The Battle of Titan

by Sudipto Majumdar

  They may have started as a rag tag group of people from different nationalities and disciplines, but they were now coalescing into a cohesive team and the foundation of which seem to be professional respect and admiration for each other.

  “Well… if you put it that way, then I will set aside my prepared speech and get back to my style of asking rhetorical questions.” She looked at Jorge sharing a smile. Obviously some private joke between them.

  “For the moment, let us set aside trying to get into the head of an alien, and get into the head of a human. If the positions had been reversed and it were the aliens approaching our human camp, let us analyze how we would have reacted. Actually we don’t even need to analyze it, we have already decided a set protocol for that eventuality two days ago.

  While I am not aware of the exact defense positions set up by you all…” she swung her gaze around to the professional military personnel in the group, “but as I understand, if we were to detect an alien shuttle coming our way, we are to immediately scramble all the soldiers in various defensive and sniper positions that you have set. Am I correct in that assumptions?” She looked at Alex for no particular reason, who nodded in agreement.

  “The next part of the protocol requires the entire leadership team to assemble at the rear part of the pass in case they have not yet crossed the pass, and the First Contact team, which now consists of myself and Major Cheng to move to the front end of the pass and wait for them to approach within a few meters. If they have crossed the pass, then we still keep the same disposition relative to each other, but now the leadership team is standing at the edge of hut #1.

  Now let us try and translate the same protocol to the alien camp now. Their camp is in the open which gives them no obvious defensive positions at height like we get in this camp. So the only defensive positions they get are the ones they can make out of the ground by digging.

  Major Cheng had pointed out that if their intentions were purely defensive, then they would have put up obvious defensive positions like gates and fences or ditches in the path. Something that an approaching person could see and be warned.

  However if you notice that neither have we put a gate on the pass, and our response is also to put snipers in high ground and niches which are hidden. We can argue that it is not so much to hide but to get cover from return fire, but the same can be argued about their ditches, although I must admit that having heat shields on them is suspicious.

  All in all, I am not dismissing Major Cheng’s argument. All I am saying that there is no conclusive way to either prove or disprove their dug out positions as an intention to ambush unprovoked.

  They may have had made those ditches to ambush, but only if the first contact went sour, just as our snipers would start firing if one of our delegation was stabbed by one of theirs.” The thought sent shivers down her spine because she would be one of the two people standing in front.

  “Next I come to their actual act of first attacking Marie and then Major Cheng. I will again try to get into the human mind first. If you are the master of a castle and have various fortifications and battlements in place. Some are upfront and obvious, and some are hidden.

  An approaching knight to the castle is expected to notice the obvious defenses, it wouldn’t surprise the master of the castle if the knight can spot out some hidden defenses being a professional soldier. As an etiquette however, he is expected to ignore them and approach the front moat for permission to enter.

  If however he suddenly charges towards a hidden trench, how is the archer crouching in that trench expected to react? Would he wait till the last moment to see if he would get trampled by the knight’s horse, or would he deliberately or in panic shoot off his arrow? And how would his comrades in nearby trenches react? Would they leave him to his fate or come to his aid by attacking themselves?

  I think you can all see the similarity in the situation. I am not for a moment trying to suggest that this logic proves that their intentions were peaceful, and it was all an accident. All I am saying is that the logic shows that there can be an innocent explanation as well.

  So in balance both these acts of digging the trench, as well as attacking, neither conclusively proves or disproves that they had premeditated to attack. The only suspicious item is their heat shield acting as a camouflage. I don’t however consider as a serious proof to anything.

  It could be part of an ingrained military doctrine. Remember that our soldiers wear a camouflage even on peacekeeping missions because it is part of the uniform and hence part of our military doctrine.

  While I cannot prove or disprove their hostile intentions, what I can observe is that they are similar to humans at a fundamental level when it comes to defensive doctrine. That is not to say that we humans have found any special defensive approach, it is all common sense and hence must be common to both of us.

  While the specifics of their defensive strategy and tactics may vary from us, some dictated by their physiology and others by their psychology, what is common is prudence and caution. They have taken the exact steps in terms of precaution that humans would. We should keep that in mind in our future preparations both civilian and military.

  The last point which I am sure you all are waiting to hear is how they will react now? What will be their attitude towards us? More specifically will they attack us here in the camp? If we approach them again, how will they react to the team that meets them?

  Instead of trying to answer these questions directly, let me ask what may seem like an unrelated question. We were here for three days before we approached the alien camp. Why didn’t the aliens approach us within those 3 days to either greet us or make war on us?

  Why did they ignore us? They were obviously aware of us, as is proved by the line of defense they had laid, which indicated that they knew the exact direction of our camp. For that matter it is two days since the last incident, we are on high alert. Why have they not retaliated or come suing for peace and friendship?

  One possibility, very unlikely though, is that they are not curious creatures and are simply not interested in us humans. I could have still bought that argument before our encounter because unbound curiosity is not a necessity in an intelligent creature.

  Curiosity is an evolutionary mechanism developed to help cope with survival, but curiosity comes at the price of higher risk to the individual, so nature develops only as much curiosity is required for the creature to survive whether to find food or mate or some other activity, nothing more.

  We humans may think we have unbound curiosity, but that isn’t true. Individuals and societies set limits to what they will explore. We may put religious or ethical rationalization to it as in the case of human cloning, but we do have our limits to curiosity.

  However after our encounter when they know we will not leave them alone, it becomes a survival imperative to become curious about us. Having survived and evolved into intelligent creatures, they would definitely have that much curiosity.

  That leaves the only reasonable option available to me. In their estimation they are not ready to meet us. What would make them think so? There are two possibilities for this.

  If they have peaceful intentions, then they think we may not have peaceful intentions and are preparing something to defend themselves or waiting for something to defend them, probably the missing alien ship. If their intentions are belligerent, even then they are either preparing themselves for an attack or waiting for their ship to attack.

  So in conclusion all things lead to indicate that they waiting and/or preparing for a battle which either they expect us to initiate, or themselves to start. I know this comes as a surprising conclusion from a known pacifist like me, but the obvious conclusions are staring me in the face.

  So now I come back to my original question. How are they likely to react? I think it all depends on timing. If we make contact before they think they are ready, they are likely to look at options of peace more seriously. If we make contact after they think the
y are ready, then it all depends on their intentions.

  They may still greet us warmly from a position of strength or they may attack us unprovoked or as popular imagination says, may make us their slaves and rape our women… although what those weird octopuses would see in a human woman is another story altogether.” She finished with a laugh.

  The mood lightened with the joke, but not by much. They still had serious issues to discuss and possibly life and death decisions to make.

  “Since you brought up the subject of anatomy, I think that is the next thing we should discuss. We have had our first glimpses of the alien now although in unfortunate circumstances. Dr. Manning would you please fill us on your observations on the aliens?” Takamori invited Violet to speak.

  “Thanks Major. I would like to back up a bit and start from some observations before we had our first sighting of them. Our first mystery started when it was confirmed that they had set up a base here in Titan with aliens living in it. Till we arrived here, it was just a conjecture.

  So why did they choose Titan of all the places they could choose from in the solar system? If they wanted to avoid earth because we humans live there, then they always had Mars. Why choose such a hellishly cold place with a poisonous atmosphere when even the many moons of Jupiter are easier place to live on?

  On the face of it, Titan has one thing going for it – the thick atmosphere. However if you are not breathing the atmosphere and are dependent on your habitat for air and protection, then the atmosphere is worse than useless. It hampers space travel, and you are better off without an atmosphere. It has been speculated that they can breathe the atmosphere, but as I will show later, it is unlikely.

  I know I am stepping into Mischa’s territory here, but I think that they built here out of some racial sentiment or racial memory. This moon probably reminds them of their home planet in some way. If we humans were to come from a distant star and stumble on to our solar system, but there was no earth in the system, we would have chosen to settle on Mars. It is nothing like earth in most ways, and yet is the closest we can get to earth.

  The second mystery is how they built their habitat. They sunk it in the ground and built underground, rather under ice. Judging from the size of the thing, engineers tell me that it should be at least 50 meters deep for it to make any structural sense. The same engineers told me that it does not make any sense for heat loving creatures like us to build under the ice.

  The air at least gets some ambient heat from sun and Saturn itself, but ice underground gets none, so it is colder. The structural engineering to build a heated habitat in ice is as they put it ‘a bitch’. You have to put a lot of insulation in the walls to prevent the heat leaking and melting the ice.

  You still can’t prevent the ice from melting, you can only slow it down. This melting shifts the ice and puts stress on the entire structure threatening to crush it. From all we know about the IR signature of their habitat, it is definitely above the melting temperature of ice, so it should ordinarily make no sense for them to build it underground.

  Here again I am stepping into Mischa’s territory to speculate that they built the habitat out of a template – a racial template. Just like we build habitats which reflect our style of construction on earth. We are even using a template of Habitat we developed on Mars. The aliens carried this habitat and the skills to make it from their home world which was suited to making it underground.

  So I want you to keep those two things in mind when we analyze the physiology of this being. First it likely to have come from a moon of a gas giant. The moon was probably a lot hotter than Titan with some amount of liquid water flowing underground if not at the surface itself.

  We now know from the experiences of moons of Jupiter and Saturn, that sunlight is not the only heat that can make liquid water on a planet. Moons like Europa, Enceladus and Titan itself can generate liquid water from the heat inside the core of the planet.

  The moon that these creatures came from would be a lot bigger I am guessing as I think it had a lot more gravity in which this beings developed, as I will show later. So this moon would not have been an icy one like Titan but a rocky one, otherwise they would not have found the minerals required to develop a body.

  The fact that heat would have been available only underground and the fact that they have built a habitat underground here, despite the fact it is not the most ideal thing to do out here, leads me to believe that these creatures evolved underground, perhaps in subterranean caves.

  This brings me to posit the next hypothesis, which many of you might find incredible given what you may have seen of these creatures in the last encounter. There is one thing that is not available underground, and that is light.

  I think these creatures evolved to be a highly intelligent social creatures, but completely blind, or as poor in using light as a sense, as we are poor in using smell as a sense. Sure they would have discovered fire at some point in their advancement to an intelligent species, but by that time their current physical bodies would have already been developed.

  They couldn’t have developed sight after discovering fire. By the time humans discovered how to create fire, we were fairly close in evolutionary terms to a modern humans. Now Major Cheng will vouch that he saw the aliens shoot la Fontaine albeit at a close range, and he himself was shot fairly close.

  Any creature who is blind should not be able to do that. I would like to put forward evidence later which may convince Major Cheng that his being missed when he was an easy target was a lucky break because the aliens may be poor shot when it came to guns.

  For this, you have to see the additional footage of the creatures which many of you may not have seen. The first images are from the Shuttle camera, for which I must thank the pilot, and compliment Major Cheng on his pilot’s quick thinking under pressure. He actually switched on the camera as he was approaching under emergency acceleration to rescue the Major.”

  Cheng nodded in acknowledgement at the appreciation, and Violet switched on the wall screen. The scene was from the perspective in front of the shuttle. It showed them rushing over the ice. A spread of grey dots on the white, which were the aliens and then a growing black spot, which was Cheng.

  They could make out one of the aliens going down, before the shuttle descended sharply and only Major Cheng was visible. Then he moved out of the frame, and the picture rose again sharply in perspective as the shuttle rose and spun. A few more of the aliens panned through the frames before they were gone and the clip finished. The entire clip was less than a minute.

  “I know that many of you have looked at this clip from a combat perspective. I however analyzed a few particular frames where the aliens were in the picture to get a complete 360° composite view of the aliens by interpolating all the pictures. This helped me complete the picture and make a 3D model of the aliens.

  Before I show you the model, let me show you what really helped me get a close up picture of the aliens. No it is not the Major’s helmet camera view, although that did help.” She started the next clip and very soon everyone had a creepy feeling running inside them. They were looking through the eyes of a dead woman.

  The clip starts at the point where the camera angle is falling slowly, which Cheng recognized was the point when Marie had been shot and was stumbling to the ground. In front of her rises from below a huge monstrous creature. It rises to the top of the frame and then disappears.

  Marie’s head is no longer tracking the monster as an alert person would have, she is already in shock from the bullet wound. As the picture is falling to the ground and about to touch it, it rises again, this time violently.

  The picture faces the alien again, this time with a clear view of the body and the limb which now with its thickness, flexibility, dexterity and strength reminds them of a big elephant’s trunk. Cheng remembered the moment as he saw la Fontaine gored and held in that position by the blade attached to the end of his limb. Then the frame after a few second tumbles in the air,
when the alien would have tossed her and then starts looking at the blank sky, as Marie must be lying lifelessly staring at the sky.

  “Now this is the real interesting part.” Violet says as she fast forwards the clip for about 5 minutes. Suddenly the image lurches and then turns to the ground but at a short height. It starts swaying, occasionally a part of the alien’s limbs would come into view.

  The body had obviously been wrapped around one of the limbs and is now being lifted and carried. Then suddenly the image perspective changes, and this time fortunately the helmet is facing forward towards the direction of motion.

  It seem to be moving inside a sunken trench in the ice which ends a long way into some kind of a door. Once they reach the door, the picture sways madly in in all direction. Probably the body is being adjusted on other limbs while the alien opened the door.

  Once inside the door the frame starts darkening very fast within seconds but not before it is obvious that it is inside a darkened corridor or tunnel. The picture continues for a few more seconds in absolute darkness, but someone had put a window besides the edited clip showing the same picture in infrared, where they could only see the ghostly light of some of the limbs of alien giving off heat. The clip then abruptly ends.

  “We lost the image once they had taken the body sufficiently underground and radio signals got cut off. What we get to see closely other than the alien itself is a glimpse of his natural environment. It may look like we saw nothing but darkness, but it just confirms that in natural environment, light does not play a part. Next here is or 3D representation of the alien as gleaned from all the images we have had so far.”

  There was a slowly rotating artificially rendered image of the alien which looked like a very faithful representation. “The outer skin that you see is not really a skin, but part of an environmental suit they are wearing. We are fairly certain of this from the various images we have seen and the way they fold at the joints.