Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (23 page)

This process took almost a minute, and Ed waited before he could feel the outer suit loosen. He gave a gentle nudge and the two parts of the outer suit fell apart cleanly. His image of the surface of Mars improved dramatically. The outer faceplate of the outer suit was strongly polarized and designed more for strength than for visibility. With that layer shed, he could take in the desolate beauty of the landscape of Mars.

Ed however didn’t have time to appreciate the marvelous vista around himself. He orientated himself with the help of his faceplate display and started running towards his destination. He now wished that the engineers had worked faster and had been able to give them a powered armor suit for this war with the Shaitans.

He had nearly 5 Kilometers to trek to the rally point. While the one third gravity of Mars will help, it was still going to be an arduous hike with his suit on. There would be marines who may have to hike as much as 15 Km to the rally point if they have not been very precise with their aerial navigation.

Ed weighed 90 Kg on Earth, which was a perfect weight for a fit and muscular six foot two marine. His suit, weapons and ammo weighed 250 Kg. So even in this one third gravity, Ed felt like he was carrying his own weight plus a 15 Kg. backpack on Earth. This was no big deal for a marine, but he would have to fight at the end of the run, and he would have appreciated the powered armor.

The powered armor would have also enabled him to carry more ammo. There new guns, popularly called the anti-Shaitan guns had some serious weight, and the ammo was even more weighty compared to normal. The amount of ammo carried by each marine was limited by its weight. He would have preferred carrying a bit more. He and his marines will have to be judicious with the use of their ammo.

The issue with powered armor was not the technology of the armor itself, but with power. To be precise the lack of power. Batteries had come a long way in the last twenty years, thanks to the Shaitan technologies discovered at Titan. They had helped increase the endurance of the suit.

The suit worn on Titan for example was twice as heavy as the one Ed was wearing, only made bearable because Titan’s gravity is one seventh that of Earth v/s Mar’s one third gravity. Yet the suit Ed was wearing not only had armor that was not present in the earlier suit, but also had three times the power and endurance of the Titan suits. Ed could safely stay in the suit for 24 hours, perhaps even a few hours more than that.

Yet the battery technology was not good enough to power an exoskeleton to carry Ed’s weight even partially. That would require an increase in the battery capacity by an order of magnitude. So Ed soldiered on, running and huffing the 5 Km towards the rally point.

Chapter 14

Valles Marineris

Mars

September 2083

The USC camp site had been chosen for a purpose. In fact it had been chosen keeping in mind many objectives. Defensibility had been one of them. It was after all a military camp. It was built on a strongly defensible plateau. The plateau jutted out of one of the side walls of the most spectacular canyons in the solar system.

Valles Marineris
is over 4000 Km long, running along nearly a quarter of the length of the equator of Mars. It was 200 Km wide and 7 Km deep at places. The Grand Canyon would look like a worm, next to this giant Anaconda. The canyon walls were sheer cliffs rising kilometer upon kilometer that were impossible to scale.

The Damalis Kormas base had been built on the mouth of the canyon. It had been named after the captain of the Charles Martell. It was the sacrifice of the Charles Martell and its brave crew that had not just saved the lives of 128 humans and their base camp on Titan, but given them the opportunity to capture a Shaitan base intact. 99% of what we know about the Shaitans and their technology today is thanks to the capture of that one base. That knowledge and technology may be the only thing that may help human species survive.

There were small plateaus jutting out of eroded walls of the otherwise sheer cliffs of the canyon, near the mouth. The plateau of the Kormas base stood on a Mesa like structure, that had a sheer drop of a kilometer on three sides and the walls of the canyon on one side, which stretched above vertically for another 5 kilometers.

The only access to the plateau was through a winding path that led to the mouth of the canyon and beyond to the vast plains. There on the plains was a temporary shuttle landing facility. The shuttles could land vertically, but a small runway helped in liftoff and touchdown with higher loads. The shuttle landing facility also had an emergency hut, and stocks of spares and shuttle fuel.

All in all the USC Kormas base was built like a veritable fortress, and it was completely owned by USC since it was outside the Rubicon line. The base however had not been built on that plateau to make it a defensible fortress. That was just a happy outcome of some fortunate geography. The original camp had been built out there because of the ‘Glass Worms’.

In the first decade of this century, as more and more space crafts were sent to Mars, scientists were excited to discover what could only be described from aerial pictures as worms. These were ribbed tubular structures kilometers long and hundreds of meters thick that appeared to be ribbed tubes of made out of glass.

The alien hunters went into overdrive citing this as proof of long lost alien civilizations, while scientists dismissed them as optical illusion. According to them these were simply artefacts of sand dunes. Unlike the ‘Face’ on Mars however, there were many aspects of those pictures, that couldn’t be simply proved as natural artefacts. Even if those were natural structures, they were mighty interesting natural structures, the origin of which was far from certain.

Thus one of the later missions to Mars in the 2040s decided to go and check them out at this particular place, where such ‘Glass Worms’ had been noticed from orbit. They were able to conclusively prove that these were natural structures, without the hand of any alien beings. That didn’t mean that they were not interesting.

Scientists theorized that these ribbed tubes were made by frozen oceans, long go when Mars had liquid water on its surface flowing freely. One can see such frozen ocean structures today on the Arctic Ocean and northern Canada. Over a period of time the frozen ice disappeared leaving the ribbed tubular structures made of salt deposits and hematite.

What was interesting in those structures were the network of tunnels adjoining these Worms dug into the walls of the canyon, carved out by water flowing at high pressure. Some of those tunnels and caves were huge. Since Mars has no geological movements any longer, most of these tunnels have survived, creating a network that would be interesting to any explorer and a goldmine for the scientists exploring the geology of the planet.

When USC had to choose a site for their base on Mars, this site was not just attractive for it fort like defensive location, but also for the amount of hollow spaces that could be used for storage and perhaps even habitation. This was a natural choice for a military base.

What the USC planners would never have imagined was that this same location could become an ideal place for the Shaitans to lay a siege and confine the defenders with no exit available to escape. Even if the humans could have escaped, there was nowhere for them to go to. This was the only permanent base available on Mars.

There were two emergency supply dumps nearby with a makeshift emergency hut, but that would not sustain so many people of the base, even if they have not been destroyed or captured by the Shaitans already. They could defend any land attack from below, and even the Shaitans wouldn’t dare climb down the sheer 5 Km face of the canyon wall to come from above.

The Shaitans had air support in terms of two shuttles that were the size of large bombers used a hundred years ago. The Shaitans had not tried to use those shuttles yet to fire on or bomb the base on the plateau. If they wanted, the Shaitans could easily do either and destroy most of the structures on the base.

The older structures were flimsy and would get destroyed even with those large caliber bullets that Shaitans use. The newer structures being constructed by Dr. Matsumoto and team were made out of local material and were more robust. They could survive those bullets, but not a bombing even by conventional bombs.

Humans had no idea what the Shaitans considered conventional. It was possible that every bomb made by the Shaitans was a nuke. That may be what the Shaitans considered ‘conventional’. The humans could however survive the destruction of the entire base outside.

USC planners had made elaborate structures deep within the network of tunnels, and a large part of Yusuke’s building experiments involved using naturally occurring shelters like these tunnels to make human habitat quickly and cheaply. So they had ample living space, oxygen, food and water stocked to last them over a year inside.

The power source for this base was the old dirty nuclear fission model used first on Titan. That was because this was one of the earliest places in space they had put up a semi-permanent settlement. The modern variable geometry fusion power plants which are clean and more efficient had not been developed yet. Even now they are too expensive to cart one to Mars. It is a lot cheaper to replace plutonium fuel rods on this reactor every few years. This reactor still had decades of working life left.

The reactor had also been buried deep into one of the dead end tunnels. That place had become a natural containment chamber with the additional bonus of a cache of frozen ice embedded within the rocks, which could be used by the reactor.

So the humans had a self-contained and sustainable ecosystem within the tunnels where they could survive for a long time. The tunnels were deep enough that they would be able to survive even if the external base on the plateau was bombarded by a tactical nuke. They may even be able to survive a nuke the size of Hiroshima, but they would most probably be sealed for good and entombed in those tunnels.

The Shaitans however would not go unchallenged if they decided to bomb the base or fire upon it from Shuttles. The base had four automated anti-aircraft guns mounted on turrets that could operate autonomously or be remotely controlled from the tunnels. In addition the base had a stock of 20 shoulder mounted missile launchers, which could be used very effectively on such shuttles.

The Kormas base had been caught in very unfortunate timing on their regular schedules. Mars bases were supported logistically by the older Resolute class ships and their generational equivalents from China and ESA-ISRO-JAXA consortium. Even some of the last Friendship class vessels that were still in service were used once in a while, though they were rare as most had been retired or used for training in Earth orbit or the Moon.

These Resolute class ships took between 5 weeks to as much as 12 weeks for a one way journey from Earth to Mars depending on the relative position of the two planets. Unfortunately for the humans on Mars, the current position was almost at the maximum distance and it took nearly 11 weeks at this distance.

When it was observed that one of the Shaitan Ships broke formation and headed towards the inner solar system, while the rest continued on their original course to miss the solar system tangentially, the scheduled resupply ship carrying returning passengers out of rotation from Mars had already started its acceleration burn towards Earth.

It could not have decelerated to a stop, turned back to Mars in another acceleration burn, decelerated again to stop at Mars and pick up evacuees, all of whom would not have fitted on the ship anyway, and then hoped to have enough fuel left to reach back to Earth.

The relief vessel meant for mars was still in Earth orbit, and could not hope to make it to Mars fast enough to evacuate the humans at Mars before the Shaitan Ship reached there. So the humans were stranded here on Mars.

Leanna as the CO of the Kormas base had done the only thing she could do. She had hunkered down and ordered elaborate preparations for the coming invasion in nearly two months’ time. She was a student of General Takamori, and she was not going to let her mentor down. She would prepare defenses that would make Takamori proud.

It was not clear what the plans of this lone Shaitan ship were. In fact initially it was not even clear which inner planet the ship was heading, and most had suspected it would be heading for Earth, and defense preparations had been made accordingly to protect Earth.

When it became clear that the Shaitan ship was heading towards Mars, the Admiral had sent a single Resolute class ship for their rescue, Leanna thought bitterly. Heck it was not just any Resolute class ship, it was the old and venerable USS Resolute itself! That must be all that their lives were worth she guessed.

She admonished herself for being bitter. As a military woman, she understood the strategic and tactical compulsions the Admiral faced. She knew that the Admiral cared about very man and woman of the USC which was the only family he had. He especially cared about her and Yusuke. The team that survived Titan were friends for life.

The intent of the Shaitan ship were not known. If the ship decided to simply bomb the human base from space with one of those monster 400 megaton nuke they had used last time, then there was very little that Leanna could do. Unlike on earth, where she could have scattered her people along the wide and open countryside, she could not do so on Mars. They had to return back to the base for life support.

Even if she scattered her people temporarily as the Shaitan vessel came into orbit, if it destroyed the human camp then those scattered humans were doomed. They would have no access to life support after their suit batteries ran down and would die, especially if the entrance to the tunnels got sealed due to bombardment.

They were better off inside the tunnels. In case they survived the bombardment of the Shaitan ship, they would be able to survive inside for a long time and hope for rescue from Earth.