The Marines inside the tube were halfway through to the other side, when they heard a massive explosion. The sound of the explosion magnified for them as it travelled inside the tube from one end to the other. It felt as if the explosion had happened inside the tube, which wasn’t entirely inaccurate. The Marine Sargent leading one of the two teams zoomed in to notice that one small section of the central axis tube at the point where it connected to the far wall where they were heading was missing. The demons had blown up their own central axis tube!
Before the Marines could recover, a second and then a third explosion happened, each one blowing a small section of the tube, until the far wall was no longer connected by the central axis tube. Well over a fifty-meter section starting from the far wall but stopping well short of the split section on the far side had been blown up. It seemed that the demons were so desperate to deny access to the Marines to the first compartment that they had blown up their own central axis tube! It also plunged the entire compartment into complete darkness as the lighting of the tube failed completely.
Why did the demons have to blow up the tube, when they had been winning by killing off all the Marines who were trying to storm towards that end? It was a head scratcher for the Marines, who didn’t know the kind of tumult and panic that had gripped the demon commanders.
The storming Marine groups on both sides of the tube had their decision made for them by the demons. There was no point moving any further and taking the horrendous casualties that had been inflicted on them so far. Both the group beat a hasty retreat, but that didn’t make them immune from the firing of the demons on top of them.
The unexpected help that the Marines got in reducing their casualties were the fact that it was not pitch dark, and despite their infrared vision, the demon targeting was hampered. The other unexpected thing was the slight movement that they could feel inside the tube. Till before the explosion, the tube had been rock-solid. It didn’t sway, and it didn’t shake. After the explosions, a very slight motion of the tube was discernible. The Marines hadn’t given much thought to the motion, but it was freaking out the demons running on top of them.
The central axis tube was situated at the axis, at zero G. It didn’t need too much of central support. In the first and the third compartment, the robust material of the tub would have ensured that even if one end of the tube was blown up, the other end could hold the tube stably. The central second compartment was a different proposition though. The central axis tube in this compartment went around the massive sphere in the center. It curved and went close to the surface on each side of the sphere, where the gravity was not insignificant.
In a perfectly balanced situation the opposing gravitational forces on either side of the sphere acting on the tubes that went around the sphere would have counterbalanced each other perfectly causing no perturbations. In practice, nothing is perfectly balanced. Even a slight sway or perturbation of the tube caused by the humans and demons on it, or the slight airflow inside the compartment started swaying the tube that was now attached on only one wall – the side of the wall that the Marines had entered the compartment. The tube swayed and put lateral stress at the joint where it was attached to the wall. The shearing stress on the tube threated to crack it or break the only remaining attached end of the tube.
If the tube broke, it would eventually spiral out of its position and go crashing in some direction which couldn’t be predicted. The fact that it would cause massive damage inside was all that could be said with certainty. Yet this precarious situation was a temporary savior for the Marines. It forestalled the plans of the demons to blow up the tube at the end where they had entered. With the elevators on the near wall damaged, and the tube on the far wall sabotaged by the demons themselves, the flow of the demons had ebbed.
It gave the Marines the reprieve they were desperate for. Of the eight hundred e-Marines who had started off from USC Sarah Brogan, a little over six hundred had managed to land on the Goliath ship. A little over five hundred had managed to enter it. Now the Beta Brigade was down to less than two hundred, many of whom were not in fighting condition. The gains the Marines had made had come at a very high price. Every survivor was exhausted, and most were also wounded, some very badly. The Marines and the demons had come to a temporary stalemate. Chichi knew that it wouldn’t last long. The demons were certain to make their next move to change the status quo. Till then though, the Marines would make the most of the short reprieve.
Chapter 16
Broken Blade
Approaching Earth
2205
USC Sapporo and USC Thor’s Hammer were the most advanced of the USC destroyers that had ever been built by the humans. They were one of the last ships to have been dispatched towards the Alpha Centauri sector by USC, more as an experimental expedition to prove the capabilities of these ships. These two destroyers were about the same size and with roughly the same armament capabilities as the rest of the fleet of destroyers. What was new about these two ships was their new and improved reactionless drives. While many human ships had been retro-fitted with external EM drives that provided a relatively small amount of thrust. These two ships had six each of the latest EM drives internal within the ship.
Those improved engines together still could only muster only about half the thrust of ion propulsion engines, but the EM drives had the advantage of being undetectable. The Sapporo and the Thor’s Hammer had been running dark and audaciously approaching the Goliath ship decelerating using the new EM reactionless drives. They had taken a huge risk, and gambled on the fact that the Marines of USC Sarah Brogan would be able to make the initial breach onto the Goliath Ship.
It was a huge gamble because the chances of the Marines were slim to begin with, but the plan called for the two ships to commit. If the Marines were unable to make a dent on the Goliath ship, the best hope that the two destroyers had was to not light up their ion plasma engines and silently fly past Earth in the hope that they wouldn’t be detected by the demons.
Fortunately for all of humanity, the gamble had paid off. The two destroyers had received the broadcast of the Marines, faint as it was, about their success in destroying one of the compartments of the ship and being able to breach and effectively disable a part of the second compartment. There was a good chance that the Goliath ship had lost main power and it was possible that the ship had lost its maneuvering capability. It was also likely that one end of the ship, where the Marines had breached and destroyed one of the compartments, had lost its weapons capability. That end of the ship was probably the safest bet in terms of a direction of approach.
All these were guesses. The Goliath demon ship could be fully operational and ready to swat the two human vessels like flies for all they knew, as had been the fate of the first and third fleet and their hundreds of human ships. Guesses were all that the Marines and the Navy could go by. There was no knowing the technological capabilities of these advanced aliens. The Marines had plunged into a far more uncertain and dangerous scenario and delivered for humanity. It was now the turn of the Navy to play its part in saving humanity!
The Sapporo and Thor’s Hammer had one task to do. They were to deliver their payload of Marines on to the surface of the Goliath ship and then run for their lives! It was a simple enough mission, and yet as dangerous as a mission could ever be. The two destroyers had been slowing down from their journey using the reactionless drives for a long time, but they couldn’t start the slow down process too early, or they would have slowed down too much to arrive at the time they needed to. Consequently, when the two ships arrived close to their destination, they were still moving too fast to release the Marines.
The Marines had to be released at a very specific speed. Too fast and they would whizz past the Goliath ship on go splat on its surface and would have to be scooped up with a spoon. Too slow and the Marines wouldn’t reach their destination in time, as well as be sitting duck floating slowly in space to be picked off by whatever weapon that t
he demons chose. To slow down to the right speed at the right time, the two destroyers had to open their ion thrusters for many hours as well as use up all the emergency chemical thruster.
It would be an open announcement to the demons about the approach of those puny human ships for many hours, giving the demons ample warning to take any countermeasures that they chose. Such was the dynamics of physics, and no one could argue with the laws of Sir Isaac Newton! The two ships would have to run the gauntlet.
“Steady on course, helm! Our first objective is to deliver the Marines, then we think of our own safety!” Capt. Yoshuhiro Nagata announced loudly on deck. The captain was responding to the warning hail from the sensors officer. It was a danger that was now flashing on everybody’s screen, but it was a danger that the captain, despite all his protective instincts about his ship was forcing himself to ignore. The entire crew had been in their battle stations for hours, ever since the Sapporo and its sister ship the Thor’s Hammer had lit up their ion plasma drives. The crew of both the ships had held their breath expecting a reaction from the Goliath ship at any moment.
The skin sensors of the two ships were being monitored by hyperactive sensor crew for any hint of signals from the newly installed antimatter warning sensors. Any part of the ship’s skin, where the temperature rose by even a few degrees would trigger not just an immediate alarm but also the newly installed antimatter repulsion system – a new and completely untried system. All the engineers could say was that it should “work in theory”!
Still, Capt. Nagata could draw some comfort from the fact that it had worked for USC Sarah Brogan and its sister ships. Those ships had really taken all the risks! He had to hand it to the captain and the crew of those ships to have been the first to venture into the maw of the beast with an untried and untested technology.
The Sapporo and the Hammer had adjusted their course such that they would pass the Goliath ship from the direction where the e-Marines had made a breach. This was also the general location where his Marines had to land, plus this was the direction where the weapons of the Goliath ship were likely to have been disabled. The two destroyers would pass the Goliath ship at an angle, because the exact location of the Goliath ship couldn’t have been predicted with accuracy while they were entering the solar system. All that the two destroyers could do was to point in the general direction of Earth.
After the Marines were ejected from the two vessels, they would have to do minor course correction with their suit thrusters to meet up with the Goliath ship. The navigational dynamics of the Marines wasn’t what Capt. Nagata was calculating in his head. Try as he might, he couldn’t take his eyes of the dynamics of the six bogeys being tracked on his screen. The demons had released missiles! This was the first time that the humans had seen the demons releasing missiles!
Compared to human missiles, these missiles were tiny! That was a surprise because everything else that the demons had in space was humongous compared to similar equipment that the humans had. Having faced the Shaitans and their large missiles, instinctively one had started associating larger missiles as more powerful.
That need not be the case if the missiles were carrying antimatter as warhead! A few grams of antimatter would be enough to beat the largest conceivable thermonuclear missile! The warhead probably didn’t need to weigh more than a few kilograms, most of the weight being mechanism to contain the antimatter safely till the time it needed to explode. To detonate such a missile, all one had to do was to let the containment mechanism fail! No detonators required. The antimatter would explode catastrophically the moment it touched normal matter.
The most worrying part of those missiles was their propulsion system. It was neither a reactionless drive, nor a plasma drive. While the missiles were expelling propellant, ruling out a reactionless drive, the temperature of the exhaust wasn’t tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of degrees that a typical ion plasma drive would emit. The temperatures were strangely cool, just a few thousand degrees like a chemical thruster, and yet it had a strange signature that didn’t match any know chemical thruster either. That in itself wouldn’t have worried Nagata if not for the fact that those missiles were accelerating at an alarming rate, never seen in either human or Shaitan missiles.
“Sir, permission to debrief on our best guess so far on those missile drives.” It was his chief engineer, along with his science officer on the screen. He was proud of them, that they had started their duties without having to be told about it, probably the instant the alarm about the missiles was sounded. Nagata nodded to signal them to proceed.
“Sir, we are going with the working assumption that the warhead is antimatter, which means that most of the missile is propulsion system. We have analyzed the spectrum of the propellant being expelled from those missiles, it is almost pure nitrogen. If our guess of the mechanism is correct, then it makes sense that it should be nitrogen. It is one of the most abundant gas, easily available, non-toxic, doesn’t react easily and can easily be stored in liquid form especially in the cold of space. Most of that missile could be a large cannister of liquid nitrogen.
“A small trickle of the nitrogen could be continuously pumped into a combustion chamber, where it would expand as a dense gas it could be ignited with a miniscule amount of antimatter, also being fed in a stream. This would heat up the gas to thousands of degrees, that could be expelled out explosively producing an incredible amount of thrust. Given the amount of propellant being expelled and what we believe is the size of the cannisters, that missile could run on that fuel for hours. There is no outrunning those missiles, sir. We will have to confront them one way or the other.” The scientist concluded.
“Understood!” Nagata responded grimly. “Good work, and keep me posted on any new information.”
So, the die was cast, the Sapporo and the Hammer would have to fight demon missiles with technology developed to fight Shaitan missiles! The two missile technologies couldn’t be more different. Nagata steeled himself, mentally reciting an ancient haiku written by some ancient warrior – ‘The swordsmith made the steel blade for the last war, and the warrior takes it to the next war. It was not the old steel but the old tactic that was responsible for the broken blade.’ This was his test as the captain and the warrior. Would he be able to adapt, or would his blade be broken? Only time would tell. At that moment, he had to concentrate on the immediate task that was fast approaching.
“T minus 180 seconds!” The navigator hailed over the ship wide channel. The computer was doing most of the work of putting the ship in the correct trajectory and speed for the ejection of the Marines, but humans needed to still say it out loud to each other as a way to ensure that everyone was on the same page. The down count continued till zero, at which point Marines started pouring out of the hold in what seemed like a mad frenzy. The Marines had a three-minute window during which eight hundred Marines from each of the ship had to evacuate the narrow hatches of the holds.
Far from a mad frenzy, it was the disciplined approach of the Marines that ensured that the evacuation could be completed well before the three-minute window closed. As soon as each Marine jumped off the ship, they engaged their suit thrusters which ensured that the Marine was carried a safe distance away from the ship. With the Marines on their way, the Sapporo and the Hammer made a one eighty degree turn and engaged their ion plasma thrusters at full power. They also engaged their reactionless drives to give them some more boost. The engines of the human ships couldn’t outrun the missiles that were approaching them, but the added speed of the encounter would raise their chances of missing or evading those missiles.
Capt. Nagata was the group captain of the two destroyers in the group. It was his responsibility to devise a strategy to confront those approaching missiles and convey the same to the captain of the Hammer. He had ten minutes to come up with a strategy, because in ten minutes the distance between the ships and those approaching missiles would have closed enough for the human ships to launch their anti
missiles. At that point the antimissiles’ onboard fuel would be adequate to reach the approaching missiles with enough fuel to spare for last minute maneuvers.
In Capt. Nagata’s mind a line from the haiku kept playing over and over – “It was not the old steel but the old tactic that was responsible for the broken blade.” After many torturous moments of cogitation, Capt. Nagata came to a decision. It was a gamble, but the lines from the haiku kept haunting his mind. This battle wasn’t going to be won pretending that the opponents were Shaitans – of that he was growing increasingly convinced.
“Release a single HVLP interceptor targeting any of those missiles, and ask the Hammer to do the same.” Nagata ordered.
“Only one sir!” It was the weapons’ officer who voiced the surprise inside the deck, but from the surprised and scared look of every crew on the deck, who had turned their gaze towards the captain, Nagata knew that she was voicing the bewilderment of all the crew. The captain understood the anxiety of his young crew, but at that moment he didn’t have time to explain. They would have to trust their captain and follow orders.
“Yes lieutenant, a single antimissile each targeting two of those six missiles. Please convey the orders to the hammer pronto, so that we are ready with coordinated launch when the window arrives.” Captain Nagata reiterated with more conviction in his voice than he really felt inside. Nagata opened a private channel to Capt. Sorensen of the Thor’s Hammer. “Johann, you will have to trust me on this one. I am going on a hunch here, I wish I could give you a more concrete logic, but frankly it is all gut feel right now.”
Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Page 35