Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  As if to answer that question, the lights turned on. Fast Current could now see water pipes taped to various orifices on her body, including one in her mouth. Belatedly she realized that she had been tasting water steadily dripping into her mouth without realizing it. The humans had kept her hydrated! The amazing thing wasn’t the fact that humans knew the exact orifices to hydrate, which may have been a lucky guess. The amazing fact she realized was the taste of the water! It was perfect! The salinity of the water, the trace minerals in it tasted just like the water in her home planet on Bodoni! How had the humans figured this out?! The human seas were a bit too saline for the tastes of the Bodars, although not harmful to them. Most Bodar spent some time desalinating themselves after a few days of exposure to Earth seas by soaking themselves in fresh water pools.

  Before Fast Current could contemplate any further, she heard sounds of humans approaching her. Her neck and her body were also under restraints, but her eye stalks were free. She turned them towards the approaching sound. She realized that although she could see well enough, she wasn’t being able to focus perfectly. Her muscle control wasn’t 100%. This was probably an after effect of the heat stroke she had suffered. It was entirely likely that the effects may be permanent, and she may never recover back to her original self. Fast Current didn’t want to wallow in self-pity, she concentrated on the humans to learn as much as she could about her captors and her prison. She would not give herself to despondency. She would fight till the end to either escape or kill herself.

  There were fifteen humans approaching as far as Fast Current could count. Almost all of them were armed with weapons that most Bodars now recognized. There was only one female human in the group, and she was unarmed. Somehow, she seemed to be in charge of things, or at the least was a very important member of the group. The rest of the group seemed to position themselves to be able to protect her. The female was saying something to another human walking next to her. How Fast Current wished, her translator was still working! She would have given anything to understand what the humans were speaking.

  “I think the hydration fluid is working perfectly now. I have been monitoring the vital stats of the two, and they seemed to respond to this mix of the fluid perfectly. I guess it was a good idea to mimic the salinity and composition of their body fluid to come up with this formula. Who knows we might have actually hit upon the composition of their sea water back in their demon home planet! What do you say doctor?” Dana asked Dr. Mostapha walking alongside.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that we have discovered their perfect natural water composition, but yes in general I concur that we have solved the problem of keeping a demon hydrated. I think the next problem we need to tackle is to figure out how to provide nutrition to the demon to keep it alive. It has already been over seven days since these demons could have possibly eaten something. If we cannot figure out a way to feed them fast, I am afraid our live specimens aren’t going to remain live for much longer.” The older Dr. Mostapha was more guarded in his response, but cautiously optimistic.

  These were the first live specimens of demons that humans had captured as far as anyone knew. In just one week their knowledge about demon bio chemistry had increased by leaps and bounds compared to the last few years of studying demon body parts.

  “I thought the whole idea of studying the demons was to figure out how to kill them efficiently… you know like… finding something that is deadly poisonous to them but harmless to us, or something that stuns them while human beings remain unaffected. If I follow you correctly doctor, you are more interested in how to save the demons!” Ozlik Kurdi was the liaison man sent by Chinggis to facilitate and follow the research being done by Dana and others on the two captured demons. He had very little idea about scientific procedures and even less patience. He was expecting actionable information from this entire venture, and was frustrated at the apparent lack of urgency being shown by the scientists.

  “Our objective is the same as yours Ozlik.” Dr. Mostapha replied patiently. “I can understand your frustration, or perhaps I can’t. After all it is your men you go out to fight and keep dying, not me. Believe me if we could do anything faster, we would do it. So far, we can only tell you what doesn’t kill the demon. We are yet to figure out any toxicology that is particularly fatal to the demons. We have just these two live demons, and we are unlikely to get any more in a hurry, knowing that these are the very first two live specimens we have been able to get after so many years of getting slaughtered.

  “So, we cannot go about randomly injecting these demons with anything and everything that we would like to experiment with. What we do is collect tissue culture from these demons, and experiment on those cultures in our labs. On those cultures we add various poisons, and other random elements to see how their cells react to those solutions. If we can figure out their biochemistry in detail, we will be able to eventually figure out substances that are toxic to them, but not to us. To be able to do that for a long enough time, it is very important that we keep these two specimens alive and healthy. So, I hope now you understand my concern about keeping these demons alive.” Dr. Mostapha finished with a smile.

  Ozlik grunted in dissatisfaction at the reply and asked a counter question. “So, what have we learnt so far from these tissues of the demons, Doctor?”

  “Well, we have learnt a lot, but I suspect you are mostly interested in the toxicology of the tissue samples. There I am afraid I have mostly bad news. First, most things that are poisonous to us humans and most life on Earth are far less poisonous to the demons, although they do get affected by many of those poisons. For example, the demon tissues are almost unaffected by arsenic and cyanide, two substances that are deadly to most organic life on Earth. This is because arsenic affects the phosphorous in our DNA, which is not present in demons, and cyanide affects the oxygen carrying iron in our hemoglobin which is again not present in the demons.

  “Surprisingly some viper venom, which disintegrates carbon bonds affects them almost as much as it affects us. The viper venom dissolves flesh and the venom are carried via the blood stream to the heart, where it stops the heart causing death in humans. The demons are also carbon-based life, so their tissues are also dissolved by those venom. Unfortunately, the demons do not have the same circulatory system as us, so the venom does not reach any critical organ to cause death. For the demons, the viper venom damage is local, not lethal.” Dr. Mostapha replied to a disappointed Ozlik.

  The entourage reached the demon they were heading towards. Today Dana was going to try a new procedure on this demon for an experiment which was being pursued at the insistence of Kyle. Lt. Kyle Hanks was worried for Dana, since she had to approach and work on the forelimbs of the demon, which housed those deadly pincers. The pincers had been bound with steel cables, but knowing that those pincers could scissor and cut a human limb or neck into two like hot knife through butter, made one nervous being around them. The cast iron restraint on the forelimb needed to be repositioned to give Dana access to the spot on the forelimb that she needed to study and place her implant.

  Dana approached the demon cagily, and had a few anxious moments when the demon struggled violently against its restraints as Dana touched its forelimbs. Dana quickly went about the procedure she had planned, cleaning the area with a scrape, then attaching the plastic implant packed with microelectronics on the forelimbs at the exact spot where demons attached their needle gun, when it was armed for battle. As Dana was finishing the job, the demon seemed to have woken up completely and it gave out one of those blood curdling banshee howl, which nearly split Dana’s eardrum.

  Fast Current heard the distressed cry of her sister coming from behind a partition. She was overjoyed and saddened in equal measure on hearing that cry. She was happy that Rising Tide was alive and right next to her. She was sad that her sister was suffering the same ignominious fate as her. Fast Current cried out to her sister to assure her as best as she could, and to inquire about
the cause of her distress. Rising Tide made a series of low rumbling sounds to explain the procedure that was being performed on her. From the tone of her voice, Fast Current could make out that Rising Tide was in panic and not thinking clearly. Fast Current however was thinking as clearly as possible, and she wondered what was being done to her sister. Then in a flash of realization, she knew what the humans were up to. This was far worse than she had imagined!

  –XXX–

  “So, is this as good as we have imagined?” Ramadan asked Kyle excitedly as he crawled up next to him at their ‘observation post’. The ‘observation post’ was the top floor reinforced modern building Ramadan had used earlier to observe the Tajik charge on the demons. Most of those Tajiks were now dead, as were half of the Greeks of the Sparta Brigade blocking the passage of demons. Between the two though, they had done their job.

  The demon advance had been stopped and the surviving demons had retreated. But the reprieve had been temporary. Air strike had been called in by the demons using their all-purpose shuttles that they used for all kinds of transportation, including transporting to and from their space ship. The air strike had flattened each and every building on the two streets that the demons had been previously advancing.

  The Greeks and the surviving Tajiks had anticipated as much, and had cleared the area post haste. No more lives had been lost in the wanton destruction, but those streets were now unpassable. That suited the objective of the Chinggis just fine. Chinggis had been able to bring in reinforcement of his own fighting force from other parts of the city by that time. Unfortunately, so had the demons. There were now close to a hundred demons advancing on a parallel street.

  This was the largest number of demons that Chinggis had ever seen gathered in one location. Best estimates put the number of demons under the Bosporus Straits at around a few hundred. If those estimates were correct, then the demons had committed a significant portion of their contingent in the area for this assault. That said something about the significance and the importance the demons attached to this mission. In Chinggis’s mind, it became that much more important to give Mehmet the time to be able to reach his destination before the demons do.

  There were over a thousand fighters scrambling to block the route that the demons were taking. Chinggis knew that his fighters were committed and would fight to death; but they had no realistic chance of being able to block or even slow the advance of a hundred demons marching with purpose. Chinggis was desperate and he decided to use his wild card – the American!

  This time Chinggis had instructed Ramadan to not just help his American guest, but to try and keep him alive as long as possible without getting killed himself. If and when the American died, and it was more of a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ – very few walked out of an assault on so many demons alive, Ramadan’s instructions were to retrieve the piece of equipment the American carried. It had been agreed between Chinggis and the American – Lt. Kyle Hanks that if Kyle died, the weapon belonged to Chinggis.

  It was this weapon being held by Kyle that was the object under discussion and the source of hope for both the men. “We shall see if this turns out to be just a lemon or as good as we have hoped it to be, Ramadan. Even if this thing works beyond our wildest dreams, I doubt it will turn the tide in our favor. At best it would give the demons a reason to be cautious. That is better than nothing I guess. Right now, they crush us under their feet with the contempt of an ant!” Kyle replied to Ramadan, and the added. “I think you should be moving out Ramadan. Shadow me as we had planned. Chinggis would be mad at you, if you got yourself killed along with me. Don’t worry, I will try my best to preserve this baby for you. Be ready to catch it, just in case I end up throwing it to you.” Kyle said with a wink, knowing that if it came to the crunch, he wouldn’t have time to throw the weapon. The best that Ramadan could hope for would be to note where Kyle got buried, and come back later to dig out the weapon.

  As the footsteps of Ramadan receded, Kyle inspected the oddly shaped gun he was holding. He knew that the weapon’s shape felt odd to him because he was looking at it with human conception of what a gun should look like. There was no barrel, it wasn’t even regularly shaped. Then again, this was not a human gun, and it wasn’t meant to be fired from a human hand. It was shaped to fit snugly on the forelimb of a demon, just behind the pincers. The closest shape that Kyle could associate with the weapon was that of an archery arm guard, but made out of metal alloy and shaped for the forelimbs of a demon. That wasn’t an inaccurate imagery, because that was the equivalent position in a demon anatomy this weapon was usually attached.

  The weapon had been taken from the limbs of one of the demons that Kyle and his Marines had captured. This was a personal weapon of a demon – the equivalent of a hand gun that every demon always carried, one each strapped on each forelimb. Other such weapons had been captured before, but no one had figured out how to fire them before. The difference this time was that this weapon had been pried out of the forelimb of a living demon – a demon in captivity, who could be experimented on. Whenever a demon gun had been held by a human, the thing that surprised them most was its temperature. It was warm – always! The gun wasn’t scalding hot that would burn one’s hand, but it was uncomfortable to hold the demon gun in one hand for too long.

  There was definitely some machinery or chemistry working all the time inside the demon gun, which generated the heat. Why the gun needed to be powered on all the time, and what work it was doing while it was powered on, was a mystery to human scientists and engineers. Assuming the demon gun worked on some kind of battery powering it, the capacity of the battery had to be staggeringly phenomenal. The earliest such captured guns had been in the possession of humans for a few years now, and those guns were still as warm today as they had been the day they were captured. In all that time it had been radiating away a few hundred watts of power every second! Humans could achieve such a feat only by attaching a small power plant to their equipment.

  The entire gun was one solid block of metal, except for a removable cartridge tray that most probably snapped on and off the top of the gun. The snapping mechanism of the tray was a guess because the humans had had to dismantle the tray by brute force. They hadn’t found any latch or lock mechanism to release the tray. Inside the tray were tens of thousands of needles. The resemblance of the needles to hypodermic needles used in medical syringes was not superficial. The needles had been observed under the microscope, and they were hollow just like hypodermic needles. One end was pointed and closed, while the other end of the needle was open. The curious fact was that the surface of the needle might look smooth to the naked eye, but under a microscope one could make out that the surface was etched in a pattern eerily like those of shark scales.

  Those patterns could be explained aerodynamically. While the pointed end of the needle cut through the air, the surface patterns on the needle would generate micro turbulence, which reduced the drag while moving in a fluid like air or water, very similar in principle to the dimples on a golf ball or the scales of a shark. It had been generally acknowledged by human engineers that the shark scale patterns were the most optimal design to reduce drag while moving in a fluid, and the demon engineers seem to agree! The amazing thing was that the gun was designed to work almost as effectively under water as it would in air or vacuum!

  The cartridge tray occupied more than half the volume of gun. Since the cartridge tray was basically an ammo chamber, it left very little space in an otherwise compact gun for machinery and especially for the phenomenally prolific battery it had to be housing. The machinery and the battery were a total mystery to the engineers. They had tried to force open using drills. Bad things happen when one tries to force or crack open the rest of the gun. In most cases the gun heats up rapidly within a matter of seconds releasing so much heat as to not just melt the gun itself but the drilling equipment, and usually the workshop itself housing the drill.

  Fires have raged in neighborhoods th
at have tried to force open the gun. It is rumored, but not confirmed, that the Chinese tried to crack open the gun with a very rapid but controlled power press that can flatten thick steel bars to sheets in milliseconds. The result is rumored to had been catastrophic, and the resulting explosion is said to have released equivalent energy to that of a very small tactical nuke.

  Humans had generally stopped trying to force open the demon gun in hopes of reverse engineering it. Some had instead focused on trying to fire it. The exit hole through which the needle was fired was obvious. In fact, there were eight exit holes, although demons had been observed to fire only one needle at a time. It was posited that either the barrels behind the holes need some cooling time before they can fire again, and hence multiple barrels were provided for faster rate of fire by rotating through the barrels behind those holes. The other possibility was that it took only one needle to kill a human, so more weren’t used, but the gun could fire all eight simultaneously if the demon was facing a gigantic opponent.

  There was no sighting equipment on the gun, which came didn’t come as a surprise. Humans had observed how the demons aimed and fired the gun. The aiming and shooting style of the demons was like that of a human shooting from the hip. Sights on a gun for such a shooter is useless.

  What had really stumped the humans had been the triggering mechanism of the gun, or rather the lack of it. Entire surface of the demon gun was relatively smooth with no obvious mechanical trigger mechanism. The best guess was that the gun was triggered either through an electrical signal somewhere on the surface of the gun, or wirelessly through an electromagnetic signal. Electrical signal was the more likely of the two. Wireless electromagnetic signal would be a security risk. The enemy may be able to hack and trigger the weapon at an inopportune time. No electromagnetic signal had been detected anyway while the demons fired their guns.