Retribution (Shaitan Wars)

by Sudipto Majumdar

  Whatever the Russian might say, it was cold outside. She was Polish and no stranger to cold, but she was glad when they entered the lava tubes and the temperature rose a bit. Mary was the only human who was not a tech-head in the entourage, and for her benefit, the Marines carried hand held electric lights. Mary carried one herself. The enhanced Marines could walk in the pitch darkness of the cave almost as surefootedly as a Shaitan.

  After nearly two kilometers of walking through the lava tubes, some of which was treacherous due to the steep incline, Mary entered the main magma chamber of this dead volcano. She knew that she was in a large chamber because her powerful lights no longer found any walls to shine their beams on. It was only when a Marine handed her a VR goggles could she really appreciate the stunning size of the chamber.

  The roof surprisingly was not very high, just about 100 meters or so, but the expanse of the chamber spread in every direction for as far as the VR goggles could project, probably over a kilometer. A few hundred meters from the entrance was the observation post, which was essentially a set of empty containers that had been daisy chained to form a temporary habitat.

  “Welcome to Nova Novosibirsk doctor. Someday this is going to be a huge mushroom farm, although I am going to be growing white asparagus. I am partial to those.” Said the cheerful Marine.

  As the two marines carting the Shaitan boxes entered the huge chamber, everyone turned around to hear the racket inside the boxes. The Shaitans had been quiet all the way through the journey. The Shaitans put themselves in a natural hibernation state whenever they experience an extended period of inactivity. Something had woken up the Shaitans and they seemed extremely agitated. Unfortunately for them, there wasn’t too much space in the box for them to unfold their body.

  “What the hell has gotten into those demonic spawns of Satan? Vasili get them to the post quickly. The Lieutenant will have my hide if those bastards die of suffocation inside those cages. We will put them in their restraining harnesses and let them out.” Sgt. Popov shouted.

  It was easier said than done trying to pacify the Shaitans and put them in their restraining harnesses. The Shaitans seem to have gone mad for some reason. After the smaller Type-A Shaitan badly gashed one of the Marines with its natural claws, all the Marines procured armor from inside the forward post and got into them. It took 8 large Russian Marines to subdue and put on the restraints on each of the Shaitan one by one.

  Mary stitched up the wounds of the injured Marine, and then came out of the containers to observe the two Shaitans who were chained outside. The Shaitans had calmed down a bit, only a bit. They were still trying to break their shackles. This was not a typical behavior of a captured Shaitan. Mary had seen enough of them to know.

  Shaitans were more instinctive than humans in some respect, and yet less instinctive in others. A shackled Shaitan would instinctively test the strength of its shackles for a few minutes, trying every technique possible, but once it was clear that it could not break those shackles, it would never again try to break the shackles. Some logical part of a Shaitan brain figured out that those shackles were unbreakable, and after that it never showed any emotional outburst of trying to break them by brute force.

  Humans on the other hand, would have tried to break their shackles with every emotional outburst, even though the logical part of their brain knew that it was not possible to break them with brute force. In that respect the Shaitans were far more logical than the humans, and yet these two Shaitans were trying to break their shackles like some mindless beasts. Clearly something more than met the eye was at work here.

  Mary had left the translator program on before she went inside to tend to the wounded soldier. Since the two Shaitans could not touch each other, any communication that the two made would be on ultrasound, which the translator program would try to interpret. The larger Type-B Shaitan had not said anything that the program could interpret, but the smaller Type-A Shaitan had been repeating the same words over and over again. “It will not happen so soon… keep your mind and soul within you… try to reduce contact…”

  Whether the Shaitan was saying that to the other Shaitan or to itself was not clear. From what Mary had been told by experts about Shaitans, they do not talk loudly to themselves, so this must be instructions for the other Shaitan. What the hell did the Shaitan mean? “Try to reduce contact.”

  It was then that Mary looked carefully at the Shaitans. There was a method to their madness. They were grappling their restraints connected to the wall of the containers, not so much to pull them as to hang on to them. At any moment only one, or maximum two of the limbs of the Shaitans was touching the ground, while it tried to put as much of its weight on its chains as possible in order to reduce contact with the ground.

  So that was what it must have meant to ‘reduce contact’. Somehow the ground out there must have been bothering them. The Shaitans didn’t wear shoes or any clothing for that matter, so the dry dusty ground out here was directly in contact with the ends of their limbs. Whatever the Shaitans were afraid of, would not ‘happen so soon’ as one of them had said, but it would happen in how much time, and what would that be?

  Was the Shaitan trying to keep up the morale of the other Shaitan when he said “keep you mind and soul within you”? Or did it mean something else? The translator programs are notorious for misinterpreting the meaning of Shaitan communication. Words could mean something completely different depending on the cultural and specific contest, which the translator program would never know.

  There was only one way to find out. Ask the Shaitans. There should be no reason for these two Shaitans to be uncooperative if Mary showed concern for them and asked what was bothering them. Shaitans may be stubborn in telling any military details, and would die rather than tell anything to humans, but they never displayed petulance or personal animosity with their human captors. Such concepts were alien to them.

  When asked if they were hungry or injured, they would always reply truthfully, since it made no sense in their culture not to reply to such questions. Mary composed her question and being a Luddite in a tech-head world, had to punch it on the touch screen of her scroll. “Are you in discomfort or danger? What is the cause of this discomfort? How can I help?”

  Both the Shaitans froze for many seconds on hearing the message, which Mary herself could not hear since it was in ultrasound. After a few seconds, Mary got her reply on the screen. “In great danger we are. The ground is the weapon. Take us away from this forbidden nest.”

  Mary knew from her year struggling with Shaitan toxicology, that Shaitans did not have a word for poison. That concept was alien to them. Anything harmful was called a weapon. So most probably the Shaitan meant that the ground was somehow poisonous to them. They wanted to be taken out of this ‘forbidden nest’. What the Shaitans called this place told her a lot.

  Such a large cave would obviously be called a nest by the Shaitans, but they had recognized this one as a ‘forbidden nest’, almost certainly because of the poisonous ground. That must be the reasons why Shaitans don’t inhabit this sector. Mary pushed her luck further to find out more. She punched a further message. “Will you be in danger if I raise you up? Is the air of this forbidden nest a weapon too?”

  Pat came the reply. “Air of the forbidden nest is slow weapon, ground is fast weapon. Take us away from this forbidden nest.”

  Mary felt a rush, as she realized that she had progressed in her research in the last 5 minutes more than she had in the last one year. These Shaitans were literally telling her what poisoned them, all she had to do was question them intelligently. All these years of the Alpha Shaitan campaign meant that the humans knew a lot about the Shaitan social hierarchy, so Mary decided to use some Shaitan social engineering to trick these gullible Shaitans.

  “My Warmaster will find cause to remove you from this forbidden nest only when he knows the detailed effect the weapon in the ground and air will have on you.” Mary punched into the touchscreen. She knew that
there was no guarantee she would get a truthful answer to this question. If these had been humans, they would have lied or at least exaggerated the danger to themselves to get out of here.

  Mary knew she had hit the jackpot when she got the reply. “We will slowly lose our mind and our soul. We will become like newly spawned younglings. We will have no control over our actions, doing things without any logic.” Mary was certain that the Shaitan had not lied, because it had used the same words when talking to each other. Shaitans were not that devious to tell a lie to each other when no human was hearing, in the hope of misleading humans in case they were recording.

  Mary and her escorting Marines had to spend just 36 hours in the forbidden nest to collect samples and test neurotoxic reactions on the two Shaitan test subjects to identify the substance that would become the silver bullet literally. It was a naturally occurring salt called Bromargyrite. To the chemist it was a compound known as Silver Bromide or AgBr, an extremely light sensitive substance. To a layman in the 20th century it would have been familiar as the coating on a photo film.

  Unfortunately for the two Shaitans, the testing as well as exposure had taken its toll. By the time the Marines struggled to put them back into their boxes to be transported back, they were not that much better than vegetables. They were completely incoherent. The Shaitans would turn viciously violent at one time and the next moment would be completely docile.

  It took Dr. Mary Kramnik more than a month after returning back to her labs, to come out with a serum. It was not a truth serum as originally envisaged, but she was sure that her military bosses would not be disappointed. She had set up a demonstration for them, and she had ensured that Sarah was part of the briefing. Sarah was senior enough as a ranking Major to be part of the briefing. Mary wanted Sarah to be proud of her work.

  “Gentlemen and ladies, I am sure you know the purpose of my research, so I am not going to go into that. I have a short presentation on my research into Shaitan toxicology, and the final product here.” Mary held up a large syringe filled with a brownish liquid. “After the presentation, I will give a demonstration which I believe should satisfy the military about its usefulness.” Mary looked at the crowd of people gathered in one of the interrogation areas of the HQ at Amundsen base. The General nodded and she continued.

  “For the benefit of my peers in the medical research field who are gathered here, what I am holding here is essentially Silver Bromide, along with assorted salts and nitrides meant to speed up the dissemination of the Silver Bromide into the circulatory system of a Shaitan. So you may ask why Silver Bromide is such a silver bullet. The answer is that it is not the Silver but the Bromine that does a Shaitan in.

  Bromine is to Shaitans, what Arsenic is to humans, but in a far more insidious way. Human DNA is made out of four chemical letters ATGC, which are actually four chemical compounds, all of which have phosphorous in them. If you recollect your periodic table from school chemistry, you would know that Arsenic sits right below Phosphorous and hence has almost similar chemical properties.

  When Arsenic comes in contact with our cells, it tricks the DNA into replacing itself with the phosphorous in the DNA, which needless to say destroys the DNA of our cells, and the cell dies. In humans and all other animals and plant on Earth, Arsenic is a blunt instrument. A poison that kills every cell it comes in contact with.

  Bromine in the Shaitan poisons them in a similar manner, but the effect is a lot more subtle and insidious. The Shaitans as you know have a distributed brain, which functions as a whole only when they are efficiently connected to each other. The nerve nodes on their limbs have evolved into fairly sophisticated brains, but by themselves they are not that intelligent, but can perform almost all autonomous function. Anyone who has seen the way the limbs of a Shaitan are controlled would know.

  The main brain of the Shaitan, which is where most of the conscious will of being resides was the original brain of the primitive being from which Shaitans evolved. That main brain uses the computational capabilities of the various distributed nodes in the Shaitan body to perform as a whole.

  The way the main brain communicates and gives controlling orders to the various nodes is through a series of neurochemical signals, which are basically micro electric signals. The signals travel using anion and cation salts primarily chlorates and other chlorine derivate salts.

  If you go back to the periodic table, you would find that Bromine is right below Chlorine in the periodic table. When Silver Bromide is introduced along with a suitable vehicle in terms of nitrate salts, bromine tricks the Shaitan nervous system and replaces the Chlorine with itself. Surprisingly there is no other harmful side effect on the Shaitan other than blocking the neural signals between the neural pathways.

  The neural pathways are blocked selectively by the bromide ions. The main brain can no longer send controlling signals to the nodes, but still gets feedback from those nodes. So the main brain in many ways is aware of its surroundings and the actions being taken by the body, but is unable to control them. The nodes, which have rudimentary thinking capability, start functioning on their own in an uncoordinated manner.

  In the natural environment, when a Shaitan is exposed to the Silver Bromide salts, a minor exposure can lead to the limbs and the body twitching on its own, very similar to the signs of old age so prominently displayed by the Shaitans. Severe exposure however leads to the individual nodes working on their own sometimes in a purely instinctive manner. It is possible that a particular limb of a Shaitan so exposed in the natural environment might start mauling its brethren using those sharp claws.

  Basically an overexposed Shaitan slowly starts going mad and incoherent, even though the main brain still functions fairly fine. It must be horrible for that individual Shaitan as one part of the brain is fully aware and sane, while the rest of it slowly goes mad.

  What I have done with this serum is a twist on this natural susceptibility of the Shaitans to bromides. As I mentioned before that the distributed nodes evolved much later as information processing centers connecting to the brain for thinking in Shaitans. The different nodes however always existed in the primitive Shaitan body as simple bundle of neurons, which were interconnected with each other for simple reflex actions like withdrawing the limb if it stepped on boiling water.

  So the interconnection between the nodes is subtly different from the neural pathway between the main brain and the nodes. My serum selectively targets this connection between the main brain and the nodes, while leaving the interconnection between the nodes intact. This means that the nodes put together have enough computing power to perform all bodily functions. However those bodily functions are not commanded by the main brain, which does most of the conscious thinking.

  I would now request Pvt. Vasili and Sgt. Popov, who have been invaluable in helping me in my research to perform a live demonstration with these two Shaitans you see in restraints. These two subjects have had no prior contact with us, and in fact have been delivered to us just yesterday. I am told that they were captured while trying to sneak out of the New Babylon sector. So I can assure you that we have in no way been able to coach or train these Shaitans, if that is even possible for a human to do… Sgt. Popov, over to you.” Mary finished and gestured to the Marine.

  “Sirs.” Sgt. Popov gave a clipped salute to the brass before starting his demonstration. “There are two parts to administering this drug on a Shaitan. First part of the process is to give a prep drug, which takes about an hour to prep up the Shaitan body to take this huge dose of the truth serum without dying of shock.” Sgt. Popov held the large syringe that had been displayed by Dr. Kramnik previously.

  “We had injected the prep drug into subject A,” Sgt. Popov pointed to the Shaitan towards the right of the audience, “about an hour ago in preparation for this demonstration. The subject is now fully prepped, which we can tell from the fact that its limbs are like jelly now, and it cannot stand on its limbs. It is sitting down splayed because all the subjec
t’s muscles are now completely relaxed and unable to tense.

  I will now inject this serum, and we will have to wait for about 15 minutes before we see the first signs of its effect.” Sgt. Popov chose a point at the base of one of the limbs of the Shaitan and stuck the syringe as if injecting a cattle. Once done, Sgt. Popov turned towards his audience and said. “While we wait for subject A to show the first signs, we turn towards subject B.” Sgt. Popov turned towards the Shaitan restrained on the left of the audience.

  Subject B had been restrained within a transparent hardened plastic box, which had a small inlet. Attached to this inlet was a large canister with a release valve. Sgt. Popov stood next to the valve and continued. “Subject B has not been prepped in any way. We are going to demonstrate a different kind of serum on subject B. On our initial expedition, our subjects had told us that even the air in that ‘forbidden nest’ was harmful to them.

  Dr. Kramnik experimented on an aerosol variant of the serum, which is inhaled by the Shaitans. The dose is lighter, and thus no prepping is required. The effects of the serum are also slower, and the initial signs are far milder. The biggest advantage of this serum however is that it can be administered at a distance, especially in those closed tunnels which these Shaitans love. So we don’t need to capture a Shaitan to administer this drug. We can use this as a weapon!” Sgt. Popov said with a sadistic glee, as he turned open the valve.

  Unlike subject A, who seemed to be completely sedated, subject B was fully in its senses. The release of the gas triggered some primal fear in subject B and it went completely berserk. It thrashed around and tried to break the plastic cage with its claws. Sgt. Popov was completely nonchalant and ignored the Shaitan as he turned to address his audience.