Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  Stopping the demon column was never the objective, delaying them as much as possible was. While the bulk of the brunt of the responsibility had been borne by the Greeks, the Turks, the Tajiks and a myriad of nationalities from around the region, Kyle had contributed and played his part. He had not only taken down eight or nine demons, which in itself was unthinkable till then for any single human combatant, he had brought the column to a halt as they searched for their sniper. The column was likely to stay under cover and stationary for some more time as they waited for their sniper to take the bait. Even when the demon commander decided to move forward again, it would do so with caution, watching all the time for the sniper, slowing down the overall speed of the column.

  Kyle had achieved so much in that short sniper session. He had proved that a human could fire the needle gun. Not just fire, but effectively target demons. He had proved that the demons were just as vulnerable to the needle gun as humans were. He had battle tested the deadliest and most effective weapon against the demons so far. He had to return alive and share his newly gained knowledge with the resistance and as many human fighting forces as possible. Being able to operate the enemy’s gun was only the first step. The technique pioneered in hacking the gun could possibly be used by humans to operate other demon machines or sabotage them. He had too little to gain, and too much to lose by taking more shots at the demon. It was time to retreat. Kyle slinked back slowly, climbing down from the half-destroyed building in which he was hiding, towards the back street where Ramadan was waiting for him. Ramadan had faithfully followed Kyle wherever he had gone. Kyle wasn’t sure whether it was out of loyalty and concern, or simply to pick up the needle gun the moment Kyle died and deliver it back to his boss as per orders. He didn’t care, he had a guide to take him back thorough the labyrinth that was the streets of old Istanbul.

  –XXX–

  Mehmet was growing increasingly desperate for he knew that he was running out of time. He was crouched at the exit of the Basilica Cistern, the final underground passage. Once out of the exit, he would have to make a dash out in the open for a few hundred meters to reach the gates of Aya Sofia. His objective was lying right there at the courtyard of the main gates of Aya Sofia. Whoever had sent that package, sure wanted it to be found. They couldn’t have chosen a more conspicuous place. The package, which must have come from space, had started broadcasting standard USC disaster beacon upon entering the atmosphere. That is how the remnants of the NATO command center in Turkey had originally been alerted to its presence. Before the invasion, a thousand tracking stations would have tracked the package well before it could enter Earth’s atmosphere. Now though, the lone surviving tracking station tracked it over the straits of Bosporus as it semi-crash landed somewhere in the old city of Istanbul.

  NATO tracking station had alerted Chinggis through the resistance network, since his network was probably the only semblance of government left in Istanbul, which was probably better than many cities around the world that had descended into complete chaos. Chinggis would have learnt about the landing site anyway. Something landing on the front lawns of Aya Sofia, one of the most iconic monuments in the World could hardly have been missed. There may have been no tourists in Istanbul, but there were refugees that had fled to this high ground from the shoreline which was the haunt of the demons. The poor curious souls who had initially rushed towards the landing site paid with their lives. Unbeknownst to those curious people, the demons had also been tracking the descending package from orbit. They had sent one of their shuttles to follow it. When the package landed, the shuttle hovered over the landing zone and fried anyone human who tried to approach it.

  The shuttle hovering over the landing zone was one of the typical shuttles used by the demon in recent years. Analysts had concluded that this was most likely an equivalent of a demon transport shuttle. These shuttles were very different in profile from the large and well armored transports that had landed during the initial days of the invasion. Those initial transports were gigantic armored crafts that had carried the initial invasion force from the demon ship down to Earth. Those large transports could easily shrug off a Surface to Air missile (SAM). Those large transport ships had extremely sophisticated defense systems. They had easily fended off the most high-tech end of twenty second century air defense systems. Even nuke missiles had been shot down easily by point defense system of those ships. Only one such large transport had ever been brought down by humans, when a Chinese nuclear sub had surprised one of those behemoth transport ships that was landing skimming the sea near Shanghai.

  Those large transports were rarely seen these days. The assumption being, that those heavy invasion machineries had been stowed away, now that the demons had effectively won the battle for Earth. Instead the demons now used smaller shuttles, the size of mid-sized human aircrafts. These relatively smaller crafts by demon standards were also relatively lightly armored, although one needed to keep in mind that “relatively lightly armored” was relative to the nearly impossible to penetrate larger invasion crafts. They were still fairly tough to kill for humans. A SAM could hurt one of these demon transport shuttles, but not bring it down. That was assuming that a SAM could get anywhere near the demon transport shuttle in the first place. The shuttles had a reasonably capable point defense system, which could shoot down almost all threats posed by human missiles. Only a concerted and large number of SAMs could overwhelm the point defense of the shuttle transport, and if that ever happened the shuttle usually was still capable enough to limp back to its base, wherever that might be.

  Still, the demons seem to be touchy about the safety of their transport shuttles even though humans had been able to bring down very few of them since the invasion. They usually flew high enough to avoid manually targeted SAMs. Automated targeting required active radars on ground, which got shot down the moment they lit up a demon transport shuttle. That way the demons had been able to keep their transport shuttles fairly safe in the last few years. The only time a demon transport is really vulnerable is when it lands in a hostile territory or hovers low over such a territory. In such a situation, the shuttles could be targeted visually with tank busting RPGs. That was the reason why demon transport shuttles did not try to land in hostile territory or attempt to drop demon fighters into such territories.

  The demon shuttle standing guard over the landing site was hovering fairly high as per their standard operating procedure. One could not see it visually, but Mehmet knew that a high-powered binocular or a keen eye could spot it somewhere over area. What was even more certain was that the shuttle had every square inch of the area around the landing site covered. Many resistance fighters had tried to sneak under the cover of buildings and trees, or try and make a dash for the Aya Sofia. Each and every one of them had met the same fate – incineration by fire from above. Two Armored Personnel Carriers had tried to dash in, only to be blown to bits by the shuttle. The shuttle wasn’t going to let any human approach the landing site.

  Mehmet was getting increasingly frustrated at the delay and there were no fresh ideas abound as to how to get across the last hundred and fifty odd meters. Mehmet was primarily a technician and not a soldier. He was surrounded by scouts and fighters who had been instructed by their Sayyid to take Mehmet to the landing site. Those scouts and minders had been holding Mehmet back from the edge of the covered area beyond which one had to dash in the open to reach the site. The scouts had sent their own in an effort to test the reachability of the site. The string of littered bodies out in the open bore a testament to their failure. Mehmet realized that his minders had run out of ideas, and before they also ran out of time, it was up to him to figure out a solution.

  Mehmet forced his way to the edge of the covered area despite the objection of his minders to try to figure out a solution. The soldiers were trying to figure out a fighting solution for the problem. Mehmet was an engineer, maybe it was time to try an engineering solution to the problem. Once Mehmet reached the edge himself, his o
ptimism waned. Mehmet could not see any obvious solution that the resistance fighters hadn’t tried. They had tried sneaking in slowly, tried dashing in on foot and in a car parked nearby. They had tried camouflage. All had failed. The only thing that the resistance fighters had to show for their effort were the string of burnt bodies littering the path.

  The only thing that Mehmet could think of was to tunnel underground, but that would take days when all they had were minutes. There was no time to tunnel, unless… Unless, he could bring the tunnel to the landing site! There might be an engineering solution to the problem after all! It would require an act of incredible cultural and religious vandalism, one for which he might be reviled by the Turkish people for generations. In his mind though, he was certain that God and his Sayyid would understand his actions. Now only if he could convince the Scout leader about his plan of action!

  It was fifteen minutes later, and Mehmet and the Scout leader were standing under the cover of Aya Sofia itself, watching the landing site from almost the opposite end of the edge of the covered area from where Mehmet had initially hatched his plan. It had taken a frenetic radio conversation with the Sayyid to convince the Scout leader. Then they had had to take another dangerous detour through another underground passage, which led directly to Aya Sofia itself. They were now staring at the landing site not just from the opposite end, but also a bit further than they had been previously. The Scout leader glared at Mehmet as if saying “This better work or I am going to kill you!” Mehmet wasn’t religious, but he made a silent prayer as the Scout leader gave the signal.

  The Aya Sofia had been housing refugees, who had turned a world heritage building squalid with the detritus of refugee living, including domesticated animals living besides the refugees inside the great hall. All the refugees had been sent away via the tunnels, but the animals had been retained. One donkey, two goats and three sheep were released from under the minaret by the scouts. The animals imparted adequate momentum with a well-placed kick on their hind quarters. The donkey bolted, while the smaller animals just ambled away from the minaret. All the animals were covered with shiny plastic to ensure maximum visibility in the sun. The movement of the animals would be unmissable from above.

  The shuttle above didn’t disappoint. Barely had the animals gone a few meters into the open when screaming supersonic missiles, probably the same as the torchlight sized building buster missiles slammed into the poor animals burning and tearing them into shreds. That explosion however wasn’t the one that startled Mehmet. It was the one that followed a fraction of a second later that really blew his eardrums off and almost threw him off his feet, although they had all taken care to stand well away from this second explosion.

  Mehmet had been a Communications Engineer before the invasion but in the resistance, he had had to learn quite a few new tricks. The tricks that he learnt best were the ones where he could use his engineering knowledge. Structured Demolition was one of those tricks. Bringing a building down at a desired angle was not that different from cutting a tree and ensuring that it falls exactly where you want it. You make a horizontal cut and a sloping cut to hollow out the tree in the direction you want it to fall. Then you make a back cut exactly behind and slightly above the horizontal cut. You do something similar on a building or a tower, except it had to be done with explosives and with millisecond precision.

  Doing this on a minaret that was almost seven hundred years old, built after the Islam took over Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul, was however tricky. The tower was built with masonry. There were no strategic load bearing columns to take out, like one would do with modern buildings. It wouldn’t even have been possible to pull such a trick, had it not been for extensive restoration and reinforcement conducted on the seven-hundred-year-old minaret in the past few decades, for the minaret would simply have collapsed vertically into a heap of rubble.

  Mehmet had gotten his calculations right. The historic minaret of Aya Sofia got a large chunk of its base blown off by the initial blast of explosives rigged to one side of the minaret. This made the minaret list in the exact direction that Mehmet wanted. It was critical that the minaret fall slowly, so that the impact of the crash does not reduce the minaret to rubble. That would make the entire exercise worse than useless. He would be remembered as the vandal who destroyed an icon of Turkey for nothing. The minaret listed initially but then stopped tilting any further. For a moment Mehmet panicked. If the tower did not fall, then that would be equally bad. The minaret groaned for a few seconds, and then gravity slowly took over, bringing the tower down in a slow-motion crash. They had made an over ground tunnel to the landing site!

  It wasn’t easy squirreling through the crashed tower. The ancient tower hadn’t stayed intact at all segments. Some segments had collapsed, and the Scout team had to dig their way through those segments. The tower though had crashed almost on top of the landing site. Mehmet had been assured by the NATO tracking team that the USC package would be encased in a hardened tungsten-titanium shell, which was designed to survive a hard landing on any planetary surface. Moreover, the package would usually be designed with a hardened nosecone, which would use the momentum of the impact to dig itself a few feet into the soil as a measure of added protection. Rocks and rubble falling over the package shouldn’t harm it in any way. As Mehmet tunneled his way to the landing site, through the rubble of the fallen tower, he hoped that this was truly the case, otherwise all this trouble would have gone in vain.

  Mehmet wasn’t disappointed, once the package was dug out of the rubble. It was a standard USC Titanium-tungsten courier shell, as had been described by the NATO dispatcher. Mehmet had been told that the USC used such courier shells from orbit to send small critical equipment or messages to their ground troops in hostile territory. Mehmet had been given all known standard USC codes to be able to open the shell, and he was eventually successful in cracking it open by using one of those codes. Inside the voluminous shell was a tiny plastic package. It had official marking in English, Turkish and Arabic pasted on it, urging the finder to hand it over to the closest representative of the government. It also had a handwritten note scrawled on it – “You are not alone. Help is on its way!”

  Chapter 6

  The Nursery

  Planet Ka-Let, Proxima Centauri System

  2189

  “I think I know what this place is!” Dr. Mukherjee turned suddenly towards her boss and declared. “This is a nursery!”

  Dr. Mukherjee and Dr. Yukio Yamagato had been wandering the confusing labyrinth of the underwater maze for well over half hour. The water was crystal clear and still, and the two were carrying high powered lights which illuminated sections of the tunnel brightly. Yet the two couldn’t shake off the creepiness that they felt inside. The two women knew that the place had been swept by hundreds of Marines and technicians. There was no known danger in those labyrinthine tunnels, and there was no chance of getting lost either. The tunnels had not just been mapped entirely, the two were in constant radio touch with over a dozen other scientists and Marines inside the complex, as well as their suits being in constant communication with the central computers. Despite all these comforting assurances, entering a submerged labyrinth of dark tunnels brings out primal fear in any human being.

  The two nervous women had initially fought their nerves by constantly talking shop with each other as they inspected the walls of the tunnels and other artefacts that they discovered in those tunnels. Then they had talked about their personal lives and love lives, especially Yukio’s troubles in handling Hector Jenkin’s troubled state of mind and how that was affecting their relationship both in bed and outside it. Lt. Jenkins may have survived unscathed physically from the encounter with the two alien creatures, but like most other surviving Marines, he had suffered deep emotional trauma that may scar him for the rest of his life. It was also affecting his relationship with Yukio. After the two women had discussed that topic passionately for some time with advice exchanged about the best
strategies to tackle their respective men, they had fallen silent, immersed in their private thoughts.

  The sudden interruption to her reverie startled Yukio initially, but she recovered quickly and thought about what her colleague had said. It did make sense. These labyrinths of underwater tunnels led to a large semicircular open space that was partially submerged. Since they were ninety meters under water, it would be more accurate to say that the semicircular opening had a large air pocket that gave the feeling that the semicircular chamber was only partially under water. There were three such chambers in the complex, each accessible through a maze of tunnels. The walls of the tunnels and the large chambers were mostly roughly constructed to give the feeling of natural underground caves. There were however segments of walls which were highly polished. Whoever had constructed those tunnels and chambers was clearly capable of giving the construction a fine finish, but hadn’t done so for most part, either deliberately to give it a natural look or simply because they were in a hurry.

  The three large chambers all partially under water and the maze of underwater tunnels leading up to them constituted over eighty percent of the space of the complex. The chambers and the tunnels were virtually empty except for being littered with objects that was hard to be classified as anything but junk. A large part of the littered objects was stones of every shape and size from pebbles to large boulders, which seemed to have been deliberately placed at various places in the chamber. There were metal and hard plastic cubes, rings and tetrahedrons of various sizes littered in the water as well as in the air pockets which were filled with sand, giving them the illusion of being a beach. The beach itself was littered with detritus and shaped objects including some that suspiciously looked like balls. There were ringed hoops mounted both under water as well as on the beach, as well as other similar small structures that seemed like obstacle courses. The three chambers and the tunnels were completely devoid of anything high tech.