In the middle of this thought going on in Alex’s minds, Sasha said the most non sequitur sentence he had ever heard. “Did you know that we have the same name?” Sasha asked as he grunted to push the bulk of the alien with this shield.
“Excuse me?” Alex blurted as he managed to reach the body of the alien with his sword and effect a small tear on it.
“I said, did you know that we have the same name?” repeated Sasha.
“Yeah I heard you the first time. Did you hurt yourself badly on the head Sasha? I will help you remember. Your name is Sasha, and my name is Alexander or simply Alex.” Alex said as he dared lower his shield a bit. His slashes on the body of the alien were having an effect and the alien’s jabs with its limbs were getting increasingly untargeted.
“My name is Alexander too. In America, Alexander becomes Alex. In Russia, Alexander becomes Sasha. I wanted to tell you this before we die.” Sasha said seriously. It must mean something to him, and that touched Alex to the core.
Alex however wanted to go out laughing so he said. “Thanks Sasha for letting me know this important fact. I couldn’t have gone my whole life without knowing it. I had thought that your mother simply hated you, and so gave you a girl’s name.” The two men found this incredibly funny for some reason. It was the laugh of two men facing death and not caring about it any longer. They laughed like mad men and kept hacking and slashing as if possessed by demons.
Takamori found himself liberated as he slashed his Katana in the traditional style of wielding such a weapon. He realized that all his life he had been using this weapon with a handicap. The handicap was the concern for his own life. It made him hold back his thrusts. It make him hesitate to move in, when he should have moved in. It made him block when he should have attacked.
Now with that handicap removed, he felt liberated wielding his sword. He moved in quicker, didn’t hold back his strikes. His motion seemed like poetry to him, and the entire experience of fighting felt like quiet meditation. He could hear the voices through his helmet and yet it felt calm and quiet as he executed his strokes. He was surrounded by his friends and enemies, killing and dying, and yet he felt as if he was alone in his garden, practicing his strikes on a wet rolled mat. He was calm and happy about his life now, and happy about how it would end. He would join his ancestors with his head held high.
The humans kept killing and dying. They could hear screams all the time, so it started sounding odd when the screams started getting lesser and lesser. Leanna knew what that meant. It was only a matter of time before her turn would be next.
She was determined to make the most of whatever time she had left. Kill as many of these bastards as she could. Then the screaming and shouting stopped all together. That shocked her. Am I the last man standing?! Or woman in this case! She looked around and saw humans standing. They were scattered and too few in numbers, but there were humans standing and none of them were screaming or shouting. That was because there were no Shaitans standing.
Alex was saying something but Leanna was in a daze and could not understand what she was saying. She saw Alex and Sasha run towards the new pass that had opened up. They were trying to find a way up to climb up the 20 odd meters to the pass. She saw them manage to jump up some boulders, and then manage to climb up and disappear into the pass.
Leanna knew intellectually that she was suffering from deep exhaustion and fatigue. She would tell the soldiers under her command all about it, but right now she did not care. She just let her legs go and let herself fall on her back. Then the whole world went black for her.
Chapter 32
The Aftermath
Ramesh cursed the design of their environment suit at the moment. He couldn’t do the simplest of human activity inside the suit – wiping the tears, which clouded his vision. He knew that the suits were the best humans had. State of the art. He was thankful that the ESA-ISRO program had taken the time to design the suit, which made it possible for him to be alive in this environment after such a severe battle.
But, he was realizing that the small things in life are as important as the big ones. He would never laugh again at a soldier, who complained about not being able to scratch his nose and other unmentionable body parts. Soldiers whom he looked at now in a completely different light now.
It was not just because they had protected him with their lives, not just because he saw so many of them die in his arms, standing between him and the hordes of Shaitan. It was not even just for their bravery, selflessness and sacrifice to protect him and his fellow scientists.
He had known and respected them for that even before he had come to Titan. No… he looked at them in a new light now because they were now his comrades. Not just fellow humans, but his people. He now knew what it felt like to be willing to die for your comrades, for he was ready to do that now.
He may not be big and strong. He may not be a warrior, but he was going to avenge his friends or die trying. And death was a certainty. As he walked up the long path to the only remaining airtight compartment of their widely dispersed habitat, he wondered how this one had so miraculously survived.
It was one of the structures closest to the pass, as the hill came tumbling down on it, and yet this hut didn’t suffer a single scratch! The decision of the planners to have a widely dispersed habitat design, despite all its inconveniences had paid off in this case.
The planners had not really designed the habitat with an attack from an alien horde in mind. It had been designed this way to mitigate the effects of an accident, whether man made or by nature. If you have a tightly integrated habitat connected together, it is very convenient to live in. You don’t have to suit up and go outside to move around, but it is like putting all your eggs in one basket. An explosion or a gas leak inside would make the entire habitat vulnerable. There could also be an explosion outside, they were after all sitting on top of a Volcano. So what if it was a cryo-volcano and the lava was at -30° C? The eruption still carried velocity and momentum.
Designed for attack or not, he was thankful for this last intact hut. Without it, the pitiful number of survivors would have all long frozen or suffocated to death. He couldn’t however ignore the fact that their survival was only a temporary reprieve. The dead were the lucky ones. The survivors faced the prospect of a slow, bitter death. This was a fate he was not willing to accept, and hence his determination for a showdown with the aliens.
He entered the airlock of the hut, which was nothing but a tube made of some hardened plastic. He was no materials engineer, but wondered what genius would have designed this plastic to have retained its characteristics in such a cold temperature. He shoved the thought out of his mind. Science should be the last thing on his mind right now.
As the airlock finished cycling and he entered the hut, he noticed how dim the lighting was. The hut was running on batteries, and every little bit of energy conservation helped. To what end he wondered – a bitter cold end.
All the humans gathered were standing with barely a meter of space between them. Damn this place was crowded despite so few humans remaining. It was not surprising really. This hut was meant as a machining and tooling hut, designed to accommodate three to four people working on various fabrication machines, and some space for spares. Those fabrication units and spares had been hastily pushed aside to make as much room as possible, but it was not enough.
“Ahh… We have Dr. Srinivasan with us now, so we can start this meeting, but before that I would like to know if Dr. Srinivasan has anything to report from his scouting mission.” Takamori said as Ramesh entered the hut.
“Nothing to report Major.” Ramesh said curtly. He was getting used to calling the military personnel by their ranks. He had even started figuring out the bewildering rank system they had, confusing as it was between the various branches of the military and the various nationalities present here.
“Very well then, let us start with a report on our current situation here in the camp. Mr. Kaminski if you could summ
arize the situation please.” Takamori invited Sasha to speak.
Sasha Kaminski was the big and strapping quintessential Russian. Till a few hours ago he was the number three in the materials & engineering section of the camp, but now he was the de-facto head of Engineering. His immediate boss was dead, and the one above was fatally injured and probably dying.
If there was a person who could claim the title of Mr. Popular in the camp, it would be Sasha. He gelled with everyone, and everybody knew him as the guy who could fix anything. Now though he had a new reputation, as a fighter. The soldiers had found a new respect for him, and considered him one of their own.
He was one of the few survivors of what was being called the battle of Thermopylae, as a reference to some historical battle which Ramesh intended to look up if he survived. What he knew was that it had been the toughest line of the battle, and Sasha despite being a civilian had chosen to stand there, and fight hand to hand with his comrades in one of the grimmest of the battles.
“Well major, the current situation in the camp can be described by what these Americans call a ‘cluster fuck’.” Sasha started in a heavily accented voice. Sasha was also a joker.
Ignoring the disapproving look from Takamori, who was always prim and proper, he continued, figuring he could get away with it since he was after all a civilian. “As you all know this is the only place which has integrity.” Integrity being the engineering parlance to say that it was air tight.
“All other habitat modules have been ruptured, some to such an extent that I do not think they can be repaired, at least not on Titan. There were two modules that I inspected, that may be repairable, but not in a short period of time, especially with so few of us left to work. We may not need that many modules unfortunately, with so few of us left.” Sasha said looking down with a morose look.
“The real problem immediately though is not the lack of living space, but of power. In the current situation, the first thing that will kill us will be the lack of power. If we had power, all of us could simply sit in this hut and survive many weeks till something else ran out.
As you know that we need power not just for heating, but to run our CO2 scrubbers, oxygen generators and many other things which are necessary to live. If this hut does not get power, then within an hour, the temperature inside will drop to anywhere between -40° C and -50° C, and that is only because there is cryo-lava flowing around at -30° C.
But you will all not have the time to freeze to death because with so many people breathing inside this small hut and the CO2 scrubbers not having power, we will die of CO2 asphyxiation. There is a way to run the scrubbers manually, but that will only postpone things because we cannot generate oxygen without power, so we die due to lack of oxygen.” Sasha gave a stoic and yet fatalistic smile that only Russians can do.
“Right now we are running on batteries of this hut, which act like a power buffer for short interruptions of power, so they do not have large capacity. The batteries of this hut at the current rate of consumption will last…” Sasha referred to his tablet which was hooked to a data socket on the wall “…about 6 hours tops.”
“The cause of the power disruption is the damage to our nuclear reactor. I have checked the power lines, they are fine. It is the reactor which has been damaged. As you know we have no spare reactor, since we barely had enough capacity to carry a single dirty fission reactor.
Since I have not had the time, neither did I have the radiation shielding to do a close inspection, I cannot tell you exactly what is damaged, but I think that the coolant fluid which circulates inside the rods may have leaked out due to some rupture.
I saw discoloration of the ground from far indicating some fluid leakage, along with two alien bodies and a human body lying on top of it. I could not identify the human from far, and I could not be sure if they had died in fighting, or due to radiation poisoning.
Since power is our most immediate threat to survival, I recommend that we put our primary efforts on fixing the nuclear reactor if possible. I have some recommendations for the same, which I can make when we discuss how to fix the reactor.” Sasha finished looking around the room and seeing the grim faces of men and women who were staring at the face of imminent death.
“Well Mr. Kaminski, since it is the most important thing for our survival, please give us your recommendation now. Let it be the first item of business. We don’t need the technical details of the fault or repairs, just what you need.” Takamori asked Sasha.
“To start with I would like to inspect all the damaged modules’ battery units and check if any of them are salvageable. Whatever is salvageable and has some power left in it, I would need help in dismantling them and bringing them here to this hut to give us more time.
At the same time as this is being done, we need to build something we can put over the suit, which would give radiation shielding. Surprisingly radiation suit was not part of our inventory, I guess no one thought we would have to repair the reactor during mission planning.
I would have gone inside without shielding if the danger was simply developing cancer, but I have checked the Geiger counter, and the radiation would kill in a few hours if the person is not shielded. I will not be able to repair the reactor so fast, so you will be left without an engineer who knows the reactor as well as I do.”
Takamori and indeed everyone in the room was moved by Sasha’s willingness to sacrifice himself, if it could buy his friends more time. “Sasha…” Takamori started using first name, which no one had heard the formal Takamori ever do “you are more to us than just an Engineer. You are our comrade, one of us. You are MY friend. No one would ever let you near that reactor without shielding, even if it meant all of us dying.”
It was Sasha’s turn to be moved, Takamori had never referred to anyone as his friend, always by their rank, title or last name. He quickly tried to hide behind gallows humor. “Yes that too and radiation fried engineer is no good to eat if we run out of food and turn cannibals. No?” Everyone winced at his poor humor but let it pass.
“Is that all you need?” Takamori asked.
Sasha replied “This is all we need to start immediately, but I also would need someone to figure out how to replace the coolant fluid, if that turns out to be issue and we can fix the reactor rupture. We can easily replace the fluid which runs the turbine with local materials mainly ice. It was designed that way.
What would be hard to replace would be the coolant fluid flowing through the fuel rods. It is a specially designed fluid that is non corrosive and has specific viscosity and heating properties. This was brought from earth and I am not even sure that we can make it locally if it came to that. I am not very good at material sciences. What we may need is a materials genius.”
All eyes instinctively turned towards Mr. Gupta who was one of the few people sitting on the ground, cradling his left arm. Most of his left lower arm was bandaged and he was visibly shaking from pain. His arm was not hurt in the conventional sense, but was frost bitten and the onset of Gangrene had started. The corpsman who had treated him had said that he would most likely lose the arm, but if not operated soon, may lose his life.
There were very few injured in the room. That was because even a small injury through your suit was fatal on Titan. Almost all the injured had similar injuries to Mr. Gupta caused by exposure to the cold. It was an irony that Gupta’s suffering was due to his own invention, otherwise he would have been dead.
Mr. Gupta’s foam was the reason that all the injured except two were even alive and in this room. Even many of the dead fought for much longer, because they were not killed immediately or on to their first injury, because of the foam.
Sarvesh Gupta was ESA-ISRO team’s materials specialist and in-situ fabrication specialist. He had been an academic till recently, and had been the head of the applied materials research lab in the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.
He had been drafted into the space program by ISRO to research and develop new material
s that humanity would need to survive in space. Things made out of materials, which can survive and work in the extreme environment of other planets and space, not just in the benign environment of earth.
At 57, he was the oldest member in the human contingent. He was not even expected to go to space, let alone come here to Titan and get into the thick of the battle. A chain of events and a twist of fate led him to be here. There was however not a single human on Titan who was not glad that he was here. Every implement of war, and both offence and defense that they had made in the weeks leading up to this battle had the imprint, contribution or was the outright invention of Mr. Gupta.
The mission planners had equipped the soldiers with cold hardened guns and a limited amount of bullets to conserve weight. That was all. No one had really expected a land battle, let alone a battle of epic proportions.
All they had fought and defended with, had to be made here in Titan, mostly scavenging from materials they had brought down with them. There was very little material on the surface of Titan that could be used making implements of war. No metals or rocks. But what little of the chemistry of Titan could be harnessed to make weapons, Mr. Gupta’s genius had ensured that it would be used.
The foam by far was the most popular invention of Mr. Gupta. It was used, carried and treasured by everyone. It was one item of personal safety, which no one ever forgot when they put on their suit. The concept itself is not new, nor the actual product. What was remarkable was how he made it and with what he made it, which revolutionized its use in the camp and in battle.
All the three ships and their crew had carried to the surface bottles of quick hardening foam brought from earth, for patching up torn space suits. The concept had been prevalent for the last decade or so, ever since the manned Mars missions. It had probably saved the life of an astronaut or two prior to this mission as well.
The Battle of Titan Page 52
