Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Read online

  Every great civilization, and every great power in this galaxy has a story. The story of each civilization winds through twists and turns, triumphs and defeats, as the civilization progresses to a position of eminence and dominance. The path is rarely straight but always interesting, and it always has a humble beginning. This is the story of the rise of the civilization and power that would come to be known in the galaxy as the ‘Human Empire’. Like all such stories, this too has a humble beginning.

  Index

  Prologue

  The Bodar Sisters

  Reverse Persistence Hunt

  Anyone Home?

  The Battle of Bosporus

  The Nursery

  The Sacrificial Lamb

  Unfulfilled Destiny

  The Beta Brigade

  Sneaking Up in Plain Sight

  Into the Jaws of the Beast

  A Generational Craft

  Breaching Gates of Fire

  Stabbing a Dragon’s Heart

  The Ultimate Sacrifice

  Broken Blade

  One Last Hunt

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Prologue

  Under Lake Serene, Planet Ka-Let, Proxima Centauri System

  2189

  “First Platoon, halt! There is something not right here!” Lt. Hector Jenkins called out to his platoon over the radio. The platoon was close enough that they were all within radio contact range. The range of radio signals is severely limited under water. The suit communication systems of the Marines weren’t exactly designed for use under water, although the standard issue Mark-7 armor suit used by USC-GCF Marines were designed to perform adequately under water should such a need ever arise. Such a need had arisen now! Marines had used their armored suits in shallow waters a few times during their battles with the Shaitans on their various home worlds. Shaitans were fairly comfortable fighting in water and even under water for short periods. Hence some of the battles in their home worlds had ended up in short spells of fights in water or under shallow waters.

  This was the first time though, as far as Lt. Hector Jenkins knew, when the Marines were going into a potential combat situation that was hundred and twenty meters under the water. This was also the first time that the Marines were going into battle where the objective was under water, rather than a chase with the Shaitans that had incidentally led them into the water. The Marines of the First Platoon, along with other Marines closing in on their objective from various directions, had prepared specifically for this under water mission.

  Marines’ armored battle suits had gone through a lot of improvements in the past century over the course of the Shaitan wars. The Marines had gone to battle on Alpha Shaitan over eighty years ago in Mark-1 armor. suits which were the great granddaddy of the Mark-7 being currently used by Lt. Jenkins and his Marines. The Mark-7 had tracked human technological improvements over the course of the decades to improve upon that original Mark-1 suit. Longer lasting batteries enabled longer missions, powered movements were stronger and lasted longer. Armor was stronger, and survivability on breach of suit were greater.

  There was one feature though on a Mark-7, which didn’t exist in a Mark-1 at all – the designed ability to wage a sustained underwater mission. The Mark-1 and most suits that followed it were designed primarily for space or for planets/moons with no or low atmospheric pressure. A Marine could survive under shallow water up to about twenty to thirty meters in those suits by the virtue of the fact that the suits were designed air tight and hence were also water tight. Beyond that there was no provision to protect a human from the crushing pressures of water at greater depths or the fact that radio communication doesn’t work too well under water, or the fact that sonar is a better sensing method under water than light.

  The Mark-7 battle armor suit that was being used by the Marines for the last decade or so, changed all that. Necessitated by the fact that Marines were increasingly invading Shaitan home worlds and fighting in their underground abodes, which often were fully or partially flooded either deliberately or accidentally, the Mark-7 was designed to specifically have some amount of underwater fighting capability. Fighting underwater wasn’t the Mark-7’s primary design goal, and it wasn’t a great underwater fighting gear, but if called upon to do that task, it could do so with reasonable competence.

  Some of the adaptations the Mark-7 had for underwater were obvious things like a sonar array and sensor, through which a Marine could make a three-dimensional map of its surroundings using high frequency sonar. The suit had low frequency subsonic sonar for long distance communications. A Marine could get signals from and to command post hundreds of kilometers away under water, although the throughput of data wasn’t as high as through radio. Consequently, subsonic sonar communications meant speech-to-text communication only, where a Marine’s speech was converted to text and then transmitted over subsonic waves. Only low bandwidth information could be downloaded from the central command using subsonic communications. Still, it was far better than radio, where the signal petered off after a kilometer or so.

  One of the not so obvious feature for underwater that the Mark-7 had, was the way it handled underwater pressure. An un-acclimatized Marine could get into a Mark-7 and dive into the water to a theoretical limit of about 200 meters immediately. The armor suit wasn’t rigid. It couldn’t be if had to provide good mobility to a Marine. Parts of the exterior of the suit were hardened to provide protection against projectiles and plasma fire, but the suit overall had many soft pliable spots especially around the joints and torso for a human to move around as naturally as possible. The Kevlar and carbon fiber weave around those spots was no more rigid than tarp. Under the crushing pressure of water, it would crush the Marine inside.

  To protect the Marine inside, the Mark-7’s inner lining was made of electro-plastic meshes. The special property of the plastic was that on application of electricity, the grains of the plastic structure would rearrange themselves, aligning themselves along the lines of the electric dipole. Without application of electricity, the plastic grains would go back to their random arrangement, and the plastic would lose its rigidity. Once the electricity was applied though, the grains would align back again in the mesh structures giving them rigidity in the forms and shapes they had been manufactured.

  When a Marine dove into the water initially, the Mark-7 would increase the electricity running through the electro-plastic mesh as much as required to make the suit rigid enough to keep the outside pressure at bay, while the pressure inside the suit was maintained at one atmosphere. The suit would then slowly start acclimatizing the Marine inside. The Mark-7 would start infusing Helium mixture into the suit and slowly cranking up the pressure inside. As the pressure inside increased and counteracted the pressure outside, the Mark-7 would reduce the electric current running through the electro-plastic mesh lining, making the suit flexible and pliable again. This mechanism ensured that a Marine could suit up and get into action underwater immediately, albeit at the cost of initially losing some amount of suit flexibility till the Marine’s body could be fully acclimatized for depth.

  Returning to the surface however was an entirely different story. A Marine could get out of water and RTB (Return to Base) whenever he wanted, but had to stay inside the Mark-7 for anywhere between five to fifteen hours depending on the depth of the dive, to go through the decompression cycle. Once the human body had been acclimatized to high pressure, it had to go through the slow decompression to avoid ‘bends’, which could cripple or kill a person.

  Lt. Jenkins’ First Platoon were at a depth where it took just ten to fifteen minutes for a Marine to be acclimatized and put under th
e requisite compression, but it would take them over ten hours to decompress back at their base. That was the least of Lt. Jenkins’ worries. He had called a halt to the march of his platoon because his gut was telling him that something just wasn’t right, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. He couldn’t keep his platoon stalled for long, for he had a schedule to keep. Other Marines converging from other directions were counting on his platoon to be in position at the designated time. Yet he couldn’t let his Marines march ahead when his instinct was screaming at him to halt.

  Lt. Hector Jenkins was suddenly startled by the popping sound of his suit. The external and internal pressures of the suit were equalizing, and some part of his suit must have reduced its rigidity as result, which had caused the popping sound. Sound! Was it sound? What was raising his hackles? It wasn’t light for sure. It was still very dark up ahead as it was in every direction other than straight on top, where a hint of the bright sky could be seen.

  His tactical display both in his head using the neural interface, as well as on the helmet screen didn’t show anything out of the ordinary. The Marines weren’t actively pinging their objective with sonar, to avoid alerting anyone to their approach, but the barge up above was actively scanning and sending them continuous updates, nothing had changed. For a moment he had suspected that it was something that he had heard, but realized that there had been no unexplained sound either.

  Then in a moment of epiphany, Hector realized that it was sound, just not the kind you can hear but the kind you can feel! Hector holstered his weapon and bent down to touch the floor of the lake with both his palms. It wasn’t as smooth and graceful a motion as Hector would have liked. The Mark-7 wasn’t the easiest of things in which to go squat even in the best of times, but at that moment Hector’s suit hadn’t completely equalized pressure, so it was more rigid than usual.

  Hector finally managed to put his palm on the floor in an almost prostrate position, which was a good thing because now he was feeling the vibrations on the lake floor with his entire body. Hector was growing increasingly convinced that he could feel a very slight vibration on the lake floor. Hector needed confirmation, so he asked the Marines on either side of him to get into a similar position. Both confirmed the vibration.

  Hector stood up and opened a channel with Major Bose up at the barge. “Sir, please be advised that the First Platoon can feel vibrations below their feet on the lake floor. My suspicion is that the low thrumming is being caused by heavy machinery running at steady RPM – some machinery with a vibration signature like a power generator or a massive pump.”

  “Copy that lieutenant, hold on for a sec.” Major Bose replied and put the channel on hold. Hector could hear over the general channel Major Bose asking all the other team leaders to touch the lake floor and check if they could feel similar vibrations as well. Only one of the other three teams confirmed that they could feel the vibrations. Major Bose was back on the private channel with Hector. “I know that you don’t have seismographic equipment with you Hector, but normally one gets a gut feel notion of the scale of the equipment by feeling vibrations. Do you want to hazard a guess on the size of the equipment?”

  “I don’t know sir… the floor of the lake looks fairly natural to me, made from mud. Even if that equipment is buried just a few feet below the surface and we are standing right on top of it, even then the machine must be massive something weighing tens of tons at the least. That is my best guess, Sir.” Hector replied.

  “Good enough guess for me, lieutenant. My sit-map shows that you are still about a hundred meters from the objective. My guess is that the objective is buried much deeper under the floor of the lake than we initially suspected and perhaps a lot more massive underground than our sonar scans suggested, which wouldn’t surprise me. Sonar scans are fine to map things under water from above. They don’t scan things buried under the ground below the water very well from above.” Major Bose replied.

  Then he switched back to the general channel broadcast. “All right Marines listen up! Delta team to the South and Alpha team to the East have reported vibrations being felt on the lake floor, indicating heavy machinery running that is buried underneath the objective. Both those teams are about a hundred meters from the objective as you can all see on your sit-maps, so whatever this place is, it is most likely buried deeper and probably is bigger than we thought. It looks increasingly likely that there is something alive down there, and probably watching you at this very moment. Watch out for booby traps or an ambush. Proceed with extreme caution, all teams make sure that you arrive at the objective simultaneously. We will take a call on further course of action depending on what you find once you reach the objective. Bose out.”

  All the four team leaders acknowledged and continued towards their objective more gingerly, keeping an eye on their display to ensure that the other teams were all in sync approaching from four directions at the same time. Lt. Hector Jenkins and his First Platoon were approaching the objective from a relatively disadvantageous position. The objective was right next to a row of rock outcroppings on the floor of the lake. The Alpha and Gamma teams were approaching the objective from East and West respectively, hugging those rock outcroppings which ran in the East-West direction. The Beta team approaching from the North was in the best position approaching the objective from above those rocks. The First Platoon was the Delta team, approaching in the open from the deeper part of lake floor, where they had been dropped.

  Their objective was unremarkable, and would have been missed by the sonar surveys, but for one fact. The sonar image had showed that a few meters underneath what looked like a shallow natural cave in the rock outcroppings, lay a structure that was a perfect circle! Such a structure couldn’t be natural. It had to have been constructed by someone! Hector was now just a few meters away from that opening of what looked like a natural cave, but on closer inspection may have been constructed to look natural. He could not see anything beyond the dark maw of the cave.

  He knew that there was at least a circular chamber somewhere below that opening in the cave, which he would be able to see only if he entered the cave. Hector checked in with the leaders of the other three teams, who had also arrived as per schedule. All the four Marine teams could see each other with the aid of infrared. They were just meters apart from each other surrounding the entrance of the cave. Hector connected with Major Bose to report and ask for permission to send in spiders for reconnaissance inside the cave.

  –XXX–

  Bothol Slayer had been awake for some time now, and she was almost completely normal and functional. The same couldn’t be said about her sister Shell Cracker, who was perhaps only halfway into recovery from the deep stasis cryo-sleep. Shell Cracker had dragged her recovery support equipment along with her to the entrance of the colony to stand besides Bothol Slayer. The commitment and bravery of Shell Cracker to stand here beside her sister to defend the colony was commendable, but it was a pathetic sight to watch for Bothol Slayer. A Bodar coming out of stasis cryo-sleep is not a pretty sight to watch.

  Bothol Slayer rued the fact that the Sentinel AI took so long to decide to reanimate her. It should have woken her up a long time ago, the moment these unknown hostiles came into orbit around this planet. Intellectually she understood the AI’s reluctance to wake up a Bodar Guardian at the first sign of an anomalous event. Bodar biochemistry was not particularly amenable to cryo-freeze. It took a heavy toll on a Bodar body to go through a freeze, and it left its mark permanently on a Bodar body after reanimation, sometimes even crippling the Bodar. As a result Bodars rarely went into stasis cryo-sleep, unless it was absolutely necessary for them to wait for a long time for an event or a cause much greater than individual lives. Once woken up, it wasn’t advisable for a Bodar to go into freeze a second time in their lives. The odds of dying in the process of freezing were too high.

  Bothol Slayer and her sister Shell Cracker had the most critical task assigned to them – they were the Guardians of the
Seeds. They were guarding a nest packed with millions of Bodar seeds. It was a life time commitment. The sisters had frozen themselves, guarding the otherwise hidden nest for millennia if necessary, awaiting commands to reanimate and hatch those frozen seeds when the time came. The sisters had reconciled to the fact that their lives were dedicated to this nest. They had expected to wake up one day many cycles from now, with the purpose of slowly unfreezing the seeds, hatching them and starting up the nursery for the hatchlings.

  The reluctance of the AI to wake up Bothol Slayer and her sister was justifiable. Once they woke up, they would not be able to go back to cryo-sleep. That would jeopardize their duty to wait for ages and assist in hatching the seeds in the nest when the command arrived. The woken Bodars would be forced to live out their lives normally and die out in a relatively short period of time. When the unknown hostiles started landing on the planet, the Sentinel AI decided to wake up one of the Bodar Guardians as a compromise. The threat was real enough to sacrifice one of them. After all the Guardians also had the responsibility to guard the nest!

  Bothol Slayer had been woken up, while her sister Shell Cracker had been left in her sleep. After her recovery, Bothol Slayer had kept an acute watch over the activities of the unknowns. Her ability to watch the activities of the unknowns was hampered by the fact that most of the electronic data gathering being done by the Sentinel AI was through a low-profile covert network. There were no big dish antenna or observatory feeding data to her. The low profile was necessary to keep the location of the nest hidden.

  Bothol Slayer had observed with increasing alarm as the unknowns started combing the area around the lake. When the unknowns scanned the bottom of the lake with Sonar and Radar, Bothol Slayer decided to wake her sister up. She knew that it was only a matter of time before the nest was discovered, and from the amount of activity that the Sentinel AI was indicating, the unknown hostiles had a sizable invasion force. She would need the assistance of her sister in the defense of the nest. Bothol Slayer only wished that Shell Cracker had more time to recuperate. Shell Cracker could barely move, she would have to position herself at the opening and defend standing. Bothol Slayer would have to take up the role of lead hunter. The sisters didn’t have heavy weapons on them, but the weapons they had were adequate. All Bothol Slayer could do now was wait in ambush!