Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (22 page)

The countdown to zero came and went, but Ed had not yet felt the shock. He always hated this part of the jump. He always seem to be caught in a surprise, however much he tried to be prepared for it, and the inexact countdown clock didn’t help.

The shock of meeting up with the atmosphere came 6 seconds after zero. It felt more violent and harrowing than normal. Ed knew why. Although Mar’s atmosphere was less than 1% of the density of Earth, they were slamming on to it at such an unprecedented high speed that even this wisp of an atmosphere felt like slamming into a brick wall. He silently prayed for his marines.

The banshee howl of the atmosphere was reaching into his suit, but Ed was keeping his eyes on the internal temperature of the suit right now. He had survived the reentry shock, and the next thing that could kill him was the heat. They had applied an unprecedented amount of foam to their suits to take care of the extra heat they expected from their unprecedented reentry speed.

That may take care of the extra ablative effect of their extra violent reentry, and hopefully the foam will not burn all the way through to their suits, but the extra heat generated still remained a problem. The anti-ablative foam was excellent at resisting the thousands of degrees temperature that their more violent than usual reentry was creating. It even helped in shedding some of the heat by slowly melting away and taking some of the heat along with it.

It was however continuously heating the layer below it as well, which in turn was heating the suit. The thicker foam meant they can burn and last longer. This also meant that the suit was heated for longer. The heat inside the suit had nowhere to go, basic law of thermodynamics.

Since the heat could not be dumped outside the suit, it had a different strategy to keeping the human inside cool. It took the heat inside the suit and dumped it into heating something specific inside the suit which could store it for dumping later.

The entire suit skin had a mesh of thin capillaries filled with liquid oils woven into it. This oil would get heated to many hundreds of degrees, absorbing the heat from the skin of the suit. The oil was continuously pumped through metal salts made primarily out of sodium. The metal salts would absorb the heat from the oils and slowly start melting, but returning the oil to a cooler state to circulate back and absorb more heat.

It was a very good system, but it had its limits. Ed’s display was showing that the cooling system had reached its limits and was no longer able to absorb any more heat. The temperature started shooting up alarmingly. Ed felt dizzy and nauseous, and he was barely able to focus as he checked the temperature display which was showing 58°C.

He was sure he was about to black out, but he kept floating in and out of consciousness, never actually blacking out. He had lost track of time, but when he was able to concentrate a bit, he realized that the temperature was not climbing anymore. It was not coming down fast either, Ed just had to hold on for some more time.

That time came some 50 seconds later, with another ding chime inside his suit, which informed him that the suit had started the sequence of shedding the foam. This meant that they had slowed down enough for the air friction on the suit not to generate more heat than it could shed.

The foam was a good insulator, which absorbed a lot of heat preventing it from passing on to the suit. Now however, that very property was undesirable, since the absorbed heat of the foam kept heating the suit, not letting it cool. So the foam needed to be shed.

How does one shed a foam from the suit that has been designed to resist thousands of degrees of temperature and the violent shock of wind resistance on high speed entry? The mechanism was simple but required the marines to help themselves.

Some of the cooling capillary tubes crisscrossing the skin of the suit were designed to burst and leak out their specially made oils on the outer skin of the suit. This created a lubricant under the hardened foam stuck over the skin of the suit. The marines had to vigorously rub their suits surface with their gloved hands and rub their legs against each other. It is not as easy as it sounds to do that when you are still falling through the atmosphere at incredible speeds, and the air resistance is pinning you down, hampering even simple movement with tremendous force.

Ed rubbed his suit enthusiastically starting with his faceplate. He wanted to cool down as fast as possible. He had started to blackout due to the heat, and that would have been disastrous. Once he had his faceplate clear, the view below was breathtaking.

He however turned his head around to check on his marines. He could not see any of them visually, and he could not turn on his IFF system. He knew that they were all there within a few kilometers of space, but it was impossible to see them in the dark twilight of the atmosphere. So he just prayed that all of them had made it this far and were conscious. If anyone had blacked out, he was almost as good as dead.

Ed was looking forward to the most fun and exhilarating part of the jump about to begin now. It was also the part where he had to manually navigate and keep his eyes on the display to constantly correct his course.

The suit Ed was wearing was a two part suit designed by the USC-GCF specifically for this type of mission. The inner part of the suit was the standard issue ‘armored’ space suit. The ‘armored’ part being dubious as far as the marines were concerned. Ed understood the practical limitations that the engineers faced, but the marines did not need to be happy about it.

The outer part of the suit, which was affixed on top of the inner suit like a shell was the part which would be in play all throughout their jump. It was designed as a throwaway attachment to the inner suit for this kind of missions. The USC-GCF or the space marines were developing new techniques in human warfare in space, and the jump was one of the newest of those techniques. There were just a handful of companies which had platoons qualified to do this.

The next specialized adaptation of the outer suit came into play now as Ed finished removing the last of the foam from the skin of the suit. He was already feeling much better and noticed that the temperature had climbed down to 40°C. He mentally nudged his suit to set the desired temperature down to 16° C from the default setting of 20°C. He needed some extra cooling right now, he felt like he was inside a sauna.

Ed swung back his arms to meet up with the sides of his body, and tightly held them in that position. He also held his legs tightly next to each other. Then he gave the mental command to the suit and waited for the ping. He could feel a very minute vibration of machinery on the insides of his legs and the sides where his arms were tucked straight. The he got the ping inside his head as well on the insides of his helmet. His suit was ready.

Ed stretched his arms and legs out wide in a spread-eagled fashion, he was a bird now. The suit had attached a carbon fiber sheet between the two legs and the hand and the sides of the body to give Ed wings. He was now flying, gliding rather through the atmosphere of Mars at supersonic speed.

If someone saw Ed’s suit now, they would have now understood, why the outer part of the suit and his helmet looked so weird to them in space. The back of his helmet had a bulge ending in a point at the top of his head. His suit similarly had a hump like structure at the back. The front of the suit looked completely flat, including the outer faceplate of the outer suit. Now as he flew in a horizontal position face down, his suit took the shape of a streamlined airplane.

Ed concentrated on the schematic map display inside his helmet and turned and oriented himself towards his destination. The display inside his helmet would have been familiar to any airplane pilot on Earth. Instead of a control stick though, Ed was using his body to steer. He had to constantly adjust the direction with his body. With such a large distance to travel, even a small deviation from course could mean landing a 100 Km off target.

The other thing he kept a constant eye on, was a small window in the display showing the position of the Shaitan ship in synchronous orbit. Although he knew that there was no way he would be able to see the ship visually, he looked up instinctively once in the general direction of the ship. His sensors were on passive scan mode, but it had no problems in picking up the ship orbiting above.

They had now entered the danger zone. Till now they had been sheltered by Mars, having entered the atmosphere on the other side of Mars near the edge. Now they had crossed over the horizon and the Shaitan ship was in their line of sight. This meant that they were also in the line of sight of the Shaitan ship. The only defense Ed and his marines had was to stay unnoticed.

Ed wondered how the captain’s plan was working, and whether they would help him or make his mission more difficult. He got his answer as he was enjoying the high speed, bodysurfing, supersonic flight over Mars. A ping inside both his head as well as his helmet alerted him that the computer had noticed a change in the disposition of the objects being tracked by it.

He looked at the screen. The dot representing the Shaitan ship was blinking, which meant that it was in motion. It must have just started moving, because it seemed to be in roughly the same position as before on the map. On the edge of the map was a new object being tracked, which was blinking much faster. He knew what that one was. It was USS Resolute.

The USS resolute had also come over the horizon as expected, and caught the notice of the Shaitan captain. The enemy captain had decided to confront the Resolute, by giving chase. So the captain’s plan was working. He was thankful for that. It definitely eased his job from impossible to implausible. That was a huge improvement.

Ed was caught in a moment of panic, when another object started getting tracked directly overhead. It took him a few seconds to realize that the new object being tracked was far overhead him, not directed towards his marines. It took a few more seconds for him to realize what the object was.

It was the missile that the captain had anticipated. The computer had been able to calculate its trajectory and it was clear that it could not pose any threat to the Resolute at its current trajectory. The missile was desperately trying to fight its own momentum and change course, as well as trying to get out of the gravity well of Mars.

It however had no hope of catching up with the Resolute, which had gotten an additional boost of speed from the slingshot ride it had taken over Mars. The captain had anticipated the moves of the enemy captain exactly. Damn she was good. He realized that the missile had been launched by the enemy captain long ago, but only came into view of his suits relatively weak sensors right now because the missile was so much smaller.

The good news for Ed was that with the Shaitan ship moving out of orbit over the camp, and its eyes now fixed on the Resolute, he has less likely to be discovered from top by the enemy ship. The bad news was that Ed was getting closer to the effects of the Shaitan jamming radio frequencies and all other electromagnetic spectrum around the human base.

The effects on his suit’s navigation sensors were worse than expected. His location and desired path kept jumping on the screen. He realized that the landing accuracy of his Marines is going to be worse than anticipated. They would end up far more scattered than expected. Ed just hoped that they would not come out worse because of it.

When Ed reached a few kilometers from where the suit navigation thought was the rally point, there was a loud ping in his suit. He immediately went from a horizontal to a vertical position, still in the spread eagled position. This had the effect of bleeding off a large part of the still considerable velocity that he was traveling at. He also felt the massive shock which was inevitable when you slowed down this fast.

He was now going at a sane enough speed for him to open up his parachute, which he mentally commanded his suit to deploy. The half odd kilometer journey down vertically was without any more excitement. Although Ed was not expecting any trouble from the Shaitans this far, he followed standard operating procedure and took time to passively scan the entire horizon.

The outer part of his suit had performed its job, and performed it admirably. It was now time to get rid of it and start moving freely. He gave a mental command to his suit, and waited for its effects to be felt. The external suit’s fastening mechanism needed to be something relatively simple to snap on to the normal armored suit of the Marines.

Something a helping crew could do reasonably fast and without making any mistakes on board a ship. It needed to be even simpler to take off in the field. The marine would be taking it off all by himself in a hostile environment, possibly under fire.

Yet it needed to be extremely reliable. If the external suit came off while the marine was making a reentry into the atmosphere, he would burn to ashes within seconds. So the seam of the external suit was engineered cleverly at a molecular level.

The external suit was informally called the ‘Mummy case’ by the marines. That was because it reminded them of the two part mummy case in which the pharaohs of Egypt were buried. The front and the rear part of the external suit were brought together on either sides of an armor suited marine.

Once completely encased, the seams of the external suit were subjected to a unique combination of acids, fluctuations in temperature and specific electrical currents. It was a sequence that was like a combination lock, which was unlikely to ever occur naturally.

This would make the lattice structure of the molecules at the seams open up and accept molecules supplied by the acids as part of its lattice structure. This would then return back to its natural state and harden, sealing the seam completely as if it never existed, with almost the same material as the outer suit.

When the suit needed to be opened up and shed. The inside circuitry of the suit supplied an almost reverse combination of temperature and currents along with certain alkali material, which turned the material added at the seams back to its original constituents, thus opening up the seam cleanly.