Wrath of the Shaitans

by Sudipto Majumdar

  The concept was simple, understood by anyone instinctively, the trick was in the execution. Any child playing dodge ball knows to watch the hands of the thrower. Once the ball has left the hands of the thrower, it is ballistic, its trajectory can no longer be changed by the thrower.

  The child calculates instinctively the trajectory of the ball and determines if the ball is going to hit him if he continues running at the speed and direction he is running. If the answer is yes, then all the child has to do is to alter his speed or direction, and the ball will miss him.

  The CADBE system worked on the same principles but tremendously fast. It needed to, after all the incoming rail gun projectile was expected to approach at tens of kilometers per second. The rail gun projectile was just a piece of mass, which did not emit any light or electromagnetic waves, so it was very difficult to track in flight.

  However CADBE took advantage of one unavoidable fact of a rail gun. When the projectile was ejected out of the muzzle of the rail gun, a muzzle flash could not be avoided. The magnetically charged rail of the gun transferred a huge amount of kinetic energy to the projectile.

  However there is one unavoidable law of physics in this universe – the second law of thermodynamics. All the energy of a system cannot be perfectly transferred to another without loss in the form of heat and light. There is no 100% efficient system in the universe.

  The rails of the gun transferred so much energy that even in an extremely efficient gun, the amount of heat and light generated in the muzzle is tremendous. For the first few hundreds of milliseconds the projectile was lit up by the muzzle allowing the CADBE system to not just track it, but compute its projected trajectory taking all the variables in the environment into account.

  All this was possible due to the amazingly fast quantum computer. The computer did not even break a sweat when doing those calculations. It could do a hundred CADBE calculations simultaneously. Computer scientists had not yet been able to figure out the computational limits of the quantum computers.

  They were only limited by the amount of parallelization of their own algorithms they could achieve. If there was something the computer scientist could make work more in parallel, they could make it faster. It was as simple as that with quantum computers.

  As a result the CADBE system finished calculating the projected trajectory of the rail gun projectiles barely after it had left its muzzle. Then it calculated the current trajectory of the ship, and worked out a million different directions it could jink towards. It then chose the most optimal direction depending on which move will require the least engine effort.

  The CADBE system would also remember if a previous projectile was also on its way towards the ship and avoid that direction. This would ensure that the ship does not get hit by one projectile, while trying to dodge another. The CADBE system was only limited by the power of the engines and the thrust it could produce.

  To ensure that the CADBE system would not be limited by the low thrust of the ion plasma engines, the CADBE engineers had fought with the ship’s designers. They would not have gotten their way due to the huge demands they were making, but for the insistence of military on another feature, which nicely dovetailed with the CADBE engineers.

  Unlike ballistic weapons like the rail gun, there was no defense from a missile other than running and running hard. The previous encounter with the Shaitans had proved that the Shaitan missiles used solid fuel chemical rockets, which were hard to outrun even with liquid fuel chemical rockets, which were designed more for efficiency of burn, rather for brute acceleration.

  The new ion plasma rockets with their puny acceleration would make Nautilus and its class sitting ducks for Shaitan missiles. So the military had insisted on chemical rockets to be retained for emergency acceleration. Since the chemical rockets would be used only for emergency, fuel efficiency was not a concern. Instead hard acceleration and low maintenance was of prime importance.

  With that in mind the ships designers had retained the chemical rockets on Nautilus, but now they were powered by solid fuel rockets, rather than liquid fuel, which required a lot of maintenance. These ships effectively had a large missile engine inside them.

  7% of the volume and 9% of the mass of the nautilus was dedicated towards this solid fuel rockets as a defensive feature. It was a lot of allowance that the ships’ designers had to concede, when they struggled with saving a single percent of mass.

  The design of the solid fuel rockets however had a twist to assist the CADBE system. The vector of the thrust of the solid fuel rocket could be pointed either towards the rear or the front. There were also special baffles in the path that could turn the vector sideways, although the efficiency of thrust reduced to 75% on doing so, but it was good enough. The vector could be switched by the CADBE system in a matter of milliseconds.

  Thus now neither the CADBE engineers, not the captain felt underpowered when evading a rail gun or a missile – at least for 3 hours, which was the maximum burn time of the solid fuel rockets.

  Now the worth of that solid fuel rocket started being felt, as the ships of the Third Fleet switched them on and started accelerating hard away from the Shaitan missiles. The acceleration was not as hard as that of the pursuing Shaitan missiles, and even with this increased acceleration, the Shaitan missiles would eventually catch up with the Third Fleet.

  It was not as if the human ships’ solid fuel rockets were small. They were bigger than that of the Shaitan missiles, but the ships’ rockets had to push mass a hundred times greater than the Shaitan missile. That was the reason that the human ships were pulling a mere half G of acceleration, while the Shaitan missile was probably pulling 6 G. Still it was better than the infinitesimal 0.005 G that the ion plasma pulls.

  The solid fuel rocket was giving a hundred times more acceleration. The acceleration, was interrupted in a staccato manner by the CADBE as it intermittently stopped the acceleration, or jinked sideways, or even decelerated sometimes to evade the rail gun projectiles. It gave a mildly nauseating feeling, which the crew did not mind, as long as it kept them alive.

  The warships of the Beta Shaitan fleet had the same trick up their sleeves as well. Unlike a migration vessel which are not expected to get into pitched battles or evade a huge number of missiles, the warships are designed with that eventuality in mind. They have their own solid fuel rockets as well, which got triggered immediately as it released its first salvo of missiles.

  Just like the human ships however their acceleration was no match for that of the human missiles. The human missiles were smaller in mass and designed to last for a lesser distance, so they could pull even higher G force. They were accelerating at almost 8 G towards the Shaitan warships, while the Shaitan warships could barely maintain 0.4 G.

  The Shaitan fleet had however done the smart thing and turned the vector of the thrust at 90° away from the sun and away from the 3rd fleet. That way they could put more distance between them and the human missiles, without having to fight the momentum they possessed which was taking them towards the human missiles.

  Fabi was glad when he saw the direction the Beta Shaitan fleet had turned. It meant that the ships did not intend to send more missiles towards the Third Fleet, and would concentrate all its missiles to kill the human missiles approaching the Beta Shaitan fleet. It also meant that the laser and the rail guns of the enemy fleet will start getting less and less effective.

  Fabi realized why exactly 12 missiles had been sent towards the humans, no more no less. The humans had promised that they would not attack. The Shaitans probably only half believed that promise. As a precaution they would have filled half their tubes with offensive missile, and the rest with defensive missiles.

  When the human missiles lit up in the dark and hopefully took the Shaitans by surprise, the Shaitan captains must have realized that they needed all the defensive missiles they could pump out, but half the tubes were filled with offensive missiles, so the fastest way of getting defensive missile on those
tubes is to pump the offensive ones out at the humans.

  So now Admiral Fabi Kalinin knew a lot more about the capabilities of a Shaitan warship. If they survived this battle and were in any position to engage the enemy again, he would be in a far better position to plan the next engagement.

  The quantum computers of each of the ships of the Third Fleet took a few microseconds to consult each other. They assigned tags to each of the incoming missile, then gave prioritized responsibility of each tag to an individual ship. Each ship was to prioritize the destruction of missiles according to the assigned priority.

  The priorities would be juggled and reassigned every few seconds, as the missiles approached closer and it became more apparent as to which missile was targeting which ship. If a particular ship cleared all its first priority target missiles, then it would move to the second priority targets to help out its neighbor.

  Once the priorities had been assigned in the first few microseconds, the pneumatic ejectors started their throbbing which could be felt throughout the ship. Each Nautilus class ship carried 200 missile killing missiles. The humans had learnt the hard way about the robustness of the Shaitan missiles as well as the dead man switch that each missile had.

  They had redesigned their missile killing missiles accordingly. At 927 Kg these missiles were almost the same weight at the nukes that the ship carried. A large part of these missile however was just dead mass – balls of depleted uranium. It had very little fuel, and its engines were smaller and hence weighed less. When your target is coming towards you at a high speed, you don’t need too much fuel or a powerful rocket to reach it anyway.

  Other than the larger weight, there were two things different about these missile killers compared to the last battle over Titan. First was the onboard computer. It was still a silicon based computer only marginally faster than its predecessor. Silicon technology had reached its limits and could not be improved too much.

  The quantum computers humans had were too big, power hungry and expensive to be put on board these missiles. That didn’t mean that the computational power of the quantum computer could not be projected on to the missiles.

  The silicon chip took 8 to 10 milliseconds to make one course correction calculation. The same computation on a quantum computer could not even be measured in microseconds. It is believed that the computation cycle of a quantum computer should be one Planck’s time.

  Planck’s time is the smallest possible measurable unit of time in this universe. Thus even a course correction calculation which may take thousands or hundreds of thousands of cycles happens on a quantum computer in time not easily measure by humans. As far as humans are concerned, it is instantaneous.

  So the sensor data is sent back to the ship where the quantum cores do the calculations and send it back to the missile. Even at 30 Km distance, the time it takes laser or radio signal to that distance is only a tenth of a millisecond. So that round trip adds just 0.2 milliseconds to the near instantaneous calculation. That is a lot faster than 8-10 seconds that the silicon computer takes.

  In reality, the calculation takes about 1.6 milliseconds at a 30 km distance. That is because the sensor and radio transmission equipment is still using silicon, which adds delay. Still it is five to six times faster than the onboard computer. The onboard silicon chip is still available as a backup in case the communication with the ship snaps for any reason.

  The ability to compute course corrections faster meant that these missile killers were a lot more accurate, which in turn meant that they could concentrate their killing mass over a much smaller area making for much denser and heavier hit on the oncoming missile.

  The geometry of the missile had also been tweaked so that the depleted uranium balls expanded on exploding in a disc rather than a sphere, thus concentrating the mass at the point of impact further. It was estimated that a single good hit should disable a Shaitan missile. At worst two hits should do it.

  Each ship had been assigned 3 primary and 3 secondary targets, but the pneumatic ejector discharged 24 missiles. It was a measure of ample precaution. You needed to take precaution with these Shaitan missiles, it was not just their monster yield of 400 megaton that was scary. It was also their design.

  More specifically the dead man’s switch design, which ensured that they will detonate the moment the missile was hit. This meant that it was not enough to just destroy a Shaitan missile. You had to destroy it far enough, preferably at a distance of more than 10 Kilometers. A distance of 8 Km might also be survivable with minor damage to the ship in space.

  A detonation at 6 Km would fry all electronics at the minimum on the ship and leave it dead in space, as USS Friendship had found to its peril over Titan. The crew had lived though they had received a dangerous dose of radiation. Anything less than 6 Km would be fatal for the ship and its crew even if the ship was not actually vaporized.

  Humans had considered copying the Shaitan design of a dead man’s switch in their own nuclear missiles. It made sense to have such a feature on a Shaitan nuke, because they were so huge that they could do significant damage even if detonated large distance. The human nukes however were small in comparison. Just about 2 megatons.

  It wasn’t as if humans could not build bigger nukes. The Russians had built the Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton monster well over a century ago. With the current technology humans could also build a 400 megaton nuke. However human offensive doctrine called for large number of smaller missiles as a more effective method to penetrate the defense of the Shaitan ships.

  The Shaitan point defense was much more effective than humans and if a small number of large yield bombs were sent, none might be able to reach their target, and even if they were detonated at a distance, the Shaitan ships were much more resilient and would not suffer a mortal blow. Thus humans had stuck to their 2.1 megaton yield missiles.

  This meant that beyond a few hundred meter, the explosion of a human missile would not be able to do any significant damage to a Shaitan ship. It was not worth complicating the design of the nuke, risk higher missile failure rate as well as increase the size and weight of the missile on that account. So the human nuclear missiles were left unmodified. They were one of the few pieces of technology that was almost the same as the ones the humans had fought the Shaitans over Titan two decades ago.

  As a matter of ample precaution against the Shaitan missiles, the Third Fleet had release a lot of antimissiles, and the humans could afford to release a lot more due to another feature added to all human missiles and satellites released from a ship. They could be recalled back at any time, refueled and reused.

  There wasn’t much hope of reusing the nukes they had released because they will impact at almost the same time, but extra missile killers could be left over, as they would approach the Shaitan missiles in a sequence one after the other.

  Space battles are like most battles. There is a long preparation time, and then when the actual battle begins, it gets over very quickly. Space battles however carry this to the extreme. It was hard to believe that the battle had begun less than a minute ago. Like most battles, this battles outcome was going to hinge on decisions and planning done long before the battle.

  Gerald was glued to his terminal, but a part of his mind noted that he had not issued a single verbal command. Not even a command on his terminal. Every response his ship and the others in the fleet had taken were automated and programmed. Space battles were too fast for humans to react or calculate in their heads, but it were humans who had programmed the rules to every contingency. The programs were acting on behalf of the humans.

  Now however there was something happening that had not been programmed as part of any contingency. The first wave of human missile killers had reached the Shaitan missiles and simply disappeared!

  “Talk to me people, what just happened?!” Gerald shouted to no one in particular.

  “Sir all 12 of our missile killers disappearing at the same time can only mean that they were hit simultaneously someh
ow…” the weapons officer shouted from his terminal without looking up “… wait a minute. What the hell?! Sir… on screen. Their missiles launched missiles! See that faint drive signature? That is a missile getting launched from those massive monster Shaitan missiles that they launch. It must have killed our missile killers sir!”

  This is where human decision making comes in and Gerald knew what needed to be done. He looked towards the flag bridge and punched his terminal. “Sir you saw what happened, the missiles have some kind of antimissile capability, we need to overwhelm those missiles now!”

  “Agreed” replied Fabi “You program the sequence at your discretion, I will instruct the fleet to download your sequence. You have to lead captain, but do it in less than 30 seconds, we don’t have more time. Fabi out.”

  It was at times like this that Gerald realized the value of being a tech-head. He could not input the parameters in 30 seconds. So he shouted out at his weapons officer, who was a tech-head. He no longer was opposed to the USC policy of preferring tech-heads on the bridge. He was a convert now.

  “Lt. Schellenger, reprogram the killers to attack 5 at a time, and upload it to the fleet. NOW!” Gerald shouted out. Five at a time was an arbitrary figure, he did not know if it was too much or too little. It was the first figure that came to Gerald’s mind and he went with it.

  Lt. Schellenger’s hands stayed on the terminal, but his eyelashes went into hyperactive flutter. It was frustrating for Gerald because he knew that his weapons officer was the best person to do the job anyway and being a tech-head he could do it as fast as possible, yet he could not see anything he was doing or any progress.

  In his anxiety, he unfastened himself from his harness and approached the Lieutenant. It was clumsy to walk on the bridge right now. The AWPS was spinning and imparted some gravity to the ship, which was not even. The center of the bridge was at the absolute center and got no centrifugal gravity, but the place where Gerald’s station was had about a tenth of a gravity. To complicate the matter, their acceleration was imparting gravity in another direction of half G, making the floor of the bridge tilt awkwardly.