Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (56 page)

Unfortunately for the AI of the ship, there was nothing it could do about it. The blocks were just that, dumb blocks of iron, which would just keep travelling in the direction they were travelling now. There was something the AI could do about where the ship itself crashed. It still have a small amount of fuel left to burn, it would be enough for these last few minutes.

The ship tried to steer itself to the closest patch of land it could find – Hawaii. The ship almost succeeded, but its great speed worked against it a second time. It did not have enough time to change course before it crashed. It crashed just over a hundred Kilometers from the big island.

Normally a ship that slams into the atmosphere at almost 90° angle, impacts with such a force that it breaks apart and then the heat generated from friction burns it up in the atmosphere. This ship was however travelling at such a speed, that it had crossed the atmosphere in less than a millisecond.

The shockwave of the impact on the ship had just started travelling as a sinusoidal wave from the bow to the stern of the ship by the time it reached the water. There was not enough time for the hull of the ship to even flex before it broke. Similarly a millisecond is not enough time for the ship’s hull to start heating up before it starts burning. The ship simply ploughed through the atmosphere as if there was nothing.

The ship went through the less than a mile of water down to the ocean floor with almost equal ease in a similar millisecond timeframe. The water was able to rob the ship off a few percent of its speed and momentum. The hull and spine of the ship had not yet even been able to bend, let alone break when it met up with the ocean floor.

When a solid enters a gas or a liquid and moves through it at non-relativistic speeds, the solid pushes the gas and liquid molecules aside as it moves ahead. The Shaitan ship however was going so fast, that the molecules of the atmosphere and the ocean it came in contact with, did not have enough time to move aside, they were pushed along with the ships, ever compressing it into a dense layer in front of it.

There had been a tunnel of vacuum created through the atmosphere and ocean, through which the ship had ploughed through. The air and the water had not yet had a chance to fill up the space through which the ship had travelled in the atmosphere and water.

If someone could have filmed the location of the impact on the ocean floor with a camera capable of taking pictures at a hundred million frames per second, they would have seen an amazing and incredible sight. For a few picoseconds, the ship would seem to touch the ocean floor and then disappear as if by magic.

It was not digging into a hole in the ocean floor. It was just disappearing inch by inch as it kept touching the ocean floor! The ocean floor was intact for those few picoseconds. It would have looked like a crude movie effect where the image of the ship was being wiped out frame by frame as it ploughed into the ocean floor.

It was Newtonian mechanics meeting Quantum mechanics. In those first few picoseconds as the ship ploughed into the floor of the ocean, the ship was moving faster than the sand and rock molecules of the ocean floor could move. The molecules and their electrons had not even started absorbing the energy properly yet, let alone transferring the energy to a broader area to make a hole.

Before this could happen, the ship had ploughed through completely into the floor, so great was its speed. This forced every electron from every molecule that made up the ship to be stripped out. Any high school student would tell you that an atom and molecule is mostly empty space with a tiny nucleus in the center and electrons revolving in a cloud around it.

Next the molecules were stripped off their bonds to decay into their constituent atoms. Those atoms, now without electrons got packed together till their nucleus was touching each other. For those few picoseconds, the entire volume of the ship was packed in a thin layer just a few million molecules thick which would be invisible.

The atoms of the ship could not be packed together any further as their protons and neutrons pushed against each other, opposed by what quantum physicist call neutron degeneracy pressure. This is a weird state of matter present only in Neutron stars. For those few picoseconds there was a piece of Neutron star material on Earth. All the remaining kinetic energy not robbed by the impact with the water and the atmosphere was stored in this state of matter for a few picoseconds.

When Newtonian mechanics was finally able to catch up with the speed of the impact, the energy stored in the neutron degenerate matter was released. Every molecule of water within a radius of one kilometer of the site of the impact first returned to its constituent atoms of Hydrogen and Oxygen and then instantly turned into plasma. The same happened to the molecules of the ocean floor a hundred meter deep.

This was just the beginning, as the kinetic energy of the ship was converted into a spherical bomb of plasma one kilometer in radius. It was the biggest bomb humans had experienced. All across the Pacific Ocean, similar scenes on a smaller scale were playing out on the ocean floor.

Out of the 128 cubes, 13 were to play a particularly devastating part in this holocaust. One found the island of Hokkaido in North Japan. It was fortunately one of the least populated areas of Japan, but was dense enough to cause over a million casualties. The impact was over a hundred kilometers from the main city of Sapporo, but it still caused devastation to the city due to the ensuing firestorms that passed over it.

One hit Korea. Unfortunately, it hit the more developed southern part of the country where the population density is higher in the Goengnam district. The closest large city of Busan was again over a 100 Km away, and the casualty figures were estimated to be about a million.

The one that hit mainland China caused the largest human casualties. It could not have hit at a worse area as far as density of human population is concerned. It hit in the Hangzhou province near the city of Jianxing, barely a hundred Km from Shanghai. No one knows the exact figures, but the estimate is between 8 and 10 million.

One hit the mountainous region of west Taiwan which is very sparsely populated, but still wiped out 200 thousand people, and one hit on the beaches of Luzon province in Philippines and caused similar damage. The islands of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea were hit by three cubes, but all were relatively forested areas, limiting the total casualties to about half a million.

Australia also got hit by three, but all of them landed in sparsely populated areas. Their casualty figures was less than a hundred thousand. Mexico got hit in the Baja peninsula, but it was in a completely unpopulated area and the casualty figures were a few thousand.

The country which paid the maximum price after China in terms of human lives was the United States. The west coast of the US is one of the most densely populated region in the country, but more importantly it was unlucky in where the cubes fell.

The first fell in the San Rafael area in the suburbs of San Francisco, which caused massive death and destruction in the entire county. This particular suburb had been fast developing as favored destination of the middle class working in San Francisco, and had become densely populated. It was believed that as many as one and half million may have perished here.

The second one was most devastating for the US, for it fell close to the heart of Seattle near the Rainier valley. As the main city of the Northwest, its population had been booming. Estimates put the toll here at close to three million.

There was a third place of pain for the US, and that was Hawaii. Though the Shaitan ship had crashed a 100 Km off the coast, the effects of the largest artificial release of energy experience by Earth was still devastating. Tsunami waves and molten earth had rained down causing raging fires on the island killing over 300 thousand people on the densely populated small island as well as many on the big island.

There had been waves of Tsunamis all across the Pacific Rim countries, which despite Tsunami warnings had still claimed a few hundred people.

Chapter 37

Remember us

Earth

31
^st
May 2084

Justin had been pedaling his bicycle for long now. The winding and sloping roads were taking its toll. His legs were tired now, despite being an extremely fit 15 year old boy. He was glad he hadn’t let his sister bring her bicycle along. She wouldn’t have been able to ride and last this long. Instead he had brought her along sitting on the top tube of his bicycle.

He was sure, that she must be extremely uncomfortable sitting like that for so long. Her legs must have gone numb, but she had not complained once. It should have been surprising that his whiny 8 year old, drama queen sister and a spoilt princess had not complained once about their ride or the incessant drizzle throughout. It no longer surprised him though.

He had seen the look in the eyes of her sister, and they were no longer that of a little girl. She had cried so little. He must have cried more than her. When he looked into her eyes, there was very little sadness to be seen for it was buried deep under a layer of fierce determination and hatred. It was scary to see that in the eyes of an 8 year old.

They had been staying at Children’s Home run by the city in the University district for the last two days. They had bunks next to each other. Their only personal possessions were the ones they had packed with them in their rucksacks for the camping trip. A trip Justin recalled he didn’t want to take. He was too old for a children’s camping trip with planned activities. He had wanted to hang around with his friends. Friends who were all gone now.

His mother had appealed to his sense of duty towards his sister who was keen on the trip. He had reluctantly agreed, only after extracting a promise of an electric bike. Now he realized how real that sense of responsibility had become with a shiver, as much from the dread of uncertainty in their lives as from the cold of the rain.

They had hugged each other and cried. Justin doing most of the crying though. He was the only person his sister had in this world now, and she was the only person he had. Now after the pain had subsided a bit, he was plain scared. He had to take care of her eight year old sister! He didn’t even know how he would take care of himself. Would they be taken care of, or will he have to earn money?

By the time he had heard of the memorial service happening at the edge of the crater, it was already afternoon. He had told her sister, who immediately and without a word jumped to her play desk. She started writing large lettered placard on some cardboard paper with the thick crayons lying around. When she was finished in five minutes, she stood up and insisted that she wanted to go and pay her respects.

When he read the placard, he did not utter a word of objection about the distance. Instead he pressed the crayon again in her hands and gently helped her correct a word she had used incorrectly. Then they started out on the ride to the memorial. It had started to rain. It always rained in Seattle.

By the time they reached the edge of the crater, where a hastily cast concrete obelisk had been erected as a memorial, it was already late afternoon. The sun was not visible anyway and it was getting dark. Most of the people had left. There were just a few people hanging around, looking at the vastness of the crater that had been created.

As Justin climbed the rim of the crater on foot with his sister, he gaped at the sheer size of the crater. The bottom of the crater had started filling with water. This crater would probably turn into a vast lake someday. They approached the memorial obelisk placed on a flattened piece of ground at the rim of the crater. There were many flowers and wreaths lying there.

There were some words written on the obelisk. Justin did not bother to read them. He had read and heard too much of those words in the last few days. Instead he held his sister’s hand to prevent her from slipping in the wet mud. She clutched her placard close to her chest to keep it from getting wet. She got as close to the base of the obelisk as she could with so many wreaths and flowers lying there.

There she carefully placed her placard, and brother and sister stood silently reading the words this human child from Earth had written. “WE WILL
REVENGE
AVENGE YOU.”