Shaitan Wars 2: Wrath of the Shaitans (6 page)

That didn’t mean that they could not sense the humans. They didn’t need light to do it. The emitted high pitch ultrasound like bats and probably had a very sharp picture of all the objects in the room.

The two Shaitans started communicating with each other using sound, mostly in the ultrasound range not audible to humans, but some of the sounds were low enough to be heard as shrill high pitched whining, trilling and cooing sound.

Violet had attached neural analyzer to Sheba’s skin slime using tape. She had removed it immediately. They had punished her with a shock from the cattle prod and then attached again. She got the message after the second shock and did not remove it a third time.

The small device was communicating wirelessly with the portable terminal that Violet had brought from her makeshift lab. They let Sheba approach Mimi. The natural mode of complex communication of Shaitans became apparent immediately. Each raised a limb and placed it on the skin slime of the other. The moment they did that, Violet’s terminal started recording signals at a tremendous rate.

The two Shaitan had been touching each other for less than five minutes, after which they decoupled and stood separately. It seemed like they had said everything they had to say to each other. It would seem strange to a human that the two Shaitans had so little to talk after 27 days of such ordeal. Only Violet knew the answer.

In those five odd minutes, her terminal had recorded nearly 100 Terabytes of information. She showed the results to Ramesh in jubilation. Ramesh smiled and said. “The good news is that it proves the theory. The bad news is that you probably missed a lot if not most of the information. Do you realize why you recorded nearly 100 terabytes in just under 5 minutes?” Violet nodded her head in the negative.

“The wireless link protocol that neural analyzer uses can send data at the maximum rate of 20 terabytes per minute. So you got the maximum possible through the wireless link, which is 100 terabytes. If you want to capture the entire conversation next time, use a wired link. But I think that is enough data for us to analyze for now.” Ramesh said.

The next several days were spent by Ramesh, Mischa and Violet cooped up in Violet’s lab. Ramesh used his considerable data analytics skills to slice and dice the data and make sense out of the patterns. Since the data was biological and fundamentally analog. Violet had to initially help in decoding and digitizing the signals.

As a psychologist Mischa assigned broad semantic meanings to various patterns identified. She kept juggling those semantics, until some sense started getting squeezed out of the recorded communication. They were helped by the ultrasonic recordings of the two Shaitans talking. They were less complex. It was assumed that they said similar things by ultrasound, since the Shaitans didn’t know at that time that they would be allowed to touch each other.

They correlated the ultrasound patterns to the patterns obtained by sampling the slime, and started making progress. On the 5
^th
day, Mischa was ready to perform the first test of their fledging knowledge of the Shaitan language. With the help of Violet and Ramesh, she had programmed the neural analyzer to transmit a specific pattern of electrochemical signals, instead of a dumb shock as they used to give till now to the Shaitans.

The same pattern had also been programmed on her com equipment, which had been modified to emit and detect ultrasound. She entered Sheba’s cell. Sheba had visually emaciated now. She was probably reaching the limits of Shaitan hunger. The marine minders were present next to Mischa, Violet, Ramesh and Jorge, but they had made no attempt to approach Sheba, who was standing slightly cowered at the other end pressing herself to the wall.

Mischa turned on her com and let the pattern they had programmed play out loud. They could not hear the ultrasound, but the tablets held by Ramesh and Violet clearly indicated the waveform that was being transmitted. There was an immediate reaction from Sheba.

She did not respond or indicate in any way that she could comprehend the message, but she seemed to stand a bit straighter and made half a step closer to the humans, no longer tightly pressed to the wall. It was almost as if Sheba was trying to hear the sound produced by the com better, although it was being played very loud.

They had played ultrasound recording earlier to these to captives, even recordings of earth bats. There had been no response in those cases, clearly Sheba must have found these ultrasound patterns meaningful in some way. However Sheba did not respond back in ultrasound even after they had played the pattern to her many times over.

The problem that the humans had faced in establishing a common language was that the Shaitans were almost completely blind. They couldn’t show a familiar object to the Shaitans like a planet or a star and then play a sound that the Sheba could corroborate. So Mischa moved to the next stage of their test.

The minders moved close to Sheba with their cattle prods held in front, but did not attempt to pin Sheba down. Mischa approached Sheba and touched the neural analyzer on her skin. This time the reaction was instant and not just in a shift in her position. Almost reflexively, she transmitted back through the neural analyzer. It was a huge amount of data.

They had taken Ramesh’s advice and used a wired data connection this time. Sheba transmitted for only a second or so, but the rate of transmission was close to 40 Terabytes per minute. So they had lost half the data in their previous recordings due to bandwidth limitation of the wireless connection. Mischa repeated the procedure a few times, reducing and increasing the signal strength from the neural analyzer, since they did not know what was the correct signal strength expected.

The team of Mischa, Violet and Ramesh went back to their research with the new data and after a day were back with a refined version of the same signal. They repeated the same routine, first trying the ultrasound version, and then the neural analyzer.

The neural analyzer was connected to Violet’s terminal, and this time they got back a reply signal, which the computer could interpret. It was just a few words and it said – ‘Yes, hungry I am. Want food.’

Chapter 4

Cracking the code

Titan

July 2061

On hindsight it was obvious, they should have tried it before. Mischa realized that they had been thinking in anthropomorphic ways, the same sin she had been accusing the Shaitans of. Just because humans eat solid food as adult, did not mean that the Shaitans should be doing the same. In fact almost all large animals on earth started their lives with liquid nutrition.

Violet had not found any teeth in her dissections, which should have been a pointer. They should have looked for liquid food. Sheba had asked them to fetch the liquid from the ‘growing tanks’. They now had been able to refine their understanding of the Shaitan language tremendously in the last few days.

Humans now understood that Sheba had asked them to fetch the liquid from the growing tanks in desperation. It was food for the Shaitan growing in that particular tank, which would now probably die. The Shaitans manufactured their food, and kept it stored in tanks. The Shaitans would bathe in those tanks to eat whenever they were hungry.

The humans just couldn’t figure all this out initially when Sheba tried to tell them so, it was too complex for their understanding at that point of time. Now however would come the more difficult questioning for Sheba and Mimi. The two Shaitans had been fed to their heart’s content, and they had visibly gained back most of the weight they had lost previously.

Now it was time for Ramesh and Jorge to extract their pound of flesh. They wanted to know everything possible about the machines in the habitat. How to operate them, what their design was and so on. Mischa was a bit scared for these two Shaitans. They had cooperated till now, since all the questions were about feeding and the wellbeing of the Shaitans.

Now the questions would be of a nature, which the Shaitans would consider compromising their species’ security. If they thought like humans, they would not cooperate easily. She was sure the marines would not hesitate in using forceful means of persuasion. Mischa was not sure whether Geneva Convention applied to Shaitans, but she was sure that Daniel and Alex would not think too much about it.

Daniel was now the ranking officer and hence the leader of the humans on Titan. Alex was in charge and the CO of the Shaitan habitat. At one level she knew the necessity of extracting as much information through any means possible from the Shaitans. She should be hating these two Shaitans after what their kind had done to them on Titan. Yet she could not get herself to hate Sheba and Mimi. She regretted giving them names, it had made the Shaitans more of a person in her mind.

From the conversations with the Shaitans, Mischa had come to know that Sheba was a member of the ‘Builder’ caster, while Mimi was a member of the ‘Curious’ caste. The best sense the humans could make out of it was that the builder caste must be the Shaitan equivalent of Engineers, while the curious caste must be the equivalent of scientists. 

Each of the Shaitans were posed the same questions separately. No coercion had been tried till this point. A few things became clear with the initial gentle questioning. First was that Mimi was probably a higher ranking individual, probably more intelligent and experienced than Sheba.

Mimi was uncooperative, while Sheba answered questions that she knew answers to. As the humans learnt more of the vocabulary of the Shaitans, they realized the reason for this. Mimi refused to answer citing ‘safety of their beings’. What she probably meant was ‘I refuse to give intelligence to the enemy’.

The interrogators realized the reason for this quickly. Sheba was born during their journey in the ship, she was barely four years old, if the humans have got the conversion of the Shaitan unit of measurement of a ‘Cycle’ correct. Both the Shaitans had referred to Sheba as ‘Learner Builder’, which probably was the equivalent of an apprentice or a trainee.

It is possible that Sheba was the Shaitan equivalent of an adolescent or someone just out of their teens. She did not have a proper concept of information security or military intelligence. It was possible that as an adolescent going through mental and physical trauma, she was disoriented mentally. She just said what she thought at the moment, without thinking of consequences to their species. It was even possible that she may cooperate in exchange for good treatment.

Mimi on the other hand was referred by Sheba as an elder. This might mean that Mimi was better versed in the security implication of whatever they would say, and hence would not be cooperative without adequate persuasion.

They decided to concentrate on Sheba as the easier target. There was plenty she knew that could be used to learn about the Shaitans initially. Once the humans had learnt enough about the Shaitans, it would be easier to use that information to interrogate Mimi.

The first breakthrough the humans got from Sheba was in cracking the nature and the purpose of the slime coating almost everything in the habitat. As had been suspected, the slime was the interface to all machinery in the habitat. Violet had been able to calibrate a neural analyzer very precisely to mimic the electrochemical signals given out by a Shaitan body in terms of the strength of the signal.

The complexity of the signal depended entirely on the complexity of programming, and while that was improving, the team still did not know enough about Shaitan neurology to mimic the entire range of complex electrochemical signals that a Shaitan could transmit through their slime.

They had given Sheba the incentive of better food. Mischa and Violet had told Sheba, that if Sheba could help them operate the Shaitan food processor, then they could provide both of them with proper food, about which Sheba had complained several times. She was still living on the liquids taken from what they now knew as growing tanks, meant to grow new Shaitans.

They did not dare let the Shaitans touch or get near any machinery. There was no telling what they might be able to activate. Sheba recorded the exact activation electrochemical signals in the neural analyzer, which they tried to replay on the food processor several times. It did not work.

It was possible that Sheba was making a fool of them and had provided a phony sequence, but everything she had done till now had been truthful. There was no logical reason for her to try to fool them on something that would give her better food. There was only one way to know, but involved risk.

Daniel finally made the call that they needed to take the risk if they were to proceed any further in learning Shaitan technology. So he removed all non-essential humans for this project far from the Shaitan habitat. Then they escorted Sheba in restraints to the food processor.

Violet had taped the neural analyzer to one of his limbs. She held that limb and touched it to the slime of the food processor. They all prayed that it was the food processor they were letting Sheba touch and not some self-destruct mechanism. It was Sheba who said that this was a food processor, the humans knew no better.

Thankfully nothing exploded. A shallow tank near the food processor started filling with a thin soupy slurry. It was thicker than the liquid from the growing tanks that they were feeding the Shaitans. It also had a very different pungent aroma compared to the sweet smelling liquid of the growing tanks. This was probably adult Shaitan food, and the growing tanks had baby food. Sheba was allowed to go and wallow in the shallow tank, under the watchful eye of four armed marines.

Mischa, Violet and Ramesh, the only three civilians in the habitat right now huddled around the Violet’s terminal analyzing the signal pattern that Sheba had used. She had not been lying. It was the exact pattern Sheba had given earlier. It was clear that the same pattern when used by Sheba worked, but not when mimicked by the neural analyzer.