Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (46 page)

The lights were specially designed to emit light in the same spectrum as their chemical rockets do when lit up. To someone observing from far away, even a few tens of thousands of Km away, it would look like the engines of the ship is turned on.

At that distance you cannot detect the ship visually well enough to distinguish between the bow and the stern. The way the ship is detected is by the sensors of the faraway ship registering the light from the engines and the computer analyzing the light spectrum, comparing it with known engine signatures. To such a computer, it would look like the First Fleet had turned on its engines to slow down.

The lights were duly shut when the First Fleet reached its designated point. The fleet however had not stopped. It was still travelling at the same speed, since it had never started decelerating in the first place. It kept going, past the orbit of Mars towards the Asteroid belt.

To an uninformed observer, it would have appeared that Admiral Cloutier had made a blunder and a stupid navigational calculation mistake. The point in space that the First and Second Fleet had been guarding by rotation was not in the straight line between Earth and the rendezvous point where the two Shaitan fleets were to meet. It was a few degrees at an angle to that direction.

As a result the First Fleet was moving towards the general direction of the approaching Shaitan Fleet being led and herded by the Third Fleet, but not it that exact line. The First Fleet would miss the line of approach of the enemy by several millions of kilometers. It was no blunder but an intentional deviation, calculated to take advantage of fortunate coincidence.

The time when the Third Fleet were to reach the rendezvous point of the Shaitan fleets was also the time when Ceres the largest planetoid moving in the asteroid belt would be close to the line of approach from the rendezvous point. Ceres would not be exactly in the line of approach, that would be an impossible coincidence, but it was close.

Ceres went about its orbit slowly, once every 1,680 days, which meant that it would stay close to that approach line for some time, giving the battle planners some leeway in terms of timing. It was Ceres that the First Fleet was heading towards. As they came fairly close to Ceres, they were hidden from the line of sight of the approaching Shaitan fleet by the bulk of the 1000 Km wide diameter dwarf planet.

It was a dangerous maneuver that they were attempting, and even a minor glitch would mean that they would go splat on the surface of Ceres. The First Fleet went into hard burn, turning their engines full throttle to reduce velocity as much as they could while their engine lights were hidden from the Shaitans by Ceres. There was however not enough time to come to a full stop.

To come to a full stop on reaching Ceres, the First Fleet would have had to switch on their engines much earlier when they were not hidden behind Ceres. So the First Fleet approached Ceres at a fairly fast clip, which could be considered breakneck. The First Fleet was pointed such that it would swing by Ceres missing it, just ahead of the direction in which Ceres was moving in its orbit around the sun.

As the First Fleet moved out of hiding behind the bulk of Ceres, it switched off its engines and coasted in a swing by maneuver around Ceres, in what is called gravitationally assisted deceleration. When you swing by a massive object like Ceres in front of its direction of movement, the gravity of the massive object makes the ship swing around the planetoid and you get thrown back almost in the opposite direction to which you came from.

The change in direction is not the only consequence. You impart some of your ship’s momentum due to gravity to that massive object. So Ceres gains some momentum, while the ships lose the same amount of momentum. Since the 1000 Km diameter Ceres is incredibly massive compared to the ships of the First Fleet, the gain in Ceres is infinitesimally small and cannot be measured, but the loss of speed of the ships is large and very noticeable.

The First Fleet made the turn around Ceres heading almost back towards Earth, but now moving at a lot less velocity. They still needed to slow down further to come to a stop. Now however, their engines would be facing towards Earth and away from the Shaitan fleet. This doesn’t mean that the Shaitan fleet could not detect the residual bleed of heat, especially in the infra-red.

The First Fleet had no other option however, and had to chance it. To minimize the chance of detection, they kept their burn rate very low. Just enough to ensure that they don’t exit the asteroid belt. When the First Fleet finally came to a stop, it was still several millions of kilometers away from the line of approach of the Shaitan fleet.

The First Fleet however had a few weeks to travel those few million kilometers. In space that is considered a tortoise crawl pace. They turned appropriately and barely lit up their engines. It was the minimum burn possible on the engine, and the light emitted was barely a few candles strong. The Shaitan fleet was still billions of Km away, it should be impossible for them to detect such low light and suspect anything.

When the First fleet reached the designated spot where the Third Fleet was to deliver the enemy, after nearly 3 weeks of crawling in space, they barely had 100 hours left in their countdown clock. The crew got busy physically muscling those missiles into the only pneumatic ejector they had. The release was controlled by the computer.

They had 40 missiles to release from each ship in a volume of space 1000 Km in diameter. The missiles would travel to their designated positions silently on the momentum of the kick imparted by the pneumatic ejector. The furthest missiles had to travel 10 thousand Km, and 100 hours to do it in. A push of 30 meters per second will take you that distance in that time in space.

The speed of deployment was limited only by how fast the crew could manually reload the pneumatic ejector. It took the fleet over an hour to get all the missiles deployed.

Francis watched with satisfaction on his terminal which showed the radar map of the packages. It was the only way to track those missiles, it was not emitting any signal and they would be hard pressed to see even the nearest ones visually.

The only reason they could see it on the radar was because they were so close to the missiles. If they had been 30 thousand Km away, instead of 10, they would have found it hard to track even by radar. As the packages spread to their designated positions as the time ticked away, Francis realized how apt the name of the operation had been.

The packages were slowly forming into the shape of a typical web woven by a common garden spider – the Orb Weaver.

Chapter 30

Orb Weaver

Asteroid belt

February 2084

Francis was looking at a filtered radar image, where the computer had filtered out all object readings, which had different profile from that expected from their packages. Francis now removed that filter to look how it should look to the Shaitan radar as it approached towards this point in the asteroid belt.

To the human eye, the unfiltered radar picture looked unremarkable, just like any other part of the asteroid belt, although a careful zooming of a particular part would have suggested a slightly denser than normal concentration of rocks a few meters wide. Nothing remarkable though.

Francis was more worried about how the picture looked to the computer. If anyone was likely to flag their spider’s web, it would be a computer. The frequency distribution chart of objects in the area, categorized by size was on his screen. Next to it was the average of the asteroid belt as a whole and also the figure of some of the densest areas of the asteroid belt.

He was satisfied that to a statistically minded computer, this area would look slightly denser than the average, but nothing out of the ordinary. This area would still look sparser than some of the denser areas of the asteroid belt, somewhere around the 80
^th
percentile. Hopefully that should not be enough for the computer to raise and alarm for anything out of the ordinary.

It was not dense enough for any danger of collisions, so the Shaitan computer should not prompt for change of course either. The only anomaly that worried Francis was the distribution chart for asteroids by composition. Humans would have missed it, but computers may be mindless, but they are relentless. They rarely miss anything.

Asteroids are of various types. Some are composed of hard rock and silica, some are metallic, some are nothing but piles of rubble and dust, and although rare in this part of the solar system, some may be made of ice and frozen methane. One can get an idea of the composition of an asteroid from the scanning radar, depending on how it reflects back the radar ping.

In this particular region where they had spun their web, the chart was showing an abnormally high concentration of carbon based asteroids. Carbon based asteroids were relatively rare in the asteroid belt. To the computer it would look like an anomaly. Francis just prayed that it was not anomalous enough for the Shaitan computer to raise an alarm. Hopefully it will merely tuck it inside a log and mark it for later reference.

The missile package, which acted as the camouflage, was made out of carbon based material. Nobody thought of the obvious consequence that so many of them floating around together would create an anomalous signature of unusually concentrated carbon based asteroids. It was an easily correctable weakness of the camouflage. Francis had a reputation in the navy as meticulous person. He made a note of the issue for future improvement, and added it to the admiral’s log.

Francis noted that the fleet had started moving at the rate of a few centimeters per second. The ships would have given the minimum possible burst of engines for a few seconds. There was no danger of detection of that small a burst. That momentum would make the ships slowly drift towards the only kilometer wide asteroid present in the neighborhood of a few million kilometers in any direction.

The First Fleet had stopped behind this asteroid, hidden from the Shaitan fleet’s line of sight to deploy their missiles. The First Fleet had however been a few kilometers away to give themselves ample clearance to eject the missiles. Now they drifted slowly towards the surface of the asteroid to close that small gap and hug the asteroid. There should be no way the Shaitan Fleet would be able to detect the First Fleet till it crosses the asteroid.

The First Fleet itself had been blind to the progress of the Shaitan fleet and the Third Fleet leading them, since they entered the shadow of the asteroid. It was impractical to depend on monitoring from Earth. The roundtrip time for the signal was over 80 minutes. So the First Fleet had released a deceptively simple object to help them see round the corner – a mirror.

It was not as simple as a mirror used in our bathrooms, but simple enough. It was a cube 25 centimeters on the sides, with mildly polished aluminum skin. The aluminum skin was smooth enough to reflect laser beams without scattering for a few million kilometers, but tarnished enough to look like a piece of floating space debris.

Inside was a small tank filled with compressed helium, a tiny battery and a single chip radio receiver. Only a receiver, no transmitter. The cube emitted no electromagnetic signal, unless you came within a few meters with a very sensitive detector. The helium could be released in a tiny jet from any face of the cube to turn it around appropriately, by observing the cube from a telescope on the ship and sending it appropriate command.

The First Fleet was reflecting a tight laser beam through the cube to the Third Fleet, which was now the eyes of the First Fleet hidden behind the asteroid. The sensors of USS Nautilus was feeding all the ships of the First Fleet, the distance count for the Shaitan fleet was now coming down rapidly as they approached at high velocity.

The roughly circular pattern of the missile deployment was not flat and two dimensional. It was a mild cone. The ones which were closer to the center and hence had to travel less distance had been pushed back a bit out of the place of the circle to give the entire deployment a conical shape. The distance to be travelled for these missiles was still less than the ones at the periphery. The three dimensional distribution, made the deployments less obvious as a circled pattern.

The plan was for the Shaitan fleet to go through this 1000 km diameter circle and all the missiles closing in on them from every side. The problem was that the Shaitan fleet was going to miss the circle and go outside of that circle by some 100 km. This contingency of missing the circle was anticipated. The targeting programs were given modified parameters, and the opening salvo of the First Fleet began.

Just as the Third Fleet was about to cross the position of the First Fleet, the missiles which were the furthest and had to travel nearly 1,100 Km opened up their package, turned and raced towards a particular point in space. This was the point where the Shaitan fleet was expected to be, when they crossed the spider web.

The human missiles were not racing in the direction of the approach of the Shaitan fleet, which was already coming in at a considerable speed towards the web. There was no need to go in that direction. In fact more the speed of approach, less accurate the targeting. The approaching Shaitan fleet’s speed was already at the limits of accurate targeting for the missiles.

The missiles were racing at a perpendicular direction to meet up at the point where the Shaitan fleet would cross the spider’s web. The missiles were at a relative rest. Even with their solid fuel rockets burning at full thrust, the furthest missiles had about 15 minutes to reach the specified point. One by one the missiles closer to the point started lighting up and racing towards it.

The missiles delayed the lighting up of their engines to the last moment possible. That way it was hoped that it would give the Shaitan point defense computer the least amount of time to prioritize targets. Unfortunately all the missiles would be coming in from one general direction now, instead from all directions as had been planned, since the Shaitan fleet had not entered the circle. Being inside the circle would have made the job of the Shaitan point defense even harder.