Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (45 page)

The distance between two asteroids with a size of a kilometer is millions of miles on an average. Standing on one of those asteroids, you would not even be able to see the nearest neighboring asteroid. The probability of a spacecraft colliding with an asteroid is so low, that no special protocol is followed when crossing the asteroid belt. The standard collision avoidance system radar used for tracking any nearby object does just fine.

In the history of human space exploration for the last 100 years, no spacecraft has ever had to take any collision avoidance measure while passing through the asteroid belt. Observing a large asteroid on radar passing by a few thousand kilometers away was rare for a spacecraft crossing the asteroid belt.

However observing smaller asteroids the size of a car or a bus was not that uncommon a few thousand kilometers away. These smaller rocks were much more numerous. Though still not dense enough to present a navigational threat, these smaller rocks when seen a few thousand or even a few hundred kilometers away does not elicit any surprise from astronauts. It is expected.

Gerald hoped that the Shaitans thought the same way. The Shaitans lived in the Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt, which had similar distribution of rocks and asteroids. The Shaitans are experienced space faring civilization. So surely they should also expect similar distribution of rocks in the asteroid belt. Their plan hinged greatly on that fact.

The Third Fleet had spent the last few months leading the Shaitan fleet inwards towards the inner solar system. They had scorched through the distance from outside the orbit of Pluto, all the way past the orbits of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter. Their plan of herding the Shaitans through the tunneled corridor had worked so far.

The Shaitans had made no effort to break away and approach Earth from a different direction. The Third Fleet had given the Shaitan fleet no reason or incentive to do so. Third Fleet had kept a non-threatening stance all the way through.

The Shaitans probably thought that the Third Fleet was scrambling ahead of the Shaitans to meet up with reinforcements before taking on the Shaitan fleet. There was nothing much the Shaitan fleet could do about that at this point, since the human ships were marginally faster in acceleration than the Shaitan ships, so the Shaitan fleet could not have caught up with the Third Fleet to take them on right now.

So there was no point leaving the straight line approach at the moment. Once the Shaitan fleet reached closer to Earth, probably after the orbit of Mars, then things might change. At that point, the Shaitan fleet might deviate from the straight line approach in order to evade the defending human fleets in space.

The halfway point from their starting point to Earth was somewhere just after the orbit of Uranus. The Shaitan fleet had turned and started decelerating at that point and the human fleet had followed suit, always ensuring to maintain the 100 thousand Kilometers separation.

As the two fleets approached the asteroid belt neither of them was at any risk from the missiles of the other. They were travelling at the same speed, so in effect they were at rest relative to each other. They were separated by a distance of 100 thousand Kilometers. Any missile launched would be detected immediately by the other fleet and there would be ample time to shoot the missile down.

The Third Fleet’s job however was not to shoot missiles at the Shaitan fleet. Theirs was to deliver the Shaitan fleet at a certain point in the asteroid belt within a maximum margin of error of one thousand kilometers. That might seem like a big margin of error, but if one considers that the third fleet was herding the Shaitan fleet from a distance of almost 6 billion kilometers, then one starts to see what a bull’s eye it is.

The Third Fleet almost achieved the task. When the Shaitan fleet entered the asteroid belt, they were just 1,100 Km from the designated spot. Rear Admiral Francis Montero could not complain. The Third Fleet had accomplished a herculean ask remarkably well. It was now the turn of the First Fleet to contribute its part.

100 Km out of the bound of their planned dragnet will have to do, because that is all the First Fleet will get. It will reduce the effectiveness of their attack a bit, but they will adapt. This was far from their worst case scenario. In fact it was not that far from their best case scenario. Francis was going to oversee the final execution of operation Orb Weaver.

The ships of the First Fleet were limited by their range and the time in space and the amount of mass it could carry, being older generation space ships that didn’t have a fusion reactor. This meant that the number of missiles it could carry was far less per ship compared to the Nautilus class. The First Fleet made up for this shortcoming somewhat with numbers.

The First Fleet, like the Second Fleet consisted of eight ships each, instead of the four that made up the Third Fleet. The USC, which was the human space navy, consisted of 17 Resolute class ships divided into 8 each in First and Second Fleet. The last ship USS Resolute, the namesake of the class was unattached. Plus the four latest Nautilus class ships, which constituted the Third fleet, which was now down to three after their battle with the Beta Shaitan fleet.

It might look like the humans had built too few ships in the last 21 years that the Shaitans had given them. It would have looked like tardy preparation for a battle which would determine humankind’s survival. The reality was that the Resolute class ships had started being built only 12 years ago, and their production stopped completely 2 years ago.

In 10 years, humans had built 21 Resolute class ships, four of which were lost or crippled due to accidents and malfunctions. Space ship technology was still in its infancy, and space crafts were still not extremely reliable, there were plenty of accidents and malfunctions. Space travel was still a dangerous undertaking. It was likely to remain so for the foreseeable future as humans continuously pushed the envelope on space technology and kept introducing newer ships with technology that hadn’t had time to mature enough.

The older Friendship class ships, that fought the first battle with the Shaitans over Titan was considered obsolete and not worth risking the lives of crew in a battle. Some of them are still in commission, used primarily for training and logistic runs to the Moon.

The newer Nautilus class ships are so new, that there has not been time to build more than four of them. Even now the orbital shipyards were working round the clock to finish Nautilus class ships under construction. The orbital shipyards were the biggest bottleneck to building more ships.

As the human spaceships had gotten bigger and more elaborate, the crew and the docking space required had increased. The Russian space yard ‘New Vladivostok’ which had been built 40 years ago as the state of the art shipyard, and could build two ships simultaneously was now creaking with age and obsolescence. Despite up-gradation and expansion, it could barely accommodate making one Nautilus class ship.

The North American consortium, led primarily by NASA had finally built a new orbital construction facility. ‘New’ was a relative term. It was 15 years old and had built the first Resolute class ship. At that time it had been constructed large enough to construct two such ships side by side. It was now struggling to construct two Nautilus class ships which was almost an order of magnitude larger.

The Chinese had built their own orbital construction facility around the same time as the US, and was facing similar issues. The newest and largest orbital construction facility right now belonged to the ESA-ISRO-JAXA consortium. Humans were struggling to keep up with the need to build ever bigger construction facilities, for their ever growing ships.

It was a catch 22 situation, spend more on building an orbital facility and sacrifice a few ships that could have been built, or build ship continuously but at a slower pace due to lack of orbital construction yards. All of this construction in space was fundamentally limited by the amount of material and people that could be hauled up to space from Earth.

Humans had to either build some faster, cheaper and scalable way to haul things to orbit from Earth. Otherwise find a way to construct in low gravity bases like Moon or the asteroids. The current way of blasting things to orbit using massive rockets was 150 year old technology. It was very expensive and not scalable when you want to build massive orbital shipyards or massive ships.

If all those constrains are taken into account, Francis knew that Humans had not done such a bad job in terms of the number of ships they had. The navy and military leaders like him will have to make do with that they have and defend Earth. If they can survive this assault, then in another 20 years when the next Shaitan invasion arrived, Humans would be much better prepared with tens if not a hundred Nautilus class ship. That all depended on stopping this wave first.

The normal payload of the Resolute class of ships that made up the First Fleet were 40 standard 2.1 megaton yield missiles. The First Fleet however had not carried the standard missiles meant for this class of ships. Instead it had carried missiles meant for the new Nautilus class ships. They had to. Their plan called for it.

The Nautilus missiles were exactly the same 2.1 megaton yield, and almost everything inside was the same as the Resolute missiles. There was just one difference, it was on the outside. The casing of Nautilus missiles was very different and bulkier, though not heavier than the Resolute missiles. That gave Francis all the operational headaches he had been going through.

The crews, captains and the flag admiral Francis Montero, all had to go through a logistical nightmare in Earth orbit during their preparation for the mission. They had to fit 40 Nautilus class missiles into missile holds meant for the less voluminous Resolute class missiles. The clamps, the sheath, the stowage, none of it was meant to hold this size of missiles.

Warships in general and spaceships in particular are very specialized crafts. They have precisely measured spaces to hold every specific item. Especially something like missiles which take a large part of the volume and mass of a missile. The mass needs to be distributed evenly and center of gravity maintained precisely. It was critical for agile and precise maneuver in space, especially in a battle.

They had to tear down a major portion of the missile holds and bolt on ad-hoc stowage contraptions, taking over some part of the cargo hold to accommodate all of those missiles. It was further complicated by the fact that the ships were not carrying the missiles as cargo. They had to be deployed in space, and deployed extremely precisely.

So they needed to bolt on an additional piece of machinery into the cargo hold – a pneumatic ejector. It gave the engineers a massive headache to ration enough electricity from the limited power capacity of a Resolute class ship to power even this single pneumatic ejector.

The Nautilus could simultaneously power 12 of these without breaking a sweat thanks to its fusion reactor. The Resolute class ships had to run on batteries that were charged by hydrogen fuel cells. It was a challenge to get enough power for just one of the pneumatic ejectors.

Then the engineers had the challenge to place and bolt that ejector appropriately near the door of the cargo hold, so that the missiles could be ejected safely. They also had to take into consideration that the missiles would be muscled and loaded manually by crew one by one into the ejector. So they had to leave enough space for that around the ejector.

The First and the Second fleet had been swapping positions by rotation. One fleet would hold position at a point halfway between the orbits of Earth and Mars, while the other would return to Earth orbit for refueling, maintenance and crew rotation.

Standing guard at that point didn’t have any particular military value when the two converging Shaitan fleets were heading towards a rendezvous point beyond the orbit of Pluto. The First or the Second Fleet could have just stayed in Earth orbit and reached that particular point whenever the Shaitan fleet turned towards Earth and had come much closer.

It was not just symbolic, to show the panicked people of Earth that USC was standing guard ready to defend earth. It also sent a message to the Shaitans who surely must also be monitoring, that Earth stands ready to defend itself. It was also a camouflage. A camouflage for a plan hatched by Admiral Daniel Cloutier – operation Orb Weaver.

It was a plan that was contingent to the battle outcome of the Third Fleet, and the signal from Admiral Kalinin. It was a signal that had been sent. Operation Orb Weaver was a go!

The rotation of the First Fleet had been timed in such a manner that it would be in Earth orbit around the time of the anticipated first encounter of the Third Fleet with the Shaitans. When the signal from Admiral Kalinin had arrived from beyond the orbit of Pluto, the orbital shipyards had gone into hyperactive mode.

They had dropped all new ship construction facility and used all their staff to outfit the 8 ships of the First Fleet with the necessary modification and stocking of the Nautilus missiles. The task was an anticipated one, and had been planned beforehand, but it was difficult to execute nonetheless when you are given just 6 days to do it.

Then First Fleet had fired up their engines and proceeded to relieve Second Fleet and take up the designated position between Earth and Mars orbit they had been guarding so long. This time however there was a difference in what they did in their navigation.

Like all ships with chemical rockets, the ships of First and Second fleet had to fire up their engines to move out of Earth orbit. After having reached a sufficient velocity to reach the destintion in a reasonable time, the ships would switch off their engines to conserve fuel and coast most of the way.

Just before reaching, the ships would turn around and fire their engines once more to decelerate and finally come to a stop at the designated position. This time though, the First Fleet did not turn around and fire their engines to slow down. Instead they switched on special lights attached in the bow of the ships.