The Bodar sisters didn’t suffer the same fate. Two minor tongues of lightning did find their way through their bodies to the ground. Fast Current and Rising Tide did suffer an electric shock, as would any being whose body consisted of a fair amount of water. What really caused damage to them was the EMP. The EMP radiation may not have caused any immediate discernible harm to their bodies, but every equipment on their person, which used electronics was fried. Almost everything that the Bodar sisters carried worked on microelectronics.
The Bodars may use a lot of fancy technology on their ships which was beyond the understanding of humans, but almost everything that a Bodar carried as personal equipment worked on microelectronics. Just like human equipment had silicon based chips embedded into almost every piece of even moderately complex hardware, Bodar equipment ran on similar concepts and technology, albeit far more advanced than the human ones. The Bodars didn’t use the same silicon based microchips used by humans, but the material of construction of the microelectronic circuits was only a matter of detail. What really mattered was that those circuits ran on micro currents, sensitive to electric overload and sensitive to sudden discharges, just like human Silicon circuits. Overload them with EMP, and they fried just like human silicon circuits.
The Bodar sisters were now exposed, shorn off their high-tech equipment, cut off from radio communications with their kind, but most importantly cut off from their high tech personal defense system that every Bodar was equipped with. The real attack from the humans came now, just as the humans had planned. It was only the incredibly fast reflexes, and their keen eyesight that saved the Bodar sisters. That and the relatively low gravity of this planet that the humans called Earth.
The Bodars had by now encountered suicide bombers a fair number of times to be familiar with this human tactic. Desperate humans across the world had tried this many time over, initially with success. The Bodars had adapted. They had tuned their personal scanners and programmed their onboard computers to smell the air constantly. The scanners could detect just a few molecules of unstable nitroglycerine and most of the common explosives used by humans. Any explosive by definition had to be unstable and released molecules in the air constantly.
The scanners could detect those molecules stereoscopically to pinpoint the direction and determine if any human was carrying explosives. If the computers even suspected a human to be carrying explosives, that human was blown away instantly from afar, no questions asked. This strategy had worked effectively and the Bodars lately had not fallen victim to suicide bombers. Most human combatants had slowly realized that the Bodars had figured out a foil against suicide bombers, and that the tactic was no longer effective. As a result, few attempted suicide bombings on the Bodars any longer.
To Fast Current it seemed that the humans had tried a variant of the suicide bombing, by strapping on electrical charge instead of explosives. That had foiled the computer algorithm, which didn’t detect explosives. The attempt however seemed pathetic initially. Electrical energy couldn’t be packed as densely as chemical energy in the form of explosives. What had the humans hoped to achieve, jolt Fast Current and her sister into submission? Her amusement soon gave way to realization and respect when she spotted the blast of rocket at a distance. In that fraction of a second she realized what the game plan of the humans had always been.
The EMP had fried all her equipment, she no longer had personal point defense operational. Now the humans had launched the real attack in the form of RPGs (Rocket Propelled Grenades). If her point defense system had been operational, those RPGs would have had no chance of penetrating them. All the RPGs would have been shot down before they could reach anywhere near the Bodars. Now though, the only thing that could save Fast Current and her sister was fast reaction and agility.
Fast reaction and agility is what both the Bodar sisters displayed. Bodar nervous system incorporated a lot more metal salts than the nervous systems of Earth based animals including humans. Signals traveled much faster through the nervous system of a Bodar than humans. It didn’t make them smarter, because that is a function of the number of neural connections of the brain, but it did make them a hell lot faster than humans. By the time the RPGs were only a third of their distance in the air, Fast Current and Rising Tide had spotted the threat and made a correct assessment of it. They used their other evolutionary adaptation – their hind limbs, aided in no small measure by the lower gravity of Earth compared to their home planet.
When the ancestors of Bodars had crawled out of the oceans on their home planet to make a living on the beach, they had done so to fill an ecological niche vacated by another species which had died out during a period of natural calamity caused by climate change. The beaches may have been vacated, but the hinterland was still crawling with large predators. Natural selection had forced the Bodars to evolve larger brains to both evade those predators and catch nimble prey on the beach. Another major change forced by natural selection was in their hind limbs.
When the Bodars had crawled out of the oceans all their limbs except their forward pincers were similar in size. Those limbs were very similar to the walking limbs of a crab or a lobster in design. Just like the limbs of a lobster, their limbs had been adapted to walk on the ocean floor. They were not particularly strong since they didn’t have to support the weight of a Bodar in water because the Bodars like most creatures of the water, maintained neutral buoyancy.
Once the Bodar ancestors crawled on to land, their limbs had to support the weight of the body on a planet that had almost two and a half times the gravity of Earth. Natural selection quickly favored those Bodars who could develop stronger limbs. It helped those Bodars catch more food, which increased their survival rate and those Bodars passed on their genes more often to the next generation. What was even more important for survival though, was to be able to run away from some of the large, terrifying predators that lurked on land. In a case of convergent evolution, the hind limbs of the Bodars had elongated, folded into segments and their muscles and tendon arrangement modified until those limbs resembled those of a grasshopper. Nature had come up with a similar solution for a similar problem on another planet. The biochemistry may have been different from Earth, but the physics was the same anywhere in the universe.
The tendons would normally lock two segments of the rear limbs under high stress spring action to be released in an emergency, which would result in the Bodar being able to make a long and high leap into the air, lifting its massive body even in the strong gravity field of their native planet Bodoni. The hind limbs evolved as a survival mechanism that enabled the Bodar to make dash for the water from the beach to evade land predators. The land predators had evolved for much longer as land animals, and hence had better limbs for locomotion on land. There was no way a Bodar could match land predators in a chase. The only hope for the Bodar ancestors were to be able to return to the safety of the water by making a desperate hop onto the water from the beach.
Those hopping legs meant that during normal times, a Bodar walked with its long hind legs raised like a grasshopper, not very useful for a normal walk. They stayed tensely coiled for an instinctive jump when a Bodar felt threatened. Four of the middle limbs, two on each side, were used for walking. These four limbs hadn’t modified much since Bodar ancestors crawled out of the water. They were similar to segmented limbs found on lobsters and many insects. The foremost two limbs of a Bodar were specialized, as they had always been even before Bodars climbed onto land. Those two limbs were the object of dread for every human alive on Earth.
Those two front limbs had an eerie resemblance to that of a Praying Mantis. Like the front limbs of a Mantis, the limbs were divided into three segments, each one large and strong and could fold to grasp its prey. The prey was immobilized by not just the vice like strength of those limbs, but also the sharp spikes lining the entire length of those limbs, which dug into the flesh of its prey ensuring that the prey could not slip away. The front limbs differed slightly from
those of a Mantis only when one inspected the tip of the limbs.
While the Mantis limbs ended as a sharp point, the Bodar limb branched into seven ‘digits’. Two of those ‘digits’ had grown into two-foot-long sharp scissor like pincers. Those pincers were strong and sharp enough to decapitate a bull with one snap, but could be equally used to delicately hold an egg without breaking. They acted like the opposable thumbs of humans. The rest of the five digits were smaller and worked analogously to human fingers. The spookiest part of those limbs was the way they were held in resting position by the Bodars – exactly the way a Praying Mantis does, folded right in front of its head in a “Praying” position. Despite these visual similarities with a Mantis, the Bodars weren’t named ‘Mantis’ by the humans, but were called ‘Demons’. The Bodars earned that name due to their heads.
Those triangular shaped heads of the Bodars were in reality fairly similar in shape and proportion to that of a Mantis. It was however the detailing of the head of a Bodar that brought out the most primal of fears in humankind. They resembled the description of a demon in almost every mythology and religion on Earth. The Bodar’s external color was mostly red. Their hard-overlapping shells on top were bright red, with a few spots of white, so were the hard chitin analogous limbs which had larger number of white spots. It was only the underbelly of a Bodar which was white, very similar in color scheme to that of a crab. The underbelly may not have been as hard as the top shells, but it was certainly not soft. The underbelly was made from cartilaginous covering that was tough enough. The underbelly was white in color for the same reason as most Earth sea animals have white underbellies – camouflage from underneath. Since the underbelly wasn’t visible much, a Bodar appeared overall red in color.
It was however the head of a Bodar that epitomized and accentuated the redness of a Bodar. It was dark blood red, almost merging into black at certain places. The ‘head’ of a Bodar didn’t function exactly like the head of most Earth animals, but was close enough. The head of a Bodar housed some of its sensory organs, but not all of them. There were ‘eyes’, big round ones at the two ends of the triangular head, exactly in the same position as the eyes of a Praying Mantis. They weren’t really eyes in the conventional sense. They were hollow pits which sensed infrared light. Those large hollow pits, gave the appearance of an empty eye socket, which contributed considerably to the demonic appearance of a Bodar.
The Bodars shared their infrared sensory organ with most of the animals of their home planet, where the sun gave out a higher percent of its energy in the infrared spectrum compared to the sun on this planet Earth. Here on Earth, only a few animals like the snakes had evolved similar organs to detect heat, and none so sophisticated as the Bodar infrared ‘eyes’. It gave the Bodars natural night vision that rivaled the most sophisticated night vision gear human technology had produced.
The true eyes of the Bodar were placed at the ends of two muscular stalks growing out of the two sides of the head of a Bodar. The thick muscular stalks gave the appearance of horns growing out of the head of a Bodar, reinforcing the imagery of a demon. The two thick eye stalks could turn in any direction independently, giving a Bodar 360⁰ vision in addition to being able to simultaneously look up and down without having to turn their heads. It was next to impossible to sneak up on a Bodar.
Their color vision wasn’t as good as human color vision, having evolved on a planet where the sun was redder and the light in the higher violet end of the spectrum not so brilliant. The Bodar, however made up for this slight deficiency by having eyes that were essentially telescopes, which could see much further than human eyes. Those muscular eye stalks housed the photo receptors of the eyes some distance behind the lens, and the muscles could contract and relax, changing the distance between the receptor and the lens, thus acting like a simple telescope. This gave the Bodars the ability to look at a small but far away position much more clearly than human eyes ever could.
The Bodars didn’t possess a nose. As underwater creatures, they had had no need for a nose, since they couldn’t use it for either breathing or for smelling. The Bodars under water detected their prey by tasting the water for the few molecules that would emanate from a prey’s body and float through the water. They had a more acute sense in water than that of a Shark, which can also taste a few molecules of blood floating in the water. Those same sense organs had been adapted on land to sniff for prey molecules wafting through the air. On land however, the Bodars were lousy in their sense of smell.
The last, but the most prominent and terrifying feature of the Bodar head was its mouth. More than anything else, it is the mouth that gave the Bodar the appearance and the name of a demon. The mouth was not for ingesting food. In that sense it wasn’t truly a mouth. Bodars ingested food through an opening in their body near the base of their neck, at the edge of their underbelly, which was normally kept closed. The pincers on the front limbs pushed food into their true mouth when a Bodar ate. The contraption on a Bodar head, which looked like a mouth was really an evolutionary adaptation to grip a struggling prey, or deliver a fatal bite. This terrifying ‘mouth’ had developed accordingly to fulfill those roles.
There were three hooked canines, almost twelve inches long. Two on top curving down and inwards, and one at the bottom curving up and inwards. Those canines when deployed, could extend almost a foot in front of the mouth to dig into the flesh of its victim and grab it. Those tusk like canines extending out of the mouth weren’t the only teeth in the repertoire of a Bodar mouth. Inside the mouth were two different teeth mechanism that could extend nearly a foot out of the mouth when it opened. The first mechanism had four-inch conical shark-like teeth set in neat rows which could be extended out of the mouth if a Bodar wanted to tear flesh.
The second mechanism could extend out an equal distance but consisted of blunter, flatter but stronger teeth, which were fewer in number. These could be deployed if a Bodar wanted to crack the shell of an armored creature like itself. Only one of these two mechanisms could be deployed at a time depending on the prey a Bodar was tackling. Needless to say, since it wasn’t truly a mouth, there was no tongue inside. It was more of a grappling, grinding and shredding organ of a Bodar.
So here Fast Current was, a full grown Bodar, standing almost six feet head height, over eight feet in horizontal length, weighing over three hundred kilos on Earth. To a human she looked like a satanic hybrid cross between a monster Praying Mantis and a hard-shelled lobster, with hind legs like a grasshopper raised above its body. The menacing pair of front pincers ever ready to cut through human flesh, and a head with two empty socket eyes peering out like Satan himself.
That massive demon along with her sister, on detecting the incoming RPGs, performed a feat of nimbleness that would be unbelievable if not seen with one’s own eyes. Those long, tightly wound hind limbs instinctively released their locks and the Bodar sisters were leaping high in the air faster than the eye could blink. In the lower gravity of Earth, the Bodar sisters managed a ten-meter-high leap and a length of almost twenty-five meters.
That leap saved their lives, and they escaped with just a few shrapnel embedded in their underbelly, which were simply shrugged off. The Bodar sisters weren’t out of the woods though. Fast current used one of her telescopic eye stalks to track the humans who had launched the RPGs. They were nowhere to be seen, most probably they had ducked under cover after releasing their missiles. Her other eye stalk detected incoming RPGs from another direction almost at the other end. This time coming from the top of one of those strangely shaped rocks.
The Bodar sisters had walked into an ambush! The second set of RPGs was released only after it was predictable where the Bodars would land. It was almost as if the humans had anticipated the Bodar response! Of course, the humans had anticipated the Bodar response, Fast Current had to remind herself! These humans had been fighting the Bodars for many rotations now, and they were as familiar with the Bodar tactics as the Bodars were familiar with the human tactics
. These second set of RPGs was a big problem for the Bodar sisters.
The muscles and tendons of the hind limbs of the Bodar wound up into a tightly coiled spring over a period of many minutes. The hind limbs had evolved as a one shot quick getaway mechanism to be able to instantly put some distance between a Bodar and a predator on their home planet, and then the Bodar could scamper on to the water with the rest of its limbs. It was never designed for continuous jumps.
Fast Current and her sister would not be able to escape these RPGs as easily as the first one. Fast Current suspected that the humans knew this fact as well, and had always counted on this second attack to do the damage. Fast Current and Rising Tide were trained and experienced hunters. They had instinctively jumped in two different directions to prevent getting bunched up and providing one single target to the enemy. The enemy had been equal to the challenge and had launched two RPGs, individually targeting each Bodar. Fast Current realized that there was nothing more that could be done, but to run like hell. That is what she and her sister did.
Fast Current kept one eye stalk fixed on the incoming RPG, while her other eye stalk desperately scanned the landscape to find some shelter. The humans had chosen their ambush point well. In this wide-open Badlands, there were very few things behind which one could duck for cover. The Bodar sisters, despite having followed cautiously and being on the lookout for an ambush, were still caught a hundred meters away from the closest point where they could duck for cover. The sisters would have to run the gauntlet and make a dash for it.
Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Page 5