Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4)

by Sudipto Majumdar

The Marines took special care in handling the body after that information, as if they were holding the body of one their own crew members. As they were strapping down the body slowly to one of the walls to keep it from floating, one of the Marines called out. “Sir! I think I found something on the person of Lt. Knutsen. It looks like a backup memory stick!”

  Chapter XXX

  Ragnar’s Log

  The Asteroid Belt

  Day 0 – 13:46 hrs. (UTZ/GMT)

  This is the opening voice log of Lt. Ragnar Knutsen, XO of USC Restless on routine transport and patrol mission of the 12th sector of the asteroid belt. I am opening this log as per standard USC procedure for officers on away mission lasting over 48 hours. Our shuttle has just departed from the Restless on its way to the mining station of Asimov on asteroid ASV-2064-0V.

  On board our shuttle, we have eight passengers who are the relief crew of the mining station. These engineers and geologists would be dropped off at Asimov, and eight returning staff from the mining station would be taken aboard and returned back to Earth. The shuttle trip would have been routine, but for the gross violation of safety standards and procedures observed by the captain in the running of the Asimov station.

  The civilians running the mining station do not seem to have taken standard navigation and safety protocols seriously. Their IFF signals have not been working for many weeks and one of their omnidirectional broadcast antennas is damaged. The crew of Asimov does not seem to have given any priority to the repair of these critical pieces of equipment.

  Hence the captain has sent me along with the relief crew to drill some sense of discipline and deliver an official reprimand to the facilities administrator on Asimov for their tardy demeanor and lackadaisical attitude towards safety protocols. I am not sure how much of my exhortations are going to get into the heads of these civilians, but I have the full authority of the USC to commandeer whatever resources are needed at the Asimov station to fix their IFF and antenna issues.

  I have Ensign Balwinder Singh from the ship’s Engineering crew along with me to provide technical support if needed. I also have Pvt. Roberto Jiminez from the Marines to ensure compliance in case we meet any resistance from the civilians to fix their equipment post-haste. In my opinion, civilians are just not disciplined enough to be given administration of any space station.

  Day 0 – 23:38 hrs. (UTZ/GMT)

  I am beginning to like this task that the captain has given me. I really enjoyed hauling up the administrator for neglecting critical communication and signal equipment repairs. We kicked the ass of all the technicians on Asimov and made it clear that we are not taking anyone back home till they fix the equipment. That really got the attention of the eight Asimov miners who were due to rotate back home.

  As a result tomorrow morning from first shift, the lazy miners are going to suit up, go to the surface and start fixing the omnidirectional antenna. The IFF transponder might require replacement parts from the Restless if Ensign Singh can’t get it fixed by tomorrow. I am expecting that either way we should have both the equipment fixed in the next 24 hours.

  Day 1 – 12:55 hrs. (UTZ/GMT)

  I can’t still believe it! The Restless left us on this rock and scooted while we were sleeping! I shouldn’t have said that… I know the captain was only following protocol and orders… but still, we could have been back on the ship in less than an hour! No… the captain did the right thing. The Restless had to mobilize immediately on a System-wide Condition 1 alert. The captain would have had to dispatch a shuttle for the away team on Asimov to bring them back. It would have taken us more than an hour to return back to the ship… still, how can the Restless go to war without its XO?

  And what is this business with a System-wide Condition 1 alert? We have only heard about it in emergency drills and military exercises, it was not something that was supposed to actually happen in real life! Don’t tell me that the Shaitans are suddenly fighting back! It is not possible, we kicked their ass for good. They don’t have the strength to even defend their own systems anymore… Or did the Heretic Shaitans betray us?

  Whatever the Shaitans did, how could they come into the Solar system without us knowing about it? Did they have some secret technology we didn’t know about? Damn! There are so many questions, and all the captain did before leaving us here on the cursed rock was to send a terse message – ‘System-wide Condition 1 alert declared. Departing immediately. Maintain strict radio and EM silence on Asimov.’

  I have recalled all the miners from the surface, repairing the antenna. Their suits would have been leaking radio waves. Ensign Singh has overseen the systematic shutdown of all transmitters on the station. We are all hunkered down inside this rock, hanging on to every piece of news we can get from any radio transmissions. The scary part is that almost all the radio transmission across the system seem to have been shut down, and whatever routine transmissions we can still find are slowly shutting down.

  Day 1 – 23:14 hrs. (UTZ/GMT)

  I have decided to keep this log as assiduously as possible. I have realized that this log may not be a routine exercise as I had thought initially. We might be stuck here for some time, and this log would form a major part of my report, so I will try to record every day before I turn in. Tomorrow I am part of the first shift monitoring the airwaves, so let me make this quick and short.

  We have formed a team consisting of Asimov staff and the three of us USC personnel. We have divided ourselves into multiple shifts to monitor continuously any communication we can glean out of broadcast that we happen to catch. Unfortunately almost all sources of broadcast have gone silent and no one has directly contacted us yet.

  We have had only one source of information during the course of the whole day, and I am not sure what to make of that one source either. It came in the form of a burst communication from USC Majorca. The communication did not have any message, it just dumped the computer core with all the telemetry and communications data into the airwaves.

  This is highly irregular and a major security procedure breach on part of the Majorca. I cannot imagine what made the Majorca do this. I am sure the captain is aware that this would attract a court-martial. I suspect something bad has happened to the Majorca. The radio burst was omnidirectional and in all possible frequencies. It sounded almost like the last cry for help before… I fear for the Majorca… I have many friends on that boat… No point speculating, we will start decrypting the message tomorrow.

  Day 2 – 21:55 hrs. (UTZ/GMT)

  I am too depressed to be sitting in the rec-room anymore, so I decided to return to my bunk and record this log. One just gets more depressed hearing speculations about dark things in the rec-room anyway.

  I decided to feed my USC encryption keys into the Asimov mainframe to enable decryption of the message from USC Majorca. Strictly speaking, by regulation I shouldn’t be feeding my encryption keys into a civilian system, but I guess we are in an emergency situation and I can bend the rules a bit. The picture that is emerging from the data of Majorca is puzzling and scary.

  Lighthouse number 3 had transmitted a priority 1 lowest level alert of a possible high velocity object heading inwards towards the Solar system. The automated alert also had an automated tag indicating that the alert was likely a sampling error because the measured parameters were too weird to be true. As per the automated algorithm of the Lighthouse software, it started the process of rescanning the area once again.

  A few hours later Lighthouse #3 issued a priority 2 higher level alert reconfirming the weird results of its previous level 1 alert. The lighthouse had pointed its roving high powered laser at that specific point and shone light to search for the ghost object coming in at a very high velocity. Light had taken those many hours to reach that object and then bounce back to the lighthouse.

  The results had confirmed the initial readings and also provided definitive numbers from the focused search. However the numbers were so weird that Lighthouse #3 had sent an automated request to the othe
r lighthouses to scan the same area for independent confirmation.

  According to the data of lighthouse #3, a very large object with a mass of between 10 and a 100 million tons (the size of a small asteroid) was approaching the Solar system at 80% the speed of light! That was not all. The Doppler shift of the laser beams indicated that it was slowing down at the rate of over 10 G! The most fantastic thing about the data was that such a massive object slowing down at such a massive rate produced no visible engine signature at all! There was no reaction mass spewing out of the engines. The massive object seemed to defy all laws of physics and was slowing down by magic! It is theoretically possible for reactionless drive to be used but no one can imagine such a large mass being slowed down so rapidly by a reactionless drive. Such a reactionless drive would have to be unimaginably huge! The Shaitan in any case do not possess such a technology as far as we know.

  The shape of the object was not determinable from a lighthouse scan, but the spectral analysis suggested that the object was made out of one of the most abundant metal in the universe – iron. There was no other meaningful information that could be gleaned out of the data. The request of Lighthouse #3 would take 10-14 hours to reach the other lighthouses, since they were all orbiting the sun and designed to be at opposite ends of the orbit to provide maximum coverage. Till then there could be no independent verification of the data. There was however, no data from the other lighthouses in the data-dump, from which I assume that disaster struck before the other lighthouses could independently verify the data of lighthouse #3.

  From what I could glean from the data dump of the Majorca, within twenty hours of lighthouse #3 detecting this massive object hurtling inwards towards the inner solar system, it had gone silent. Since the lighthouse was three light hours away from Earth, it must have been destroyed three hours earlier from the time Earth got to know about it. The lighthouse had been tracking the object continuously, and its last report indicated that the unknown object had started decelerating at the fantastic rate of 23 G!

  Other than the incredible amount of thrust that would be required for such a massive object, no human or Shaitan could have withstood those G Forces and would have been crushed to pulp, if they had been riding on that thing! If it is a ship, then it must be an automated ship run by an AI. Even a Shaitan AI, which has organic components inside it would not have been able to withstand that kind of G forces. It must be an AI like the crude ones that humans produce, completely machine made out of quantum computers. Otherwise, it had to be something else altogether… something we have not seen yet, something we do not understand yet… and that is a scary thought! I better turn in tonight, I will try to reconstruct more of the log tomorrow.

  Day 3 – 14:25 hrs. (UTZ/GMT)

  Oh my god! I can’t believe this is happening. I keep pinching myself in the hope that I will wake up from this nightmare! Is this how the people who live through Armageddon are supposed to feel? Is this how the last humans alive are supposed to feel? I don’t know, but I and everyone else in this station are feeling that way. None of us went to the cafeteria for lunch, but retreated to our own bunks too depressed and scared to eat. I am sure others have retreated to their own private hell as well, hoping, praying and possibly journaling like I am. What else is there for us to do but to hope and wait… and yet knowing in our heart of hearts that there is no hope. We are most likely to wait here forever and die, or be soon discovered and hunted down like animals by the demons.

  Demons! That what they are calling them! Is this what the Bible had foreseen as the end of days? Is this how we humans were destined to die?! Oh god! I cannot go on…

  … I need to be strong and display courage, if not for myself but the civilians on this station. They are really scared and are looking up to me for leadership. I need to hold this place together, so let me act professional. Let me act like a soldier. I will start with not rambling in this log, but narrating a cogent sequence of events as I have observed.

  We continued our efforts to reconstruct the data from the Majorca in the morning. The other lighthouses had been able to track and find the ship… and it looks like it is some kind of a ship which is powered and controlled, because after destroying lighthouse #3, it changed direction and headed straight towards Earth! All the weird measurements of lighthouse #3 were correct! The ship is between 30 and 40 million tons in mass. I cannot even visualize a ship that large.

  The Second Fleet which was closer to the line of approach of the unknown super-ship, was alerted and it went into maximum acceleration to intercept the super-ship. The super-ship didn’t respond to the radio hails of the Second Fleet, which is not terribly surprising. What is surprising and shocking is the encounter of the Second Fleet with the super-ship.

  The super-ship was still travelling fairly fast at a few percent of the speed of light when the Second Fleet intercepted the path of the super-ship, which had made no attempt to deviate from its path and avoid the Second Fleet. That in itself wasn’t surprising. A ship that massive, which outweighed the collective tonnage of the entire Second Fleet a hundred times over didn’t have anything to fear from the Second Fleet. If anything, I can’t imagine what must be going through the minds of those brave comrades of mine, who were facing up to such an impossible adversary.

  I don’t know how much damage the Second Fleet hoped to inflict on that monster super-ship, but they did launch a massive barrage of missiles at it. When the missiles reached about four thousand kilometers from the super-ship, they simply winked out of existence! No explosion, no impact with any antimissile, the whole lot of a few thousand missiles, simply ceased to exist! One moment the missiles were sending back their data, with all parameters nominal, and the next moment they stopped sending data.

  The Second Fleet did send out a second barrage of missiles and started shining their main attack lasers at the super-ship, but it was too late. When the super-ship reached a distance of about four thousand kilometers from the Second Fleet, all contact was lost with the Second Fleet. Just like their missiles, the Second Fleet simply winked out of existence.

  All this was recorded by the First Fleet, which was accelerating as fast as it could to intercept the super-ship themselves. That’s why it was part of the records of USC Majorca, which was part of the First Fleet. According to the records, some of the ships of the First Fleet recorded a momentary pinprick of light before the Second Fleet vanished out of existence. Nothing could be concluded from those observations, as the First Fleet was too far off, and those observations were well within the margin of error of the sensors.

  The First Fleet was able to intercept the super-ship fairly close to Earth, at a distance of just 3.3 million kilometers. By this time the super-ship had slowed down considerably by keeping up its incredible 23 G deceleration. Thus the battle with the First Fleet happened at a lower speed, which helped the First Fleet experience its own doom for a few more seconds. That was the only difference. Otherwise the First Fleet met with exactly the same fate as the Second Fleet – swatted out of the way like a fly!

  Those few extra seconds accorded to the First Fleet, enabled the quick thinking captain of USC Majorca to do one last service to humanity before he died. He was able to command his ship to eject the ‘black box’ computer core. The ‘black box’ computer core kept a digital record of every scanner, and sensor signal passing through the systems of the ship, along with all voice and video recordings of the bridge. It was very similar in concept to the ‘black box’ fitted into airliners for nearly two hundred years. The function of the black box was exactly same as their earthbound counterparts – to be able to piece together the last moments of any ship that met with a disaster.

  When the black box was ejected, it automatically went into an omnidirectional high powered radio broadcast mode of its data. This was meant to help the black box being located by investigators, and to be able to retrieve the data remotely, in case the black box ended up in a place where it was irretrievable. Unfortunately the black box wasn
’t able to finish dumping its complete data before it was destroyed. The strong radio signal must have gotten the attention of the super-ship, which must have destroyed it with whatever super-weapon it was using.

  I was able to retrieve the last piece of voice recording from the bridge, and the words of the doomed crew is still playing in my mind – “My God! We are burning from the insides!”

  Day 12 – 20:20 hrs. (UTZ/GMT)

  I haven’t made any log entries for the last week, because there was nothing more to add to the log. The status hasn’t changed. Everything went dark, and remains dark in the solar system. We haven’t heard as much as a radio squawk in the last one week. We are now looking at the very real possibility of having to spend a very long time hidden out here.

  I have put the radio frequency monitoring on automated recording mode. If we hear something the computer will alert us. We have organized and assigned ourselves specific tasks to help us survive as we hunker down for the long haul. We are organizing our supplies to ensure we can last as long as possible. May God help us survive!

  Day 333 – 23: 45 hrs. (UTZ/GMT)

  I don’t think that we can last much longer. Our food recycle machine has run out of the basic inputs materials it requires. Our air recycling system has broken down more times than we care to count, it has run out of spares, especially for scrubbing out CO2. We are now breathing dangerously poisonous air. There is no point in living like this anyway. I don’t think anyone is coming to rescue us, if there is anyone left alive in the solar system in the first place.

  I have organized my logs and made multiple copies along with all records of this mining station. I don’t know why I did that, for I don’t think there is anyone left to find or read them. In the forlorn hope that there might be humans still alive in this universe and some day they may find this place and the records, perhaps. Or maybe the records would be found by some alien species, who would know that there once existed a species called the Humans who reached for the stars! May be they will read my goodbye and my own epitaph. And if this place is never found again in eternity, then here is my goodbye to eternity!