Exodus (The Domus Series Book 2)

by Spartan Kaayn

  Alex held the wheel and Aslam stood by his side, looking out into the ocean. Susan was asleep and cocooned to Nilofer’s body with her long scarf. Alex steered the yacht to about three kilometers in a north-westernly direction to the co-ordinates where the submarine was due, anytime now.

  The sub was an hour late. It was an unnerving experience for Nilofer. Even Aslam was ill at ease, never having had to set his foot off the ground to fight his battles. The dark smog covered skies, with undulating waves rocking their boat and Alex’s decision to kill the motor and not to have any lights on board, made for a scary proposition. The fear and foreboding kept them on tenterhooks, the cool sea breeze bringing goosebumps all over.

  The sub surfaced silently five hundred meters from their location. Alex started the motor and ambled towards the sub, lining up along the side of the sub. He first helped Nilofer off the boat and into the sub, Susan tied firmly to her chest. Aslam followed, relieved to get off the boat. Alex was the last to get on to the sub, casting a final glance at the land beyond the smoke and the fog.

  Aslam and Nilofer headed for their cabins while Alex was taken to the Captain’s room. Captain Scott met him at the door and offered him a warm handshake

  ‘I heard about your misfortune. I am extremely sorry about Sienna’

  Alex nodded his head and took a chair opposite Scott. Scott continued

  ‘You must have pissed them really bad, for them to have come after you like that. The message on the downed harvester could not have helped matters either. They must be thirsting for your blood now. What is this Montferret thing?’

  Alex was not at liberty to disclose anything. Anything he said now could jeopardize William on the ship and he did not want that.

  ‘I cannot reveal that to you but it must be obvious that we have allies on the alien ship, allies whom we can count upon when need arises.’

  Scott was thrilled with that admission from Alex and yet he understood that Alex might want to protect someone onboard the alien ship and did not press the matter any further. He poured a glass of clear liquid for Alex

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Vodka and Gin’

  Alex grinned and replied

  ‘Too strong for my taste. I think I will pass. Where are we headed now?’

  ‘Mumbai’

  ‘What’s in Mumbai?’

  ‘The next big strike is being prepped in Mumbai. We have a team there, working with the Indians and the Chinese to get a strike team on board the alien mothership. They would love to have you there and share your experience with them.’

  Alex was excited with the news. If they could take the fight to the aliens, it would be a big step forward.

  ‘How are we planning on getting to their mothership? What are we going to hit them with, once we are there?’

  ‘They are working on that, the getting there part. As about hitting them, it could be nuclear, thermonuclear, chemical, anything. We have to find a weakness and strike them hard with all our might.’

  Alex understood that Scott did not have more to offer and there was no point in him pressing for more. It was going to be a good 5 days before they reached Mumbai and he could use the time to tend to himself. He would need himself to be a hundred percent fit in Mumbai, especially when they were preparing for the impossible. Alex understood that it was near madness to attempt what they were contemplating in Mumbai and hoped they had some serious shit planned as an offensive against these invincible aliens. Alex nodded to Scott and got up from his chair

  ‘I hope they have some good shit brewing in Mumbai. It is long overdue to have one up on our sleeves; we cannot win against these motherfucking aliens by our conventional weapons.’

  Scott raised his glass

  ‘I will drink to that. You would be escorted to your living quarters. I will have the doctor come and have a look at your wound. Goodnight Colonel’

  The sub had cramped quarters but was running on a minimal staff and they could free two rooms for their guests. Alex and Aslam shared a room and left the other for Nilofer and Susan. Susan had taken to Nilofer, finding comfort in the warmth of her young bosom. Susan was never going to know her mother and Alex was glad there was someone to fill that space for now.

  ‘What is her story?’ he asked Aslam.

  Aslam waived his hand

  ‘Bad. Fucked up as you would say. I will tell you some other time. Now I need to get some sleep. I have already puked three times since coming. The good doctor gave me something to soothe my stomach and I feel too damned sleepy now.’

  Aslam was indeed having a rough time. He looked like hell and Alex knew it was perhaps his first time on sea, and let him off to find sleep.

  Neither sleep nor the medicines helped Aslam much in the next five days. He was constantly tossing and turning on the bed and puking when on his feet. Alex tried calming him down but to no avail. The seas were rough and the sub had some roll even when submerged. That did not help matters. Alex on the other hand was used to the sea and used these 5 days to find adequate rest. The doctor debrided his wound once and dressed it daily and at the end of those five days, it was filling up nicely with healthy granulating tissue. Susan slept her way through the trip, Nilofer by her side, and milk and milk substitutes on the sub doing her tiny body a world of good.

  Chapter 31

  The Plan

  Kihim Beach, Mumbai

  April 6, 2019

  The submarine surfaced near Kihim beach in Alibaug, some 120 kilometers from Mumbai. It was late at night and Captain Scott had made contact with the landing party that was to arrive. Alex thanked Captain Scott for the ride. The Captain wished Alex the best and hoped that his presence would bolster the efforts of the resistance here.

  The speedboat arrived within the hour and aligned itself alongside the bridge of the sub. Aslam climbed out first followed by Nilofer and Susan. Alex was the last to come up. The boat disengaged from the sub and revved up its motors. Three men in army fatigues introduced themselves as Lieutenants in the Indian Army. The boat rushed to the shore and they disembarked and boarded an army truck there. The truck raced through Mumbai suburbs, the buildings there having met the same fate as those in Egypt. There were scenes of widespread destruction and the occasional breeze brought about the smell of death and destruction with it.

  It wasn’t too long a drive and Alex was thankful for that. The truck was clearly taking a serpiginous route, avoiding the highways and finally some three hours later, ended in a derelict junkyard housing old and discarded vehicles. There, hidden amongst the junk, was a dirt road that led to the back of a fallen skyscraper. They got off the truck and were escorted by the officers to a checkpoint manned by Hellraiser wielding soldiers in Indian army fatigues. They entered the building and were led down three stories of basement parking to reach what Alex presumed to be some sort of Command Center.

  There, an elderly Caucasian man stepped forward and greeted Alex

  ‘Hello Col Dunbar. Welcome to the Mumbai Command. I am General Lewis Canton, formerly with the NATO Command Office at Kabul and now with the Mumbai Command’

  Alex shook his hands and introduced himself and Aslam. The officers on the boat had taken Nilofer and Susan to the base kitchen. Alex and Aslam accompanied General Canton, who took them to meet General Gautam Raghuvanshi, who was the Commander in Charge there. The General was in a meeting with Col Lin Shi of the Beijing Command and Alex accompanied General Canton to the meeting.

  General Gautam stepped up and shook Alex’s hand

  ‘Welcome to the Mumbai Command center, Colonel Dunbar. We have heard a great deal about your work in Egypt and we are glad to host you here. I am also very sorry for your losses, personal and otherwise, in Egypt.’

  Alex shook his head in acknowledgement, looking straight into General Gautam’s eyes

  ‘It was all personal, General’

  General Gautam shook his head in understanding and introduced Alex to General Lin Shi. After a formal round of interactions and afte
r Alex’s umpteenth retelling of events leading to his capture and circumstances leading to his release from the mothership, they sat down for a round of taking stock of the recent developments in the war against the aliens.

  General Lin Shi was the first to speak, his narrative slow and measured as he was speaking in English, which was not something he was very comfortable with

  ‘I bring good news from Beijing. You must have heard of the harvester that was brought down in Tibet’ he looked at Alex and continued, ‘it contained a message for Colonel Dunbar here from someone called Mr. Montferret. We haven’t been able to fully understand that yet’

  Alex smiled at the mention of Mr. Montferret and replied

  ‘I will tell you all about it in good time. I need to protect ‘Mr. Montferret’s identity or else he might get into trouble.’

  General Shi nodded his head and continued

  ‘Well, about that harvester. The message was not the only thing that we found on it. The harvester had something else on it too.’

  He had the complete attention of everyone at the table now.

  ‘A Daiit baby. A toddler actually. Alive. He was bound and gagged and hidden inside a basket in the undercarriage, where the cables and the tentacles are stored.’

  Everyone was stunned. The implications of that dawned on them slowly. This was huge. They had the first sample of alien biology with them. Captain Gautam was the first to overcome his shock

  ‘What have you done with it…him…it?’

  ‘We think ‘it’ is a her. She is carbon chemistry and breathes our air and thrives well under captivity. She is a biped, walking on two legs just like us. She has two hands and many small appendages which will probably grow to become tentacles, four on each side. Her skin breathes in some measure, and there are chromophores under her skin, allowing her to change color, some form of camouflage, we think.’

  ‘We have been doing a lot of tests on her. Blood, tissue, CT, MRI etc. As I said, she is carbon chemistry, with organ systems in her body, much like ours. She needs to eat food to survive and eats indiscriminately. She has a respiratory system that consists of lung equivalents and skin. There is a circulatory system that is perhaps a better design than ours. She doesn’t have a central pumping mechanism like the heart but hundreds of tiny muscular nodes that pump in sync to circulate a pinkish fluid all around her body. Oxygenation happens both in her lung equivalents and in her skin. She is devoid of skin appendages like nails or hair but her back has hardened ridges like those on a crocodile. There is a nervous system with possibly a central and a peripheral component. She has a very hard skull, double the size of our skulls and a brain that is disproportionately large for her body.’

  Alex could not help remark

  ‘Well, I guess the chickens here would say the same thing about us - having a disproportionately large head’

  General Gautam said, almost to himself

  ‘And look how we devour these harebrained chickens…as these aliens are devouring us. I guess that is what we are to them, chickens.’

  General Shi halted his narrative for a moment and looked at the General for a moment and then continued,

  ‘Yet we are not chickens. We have found a chink in their armor, a weakness in their biology that we think can be exploited for our benefit.’

  He had the undivided attention of the room yet again,

  ‘Their blood is pinkish due to a chromophore, a hemoglobin analogue, which transports oxygen to their lungs and their skin. It has four times the oxygen carrying capacity of hemoglobin and gives up its oxygen just as easily when it delivers it to the tissues. We need close to five liters of blood to move the oxygen around our bodies but their bodies, which are about one and a half times our size, needs only a quarter of that amount of blood to meet its oxygenation needs. But, this efficiency comes at a price. The molecule as I said, gives up its oxygen easily and is therefore susceptible to poisoning. We hit jackpot with almost the very first thing that we tried. Cyanide binds avidly and irreversibly to this molecule and makes it discharge its oxygen rapidly, rendering it incapable of carrying oxygen thereafter.’

  There were murmurs around the room and there were a lot of questions, but no one wanted to interrupt General Shi now. He continued

  ‘We haven’t yet tried it on her but the lab results show that cyanide will work. We still have to figure out a way to deliver it to them. This is probably the first encounter that we are having with them in person. They live tucked away in their mothership, letting the Greys and the machines do all their dirty work. We are this close to annihilation as a species and this is perhaps the first time we are coming face to face with our attackers, our annihilators.’

  Alex was tingling with excitement. This was an opportunity to take the war to the aliens, perhaps the best and the biggest they will ever get. They had to do it right. Another opportunity like this may not arise.

  ‘What does physical violence do to them? Do bullets affect them?’

  General Shi was interrupted in his narrative train

  ‘Yes, of course. That is a given, their biology being not much different from us. They are made up of tissue and water and are not very different from us in their ability to retard a bullet or an explosion. The problem will always be to get that close to them with arms and ammunition. Hand to hand, they might be tougher, as they are bigger than us and have four limbs and eight appendages.’

  ‘Hope it doesn’t ever come to that, hand to hand I mean. How are we to deliver the cyanide to them? The ship is massive and there must be a billion of them on that ship.’

  General Shi looked pained at that question

  ‘We are yet to figure that out. We are currently hoarding raw materials for industrial scale production of cyanide. A few options look promising as of now. One of them is a liquid form called Glycolonitrile, which would diffuse into a gas on contact with air. If we can regulate the flow, the Hydrogen Cyanide or HCN levels could be kept low enough to be lethal for them but not us. We are working on that.’

  General Canton jumped into the conversation

  ‘Where are you doing this? Is it within the Beijing Command office? I don’t think you have enough space to do all that there.’

  General Shi was reluctant to answer Canton’s question but decided to do that anyway

  ‘The catacombs and the tunnels under Beijing. It’s a system of ancient secret alleyways built under the city…’

  General Canton interrupted him,

  ‘I know about them. Have you guys started manufacturing?’

  ‘No. Right now we are just getting the raw materials and setting up the production facility. We need your help to suggest us ways to get this done. I have got some tissue samples with me for your scientists to have a look. We are also open to any other newer ideas. Developing a proper biological warfare system would take time and more test subjects, neither of which we have now.’

  Alex almost blurted out

  ‘What do you mean by tissue samples?’

  ‘The appendages. We have removed them from her body and given you some. Pieces of the same have also been sent to Tokyo and Moscow for them to have a look.’

  Alex understood the need but still felt squeamish about the barbaric nature of the act. After all it was just a toddler. Does it make it okay for us to be as barbaric as them? But he understood that this was not the time to be humane.

  Things had to be done. Period.

  The emotions played on Alex’s face and were there for all to see. General Shi whispered, his voice carrying a menace, across at Alex

  ‘She is alive. Because, she is a test subject, the only one we have. The moment we realize she is of no importance to us anymore, I will personally put a bullet in her face.’

  Alex nodded his head, feeling guilty about that ingot of compassion he had felt for the alien subject.

  General Canton spoke up, doubts about the feasibility of the plan in all their minds,

  ‘Even if the HCN is liquefied, it will
be pressurized canisters. How are we to get those canisters to the mothership? It has been difficult for us to approach and to attack the harvesters and the pods. How are we to reach and infiltrate the mother ship?’

  No one had any answer to that. General Shi continued,

  ‘That is something we have to think about. Meanwhile we will be going ahead with production of HCN. I am sure we all will think of something.’

  Chapter 32

  The Solution

  Mumbai Command Centre

  April 21, 2019

  Susan had her shots today.

  Alex had been trying his best to devote as much time as he could to his daughter. It was tough, with him being constantly pulled away to consult on planning and execution of the counter-attack. It was a great help to have Nilofer, who was the closest thing that Susan had to having a mother. Alex marveled at seeing maternal instincts in such a young girl. Extraordinary circumstances brought out the extraordinary in people, good in some and the worst in others.

  Alex had taken Susan to the makeshift base hospital which generally dealt with battle injuries. He was directed to meet a pediatrician amongst the civilian refugee population, who ran a small voluntary clinic for kids there. She had given Susan a thorough check-up and had declared her fit for her age. She had mentioned about the need to vaccinate her but, there were none on the base. Alex had since spread the news amongst the surface raiding parties to look for vaccines and they had gotten lucky today.

  ‘She is a survivor, a tough cookie. She will live through all of this’ Dr. Sunita remarked, after giving Susan her shots.

  ‘Thanks for the shots doctor. I hope she does. You have been a blessing for me here. I don’t know how to thank you enough.’

  Sunita waved her hand dismissively