Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (44 page)

We can leave the Resolute in hibernate mode orbiting Mars. It will save fuel. If we need the Resolute in an emergency, then we can always come back in the shuttle and we will have that much more fuel due to having put it into hibernation.” Trisha put forward her decision.

“Ok. It is settled then. We are going to have one heck of a busy shuttle going around. Oh… by the way we captured the pilot of the Shaitan shuttle. The bastard survived the crash of his shuttle which would have killed any human being. Tells me that we still need to go a long way to come up to par with Shaitan technology in terms of robustness of our crafts.

Fortunately we have the Shaitan communication protocols and language library loaded on the shuttle from our previous interrogation of the Shaitan prisoners in their camp. We have just started interrogating the bastard. What we have learnt till now is only that it is a member of the ‘curious’ caste. If I remember correctly, that means that this Shaitan is some kind of a scientist or a researcher.

He happened to be eating in the shuttle when we sneaked in. I feel disgusted just imagining the Shaitan eating the way they do. Any way we were unlucky in that the shuttle was occupied at the time and hence could not take it down on the ground itself. We were however lucky in that it was not one of their ‘warrior’ caste who was on the shuttle. The poor bastard flew the shuttle very incompetently, otherwise we all would have been toast. He managed to take down one of our shuttles despite that.

The bastard Shaitan is being uncooperative. We plan to start ratcheting up the pressure on him and start using more persuasive methods very soon. We have the logs of Violet and Mischa from the last Shaitan interrogation. This one will break soon enough. For now I am slowly starting to send in volunteers meter by meter inside to check if we can enter till the top balcony where the spider was. I will keep you all posted. Yusuke I want you here on the next trip the shuttle makes.” Leanna finished.

The next one week went in a blur as the marines and the civilians got on with the business of reconstruction of the Kormas base as best as they could. The fact that the engineer’s primary mission was to build a permanent base on Mars using local materials helped a lot in the reconstruction. They finished the structures they had partially constructed, and built new ones. They had the construction equipment to do it.

Yusuke and his team had managed to erect a temporary shelter on the south pole capable of supporting a few people for a month in case of an emergency. It was not enough for the number of marines and civilians currently situated there, but the marines would leave once they were absolutely certain that no Shaitans were still hiding inside and there were no booby traps.

Yusuke had suggested a plan to transport the power plant in the Shaitan camp here to the South Pole, which would enable them to have a full-fledged camp capable of supporting large number of humans for indefinite periods of time. The engineers were studying the feasibility of using the Shaitan electric supply. It had never been used for anything other than research before, but there was nothing stopping one from using the power theoretically.

Humans now understood the workings of a Shaitan fusion plant fairly well. Transporting the huge reactor on their relatively small shuttle was another issue. Those matters could wait as far as Yusuke was concerned, for today was the big day. Today was the day Yusuke would be the first civilian to enter the hole and go up to the top balcony. The furthest point they had seen till now.

Marines had already been till that point to certify that it was safe to go there. It was now Yusuke’s turn to go in and start using active scanning. He planned to start with the oldest active scanning that humans have done since stone ages, something we humans appreciate instinctively – shining light on the cave.

There was a thin fiber line trailing Yusuke’s suit feeding the outside world with huge amount of data of everything that was being scanned by the various equipment he was carrying. Yusuke might start with shining light into this gigantic chamber, but it was not going to be like taking a huge floodlight and lighting up the walls of the chamber. It was much more subtle and effective. If there was something or someone inside this place that was monitoring, it would hopefully feel a lot less threatening as well.

It is not possible to shine a light from a floodlight to light up a chamber that is kilometers in width and hundreds of meters in depth. So Yusuke was going to use computer compositing to get a full picture by lighting up small patches. He released a telescopic boom from the edge of the balcony. It extended out nearly 30 meters and sagged from the weight of the equipment at its tip.

At the edge was a spherical mount on which currently was placed a laser assembly that would transmit a beam of light in various colors starting from Infrared to red, green and blue. The narrow beam of light could illuminate a patch of the wall many kilometers away brightly, and then the reflected light could be clearly recorded by the computer.

The spherical mount would slowly and meticulously illuminate and record patch after patch by rotating and swiveling and the computer would stitch up the images to create a grand and crystal clear picture. The chamber would be scanned in red, blue and green to create a full color picture along with many intermediate colors as well as sonar, and microwave. Layer by layer, they would be able to create a detailed 3D model of the chamber as visible from this vantage point.

The first few moments were the most tense, as the laser switched on and started cutting across the chamber patch by patch. If something had to react to them shining the laser, it would likely do now. Thankfully nothing happened and the computer continued building up the image. The image was being superimposed on the faceplate of Yusuke such that he could turn in the direction which he wanted to see and the computer image would be superimposed on the otherwise dark walls that he was seeing right now.

The first thing that Yusuke noticed was color. One had to expect the walls to be of some color, but it was not what he had expected. These were bright bands of color that almost glowed in a fluorescent manner. The colors seem to be painted in horizontal bands from the little patch that had been illuminated till now. The scanner was scanning vertical patches from roof to floor and only a small patch of the entire wall had been illuminated till now.

This was however very different from anything they had seen about Shaitans. The habitats, ships and shuttles were all coated with some dull uniform color. It was the natural color of whatever material had been coated on the surface or whatever material the ship or shuttle was made from. There had been no attempt to paint any surface that the Shaitans built. It was natural for a being that is blind and lives in darkness not to care about painting color on their surface. This was the first time they were seeing bright and varied colors on an alien surface.

The scanner was doing a full 360° circle before swiveling slightly and scanning an adjacent patch, so they had view of a patch of two walls, the floor and the ceiling. Yusuke gasped as he read the figure of the depth of the floor. The floor was 310 meters deep, but at places the bottom read 240 meters deep. He looked carefully at the small patch of the picture that had been illuminated till now and realized the 310 meter depth was a flat floor, whereas the 240 meters depth was curved and looked metallic.

The depth of the floor was 310 meters, there was some object placed on the floor that was nearly 70 meters high. As the scanning progressed and the image patch got bigger, Yusuke realized that the object on the floor was massive. It may be 70 meters high, but it was nearly half a kilometer in length. After 10 minutes more of scanning, Yusuke heard the collective gasps of all the people connected over the com, who were also watching the scans real time.

The object was the largest ship they had ever seen. More the twice the length of the largest Shaitan vessel they had observed yet. It was resting at the bottom of a canyon like chamber. The chamber was slightly curved and they could not see the ends of the chamber, by whatever they could see it was about a kilometer in either direction.

The most amazing part beside the gigantic ship was the walls on either side of the covered canyon. It was hard to visualize this any other way. It would be an insult to this structure to call it a chamber. It was a canyon with a ceiling. The walls of the canyon were filled with neatly stacked rows upon rows of balconies just like the one Yusuke was standing on, extending all the way down to floor of the canyon. There were many objects on the floor of the canyon dwarfed by the gigantic ship, but fairly large in their own rights. None of the objects were recognizable.

The view was made even more marvelous by the vibrant rainbow colors in which the walls were painted. It was not just bands of colors as it seemed initially. There were geometric patterns some complex like the Fibonacci series. The canyon was a celebration of colors that would make any human artist proud.

The best of the paintings was yet to come as the scanner continued to illuminate the walls. Just above the ship there was a patch of the wall that did not have any balcony, and in that circular patch was a painting which was unmistakably of an organic being. Its outline shape and features left no doubt about that fact. It was however not the image of a Shaitan!

Yusuke had scraped a bit of paint from the wall near the balcony and fed it to the analyzer. He looked at the result and drew in a huge breath to calm himself. Then he spoke on the com. “Before I pass out due to excitement, let me report my findings till now. There is trace amount of radioactive material on the paint, which gives it the fluorescent glow. Nothing harmful, but convenient marker to measure the radioactive decay and get an age.

I hope you all are sitting down, when you hear this. The paint on the wall is between 75 to 80 thousand years old. Now I am no Shaitan expert, but that painting out there on the wall sure does not look like a Shaitan. Neither does that ship resemble the Shaitan ship design remotely. That ship is unlikely to be a water ship or a submarine. There has been no surface water on Mars for 4 billion years.

So that is an alien space ship. I have a theory about how it reached where it is standing. I have been looking at the structural scans of this place done by sonar and microwave while you guys were gaping at the visual images. This place really is a canyon. A natural formation like many others on Mars. It formed hundreds of millions probably billions of years ago when Mars was still active geologically.

The only thing that is not natural is the roof. There are metal arches, struts and other load bearing structures that are holding up the roof. My guess is at some time when this canyon was open on top, this space ship was lowered into the canyon and then a roof was built on top. The roof was then covered with soil and rock so that it appears a flat plain from above.

The only marker left on the roof was the opening through which we entered. It took some time for the computers to crunch the millions of possibilities to figure out what was different. The rock samples taken from near the hole have similar characteristics as rock samples taken from anywhere in the vicinity up to a few kilometers.

There are trace radioactive elements here in the rocks as there are all around the place as it is in various parts of Mars. However there is a very subtle difference in the rock samples near the hole, something that does not occur naturally. The ratio of the isotopes of Uranium and Thorium, both of which are radioactive are reversed from what occurs naturally all around Mars.

This is only possible if someone took the soil and rocks around the hole, sanitized them of these two elements, and added a reverse mix of the isotopes and spread it around. Only someone who knew what to look for could have figured out the opening of the hole. There would be no obvious sign from space, but if someone were to take a shuttle and fly low scanning the neighborhood and look for this subtle difference they would be able to pinpoint this place accurately.

Obviously the Shaitans must have known what to look for, but I seriously doubt that they built this place. If you notice the balconies, they are too small for a Shaitan to squeeze through comfortably. I would say ladies and gentlemen that we are looking at an 80 thousand year old archeological remains of the second alien species that humanity have discovered.” Yusuke finished his report sounding overawed.

Ed broke into the public channel after Yusuke had finished. “People be advised that as part of our interrogation, we have been feeding key pictures of the site to the scientist Shaitan investigating the site. He had been very uncooperative till now despite us using very persuasive tactics, if you know what I mean.

On being fed the portrait of that weird alien painted on the wall though he started the Shaitan equivalent of babbling on his own. Dr. Mishra says that his neural and hormonal reaction is the equivalent of a Shaitan laughing and I am copying the computer translation of what he keeps saying over and over again.” Ed said and transmitted the text over the public channel.

‘The Ka-let is no more. The Ka-let are dead as they should. The Ka-let has been exterminated by our ancestors, as they said they would. We can vouch for the honor of those ancestors that they did their holy duty right. The Ka-let are dead and they can defile no more. Your masters are dead and they can help you no more. The spawns of Ka are born to test our people and to make us strong. Every generation so tested have proved themselves worthy. We the custodians of our beings’ essence will also not fail in our holy duty.’

Chapter 29

First Fleet

Approaching the Asteroid belt

October 2083

The asteroid belt in real life is not what it is depicted to be in popular fiction and movies. The asteroid belt visually looks empty. An observer approaching or crossing the asteroid belt would not even be aware of the fact, unless he looks at the radar. There are just about a 100 thousand sizeable asteroids that can be measured in kilometers. This over a volume of nearly 50 trillion times trillion cubic kilometers that is the asteroid belt. That is a lot of volume and too few large asteroids.