By the time alarms were raised in the central compartment, many hundreds of humans had managed to stream through that axis. The human boarders hadn’t been able to get any of their weapons through that Axis hole though. None of their weapons could have been shielded enough to survive the intense radiation of the central Axis tube. The only weapon that they managed to get through were sharp edged weapons.
These weapons aren’t very effective on a naturally armored Bodar, unless wielded expertly by a large group of humans on a single Bodar. Given the fact that there were thousands of Bodars in the compartment to defend against the few hundred humans who had managed to slip through the axis, their weapons hardly presented any challenge. Even at this stage the human boarding party could easily have been repelled.
Unfortunately, frontal combat wasn’t what the humans had in mind. We were all well aware that one of the prime objectives for the human boarders would be to sabotage equipment inside the Ravenous. However, the humans hadn’t been able to get any of their weapons other than sharp edged blades into the second compartment. So, we were confident that they would not be able to do too much damage. The central core machinery of the Ravenous was too robust for anything wielded by the power of muscle, and the humans lacked knowledge of our technology to be able to do inflict any damage by reprogramming any of the control systems.
However, the humans found a way to sabotage in a manner we hadn’t anticipated before. The humans managed to force open one of the two maintenance hatches to the core. In hindsight, this was an obvious weak point of the core that we should have anticipated. The maintenance hatches are located deep within the belly of the Ravenous, hence they aren’t hardened for battle. Since these hatches are only used to insert maintenance probes and drones which are small, and not big enough for a Bodar to get through, the hatches are built lightly for ease of manual operations. In any case, one couldn’t imagine any living being inserting themselves into the core to a certain death.
We were wrong on both counts. The hatches may have been narrow for a Bodar, but a human could slip in through it. I am not sure whether the humans were aware of the lethal danger they were putting themselves into by entering the core. I have a feeling that they did. The humans are intelligent enough to realize the danger of getting into a sealed core, even if they may not have understood the workings of the machinery. I also know that most human soldiers carry radiation strips with them that change color on exposure to hard radiation.
Many humans entered the core anyway and to their deaths, though not before being able to cut enough of support and positional cables inside the core to make it impossible to keep the central antimatter power generators running. The humans hadn’t been able to do any damage to the power system itself, which was operating fine, but enough cables had been cut to make it impossible to keep fine positional control over propulsion system. If we kept the power system running, the Ravenous would spiral out of control with serious risk of a decaying orbit plunging it down into the planet below.
Thus, the Ravenous was dead in the waters in a manner of speaking – without maneuvering capability or power, running on batteries. We had enough antimatter batteries to keep the Ravenous running for a long time to be sure, but a battle even standing where we were would deplete our antimatter stores quickly. We were in no position to fire our antimatter cannons for any length of time. We still had other weapons, but we needed to get the core repaired quickly else the Ravenous was in serious trouble. That was easier said than done.
The moment we shut the core, the radiation inside the central axis stopped, which enabled the humans to rush in through it with all their electronic equipment and weapons. Hundreds more rushed in, and these new humans were even more lethal and effective because they now had their weapons and equipment with them. Being inside the core compartment, robbed us of our key weapons advantage.
We could not use our antimatter weapons, because those are the class of weapons that could rupture the core. Humans use ballistic weapons, which we haven’t carried on our ships since pre-history. From superior weapons, we had been brought down to worse than weapons parity! We were fighting with inferior weapons compared to humans! All we could depend on was our greater strength, size, robustness compared to humans and the fact that there were many more of us inside the Ravenous than them.
The humans fought like demons, a name that they have otherwise reserved for us. Their dexterity in low and zero gravity combat is exceptional, far superior to a Bodar, also aided by the fact that they are smaller and unhindered by external shells. Unfortunately, the maintenance hatches for the core are located at the axis of the Ravenous, where the gravity is close to zero. The humans were denying us access to those hatches, and were being able to engage our Bodar hunters one on one, although in most cases eventually Bodar hunters prevailed, and it was clear that we would be able to finish off all the humans eventually. It would take time, especially due to the fact the narrow-constrained spaces through which we had to fight to get to the hatches meant that our greater numbers could not be made to bear on the humans. That was another way the human soldiers had been able to even the odds… by fighting in inaccessible spaces.
It was around this time that we discovered something terrifying through our scans on the human hunters who had entered the second compartment. The humans had managed to bring in more of those primitive nuclear devices into the second compartment! Primitive those weapons might be, but we had seen the effectiveness of even one of those going off inside the Ravenous. Our scans showed that the humans had managed to bring in three, may be four of those weapons. Initially we ordered our hunters to target those weapons, and bring the bearer of those weapons down.
We soon realized that each of those weapons was designated to a special human hunter, whom from their intercepted broadcast we found out they called the ‘mule’. This human hunter was not just the carrier of the weapon, but from our best guess duty bound to detonate the weapon immediately on the first sign of being overwhelmed, sacrificing himself and all his fellow hunters around him. We had no reason to disbelieve the human hunters wouldn’t sacrifice themselves to achieve a larger goal, they had done it before, and we had seen their willingness, almost eagerness to commit suicide during the course of a battle to get tactical advantage over and over again.
This was just around the time I was returning to the Ravenous. The Master of the Watch was in a dilemma that few if any Bodar had ever faced in a battle. She decided to wait for my arrival. With hindsight, that delay in decision making might have provided the humans with the crucial time they needed for the reinforcements to arrive, but this is one place I can hardly second guess the command decision of the Master of the Watch.
It is hard to say how the humans would have reacted if she had decided to press on. The humans may have come good on the perceived threat and detonated the nuclear device. They were cornered and hardly had anything to lose. Detonation of nuclear weapon would have meant the certain end of the Ravenous.
Whatever and whoever would have been left in the third compartment would eventually have to be relocated back to the planet below, where without the support of the Ravenous, our hold on the planet would increasingly get tenuous. It is not inconceivable that the humans with their vast numbers and thousands of years of embedded infrastructure built on the planet eventually started getting the better of us and eliminating us bit by bit from the planet. They might even be able to eliminate us before help came. The only way we could forestall such a fate would have been to indulge in mass destruction using our antimatter weapons inside the atmosphere of the planet. That however, defeats the entire purpose of preserving this beautiful planet as a game reserve.
In any case, our hands were forced by the humans when we realized that two human ships that we had detected approaching us had no intention of engaging in a space combat with the Ravenous. Instead they were preparing to send more boarders, potentially thousands more through the opening they had managed to secure in the third
compartment.
The humans had sensed that the Ravenous had lost its capability to maneuver, as well as weapons capability on one side of our vessel. The two human ships approached from that end, probably feeling secure. What we hadn’t lost yet was our telemetry and our entire range of sensors and scanners, which could operate from either ends of the Ravenous.
We still had our missiles, that Bodars haven’t had to use for almost a generation. We also had our daughter combat ships that could inflict damage at a distance without Ravenous having to move from its place, although with our power generation stopped, those daughter ships were limited to the amount of time their antimatter batteries lasted. Still, we had enough arsenal to ensure that those two approaching human ships were toast.
I have a feeling that the human commanders of those ships knew this fact as well. Their maneuvering tactics suggested that they were not counting on the long-term survivability of their ships. Instead they were concentrating on only one objective – delivery of their deadly payload on to the Ravenous. Strange as it may sound, that payload didn’t consist of any sophisticated weaponry, but a bunch of human hunters who were to prove deadlier to the Ravenous than any sophisticated weaponry could ever be.
Almost two thousand human hunters in space armor streamed out of the human ships, just before our missiles could reach those ships. After that the human ships put up a surprisingly good effort in evading and even destroying a few of our missiles. It was apparent that the humans were well versed with missile warfare in space. Had our missiles not had the advantage of antimatter propulsion, it was likely that the human ships would have evaded all our missiles. They didn’t make any attempt at attacking the Ravenous with their missiles. Instead the human ships used all their offensive capabilities in terms of missiles and lasers to try and thwart our missiles. The human ships managed to delay the inevitable for some time, but eventually were destroyed.
This however gave us no reason to cheer in relief, because the ships’ deadly payload of human hunters was steadily advancing towards the Ravenous with the momentum imparted to them by their now dead mother ships, and we seem to have no way of stopping them. Our antimatter cannons on that end of the Ravenous were non-operational. Those would have been the ideal weapons to pinpoint and shoot down such tiny targets.
Our missiles would be ineffective in dealing with such small targets. The human hunters had deliberately spread themselves thin in the vastness of space as they approached the Ravenous. The missiles weren’t designed to seek targets as small as human hunter floating in space. Even if the missiles could seek a hunter, at best it would be able to kill that hunter and not much more. Even the vast armory of the Ravenous didn’t have so many missiles to target each of the thousands of human hunters this way.
Despite the futility, I was still tempted to send a few missiles on the way to block the human hunters as they converged upon the Ravenous. Another development held me back from doing so. Instead I sent our daughter ships to try and intercept as many human hunters in space as they could. Even our daughter ships weren’t designed to hunt such tiny prey, but with a Bodar piloting each of them instead of AI, they were likely to be a lot more effective in such a task.
The daughter ships indeed could hunt down a fair amount of the floating human hunters, hundreds of them, but that was not enough in effectively stopping them since there were thousands of human hunters. I didn’t want to repeat the mistake of the Master of the Watch and open a hatch to send Bodar hunters to the external surface of the Ravenous.
In any case the first skirmish on the surface of the Ravenous between us and the humans had proved that the humans were far more effective zero-G space fighter than the Bodars. It was no point taking them on in an arena of their strength. Instead the daughter ships were employed to try and shoot down as many as they could before the human hunters managed to enter through the already open hatch on the third compartment. Thousands managed to enter the third compartment and reinforce the dwindling number of human hunters in the second compartment, who were by now almost defeated and fighting for their lives.
The development that worried me most though wasn’t the fact that the humans were again ascendant in the skirmish on the second compartment right next to the core. Given enough time, even these thousand human hunters could be cut down and the second chamber liberated albeit at a great cost in terms of Bodar lives.
What worried me most was what long-distance telemetry was picking up on the sensors. Every few human minutes, the sensors would register the signature of an ion-plasma drive lighting up. These were the drive signatures of human ships slowing down, as they entered into the solar systems. Some of the furthest were well outside the system and would take weeks if not months to reach at the rate at which they were approaching. There were however many which were well within the system, and had slowed down considerably. They couldn’t have slowed down to that extent undetected without the use of reactionless drives.
We realized that human reactionless drives were not as experimental as our research had led us to believe. Some of the nearest human ships would reach us within a matter of days. All the human ships were arriving from the general direction of the nearby star and its outskirts, where we were aware the humans had some straggler ships fighting their adversary race – the Shaitans. With hindsight, I realized that it was a costly mistake to not have gone out to hunt those down.
The human ship that worried me most however was coming from a very different direction. This ship was actually accelerating and not decelerating towards us because its velocity was too low to be coming in straight from an interstellar journey. This ship must have already been lurking in the solar system, probably gathering intelligence and coordinating the current attack. How long this ship had managed to hide was impossible to say, but we had to assume that it was well aware of the capabilities of the Ravenous, as well as its current debilitated state.
This ship would reach the Ravenous within seven or eight of human hours. If the few thousand humans who had recently reinforced the human hunters inside the Ravenous were able to hold on for that long, they could expect another reinforcement of a few thousand more. I am sure that the humans had mentally written off their ship, having seen the fate of the previous ships that had launched boarders.
I am sure that the humans were willing to sacrifice all their ships so long as each of them could release their payload of human boarders, who could take over or destroy the Ravenous from the inside. The human ships were unlikely to even bother to try to attack the Ravenous from the outside.
The scary part was that there was a good chance of this human strategy succeeding. Scanners indicated that the humans had managed to get many of their nuclear devices into the second compartment. If they ever felt like they were losing control of that core compartment, they were sure to detonate one or more of those nuclear devices. That would ensure that the Ravenous would be fatally wounded and could never be repaired. We would permanently lose our antimatter generator and then it would only be a matter of time before we ran out of all antimatter. We might be able to run the first compartment on backup nuclear generators for a long time, but we would lose our commanding weapons superiority and not be able to support our sisters back down on the surface of the planet in any effective way.
If the humans could manage to keep landing boarders on the Ravenous, then irrespective of whether they had to destroy the second core compartment, they will eventually be able to take over the Ravenous. There might not be enough Bodars on the Ravenous to overcome the human hunters from all the human ships that were now approaching it. There was no knowing how many more of those human ships might still be on their way that we hadn’t detected. There is also no guarantee that humans from the surface hadn’t retained some hidden capability to launch into space and attempt to board the Ravenous.
Despite all this, we fought on in the second compartment with the human boarders. We successfully prevented them from making a breach into the first compartment
through the central axis tube. I had a strategy in mind. There were over six thousand Bodars left alive in the Ravenous in the first and the second compartment after the third compartment had been destroyed by the humans. Less than two thousand humans had been able to board the Ravenous so far, out of which half were still alive by our reckoning. In the same time, the humans had killed about five hundred Bodars. One Bodar for every two humans killed. It was very good performance from the human hunters compared to what they had ever achieved before in combat with the Bodars, but it was not good enough.
If we went on an all-out push, we could kill all the rest of the human boarders before any more human reinforcement could arrive. But it wasn’t as simple as that. If the humans got to the verge of completely being wiped out, then they would detonate their nuclear devices that they had planted at various points in the second compartment, because at that point they would have nothing to lose. As far as we could make out, the only reason that the humans hadn’t detonated their nuclear device was because there were substantial number of humans inside the second chamber, who were fighting us Bodars perhaps in the hope of being able to take the ship from us.
We had to handle the nuclear devices and the human hunters guarding them delicately. We had considered blowing up the positions where the nuclear devices had been planted with small missiles. The problem with that approach was that there was no guarantee that we would be able to destroy the nuclear device before it could be triggered by their ‘mule’. We know that humans have a penchant for what they call a ‘dead-man’s-switch’, where a human holds on to a switch so long as he is alive. The very act of killing the human would activate the switch. We also know that humans use their own version of direct brain to machine command system to switch their machines and weapons.
Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Page 40