The Admiralty estimates put the capacity of this Goliath ship to accommodate a hundred thousand demons, much more if they were willing to live in cramped conditions. Even assuming ninety percent of those demons are currently on Earth, that would leave ten thousand demons inside the ship. Assuming a third of those demons were wiped out with the nuclear destruction of the third compartment, that would still leave between six to seven thousand demons waiting on the surface!
The only reason that those hordes of thousands of demons hadn’t descended upon them was because the Marines were in probably the most inaccessible part of the Goliath ship. Once the Marines descended, that accessibility constraint would no longer be an issue. The Marines would be surrounded by thousands of demons on unfamiliar and literally alien terrain. Even if those building down there are made from solid material behind which one can take cover, how effective would that cover be when you don’t know how to open a door to hide inside a building?
Heck, it is possible that the Marines may not even be able to identify which part of the building is the door or some other form of entrance! The demons on the other hand would be on their own turf. They may not even have to shoot at the Marines. They may simply decide to just crush the Marines by bring down their doors upon their heads!
Both the options were bad. How could Chichi decide? What were his objectives? His first and foremost objective was to ensure that the Marines could blow up this compartment with a nuke in an instant, and the demons would have no way to prevent it. To be able to do that he had brought three nukes into the compartment, but they needed to be ensconced in three separate secure locations as a measure of redundancy.
He ordered the platoon commanders of the mules to scout for three such positions. The positions should be guardable by Marines in case the demons decided to storm the nukes or try to blow it up. The positions had to be near enough to the exit such that the Marines could leave it and make a run for the connecting tube in case they decided to detonate, and at the same time be able to prevent the demons from accessing it for the few minutes that they would need to evacuate.
It wasn’t going to be easy to find three such places out here at the axis, where everything was out in the open. Yet it was urgent that the Marines plant their nukes quickly. Humans had the technology to detect beta-decay from fission bombs like the ones the Marines were carrying. It was not just likely but a given that the demons would have such detectors too. It was just a matter of time before the demons would detect the nukes and be able to locate them with their sweeps.
Chichi’s second objective was to make their current position less accessible to the demons. The tube may be vulnerable to bombardment, but it did give a measure of security because it was so hard for the demons to access in large numbers. Till the time he had the tube intact, he could secure his position further by making it even less accessible to the demons. That way he might be able to also make it secure from bombardment if the demons couldn’t get close enough to shoot at it. It might also work the other way around. Having no more access to the tube might make the demons desperate and such an advanced alien civilization surely had the technology to be able to shoot down a targeted segment of the axis tube from the surface. It was a roll of the dice.
Chichi’s third objective was to try and breach into the first compartment of the Goliath ship. Till that point in time, the Marines had not attempted to move to the first compartment of the Goliath ship by moving along the central axis tube which connected to that compartment. The ingress to the first compartment was likely to be blocked by a similar radiation filled tube that had blocked the ingress to the second compartment. Moreover, Marines were getting through to the second compartment at such a slow rate without any of their weapons that all of them were required to hold their position near where they had entered the second compartment.
Those constraints no longer held. The second compartment was guaranteed to be destroyed with three nukes inside it. The Marines were entering the compartment at a fast clip, fully armed. Most importantly the radiation filled tube leading to the first compartment was likely to be radiation free just like the tube at the junction between the third and the second compartment.
Demons were reaching the Marine position from two vectors. The demons were approaching from the two ends of the central axis tube where the tube was attached to the compartment walls. To stop the flow of demons from the near wall’s eight lines of elevators continuously carrying demons, he ordered some of his Marines to first position themselves right next to the sphere. Anchor themselves to the sphere with their magnetic boots, and then target the elevators using shoulder fired guided missiles.
It would take a few minutes for those Marines to get into place to carry out those orders. In the mean while he tasked another group of Marines to carry three more nukes that had recently made their entry into the compartment to the other end of the compartment through the central axis tube and try to breach into the first compartment and place the nukes there.
This was a large group of Marines, which would split up into and travel along the two split tubes going around the large central sphere. That way at least one of them would have a better chance of reaching the other end, where the two split tubes joined up again. The Marines thought it was likely that the demons coming from the other end of the central axis tube towards the Marines would be able to shoot the Marines running inside the tube trying to dash in the opposite direction towards the far end wall. Their apprehensions would prove to be justified.
The Marines had secretly wondered why the demons were so shy of firing their needle guns when the devastating killing power of the weapons was so apparent whenever it had been used in this battle. Granted that the needle gun seemed to have a lot of penetrative power, so it was advisable to not use it pointed anywhere next to the large central sphere that the demons were trying to protect. The central sphere however had walls that were at least two meters thick! How much damage could an individual needle do?
That question would be answered in the next few moments as the Marines tasked with targeting the elevators on the near wall got into their positions on the surface of the sphere. Eight Marines targeted eight different elevator lines simultaneously in order to plug the route of all the elevators at once. The top most elevator cage was targeted. It was the closest and easiest to target, and if that cage could be destroyed and jammed into place, then no other elevator behind it could cross that point to reach to the perch of the Marines.
The demons in the cage saw the shoulder launched missiles streak towards them, but they were helpless to do anything about it. In any other situation, the small point defense gun mounted on their carapace would almost certainly have shot down those missiles before they could reach even half the distance. The embedded computer of the demon would have calculated the trajectory of the approaching missiles within centimeters of precision. The input would have been fed into the point defense gun, which would have then shot a slightly larger version of the needles that were used in their hand gun by the demon.
The targeting on an average is deadly in its accuracy, which would have almost certainly ensured the destruction of all the missiles. Unfortunately for the demons riding those elevators, the point defense gun’s targeting on an average was deadly, but there was no guarantee that some of those needles wouldn’t miss. In fact, it was almost a given that a few of those needles would miss.
The personal point defense of a demon did not work by launching antimissiles that blew itself in front of the incoming missile to hit the incoming missile with shrapnel. If that had been the case, then it would have been safe for the point defense to activate. The point defense mounted on an individual demon’s carapace needed to be small and light. It was a personal defense system. It could not be loaded with bulky antimissiles. Instead the point defense system worked by aiming to directly hit the incoming missile with a needle of a slightly higher caliber than the personal handgun needle of the demons.
The incoming shoul
der launched missiles were far slower than ship launched missiles, and the personal quantum computers of the demons fast enough that a computer controlled targeting system had a reasonably good probability of hitting the missile directly, especially as it approached and reduced its distance. The key was that any individual needle shot by the point defense system only had a good probability of directly hitting an incoming missile, not an absolute certainty. To overcome this limitation, the point defense system would continue to shoot multiple rounds as the missile approached, and the odds eventually caught up.
One of those many needles was almost certain to find its target and destroy the incoming missile. This may have been acceptable anywhere, but was not acceptable when the missiles were coming from the direction of the sphere! All the needles that missed their target would bombard the sphere. The point defense systems of the demons overrode the demons’ instinctive command for protection and refused to activate!
So how much damage would the point defense system have caused if it had been activated? A small preview of that hypothetical situation answered the Marines’ curiosity. Two demons in two different elevator cages abandoned their discipline and tried to shoot down the incoming missiles with their hand-held needle guns. Neither of them succeeded in their quest. Even the fast reflexes of the demons were no match for the complex real-time information processing required to shoot down something coming so fast. It is beyond the capability of any organic being. It had to be done by a computer. All that the two demons managed was to launch a barrage of needles, all of which hit the sphere.
The needle gun of the demons had been honed into its current shape after thousands of generations of use. It had become the single all-purpose personal weapon of the species after being tried and tested by those thousands of generations in various battle situations. It had settled into the consensus optimal solution to a simple, lightweight, reliable weapon that could fit multiple roles and multiple uses and yet carry a large enough quantity of ammunition in a very small package.
The needle, which at first appears to be a very simple in design is the epitome of continuous and iterative refinement of demon material sciences and engineering design. Part of that brilliance of design is its simplicity. The needle is hollow and would normally not contain anything inside, and yet it could be supercharged to act like a capacitor that could hold hundreds of watts of power for as much as thirty to forty seconds in such a tiny package. That was just the beginning of the brilliance of its sophisticated and yet simple design.
The needle, once supercharged as a capacitor would selectively turn its hollow inner surface into a strongly positive charge, while the outer surface would turn negative. The inner surface of the hollow needle would develop strong enough positive charge such that when injected with a few nanograms of antielectrons into the hollow from the rear open end of the needle, it would hold those antielectrons without letting them touch the inner surface of the needle.
On being fired, the rear end of the needle’s containment would selectively start failing, inching slowly micrometer my micrometer towards the front of the needle. The immediate effect of the rearmost end of the needle’s antimatter containment failing would be that it would melt and turn to plasma, instantly plugging the rest of the antimatter inside the needle from leaking out.
The wonder of the material used to make the needle was that it would heat up in a localized area a few microns wide and turn to plasma without spreading the heat to the rest of the surface of the needle too quickly. This allowed the needle to burn like a lit fuse, as it slowly started its burn at the rear and the plasma fire proceed slowly towards the front as the antimatter containment failed slowly in that direction. The plasma blowing out from the rear acted like a jet propelling the needle at ever accelerating speed.
The superbly etched outside skin of the needle was a testament to the finesse of demon craftsmanship and engineering. As the plasma jet acted as a rocket to boost the needle, the whorl shaped etching on the outside made sure that the plasma jet also provided a small spinning moment to the needle, thus stabilizing its flight in space. If the needle was moving through air or water, those whorls micro-etches added to the spin to provide stability in flight as well as produce micro turbulence that reduced drag friction both in air and water.
Once the needle hit a target, the front section of the needle which was made from similar but slightly altered material would fail antimatter containment, turning into plasma hundreds of times faster than the rear end. Yet the material was robust enough to delay the catastrophic failure of the rest of the antimatter contained in the central section for tens of milliseconds. This plasma jet emanating out of the front of a needle could dig a hole through anything.
When it hit soft organic being, it effortlessly bored a hole through the tissues and bones barely losing its velocity. When it hit a hard surface like concrete or metal, it could still bore hole tens of centimeters deep before the central section of the antimatter containment failed catastrophically. The bulk of the antimatter held in the central section would then explode by turning the rest of the matter of the needle into close to a hundred kilojoules of energy.
When shot at a relatively small being like a human or even a demon, the needle would pass through after having expended only a small fraction of its tremendous energy, but that energy would be good enough to kill that being instantly. When shot at a massive creature like a Bothol or a Blue Whale, the needle would have embedded itself deep inside the creature before the central section explodes, blowing even such a massive creature from the inside, usually to smithereens.
When shot at a hard surface like concrete or metal, it would embed itself deep enough before exploding, acting like a small shaped explosive that could cause structural damage to small structures or cause fragmentation and blast pressure damage nearby depending on how it was used. Thus, in one handy weapon, the demons had the equivalent of an incredibly powerful gun, a fragmentation grenade or a small structure busting missile.
The best part was that the weapon fired without any recoil, since it used plasma jet propulsion. It could be used in space just as well as it could be used on the surface.
Despite all that lethality, the needles were completely safe to store and transport because they contained nothing inside them till they were fired! They were so thin and small that a demon could carry over a thousand needles on its person without even noticing its weight. The only part of the gun that could be considered dangerous was the base unit that held the antimatter bank. The demons had become masters at handling antimatter over thousands of generations of use. They had continually refined their designs especially of the base unit till they had arrived at the current design.
It was self-powered, drawing its energy from the antimatter bank itself. The base unit could take an incredible amount of abuse before it failed. Even when the base unit failed, it was designed to discharge its antimatter bank as slowly as possible by selectively failing in parts like the needles so that the energy would dissipate in hundreds of seconds. This would only cause localized damage and prevent a massive explosion.
Only in the rarest of cases would the base unit fail catastrophically all at once causing a massive explosion. Each demon carried a personal super weapon of last resort in the form of the base unit. In times of extreme emergency, the demon could arrange for its gun’s base unit to fail catastrophically and detonate a massive bomb!
The only limitation of a needle gun was that each needle took a few seconds to supercharge and be loaded with antimatter from the base unit before it could be fired. The design of the needle gun tried to overcome this limitation by having a battery of eight needles which could be loaded and charged simultaneously. Then the battery of eight needles could either be fired simultaneously to create a massive explosion at its target, or could be fired in succession to provide a fast rate of fire, while the empty slots in the battery got reloaded and supercharged again.
Such a killing machine of a weapon was wanton
ly fired by the two demons who wanted to shoot down the missiles but missed. Those needle shots all hit the sphere. The sphere was massive, covering most of the compartment’s volume and there was no way a needle would miss the sphere if fired even remotely in its direction. Each needle embedded itself and then blew chunks of from the surface of the sphere.
Some of the pockmarks on the surface of the sphere were half a meter deep, while a few craters on the sphere were deeper where more than one needle had struck. None of the needles had managed to make a hole in the sphere, but it wasn’t unimaginable that if a few more needles struck in the same pockmarked craters could make a hole in the two-meter-thick hardened steel sphere! Those massive explosions on the surface of the sphere took two Marines anchored nearby along with it to their deaths.
Meanwhile Marines rushing towards the first compartment inside the central axis tube had been noticed by the demons on the outside of the tube rushing in the opposite direction towards the bulk of the Marines. The central axis tube bent around the massive sphere at the center. This meant that that the further they went, the close they got to the surface. It was no longer zero G near the maximum bulge of the sphere where the Marines were at that moment. In fact, it was close to 1 G. There was an up and a down direction now.
Unfortunately for the Marines, the demons by necessity were running on top of the tube which was closer to the sphere, while the Marines were below inside the tube so that when the demons fired, they were firing away from the sphere. The demons were picking off the Marines like flies. The casualty rate of the Marines was so high that the hardened resolve of the disciplined Marines wavered, and their run towards the other end of the compartment stalled. The Marines were on the verge of a panicked retreat when something unexpected happened.
Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Page 34