None of his fears about being shot while in the air had come through. Not a single shot had been fired at his Marines. It seems like this planet was well and truly deserted. The Marines had targeted a patch of land a few square kilometers in area just outside the settlements they were to investigate as their landing zone. It was barren high lands. The hills on this planet were not very high, probably because there was no tectonic plate movements on this planet from whatever little the scientists onboard the fleet had been able to gather.
The chosen landing zone overlooked the settlement, which was right next to a big but shallow lake on one side, and an endless field of what looked like lichens or moss, but red in color on the other side. The analogy was probably all wrong, but if a human tried to find an analog, the scene would be that of a quaint farming village with a lake and fields on either side.
That feeling of quaintness gave way to horror, when the third platoon and their commander Lt. Jenkins made their way into the village. The platoon had landed uneventfully enough on the highlands, and had gingerly at first and then speedily made their way towards the settlement. On the way as the Marines were climbing down the hill, they noticed a curious thing. On the face of the hill overlooking the lake was carved well-constructed and symmetrical niches that resembled bird houses or pigeon holes. The niches were stacked one on top of another fairly high on the cliff face, almost hundred and fifty to two hundred meters high, starting right from the bottom of the cliff.
They did not look like animal constructed niches, but well-engineered ones with materials that looked like concrete and metal. There was a sense of neglect and disrepair about those construction though. It was as if those structures had been abandoned long ago. The Marines didn’t have time to explore the niches at close range, but reported it back to their ship. The experts who viewed the footage conjectured that these might be the habitats of the long dead Ka-Let, which would have been abandoned by the Shaitans once they took over the planet. Similar niches had been found in the covered canyon on Mars that were known to be Ka-Let habitat.
There was no doubt about who had constructed the settlement that the Marines were heading towards. It was a typical Shaitan habitat plan with a sunken round dome. The only difference was that this settlement had at least six such sunken domes that Lt. Jenkins could count. As the Marines neared the settlement, they found many indicators of recent habitation like machines which time had not worn out, and looked well oiled. Yet the Marines found no signs of recent activity. No pawmarks on the sandy surface, which a Shaitan walking would leave. There was no sound that their helmet mikes were picking, other than the ambient noise of what sounded like indigenous animals. These were constant high pitched but very faint sounds, like millions of crickets sound from very far away.
The horror started almost a kilometer from the settlement. The Marines were moving crouched in a leapfrog fashion, when one of the Marines called for a halt. “Sir! I think you should see this!” The Marine called out to Lt. Jenkins. “I don’t know how to describe this!”
Lt. Jenkins quickly made his way to the boulder behind which the Marine was crouching and looked in the direction the Marine pointed. It was the most shocking and revulsive sight that Lt. Jenkins had ever seen. He had never thought that he would ever feel bad at the sight of dead Shaitans, but this was too much even for him. A few meters away, right in the middle of the path the Marines were following that led to the settlement, lay a pile. It was a roughly circular pile, fifteen to twenty meters in diameter and stacked four or five meters high. The pile was stacked high with Shaitan carcasses!
There must have been hundreds of Shaitan bodies in that pile. This planet didn’t have very severe winds or dust storms very often, as per the meteorologists who had studied the weather from orbit. Yet from the amount of dust that had settled on the corpse pile, it was clear that the pile wasn’t very recent. It must have been here for months, possibly years. Yet the corpses had not decomposed. At least not completely. The corpses had lost most of the body moisture and looked desiccated. The atmosphere was fairly dry compared to Earth, which explained the loss of moisture.
The scientists viewing the feed guessed that the local flora and fauna that had evolved locally probably couldn’t feed on Shaitan flesh and hence had left it alone. The local equivalent of bacteria, which would probably decompose a body was so different in their genome from these alien evolved Shaitans, that they couldn’t decompose these bodies. So the bodies had stayed as they were, desiccating and slowly turning into fossil.
Yet the bodies had decomposed slightly, as was clear on closer inspection. The local bacteria may be incompatible with the Shaitan genome, but the Shaitans had brought their own bacteria inside their bodies. Those internal bacteria must have degraded the bodies up to a point before the bodies lost all their moisture making the bacterial culture growing on the bodies unviable, and the bodies stopped decomposing.
Yet it was not the state of decomposition of the bodies that interested the Marines on close inspection. What shocked the marines when they went closer to the pile was the realization that they were not looking at Shaitan bodies, but at their body parts! The entire pile consisted of dismembered Shaitan body parts!
The Marines scanned the pile for booby traps, and when satisfied that none existed, they removed a few of the body parts and lay them out on the ground to better understand the carnage that had transpired here. From the severed parts the Marines realized that some of the parts had been literally torn apart from the body, while others had a very specific cut pattern. Wherever they found the part had been cut rather than being torn apart, the cut pattern was exactly the same. It was as if some sadistic operator had used a massive cutting press with a curved and serrated blade of a very specific pattern to cut the flesh of these Shaitans and dismember them!
The Marines sent their spider surveillance drones ahead of them to the settlement to recce the place before they approached it. The pictures that the spider sent back resembled that of a horror movie. There were dead Shaitans lying everywhere around the settlement, but rarely did they find an intact body. Almost all had been torn or cut apart. The spiders went deep inside the habitats and the scene was the same inside as well. The entire habitat was littered with Shaitan body parts. The curious thing that Lt. Jenkins noted was that the elaborately constructed habitat itself had suffered little damage.
Everything in the settlement was intact except the inhabitants, who were lying in pieces all around the place. If there ever was a ghost town, then this had to be it! That was the grim thought Hector Jenkins was carrying back with him as he headed back towards the landing zone. His platoon had been ordered back to the LZ to make a secure perimeter for the first shuttles to land. There didn’t seem to be anything to secure the LZ against, unless one was afraid of ghosts.
The platoon reached the LZ without any incidents, marked the shuttle landing zone for the benefit of the pilots and secured the perimeter according to standard operating procedure of the USC, and waited. The first shuttle to land brought more marines, who took over from Lt. Jenkins’ platoon, guarding the perimeter, while Lt. Jenkins and his platoon sat next to some boulders and took a break. The stream of shuttles continued, about one every hour bringing in temporary habitats with them.
The days were long on this planet, and consequently the nights were long as well. Proxima Centauri may be far dimmer than the Sun, but this planet was far closer to its sun than Earth was from its own sun. The planet surface received only slightly less heat per square meter of surface than Earth received from its own sun. Yet the peak day time temperature soared to well over forty degree Celsius at the equator and close to thirty degree Celsius at the temperate zone, where the LZ was situated. This was primarily due to the higher concentration of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere, which acted like greenhouse gasses.
The planet took close to forty hours to spin around its axis, which made the days about 20 hours long, and the nights another twenty. The longer day built
up the heat, making the days fairly hot, and the longer nights bled more heat than on Earth, making the nights fairly cold. Night was approaching, and the arrival of the temporary habitats was welcome. It would allow Hector and his Marines to get out of their suits and rest properly. It would also allow them to take care of their bodily functions, which were disgusting or impossible to perform inside their suits.
By the next day five companies of Marines had landed and made the LZ into a fairly functional base. None of the heretics had been brought down to the surface yet. In fact the heretics hadn’t been told anything about what the Marines had discovered yet. Things were too bizarre and unfathomable. The brass had thought it prudent to hold back their discoveries from the heretics, till they could figure out what the hell had happened to this place. The heretic warriors weren’t needed for combat on the surface anyway. Not for the moment. Not till they found something alive on this planet.
Lt. Jenkins was ordered to join the expeditionary force that was boarding the shuttle in the morning along with a fire-team from his platoon. Their job was to give protection to the two scientists who were on board the shuttle. The shuttle flew to the nearby large populated area, which was the equivalent of a city. The scientists wanted to fly over the city to get an aerial view of the city, but the pilot had orders not to risk such a thing. The shuttle would be a sitting duck if it flew low and slow over a populated area. Any hand held RPG or guided missile, operated by someone hiding in the city could easily blow the shuttle out of the sky.
Instead the shuttle landed outside the city perimeter and the Marines along with the scientists walked to the city. The gravity was only about 40% of Earth’s gravity, which ensured that the long walk to the city in the suit was not very arduous.
If what the Marines had seen at the village was shocking, then the view that awaited the humans on reaching the city was beyond description. No book on apocalypse or visions of hell could describe the carnage that had happened in that settlement, because humans couldn’t probably even conceive carnage on those scales. Humans had made weapons of mass destruction like nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Some of those weapons had even been used both on their own kind as well as on Shaitans. Humans had experienced the Kinetic holocaust which had killed tens of millions of people.
This was completely different though. It was not the scale of death that was as disconcerting as the nature of the deaths. A nuclear or kinetic holocaust burns and obliterates everything that it kills, leaving a devastated but sanitized site. This city was nothing like that. From the marks on the walls and the streets, it was obvious that this city had run rivers of blood! Literally. Every square was filled with mountains of body part! Body parts! Not bodies. It was the scale of savagery that was staggering. Whoever had done this had taken unimaginable sadistic pleasure in ripping and cutting bodies of sentient beings.
Lt. Jenkins never thought he could ever feel sorry for the Shaitans or have any empathy for them. He was wrong. At that moment he was felt sick and more embarrassingly, he could feel his eyes watering. Somehow he was successful in arresting both those feelings and prevent any fluid coming out of his body. The two scientist they were protecting were not so successful in their endeavors. One of them was kneeling down, and a Marine was imploring her. “Ma’am you cannot get sick inside your suit. Your respirator would clog, and you will have a hard time breathing. Take a deep breath and swallow whatever is in your mouth, however disgusting it may feel.”
Lt. Jenkins could see that the scientist wasn’t being successful in following the instructions of the Marine. The quick thinking of the Marine saved the scientist from having a miserable time inside her suit. He quickly released the emergency latch of her suit that attached her covered helmet to the suit, and pulled it out. The he ordered. “OK. Quickly puke it out.”
The scientist expelled her breakfast and gagged, not due to the atmosphere but due to her vomit. She could take the atmosphere for a few minutes, and at most would be left with a headache. The Marines helped her to puke quickly. She got no basic niceties of being able to wipe her mouth, for there was nothing available at hand to wipe it with. The marines quickly put back her helmet. She would have to live with the aftereffects in her mouth till they got back to the base, but it was far better than what she would have had to live with if she had puked inside.
Back at the base in the evening, after a very long day, Lt. Jenkins was invited to the command tent for debriefing along with the scientists who were already present, talking over a video link, presumably with someone above in the fleet. On seeing Hector, the woman got up and approached him. “Yukio Yamagato.” She said introducing herself. “I would like to thank you Lt. Jenkins for the quick thinking and preventing me from having a terrible time inside my suit.”
“You need to than Pvt. Gonzales, Dr. Yamagato, he was the one who did the quick thinking. I will convey your gratitude to him ma’am.” Lt. Jenkins replied.
“Please… you can call me Yukio.” She replied.
“Thanks Yukio, and you can call me Hector.” Lt. Jenkins replied with a twinkle and a smile.
“Ahem… sorry to rain in on your first name exchange ceremony, but we need to get on with the briefing. The brass has joined the conference. It all your show now Dr. Yamagato… or do I also get the privilege of being able to call you Yukio?” The General asked with an impish smile and a wink.
“You’ve always had that privilege, General, but lets’ not keep the brass waiting. Shall we?” Yukio said and in a mock twentieth century mannerism crooked her arms and offered it to the General, to escort her to the other side of the tent where the video conference was going to happen. Hector was impressed with the aplomb with which this tall and slender woman could flirt. If he was going to stay on the surface long, he intended to make an effort to get to know her better.
“Good evening to you all.” Yukio opened the conference. “It has just been a few hours since our return from the field, so we haven’t had time to file a report yet. I and Dr. Mukherjee have not yet finished sorting and analyzing the samples we have collected through the day, but we have preliminary analysis which we can report right now. You will get our formal report before sunrise tomorrow. Having long nights has its advantages,” Yukio said with a smile, “We get almost twenty four hours to make an ‘overnight’ report.” The light hearted opening statement hid the dark mood prevalent in the tent. All of them had seen things which no human should ever have to see.
“The administrative records of the Shaitans that we had seen on their core worlds tells us that this planet was authorized to have a population between three hundred and four hundred million. We don’t know the exact count of Shaitans on this planet when this catastrophe occurred, but there is nothing we have seen till now from the overall orbital survey, that makes me disbelieve that number. Whatever or whoever did this atrocity on this planet, didn’t destroy the electronic records on the planet. In fact, other than the Shaitans themselves, we found very little destroyed in the city.
“There was damage and signs of struggle that were observed, but I am told that the damage was more collateral in nature from the fairly feeble defense that had been put up by the Shaitans. I am going by the expert opinion of Lt. Jenkins here and his team. Being a disciplined military man, I am sure he has filed his report already, unlike us slacker civilians, but perhaps he might want to add something?” Yukio turned towards Hector with a playful twinkle in her eyes to check whether he would like to speak.
“Thanks Dr. Yamagato. Yes, as you may be aware, we have already filed the raw footage with our annotations. You will have a far detailed analysis at the end of the ‘long night’, as Dr. Yamagato puts it.” Hector said, while looking at Yukio and signaling with his eyes that he was enjoying the verbal sparring and was up to the challenge.
“There were signs of struggle and fight everywhere within the city. The signs of struggle were at multiple levels. Majority of the signs of struggle that we observed were the scratches of Shaita
n claws everywhere. There were claw marks on the pavements, on the walls and every other surface we managed to inspect. From the nature of those marks, what we could make out was that some of the marks were made where the claws dug deep into the surface. It was as if the Shaitans tried to stab something with their claws and missed. This in itself is amazing because the Shaitans possess amazing speed and motor skills. Whoever or whatever they were trying to hit must be fast – extremely fast.
“The other type of scratches were more about writhing in agony or in their death frenzy. Those were random patterns expressing the pain of a dying creature.
“Besides scratches, we detected signs of firearms and explosive damages as well. Compared to the scale of the disaster, the amount of bullets, bullet marks and RPG and other rocket propelled munition traces was very little. Our current hypothesis is that this was probably a purely civilian settlement. It mostly consisted of what the Shaitans call the Builder caste. From the torn body parts, we could identify very few Type-B warrior Shaitans. The overwhelming majority of the body parts belonged to the smaller Type-A Shaitans.
“So we believe that there weren’t too many arms and ammunitions in this city and very few warriors to wield it expertly. Even taking those facts into account, whoever did this, did a very swift, efficient and expert job of neutralizing the weak defense. Most of the guns and weapons found, still had most of their ammunition intact, indicating that whoever or whatever overwhelmed them, did so even before the Shaitans could pump all their bullets into the enemy.
Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4) Page 49