The Battle of Titan

by Sudipto Majumdar

  When that objective looked unattainable, the alien commander had shifted to a secondary objective. The objective now for the enemy, was to try to draw out as many fighters from the main assault at the hot gates to this location, to leave the position at the hot gates weak, and hence give them a better chance for overall success.

  So the alien commander decided to use his soldiers like an expendable tool. First part of the plan was deception. In the amount of time that Ma had spent on the ledge, she had seen 6 jumps. The exact number he had seen come over the bend on the pitons.

  So the alien commander was sending half his troops on a task which had 100% fatality rate and 0% chance of success. He was basically sending this half of the aliens to their certain death to maintain a deception. It kept the human defenders busy and their eyes glued in this direction.

  The second part of the plan involved asking the other half of the alien commander’s troops to jump across the ravine, with only a 33% chance of survival. The alien commander was probably hoping initially to sneak up on the mountain squad from the other side, without them noticing, and being able to neutralize the mountain squad.

  However that didn’t happen, and the alien commander must be aware of it. Yet the alien commander is sending 100% on one side and 67% of the other half of his troops to their certain death. That is nearly 84% of his troops. All this to let 16% of his troops to come through a position less defensible by humans.

  It may look heartless to a human commander, but if you kept human morals aside, it was a clever military tactic. If the enemy commander had not kept the deception going, then Cheng would have patrolled the plateau, and prevented the first aliens to climb up the plateau. Those first aliens have been able to make a beachhead. Now it was impossible to stop the aliens who had gathered on the plateau.

  If Cheng did not call for help, then the mountain squad would be neutralized, and the enemy commander can proceed with his primary objective with his remaining troops. If Cheng called for reinforcements, then the defense at the hot gates would be weakened, thus fulfilling the enemy commander’s secondary objective.

  Cheng realized that the enemy commander had already won. The alien commander had fought with his mind and not his heart and won. If the aliens even had a heart, although Dr. Manning had assured him that the aliens have to have a heart, since they definitely had a circulatory system, if the sample limb is anything to go by.

  Well… Dr. Manning can have as many full specimens for dissection as she wants, if she is even alive by the end of the day. It doesn’t seem like she will be. Neither will any of them. This is the place where the tide of the battle will turn, and he could see no way out.

  He realized bitterly that the Shaitans had one fundamental advantage over humans. The Shaitans could use their own kind as expendable implements of war. Humans couldn’t do that.

  Cheng was shaken out of his bitter thoughts by the shouts of Sgt. Lao. It wasn’t what he was saying, but how he was saying it. He was chanting in Mandarin the words. “For the people of China. For the people of the world. For humanity.” After a few times, all the other members of the mountain squad were chanting along with him. It was the haunting tone of people who were preparing for something.

  The ice bridge was about 30 meters in length, too far for anyone to jump from one side to the other side even in the low gravity of Titan. Neither the humans could do it, nor the aliens who had similar jumping distance.

  The ice bridge had formed due to erosion of the methane river, and had taken the form of a natural arched bridge with the center of the bridge being the narrowest part of the bridge. The ice on Titan is hard. Very hard. But ice by nature can be brittle. While six of his comrades held the Shaitans at bay desperately, one of the soldiers of the mountain squad went to the middle of the bridge and started hacking it with his sword with all his might.

  Cheng couldn’t see what was happening, since he was still fighting off the aliens who managed to cross over to the ledge, but he could hear the screams, shouts, appeals and pleadings of Lt. Ma. She had also reverted to Mandarin, and was speaking so fast that her words were barely understandable. When it happened, Cheng could not hear the sound, but he could feel the tremor in his feet.

  The center of the bridge, which was the narrowest and the weakest part of the bridge first chipped and then crumbled and finally with the continuous hacking, broke off a substantial piece. As any engineer would tell, an arched bridge works as a single entity. Every part of the bridge gives strength to the other.

  If even a small part of the bridge shatters, then the structural integrity of the entire bridge collapses. This is what happened to the ice bridge. The hacking soldier did not attempt to jump back to the safety on this side of the bridge. He tried to join his doomed comrades on the other side instead.

  He didn’t make it, and went plunging down to the methane river 200 meters below. Cheng heard the chant of the other six soldiers for many minutes even though they were now completely engulfed by aliens. One by one their chants kept reducing until there were none.

  The futile deception stopped almost immediately. There was no more point in trying to walk across the pitons and die. The path at the other end had been closed. The aliens stranded on the plateau had nowhere to go, and new aliens had stopped arriving at the plateau. In a bizarre display of single mindedness, the aliens stranded on the plateau, still tried to jump across the chasm left by the destruction of the bridge.

  One by one they jumped and fell into the methane river down below. Yet it did not prevent the ones behind from trying. They jumped one by one and kept dying. When the last of the Shaitans had jumped to their death, all that was left on the plateau were the shredded bodies of six brave humans.

  Cheng was as bitter with himself as he was proud of his men. His men had compensated for his tactical shortcomings by sacrificing their lives. Then he thought even more bitterly. The aliens may have the advantage of using their own kind as implements of war, but the humans compensated for it with their bravery and sacrifice.

  Chapter 31

  Battle of Shiroyama

  To Alex and Takamori, it looked like the battle had suddenly paused after the carnage caused by the flamethrowers, and after a pause of about 10 minutes started again, on no apparent trigger, in all its fury. If anything the assault seemed even more ferocious than the previous one. They would realize the explanation later.

  The alien commanders let off the pressure on Thermopylae only to encourage a desperate Cheng to call for help and get reinforcements, thus weakening the defense at the gates. The arrival of reinforcements at the Devil’s Chasm, would be the signal for the real manic assault on the weakened defense at Thermopylae.

  The alien commanders had been waiting for the last 10 minutes for that cry of support to come from Cheng. When the brave Chinese soldiers put paid to that scheme, there was no point holding back, and the alien commanders had unleashed the full fury of the alien hordes massed in front of their gates.

  There were alien bodies littered across the entire pass now. It was lying in heaps sometimes stacked many aliens high. Alex estimated that there was definitely more than a thousand alien bodies, probably even more than thousand five hundred. The pikes and the trenches despite being partially destroyed were still playing a role in injuring and slowing down the enemy.

  The corridor of death was still doing its job despite the machine guns running dry. Due to the impediments of the pikes and the trenches, charging Shaitans preferred to take the corridor creating a crush in the narrow passageway open on one side to the river. This inevitably led to a few of them slipping and falling into the river and their deaths. The corridor could still retain its name as the ‘corridor of death’.

  Due to these human made obstacles as well as the heaps of alien bodies lying in the passage, it was not possible for the aliens to thunder in and charge at full speed. Alex had climbed back to his observation niche and he noticed that there was something different about the formation this time.<
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  There were no waves. It was simply a mass of alien bodies funneling into the narrow pass. They were not charging, but marching at a deliberate pace. Alex realized that this assault did not intend to smash its way in. It intended to push its way in, with the sheer mass of bodies.

  The aliens were finally getting smart. They must have realized how few humans were defending the gates compared to the alien numbers. Sending Shaitans in waves only enabled humans to kill them in small manageable bunches. It had already been proven that the alien commanders did not care about the losses to their own kind.

  This time, they will use the aliens on the front line simply as a buffer, made of bodies and use the entire mass of the alien army to push through the pass. The defending humans simply did not have the numbers or the mass to push back, and they could not kill the aliens in the frontline more than once. It was a simple plan, and one Alex knew would work.

  Takamori had also climbed up a niche and was watching the same sight. He quickly thumbed his com to connect Cheng. “Takamori to Major Cheng, please respond.”

  Cheng sounded despondent as he replied. “Cheng here, go for it Major.”

  Takamori sounded so grave that Cheng was shaken out of his blues. “Major if there is no activity on your front, then I would request you leave one of the lookouts there and rush back to the hot gates. We need every person here.”

  “We are just three people left here Major.” Cheng was back to his mourning.

  “The situation here is beyond dire Major.” Takamori replied. “Every able bodied human out here would make a difference. I know the mountains are your responsibility, but I would request that you get as many of the 6 lookouts you can spare as well with you.

  While you are at it, please get the people running logistics behind the lines as well. There will be no need to run logistics, or anything else in the camp if the situation here goes south. We could do with every human in the camp right now.”

  Cheng didn’t need to be told more. He trusted Takamori and had never heard him exaggerate. If Takamori sounded like that, then the situation must be indeed beyond dire. He called Dr. Srinivasan who was the nearest lookout, to take up their position and asked the rest of the five lookouts, who were mostly scientists to reach the gates.

  As Cheng rushed downhill along with his two comrades, he called out to Mr. Gupta who was running the logistics, instructing him to reach the gates. He paused and checked his HUD display for a moment, as he was crossing the habitats. He brought up the menu with the IFF (Identify friend or foe) option to ensure that no one was still inside any habitats. Once satisfied, the started running towards gates himself.

  As Cheng reached the defending human line, he was greeted by an amazing sight. The aliens seemed to have grown taller! They looked twice their normal height. It took him a few seconds to realize what was really happening. The advancing aliens had each picked up a dead body of another alien each, as they reached the pass which was littered with alien bodies.

  They were now holding the dead bodies of their comrades over themselves as a shield against the flamethrowers! Humans would flinch at such disrespect for their dead comrades, but the aliens had proved that they did not care for such niceties. They were doing the most logical thing, using the materials available in the environment to provide themselves with as much cover as possible.

  When the aliens reached the range of the flamethrowers, it became apparent that the makeshift shield did help a bit but eventually the liquid oxygen and the liquid propane dripped down to the shielded alien below and it caught fire.

  The flame operators simply had to be a bit more deliberate and precise while spraying the liquid, and also had to use more of the fuel to get the same results. Still it was bad news for the humans. It meant that the flamethrowers would run out of fuel faster.

  The aliens had one more surprise up their sleeves. The aliens in the frontline had not yet reached the defending human line. They were still about 20 meters away when the live aliens below the dead ones started catching fire themselves. As soon as this happened, they rushed into the human line in a frenzy and hurled the dead aliens on top of them into the defending human line. The limbs of the aliens were very strong. They could throw a dead alien body almost as far as they could jump themselves.

  This put the human line in a chaos. The human line had been tightly packed, but started scattering as the flaming missiles started crashing in. The only saving grace was the slowness with which the burning dead bodies of the aliens were travelling through the air, due to the low gravity. It gave them ample time to dodge individual missiles, but the massed chaos and multiple missiles coming in, still created mayhem in the human lines.

  Someone shouted “use the spears! Use them to block!”

  Some quick thinking soldiers had started using their long spears to intercept the flying body before it reached close to the ground. The impaled body would act like a shield for the next flying alien body, but while it protected the soldier holding the spear, the burning alien body still fell next to him on one of his comrades.

  Some of the more dexterous soldiers had figured out a technique to flick the incoming body missile the moment it touched the spear in such a way, that the dead body would not be impaled, but its momentum would be turned sideways towards the river or further along to fall safely behind the human lines.

  It was a short term strategy and a short term advantage for the aliens. Once the two opposite lines had merged and started pushing each other, it was very hard to target the thin human line. Many of the body missiles flew over the human lines or fell short on the aliens themselves. After a few minutes none of the missiles were reaching the human lines at all.

  Alex who was standing in the frontlines realized in amazement why. All the aliens in the front line were dead! They had either been burnt, stabbed or slashed. They were essentially pushing against a heap of alien carcasses! The live aliens were so far back that they could not throw body missiles this far.

  The three flame throwers were not going about their business uncontested either. They had to face burning body missiles as well as some ice rocks too. They had been strapped to harnesses, attached to the wall behind the niches, for this exact eventuality.

  None of them had fallen, but two of them were out of the fight either dead or injured. Fortunately each niche had two persons for this eventuality. Their partners had checked for suit puncture. One had a cracked helmet but the other had none. The cracked helmet was foamed over and the two left alone for the moment.

  Both had probably suffered blunt force trauma, and there was a chance that they were alive, simply knocked unconscious. All three of the flamethrowers were still operational due to the redundancy of operating in pairs. The flamethrowers were however running out of aliens to burn, and more worryingly they were running out of fuel as well.

  All the aliens within the range of the flamethrowers were already burning, most were dead and the rest dying. The aliens further behind the line who were alive, and doing the actual pushing were beyond the range of the flamethrowers.

  A new row of aliens would slowly come into range as the crush of the dead alien bodies in the pass would cause some of the bodies to slip into the river and make space. The more worrying reason the aliens would come into range, was because from their birds’ eye view, the flame operators could see that the human line was now slowly but inexorably being pushed behind. It however gave the flamethrowers an opportunity to burn aliens at leisure using only the optimum amount of fuel, thus making it last as long as possible.

  When the humans had been pushed two thirds of the way into the mouth of the pass on the caldera end, the fuel tank of the flamethrowers ran empty. The four functional humans climbed up the escape ropes hanging above their niches, and took the path back to the base to join the rest of the human line to help in their efforts to push.

  Takamori saw the four reaching back behind the human lines and was initially glad for the additional help, but realized that this mean
t that no more aliens were dying in their efforts to push the humans back. There was no more advantage to be gained in tiring themselves out, trying to hold the aliens back. They needed to fall back to their contingency planning.

  He shouted out orders to Leanna and informed Alex, who was in the frontline leading the defense. Leanna would give the signal, and Alex organized his men into appropriate positions while grunting and pushing, so that they would be able to react on Leanna’s signal. This was the last desperate measure the humans had planned and hoped would never be used, but that had come to pass now.

  The reason the humans were reluctant to use this last resort, was that it may jeopardize their own chances of long term survival. That is why it was the last desperate measure, but everyone realized that if it was not used, then their short term survival was in jeopardy. They would figure out their long term survival later.

  Within a few days after their arrival at Sotra Facula cryo volcano to set up their base, Dr. Yusuke Matsumoto had mapped the entire geological and topographical terrain of the volcano and its caldera. This had been done as a safety protocol, to ensure the geological stability of their base. It was however a planetary geologist’s dream, to be standing on another planet or moon and studying its geology, so Yusuke had gone about his work with extra enthusiasm and vigor.

  Of particular interest to Yusuke had been the pass connecting the caldera to plains outside. It was not an unheard of feature, but rare. He had studied in detail the various layers of ice that made up the walls around the pass, to get a clue as to how the pass had formed. Ice has 15 different phases in which it can exist, depending on temperature and pressure.

  Some of the types of ice have small ice crystals forming inside them, like the ice we find in snowflakes and in our refrigerator, while others have none. Some are under so much pressure and such a low temperature, that they are very hard with the consistency of a hard rock. While there are other types which are brittle or amorphous. Some would flow like a fine powder when put under pressure.