The Battle of Titan

by Sudipto Majumdar

  Daniel had struggled a lifetime to get himself out of the farm, to explore the world. He joined the air force partly to get out of the farm. He had average grades as an undergrad in college, and probably could have gotten himself an average middle class job in Milwaukee, but knew that it would have inevitably pulled him back into the farm.

  It would not have made monetary sense to do an average job, when his father needed the help of an educated son to run his multi-million dollar farm business. That’s why he enlisted into something that not just gave him the unbounded freedom he longed… flying, but also took him far away from his farm. What he really obsessed over, even more that flying was space. It was a fascination he had since childhood. He would imagine himself roaming the universe in starships.

  Here he was roaming the universe, well the solar system really, but one has to start somewhere. He had not believed it when he was chosen for this mission, and then named the captain. His journey from bomber pilot in USAF to this mission had been a dream. Now at the age of 43, he was going to fulfill his ultimate boyhood fantasy, meet aliens from another star system!

  He had been part of this mission now for nearly five years. Back then it was a different mission altogether. That changed with the second sighting of the alien space craft coming into our solar system. Humans have been anticipating this moment for over two decades now, ever since the first encounter with an alien drone sent out to scout our system.

  There had been many opinions after the first encounter. At one extreme were the pacifists, who thought that the aliens were benign beings. According to them the aliens explored the universe looking for life, treating each life as special, helping them grow without interfering with them.

  The other extreme were the belligerents who thought the aliens were pathological murderers and expansionist. According to them the aliens roamed about the universe, consuming the resources of the systems they encountered, and exterminating any living creatures they encountered. As is usual most of humanity fell somewhere in between this spectrum of opinion.

  One surprising exception were the scientists from most disciplines, but most importantly evolutionary biologists. Given the normal pacifist attitude of most scientists, one would expect them to be in a similar camp on this issue as well. They however were firmly in the belligerent camp.

  Most of them believed that if evolution follows the same principle anywhere in the universe, as is believed, then “Survival of the fittest” would be hardwired into the genes of the aliens.

  Daniel could not deny the logic of the scientists, and leant towards their thinking, though in his heart he hoped that the pacifists were right. He would like to get help from the aliens to roam the universe. But it never hurt to be careful.

  If the aliens turned out to be peaceful, all that much better. That was the thinking of most governments, except the greens and the Chinese. The greens had small representation in most democracies and a significant presence in the Scandinavian countries.

  They influenced government policies, and as expected they were in the pacifist camp. The Chinese government on the other had believed, that from the experience of the first encounter, it was highly likely that the aliens were hostile, and we needed to prepare for war.

  That first encounter and the Chinese are the topic of the biggest controversy in our times. Many accuse the Chinese of warmongering and attacking a peaceful alien envoy on a mission of goodwill. Some even believe that an otherwise peaceful alien may have been turned into our enemy due to the actions of the Chinese. The Chinese obviously have a completely different interpretation of the events.

  Daniel had been a keen student of every detail of the first encounter all his adult life, and especially after being inducted into this project, and having gotten privileged information, not generally available to public.

  As much as he disliked the dictatorial Chinese government, he could not see any major flaws in their reasoning, and their interpretation of the events. That was another reason that his mind was with the belligerents, while his heart was with the pacifists.

  The sector of space where the first alien scout ship had emerged had become the most watched sector since then. Worldwide astronomy institution’s budgets had increased more than ten times, with a significant part of it going towards observational astronomy, watching not just that particular sector in space but almost every sector.

  Lightning may not come from the same direction twice, was the twist on the old adage. Astronomy was no longer considered just a pure science, it was now part of the operational doctrine of all major powers’ defense forces.

  So it was no surprise that all of the major powers declared within the space of an hour that a sighting of ion plasma emission had been detected from the exact same direction as the first encounter. They had a tentative estimate on the time of arrival to earth… 5 years!

  That is when Daniel’s mission and life changed. The original mission had been a human mission to Mars. It was the most ambitious program to be undertaken by NASA in a hundred years. In honor of the original pioneers of NASA a century ago, the program had been named Zeus who was the father of Apollo.

  The mission had been conceptualized and planned nearly 20 years ago in direct response to the first contact with the aliens. As the world opinion was thrown into chaos upon the knowledge of aliens, there was a cry in all major powers for a response, any response. The people wanted to see their leaders taking action, any action.

  Most of the governments could agree that major space capability development was required. While they could not yet dream of inter-stellar travel, they at least had the technology to patrol most of the solar system.

  How much they eventually invested in developing a space fleet was a question for future generations and budgets, but right now what they needed to do was to develop basic technologies, which would be required to achieve a space fleet.

  To that end, the Zeus program was authorized by congress as a 25 year mission which would drain the GDP of the USA by almost 3% every year. Extreme voices on either side cried out over this. One would bemoan the trillions of dollars being spent while there were so many poor Americans, struggling for basic things in life.

  Other would say that in the face of an alien threat and potential extinction, all the government could do is to look at its balance sheet; what is the life of Americans and for that matter humanity worth, just 3% they would say? As most politicians know, it is not true that you cannot please everyone. In politics, you cannot please anyone.

  So why did the Zeus program chose to go to Mars and make a habitat there for rotating occupancy? The objective of Zeus and most of human space endeavor in all countries had turned to building capability and capacity to make inter-planetary capable ships. Ships which if necessary could slowly be turned into war ships with armor and weapons.

  Humans didn’t yet have the capability for interstellar travel, although enough R&D dollars were being spent on that. The objective of humans was to build a strong enough space navy capable of patrolling the solar system, to be able to defend it.

  They needed space ships that could meet invaders into the system, as further out as possible, to prevent them from reaching earth. They could not even allow themselves to think of a situation where alien ships reached earth and could then bombard it from orbit, probably with nukes or something even more terrible.

  Earth was the only home the humans had. That brought them to the other main thrust of the space program – to be able to build sustainable habitats in another planet. Some thought that it was pipe dream.

  That unless we can travel to another star system, there was no point in even having a small human outpost in say Mars, which was the most suitable place on our system, other than Earth. A few hundred colonist in Mars, which is the maximum our current technology can support, would not be able to save humanity if the Earth was destroyed.

  They would also die eventually, if not directly wiped out by the invaders. We humans, however did not know when
and if the alien ships would return, so we needed to plan for the long term, while taking steps for the short term as well.

  So here they were, the third mission of Zeus program, with extensive plans for making a temporary habitat on mars for 40 humans for nearly two years, and setting up the first re-usable and hopefully continuously inhabited station on Mars.

  Now though the mission was completely different. Not that the planners had not anticipated it. The Zeus program had been started with the object of building capability, not colonize Mars. Mars was just the most convenient target.

  The space crafts of the Zeus program were designed to be able to reach Jupiter and back, even if earth and Jupiter were at opposite ends of the sun. That was the new doctrine of human space efforts. Stop the aliens as far out as possible.

  Jupiter was as far as they could go carrying 49 humans with their current technology. Given time they would do better, but the aliens had not given them more time, just 21 years.

  The problem was that they were not going to Jupiter, but to Saturn which was much further off. It would not have been possible, if not for the convenient fact that earth and Saturn were currently on the same side of the sun, at one of the closest point these two planets reach.

  That put them barely within the range of this spacecraft, and Daniel and his crew were pushing those spacecraft specifications to the limits. He was not particularly religious, but yet put in a silent prayer for his crew. They would have no backup for this mission if things go wrong. Well that was not completely true.

  Following a week behind them was the ESA-ISRO space ship Charles Martell. The naming of the ship had caused unexpected controversy, which Daniel had observed with growing amusement, as he readied for his own launch.

  Such is still the state of human politics, that two ships would be named by the Europeans, and the third by the Indians, roughly reflecting the proportion of money they were putting into the space program. This one was named by the Europeans.

  When it had become obvious that the mission of this spacecraft was literally to stop the enemy at the gates, the Europeans had taken inspiration from the great Frankish general Charles Martell, who had stopped the Islamic armies from marching into Europe in the eight century.

  It is widely regarded that without him, there would be Islamic teaching being offered in Oxford today, as Europe turned completely Islamic. The Europeans probably had not looked at the anti-Islamic angle, and simply considered the stopping of the enemy at the gates symbolism, when they named it. In India however, where there is a substantial Islamic minority, there was a huge controversy.

  Less than a week behind the Charles Martell was the Chinese-Russian space ship Jiānjué, which most of the crew referred to by its English meaning “The Resolute”. So they were flying to meet the aliens, whom he still hoped he would not have to call enemy, in humanity’s first rag tag space fleet.

  He thought with amusement, that many in the world accused the US of being hawkish and belligerent. Yet it was the US ship that had the most dovish and hopeful name – USS Friendship. The rest of the world seem to have resigned to the fact that they will have a fight on their hands.

  Daniel was watching the count-down clock as they were finishing the first deceleration burn. There was still a bit more than two minutes left to it. After that they would have to calculate minor course corrections, before they started their second burn approaching Saturn, allowing the mighty gravity of Saturn to capture their ship in orbit.

  They did not dare attempt an aero-braking maneuver on Saturn, the way they would on Mars. Humans had not mastered the technique to that extent yet, and their space craft was too flimsy to withstand the thicker atmosphere of Saturn.

  So they had to spend precious rocket fuel to decelerate. Once in an eccentric orbit around Saturn, Daniel’s crew would have to calculate the third and final burn, with lots of help from mission control at Houston, which will lower its orbit to that of Titan, where the moon would capture the ship in its orbit.

  All throughout the journey, they had not had sight of the alien ship, except what was fed by mission control over tight laser beams. This had been the change in the human doctrine for this second encounter with the aliens. During the first encounter, they had bombarded the alien ship with active scanning on all electromagnetic frequencies.

  Many xeno-psychologists and xeno-sociologists (yes there were such disciplines now), thought that these signals may have triggered threat response from aliens, who would have evolved in similar Darwinian environments, and perhaps considered active scanning as an aggressive response.

  The military simply considered giving away their position as an unsound tactical strategy. So everybody’s objective converged, and the world as a whole had decided that if and when the next alien ship came, no one would scan it actively by shining any electromagnetic signals onto it. They would observe passively.

  Both the first as well as this second ship unfortunately did not emit any kind of electromagnetic signals that they could detect at such a long range. Most in the military argued that this is a sure signal that the ships are of military nature, not civilian exploration types.

  The scientists hypothesized that the aliens would have to be in touch with their home planet. The alien communication was on either a tight beam laser, although humans did not have the technology to keep a laser coherent at the distance the alien home world is.

  Else the aliens can somehow focus radio and microwave beams to such an extent, not yet possible by humans that they are sending and receiving signals behind them to their home world, and the leakage is so low that humans cannot detect it.

  The only way the humans could observe the alien ship was the old fashioned way – through telescopes. From the ageing James Webb telescope, successor to the legendary Hubble telescope, to the most modern ones in the sky, all were collecting reflected sunlight and reflected Saturn light from the alien spacecraft and gleaning out as much information as possible.

  Humans had also taken a leaf out of the alien strategy, and all communications from and to the ship were via tight beam lasers. The ships still carried radio communication gear to be used in emergency, when line of sight communication may not be possible, but it hadn’t been needed yet.

  USS Friendship had been on a line of approach, such that the alien space craft was hidden behind Titan most of the times, since the alien ship was in a low synchronous orbit over a particular spot on Titan.

  It was theorized that this particular spot must be the landing site of the aliens. The few times that the alien ship was in direct line of site USS Friendship, they couldn’t see the alien ship because they did not carry a telescope powerful enough to view at this distance.

  Neither should the alien ship have been able to see them, unless they knew where in space to point their alien telescope. The images they had of the alien ship, were ones fed from near earth based telescopes. They were essentially running silent and coming in from the cold, as far as the alien ship was concerned.

  That was about to change very soon though. Soon after they would finish their third and final burn, and descend towards Titan’s orbit, they will be close enough and pointing in the right direction to be in direct line of sight, and within the ship’s telescope capabilities. By the same token, this will also be the time when the alien craft should be able to detect them.

  That was going to be the moment of truth for all of them. How will the aliens respond? Will they send radio signals? If they did, what will it say? Will the humans even be able to understand it? The aliens are intelligent, that is beyond doubt, but will they have the capability to get inside the head of another alien being, and grasp the concept of inter-species communication? Will they realize that they may have to transmit a set of universally understood mathematical concepts for us to establish a common language?

  What if they sent an emissary instead? May be a single person shuttle to come over and declare “We come in peace.” Wishful thinking probably. Or they could make
themselves clear by launching a missile, or some kind of energy weapons talked about in science fiction. Humans didn’t have any laser or energy weapons.

  It would solve the problem of communication for Daniel because the message will be clear. The fact that they may not survive the message was altogether a different matter.

  The aliens could act in an ambiguously hostile manner as they did in the last encounter. This will be a massive command headache for Daniel. How is he to react when he is not sure if the other side is acting in a friendly or hostile manner?

  How is Daniel to react if the alien ship releases a relatively slow moving object heading directly towards his ship? Should he consider it hostile, if it looks like a missile? How would he know what an alien missile in space is supposed to look like?

  It need not be streamlined like the missiles in the atmosphere. Even if it approaches slowly, how can he be sure that it will not come next to his ship and explode, or send a massive burst of EMP and disable his ship?

  The actions of the last alien probe were considered ambiguously hostile because, while it had caused the destruction of the Sedna – I probe and attempted to destroy the US Sentinel probe. It could not be said with 100% certainty, that they had used weapons to destroy and damage the probes.

  It was possible though most did not think it likely, that the actions of the aliens was meant to signal something else, and the destruction due to high velocity of the probes, was an unintended consequence – an accident.

  All these thorny issues were playing in Daniel’s minds as the ping of the console in front of him, told him that the navigation computers had been locked with the final computations on their third and final burn. Fifteen hours and forty six minutes, that was the time before the final burn would begin, lasting a fraction over six minutes. So now they had a countdown to their destiny!

  He decided that it was time for him to do his captain’s thing. Address the crew, both military and civilians. He knew many of them were perhaps scared shitless, and all of them would be anxious. He had to boost their morale.