Wrath of the Shaitans

by Sudipto Majumdar

  The older Friendship class ships, that fought the first battle with the Shaitans over Titan was considered obsolete and not worth risking the lives of crew in a battle. Some of them are still in commission, used primarily for training and logistic runs to the Moon.

  The newer Nautilus class ships are so new, that there has not been time to build more than four of them. Even now the orbital shipyards were working round the clock to finish Nautilus class ships under construction. The orbital shipyards were the biggest bottleneck to building more ships.

  As the human spaceships had gotten bigger and more elaborate, the crew and the docking space required had increased. The Russian space yard ‘New Vladivostok’ which had been built 40 years ago as the state of the art shipyard, and could build two ships simultaneously was now creaking with age and obsolescence. Despite up-gradation and expansion, it could barely accommodate making one Nautilus class ship.

  The North American consortium, led primarily by NASA had finally built a new orbital construction facility. ‘New’ was a relative term. It was 15 years old and had built the first Resolute class ship. At that time it had been constructed large enough to construct two such ships side by side. It was now struggling to construct two Nautilus class ships which was almost an order of magnitude larger.

  The Chinese had built their own orbital construction facility around the same time as the US, and was facing similar issues. The newest and largest orbital construction facility right now belonged to the ESA-ISRO-JAXA consortium. Humans were struggling to keep up with the need to build ever bigger construction facilities, for their ever growing ships.

  It was a catch 22 situation, spend more on building an orbital facility and sacrifice a few ships that could have been built, or build ship continuously but at a slower pace due to lack of orbital construction yards. All of this construction in space was fundamentally limited by the amount of material and people that could be hauled up to space from Earth.

  Humans had to either build some faster, cheaper and scalable way to haul things to orbit from Earth. Otherwise find a way to construct in low gravity bases like Moon or the asteroids. The current way of blasting things to orbit using massive rockets was 150 year old technology. It was very expensive and not scalable when you want to build massive orbital shipyards or massive ships.

  If all those constrains are taken into account, Francis knew that Humans had not done such a bad job in terms of the number of ships they had. The navy and military leaders like him will have to make do with that they have and defend Earth. If they can survive this assault, then in another 20 years when the next Shaitan invasion arrived, Humans would be much better prepared with tens if not a hundred Nautilus class ship. That all depended on stopping this wave first.

  The normal payload of the Resolute class of ships that made up the First Fleet were 40 standard 2.1 megaton yield missiles. The First Fleet however had not carried the standard missiles meant for this class of ships. Instead it had carried missiles meant for the new Nautilus class ships. They had to. Their plan called for it.

  The Nautilus missiles were exactly the same 2.1 megaton yield, and almost everything inside was the same as the Resolute missiles. There was just one difference, it was on the outside. The casing of Nautilus missiles was very different and bulkier, though not heavier than the Resolute missiles. That gave Francis all the operational headaches he had been going through.

  The crews, captains and the flag admiral Francis Montero, all had to go through a logistical nightmare in Earth orbit during their preparation for the mission. They had to fit 40 Nautilus class missiles into missile holds meant for the less voluminous Resolute class missiles. The clamps, the sheath, the stowage, none of it was meant to hold this size of missiles.

  Warships in general and spaceships in particular are very specialized crafts. They have precisely measured spaces to hold every specific item. Especially something like missiles which take a large part of the volume and mass of a missile. The mass needs to be distributed evenly and center of gravity maintained precisely. It was critical for agile and precise maneuver in space, especially in a battle.

  They had to tear down a major portion of the missile holds and bolt on ad-hoc stowage contraptions, taking over some part of the cargo hold to accommodate all of those missiles. It was further complicated by the fact that the ships were not carrying the missiles as cargo. They had to be deployed in space, and deployed extremely precisely.

  So they needed to bolt on an additional piece of machinery into the cargo hold – a pneumatic ejector. It gave the engineers a massive headache to ration enough electricity from the limited power capacity of a Resolute class ship to power even this single pneumatic ejector.

  The Nautilus could simultaneously power 12 of these without breaking a sweat thanks to its fusion reactor. The Resolute class ships had to run on batteries that were charged by hydrogen fuel cells. It was a challenge to get enough power for just one of the pneumatic ejectors.

  Then the engineers had the challenge to place and bolt that ejector appropriately near the door of the cargo hold, so that the missiles could be ejected safely. They also had to take into consideration that the missiles would be muscled and loaded manually by crew one by one into the ejector. So they had to leave enough space for that around the ejector.

  The First and the Second fleet had been swapping positions by rotation. One fleet would hold position at a point halfway between the orbits of Earth and Mars, while the other would return to Earth orbit for refueling, maintenance and crew rotation.

  Standing guard at that point didn’t have any particular military value when the two converging Shaitan fleets were heading towards a rendezvous point beyond the orbit of Pluto. The First or the Second Fleet could have just stayed in Earth orbit and reached that particular point whenever the Shaitan fleet turned towards Earth and had come much closer.

  It was not just symbolic, to show the panicked people of Earth that USC was standing guard ready to defend earth. It also sent a message to the Shaitans who surely must also be monitoring, that Earth stands ready to defend itself. It was also a camouflage. A camouflage for a plan hatched by Admiral Daniel Cloutier – operation Orb Weaver.

  It was a plan that was contingent to the battle outcome of the Third Fleet, and the signal from Admiral Kalinin. It was a signal that had been sent. Operation Orb Weaver was a go!

  The rotation of the First Fleet had been timed in such a manner that it would be in Earth orbit around the time of the anticipated first encounter of the Third Fleet with the Shaitans. When the signal from Admiral Kalinin had arrived from beyond the orbit of Pluto, the orbital shipyards had gone into hyperactive mode.

  They had dropped all new ship construction facility and used all their staff to outfit the 8 ships of the First Fleet with the necessary modification and stocking of the Nautilus missiles. The task was an anticipated one, and had been planned beforehand, but it was difficult to execute nonetheless when you are given just 6 days to do it.

  Then First Fleet had fired up their engines and proceeded to relieve Second Fleet and take up the designated position between Earth and Mars orbit they had been guarding so long. This time however there was a difference in what they did in their navigation.

  Like all ships with chemical rockets, the ships of First and Second fleet had to fire up their engines to move out of Earth orbit. After having reached a sufficient velocity to reach the destintion in a reasonable time, the ships would switch off their engines to conserve fuel and coast most of the way.

  Just before reaching, the ships would turn around and fire their engines once more to decelerate and finally come to a stop at the designated position. This time though, the First Fleet did not turn around and fire their engines to slow down. Instead they switched on special lights attached in the bow of the ships.

  The lights were specially designed to emit light in the same spectrum as their chemical rockets do when lit up. To someone observing from far away, even a few tens of thousands of
Km away, it would look like the engines of the ship is turned on.

  At that distance you cannot detect the ship visually well enough to distinguish between the bow and the stern. The way the ship is detected is by the sensors of the faraway ship registering the light from the engines and the computer analyzing the light spectrum, comparing it with known engine signatures. To such a computer, it would look like the First Fleet had turned on its engines to slow down.

  The lights were duly shut when the First Fleet reached its designated point. The fleet however had not stopped. It was still travelling at the same speed, since it had never started decelerating in the first place. It kept going, past the orbit of Mars towards the Asteroid belt.

  To an uninformed observer, it would have appeared that Admiral Cloutier had made a blunder and a stupid navigational calculation mistake. The point in space that the First and Second Fleet had been guarding by rotation was not in the straight line between Earth and the rendezvous point where the two Shaitan fleets were to meet. It was a few degrees at an angle to that direction.

  As a result the First Fleet was moving towards the general direction of the approaching Shaitan Fleet being led and herded by the Third Fleet, but not it that exact line. The First Fleet would miss the line of approach of the enemy by several millions of kilometers. It was no blunder but an intentional deviation, calculated to take advantage of fortunate coincidence.

  The time when the Third Fleet were to reach the rendezvous point of the Shaitan fleets was also the time when Ceres the largest planetoid moving in the asteroid belt would be close to the line of approach from the rendezvous point. Ceres would not be exactly in the line of approach, that would be an impossible coincidence, but it was close.

  Ceres went about its orbit slowly, once every 1,680 days, which meant that it would stay close to that approach line for some time, giving the battle planners some leeway in terms of timing. It was Ceres that the First Fleet was heading towards. As they came fairly close to Ceres, they were hidden from the line of sight of the approaching Shaitan fleet by the bulk of the 1000 Km wide diameter dwarf planet.

  It was a dangerous maneuver that they were attempting, and even a minor glitch would mean that they would go splat on the surface of Ceres. The First Fleet went into hard burn, turning their engines full throttle to reduce velocity as much as they could while their engine lights were hidden from the Shaitans by Ceres. There was however not enough time to come to a full stop.

  To come to a full stop on reaching Ceres, the First Fleet would have had to switch on their engines much earlier when they were not hidden behind Ceres. So the First Fleet approached Ceres at a fairly fast clip, which could be considered breakneck. The First Fleet was pointed such that it would swing by Ceres missing it, just ahead of the direction in which Ceres was moving in its orbit around the sun.

  As the First Fleet moved out of hiding behind the bulk of Ceres, it switched off its engines and coasted in a swing by maneuver around Ceres, in what is called gravitationally assisted deceleration. When you swing by a massive object like Ceres in front of its direction of movement, the gravity of the massive object makes the ship swing around the planetoid and you get thrown back almost in the opposite direction to which you came from.

  The change in direction is not the only consequence. You impart some of your ship’s momentum due to gravity to that massive object. So Ceres gains some momentum, while the ships lose the same amount of momentum. Since the 1000 Km diameter Ceres is incredibly massive compared to the ships of the First Fleet, the gain in Ceres is infinitesimally small and cannot be measured, but the loss of speed of the ships is large and very noticeable.

  The First Fleet made the turn around Ceres heading almost back towards Earth, but now moving at a lot less velocity. They still needed to slow down further to come to a stop. Now however, their engines would be facing towards Earth and away from the Shaitan fleet. This doesn’t mean that the Shaitan fleet could not detect the residual bleed of heat, especially in the infra-red.

  The First Fleet had no other option however, and had to chance it. To minimize the chance of detection, they kept their burn rate very low. Just enough to ensure that they don’t exit the asteroid belt. When the First Fleet finally came to a stop, it was still several millions of kilometers away from the line of approach of the Shaitan fleet.

  The First Fleet however had a few weeks to travel those few million kilometers. In space that is considered a tortoise crawl pace. They turned appropriately and barely lit up their engines. It was the minimum burn possible on the engine, and the light emitted was barely a few candles strong. The Shaitan fleet was still billions of Km away, it should be impossible for them to detect such low light and suspect anything.

  When the First fleet reached the designated spot where the Third Fleet was to deliver the enemy, after nearly 3 weeks of crawling in space, they barely had 100 hours left in their countdown clock. The crew got busy physically muscling those missiles into the only pneumatic ejector they had. The release was controlled by the computer.

  They had 40 missiles to release from each ship in a volume of space 1000 Km in diameter. The missiles would travel to their designated positions silently on the momentum of the kick imparted by the pneumatic ejector. The furthest missiles had to travel 10 thousand Km, and 100 hours to do it in. A push of 30 meters per second will take you that distance in that time in space.

  The speed of deployment was limited only by how fast the crew could manually reload the pneumatic ejector. It took the fleet over an hour to get all the missiles deployed.

  Francis watched with satisfaction on his terminal which showed the radar map of the packages. It was the only way to track those missiles, it was not emitting any signal and they would be hard pressed to see even the nearest ones visually.

  The only reason they could see it on the radar was because they were so close to the missiles. If they had been 30 thousand Km away, instead of 10, they would have found it hard to track even by radar. As the packages spread to their designated positions as the time ticked away, Francis realized how apt the name of the operation had been.

  The packages were slowly forming into the shape of a typical web woven by a common garden spider – the Orb Weaver.

  Chapter 30

  Orb Weaver

  Asteroid belt

  February 2084

  Francis was looking at a filtered radar image, where the computer had filtered out all object readings, which had different profile from that expected from their packages. Francis now removed that filter to look how it should look to the Shaitan radar as it approached towards this point in the asteroid belt.

  To the human eye, the unfiltered radar picture looked unremarkable, just like any other part of the asteroid belt, although a careful zooming of a particular part would have suggested a slightly denser than normal concentration of rocks a few meters wide. Nothing remarkable though.

  Francis was more worried about how the picture looked to the computer. If anyone was likely to flag their spider’s web, it would be a computer. The frequency distribution chart of objects in the area, categorized by size was on his screen. Next to it was the average of the asteroid belt as a whole and also the figure of some of the densest areas of the asteroid belt.

  He was satisfied that to a statistically minded computer, this area would look slightly denser than the average, but nothing out of the ordinary. This area would still look sparser than some of the denser areas of the asteroid belt, somewhere around the 80th percentile. Hopefully that should not be enough for the computer to raise and alarm for anything out of the ordinary.

  It was not dense enough for any danger of collisions, so the Shaitan computer should not prompt for change of course either. The only anomaly that worried Francis was the distribution chart for asteroids by composition. Humans would have missed it, but computers may be mindless, but they are relentless. They rarely miss anything.

  Asteroids are of various types. Some are composed of hard rock and si
lica, some are metallic, some are nothing but piles of rubble and dust, and although rare in this part of the solar system, some may be made of ice and frozen methane. One can get an idea of the composition of an asteroid from the scanning radar, depending on how it reflects back the radar ping.

  In this particular region where they had spun their web, the chart was showing an abnormally high concentration of carbon based asteroids. Carbon based asteroids were relatively rare in the asteroid belt. To the computer it would look like an anomaly. Francis just prayed that it was not anomalous enough for the Shaitan computer to raise an alarm. Hopefully it will merely tuck it inside a log and mark it for later reference.

  The missile package, which acted as the camouflage, was made out of carbon based material. Nobody thought of the obvious consequence that so many of them floating around together would create an anomalous signature of unusually concentrated carbon based asteroids. It was an easily correctable weakness of the camouflage. Francis had a reputation in the navy as meticulous person. He made a note of the issue for future improvement, and added it to the admiral’s log.

  Francis noted that the fleet had started moving at the rate of a few centimeters per second. The ships would have given the minimum possible burst of engines for a few seconds. There was no danger of detection of that small a burst. That momentum would make the ships slowly drift towards the only kilometer wide asteroid present in the neighborhood of a few million kilometers in any direction.