction of incubation chambers for the heretics. The heretics didn’t mind using their newly hatched warriors as cannon fodder, as long as they got the leeway to prosecute the campaign in their inimitable style. That style included wanton violence and torture on their fellow Shaitans, whom they considered non-believers.

  In most surface campaigns, the human commanders kept those sadistic tendencies of the heretic warriors in check, but in this particular campaign, the human commanders turned a convenient blind eye to those atrocities committed by the heretics on their own kind. Charlie would make an extensive note of the brutality of the heretics and the amount of torture inflicted by them on the non-believers. His memoirs released by his descendants a century later would be used as historical documentary evidence a few centuries later by another species to demonstrate the culpability and evidence of humanity’s uncivilized behavior.

  Charlie had no idea how his memoirs would be used in the future. He kept a faithful log of his experiences in order to not be numbed by the amount of gore and violence he witnessed on a day to day basis during those five years. The most vivid of his records was his experience of the taking of a nuclear reprocessing plant, and its adjunct weapons factory. Even by the gory standards of the war on World #4, this was the goriest battle Charlie had witnessed. There was a purpose and a method to the madness in the taking of the nuclear reprocessing facility.

  The Shaitan nuclear bombs used by their war vessels broadly used the same ingredients as the human nukes, which was not surprising because both were thermonuclear devices. The designs of the two weapons were however, very different. Human nukes were two stage fusion devices with an outer primary made out of Uranium235 and Plutonium239 mix, which when triggered by the outermost shell of high explosives, would trigger the innermost core of the secondary explosion consisting of a mix of Deuterium and Lithium6.

  The human design was technically a ‘Hydrogen’ bomb, because the Lithium6 would degenerate into Tritium, and that isotope of Hydrogen would fuse with the other isotope of hydrogen – Deuterium, to produce Helium and a huge amount of energy. What was less known to most people was that the hydrogen fusion reaction’s main purpose was not the energy, but the copious amounts of free neutrons that it also released along with the energy.

  This free neutron allowed the thick dampener shell sandwiched between the primary and the secondary, and made out of cheap Uranium238, available in plenty in nature unlike the fissile Uranium235, to turn fissionable and start a fission chain reaction that produced most of the energy of the bomb. Only about 10% of the 2.1 megatons of energy of the bomb was produced by the hydrogen fusion reaction. The rest 90% was produced by the fission reaction of the U238 shell. In reality the human bombs were more of a fission device than a fusion device. The fusion reaction was mostly to boost the fission reaction of the otherwise inert U238 shell. This had been the dirty secret of all ‘Hydrogen’ bombs made by humans since the mid-20th century. That is why, despite the fact that Hydrogen fusion is a relatively clean process, the human ‘Hydrogen’ bombs have such a massive radioactive fallout.

  The engineering benefit, was that such a design allowed for a very compact and lightweight design. This was because most of the U238 shell would be consumed in the fission reaction releasing a large amount of energy relative to the overall size and weight of the bomb. It was also relatively cheap to make, since the major ingredient in the bomb was the naturally available and stable isotope of Uranium - U238, available in relative plenty in nature. Very little of the rare materials like the radioactive and unstable isotope of Uranium – U235, or the toxic and radioactive Plutonium239 or rare materials like Lithium6 or Deuterium were required.

  The Shaitan nukes on the other hand were three stage devices that could truly be called ‘Hydrogen’ bombs because 98% of their monster yield of 390 megatons came from fusion reaction of Hydrogen into Helium. Humans had made only two such designs in their history. The 25 megaton B41 of the US and the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba of the Soviet Union. Three stage design, as the name implies, have a third stage inside the secondary, where direct Deuterium-Deuterium fusion reaction is possible due to the boosted temperature and pressure provided by the outer layer of thermonuclear fusion reaction of the Deuterium-Tritium fusion reaction. This yields a much higher amount of energy.

  The downside of a three stage design is that it needs to be large. Both the human three-stage designs were at the lower minimum threshold yield of a three-stage design, while the Shaitan designs were at the higher end of that spectrum. The huge size of the bombs and the insanely large yields, made these designs impractical for humans for warfare on Earth, and hence were never pursued. When the humans took their nukes to space, they carried the same philosophy of their inter-continental ballistic missiles – MIRV. Basically using more of the smaller missiles, rather than use one huge monster bomb.

  The Shaitans followed a philosophy of self-sufficiency in all their world. Every world of theirs was expected to produce everything that the Shaitan society required, without having to depend on imports from other worlds. The Shaitan self-sufficiency policy was necessitated by the long travel times between worlds on a Shaitan ship. It didn’t mean that the Shaitans didn’t trade between their worlds at all. Raw materials scarce in one system were regularly imported from other worlds, as was any new or improved technology. Since there was no jealously guarded intellectual property rights or trade secrets between Shaitans, new technology prototypes once imported, would be copied and manufactured freely on other worlds.

  The only item that the Shaitans exchanged regularly and religiously were their genes. The regular interchange of Shaitans from every world to every other world ensured a sense of unity, and prevented genetic drift, towards which the Shaitan genes were highly susceptible, as the heretics on World #6 had proved.

  This meant that every world that produced warships, would also have a nuclear missile factory, since nukes were an integral part of the warships. The humans had been told about this aspect by the heretics. Unfortunately, the heretics had no idea where the weapons factories on World #4 were located. Even in an open society like the Shaitans, there were some things that even the Shaitans found prudent to keep on a need to know basis. The location of their nuclear factories was on the top of the list of such things. There was no need for the beings of another world of the Shaitans to know the details of weapons manufacturing facilities on world #4, so that information was never put on the shared Shaitan database.

  Then the desperate Shaitans of World #4 defending their ever shrinking domain did something that was unthinkable. They used a nuke on their own world! The heretics were stunned, because it was considered an affront to use a nuke even for testing on the surface of one’s own world. That taboo was for a good reason. A four hundred megaton blast on the surface has apocalyptic implications for the local landscape and weather.

  A particular non-descript sector of World #4, had been under the human-heretic alliance siege for over a year, and the noose was slowly tightening around it. For the unfortunate resident Shaitans of this sector, things were not just getting desperate, but there didn’t seem to be any hope on the horizon. This particular sector was unusually isolated from the rest of the populated parts. The underground was where this world, like most of the Shaitan worlds, the residents lived and worked. Access to this sector from the underground tunnels to the rest of the world had been cut off by the human-heretic alliance for some time. Blockaded, this sector was running short on everything, including arms to defend themselves.

  The human-heretic alliance was too well entrenched on those tu
nnels for there to be any hope of breaking the blockade. So the trapped residents of this sector started doing something that they usually didn’t do. They started running supply runs over the surface in an attempt to ease the hardships of the blockade. When the human-heretic alliance realized this, they put up surface patrols around the entire sector, which could easily detect and stop the small number of Shaitans trying to sneak over the surface in every run.

  With the surface routes blocked, the desperation on the trapped Shaitans forced them to do something that was otherwise unthinkable for Shaitans. A nuclear missile of the kind used by the Shaitan warships emerged from a silo inside the sector, rose to a height of about two kilometers somewhere at the center of the rough circle around which the human-heretic alliance had set up a heavy presence in terms of patrols, and exploded.

  A four hundred megaton explosion over a surface covered with ice sheets a few meters to a few hundred meters thick, produces some spectacular and deadly pyrotechnics on a global scale. The initial shockwave of the blast killed any human or heretic on the surface within a blast radius of fifty kilometers instantly. The barren icy surface had no topography to stop the shockwave travelling at several time the speed of sound. The ice near the blast vaporized into steam, contributing to a giant mushroom cloud that went all the way to the edge of the atmosphere and space. The ice sheet melted near the blast, in places exposing the bare rock to the atmosphere for the first time in hundreds of millions of years, perhaps for the first time ever in the billions of years of the existence of the moon.

  Ironically, the most amount of damage and casualty was suffered by the Shaitan sector that launched the nuke. Most of the ice on the surface was permanently frozen, so very little of the ice water ever trickled down to the underground habitats of the Shaitans. There had never been any need to waterproof the underground habitats, because the innumerable cracks and crevices on the surface under the permanently frozen ice sheets never leaked.