Gerald had started chatting with people gathered in the hall as he lost interest in the seemingly static picture when he heard someone shout “Super Earth!” Gerald was not familiar with the term ‘Super Earth’, but obviously the scientists were, for they turned to the main screen and gave a collective gasp. Gerald turned to the screen and noticed a dotted line circle had been drawn by the computer close to the gas giant Beta Shaitan.
Obviously the computer had sensed the presence of a moon of Beta Shaitan, which as yet was too faint to be visible to the human eye. Gerald could not find anything special in the depiction of the moon, which should warrant such gasps. They expected to find moons around Beta Shaitan, and they found one. It didn’t look anything different from the several moons that they had detected around Alpha Shaitan.
Gerald turned to Monsieur Poulin, who had been camped in this hall now for several days, to interpret what all the fuss was about. Poulin reluctantly tore his eyes away from the screen and said. “The fact that we are even being able to see it at this distance is amazing, Admiral. We should not be able to see a moon at this distance yet, not till we reach much closer. It means that moon is huge, and monster sized moon!”
“Oh… I see…” Gerald said disappointed. He had expected something more dramatic.
“No you don’t seen mon Admiral. That is not even half of it. You see the outline the computer has drawn, it is not a depiction, but the actual size! Normally the moons of a gas giant are so small, that even in this giant screen, they would only be a pixel or two wide, so the computers draw an outline bigger than the moon actually is, so that we can see the positions of the moon properly.
Check the estimated diameter of that moon Admiral, it is almost twice that of Earth. We could fit 6 to 7 Earths inside that moon! We don’t have the mass of the moon yet, but you can bet it will be heavy, probably with many times the gravity of Earth. Such planets and moons tend to capture a thicker atmosphere than Earth. It has all the classic symptoms of a Super Earth!
We scientists have been observing them for a hundred years around distant stars. They were the best candidates for containing alien life, before we discovered the Shaitans. We never thought that we could even get close to one. Now we have one right in front of our eyes!” Monsieur Poulin said in animated excitement.
Gerald could now understand the excitement of the scientists. They had found one of their holy grails, but from a military standpoint, it threw up some intriguing questions if it was the home world of the Shaitans. He kept those questions to himself till it could be determined whether it was indeed the home world, and how strong its gravity was on that moon.
It took another 10 minutes before the Beagle was close enough to get a close enough view of the Beta Shaitan system to start seeing other moons of the gas giant. The computer was keeping a count of the moons and classifying them. The tally as of now stood at 6 large enough moons to be seen from this distance including the ‘Super Earth’.
Monsieur Poulin informed Gerald, that even from the preliminary analysis, it was clear that this gas giant was very different in its composition and probably origin from Alpha Shaitan. Scientist would have their hands full for many years analyzing the torrent of data that the Beagle was sending. The Beagle didn’t have a true AI, since the humans had not been able to create one yet, but the set of complex rules programmed into the Beagle determined that the ‘Super Earth’ would be body of maximum interest.
As a result the Beagle had concentrated a large amount of its sensor assets on the measurement of this one body, including the main high gain telescope. The Beagle was not heading straight into the Beta Shaitan system. That would have given it away. Instead the Beagle was going to pass the Beta Shaitan system at a distance of 1 AU at the closest point.
1 AU is the distance between Earth and the Sun, so it is a long enough distance in a dark region of space, where even an advanced civilization should not be able to detect a small, stealth coated, dark spacecraft whizzing by. Yet it was close enough for the telescopes to get a detailed view of the ‘Super Earth’. Finally Gerald saw something visually which was dramatic, and which took his breath away.
The image of the ‘Super Earth’ filled up half of the large screen, and the dark surface of the moon was visible in detail. The surface was no longer completely dark in this detail. Parts of the surface were covered in clouds with an orange tint. Unlike on Earth, the clouds were lit up, not by light from the sun above, but from the hell fires raging below on the surface. They made the clouds seem to shift shape and dance around.
The visible surface was a stark pattern of black and white dotted with orange fires raging all around the surface. The surface looked like a surreal psychedelic painting of a demented demon. Even the logical minded scientists in the hall stood stunned, gaping at the shocking and yet strangely beautiful moon. Gerald heard Monsieur Poulin said something in what sounded like Italian or Latin, which surprised him, for Monsieur Poulin was French.
Gerald tore his eyes from the screen to stare at the elderly scientist to ensure that he was fine. “Pardon me, Monsieur.” Gerald asked.
“That is Dante’s Inferno mon Admiral… that is Dante’s vision of Hell. I wish Dante had been here to see that we have found his ‘Il Inferno’ 800 years after he wrote about it!” Monsieur Poulin said softly, there was a hint of tears in his eyes.
Gerald did finally read that report a few days later, annotated with an executive summary, which he wanted to avoid by being there at the time of the discovery. Unfortunately the raw inputs coming from the scientists were too technical and abstruse for him to understand well. After reading the report, he now had a fair idea of the Beta Shaitan system and the spectacular planet ‘Dante’.
The ‘Super Earth’ was no longer being classified as a moon, but rather as a planet. The Beta Shaitan system was officially being classified as a ‘Twin planet’ system. A new form of classification which was creating a lot of heated debate and passionate controversy in the astronomy community. Trust scientist to be so passionate about the classification of a piece of rock a third of a light year away!
Monsieur Poulin’s reference to Dante’s Inferno had struck a chord, and the planet was now generally referred as Dante, although officially it was still classified by a long number. The reason it was classified as a twin planet was because Dante made Beta Shaitan wobble measurably.
All bodies in space orbit each other. It is not just Earth which is orbiting the Sun, but also the Sun that is orbiting Earth. In reality, both Earth and Sun are moving around their common center of gravity known by the scientists as the ‘barycenter’. However the Sun is so massive compared to the Earth, that their common center of gravity (barycenter) is almost the same as the center of the Sun, so for all intents and purposes, the sun is orbiting around its center while the Earth is also orbiting around Sun’s center.
If however someone were to measure very accurately, they would find that even tiny Earth makes the Sun wobble, albeit very minutely. In the case of Beta Shaitan and Dante, it was a bit different. While Alpha Shaitan was massive, the mass of Dante was not insignificant compared to the gas giant.
As a result the barycenter of their combined mass was not near the center of Alpha Shaitan, but some way off the center. It was a point about a quarter of the distance from the core to the surface of Alpha Shaitan, around which Alpha Shaitan was orbiting. This gave the gas giant an easily measurable wobble.
21 moons had been counted orbiting the system excluding Dante, which was no longer considered a moon. Three of these moons were fairly large to be of particular interest, and two of those moons BS-c and BS-d had space elevators on them. There was no elevator observed on Dante, but that was not surprising. At 2.1 times the gravity of Earth, it would be a bitch to put a space elevator on Dante.
It was still possible that Dante had a space elevator, because one half of the planet had not been observed, but most people doubted it. Despite its larger gravity than Earth, the planet Dante was surpri
singly low in mass compared to its size. It was 6.8 times Earth’s size but only 2.2 times Earth’s mass, resulting in a planet with far lower density than Earth, and hence a gravity only 2.1 times that of Earth, which was not as oppressive as expected of ‘Super Earths’.
The surface texture of Dante could be partly explained. The surface of Dante was active volcanically. Dante also seemed to have tectonic plates like Earth. It was at the boundary of those tectonic plates that a profusion of volcanoes seemed to have erupted, much like Earth’s own ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’, but scaled up a hundred times in volcanic activity.
These ‘Rings of fire’ as seen from space gave Dante the impression of the visions of hell exactly as described in the original Dante’s literary work of ‘The Inferno’. The volcanoes poured out lava and turned the otherwise white surface covered with ice into a black surface. The regions where there were no volcanoes, cooled down and ice reclaimed those parts and the surface became smooth white again.
The surprising thing was that not all points of light on the surface were volcanoes. There were random pits on the surface which were belching out fire and acrid smoke. These huge pits were burning gases like Methane, Propane and other assortment of organic gases that were highly combustible. How such gases were being produced under the ground was still a mystery, but what was clear that for it to burn, there must be oxygen in the atmosphere.
There was ample oxygen in the atmosphere as measured by the spectrographs. There was 13% oxygen in the dense atmosphere of Dante. While that might sound low by Earth standards, the atmosphere of Dante on the surface was estimated to be over three times denser than Earth, so in effect the amount of oxygen available on the surface was twice that available on Earth.
That didn’t mean that a human could breathe on the surface of Dante, for the atmosphere would most likely be poisonous to humans. The atmosphere contained trace elements expelled from the volcanoes of every conceivable group of elements, from cyanides, to phosphorous, arsenic etc. It was a veritable witch’s brew from hell.
Still, the very fact that there was so much oxygen in the atmosphere indicated that it must be produced and renewed by something. Otherwise oxygen would have been consumed in those hell fires a long time ago. The only source of oxygen generation known to humans was organic life. What that source could be was not known, but it could not be the Shaitans, who just like humans did not produce oxygen, but consumed it.
The fact that there were Shaitans on Dante was irrefutable. There were too many signs of habitation leaked out from the surface. There were permanent artificial structures that could be made out in certain areas, and despite the best efforts of shielding electromagnetic radiations by the Shaitans, there was a certain amount of EM that leaked out of machinery at a low level, that no civilization could hide if one went close to the planet.
Surprisingly the Shaitans preferred to inhabit close to those volcanoes and fire pits, rather than far away from them. The density of artificial structures at a range of 20-30 Km from the volcanoes was far higher than those a few hundred kilometers from the volcanoes. Beyond that the scientists had made a lot of geological and atmospheric conjectures and hypotheses, which Gerald was not interested in right now.
What interested Gerald was the report from the ‘space rock’ probes that had been released some time before the Beagle had entered the Beta Shaitan system. The probes had been aimed such that it would pass through the heart of the Beta Shaitan system spread out on either side of Beta Shaitan to cover the expected moons orbiting the gas giant.
BS-c and BS-d moons were the main ship construction facilities of Beta Shaitan. That much was obvious from the amount of construction activity that could be observed. Dante itself had many satellites, and orbital facilities as well as ships orbiting it, but no concentrated orbital activity typical of ship construction. This made sense. It would be incredibly expensive to raise raw material from Dante when there was no space elevator to drag things out of that deep gravity well.
It was hard for the probes to distinguish between the types of ships parked or orbiting the shipyards and Dante because of the speed and distance at which they whizzed past, but there were 26 ships counted that were either Shaitan warships or Shaitan troop carriers, or some similarly large ship. Gerald would have been happy if that was the end of the story.
The scariest news came to him a few days after reading the scientists’ reports on the Beta Shaitan system. It came not from Beagle’s survey of the Beta Shaitan system, but from a purely scientific survey being done by the astronomers as part of their astronomy mission. After all that was the ostensible task of the Beagle probe.
One of the successes of the Alpha Shaitan campaign till date had been the capture of some of the central data repositories of the Shaitans on Jehannum, those that the retreating Shaitans had not been able to wipe out. From those hacked data repositories, humans now knew the exact coordinates of each and every one of the 12 Shaitan worlds.
It was now known that Alpha Shaitan was the furthest and newest colony of the Shaitans. ‘New’ being a relative term, for Alpha Shaitan was settled two and a half million years ago, when Alpha Shaitan was on the other side of Sun in direct line with the Alpha Centauri system. At that time, it was settled from Beta Shaitan, which was just a short distance away.
Unfortunately for Alpha Shaitan, its orbit around the sun had put it at the other end of the Sun at the present moment, cut off from the rest of worlds of the Shaitan, which made it impossible to send help from other Shaitan worlds in a reasonable time to Alpha Shaitan. Probably that was the reason why no other Shaitan world had come to the aid of Alpha Shaitan. The very orbit, which had brought it close to the Sun and Earth, enabling it to discover humans, had also been the cause of doom for Alpha Shaitan.
Beta Shaitan suffered no such predicament. Although it was also orbiting the sun at a further distance with an even longer orbital period than Alpha Shaitan, currently it was in the direction of the Alpha Centauri, where rest of the Shaitan worlds exist. Help however was not that easy even for Beta Shaitan to receive, for it had drifted to a distance of almost half a light year from ‘World # 8’, which was the nearest Shaitan world, from where ‘World # 11’ aka Beta Shaitan had been settled.
Alpha and Beta Shaitan were the only two worlds of the Shaitans that orbited the Sun in the proper sense of the word. In many ways these were the first two settled worlds of the Shaitans in the Solar System, in their slow migration from the Alpha-Beta-Proxima Centauri triple star system into the Solar system. ‘World # 8’ was probably in the gravitational influence of the Sun, since the Sun’s influence was thought to extend to an extent of at least 1 light year, probably as much as 2 light years.
At 0.81 light years from the sun ‘World # 8’, if it was under the gravitational influence of the Sun, it was at best nominal. ‘World # 8’ was probably not orbiting the Sun in the same way as Alpha and Beta Shaitan were, in the plane of the solar system. It was probably was part of the spherical cloud known as the Oort cloud that surrounded the Sun at that distance. It had to have a small drifting orbital velocity, to keep it from falling into the Sun, but it would be so small that World # 8 would appear remain in the same region for millions of years.
The frustrating thing for the scientists and the military alike was that despite knowing the coordinates of all the Shaitan worlds, there was no way of observing them. The Beagle had the best chance of observing another Shaitan world other than Alpha and Beta Shaitan. From its current position, the Beagle would be just half a light year away from World # 8, and just at the edge of visibility, if this world had a reasonably bright gas giant as its host.
So the Beagle turned its telescopes towards the direction of World # 8. Before it could even begin to locate the gas giant, it was blinded by the brilliance of another source of light emanating from that direction. Approaching from World # 8 towards Beta Shaitan were 128 distinct points of light burning bright. These were the distinct and unmistakable signature of the de
celeration burn of 128 Shaitan warships!
Chapter 27
Turning Tide
Amundsen Base, Jehannum, Alpha Shaitan System
August, 2116
History has proven that in a situation of long term military stalemate, often the unlikeliest of events breaks the status quo. So was the case with the Alpha Shaitan campaign, or more specifically the siege of Jehannum. Like many such breakthroughs that had changed the course of a war, this one was also not recognized as the thing that finally decided the war, until many years after the war.
Humans were well entrenched on Jehannum. Starting out from the beachhead the Marines had made on the North Pole, the humans had captured many scattered sectors of the Shaitan home world. Some sectors were always in contention changing hands many times between the humans and the Shaitans. However if one took a long distance view of the siege of Jehannum, it would be obvious to any General, that the two warring forces were essentially in a state of long term stalemate.
It was clear that the Shaitans were not winning this war. They were decimated in space. Humans dominated the Alpha Shaitan space completely. There was no hope of regaining some of the sectors lost to the humans in a ground war without substantial support from space. The only hope for the Shaitans in space would come if their brethren from other Shaitan worlds came to their rescue. It was unlikely in the short run. It would take over 4 decades for a Shaitan warship to reach from Beta Shaitan to Alpha Shaitan.
There was no longer any hope for the Shaitans that they would be able to wear down the humans by stretching their supply line so far from home. Humans had established a robust supply line in the form of the ‘Mule Train’ and regular new addition to the ranks of fighting men and women in the form of ‘Settler Marines’. Far more significantly, humans had started producing primary and secondary manufactured goods in the Alpha Shaitan system. Humans were far from self-sufficient, but life was getting more comfortable for the humans in Alpha Shaitan, as it was getting less expensive.
Retribution (Shaitan Wars) Page 50
