The Battle of Titan Read online

  It was in the middle of one of the unending sessions of administrative rigmarole and consultations, that Harmony got a sharp taste on his personal com, which was an alert for a new message. He was relieved and disengaged his touch from the Mingle of beings that had gathered for the consultation, thankful for the break from this tiresome debate.

  The message tasted urgent, and he was on his way out from this consultation mingle even before he had finished tasting the entire message.

  He was back into the control chamber, which was the heart of the operation, in record time. He did not bother going to his niche and the tasting station out there, instead he dived straight into the Mingle, touching as many beings as possible with all his six limbs as well as his body. This is the way juveniles straight out of the spawn behaved, but he could not care about etiquette right now.

  He almost instantly knew from the chemical tastes of their slime and the pico-electric currents flowing through their skin slime, all that the Mingle of beings knew and were discussing.

  The scout probe had been flashed with strong electromagnetic waves across the spectrum from the same source as the anomalous signals! This was exciting, momentous and dangerous! Someone was aware of them! More precisely, someone had detected their scout and was not just aware of it, but actively scanning it with electromagnetic waves!

  The fact that this someone were not their own beings was beyond doubt, so it must be spawns of Ka! This was momentous news, can it get any bigger?! For only the third time in the existence of his beings, they were encountering a spawn of Ka! The council needed to be told about this immediately, but first he must stick to his caste’s credo and get all the details possible.

  So he went to his tasting station, and within moments had absorbed the dense packets of taste containing all the details. He didn’t bother copying the data, he would have access to it from any tasting station in the nest-of-nests. He was the overseer of the nest-for-Kalshuk, which gave him access privileges second to none, save the council of seers.

  He put in a request for an emergency briefing of the council, with an alarm set to alert him when he gets back a response. He hurried back to the Mingle to discuss with the excited curious and builder beings as they flashed ideas and speculations back and forth.

  He was surprised by the speed with which he got the response from the council, though he should not have been, he was running the most important project of his beings. He went into his niche and engaged the privacy chamber there before touching the tasting station. He could taste most of the members of the council.

  There existed no greetings in his beings. The protocol was simple, the tasting station would stay in standby mode, with no emotion or odor transmitted except the taste of presence of people already in conference. Once the convener of the conference, in this case a functionary of the council started the conference, there was no need for protocol about who should open.

  His beings could all have communication at various levels with multiple beings simultaneously. Not only was their chemical and electrical receptor equipped for multi-dimensional communication, the circuitry in their brain was wired to process it as well.

  In this case however there was no need for multi-dimensional communication. It was Harmony who had something to let the council know. He let them know the facts as clearly and concisely as possible, and then spelt out his inference about the existence of the spawn of Ka.

  His request for switch to data mode, so as to enable Harmony to feed the council members with raw data was ignored for the moment, as the entire council exploded in a chaos of tastes.

  After the chaos had subsided, one of the elder seers of the council conveyed to Harmony, that he could send the raw data offline. They did not doubt the data or the inference, but the gravity of the inference meant that the council will have to discuss this in private. Hence he was excused.

  He dis-engaged from his tasting station and dived right back into the Mingle, which was rife with many wild speculations. Harmony enjoyed every moment of it.

  Almost a hundred cycles after the momentous discovery about the spawn of Ka, Harmony called a Mingle of all the beings involved in the core operations at the command chamber. It consisted of a mix of curious and builder castes, and one warrior. They had to make an important operational decision.

  When and where to change the vector of thrust of the scout vessel. Currently the vessel was running on its pre-programmed mission parameters, which would continue to apply the current thrust, with the vessel squarely aimed at the bright star Kalshuk itself. This would cause it to stop right next to the star and burn up, which obviously was not the desired outcome of the mission.

  They needed to decide where to aim the vessel and also where to make it stop. They would have to start this maneuver as early as possible to save fuel, which might be required for further maneuver or exploration of the system. The vessel was never designed to be a long range scout, so it barely had enough fuel to reach the system within a reasonable timeframe.

  It would be a pity however if the vessel, which had no remote refueling capability would get disabled after reaching the system due to lack of fuel. The additional difficulty was that signals now took almost 29 cycles to reach the vessel.

  This meant that they are taking decisions based on data 29 cycles old, which would be executed after another 29 cycles. That made the urgency of making decisions even more acute.

  The problem they faced was that they still knew very little about the system to be able to decide where to point the vessel. They now knew that the system had two gas giants, one larger than their own gas giant by mass, although about the same size by volume, and the other smaller than their own gas giant but decent enough sized.

  They also knew that there were two more globes which they had earlier thought could be gas giants, but were much smaller, and were the outermost globes. They had plenty of gas but had rocky cores. They knew that there were between 3 and 6 rocky planets orbiting in the inner part of the Kalshuk system, the details of which would get resolved only after another 100 cycles.

  They had to come to a decision with imperfect data. That is the reason he has been put as the overseer by the council, so Harmony came to a decision.

  Though it was far from certain that the signals came from the gas giants, where else could it come from? There was no life possible otherwise. That part of the decision was easy. What was vexing was which one of the two? If one went entirely by probability, then the larger of the giant was more likely. However the smaller gas giant was not that small either that life was impossible in its orbit.

  The third option was that both had spawns of Ka. If this system was being inhabited by Ka’s spawns, they would certainly have explored both. One couldn’t say anything about the void capabilities of these spawns of Ka, whether they were capable of traveling from one to other, but they were certainly capable enough to detect our approaching scout vessel.

  What clinched the deal for the larger gas giant was the timing of its orbit. When they approached the system, the larger gas giant would be at the opposite end of the system, which made it attractive. This might sound counter intuitive initially, but it isn’t.

  If Harmony aimed for a point which was further than the Kalshuk star, where the vessel was designed to stop now, it meant that he would have to slow down the burn rate to reach a further point.

  This in turn meant that he had more fuel conserved that can be used later. If he turned out to be wrong, and it was the smaller gas giant, which would be on the side closer to their approach and hence closer than the Kalshuk star, then he still had the fuel to do a hard burn.

  However if he did the opposite and aimed for the smaller gas giant right now, then he will have to do a hard burn right now and exhaust his fuel. If it turned out to be the bigger gas giant, then he would not have enough fuel to accelerate to it, although he could wait for the orbit of the larger gas giant to bring it closer after hundreds of cycles, and hope enough fuel would be there to
reach it. Not a good option.

  They did not have to do too much of course correction. Although they were approaching the system from above the plane of the azimuth, it was very shallow angle, less than 1 in 128 of a circle, and the larger gas giant would be at a positional angle of only 4 in 64 at variation to the Kalshuk star, their original goal.

  The course corrections and reduction in thrust calculated to the smallest fraction possible given the data they had, it was sent to the scout vessel to be executed when it was received 29 cycles later.

  Forty cycles after the first course correction had been uploaded, as they were about to calculate and upload a minor adjustment based on data received since then, they got an unexpected surprise.

  Harmony was in mild hibernation, not in his nesting place, but on his tasting station in the control chamber. He now went into hibernation here more often, visiting his nesting place less and less. The odor of alarm, which brought him back from his stupor was urgent. He slammed his limb on the tasting station and was shocked by what he learnt.

  The scout vessel was being scanned with focused electromagnetic waves again, but in addition was also being tracked with a tight beam of coherent light. It was the kind of beam his beings used for communication and tracking between vessels and worlds. It was the kind of beam the spawns of Ka were not supposed to have, because Harmony had not detected them being used yet!

  That was not even the shocking part. The shock was the source of those signals. The signals were not coming from the original source! They could be reasonably sure of this because this new scanning was using the coherent laser beam that had never been used before.

  With that signal they could pin point the exact direction of the source with a much higher degree of accuracy and then correlate that with the radio scanning by the same source, it was at a marked variation in angle to the original source!

  There couldn’t be two different worlds scanning them, could there? No that is not possible, since the new source could be pin pointed to a very high degree of accuracy, and it was not pointing at any gas giant, or to any orbiting body at all. It seemed to come from a point in empty space.

  The original source could not be pin pointed to any gas giant either, but it had not used laser, only radio waves which could not be tracked to that high degree of accuracy, it could still be coming from a gas giant. There can be only one conclusion. That the new scanning was coming from a void vessel, traveling in the void, perhaps even trying to encounter the scout vessel!

  They would not be able to taste the vessels with light yet, because they were looking into the star and the enemy vessel was coming towards them from the star. In addition, the new vessel would have its propulsion discharge pointed away from them, so there would be no way to taste it with light yet, until it gets much closer.

  The new vessel could however see the scout vessel very easily. The propulsion nozzle of the scout was pointed towards the new vessel that must be lighting up like a beacon, plus the light from the bright star Kalshuk would also be reflecting off the surface towards this new vessel.

  This was huge! The spawns of Ka, not only were capable of tracking their vessels in the void, and hence aware of their scout ship; it was now confirmed that they had at the very least some mastery over the void, perhaps even capable of launching a defensive maneuver in the void. What would be scary, would be if they had an offensive capability as well.

  Now the verification committee report, that Taste of Light had manipulated so many thousands of cycles ago, started looking plausible. At least it no longer looked far-fetched. What if these spawns of Ka had the capability to launch an attack on their home world, or even their origin world if they would ever find it!

  Harmony took some time to study all the data in detail, confirming his initial suspicions. He took the time to make a short report, making sure every hypothesis he made had a plausible basis and every conclusion he came to, could be justified with data. He uploaded the report to seers’ council, with a request for a higher warrior liaison than he currently had.

  He indicated that the tactical situation could turn worse at any moment. As it is he was looking at data 29 cycles old, for all he knew that the scout vessel had been blown to bits and he would come to know about it in a few cycles.

  He also indicated that he is available for remote consultations at any time the council desired, but will be unable to leave the control chamber at this critical juncture. He marked the dispatch “Highly urgent” with his personal odor, as he knew was the tradition in the council.

  The conference he expected with the council came fairly fast, he attended from his own tasting station, as did most of the council members from their own respective tasting stations. There was no session scheduled, and most were attending from their respective nesting sites.

  Harmony basically repeated to the council, what he had already mentioned in his report. The council in turn could not help him much except with the warrior liaison. A warrior seer member of the council Taste of Triumph was nominated and would shortly be coming over from nest-of-nests to the control chamber of nest-for-Kalshuk and would take over as the military advisor.

  Harmony would still be running the operation center, but would defer to Triumph’s advice on tactical matters. Harmony was secretly relieved slightly. Hopefully now he could not be blamed if the scout vessel was blown to bits. There would be someone elder to him, who would be equally responsible for decisions.

  The scout vessel was not blown to bits as he feared, but over the period of the next 22 cycles, there was a second and then a third source of scanning. Each was coming from the same new direction in the empty void, indicating that these were also void vessels. So now there were three void vessels coming up to encounter their scout ship.

  They were now fairly confident that the vessels were coming towards them because they had been closely tracking the scanning from the first vessel now for 22 cycles. The strength of the signal was slowly getting stronger.

  Taste of Triumph was convinced that with three vessels dispatched, it could not be a scout force from the spawns of Ka. The evil spawns must have sent three vessels with the intention of destroying the scout vessel. Harmony could not fault the logic of the assessment and feared the worst for a vessel he had been shepherding for many thousands of cycles now.

  That the enemy would want to destroy the scout was logical. What Taste of Triumph rued was their initial hurry in dispatching the scout vessel without weapons or armor. He had not been a member of the seers’ council those many thousands of cycles ago when the decisions for this mission were taken.

  Back then the council had very few warriors, it was a time of peace and only token representation was given to the warrior caste. Even the number of warriors spawned were fairly low, the absolute minimum to ensure a balanced order in this world, and to ensure genetic diversity within the warrior caste. He could very well imagine a bunch of curious and builder caste seers taking naïve decisions on little or no warrior advice. Now we all would have to pay the price!

  Things are a lot better these days. We have after all entered a new era of migration, witnessed by very few of the generations of our beings, a momentous age usually remembered in the sagas of seers. Now it seemed we are also entering an age of war!

  Seers’ council had a lot more warriors to ensure prudent decisions, still there were not enough of them in his opinion. New warriors are being spawned on priority at the expense of most caste. More resources than ever are being spent on the warriors’ training and in the implements of war. Yes we are living in an exciting time for a warrior.

  All this exciting thought did not change his tactical situation though. A scout vessel is not expected to win a stand up fight, but it is expected to evade, deceive and also hit back when the opportunity arises. These are supposed to be all part of a scout vessels standard toolkit, which a Warmaster can use to ensure success of the scout’s mission. He had none of these tools in his toolkit.

  The vessel h
ad no emergency chemical propulsion which would have given it quick burst of acceleration in any direction for maneuvering. It depended on an ion plasma propulsion system, which may have been fine for its original civilian purpose, but was underpowered for a battle.

  It had no weapons at all, and no decoys to deceive missiles. Its armor was not battle grade. It was being approached not by one but three void vessels which were sure to be designed for war and armed to the teeth.

  To top it all, the enemy vessels would be operated by Warmasters inside those vessels taking instantaneous battle decisions, while any information he is getting is 29 cycle old, and any command that he gives to the vessel will be executed after 29 cycles.

  All in all a disaster of a tactical situation. He would do all he can, but he did not think he could save the vessel. However if he thought about it strategically, all was not lost. The scout vessel had already achieved a lot of its objectives. It has almost reached its destination and has discovered the existence of the spawns of Ka.

  That was the most critical discovery and worth a mission in itself. It has already charted a decent layout of the star system, with a fair idea of the bodies orbiting Kalshuk along with their, mass, orbit velocities, composition etc. With every cycle, it was conducting detailed spectral analysis on every orbiting body and building up more detailed picture of each of the body.

  These are critical information for the warrior’s planning. It had been able to identify the source of signals with a fair degree of confidence. The large gas giant was not an absolute certainty, it is could be the small gas giant, but fair enough, and even that will be resolved with a far more certainty in the next few cycles.

  There were two more important objectives the scout vessel was yet to accomplish. The first was to get close to the gas giant and send strategic information about the layout of the defense, as well as targeting information. The second was an idea of the weapons capability of the enemy.