Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  –XXX–

  Ramadan pointed the Tajik leader towards their destination. Ramadan had had a tough time explaining the orders of Chinggis to the Tajiks. The Tajiks understood very little English, and didn’t understand Turkish or Arabic. It was almost the twenty third century, and in this day and age, it was unimaginable for Ramadan that he would encounter a group of people who could only speak their native tongue and almost nothing else. These fighters were from an amazingly insular society.

  As Ramadan held back, while the Tajiks advanced, a few of the fighters glared back at him and shouted words in their native language while laughing disparagingly. Ramadan didn’t have to understand the Tajik language to know that those words weren’t complimentary. The gestures made it clear that the Tajik fighters were expressing their doubts about Ramadan’s manhood. Ramadan didn’t take the bait. He was following the orders of his Sayyid. That didn’t mean that he was about to go too far from action. His orders had only forbade him from participating in the assault, there was nothing in his orders that prevented him from being an observer! Ramadan knew the perfect spot!

  As he passed the street corner, Ramadan longingly looked at the spot where he had whiled away endless hours as a teenager sitting on a street café chair. He had the sweetest memories of his life sitting there with Ayesha. He remembered all the pointless debate he had had out there with his friends. Now Ayesha was dead, as were most of the friends. In its place, all that was left were memories, and a ruined heap of garbage, where once stood his favorite haunt. He pushed his sentimentality aside and leaped on to the flight of narrow stairs next to the ruined café.

  Like many buildings in the old city, this one was made from masonry, constructed in the early twentieth century, when reinforced concrete wasn’t a prevalent construction technique. The building may have looked very solid with its thick stone walls but in reality, was extremely vulnerable to building-busting rockets of the demons. A building built out of only masonry crumbles catastrophically once the superstructure is damaged beyond a certain point.

  The very thing that makes the building look solid – its thick walls made from rock, become its Achilles heel. It collapses on itself almost instantaneously, helped by the sheer weight of the rock walls and masonry, giving very little chance to any occupant to make good their escape. That point was proved amply by the fact that this building had collapsed entirely on one side, and was open to the sky near the staircase he was climbing. Ramadan had no intention of hanging around this building for long.

  Ramadan climbed the first floor of the ruined building and carefully made his way along a collapsed pillar, which bridged the narrow gap between the building and the next one, which as almost equally ruined. From that building, he jumped into the balcony of the next building which was more or less intact. The old city of Istanbul was built densely with narrow streets, just like most old cities across the world. Once a majority of the buildings in the old city got damaged to some extent, it became surprisingly easy to move from the ruins of one to the other, if you knew your way around. Ramadan reached his destination – a rare modern building in the old city, constructed just a few decades earlier.

  Real estate in the old city at the end of the twenty second century was incredibly expensive, and building permits in the heritage section of old Istanbul was rare. Whoever had made this building must have been incredibly rich, so he spared no expense in constructing the building. It still had reinforced steel - concrete foundations and columns, which a twentieth century civil engineer would recognize.

  Beyond that though, every material used to make the walls, doors and furniture was state of art. Carbon reinforced aluminum trusses gave supplementary structures rigidity and strength. Walls made from industrial strength plastic-silicon meshes, coated with faux masonry gave the appearance of thick solid walls, but which were amazingly light and fireproof. This building wasn’t any stronger than its neighboring ones, but where the other buildings stood rigid in the face of an impact or an earthquake, this one flexed and buckled. It deformed on impact, reducing the stress. This building could take a lot more punishment before it collapsed.

  Even if this building did collapse, it would do so slowly, degrading gracefully and giving its occupants a lot more time to escape. In the worst-case scenario, if Ramadan did get trapped in the rubble of this building, he was less likely to get crushed and had a much better chance of getting out of it alive.

  As Ramadan reached the roof of the building, he observed two different battles being pitched at the two ends of the upsloping Street. The contrast between the style, strategy and objective of the two battles couldn’t be starker. The Greeks were waging a guerrilla style urban warfare on foot, darting in and out of shadows and ruined buildings, using ranged weapons and firepower. The Greeks weren’t shying away from using guns and RPGs, and they were facing the consequences.

  Any time an RPG was fired from the cover of a building, that portion of the building was toast. The automated defense system mounted on the back of the demon would ensure that portion of the building came down from a barrage of retaliatory rocket fire. If any of the Greek soldiers wasn’t fast enough to get the hell out after firing, they would go down with the rubble. If they were lucky they would be killed instantly, else they would have to endure a slow and painful death from being buried under the rubble.

  A single RPG was usually ineffective against the demons. Their automated point defense system could shoot down a single RPG, unless it had been fired from a range of less than a hundred meters, in which case the point defense system usually didn’t have enough time to react. Seasoned fighters usually coordinated their RPG attack on a demon by synchronizing two simultaneous RPGs fired from two different direction. That way there was a chance of overwhelming the point defense of the demon and the possibility of one of the RPGs hitting its target.

  Unfortunately firing an RPG at a demon from a close range was also sure shot death warrant for the person firing it, because the retaliatory rocket fire would reach the person firing almost simultaneously. Demons’ rockets came screaming like banshees from hell, as they broke the sound barrier in a matter of milliseconds. Those thin and small rockets carried a punch that was almost unbelievable. Those flashlight sized missiles, which couldn’t have weighed more than a kilogram or two, unleashed an explosion that rivaled tens of kilograms of Semtex.

  If one assumed that the diminutive demon rocket had to carry fuel and engine for its rocket in that small frame, then one couldn’t imagine how it could pack in any explosive at all! No chemical traces had ever been found of the rocket at the site of their explosion, just as none had ever been found for their needle gun. It was too small to be a nuclear explosion. The size of those rockets was below the theoretical minimum critical mass for a nuclear explosion in any case.

  Curiously though, faint traces of radioactivity had been detected for a few hours wherever a demon rocket exploded. The radioactivity wasn’t strong enough to be a nuclear explosion, but hinted at a technology about which the humans had no clue. The explosion was strong enough to bring down a portion of a well-constructed building. Needless to say, the person who fired from such a short range was toast. Only a suicidal human being would do such a thing.

  High powered rifles could penetrate the tough shell of the demons and certainly the underbelly, if a demon got careless or distracted enough to expose it in the first place. Unfortunately, a bullet didn’t stop a demon. It didn’t even slow them down. There are soldiers who swore that they had seen demons take fifteen to twenty bullets and keep moving forward. Eventually the demons slowed with enough bullets pumped into them, but bullets rarely killed a demon. The demons withdrew from the battlefield before bullets could do enough damage to kill them. One assumed that they went back to the equivalent of their demon hospital.

  All this assumed that the demon wasn’t wearing armor plating on top of its shell. Demons usually wore such armor plating when they fought in an urban landscape like they were doing now. Wh
en the demons hunted in open areas, they usually preferred not to wear such armor plating. It wasn’t due to the weight of the armor., because humans had recovered pieces of those armor. It was extremely light and fantastically tough for its weight. The labs which could have analyzed the composition of that armor were all destroyed, so humans had no clue on its makeup.

  Most soldiers who had fought demons and survived to tell the tale agreed that the armor most probably constrained their movement to some extent, which is why they preferred not to wear it when it was not thought absolutely necessary. Surprisingly these demons weren’t wearing armor, despite fighting in the narrow streets of old Istanbul. Ramadan guessed that this wasn’t a pre-planned attack. These demons would have been called up and rushed here in a hurry in response to the landing, just as the Sayyid had to scramble his forces to reach the same landing site.

  A few bolts embedded into the shells of the demons were a testament to the fact that the Greeks hadn’t held back their cross bows either. The crossbow was an ideal weapon to use against the demons if one could sneak up close enough unseen, not because it caused too much damage to a demon. It was a good weapon to use because the consequences of using it were not as dire. The bolt out of a crossbow didn’t make any sound, and hence didn’t trigger the point defense system mounted on top of the demon. Despite this, a demon could dodge many of the bolts by sheer reaction speed. Their tightly wound up muscles of the long and folded rear legs instinctively managed to make a demon leap away from many of the bolts fired.

  A demon would usually not fire back if attacked with a crossbow. Instead it would try to hunt the attacker with its claws and pincers. Crossbows were sometimes used by humans to try and lure demons into traps. It didn’t succeed often. Demons were too smart to fall into obvious traps. They were accomplished hunters, who understood this game as well as humans did.

  The Greeks of the Spartan Brigade had taken a lot of punishment because they were attempting to do something that most human fighters dare not do – block the path of a determined group of demons. The demons simply were not interested in playing hunting games. They were shooting their way through every blockade created by the Spartan Brigade, in the process bringing down buildings on top of the Greek fighters. Chinggis was rushing additional forces to aid the Greeks, but they would take time to reach this part of the city.

  The old city had never been a heavily contested part, so not many fighters had been stationed in this part of the city. The demons didn’t prefer to enter the narrow lanes of the old city and potentially be ambushed, so they usually left this part of the city alone. The only forces available to Chinggis at short notice to provide some relief to the Greeks had been the Tajiks.

  The Tajiks were having the desired effect on the advance of the demons. Ramadan noticed that the amount of bombardment on the Greek side had reduced considerably as the demons turned their attention to their rear and flank at the commotion created by the Tajiks. The Tajik horsemen were either incredibly brave or completely suicidal maniacs. Ramadan couldn’t make up his mind on that point yet, but he had to admit that each and every one of them was an incredible horseman.

  The horsemen were proving Ramadan wrong about the horses finding a firm footing on steeply sloping cobbled pavements. The Tajiks had tied rough cloth as shoes on the hooves of their horses, which gave the horses a much firmer grip on the cobbled pavements. The horses were being maneuvered so skillfully, that they were never in any danger of slipping or sliding. With their long spears, they simply charged at the demons making a racket that would have woken up the dead.

  There were three demons being charged at their flanks by the Tajiks. One of the demons was taken enough by surprise to instinctively deploy its hind legs and jump up and forward high in the air. This took that demon closer to the front of the assault, where the Greeks had been fighting the van of the demon assault. The Greeks of the Spartan Brigade didn’t miss the opportunity presented to them. The trajectory and hence the landing spot of the demon could be instinctively predicted. If a skilled RPG wielder could time it right and fire an RPG at the spot where the demon was expected to land, then most of the time the point defense of the demon didn’t get activated, since it computed threats based on missiles fired towards it.

  Somehow the demon point defense system wasn’t capable of understanding that the demon was in mid-air flight and would land at that very point! The skillfully timed and aimed RPG landed within fractions of a second at the same spot as the demon. The demon was blown to smithereens, its gooey internals spattering the ancient walls of the old city of Istanbul.

  The Greek soldier didn’t even get an instant to savor his moment of triumph, though. He had barely started running down the street when building on either side came tumbling down upon him as a result of a particularly vicious return fire from the rest of the demons using an unprecedented number of building busters. It almost seemed that the demons were being vengeful, which was not that far from the truth. With all the demons at the van of the attack concentrating their fire on one poor Greek soldier, it gave an opening to his comrades to unleash their RPGs and high velocity bullets at the demons without the risk of immediate retributive return fire for a few moments. The rest of the Greeks brought down two more demons, before the demons got over their anger and realized that they had left themselves vulnerable to fire from all sides.

  For Pvt. Thanos Pappas though, the battle was almost over. He was pinned waist down by a falling concrete slab. He could not feel his legs. Most probably his spine was broken. The lights were dimming, and he had to struggle to stay conscious. This is not how he had expected to die, but then a lot of his expectations had been belied. He had taken his oath as a soldier to defend his country against its enemies, the Turks being the primary such enemy of his nation. He had expected to be fighting Turks at the border. Here he was laying down his life for the defense of Turkish land from invaders!

  The irony of the situation almost made Thanos laugh, despite pain convulsing his body. Through his blurred vision, he could see through an opening in the falling rubble ahead of where he was pinned. The battle was still raging around him, and a demon was scampering towards the opening in an effort to find cover, completely unaware of Thanos pinned out there. Pvt. Thanos Pappas still had his RPG loaded and lying next to him, and his hands were free. At just a few meters distance and being completely unaware of the danger, there was no way that this demon could avoid Thanos’s RPG. Two demons blown apart by him within the space of a few minutes! That was not a bad way to die, Thanos thought to himself as he pulled the trigger.

  –XXX–

  “There can be no worse way to die than this! No! What am I thinking?! This is not death! I wish I had died, it would have put an end to this misery and the untold damage I am doing to my sisters! Death would be a welcome mercy that my captors have not shown me. This is neither life nor death, but suspended in eternal misery somewhere in between! How I wish I could kill myself! Surely there must be a way for me to end my life!” Fast Current could hear the echoes of these thoughts going through her mind over and over again for who knows how long. How long has she been in the captivity of the humans? She had lost track of time. It could be days, weeks, months or years for all she knew. She was pretty certain that the state of her mind was a consequence of drugs being administered to her.

  How did these humans learn about Bodar biochemistry to be able to administer drugs that put her in such a hallucinated condition? She had never experienced such states of mind before. The weird thing was that she sometimes actually liked it! There were times she even craved to be put into such a hallucinated condition! Then there were moments of lucid contemplation like the state she was in right now, when she was back to her old self and could indulge in rational thought processes. How did the humans do this to her?

  She had to remind herself that these humans were not some dumb animals to be just hunted. They were a space faring race, which had almost reached their neighboring star. That feat m
ay be no big deal for the Bodars, but on the scale of intelligence in this universe, that was a fairly significant feat. It was a belated realization on her part that these humans shouldn’t be taken lightly, and their intelligence should be treated with less contempt. There were tricks that these humans knew, which the Bodars could learn from.

  Fast Current tried to sense her surroundings. She was in a dark place, her eye stalks were of little use in the absence of light, but her infrared sensors could make out the contours of the place. The walls and the ceilings were not regular or straight. This was a natural formation, either a cave or an underground grotto. It was fair sized cave. Although she could not make out the exact shapes of equipment with her infrared senses, the cave had lots of equipment dumped at various corners. She may have had a poor sense of smell, but she was extremely sensitive to moisture. She could detect a fair amount of moisture in the air, which suggested that this place was close to her beloved sea. How she longed for the open seas!

  Next, Fast Current inspected her restraints. Although she could not see her restraints in the dark, she could feel them. Each of her limbs had been shackled by thick and heavy metal restraints. The restraints were anchored to the ground with almost no play. Fast Current was effectively anchored to the ground. She tested the strength of her restraints for the thousandth time and came to the same conclusion as before – there was no possibility of using her strength to break the restraints.

  Her strength seemed to be waning in any case, which was because she hadn’t taken any nutrition since her capture. That thought brought some cheer to her. Eventually she would die of hunger, and her suffering would be over! Just as she was getting happy with that thought, another thought struck her. She had dehydrated when she fell, and should have been dead by now! How was she still alive?