Retribution (Shaitan Wars)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  “Dr. Basheer, how deep below the surface is this tunnel plugged?” Alex asked.

  Dr. Basheer magnified the image and zoomed in on the tunnel that Alex had pointed to. It seemed to touch the surface, but the mouth of the tunnel didn’t have a red color, which indicated that it was an open tunnel. So that tunnel must be plugged but very close to the surface. Once the map had zoomed enough, they could read the scale distance. “Less than a meter. I am afraid the maps in that region are not yet very precise, otherwise I could have told you in centimeters. My guess is that the tunnel is plugged only till a depth of about 0.8 meter. If we were to dig just 80 odd centimeters we can open up the tunnel. Why?” Dr. Basheer asked.

  “It is not us I am trying to make things easy for. I was thinking more like… how hard would it be for the Shaitans?” Alex said with a mysterious grin. Then he asked after a bit a pause. “Tell me something Dr. Basheer. Are you familiar with the marker those Shaitans are looking for? The one that marked the entrance to the Ka-let habitat on Mars?”

  “Of course I am familiar with it General! Every scientist in USC is aware of it, and as a Geologist it is particularly fascinating to me. No one had thought of using radioactive isotopes as geological markers like that before. It is fairly easy to find if you know what you are looking for, and almost impossible if you aren’t. A perfect way to camouflage an underground spot.” Dr. Basheer said.

  “I believe it is basically a layer of soil which has some very common and mildly radioactive elements, only they are somehow different in that isotope thing. Right?” Alex propounded his best scientific understanding of the process.

  “Well… if you put it that way, yes… sort of. The process is a bit more sophisticated than that, but yes that is the general idea.” Dr. Basheer answered dubiously.

  “Could you make the same marker here in your lab doctor?” Alex asked expectantly, almost urging with his eyes for Dr. Basheer to say yes.

  Dr. Basheer took some time to reply. “In theory yes it can be replicated, if one has all the raw materials. I don’t think I have all the radioactive isotopes required though. Even if I had all the isotopes, it may still not be the right formula. We have seen just one example which blends with the soil of Mars. The regolith soil on Moon is very different. If the Ka-let have a formula for this thing, it might be very different for this soil.”

  “But you could try and give it your best shot. Couldn’t you? Something good enough to convince the Shaitans that it is a Ka-let marker.” Alex asked hopefully.

  “Sure General. I could give it a shot if I had Thorium in my labs, which I doubt we have. I am fairly certain we have both the isotopes of Uranium 235U and 238U with us. We use both of them in our radioactivity research. The samples on Mars had in addition to these two isotopes of Uranium, two isotopes of Thorium 230Th and 232Th. Let me check with my assistant if we have those. Very unlikely we have those.” Dr. Basheer said, as he reached over to his com to speak to someone.

  It took over 5 minutes for his assistant to get back to Dr. Basheer. “Looks like you are in half-luck. We have a small quantity of one of the isotopes of Thorium brought in for some experiment which I intend to find out about, when I am done here. We could try to make the marker soil without the last ingredient, and mix it with the lunar regolith… I am not sure whether that would fool the Shaitans though.”

  “It is worth a shot though. How long would it take to make the stuff doctor?” Alex asked.

  “How much do you want made?” Dr. Basheer asked.

  “As much as required to mark this plugged lava tube.” Alex said, pointing at the lava tube that was almost touching the surface, which they had discussed previously.

  “If I have to cover a centimeter thick layer of regolith with the desired mix, it would take just about 100 grams of radioactive isotopes. I could have it prepared within half an hour, just as soon as I can get someone into a hazmat suit. It would be best if we could get soil from that spot to mix with the radioactive isotopes. You may have to send a Marine out on top to collect a few kilograms of lunar regolith from that spot.” Dr. Basheer said.

  “Here is the twist Dr. Basheer. We cannot be seen going to the exact spot that we want the Shaitans to find. Is it possible to mark the spot from inside?” Alex asked, fearing he had asked one too many thing from the geologist.

  “This kind of radioactivity can easily penetrate a few inches of top soil. You will have to thin out the plug till it is only a few inches thick, and then will have to stick this soil somehow on the ceiling of the tunnel, underneath the plug.” Dr. Basheer replied to Alex’s relief.

  “Not a problem doctor. You get busy with your concoction, I will get a few Marines to prep up the tunnel.” Alex replied.

  When the geologist was gone, Cuifen came next to Alex and asked softly. “Care to share your devious master plan with us mere mortals General?”

  Alex smiled and replied softly. “Not a master plan love. I wish I had such certitude. This is more like a gambit with the hope that we can achieve one part of our task without too much Marine blood being shed.”

  “And the plan is to lure them inside that tunnel?” Cuifen asked dubiously.

  “Look. If we were to pop out of a tunnel, shoot at the Shaitans and then quickly duck back. Do you think that the Shaitans would simply follow us into that tunnel?” Alex asked and then answered his own question. “Of course not. The Shaitans are not that stupid. The Shaitans are not stupid at all. Period.”

  “However if they were to find a marker to a spot they have been looking. A spot they think we humans are not aware of. And they know that if they dig that spot, it would lead to an underground facility inside, wouldn’t the Shaitans enter such a tunnel?” Alex asked gleefully. “This tunnel may not be what they expected, but then the Shaitans may not be having any preconceived notion as to what to expect. It is not their own habitat they are entering by an 80 thousand year old habitat of an enemy species.

  The Shaitans aren’t fools, they will not send a huge number of Shaitans inside immediately. Most likely they will send a few scouts inside to check out the tunnels. If we are looking for intelligence from the Shaitans, then maybe trapping just a few of them is enough. We are then free to kill the rest of them as best as we deem fit.” Alex said.

  “Hmm. Not just a pretty face then. Look! There is some real brains in that handsome, silver blonde head!” Cuifen teased Alex. “It is a good idea General. I will get my Marines to work on it immediately and coordinate with Dr. Basheer.”

  As Cuifen was on her way to instruct her Marines a thought struck her and she turned to ask Alex. “By the way. What if there is actually a Ka-let base here and the Shaitans stumble upon it first before getting to our trap?”

  “You know as well as I do Jojo, this entire crater has been combed fairly well with underground sensors to map all the tunnels. If there was such a huge hole underground to accommodate a Ka-let base like Mars, we would have known about it. Even if there is such a base and the Shaitans stumble upon it first, we are no worse off than we are right now.” Alex said with a sigh.

  The pattern in which the Shaitans were searching would bring them close to the mouth of the plugged lava tube in about 10 hours. That was the deadline Mr. Basheer and the Marines had to plant their bait. The bait was not the only thing that the Marines had to plant. Nearly a hundred Marines with demolition training were busy for those 10 hours carrying out the instructions of their CO.

  Alex had just come out of a quick nap in one of the bunks behind the Ops control room. He entered the control room to hear Col Cuifen Ma finishing her instructions to the Marines. “… and lieutenant, make sure that no equipment or any artefact identifiable as human are left in those tunnels. I expect the tunnels cleared of Marines by O eight thirty hours at any cost. Good job lieutenant. Cuifen out.”

  That last piece of conversation got Alex thinking. He asked Cuifen. “What do you think would happen if the Shaitans entered the tunnel and discovered some human artefact? Like let�
��s say… a wrench or an empty crate?”

  Cuifen was confused at Alex asking such an obvious question. “Why? The Shaitans will smell a trap and run for the exit!”

  “Well if the Shaitans find a human artefact right at the entrance of the tunnel, then yes probably that would be the logical thing to do. What if however they found the same artefact somewhere deep inside the tunnel? Say… after having wound a kilometer inside those twisting tunnels?” Alex asked half to Cuifen and half to himself.

  “Why should the Shaitan reaction be any different?” Cuifen asked puzzled.

  “Because the Shaitans would have dug through an undisturbed piece of the surface to open up the tunnel mouth. The Shaitans would be fairly confident that we humans were either not aware of that tunnel opening, or had not anticipated that the Shaitans would dig open that tunnel opening.” Alex said.

  “I get it. The Shaitans would reason that they have surprised us humans in some way!” Cuifen said excitedly, understanding the implication of what Alex was suggesting.

  “Exactly! If the Shaitans start observing increased signs of habitation as they progress within the tunnel, they are likely to believe that they have stumbled upon a back door to our habitat. They would not be wrong in that assumption because the tunnels do wind up into our habitat after a few kilometers. Where I am hoping the Shaitans would be wrong, is in the assumption that either we are not aware of that fact or that we are not prepared for the invasion.” Alex completed the train of thought.

  “So in effect what that will make the Shaitan commander do is send more of their troops into the tunnel to take advantage of the lucky strike that the Shaitans would believe they have chanced upon! We can even reinforce that impression by arranging to have a few Marines ‘bump’ into the Shaitans and having them run for their lives!” Cuifen added.

  “May be we are just building castles in the air Jojo. The Shaitans can’t be expected to be that stupid. We humans would not have rushed headlong into a dark tunnel, if the positions were reversed. We would have sent out a small expeditionary force.” Alex said with self-doubt.

  “We humans would not have done that Alex, you are right. But you are forgetting something. We humans have an instinctive fear of dark enclosed spaces like those tunnels. However much we would like to believe that we have become rational beings, the truth is that even our military strategy is still dictated by those primitive fears.

  The Shaitans have no such baggage. In fact if I have understood the scientists correctly, the Shaitans feel right at home in dark tunnels. Most likely it reminds them of home. It is very similar to their natural environment. The Shaitans see very well in the dark. For them it must be just the same feeling as we humans feel charging through an open plain.” Cuifen countered Alex’s argument.

  “You may be right Jojo. In any case, what have we got to lose? It doesn’t cost us anything to try it out I guess.” Alex agreed.

  Cuifen got back to her com immediately and said. “Lieutenant. Scratch that last order I gave you. Here is what I want you to do…” Alex tuned out as Cuifen went into detailed instructions for the Marines. He had to work out a defense plan on the surface. Most likely the Shaitans won’t be stupid enough to take the bait. Even if they did and the humans were able to trap a few hundred Shaitans in the best case scenario, they would still have to fight a pitched battle on the surface. There were two thousand Shaitans on the Moon.

  The Shaitans did find the human bait, and when they did, the shuttle that found the marker immediately settled down on the surface nearby. The opening of tunnel with the phony marker was just over the horizon from Shackleton base. It was over 8 Km away from the Shackleton base and the Shaitans possibly felt confident of landing their shuttle there. There was no line of sight visibility from Shackleton base, and the only reason the humans knew what was going on was due to the satellite eye in the sky that had been released by the surviving navy ships holding pattern above the Shackleton crater in space.

  The other shuttle immediately called off its own search and went straight to the place where the Shaitan warriors and equipment had been dumped. It picked up a large number of warriors and landed next to the shuttle that had found the marker. Humans were alerted the moment the Shaitans started digging. The mouth of the tunnel could not be wired from the inside. There always was a risk that the Shaitans may discover the sensors and get spooked.

  The mouth of the tunnel was being monitored instead by spiders. The spiders were relaying their information on long hair thin, kilometers long wires to avoid radio transmission. In these winding tunnels, radio transmission didn’t carry too far in any case.

  It took the Shaitans just a few minutes to dig through the plug. Two Shaitans entered the tunnel and went about 50 meters inside before they stopped. The spiders had retreated far behind a bend in the tunnel to ensure that the infrared heat signature of the spiders was not visible.

  One of the many spiders then found a niche in the walls and embedded itself inside the niche. It then turned itself off almost completely, leaving just enough power on to go into standby mode. The wires of the spider were withdrawn. The spider would sleep till it needed to be awoken to gather intelligence, and from here on it would operate wirelessly, transmitting its data within a limited range, which could only be relayed if another spider was within that range.

  Effectively the spider could communicate only in a daisy chained manner with the command HQ. The spider turned cold, almost immediately due the extreme cold on the surface of the moon. It would now be invisible to IR as the Shaitans passed it. As the spiders retreated, they left one of their kind at strategically placed niches, where they could be awoken at a later time to provide real time intelligence on what the Shaitans were doing inside the tunnel.

  Soon there were more Shaitans inside the tunnels. The tunnels forked and merged into a complex system, which slowly meandered their way towards the Shackleton base. All of the tunnels led to dead ends, having been plugged four and a half billion years ago by a cooling Moon. Only two tunnel forks led to the outside surface. One of them led directly through the Shackleton base to the outside.

  Alex was keeping his eyes on the right hand top figure on the console. It displayed a count of the number of Shaitans currently inside the tunnel. Once the initial Shaitans had passed them by, the spiders had crept back and started operating in low power stealth mode along the tunnels. Now that the Shaitans were inside and had observed no threat or anything suspicious, it was hoped that they would not notice a spider embedded in a niche operating on extremely low power.

  Alex literally had his fingers on the console screen. At the first sign of panic or alarm from the Shaitans, he would pull the trigger and capture as many Shaitans as he could. At that moment, eight Shaitans were inside the tunnels and they seemed to be fanning out in geometrical progression, doubling their number every time. It appeared that every time the advance scouts gave a ‘clear’ call, the number of Shaitans in the tunnels doubled. The new entrants would take up the place of the advance scouts, while the advance scouts would venture forward.

  Alex’ guess was on target, when the count jumped from 8 to 16 and then to 32. This was already turning out to be a good. Alex just hoped that their luck held and a lot more Shaitans entered those tunnels. “Advance Shaitan scouts nearing exhibit 1.” Alex heard over his com. ‘Exhibit 1’ was the first piece of human artefact that had been deliberately left lying in the tunnels for the Shaitan to find. This was going to be a crucial turning point and a litmus test.

  The marines had installed their first fixed sensor at this point. From this point onwards, humans were not trying to hide their presence. Quite the opposite. So having a fixed piece of equipment discovered from this point onwards would not harm the human strategy in any way.

  The sensor picked up the IR image of the Shaitan as it came across the small metal screw. Alex watched tensely on his console. Would the Shaitan notice such a small piece of human debris? There was money at stake as Marines had tak
en wagers on whether the Shaitans would detect such a small object in a dark tunnel. The Marines who bet against the Shaitans lost.

  The Shaitan scout stopped and put one of its limbs on the spot where the screw was located. It was clear that the Shaitan had not seen the screw, which was cold and dark as the background. It groped a few times before it set the end of its limb on the screw. Shaitans did not pick up stuff to inspect it. They had no use for such mannerisms, for they had no eyes to bring the object near. The primary sense used by the Shaitans was touch and taste, and their suit had sensory extensions to enable them to taste objects while suited.

  The Shaitan stood stationary for several minutes after having tasted the screw. Alex’s hands started to ache, as he held his hand over the button tensely. If the Shaitan bolted towards the exit, or his mates further behind did, then he would slam the button. Alex heaved a sigh of relief when the Shaitan did not bolt for the exit. Instead three more Shaitans joined the advance scout, and the four of them started proceeding inwards into the tunnels again, but this time more slowly than before.

  It took the four Shaitan scouts almost 25 minutes before they reached ‘Exhibit 2’. Exhibit 2 was a medium sized screw driver, unmistakable as anything other than a tool, and the intelligent Shaitans would easily be able to figure out its purpose. The number of advance scouts did not increase this time. The four scouts continued inward after waiting for some time at the point of discovery of Exhibit 2, probably reporting back to their commander.

  As the humans would learn later. Up until that point, the Shaitans were still under the impression that they were entering a Ka-let habitat. A screw and a screw driver is a universal tool across the galaxy. The next exhibit that the Shaitans would encounter however, would leave no doubts in the minds of the Shaitans about which species’ nest they were entering.