Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4) Read online

  “From whatever we have been able to analyze from the message, there is no reason to disbelieve that threat of the Ka-Baal, especially because the logic put out by the Ka-Baal in their threat makes eminent sense. Something even our beings would have done, if the situation had been reversed.

  “Esteemed Seers of this council, it seems that aligning with the Ka-Baal may be perilous, but refusing to align with them might be even more dangerous. Aligning with the Ka-Baal gives us some hope, however slim of survival and possibly even of prosperity. Refusing to align with the Ka-Baal on the other hand would almost certainly bring us doom, irrespective of who wins this war eventually. If our beings win the war and prevail, then they would surely come here to cleanse this world, if they do not decide to do it earlier, even before the war is won. If the Ka-Baal win the war, and we are not aligned with them, then we are doomed in any case.” Taste of Remembrance concluded his analysis and yielded back control.

  The debate started immediately with impassioned, scared and hopeful Seers putting their points across for the council. The Seers knew that the decision they would take, would decide their fate and that of their world. More important to the seers was the fact that their decision would determine the fate of their religion – whether it lives or it dies. That fact added additional religious fervor and zeal to the debate. Shaitans are hardy creatures, who can go many cycles without nourishment. The council stretched the limits of their physical endurance in the marathon session.

  In the end a consensus slowly emerged. The Shaitans of World #6 decided what they would do, and how they would go about it. As the council meeting was winding down, one of the seers asked Seer Taste of Remembrance. “If I am not mistaken, you had mentioned that the Ka-Baal had made two military demands. We seem to have discussed only one: that we send our warriors on their transport ships to fight alongside the Ka-Baal warriors. What is the other demand? It is pertinent input to our discussion.”

  Seer Taste of Remembrance replied. “The second military demand made by the Ka-Baal is a deferred one, which is expected to happen much later in time, if at all. Hence I had not mentioned it, because it is not pertinent to our immediate decision or survival. I did not want to complicate the debate further. Now that we have come to a decision, here is what the Ka-Baal demand from us.” Seer Taste of Remembrance explained in detail about the second military demand made by the Ka-Baal. As mature beings as the seers of the council were, who had complete master and control over their body, the council chamber was filled with odors of dread, amazement and shock.

  Chapter XXX

  Reactionless

  Earth

  Second & third decade of the 22nd Century

  It had been the holy grail of fiction writers – Reactionless drives! Writers and dreamers over the past few centuries had dreamt of travelling around the galaxy in ships with reactionless drives. So what was a reactionless drive, and why was it so special? Surprisingly the answer to that question depended on whom you asked, for there were many methods imagined to achieve a reactionless drive, and there were equally varied reasons to build one.

  The common thread among all reactionless drives could be defined by what it was not. A reactionless drive did not use Isaac Newton’s famous Third law of motion – ‘every action had an equal and opposite reaction’. Hence the name reactionless drive.

  The standard methods of propulsion used by human spaceships (as well as Shaitan spaceships), were based on ejection of propellant. A chemical rocket expels hot gasses at the rear of a ship through its thrusters to provide forward motion to the ship. An ion plasma rocket works on a similar principle of physics, expelling ion plasma stream to provide propulsion. In both cases the expulsion of propellant is the ‘action’ and the forward motion of the ship is the ‘reaction’.

  There were three major benefits imagined of a reactionless drive. First, ships would not have to carry the huge amount of propellant it currently does. Second benefit would be possible only if a special kind of reactionless drive was possible, one where not just the ship, but every molecule inside the ship was uniformly accelerated.

  A ship’s engine produces thrust, which being bolted on to the ship pushes the entire ship forward, which in turn pushes everything inside the ship like the human travelers and their equipment along with it. Thus the momentum imparted to a human inside the ship is by the pressure that the human experiences during acceleration.

  By the standards of the early 22nd century human technology this was not a problem, because the fastest human ships could only accelerate long term using their ion plasma engines at 0.5 G, or 50% of Earth Standard gravity. The humans inside the ship just felt low gravity sensation. This slow rate of acceleration however meant that if the ship wanted to reach anywhere near the speed of light for fast travel, it would take years to accelerate to that speed and another few years to slow down to a stop. This was clearly not practical.

  To reach the speed of light within a reasonable time frame, the ship would have to accelerate at over 10 G for over a month at the least. Needless to say, that would kill every human inside the ship. The military would like to go one step ahead and have its warships accelerate at 50G in emergency situations, which would make a gooey paste of every human inside the ship!

  The Holy Grail in reactionless drives was where the drive did not accelerate the engine, but every molecule of every object inside the ship. If that could be done, then it would not be individual objects and their molecular bonds that would feel the acceleration pressure. Each molecule would be accelerated equally, and the humans inside would still feel weightless as they accelerated even at 1000Gs.

  The third major benefit from the military perspective was stealth. The ion plasma drives announced themselves for years while approaching the enemy. With reaction drives, it was impossible to move around without advertising the precise location and velocity of the ships. From the military standpoint, it would be wonderful if their warships could emerge at their designated positions stealthily, without the signature emitted by ion plasma drives.

  Unfortunately all the benefits of a reactionless drive were moot, for they remained the fantasy of fiction writers and drive designers. The reason they remained a fantasy was that reactionless drives violated a fundamental law of classical physics. The ‘law of conservation of momentum’ is derived from Newton’s laws of motion. In plain English, one cannot move forward in space without pushing something back, and hence experiencing a force.

  In the meanwhile drive designers had tried to mitigate the drawbacks of the reaction drives as much as possible, thus reducing the urgency of experimentation on reactionless drives. The ions of the ion plasma engines in the latest generation of engines were accelerated to close to the speed of light in an accelerator before being ejected.

  The relativistic effect was that these ions’ mass was ten times the rest mass. As a result very little propellant was needed to be ejected out. Thus propellant weight was no longer an issue. The limiting factor had now turned to be the amount of hydrogen required for generation of energy.

  It is a good thing that human society throws up mavericks who do not conform to accepted norms of what should be and what shouldn’t be. These mavericks could not be bothered by little things like violation of fundamental laws of physics. Human progress has depended throughout history on such mavericks. Surprisingly such a maverick arose not at the beginning of the 22nd century, when the first practical reactionless drive was commissioned, but a full hundred years before at the beginning of the 21st century.

  The EmDrive was ridiculed and pilloried when it was first designed and implemented in the year 2000. It was not surprising, for many such reactionless drive claims had been made before, and all those prior attempts had turned out to be false starts. It had not helped that the inventor himself had not been very scientifically articulate in his presentations to the rest of the world.

  The biggest hurdle to the EmDrive credibility was that neither the inventor, nor anyone else underst
ood the science behind why it should work. That was not surprising, for the science behind the EmDrive had not yet been discovered. It would take eighty years more before it could be truly understood why the EmDrive worked, when a new scientific theory to understand the nature of the fabric of space and time started being discovered, which explained among other things the nature of Dark Energy and Dark Matter.

  Scientists and institutions tried hard year after year to disprove the EmDrive, each building their own experimental drives, and each finding to their surprise that the damn thing actually worked! The Germans, the Chinese and finally in 2014 NASA had to admit that their own prototype worked. No one knew why it worked, but they suspected it had something to do with quantum mechanical effects. The basic design of the EmDrive engine was a tapering and constricted tetrahedral box. When electromagnetic waves like Microwaves, was pulsed from one end inside this constricted box, the entire box was pushed in the opposite direction with a very tiny but measurable force.

  The insulated box emitted no EM waves outside, and in space the tiny force was enough to make to accelerate and move, albeit at a very slow rate. To an observer outside, it seemed that the box was moving by itself as if by magic. It wasn’t magic, as theoretical physicists would later discover. The constricted geometry of the box forced the EM waves inside to flow in a very disruptive pattern. The result was that the photons of the EM waves at a quantum-mechanical scale were constrained to push at the very fabric of space in order to maintain the Electromagnetic equations that we are all familiar with.

  As physicists had realized since the early 20th century, space is not an empty nothing. Space is made up of ‘something’… it is a ‘something’ that we cannot touch or feel just like Dark Matter and Dark Energy, but that is our limitation as beings made out of Baryonic matter. The fact that we cannot touch or feel space doesn’t make it any less real in terms of being made of ‘something’. Einstein first coined the term ‘fabric of space’ when he showed through his theory of relativity, how this fabric can be bent and warped, and how this fabric of space resists any motion through space. As any object moves through space at increasing velocity, space resists the motion by increasing the mass of the object. It is this fabric of space that prevents us from ever reaching the speed of light or going beyond it.

  It is this very fabric of space against which the EmDrive pushes to provide itself momentum. So, in a way the EmDrive does not really violate the Newtonian laws of motion, all it does it expand the definition of the laws to also include space as a material object.

  All that backslapping by the scientists in finally being able to explain the enigma of the EmDrive had not helped the cause of the EmDrive much. As the technology stood at the beginning of the 22nd century, the drive was pitifully slow for any practical use, since it generated a miniscule amount of thrust compared to even the ion plasma engine, which were themselves considered low on thrust compared to chemical engines. To make matters worse, the EmDrive was horribly energy inefficient. The ion plasma despite its shortcoming on thrust had been adopted because it was far more efficient than the chemical engines. The EmDrive was nowhere near that kind of efficiency. Energy used to generate the microwaves inside the box was mostly absorbed by the insulation layer as heat, and only a very small fraction was converted into momentum.

  Thus, there had been no substantial effort to research the EmDrive. It did not provide good thrust or energy efficiency. There was no reason to try to build a reactionless engine using the EmDrive technology.

  That situation changed with the success of the Beagle mission. The Beagle mission proved the value of a stealth drone sent deep into the heart of enemy territory. The intelligence provided by the Beagle had already helped humanity avoid a certain disaster in the form of the Hadean Fleet. It had provided real time intelligence, delayed only by the speed of light on the enemy’s preparations and movement in their home world. That in turn not just helped in planning defense but also offensive attacks that save innumerable lives. Both the military and the civilian governments were total converts on the usefulness of stealth drones. The USC had been granted budget to develop an advanced spy drone to be sent to every Shaitan world possible with multiple backup drones hanging back at a distance. If a spy drone was discovered, then the backup drone could stealthily creep into the system to replace the compromised drone.

  The Beagle as a template for a spy drone was fairly adequate on all aspects except one – decelerating and creeping into the enemy system. This was one area where any kind of conventional thrust engine fell woefully short. There was no way for such a ship to slow down into the enemy system as they approached it without being detected. The Beagle had compromised firstly by not travelling at the topmost speed it was capable of, so that it would have less velocity to shed. Secondly, the Beagle had whizzed past Beta Shaitan at high speed without attempting to slow down. Only after it was some distance away from Beta Shaitan, did it open up its engines which would now be turned away from Beta Shaitan to slow down. In addition it had used its Harvester like an umbrella shield to hide the slight leak in radiation that is visible even if the engines are pointed the other way.

  This compromise was hardly a good solution for a spy drone, especially if it had to go further into the Shaitan worlds. If the spy drones were not allowed to go at the top speed possible due to the Harvester technology, then these drones would not be able to reach their objectives within any reasonable frame of time, rendering them useless. If on the other hand they went at their top speed possible, then they would whizz by their objective system so fast on some of the more distant worlds that very little valuable real time intelligence would be collected on the fly by. The military would have to wait many more years as the drone turned and slowed down after passing its objective, and then slowly creeping in. The creeping in part was especially dangerous to the drone because as before, the drone would not be able to slow down. This meant that the creep would have to be very-very slow, which meant adding even more time before the drone can deploy its mission.

  The only reason this painful procedure had been acceptable for Beagle was because Beta Shaitan is relatively close to Earth, so Beagle did not have to build up too much speed to reach there in a reasonable timeframe. This meant that the fly-by was at a lower speed and hence useful enough. It also meant that the Beagle did not have to shed a huge velocity, and hence could creep back reasonably fast. The same tactic cannot be employed for example on the Shaitan origin world which was about 2.5 light years away from Earth.

  So how do you slow down a drone without giving yourself away? The answer was to use a reactionless engine. The reactionless engine with all its drawbacks may not have been practical for a warship carrying people, but those drawbacks were not a huge issue for a drone and the kind of mission it was expected to perform. Drones need not come to a complete halt as they passed by their objective. As long as they could slow themselves down reasonably, it was acceptable. They could always creep back as Beagle had done. In fact the creep back can be a lot faster because the ship could turn and decelerate without any danger of detection of any engine glow.

  The inefficiency of the EmDrive engine was lesser of an issue for a drone because even a single fusion reactor was an overkill for a drone by a factor of almost seven to eight. The military intended to put two fusion reactors in every drone for redundancy. Fusion reactor and Harvester were the only two piece of equipment that the Beagle did not have in duplicate because of their expense. The Beagle was an experimental vehicle. The drones being designed by the USC were meant to operate on their own in remote space for 50-70 years, so adding another fusion reactor was imperative. Power was not an issue on these drones, so the inefficient EmDrive could be tolerated.

  So, after over a hundred of discovery of the EmDrive, serious research dollars were spent on creating humanity’s first reactionless drive. At the time the reactionless drive seemed like a minor footnote in the overall war efforts. Later historians would however mark that mom
ent with greater significance. This was the first piece of technology developed by humans whose principles of operation couldn’t have been understood by either Newton or Einstein. This was the moment humans started making practical use of new physics not understood even in the 21st century. This was the moment when Humans leapfrogged the Shaitans in technological terms. This was the time humans truly stepped out to become a star faring species that, would one day dominate this corner of the galaxy.

  Chapter XXX

  The Transporter

  Approaching World #6

  2134

  “So after all these years we are going to find out whether the pact with the heretics was real or just a trick on the part of the Shaitans! Even if it turns out to be real, I am not sure if it was worth it. They might be more trouble than they are worth.” Lt. Mohammed Latif said softly under his breath at no one in particular.

  “If they honor the pact, then they will be more than worth it Lieutenant, I can assure you of that. It would be the biggest coup and the greatest weapon of the Humans against the Shaitans… and as a practice, I would recommend that you use the term ‘True Believers’ rather than ‘Heretics’ or ‘Heretic Shaitans’ when referring to these aliens Lieutenant, even when they are not listening. Make it a habit of calling them that, so that you don’t commit a diplomatic faux pas when you actually are in conversation with one of them.” Sandy said sternly to Lt. Latif.

  Commander Sandra Montgomery aka ‘Sandy’ was the chief liaison officer of this mission, which was as much diplomatic as military in nature. To emphasize the diplomatic importance of this mission, Sandy had a whole platoon of non-combat liaison officers under her command spread across all the ships of the fleet. Sandy may have been the ranking officer of the USC-GCF aka space marines on this mission, but she was not a combat officer. She had not even started her career as a soldier, let alone as a space marine. She was an academic first and foremost, who had been inducted into USC for the service of humanity because she was the best in what she did, which very few humans could do. Right now her skills were the most valuable for a mission like this.