The CO of the Beta brigade was anxiously monitoring a bunch of infrared signatures from pods that were being targeted, but were still intact for the time being. Some of those infrared signatures would turn into a UV flash, but Brig. Osbourne prayed that at least some of them made it. Even by delaying their own deaths, individual pods helped save the lives of other Marines because only about twenty pods could be targeted at a time, and a beam couldn’t move on to its next target until the one it was working on was destroyed. Brig. Osbourne and the brass knew that some of the e-Marines wouldn’t make to through in this landing attempt. His hope was that most of his boys and girls would make it.
Brig. Osbourne also couldn’t help noticing the fact that all the panicked shouting on the communication channels had ceased for the moment. His Marines, by providing a more urgent target to the Goliath ship had given the two USC destroyers a reprieve from the merciless assault of the antimatter beams. Whether it would make any difference in the end was unknown, but the Marines by making themselves the target had boosted the slim chance of survival that the two destroyers had previously. This was because the two destroyers had just crossed the Goliath ship and their closest point of approach to it. From now on, the two USC destroyers would be adding distance between themselves and the Goliath ship, which can only increase their chances of survival.
Chichi kept a sharp eye on the countdown on his helmet screen. When it hit zero, he pulled the safety tab of a big round button on top of his head and jammed his finger to press it hard. Then he crouched down and instinctively put his arms over his head, although it wasn’t necessary. His head would be far better protected by the helmet than the suited arms. The timed explosive fuse went off after two seconds and a round hole opened on top of him. He climbed up as quickly as he could. This part of their maneuver was tricky and cut to the wire. He would have only a few seconds to brace himself.
Chichi emerged out of the pod from the top, the only face of the pod that couldn’t be targeted by the antimatter beams. He jammed his boots into two specially made boot shaped notches on the roof of the pod, and snapped a catch with his gloves, which would hold his boots in place. The he took a deep breath and waited for the crash – three, two, one and zerooooo!
It was worse than the worst that Chichi had expected. It wasn’t the shock of the landing, which had knocked the wind out of his lungs. It wasn’t the fact that he was floating and tumbling wildly in space as he bounced off the surface of the Goliath ship. It was the incredible pain in his legs! His feet, his calves, his thighs! Every part of his legs was on fire. His back hurt so much that for a moment he panicked that he might have broken his spine. Chichi’s training took over and he managed to ignore and overcome his pain. He thought clicked his suit retro jets into action, and the suit’s computer stabilized his wild tumble.
Chichi quickly became aware of the screams and shouts over the com channel, a lot of which were cries of pain mixed with choicest of expletives. Chichi noticed screams of anguish in his proximity on his headset and oriented himself in the direction indicated on his screen. It was a Marine floating in space still inside his pod! Two of the sides of the pod had come apart but the rest of the four sides of the hexagonal pod were still intact. The roof of his pod had collapsed on to the floor of the pod, instead of the entire pod crumbling and absorbing the shock of the crash. The roof of his pod was still attached to his boots!
“Easy Marine, we are almost there. You made it, just hold still. I will get you out of there.” Chichi comforted the Marine, whose ID flashed on his screen, but Chichi didn’t know him well because he was from the other battalion.
“My legs are broken sir!” The Marine gasped. “It hurts like a bitch!”
“Administer yourself some adrenalin and pain killer, while I unlatch your boots from the notch.” Chichi told the Marine, while he tried to free the poor Marine’s broken legs from the latch on the foot notch. It was harder than it looked trying to undo the latch while floating freely. When Chichi finally managed it, he did it clumsily enough that the Marine screamed in pain.
“You will be fine Private. You won’t need to use your legs. We cannot walk on the surface anyway. You will be floating around. Activate your jets and follow me.” Chichi commanded the Marine and turned toward the surface of the Goliath ship from which he had drifted about a hundred meters. It was time to organize his Marines and begin the next phase of the mission!
Chapter 11
Into the Jaws of the Beast
Earth Orbit
2205
“The spiders have spread out in every direction for almost a kilometer. I am afraid we haven’t been able to locate any structure that remotely looks like an ingress into the ship, sir. There just doesn’t seem to be any way to enter the ship.” Chichi could hear a tinge of panic in the voice of the Marine who was reporting to him. Chichi himself could feel a bit of panic swell up inside him. Their luck had held up so far. In fact, it had held up far beyond his expectations so far. It seemed too good to be true. Was this the moment when the odds caught up with the Beta Brigade?
Chichi analyzed the data stream being fed to him by the various spider bots the landing Marines had released. Every Marine had released bots wherever they had landed on the Goliath ship, which pretty much covered one half of the face of the ship that had presented itself in the direction of the approach of the Beta Brigade. It was inconceivable that a ship – any ship, even one designed by advanced aliens, would not have a single orifice, access point or otherwise some kind of potential ingress into the ship on an entire half of the ship.
A ship needs to provide entry point for its occupants, equipment, consumables, weapons etc. A ship needs ports for the release of its weapons, orifices for disposal of waste and for propulsion. It needs hangar bays for shuttles. It is just not possible to design a hermetically sealed ship. There had to be a potential opening. It was just a matter of finding it… or perhaps it was a matter of recognizing it! Maybe they have been looking at entry points of the ship without recognizing them, and just passing by! After all the exterior of this ship was more alien than he had thought was possible.
The exterior of human as well as Shaitan ships were smooth, constructed out of finished metal or ceramic. The details of the construction may vary between the species, but one could immediately make out from the exterior and the smooth finish of either of the species’ construction the contours and in most cases even the seams of the construction. That wasn’t the case with this demon ship. Standing on the hull of the ship, one would not even be able to guess that one was standing on something that had been constructed, let alone constructed by an advanced alien species.
Looking at his immediate surroundings, Chichi had a hard time even recognizing it as the external hull of a space ship. It looked and felt rather like standing on an asteroid. It was rough and lumpy at spots, like standing on naturally formed rocks, there were even slight cracks and crevasses a few feet deep in places. There were places where the hull was raised by a foot or two in lumps, which felt like boulders on an asteroid.
Chichi pulled up the surface analysis report in his head. The surface was primarily made from nickel-iron. It also had traces of siderophile (iron-loving) metals such as gold, platinum, iridium, and palladium – almost the exact composition of a typical nickel-iron asteroid. The composition was low on silicate and other carbon impurities that are also present in a nickel-iron asteroid. According to the analysis, this indicated that the hull material had been processed, albeit crudely.
The best guess the AI analyzer could make about the hull, was that it was constructed in space by some process that involved, heating and melting a nickel-iron asteroid, and putting it through a gravitational refinement process. Most probably the refinement involved spinning the molten asteroid such that the artificial gravity of the spinning process in space would separate out the various elements such that the heavier iron-nickel would settle out towards the rim, where it would form a cylindrical or an oblate spherica
l shape like this ship, while the lighter silicates and carbon would accumulate towards the center, which could be scooped out to hollow the interior of the ship.
Whatever technology was used to construct this ship, it probably didn’t involve hot-rolling or cold-rolling technologies used by humans on Earth to form steel. Those are the processes which gives the steel and other metals a smooth surface finish. Since the construction most likely was in space, it probably involved artificial gravity and/or acceleration to exert forming process on the massive iron slabs that formed the hull of the Goliath ship. Therefore, the iron would have hardened from molten slag in a natural uneven manner, giving the current uneven texture of the external hull of the ship.
Fascinating as those details of the construction of the ship may have been, what really interested Chichi was the last piece of information in the analysis – the thickness of the hull. The iron-nickel hull on an average was twenty meters thick! There was no way they were going to be able to breach that hull. They had to find an ingress point.
Chichi realized that the Private he had been speaking to was expecting some response, orders or any other form or encouragement from his commanding officer. He also realized that he was on an open channel, and all other Marines of the platoon were also listening to the conversation. He quickly brought himself out of his reverie and said in a firm and confident voice, without betraying his own growing concerns. “Potential ingress points are unlikely to look anything like those on a human or a Shaitan ship. Look at the construction of the hull – it is as alien as one can imagine it to be. The ingress points are most likely going to be like nothing you have seen before. Look for anomalies, think out of the box, and most important stay calm, focused and sharp. Fortunately, we are not under fire, which is more luck than we had hoped for, and I am sure that the same lady luck will present us with an opportunity soon.”
Chichi’s words proved prophetic and wrong at the same time! Almost as soon as Chichi had finished speaking, there was a shout over the platoon channel – “Man down! We are under fire. Hordes of demons exiting out of the ship from a large portal that has suddenly opened to my 8’O clock!” They were now under fire, and the demons had opened an ingress to their own ship! All that the Beta brigade now had to do was to fight their way in. It would prove to be easier said than done.
–XXX–
The Master of the Watch was beginning to realize the game of the humans finally. The intention of the human ships had never been to attack the Ravenous directly! The attempted attack by the human ships was a feint. No wonder the space attack tactics of the human ships seemed so pathetic and halfhearted! It was all for show – a deception to take the attention away from their real objective. Their real objective had been to let those pieces of debris of the destroyed human ship approach the Ravenous unmolested without scrutiny. Why would anyone want to inspect the floating debris of a destroyed enemy ship, when there still were intact enemy ships attacking your own ship?!
The mystery of the strange explosion profile of the human ship was also amply clear now. The AI of the command center of the Ravenous had flagged the strange explosion profile of the destroyed human ship. The Bodar operators had not been able to detect anything strange, but the AI had reported that the human ship had been destroyed in an anomalous manner compared to all other human ships that the Ravenous had destroyed previously.
While many human ships had exploded after antimatter bombardment, none had fragmented into that many pieces as this human ship. Most ships had cracked into two pieces, some into four, five or six. In a few cases the ships had exploded with tens or even a few hundred pieces. This particular ship disintegrated in tens of thousands of almost even sized pieces, which the AI had found too unnatural. It was almost as if the ship had been designed to come apart like a huge jig-saw puzzle game that the humans so love to play. Now the Master of the watch realized, that this was exactly the case. The ship was – to borrow a human term, a sacrificial lamb. It was designed to come apart. Humans had designed their own ship to explode and come apart into tens of thousands of pieces!
The Master of the Watch realized that she had made a mistake in not taking the anomaly of the explosion of the human ship more seriously in the heat of the battle. She should have had her red flags waving the moment they realized that the other human ships had developed resistance to antimatter bombardment! Why should one ship be so vulnerable to antimatter bombardment, when the other ships had developed some manner of screen protecting them from antimatter bombardment?!
It was too late to rue over these facts. She had to deal with the consequences of her past mistakes. Now she had to deal with the real plan of attack of the humans on the Ravenous – boarding! How deliciously quaint! The Master of the watch couldn’t recall another attempt at hostile boarding of a Bodar Hunting Shell, or War ship as the humans called it, in recent history! This was a primitive technique used by primitive species against each other in primitive space warfare! Then again, the humans were a primitive species!
Still, what were the human commanders thinking when they decided to hatch a plan to board a Bodar Hunting Shell?! The Master of the watch thought in amusement. Were they expecting to beat the thousands of Bodars inside the hunting shell into submission?!?! She could perhaps understand, if the humans had been a physically powerful species. It took nearly thirty to forty humans attacking a single Bodar to subdue or kill it. By all estimates of the AI, a few hundred – at the most a thousand humans had landed on the outer shell of the Ravenous. What do the humans plan to achieve with such a tiny boarding party to a ship as large and mighty as the Ravenous?!
In a way the Master of the Watch was glad and thankful to the humans to have chosen this quaint tactic of sending a boarding party. It gave her bored and restless crew inside the Ravenous an opportunity to go on a zero-G hunt of the humans. She was envious of the Bodars who would go out and deal with the puny humans tapping the skin of the mighty Hunting Shell, the Ravenous, in their pathetic attempt to breach its impenetrable shell.
She wished she didn’t have her responsibilities and could go out there with those other Bodar hunters. She would have the unique opportunity and bragging rights of having hunted humans in space in a one-on-one combat – something no Bodar on the surface of Earth can lay a claim to. That would have been a one up on her peers who had so unfairly punished her to this boring job in space for an innocent mistake, which should never have been judged as incompetence. She may not personally be able to go out, but her shoal sisters who went out would have that bragging rights, which was good enough for her. The Master of the Watch gave the orders for the hunting party to go out and deal with the human boarding party.
–XXX–
It was Desmond who spoke up before Chichi had a chance. ‘Infil – Option 2’ was primarily the task of his battalion, while Chichi’s battalion scoured for the preferable ‘Infil – Option 1’. The first and preferable option had always been to locate and breach a weak point on the exterior of the demon ship. That was expected to be a safer option, with better chances of the e-Marines being able to gain access to the interior of the enemy ship without taking too many casualties. The logic being that if the Marines could breach into a maintenance shaft of some kind, they were less likely to encounter demons waiting on the other side. On the other hand, entering the ship through a regular ingress route used by the demons was fraught with the possibility of a large number of demons blocking their way, and the Marines would have to fight and go past them, slowing them down as well as inflicting heavy casualties for sure.
“Floaters, the demons seem to have rolled out the welcome mat for you. Let’s grab this opportunity before the window of opportunity is closed literally! The demons might decide to shut the door behind them! I have marked the spot, converge on it. Remember your drill, approach in groups not alone! See you at the portal. Desmond out.” Desmond cut his transmission, and used his neural interface to skillfully work his retro thrusters on his space suit to float over t
he demon ship’s skin moving as fast as he dared. Too fast and he might overshoot the target, or worse be flung off the vicinity of the ship altogether to float forever in the emptiness of space.
Not all the e-Marines who had managed to land on the demon ship had stayed on the surface of the hull. The ‘Floaters’ were the 4th platoon of the 1st company of Desmond’s battalion, who had a specialized task. Immediately on landing on the surface, they had risen again using their retro thrusters to a height of a few hundred feet above the surface of the demon ship. They were using their suit embedded sensors, as well as their Mark-1 eyeballs to look for a possible point of ingress. However, their primary task was to wait – wait for this exact opportunity that had been presented by the demons.
The suit computers of the Marines of the 4th platoon networked and coordinated with each other to adjust the thrust of the suit retro-rockets to enable the Marines to bunch up together in groups of five before making the final approach towards the open portal. Once bunched up over the top of the portal, the suits opened the thrusters to make a reckless dash towards it at a speed that would be extremely painful even to an e-Marine, were they to collide with a demon on its way out. The idea was to surprise the demons with speed, to prevent them from blocking the ingress of the Marines.
In the end, the reckless speed was unnecessary. The portal was fairly wide. Far wider than anyone would have expected. The suit computer of the Marines estimated the square shaped portal to be over ten meters wide on each side. Demons were still exiting from the portal in ones and twos, but there were enough gaps for the first group of Marines to fly past the exiting demons without running into any one of them. The joy was short lived though. Even before the first Marine could go past the outer skin of the demon ship, he had to reverse thrusters and brake as hard as the tiny retro-rockets would allow.
Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Page 21