The Chinese have also been developing manned long distance travel capability. The CNSA Jupiter orbit mission was still not ready to launch, but was expected to be ready in 2 years’ time. All the three major space powers were however extremely comfortable with Mars and any distance till Mars.
With this capability in mind, it was decided that humans would meet the alien ship beyond the orbit of Mars, nearly halfway between the orbit of Mars around the sun and the asteroid belt. The ship will be manned so all decisions will be real time. No more depending on pre-programmed computer responses. No more spectator time. Real military action required human beings fighting in real time.
It was initially thought that the ships should have only the crew required to operate it. Since if it came to battle again, it would primarily be a space battle, there was no need to risk more lives than was necessary. However humanity had not lost the hope of reconciliation. It was hoped that the last encounter was all just a big misunderstanding.
Many thought that the ship was a remote probe controlled by computers which could not have real time communication with their home planet that was 3 light months away. So it was entirely possible that the hostilities were a result of a mindless computer executing pre-programmed routines.
There may have been no real intent of hostility from the Shaitans itself when they launched the remote probe. Otherwise why would they send an unarmed probe? That was the reasoning of the proponents of this thought.
There was a vocal minority of humans led by the Greens and the extreme left, which actually blamed humans for starting the hostilities and reserved particular venom towards the Chinese for nuking their ship. While the governments of all the worlds and most of its people understood and even were thankful of the Chinese actions, they had to appease this vocal minority by attempting another chance at reconciliation.
Thus it was decided that the entourage would also consist of scientists and Shaitan specialists who had the best chance at opening a dialog with the aliens. As a measure of ample precaution, the rest of the available slots on the ship would be filled by professional soldiers specially trained for battle in space and on other planets, just in case it came down to a boarding attempt by the aliens.
There was one more thing that would be new about the ship the US sent this time. It would be first ship which was officially being commissioned by the US armed forces and not NASA. In some sense it was the first space war ship that the United States was commissioning. As a gesture of concession towards the pacifists, who had opposed this idea, the ship was named USS Friendship to make clear its primary objective.
So the people had trained for the mission, the engineers had gone on overdrive preparing for the mission. New Horizons space yard was a beehive of activity with two major space ships being built simultaneously. The USS Friendship and Charles Martell. The orbital space yard was bursting at the seams.
There was a serious need to either expand it or build a new orbital ship assembly yard. The decision was deadlocked as usual in politics, over whether the US should build a new one altogether over which it had total control.
Some were opposed due to the larger costs. It was cheaper to expand the former ISS and now the New Horizons Space Construction Facility (NHSCF), but it was jointly owned with the Europeans and some other countries like Canada & Australia, so it created its own administrative problems.
Moreover New Horizons was not the most ideal construction platform to be expanded, since it was made on the foundation of almost 80 year old technology of the ISS which was built for a different purpose altogether.
The Russian-Chinese orbital space yard New Vladivostok had taken its time to be developed and initially had lesser facilities, but now after over 15 years of construction, it was considered superior to New Horizons.
It had been calculated that as the alien ship crossed the orbit of Saturn around the sun inward, humans would have to launch from earth to be able to meet at the designated area. However as the alien ship passed the orbit of Neptune and officially entered the solar system, they sprung their first surprise.
The alien ship was now close enough to make out the exact direction in the solar system it was pointed to, and it had been pointed towards the sun, which was understandable. When they started off from Shaitan, all that would have been visible would have been the Sun, and that is where they would have pointed to.
It was expected that once they neared the solar system, they would change direction so as to come on an intercept course with earth in its orbit around the sun. The alien ship did change course, but not towards earth, but to intercept Jupiter!
This obviously puzzled and surprised the humans, and put all their planning into a tizzy. What the hell were the Shaitans up to? It would make no sense to come all the way here and then visit an uninhabited planet, when there was life on another planet, however beautiful the gas giant might be.
One school of thought, was that they were simply stopping over to refuel their hydrogen tanks by skimming off the atmosphere of Jupiter. Another theory was that they were never interested in earth and always wanted to go to the gas giants, since it was much more like home.
They were probably interested in settling in one of the moons of Jupiter. Europa or Enceladus perhaps. That must be what makes the aliens feel like home. The third theory was that they would eventually come to earth, but were making a base on one of the moons of Jupiter to do what the other two theories suggested. They would however eventually come to earth to destroy humanity.
The theories were just that, theories and speculation. Humans didn’t have any data to prove or disprove any of them. The mission planners went back to the drawing board. They made plans for encountering the aliens in Jupiter. The ships which were already in advanced stages of construction would have to be redesigned and repurposed for a longer trip.
The aliens could land on one of the moons, so land mission was a possibility. This was added to the mission parameters. The entire thing was a mess. The only positive thing to come out of it, was that it gave them more time. How much they could not say, but possibly months if not years more.
Just as the mission planners had finished planning and were starting to implement the modifications to the old plan, equipment and training of the personnel, the aliens threw all of that out of the window once more. They changed course again and headed to intercept Saturn!
It was now becoming impossible to predict what the aliens were doing, and there was a strong opinion in the military circles that this was classic tactic of misdirection aimed at the enemy. Do unpredictable things to keep the enemy off balance and prevent him from preparing for the actual intention you may have.
It was decided, that all change planning and implementation would be put on hold. They would continue preparing to intercept the aliens according to their original plan just beyond the orbit of Mars. They will wait and see what the aliens are up to. If they actually stop at Saturn and make camp out there, then they can plan a modified mission at leisure.
If this is another trick, then it doesn’t hurt earth’s preparations. They would have to come towards earth anyway. If the aliens skipped past Saturn and headed inwards towards earth, then the mission would launch immediately and still be able to encounter the Shaitan ship close to their original rendezvous point.
Human ships used chemical rockets, which gave a much higher thrust compared to ion thrusters used by the aliens. They had seen no evidence of chemical rockets in use by the aliens, and the amount of rocket fuel needed to move such a large ship using chemical rockets was so huge, that it was unlikely they carried any.
So the humans waited. Their ships ready, the crew staying close to their shuttle launch points on earth, as the Shaitan ship approached Saturn. This time however the alien did not appear to be involved in any trickery. The alien ship slowed down and let itself be captured by the gravity of Saturn and then orbited Saturn for many weeks, possibly surveying the Saturn system.
Then they modified thei
r course and slowly went into orbit around Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. They orbited Titan for another 10 days in various orbits starting from a high orbit slowly lowering itself to low orbit, until it settled into a low synchronous orbit around Titan.
When the alien ship had not moved from its synchronous orbit for over three weeks, it was decided by the planners both civilian and military that they had to take a call now. Do they go to Saturn and greet the aliens there, or do they wait more time to see what their next move is?
What if the aliens are also playing a waiting game? They may be camped there to observe earth, though not many people believed that. A synchronous orbit around Titan was a lousy way to observe earth. Not that they could expect to be hidden out there.
Humans had observed them approaching and could see them from earth, so observing from such a distance made no sense. Titan and Saturn eclipsed earth’s direct view constantly making it a really bad observation post for the aliens.
The more ominous reason for waiting could be that the aliens are waiting for earth to launch its response. The moment they see rockets launched from earth, they would start their move for earth circling and taking a roundabout route to reach earth.
The earth ships would be forced to follow thereby exhausting their limited fuel supply, while the alien ship probably didn’t have fuel concerns for moving around in the solar system. This ploy of the aliens could be thwarted to some extent by human ships adopting a strategy to go slow, by thrusting less and coasting more and thus saving their fuel.
But even if they could outfox the aliens on the fuel issue, human space ships had other limitation on the amount of time it could be in space in terms of oxygen and food. The aliens probably did not have such limitations having already spent nearly 20 years in space.
The aliens could thus outlast the human ships and then make a run for earth. This was really the case against launching right now to meet the aliens on Titan. There were other issues as well, not least that there had been no manned mission that far, although it was theoretically possible.
The case against waiting any longer was more to do with human psychology rather than the aliens. It could be summarized in one sentence… Fear of the unknown. What were the aliens up to on Titan? Were they building a super weapons factory out there to make super weapons to destroy the entire earth?
Were they breeding millions of drone soldiers to invade earth? Titan was metal poor on the surface and the temperature was -179° C, but other than that it was not a bad place to do either. They did not know what materials the aliens needed to build super weapons.
Perhaps they didn’t need metals or had enough of them on their ship, which was 40 thousand tons or thereabouts, or they could mine the nearby moons of Saturn for raw materials. The cold should not be a huge issue for such and advanced alien race. They should easily be able to build a habitat to overcome the cold. Humans could, although not so easily, so no reason that the more advanced aliens could not.
Titan had a thick atmosphere, even thicker than earth. It might even be a friendly atmosphere to the aliens, who most probably evolved on a similar moon of Shaitan. It had a lot of organics, which could act as raw materials for a lot of things including food fabricators for any carbon based life. So Titan was really the most logical place other than Earth or Mars to set up a camp.
The two opposing arguments for waiting and leaving immediately to meet up at Saturn, was tearing apart the mission and military planners, so they reached a compromise solution. Both USS Friendship and Charles Martell were right now docked in the New Horizons yard.
They were essentially finished but since there was time, it was being further tweaked, fitted and adjusted for a much longer journey to Saturn, instead of its original mission that had planned for provisioning it to a maximum distance of Jupiter.
Nothing had to be changed in the ship design fundamentally, since they would be coasting the extra distance burning no extra fuel, but it would add to the travel time, which meant extra fuel and provisions.
The provisions had been stuffed inside at the expense of some living space, and the extra fuel was being strapped on to the hull of the ship externally, which would be discarded as the journey progressed.
By the time it reached Saturn, the ships would have discarded all their strap on tanks and would look exactly as the designers had intended, hence there would be no compromise on the characteristic of the craft if it came to a fight.
The two ships would be immediately undocked and would float close to the yard but free up the yard. The rest of the upgrades which were non-critical anyway, will happen by engineers flying by shuttle to the ships from the yard. It would slow down the minor upgrades a bit but not by much, and these ships had six months anyway by which time the engineers will perhaps run out of ideas to perform last minute upgrades.
The freed up slot would immediately start the construction of two more ships. This time both the ships would be of the USS Friendship class not Charles Martel class. This will speed up production, and the Freedom class ships were more specialized military ships in any case.
One would be funded by ESA-ISRO consortium while the other by the US government. USS Friendship had taken four years to build. The plans had not been designed from scratch. It had been based on all the proven technology and techniques NASA had learnt in the Zeus program to Mars and even a few tricks incorporated from the ESA-ISRO Mars program.
Many of the electronics and internal components were the same as older Zeus program ships and hence could be built quickly from existing machining tools and dies, or from existing silicon designs.
However due to its bigger size and this being the first ship to incorporate the new hull material developed after studying the alien hull, all the machines, dies, tools to construct the ship had to be first made from scratch before they could even start making the ship.
This would no longer be the case. Every machine or tool required to construct a Friendship class ship was already available and waiting in some engineering shop with one of the contractors or in a government facility. All they had to do was to make two more of each part.
Similarly a whole host of space assembly techniques had to be learnt via trial and error for assembly of the new hull material, and the engineers constructing the ship had to get themselves trained in constructing a vessel of this class, the biggest human ship constructed (not exactly true, the Charles Martell was a bit bigger in volume, but Friendship was heavier with better armor). Now all those engineers were experienced and trained, so they could do it right quickly the very first time.
The engineers would be overworked and the supply train from earth to orbit would be harried, but they estimated that they could have two more Friendship class vessels ready in six months.
They would not have to worry about crew either. Both the US and the ESA-ISRO team had trained three teams each for their missions. The primary team had a backup and there was a backup to the backup. The backup team would crew the second ships, and they would still be left with a backup.
This strategy had been shared with the Chinese and they had shown their approval by copying the exact strategy. The Jiānjué had been delayed and was still not exactly ready, although the Chinese claimed it was. However New Vladivostok had already started building on its spare dock an exact copy of the Jiānjué.
The US and rest of its allies had not exactly become friends with the Chinese, but after their first encounter and experience fighting the aliens together, there was a certain amount of coordination now between the two otherwise antagonistic sides, when it came to fighting aliens.
Whether it was due to self-preservation instinct, or development of a certain amount of mutual respect and admiration due to fighting a common enemy side by side, no one knew and no one cared, as long as humanity fought together.
Humans had developed another strategy by co-ordination, to avoid the alien ship from tricking them and taking them on a merry ride the moment they left earth. The three
human ships ready will not leave at the same time. The USS Friendship would leave 15 days before the two new ships were scheduled to be ready.
The Charles Martell would leave 7 days later and the Jiānjué would leave after another 7 days. The rag tag human fleet would travel in a long trail of three ships separated by a fair amount of distance. This will make it harder for the alien ship to maneuver and evade all the ships at the same time.
If somehow the alien ship managed to do that, there would be additional three ships waiting closer to earth to intercept it, and it should be close to impossible for the alien ship to evade all the six ships and slip close to earth.
The only people in those six months of waiting who did not suffer from anxious waiting were the engineers constructing the second set of ships. The suffering from exhaustion ensured that they did not have time to worry about anything else.
For a change the Shaitans threw no more surprises, and humans were able to proceed as planned. The opening moves in what later historians would call the ‘Battle of Titan’ had been made.
Chapter 19
Approaching Titan
Early 2061
Captain Daniel Cloutier was edgy and nervous as they approached Saturn. He had every right to be so. Here he was captaining the ship that was about to make contact with the first aliens, humans have encountered. First contact! Everything a farm boy from Milwaukee could dream of.
He was supposed to be the archetypical example of Middle America. But his had not been a typical farm. Daniel could trace back his ancestry to the original settlers of Milwaukee, and his dad was one of the largest land owners in the counties surrounding the city.
Their farms were the biggest producers of cattle, milk and even cranberries in the neighborhood. Yes his family in general, and his father in particular were rich. But he was still a farmer, with a mindset to go along with it.
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