Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (54 page)

He did not feel like speaking to anyone right now. Not even his friend and boss, but military discipline made him hit the button. It was a message packet anyway, so he didn’t have to respond immediately. They were too far from earth to have a fluent real time conversation.

“Fabi. I know you and I know that you are not celebrating right now. There will be a time to mourn and celebrate later. Unfortunately now is the time for neither. There are two Shaitan shuttles and over a thousand Shaitans on the Moon, now stranded there with no hope of rescue.

They have entrenched themselves some distance from the Shackleton base. The Shaitans are not attacking however, but behaving very strangely. I want a thousand marines transported to the Moon immediately to reinforce the base and handle the situation. The Second Fleet is currently not in a shape to perform this task, and they would take too long to reach Earth anyway. They are very low on fuel and will have to crawl back to Earth.

I want the Third Fleet to make back to Earth orbit at best speed to carry out the transportation task. I am sure you and your crew are looking forward to a long R&R after over 2 years of deployment. We will fly with the relief crew. Daniel out.” The message from Daniel finished.

Somewhat lifted by the thought of walking on Earth again, Fabi spoke up. “Acknowledged admiral, will set course for Earth immediately. Why do you want to waste another human life, on those Shaitans admiral? Why not just bomb the hell out of these Shaitans from orbit?”

Fabi got his reply after nearly 10 seconds. “We need every gift of technology and intelligence that our enemy provides us Fabi. This battle was won on the technological gifts of the last battle on Titan. You can be sure that the Shaitans will return again, and we may need the technologies and intelligence tucked away in those shuttles and the brains of the Shaitans to win the next war.

In fact the salvage plans are complete for the dead Shaitan troop carrier orbiting Mars and the one Shaitan warship not completely destroyed beyond the orbit of Pluto in your first engagement with the fleet from Beta Shaitan.

The moment we have transported enough marines to Moon, the ships of the Third Fleet will be tasked to retrieve as much technology as possible from these only two Shaitan ships that are intact enough to have anything left salvageable. We have to learn anything we can Fabi, the human war with the Shaitans has only just begun.

Chapter 36

Ka-ma-khya

Earth

28
^th
May 2084

How does a bad day begin? No one knows the answer. We just look back at a sad and devastating day, recollect how the day began and term it as the beginning of a bad day. No one gets up in the morning and thinks that today would be a bad day. Certainly not an elated humanity riding on a high of recent victory.

If it had come from any other direction, humanity may not even have known what hit them. The laws of physics are such that it had to come from one the direction, which was the most observed spot of sky in human history. That is the reason humans got a five hour warning. Not that they could do much about it.

The only benefit of the warning was humanity knew what hit them. They would also know the identity of the perpetrators of the worst atrocity committed on humankind. Humans had committed unimaginable genocides in their history. It was hard to believe anything could ever top those terrifying episodes of our history. That morning as people woke up to go about their business, no one thought that his would be not just a bad day, but the worst day human species had ever faced.

Such a terrible event began as a simple computer alert on the computer screens, com equipment, foldable scrolls and for a few of the visually impaired scientists, through their neural interfaces. It was simply an automated image analysis program, giving a regular alert that a faint patch had been detected in the images from the telescopes pointed towards the sector of the planet Shaitan.

In normal times a few scientists awake and in front of their terminal would have bothered to just about look at them. Most probably it was some small uncharted asteroid passing in orbit front of the field of view of the telescope in the asteroid belt. It could even be a glitch in the telescope or data communication error causing imperfection in the image.

Even in the unlikely case of it actually being of interest, these things take months or years to reach anywhere near a distance of interest. Something that can be checked next morning when you reach office, certainly nothing to run back to your desk for. This being a time of heightened alert, having just come out of a major war with the Shaitans, some of the astronomers did pay interest and checked their terminals or their scrolls.

They observed the continuous streaming data for a few minutes and eliminated the possibility of it being a telescopic glitch or data error. There was definitely something out there. Something small, shining no light. Most probably an uncharted asteroid in the asteroid belt. The object was still too faint to be visible in the pictures by human eyes. Only the computer could make out the slight difference in contrast from the dark background.

The alarm bells rang somewhere around 15 minutes after the initial discovery, when there was enough data for the computer to do a blue shift analysis. The object was moving at 2.7% the speed of light! Scientists did not need to be told by the computer that the thing was moving fast. In fifteen minutes the object had become bright enough that they could now see the object in the pictures with their own eyes.

The scariest part was that the object had not moved a single pixel in the picture in any direction in the last 15 minutes, as it grew brighter. That could mean only one thing. It was coming head on towards Earth! They still did not have data on how far or how big the object was, but news they had was already significant enough. All observational scientists had informed their chain of command, and it was just reaching the ears of the heads of governments around the world.

The establishment was alarmed, but panic had not set in yet. The news that threw the world in panic came another 15 minutes later, when the computer had compared pictures from telescopes spread far apart in the orbit of the sun. These pictures had done a stereoscopic analysis of the pictures known by the astronomers as the parallax method. They had determined the distance of the object. Knowing the speed, they could now estimate the time to impact with earth.

The object was less than an AU, about 140 million Kilometers from Earth. ETA 4 hours and 28 minutes!

The scientist did not have an idea of the mass of the object. It would be the factor which would determine whether humanity and most life on earth would become extinct or not. The fact that this would be the biggest disaster since the asteroid that wiped the dinosaurs from earth seemed a distinct possibility.

Even a Kilogram of mass slamming the Earth at 2.7% the speed of light would release kinetic energy of 8 Kilotons of TNT. Nearly half the size of the Hiroshima blast. 120 Kg of mass would release over a megaton of energy, the yield of a typical Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). 6 tons of mass would release a yield of over 50 Megatons of TNT, the size of Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear bomb ever made by humans.

100 tons of mass would release a yield of 8000 megatons of TNT. That is more than the yield of all nuclear explosions that humans have ever exploded. It is even more than the yield of all explosions of all bombs that humans have ever exploded in entire history!

This object at the minimum had the mass of a few thousand tons if it was an artificial object and hollow. If it was a dense natural object like a rock, it could even weigh a few million tons. At the top end of the estimate, it would release almost as much energy as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs! It was far smaller than the dinosaur killer asteroid, but it was travelling far faster.

There was a surreal atmosphere which went beyond panic in the military and administrations around the world. They realized fairly quickly that there was nothing they could do to prevent the object from crashing into Earth. It wasn’t due to the inferior technology of the humans. The laws of physics and mechanics were against them. Even the advanced Shaitans may not have been able to do anything to prevent such an object from crashing into their home planet.

The problem was momentum. Even if the humans could put one of their spaceship in front of the approaching object, it would simply vaporize the human spaceship, with no discernible change in the momentum or the direction of the momentum on the massive object travelling at such a massive speed.

It was a moot point anyway, since there was no human spaceship that could reach the line of approach in the four odd hours left. Even if a human spaceship could reach to intercept the line of approach, it would be next to impossible for it to place itself exactly in collision course of such a fast moving object. The precision required of the engines and the computers were a million times faster than what was available, thus the odds of being able to do it was a million to one.

Most of the administration and the military of the world concentrated on the only thing they could do. Organize to minimize the loss of human lives. How does one protect oneself from bombardment, when they don’t know where on earth it would impact? The good news was that it would only impact in one place on earth. The bad news was that no one knew where.

So they did the only thing that the governments could do. Rush the people to the shelters that had been built over the last 20 years. Humans had known for the last 40 years that a day might come when aliens may attack Earth. After the battle of Titan, and having seen the incredible 400 megaton yield missiles of the aliens, the humans had been preparing for the last 20 years.

They had built shelters that could withstand the incredible sized bombs. Most shelters would not probably survive a direct hit overhead, but it was expensive building a shelter that could stand a 400 MT bomb direct strike. It was certainly not possible to build that many for the 10 billion population of the world. The people in the poor countries were especially vulnerable. Half the population of the world did not have any shelter at all. Not even basements. Most homes in poor countries don’t have basements.

The fact that the world had just come out of an alert for imminent alien bombardment just a few hours ago helped the local administrations a lot. People were used to it and knew the routine. A lot more people could be brought into the shelters due to this fact.

This did not mean there were no looting for supplies in local markets and malls. That was one characteristics that was common in both rich and poor countries. The good part was that the shelters were already decently stocked and maintained, having been evacuated just a few hours ago after a brief occupation.

The shelters would help people survive the fire storms and the hurricanes that would rage across the world. There would be rations to survive the first few days or weeks after the nuclear winter set in. Unfortunately there would be no guarantee of long term food supply for the many years it would take for the skies to clear and the weather of Earth to return back to normal.

There would be crop failure and starvation for many years, perhaps decades to come. Many humans were going to die of starvation and depravation. Others would die of food riots and people killing each other for food. The numbers who would die of starvation would be many times more that those who die in the actual bombardment. The government just prayed that the total toll would be in millions and not billions.

The only reprieve this impact had given to the humans was that there would be no radioactive contamination. Humans would not die and get sick on that account, and the land would recover within a decade.

When the ETA of the impact reached 3 hours, astronomers were able to identify confidently what the object was. They were thus able to also get a fairly accurate estimate of the mass of the object. It was an exact replica of the original scout ship that the Shaitans had sent 40 years ago!

That ship had travelled at the maximum speed of 0.7% of light. The purpose of the previous ship was different. It had left approximately half its fuel for deceleration to arrive at a stop near Earth. The purpose of this ship is different. It is a missile. A Kinetic Kill device. It had no need to conserve its fuel for deceleration. It could use all the fuel it had plus any reserves so the ship could have travelled at 1.5% the speed of light unmodified.

This ship had been purpose built for one and one purpose only. So it had been modified. It probably carried more fuel to give it more speed. The kinetic energy an object carries increases by the square of its increase in speed. So by making this ship nearly twice as fast, the Shaitans had given it four times the energy and killing potential.

The fact that the first scout ship was a drone was confirmed with the hack on the Shaitan computers. That meant this one was also a drone. Its purpose was thus left in no doubt. It was meant for a suicide mission. It did not need to carry any bombs. The ship itself at that speed would be far more deadly than any nuclear bomb it could possibly carry.

The military understood the cruel simplicity and effectiveness of this attack. The ship would be accelerating all the time facing its nozzle away from Earth. There would be no direct light visible to humans as it approached Earth. The ship would have finished its fuel well before reaching the solar system proper i.e. the orbit of Neptune. So there was no hope of even noticing the residual light that can be observed from the nozzle emissions.

So the ship would come in silent and cold at 2.7% the speed of light. Humans would get no more than a few hours warning if they were vigilant. If they were not, then the humans would not even know what hit them. Even if the humans were warned, unlike the conventional warships of the aliens that they had recently fought, there was nothing that the humans had, which could prevent or even attempt to thwart this attack. It would deliver 100% guaranteed death.