Retribution (Shaitan Wars)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  What could be inferred was that through some punishment device attached or some medical procedure administered, the captured Shaitans were made docile and obedient. The text of Fraternity refers to this process as ‘losing of the soul’. The specific word used over and over in the text for the process is Ka-Baal.

  The only reference to the physical attributes of the Ka that can be inferred is that physically the Ka were a lot weaker than the Shaitans. There are passages that mention that the Ka wanted the Shaitans as slaves because of the heavy physical work that could be done by the Shaitans but not by the Ka.

  Intelligent, strong, and completely controllable was a deadly combination of attributes which the Ka could not resists, and thus began a thriving trade in Shaitan slaves. Within 5000 cycles, which is about 50 years of the Ka building their first mining post on the Shaitan moon, tens of thousands of slaves were being shipped to the Ka moon. It is not clear even to Fraternity, how long this slave trade continued, for he just mentions that it happened for hundreds of years.

  At the time of the ‘Great Awakening’ there were half as many Shaitans on the Ka moon as Ka themselves, doing all kinds of menial work. Fraternity’s text disdainfully mentions that by the time of the ‘Great Awakening’, the Ka had grown so used to not working that they had forgotten how to work, and forgotten how to even think.

  The ‘Great Awakening’ did not happen in the Shaitan origin world. It happened amongst the enslaved Shaitans in the Ka home world. At the core of the ‘Great Awakening’ of the Shaitans was a simple idea, which the humans had developed even before they had developed technology – Religion.

  It was a story that was eerily similar to a human tale about the Israelites and the ‘Exile of Babylon’. Israelites had been defeated, exiled and enslaved around 650 BCE by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. They were subsequently freed many years later and allowed to return to their homeland by the Persian king Cyrus the Great, when he defeated Babylon.

  During their long years in exile and enslavement, other than their hardships, the Israelites had a fundamental problem about their own religion that they needed to address. If the gods of the Israelites were supposed to be better and stronger than the gods of Babylon, then how come the Israelites were defeated and enslaved while the Babylonians were victorious? This fundamentally contradictory position had to be squared.

  Some creative theologians amongst the Israelites resolved that contradiction with an equally contrarian logic. First they concentrated on one primary god Yahweh. Then in essence they concluded that Yahweh was always more powerful and omniscient. Yahweh was in fact punishing the Israelites for straying from the true path, and the Babylonians were the instrument of punishment for Yahweh.

  In one fell swoop, not only could the Israelites reconcile why they had lost, but it made the gods of Babylonians look inferior, since they were only the tools of Yahweh. Thus from the exiled slaves, returning back to their homeland was born a revision of Judaism that slowly transformed from a polytheistic to a monotheistic religion that endured not just as one of the oldest practiced religion but also spawned two of the largest followed religions of the world.

  The slave Shaitans on the home moon of Ka went through a similar transformation, but with a twist. The Shaitans had no religion to begin with, so they had to first invent a religion. They did invent a religion, but a unique one from a human perspective.

  The religion of the Shaitans didn’t have a god. Instead it only had an anti-god, a form of Satan. And this anti-god had a name – Ka. Obviously the slave Shaitans had initially chosen the name to represent the evil species that had enslaved them.

  Over the millions of years of practice of the Shaitan religion, the name Ka to represent the abstract concept of evil and the anti-god which embodied that evil, while the actual species that it had been named after faded into a haze in the background consciousness of the Shaitans. The species started being describes as the ‘spawns of Ka’, as has every subsequent species that the Shaitans have encountered.

  The religion of the slave Shaitans had some simple and basic tenets. It said that the Shaitans were the ‘chosen species’ in the universe. Curiously it did not mention ‘chosen’ by whom. There was no mention of a god or any supreme being. The Shaitan religion actually gave evolutionary logic to justify that the Shaitan species had evolved as the fittest species to survive in this universe. The religion did not however bother to give specific reasons why this should be so. One of the cultural reasons why the Shaitans did not have a name for themselves was because they were the ‘chosen beings’ or simply the ‘beings’.

  According to this new religion, the Shaitans were enslaved because Ka throws challenges at the ‘chosen beings’ from time to time, and it was the holy duty of the Shaitans to overcome this challenge to prove themselves worthy of the title of the ‘chosen beings’.

  The religion gave examples of predators that the Shaitans had faced as primitive people who would prey on them when the Shaitans were not the dominant species on their moon. The predators’ example was very similar to the Lions and Hyenas that primitive humans would have faced on the savannahs of Africa, when we were struggling to survive.

  The slave Shaitans pointed out that the Shaitans had been thrown those challenges of an existential nature by Ka. It had threatened to make the Shaitan species extinct, and the ‘chosen species’ had overcome those challenges to survive and rightfully claim its place as the ‘chosen species’.

  Now that the Shaitans had become an advanced species with no natural threat on their own moon, Ka had thrown a new challenge at them with an even more advanced species from another moon. It was now up to the Shaitans to prove again that they were worthy of being called the ‘chosen beings’ by overcoming this threat.

  The logic was simple enough and well capable of lifting the morale of an oppressed species to stand up and fight. According to the notes of Fraternity, the Ka control mechanism, which made the Shaitans lose their souls was not geared to handle the ‘Great Awakening’. The human interpretation was that whatever punishment device or drug that was being administered was not strong enough to overcome the emotional strength that the Shaitans received from their newly minted religion.

  Unlike the Israelites, the Shaitans were not freed peacefully by a benign king. The Shaitans freed themselves and did so violently. The Ka had been lulled into a false sense of security after having the Shaitans as docile and obedient slaves for hundreds of years. The Shaitan slaves had learnt almost everything that their masters knew, for the Shaitans were also an intelligent species and on an evolutionary scale almost as advanced as the Ka.

  The Shaitans moved freely without restraints within the homes and work places of the Ka. The Shaitans were physically stronger and now knew all about weapons and how to use them. The slave revolt was coordinated and from the inside. The Ka didn’t stand a chance.

  As the text of Fraternity mentions, within 10 cycles which is just about a month, the Shaitans had control over the entire moon of Ka, and every Ka that the Shaitans could find was shredded to pieces. The Shaitan religion, philosophy and doctrine had made its first ‘extermination’ and also its first conquest. The enslaved Shaitans had prevailed and successfully performed their ‘holy duty’. Their religion and beliefs only got reinforced.

  The moon of Ka became Shaitan home world 2. It took the freed slaves over five decades to return back to their origin world. While the text of Fraternity mentions this delay as ‘worthy preparations for the great leap into the void’, it was probably due to the fact that the Shaitans had to figure out the Ka space travel mechanisms, since they had killed every Ka that knew how to launch and navigate in space.

  The text in a similar tone glosses over the various failures and accidents in their attempt to reach space and land on their origin world as ‘test of Ka eventually overcome by our beings’. All the time that the freed slave Shaitans were trying to reach their origin world, they kept on multiplying on the Ka moon and established themselv
es as a well running and strong economy. Their new found religion gave the freed Shaitans a sense of purpose and organization.

  By the time the freed Shaitans returned back to their origin world, the stranded Ka miners had died out without support from their home world. So the returning Shaitans who were not very large in number, since they had only one functioning ship, were relieved not to find the expected resistance. The returnees however found trouble from unexpected quarters – their own beings.

  In the texts of Fraternity, it mentions that the ‘ignorant beings’ of their origin world were incapable of understanding the message of the ‘Great Awakening’ however hard the returning Shaitans tried. It was not that the ‘ignorant beings’ did not try to understand.

  The text specifically mentions that the returning Shaitans spent cycles with the ‘ignorant beings’ in a Mingle, but try as they may the returnees could not get their message across. The ‘ignorant beings’ in turn accused the returnees of being in a state of Ka-Baal, and hence the returnees were spreading this unintelligible gibberish. This enraged the returnees.

  Human scholars have speculated that it is possible that the slave Shaitans may have either been subtly genetically modified to try to make them better slaves, or that the few hundred years of isolation between the two groups of Shaitans may have cause a slight genetic drift, since one of the properties of Shaitan DNA is the ability of rapid mutation to adapt to new conditions. The Ka moon would definitely have been a new condition for the slave Shaitans.

  This slight genetic difference between the two groups may have wired their brains subtly differently, which is why one group had a high proclivity for religion, while the other group was incapable of understanding it. Otherwise, the original Shaitans should have discovered religion a long time ago during the process of the development into an intelligent species, just like humans had.

  In the end the religious zealotry of the small group of returnees became too much for the Shaitans on the origin world to bear, and these returnees were sent to the liquefaction chamber because their brains were deemed to have become nonfunctional, as is the way of the Shaitans. The killing of those first messenger Shaitans carrying the message of religion from World 2 was a red letter day in Shaitan history.

  What followed was an unequal struggle over centuries between the Shaitans left behind on their original planet, who were at a lower technological level, and the freed slave Shaitans of World 2 who had found religion and with a new strength of conviction and organization. More importantly the Shaitans of World 2 had access to better technology and could travel across space to reach their origin world and hit out at their stay-at-home cousins.

  The period of this struggle is referred in the notes of Fraternity as the ‘Great Purification’. It was a religious language to couch the truth, which was that it was the ‘Great Purge’ and the genocide of the original Shaitans on their origin world. The only reason that this process took hundreds of years was because the religious Shaitans had to come over from World 2 by space. They still did not have technology to build huge ships which could transport hundreds of thousands of troops to wipe out the millions on the origin planet.

  Slowly but surely as the Shaitans of World 2 were able to transport more troops and as their technology got better to build more and bigger ships, they were able to wipe out the original Shaitans over a period of a few hundred years. Thus began the reign of the modern Shaitans who have since then remained essentially unchanged, although 66 million years would have caused minor evolutionary differences.

  Being evolutionarily static for 66 million years is not unprecedented for a successful design. On Earth the crocodilian family is a very successful branch of animals, which as essentially remained unchanged of 120 million years. Same is the case with Sharks which have retained the same body design for over 400 million years. The sharks were here much before the dinosaurs, and they continue to be here much after them, because the shark body plan is one of the most successful designs created by evolution. Same was the case with the Shaitans.

  Like all intelligent creatures, the Shaitans are curious, but unlike humans, they are not intrepid explorers who go out to seek the unknown just for the heck of it. The Shaitans go out to explore both in space as well as in scientific research on the basis of some need or a threat perception. So the Shaitans didn’t go out seeking new worlds and new planets after becoming a spacefaring species, like the humans would do.

  Over the millions of years, the Shaitans did however come across a myriad of alien species, some intelligent and others just sentient but not intelligent. The Shaitans came across most of these species either by accident or due to circumstances of celestial mechanics. In the case of Ka-let for example, they discovered the drive signature of one of their ships, while in the case of humans the Shaitans discovered their radio signals, so to that extent, both these species were discovered by accident.

  The other way Shaitans discovered new world was when the gas giants of their home system would come close to another gas giant orbiting the star. Usually it would come close enough for the Shaitan observatories to see the dark gas giants through their IR sensors. The Shaitans would then embark on a journey of discovery to the other gas giant, which would typically be close enough to be reached within a few years’ journey.

  This is how the Shaitans had progressed in space conquering one dark gas giant after another. The origin world of the Shaitans was a gas giant in the Oort cloud of the triple star system of Alpha-Beta-Proxima Centauri. Most gas giants in orbit around stars far out in the Oort cloud follow eccentric orbits, which take them fairly close to the stars and then very far out to the boundaries of the neighboring stars.

  The Shaitan spread out in space following the eccentric orbits of their gas giants around their stars. On their way they found worlds and alien species, which they exterminated as their holy duty to meet up to the challenges thrown up by Ka. All but two species that the Shaitans exterminated were very primitive compared to the Shaitans and were a pushover. They weak species were all referred generically as ‘spawns of Ka’, no specific name of those species was mentioned in the records.

  The two species named in the records, which put up a tough resistance to the Shaitans were the Ka-let and Ka-Sthaal. Not much is written in the records of Fraternity about the Ka-Sthaal except that it was a species that the Shaitans encountered very early in their 66 million year old history. Within the first hundred thousand years in fact. Technologically the Ka-Sthaal were behind the Shaitans, but from the tone of words used for them, the Shaitans obviously had high respects for their fighting abilities.

  It was while trying to defeat the entrenched Ka-Sthaal enemy that the Shaitans invented Ka-ma-khya. The Shaitans were not being able to put down the planet despite huge losses on both sides. The enemy was extremely strong willed as well as being able to regenerate their population very fast. Even nuclear bombardments of the planet did little to affect the Ka-Sthaal, who like most creatures evolved on small moons lived underground.

  The first attempt at Ka-ma-khya did not work out for the Shaitans. They changed their style of Ka-ma-khya and got it right only in the second attempt, when they figured out that a ship traveling at a few percent the speed of light can cause huge devastation to the planet. The first attempt at Ka-ma-khya had been far more grandiose. It had attempted to crack the moon itself.

  The Shaitans had taken an asteroid floating in the Oort cloud and attached a large number of ion plasma engines to the 11 Km rock. Then over a period of over 30 years they had accelerated the huge mass of rock aiming it at the moon of the Ka-Sthaal. The theory was that such a large mass with a reasonably large momentum would crack the crust of the small moon, gushing out incredible amount of lava, which would wipe all life on the moon.

  It is incredibly difficult to steer such a large piece of rock accurately enough to hit a small moon moving in space. The Shaitans found this out the hard way, when the large rock missed the Ka-Sthaal moon by a whisker and continu
ed onward into space. A single line from the records of Fraternity, set the humans abuzz with speculation. It said – “In a million years the wayward rock would reach the heart of the Kalshuk system and be either captured by the star itself or one of its planets.”

  That was 66 million years ago! We all know what happened with a certain rock measuring approximately 11 Km in length 65 million years ago, and what it did to the dinosaurs. It is entirely possible that the asteroid that hit the Earth was a different rock, but the timing and the size were too much of a coincidence.

  If the Shaitans were the cause of the rock that hit Earth, then it would be a divine irony. It was that rock that wiped out the dinosaurs and enabled mammals to rule the Earth. It was now one of those mammals which was threatening the Shaitans. In a way Mother Earth has reached out after 65 million years to avenge the affront.

  The Shaitans went about their business hopping from gas giant to gas giant till they met the Ka-let. The Shaitans had reached their first star – Proxima Centauri, for the Ka-let planet orbited that star. In the meanwhile migration was also happening on the other side of their expanding domain. When one of the Shaitan worlds reached close to another gas giant, and hopped on to it, the Shaitans did not initially realize that they had hopped on to another star system altogether!

  The Shaitans had made their first interstellar hop. The new world settled was World 8 and the Shaitans soon realized that it was not orbiting the Alpha-Beta-Proxima Centauri system, but it was orbiting Sol, or the Kalshuk system (as the Shaitans know our solar system). The worlds of the Shaitans keep in touch with each other through tight laser beams or focused microwave, but travel between worlds is rare due to the great distances involved.

  What keeps the Shaitan people together is their religion and the shared purpose it gives them. With that shared purpose in mind, the Shaitan World 8 continued its missionary colonizing work as it came close to other dark gas giant over the millions of years in the Oort cloud of the solar system. Not every gas giant has habitable or desirable moons, but eventually they found one. This one was christened World 11 or as known to humans – Beta Shaitan.