Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  “Hiro, you know I will follow you to hell and back, but give me something to ease my mind. Right now, my balls are in my mouth!” Capt. Johann Sorensen of the Hammer looked concerned enough as he replied, and Nagata realized he need not explain himself to his crew, but he would have to let his fellow captain know his line of thought.

  “Think of this as a test probe. We need to figure out what we are fighting. We have to try to figure out the capabilities of those missiles, and scratch the surface for any possible weaknesses.” Nagata explained.

  “Alright, I will go along with that, but I hope we have time left after this experiment.” Capt. Sorensen replied to his friend, still a bit skeptical.

  “There is always time my friend, there is always time.” Capt. Nagata assured his friend.

  Two ‘High Velocity Low Profile’ interceptors or HVLP for short left the missiles bays of the two USC destroyers on course towards the approaching demon missiles. The HVLP were specialized antimissiles. These weren’t designed to shoot down Shaitan nukes, rather these antimissiles were designed to shoot down Shaitan antimissiles. In the escalating arms race between the humans and the Shaitans, each side had tried to go one up. Each side had developed countermeasures, and the other side then went on to develop countermeasures to the opponent’s countermeasures. USC strategists had figured out that beyond a certain point, it was more effective to target Shaitan countermeasures than it was to try and develop more effective offensive weapons.

  Thus, instead of trying to develop faster missiles, it was more effective to target the Shaitan antimissiles, so that more of human missiles could get through. This is where the HVLP had entered the USC Navy’s arsenal. The HVLP was designed to kill something moving faster, nimbler in its maneuvering capabilities that presented a smaller profile for the HVLP to hit. While all these factors made it a more difficult task, the one thing going for HVLP was the very thing that otherwise made its task difficult – high velocity.

  A higher velocity meant higher kinetic energy, which rose at the square of velocity, meaning at double the speed one would have four times more kinetic energy. The pieces needed to kill the opponent’s missiles need not be as big or as massive. Consequently, the HVLP could fragment into smaller pieces than conventional antimissiles and thus increase its chance of hitting its target with larger number of fragments, which partially offset the fact that the target presented lower profile and moved faster.

  “Keep the HVLPs in manual mode, do not switch them to auto targeting mode. I will let you know when the HVLPs need to be switched to auto target.” Capt. Nagata ordered his weapons officer.

  “Aye, sir!” The weapons officer replied, but was unsuccessful in hiding the exasperation in her voice. The standard procedure was to switch all antimissiles to auto targeting once the missiles had cleared the bay and were at a reasonably safe distance from the ship. The instantaneous decisions about course change that an antimissile needed to make meant that there was no way the antimissiles could be successfully manually targeted from the ship. The weapons officer wasn’t sure what the captain hoped to achieve or where he was going with that command, but hers was to follow not to ask questions!

  Less than thirty seconds after the release of the HVLPs, the six demon missiles responded by executing a sharp maneuver down the plane of Earth’s orbit, seemingly moving away from the target. In reality they were still moving towards the two human ships with the momentum they already had. All they had done was to increase the distance that was to be travelled to reach their target. The demons or their targeting AI had correctly calculated the fact that by increasing the distance slightly, the human antimissiles would run out of fuel while trying to follow their targets down the plane, while the demon missiles would only be delayed by a few minutes in reaching their target.

  It would take a few years for USC tacticians going over the captured records of the battle, supplemented with new knowledge from decrypted demon databases to know that the calculations and subsequent tactics were decided by AI within the missiles. The demons depended entirely on their AI for all maneuvering decisions once the missiles had been released. They followed a fire-and-forget strategy.

  “Sir, the bogeys are making evasive maneuvers!” The weapons officer shouted out the fact that everyone else already knew. All pair of eyes on the deck were glued to the tactical screen.

  Capt. Nagata sat still for a few moments, while his mind whirled with myriads of permutations and combinations. “Do nothing! Ignore those bogeys. Let the HVLPs continue on their current course.” Nagata finally ordered.

  “Sir!?!?” It was more of an exclamation and a question from the weapons officer and less of an affirmation that she had understood the order. She couldn’t believe her ears!

  “Do it!” Snapped Capt. Nagata. He was taking the biggest risk of his life, and was on the edge himself. He didn’t have time for courteous conversation with his crew.

  Capt. Nagata’s faceplate screen flashed. The crew were in full battle gear, which meant they were donning their suits. Nagata accepted the call, and Capt. Sorensen spoke in a voice that betrayed the fact that he was forcing it to be calm, while his face amply displayed his anxiety. “I take it that we are not interested in trying to intercept those demon missiles coming to blow us up?!” The tone wasn’t sarcastic, it was more like fatalistic.

  “Those HPLVs cannot follow the bogeys. They will run out of fuel. So, there is no point playing into their hand Johann. We will need to wait a few more minutes and launch more antimissiles at closer range when maneuvers on part of the bogeys wouldn’t affect our HPLVs ability to track and follow them. In the meanwhile, I am using this opportunity to find out who is making the decisions, and how they will react when we don’t behave as per their expectations… you know, do the unpredictable… think of this as a game of ‘Chicken’!” Nagata replied with a fatalistic smile of his own. His logic was sound, Capt. Sorensen accepted it and signed off.

  Almost two minutes after the demon missiles had taken a dive, but the human antimissiles had refused to track and follow, the demon missiles stopped their dive. The demon missiles didn’t just stop their dive, they seemed to have stopped their drive as well. They weren’t accelerating in any direction, though still floating in the direction of the human ships with the momentum they already had. It almost seemed as if the missiles were hesitating and unsure of their next course of action. Within a few seconds though, a decision seemed to have been made.

  One of the six demon missiles rose back to the plane of the orbit on an intercept course with the two human HVLP missiles, while the other five demon missiles reoriented themselves towards the two USC destroyers. It seemed that the tables had turned! The demon missile was now eager to intercept and stop human antimissiles! Who would have thought of that?! The irony brought a wry smile on the face of Capt. Nagata, but there was something ominous that was worrying him. Why had only one missile risen? Was it expecting to stop both the human missiles by itself? Surely it wasn’t that powerful, or was it?! There was only one way to find out.

  “Increase the separation between the two HVLPs to hundred kilometers.” Nagata ordered. Normally USC programmed its missiles to keep a separation of at least five kilometers to prevent accidental damage of one missile from fragments of antimissile targeting another of their missiles, or even a nuclear explosion. In this case the two HVLPs were separated by seven kilometers. There is no air in space to blow things away, so the only way a nuclear or even an antimatter explosion can damage is through radiation and shockwave.

  If the demon missile expected to slip between the two missiles seven kilometers apart and destroy them just by radiation and shockwave alone, then the missile had to be incredibly powerful indeed. The math was too complicated for Capt. Nagata to do in his head, but he was sure the yield would have to be in multiple giga-tons if not tens of giga-tons! Surely enough, within seconds of the two HVLP missiles increasing their separation to hundred kilometers, another demon missile rose to the plane of
orbit to intercept the two HVLPs.

  There are times when things happen exactly the way you expect them to, and yet you are left stunned by the sheer enormity of the event. When the two demon missiles intercepted the HVLPs and exploded, it was exactly that feeling for the crew. The flash of the explosions would have left humans blinded thousands of kilometers away, had someone looked at it with their naked eyes.

  The sheer amount of hard radiation in terms of gamma rays and x-rays was hard to even conceive. The explosions would be visible on Earth to the naked eye in the night side as a brilliant flash of light brighter than any star in the sky. The battle for Earth had truly begun, and the people of Earth were getting a grand stand view to it!

  There was stunned silence on deck and Capt. Nagata had to shout out his question to shake the crew out of its shocked stupor. “Yield analysis!” The captain demanded.

  “Sir, the yield analysis algorithm and sensors are calibrated up to a maximum of two giga-tons, no one ever expected to have to measure anything beyond that! The yield counter is maxed out, but I am doing a manual analysis using the spectrum intensity measurements and a calibration table for spectrum intensity for various yields. Even this calibration table stops at one giga-ton, but there is a formula given along with this table which I can extrapolate for the observed amount of spectral intensity. Just need a few seconds sir.” The weapons officer replied in a distracted tone, no doubt because he was furiously giving mental commands to the computer to compute something that had never needed to be calculated by humans before.

  “How reliable are those tables?” Capt. Nagata asked grimly.

  “For thermonuclear explosions, the tables are very reliable sir, close to 95% even at the higher end of the yield which have never been measured from actual explosions, but simply are theoretical yields. However, given that this was almost certainly an antimatter explosion, I cannot say how reliable the tables would be. The composition and relative proportion of gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet and visible light for a thermonuclear explosion are very different from that of an antimatter explosion. Of that I am very sure.

  “What I don’t know, and what probably no human knows is what the spectral signature of an antimatter explosion should be composed of. This is something for theoretical physicists to ponder over. What I can definitely give you is a lower bound to the strength of that explosion. The upper bound could be anything – fifty percent more, double or even triple the lower bound.” The weapons officer replied apologetically at not being able to be more specific.

  A few seconds later she spoke up again. “We have the numbers from the computer sir. Each of those explosions had a minimum yield of eight giga-tons, with an upper bound of twelve giga-tons. As I had said before sir, please take the upper bound estimates with a pinch of salt. The radiation estimates put the minimum survivable distance for the crew at between twenty-five to thirty-five kilometers depending on the actual yield. Even in this radiation shielded ship, any distance less than that and the crew would be exposed to lethal dosage of radiation. At a distance of eight to twelve kilometers, radiation would cause enough damage to the ship’s equipment to cause major malfunction. Any distance closer than that would literally melt the metal off the ship.”

  “Well then, we will just have to make sure that those four remaining missiles don’t get close to us, don’t we?” Nagata said with a sense of optimism that he didn’t feel in his heart at all, but he had to think of his crew’s morale.

  Capt. Sorensen hailed Nagata. “Well my friend, if you had sent a few more of those HVLPs out there, we might have been able to get rid of all six of those bogeys cheaply. Those two demon missiles did our job for us. Instead of avoiding, they intercepted our antimissiles and annihilated themselves!”

  “Honestly, I didn’t expect the demons to get suckered so easily Johann. I have a suspicion that it was an AI rather than an organic being that took the decision to intercept our HPLVs. The demons would most likely have known that we humans don’t have antimatter technology, so given the size of our HVLPs, they would offer no threat to the Goliath ship. Only an AI would play it safe and expend precious missiles to extinguish such a dubious threat posed by our HVLPs.

  “In any case I will follow your advice and dispatch four more missiles towards that Goliath ship. I doubt even an AI is going to be fooled twice though. The moment our HVLPs were destroyed, it would have been obvious that they carried no antimatter payload. Just to keep things confused for the demons, this time we will launch four nukes towards the Goliath ship. Let them chew on it, and wonder whether to ignore a new class of missiles.” Nagata replied with an impish smile.

  The Sapporo and the Hammer launched two nukes each aimed at the Goliath demon vessel. The nukes were programmed to go at half the maximum thrust, both to conserve fuel in order to be able to reach the distance to the Goliath ship, as well to present a juicy slow-moving target to the four approaching demon missiles. The human nukes were however programmed not to detonate on reaching the Goliath vessel. The nukes wouldn’t even be able to scratch the surface of the vessel, but there were humans on the surface of the Goliath vessel who could potentially be harmed.

  As Nagata had feared, the four remaining demon missiles didn’t take the bait, but as USC would learn a few years later, not because of the reasons that Capt. Nagata had anticipated. The AI had looked at the new class of missiles launched towards the mother ship and considered it a new threat worthy of being eliminated. The AI were however a difference engine, a very sophisticated heuristic algorithm based difference engine, but a difference engine nonetheless. In their mission parameters destroying the source of the threat i.e. the human ships had a higher weight, so they let the new threat pass, to be handled by the mother ship itself, while they continued their mission of destroying the human ships.

  One and a half century of continuous war with the Shaitans had brought about many improvements in human missile technology. One of them being that all missiles launched could return to their launching ship, or even an allied ship if proper authorization codes were supplied. All human ships had the mechanism to capture a returning missile and their solid fuel cannisters could be hot-swapped and hence refueled in a matter of minutes. This spared the captains of human ships from making one of the most agonizing choice of their command – conserve antimissiles for a future volley from the enemy and put the ship in present danger, or to commit large number of antimissiles to prevent the present volley of the enemy and put the ship in future danger.

  The demon missiles were close enough that no amount of maneuvering by them could prevent anti missiles from being able to intercept them. The Sapporo and the Hammer launched antimissiles in a sequential pattern, following tried and tested algorithms that had worked well in intercepting Shaitan missiles. Depending on the speed and angle of approach, the antimissiles approached singly or bunched into pairs or triplets to maximize the probability of being able to make a fatal hit on their objective. In this case most of the antimissiles bunched in pair given the speed and the angle of approach.

  Well over a hundred antimissiles were launched, which should have been more than adequate if those approaching bogeys had been Shaitan missiles. With these smaller and faster demon missiles, one couldn’t be sure. There were hundreds more antimissiles waiting in the hold to be released on command, should it turn out that human antimissiles were failing miserably in shooting down the demon missiles. When the moment of reckoning arrived, it turned out to be neither the best case, nor the worst-case scenario. The demon missiles were devilish in their counter strategies, sometimes slowing down drastically to confuse the human antimissiles. This, along with their smaller profile made them very hard to kill.

  Antimissile after antimissile failed to stop the demon missiles, but eventually the laws of probability caught up and one by one each of the demon missile was destroyed. As had been expected, each of the demon missile died with an enormous explosion, but these explosions for some reason were slightly less intense
than the explosions of the first two missiles that had detonated by themselves to intercept the HVLPs. Science officers and engineers got onto the job of speculating why this should be the case. The rest of the crew cheered at the fact that those monster yield missiles had been stopped, albeit at the cost of a huge number of antimissiles. Only six of the antimissiles had survived to return to their crafts.

  It wasn’t too worrying though, each destroyer class USC vessel carried eight hundred antimissiles, so between the two ships, there were still over fifteen hundred antimissiles in reserve. That smug smile on the face of the crews was wiped off quickly when the sensors registered a new volley of missiles launched by the Goliath ship. The count on the screen just kept increasing. Anxiety turned into panic, which gave to horror as the count on the screen kept on increasing. When the count finally stopped increasing, the count stood at eighty-eight!

  Why the demons stopped at that particular number was unknown. It could be a nice round number to the demons, or it simply could be the number chosen by some AI software as the most optimal number of missiles that it had calculated would get the job of destroying the two human ships done. If the last encounter was any indication of effectiveness of the countermeasures, then all the antimissiles available between the two ships would be able to stop sixty, may be a maximum of seventy of those demon missiles. It would take just one of those missiles to definitively wipe out a human ship of any size.

  The last desperate measure was to use the arsenal of offensive nukes to try and stop the demon missiles. The effectiveness of such a measure was dubious at best. The offensive nuclear missiles were large and lumbering, which could be easily outmaneuvered by the much smaller and faster demon missiles. This fact would get proven almost immediately when the four thermonuclear missiles launched as bait by the two human ships were ordered to try and intercept the incoming missiles.

  All the eighty-eight demon missiles had kept a trajectory well clear of the four approaching human missiles. When the human missiles tried to target individual demon missiles, those targets easily accelerated away from the path at speeds that the human nukes could not hope to match. It wasn’t even a contest. The nukes didn’t manage to get anywhere close to demon missiles to even attempt a detonation. It wouldn’t be so bad a contest for the human nukes later on as the demon missiles approached the human ships. At that time, the demon missiles would have no option but to approach their targets, tying their line of approach down to their destination. Human nukes would have a much better chance then.