Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (39 page)

Eagle 1 buzzed the three siege positions before the marines started their assault. Eagle 1 had a narrow escape as one of the Shaitans managed to recover fast enough and launch a SAM. Eagle 1 was able to take a sharp turn and somehow the SAM’s IR sensor lost track of the shuttle.

16 Shaitans had been left behind in each of the siege positions to man the missile launchers and the heavy guns. A few of those Shaitans had been wounded or killed by mortars, but most were fighting fit. Assaulting an entrenched position is a lot more difficult and dangerous than sniping from a distance. The marines started taking casualties despite Eagle 1 buzzing the three siege positions one after the other.

Eagle 1’s machine gun did not have to worry too much about friendly fire because the IFF signals of the marines would become the moment the shuttle came close enough to overcome the effects of jamming. It managed to cut down a few of the Shaitans from the air. It helped but was not enough to prevent casualties.

The marines lost 5 of their own and one seriously injured before they took the three positions. Majority of the casualties were inflicted as they approached and were seen through the dust by the Shaitans before the marines could see their enemy. Once the marines reached within range, their superior marksmanship coupled with faster reaction times ensured that they killed all the Shaitans without taking any further significant casualties.

The 50 marines had killed 44 Shaitans in the assault while taking 6 casualties. 5 dead and one seriously injured. By any reckoning 10% loss to inflict 100% kill rate, when storming positions held by enemy of similar strength would be considered a win. The marines didn’t feel that way as they knelt over their dead comrades. Humans just didn’t think that way.

It however demonstrated the inherently superior fighting capabilities of human species compared to alien species they would encounter over the centuries to come. Humans would not like to think of themselves that way, but their reputation in the galaxy would spread as a martial species honed by evolution into the meanest of fighting machines.

When given half a chance in terms of comparable technology, humans would fight and overcome superior numbers and slightly superior technology with their guile and ferocity. The mourning marines did not know it, but with every battle they fought, they were building the reputation of humans as a species that others in the galaxy would be fearful and in awe of.

Chapter 25

The Kill Box

Kormas Base, Mars

September 2083

It may not have been obvious earlier, but it was apparent now that humans had slowly but steadily put the Shaitans exactly in the place they wanted them to be in. Humans held all the cards. They had unchallenged air superiority. Human shuttles could now hover slowly over the Shaitans and strafe them with machine guns with relative safety.

The Shaitans had lost control of their heavy weapons and missiles. They had been forced to abandon their good sniping positions, and the reinforcements on the plains were tied up by a mere platoon of human soldiers. The only thing that the Shaitans had now was their numbers and their desperation. And their desperation showed.

The marines may have deprived the Shaitans of their positions and heavy weapons, but they had not killed enough of them to make a dent yet. There were still close to 1200 Shaitans left who had survived the mines and explosives laid down on the winding path up to the base. They were now two third of the way up, but thankfully the marines could now come out of the tunnels to defend the road leading up to the plateau, now that the missiles had been silenced.

“Switch on the lights. Marines proceed forward to your positions. Civilians follow the lead of Havaldar Thapa as instructed earlier. He is your commander.” Leanna ordered. It was time for the humans inside the base to get into the battle truly. The lights were switched on and the marines started trooping out.

The ‘lights’ were not truly lights in the conventional sense. These were high powered and focused infrared sources which were shone on the path leading to the plateau. They had been originally placed in case of a night attack by the Shaitans. The Shaitans were hardly hampered by absence of light, but the humans were handicapped without light.

To even the odds, they had lit the path close to the plateau so that humans would be able to shoot at the Shaitans as easily as the Shaitans would be able to shoot back at them. They could not obviously put street lamps on the path though, which would be destroyed by the advancing Shaitans. They had to shine the light from flood lights here in the plateau.

It is hard to clearly light up a path half a kilometer long and winding with flood lights. If you shine infrared though, the entire path can be lit up like Christmas when watched from IR vision of the helmet. Fortunately IR also worked best in a dust storm. It is able to cut through dust far better than visible light. So as the humans emerged on to the plateau, they could see the faint outline of the Shaitans as they turned round the corner of the winding road, but the Shaitans could not yet see the humans since the IR light was not being shone on the plateau itself.

Yusuke felt déjà vu as he emerged from the blast door to take up his position at the rearmost line. Every non-essential personnel was now out of the tunnels defending the plateau and the Kormas base. There were just 5 people left inside the base handling the communications, monitors, remote defense systems and bringing weapons from deep inside the tunnels to the blast door.

Amazingly he did not feel panic at all. He recollected how sick he had felt on Titan as the moment of battle had approached. He had had to struggle to prevent himself from throwing up due to fear then. This time an unreal sense of calm and detachment fell over him. Although his confidence in the marines had grown leaps and bounds since Titan, he knew that he could die just easily this time as he could have the last time on Titan. He could die even if the humans won the battle.

The fact that he had survived in Titan was sheer dumb luck, as it was with the other 18 humans who had survived. The large majority of the humans had died because they did not have as much luck as the surviving 19, and ended up being in the wrong place at the wrong time somewhere during the battle. That could easily happen to Yusuke this time, but he strangely he did not feel afraid knowing that fact. He had been here before in life and something about being in such a situation once gives you a very different perspective about death.

Yusuke watched with fascination as the Gurkha marines started climbing the mountain to get to their respective defensive positions. These people were built for the mountains, their footing as sure as that of a mountain goat. Born and bred on the Himalayas, the Gurkha with his reputation for ferocity came to his own when fighting in the mountains.

Leanna knew that the bravery of the marines would not be enough in itself. They were outnumbered 6 to 1 in this fight. Bullets and explosives would not have enough stopping power to prevent the charging Shaitans from overwhelming them. They would need old fashioned stopping power. She missed the ingenuity of Mr. Gupta and the industry of Sasha Kaminski, but she had enough engineers in the base. She had learnt the value of using the lay of the land and the materials available locally from Titan. It was not a new doctrine, generals from Napoleon to Julius Caesar to Genghis Khan had used it all the time.

The tactical approach Leanna had taken to defense was a ‘divide-sequester-kill box’ approach. First divide the approaching horde into manageable chunks. Then force a separation between the divided chunks and sequester the chunk from the rest of the horde. Lastly drive the sequestered Shaitans to a kill box into which you can fire from many directions and dispatch the enemy before letting the next batch enter the kill box.

It sounded a simple and obvious strategy, but there was a lot of planning to be done to achieve it, and there was no guarantee of success. The sloping path became visible about half a kilometer from the plateau as it wound itself from behind the mountain. This turning point became the first marker beyond which an advancing army could not see what was happening on the plateau and the road leading to it.

It was also the logical place to position the first and the heaviest obstacle. The press of the advancing horde beyond this point which would not be able to see the obstacle would push some of the Shaitans off the path and hopefully to their death. The problem with creating such an obstacle was that it needed to be retractable, but strong enough to take a heavy beating and still be deployed against the push of pressing army. It could not be just a set of boulders placed in the path.

This is where Yusuke and his team of habitat construction specialists came in. Their original task had been creating permanent habitats on Mars using local material, which had been going just fine before the Shaitans decided to intrude. Now they put their newly learnt skills to good use.

It is surprisingly easy to make concrete on Mars. Most of the raw materials exist in plenty on the surface, and a few that don’t have easy substitutes. All you require is a lot of energy, which thanks to their nuclear power plant they had plenty of. In fact a layman would find it hard to distinguish between Earth made concrete and Mars made concrete.

Leanna and the marines had used their time well in preparation for the attack. They cut a thin but deep slice of the ground on the path as well as a groove deep into the side of the mountain the path was cut through. They had taken the spare parts of the blast door stocked for maintenance and repair, and performed a simple modification.

The blast door closing mechanism was designed to close a reasonably heavy door, reasonably fast. It had a 30 BHP, high torque motor with appropriate gearing attached to it. The gear ratio was changed drastically by simply attaching a much smaller gear. Now the mechanism would move 20 times slower, but it could take 20 times more load.

The mechanism was fitted at the bottom of the sliced hole the marines had dug. The hole had been dug at a slight angle, so that it faced downslope. Thin wired rebar block wrapped in hard plastic to make a hollow rectangular block with its top open, was lowered into the mechanism and attached to it. The rebar block was then filled by pouring concrete. To add a nice touch, spikes were inserted into the soft concrete on top.

Once hardened, the marines had a slowly lifting sloping gate made out of 60 tons of reinforced concrete slab, slightly less than half a meter thick. The gate slid from below and was embedded on the mountain side in a groove, which gave it support on two of the four sided of the, left and bottom. The gate rose to a height of 10 meters, tall enough that the Shaitans would not be able to jump over unless they made a pyramid with their bodies.

The gate rose tilted slightly outwards, which not only made climbing difficult from the outside, but also gave more structural strength to the gate when pushed from outside. To top it off the metal spikes on the top of the gate further discouraged climbing over it.

Like Yusuke, Leanna had her déjà vu moment when she shouted. “Hold… Hold… Now!” It transported her back to the moment a younger and fitter version of herself had stood in front of a horde of Shaitans on Titan, armed with nothing but swords and pikes trying to hold up the courage of a ragged group of soldiers and civilians.

This time she had hardened marines facing up to the approaching Shaitans with their SG-4 aimed squarely at the Shaitans, although she had civilians, mostly engineers and some scientists were at the rear of the line. The signal was to the controller inside the tunnel. It was hard to tell initially that anything had really happened on her command. The Shaitan horde was still advancing in a scary mass.

After 10 seconds though, it became apparent that the mass of Shaitans was thinning at a certain point in the path. Fewer and fewer Shaitans were coming through from that point. Within 5 more seconds, the rising concrete gate was visible, though Shaitans were still jumping or climbing over it. 30 seconds after Leanna had given her command, Shaitan getting through over the gate could be counted on one’s fingers and most of them were likely to have damaged suits due to the spikes.

The Shaitans were nothing if not innovative themselves. The concrete gate extended well beyond the edge of the path on the open side of the mountain to prevent intruders slipping past that way. Shaitan anatomy however was different from human. They used their strong six limbs and the sharp metal claws like a spider to try and cling to concrete and slip past beyond edge. Some failed and fell to their death, but a few succeeded. Still it was just a trickle.

By Leanna’s reckoning they had been able to separate about 150 Shaitans from the rest behind the gate. It was time to fire the opening salvo. “Barrels out and rolling now!” Leanna ordered. Four marines brought four objects that looked more like very wide tires from a racing car than barrels. In reality they were neither. They were originally empty container boxes used for shipment of spares for engineering.

The ‘barrels’ had been filled with small metal objects from screws and bolts to ball bearings and broken equipment pieces. At the core of the barrel was a reasonable amount of explosive to propel the metal junk at speeds that would rend Shaitan flesh and embed the material deep into their bodies. Leanna called them barrels because the whole concept reminded her of medieval castle being defended by people rolling burning tar barrels down the slopes.

The barrels were rolled by the marines very much like children who roll tires in their play aiming it go down in a straight line down a slope. The barrels were not warm, so they should become visible to the Shaitans only at the last moment visually. She was not sure what kind of reaction to expect from the Shaitans when they saw the barrels.

‘There goes the last of my explosives.’ Thought Leanna. She wished she had more explosives. This was however a training base and not an ammunitions dump. The explosives they had were essentially meant for demolition training. No one transported anything to Mars more than it was required, least of all explosives.