The Battle of Titan Read online

  It was the first day he realized he loved her, so it was the day he told her. It was that simple. Things about relationships were really simple for Jorge. Mischa still remembered the date and they had their own private celebration every year on that date. To her that day was more important than the day of their marriage. She would admonish and then forgive him every year for forgetting the date of their first expression of love.

  Most people in the world also remembered that date. In fact they remembered the exact time and place they were at that time. It has been fifteen years and no media or publication would let anyone forget that anniversary. Not for the first expression of love of two young lovers, but for the day when the president revealed the discovery of the Shaitans.

  The word Shaitan had now been firmly embedded in the public lexicon, and freely used by the media to refer to the aliens from the gas giant also named Shaitan. It had even found its way into the Oxford dictionary. Officially however they were still referred to as aliens.

  Jorge looked lovingly at his wife who was firmly ensconced on his side, clinging to his arms with her head on his shoulders. “You know, we may be getting a bit too old to be having these ‘dates’ of ours.” Jorge said.

  “Are you crazy? We will never be too old for this. We will be having these ‘dates’ of ours for the rest of our lives. Stealing these lunch moments, to sneak up and meet like two teenagers is what keeps us happy. I don’t want these little dates to ever end. I feel as good about them now, as when we went out the first time. This is our secret to happiness. Our love is as young and new today as it was then.” Mischa said without looking up and clinging to his arm even more tightly.

  The little dates they were referring to was the half hour or so that they would steal from their lunch breaks to meet up on this park bench for the last few years. It was public knowledge in both Jorge and Mischa’s respective departments about their daily afternoon sojourn. It was the source of friendly leg pulling and mild jokes amongst the men, and a source of secret envy amongst the women.

  Jorge’s physics department building was a bit further on one side, while Mischa’s budding new department, was housed in the annex of the psychology department on the other side. Mischa’s emerging new discipline, and hence the department was yet to get an official name, but they all knew it as Xenological studies in campus.

  They had found and sat on this bench one day while walking together and holding hands in campus, in love as much as any sophomore couple walking around. It had become their permanent lunch meeting place now.

  A lot had happened in Jorge and Mischa’s life in the last 15 years. A lot more had happened in the world at large in those years. To say that the course of human development and human history had been changed would be an understatement.

  The day Jorge had successfully defended his thesis and was on his way to earning a PhD, he had proposed to Mischa. Mischa still had a year or two to earn her own PhD since she was a year junior to Jorge, and had chosen a completely new field of study for humans. Jorge took up post-doctoral work under Dr. Oleg Larson’s guidance at UC Berkeley after a recommendation from Heidi.

  The couple had to endure over two years of long distance engagement and romance. Heidi had used up a lot of her chips in the academic circles, earned over a lifetime to get Mischa placed in a post-doctoral position in UC Berkeley, with the not so inconsiderable influence of Oleg in the college.

  It had been hard to place a PhD in XenoStudies and XenoPyschology those days. Mischa had been one of the first students of the discipline. She was literally making up the discipline as she progressed in her career.

  Mischa had been at a loss of words at amount of trouble Heidi had gone to help to her. Heidi had only said. “It is not just because I see Jorge as a son I will never have. It is because I don’t want you to ever have to say these same words in a few decades – ‘a son I will never have’. I have regrets in life, which I never want you to have Mischa.

  I see a glorious career ahead for you Mischa, I just don’t want you to pay a terrible price for it. Believe me Mischa I know.” Mischa knew about it too. The two women had just hugged and cried for a long time. The two women had become emotionally close at that moment, and had stayed so since then.

  Mischa and Jorge now were the harried parents of two energetic pre-teen children, with all the trials and travails that go along with it. The only quiet time they could manage to themselves together were these ‘dates’ they had at lunch time. That’s why they both valued this time so much. It renewed and re-energized their love and friendship.

  They kept in touch with their life-long friends Ramesh and Fluentez. They lived in San Jose not very far. Ramesh and Fluentez had been married almost a year before them. Fluentez believed in a large family and they had four kids. Fluentez had let her career take a back seat and practiced clinical psychology part time.

  Ramesh had switched between academia and industry a few times. He had been involved in a very successful start-up in the Silicon Valley and could now be considered fairly well off. Currently he was back into the academic world as a member of the computer science and engineering department at UC Santa Cruz.

  He was leading a research into quantum computing, which till now had been a reasonably obscure field of research, but now had almost unlimited DARPA funding. It was considered critical in timing and targeting missiles that would be needed to fight the Shaitans.

  Heidi had at last found the love and happiness in her life that had been left unfulfilled. Herman’s wife had died of cancer over five years ago and both his children were grown up and working in Argentina. He had nothing left but memories in Chile, and chose to return back to his native Germany.

  He now held a senior position at Max Planck institute for Astrophysics at Munich. Heidi had one day simply walked over to the dean of her university’s office, put in her papers and retired. She then took a long distance non-stop trip from Honolulu to Munich and reached Herman’s door late in the evening with nothing but a travel bag on her shoulders.

  When Herman opened the door, and they looked at each other’s eyes, they didn’t need to say a single word to each other. They just stood in the doorway, held each other and cried for a long time. It was the first time in Heidi’s life that she had seen Herman the joker cry.

  Herman had asked Heidi to take up work at the Max Planck institute. An astrophysicist of Heidi’s caliber and reputation would be more than welcomed with open arms. Heidi had however refused. Mischa had talked to Heidi about not working at all, she had been worried about Heidi coping without any professional work to do. Heidi’s reply had made sure that Mischa never again brought up the topic.

  “I could not lead the two parts of my life together in parallel. I had to lead my professional life first all alone, and now have got the chance to lead my personal life. I want to give it the same dedication. I don’t know how many years we have together, but whatever years I and Herman have, I want to give it all I have.” So Heidi led a retired life, building a nest, going to the markets and the opera, doing all the simple things in life, and it brought her happiness and fulfilment.

  Humanity in general had also been busy these last fifteen years. A fairly significant percentage of the national government budget and national GDP was going into space research in all of the major powers of the world.

  Smaller nations were not contributing that much directly into space efforts, but they contributed indirectly in ways that boosted the overall world GDP or improved the efficiency of the world economy.

  The Middle East had come together to put a pause to their hostile dispositions towards each other. It had not solved disputes, between the Muslim countries themselves and between them and Israel, but multilateral and bilateral accords like the Teheran accord had put a hold to overt hostilities.

  There were still incidents of minor skirmishes, but the region as a whole had become a lot more peaceful. This was helped in small amount by various religious leaders interpreting the arrival of
the aliens as the manifestation of Satan, which humanity needed to combat together. It had led to increased commerce and GDP across these countries, lowered defense spending regionally and also leading to greater world GDP.

  Community and religious leaders in central and sub-Saharan Africa had termed tribal conflicts as sin till the aliens who were seen as the spawn of Satan were defeated, thus freeing up a lot of the world’s resources used to hold the place together.

  Pakistan had been goaded by its ally China to enter a non-aggression treaty with India. China itself had entered such a treaty with India, thus lowering all their defense expenditure. This enabled both India & China who had fought a bitter war 90 years ago to lower their defense budgets, most of which was funneled to space research.

  With rest of the world less in conflict with each other and better able to take care of itself, almost all of the economic, humanitarian and military aid provided by the western nations was diverted into space research. It was estimated by economists that 3.2% of the US GDP was going into space and space warfare research, which was slightly higher percentage than what was spent on the Apollo program nearly a hundred years ago.

  Humanity had a lot to show for that effort. Human ships were now bigger, faster and sturdier. They could go further and carry more people. Humans had landed on Mars, and now there were regular missions planned out there, staying longer. Humans had a continuous and permanent presence on the moon, even if it was just a few people in a small habitat. In another 15 years it was thought that humans would be able to have a semi-permanent habitat on Mars.

  Human technology however was still no match for what the aliens had demonstrated. At the least the aliens were a few hundred and at the worst seven to eight hundred years ahead of humans. Humanity however did not have that much time.

  It had been calculated that the last alien ship had taken 40 years to reach the solar system. Since light takes a quarter of a year to reach their home world, they would have known about the destruction of their ship in three months. If they started immediately to take revenge, they would be here again in 40 years, which did not give humanity that much time.

  Humanity had made good use of the time till now. The pieces salvaged from the derelict alien ship had helped in materials design. Most of the pieces collected from inside the ship were too mangled to give any clues about alien machinery, except for the fact that they used metals and composites the same way we did, but their materials were far more advanced.

  Some of the materials were still being deciphered and all their properties analyzed, while other materials had been understood reasonably well and even copied. That in itself represented nearly 50 years of research advancement in some cases.

  The most prized pieces of material to be salvaged was as expected, the pieces of the hull itself. It had opened the eyes of material scientists to new ways materials could be designed. It was not the elements itself that was a revelation. All the elements used in all the alien artefacts were known to man.

  It was the way they were constructed, arranged, layered and mixed that was an eye opener. The hull for example was made out of what now the humans termed as metal based molecular composites. Certain polymer based composites were known to humans, but this was an order of magnitude more complex.

  Humans didn’t even know how to manufacture these materials. It was as if the aliens had first figured out the best properties that could be achieved with different elements, combined them into molecules, then combined these molecules, which would normally not stick to each other chemically by weaving them together like a fabric, but at the molecular level. Humans had no idea that such a manufacturing process was even possible, let alone be able to duplicate it.

  That didn’t mean humans had not made progress with these materials. They had copied most of these molecules, although not all. Made them into strands sometimes 20 times thinner than human hair and weaved them physically, then pressed them and sandwiched them over metals such as titanium to come up with extremely strong and sturdy but light hull material and other such uses.

  Until humans could figure out the alien manufacturing process, this was the best they could do. It was more than 10 times better than what humans had been using till then, but still more than 10 times inferior to what the alien ship was made of.

  All human research was not limited to studying alien material however. Far from it. That part of the study was only a small part of the overall human R&D efforts. There had been improvements in propulsion, although humans were still limited to chemical rockets. It wasn’t as if humans didn’t have ion propulsion systems.

  There have been human space crafts with ion propulsion for over 60 years since the 1990s. These systems were however puny, it was still inferior to chemical rocket propulsion in most aspects. The real barrier to ion propulsion was due to the lack of a small compact energy source capable of generating large amount of energy over a long period of time using fuel that weighed very little. That barrier could only be crossed when humans could figure out a small, safe and relatively cheap nuclear power source be it fission or fusion.

  Fission reactors were dirty in any case, and were unthinkable in a manned space craft with no shielding. Shielded nuclear fission reactors on earth weighed thousands of tons and were impractical. Humans have been able to able to run sustainable fusion power reactors for less than 20 years now.

  We humans have been guilty in the last 100 years or so of not taking our energy research seriously. The first serious attempt to make a fusion reactor had to be led by the Europeans at the start of this century, no thanks to the US government which scuttled the budget for a similar effort in the US.

  The first experimental fusion reactor built in Southern France called ITER and plodded along for nearly thirty years primarily because it depended on contributions for a marquee selection of countries from Europe, Japan, China, India, and Russia. Oh the US did contribute some loose change, lest someone say we were not doing our bit, but it was a token effort.

  When the reactor came online in the early 2030s, it was only a partial success. It had problems sustaining fusion over long periods of time, and it was still putting in more energy into running the reactor, than it was able to get out, although it had managed big improvements, and almost balanced the energy equation.

  Right now we have just four working fusion reactors spread across the world, all except one are experimental. The first commercial reactor will hopefully come online in a few years. Even then, this reactor is the size very large soccer stadium, and the support infrastructure required makes the entire power station take up the size of a small town.

  There had been improvement in navigation, sensors and computing power especially for targeting computers. Humanity was however still using silicon wafer based computers. The new horizon in computers was quantum computing, which could be a million or a billion times faster, nobody could exactly predict, but it was still confined to the labs as huge delicate and clunky machines doing relatively simple calculation.

  Quantum computers had been around for more than 50 years and have progressed somewhat since then. The real impetus and the progress had happened in the last 15 years or so after the inadequacies of silicon based computing had been exposed in the missile targeting system.

  Still, a practical and general purpose quantum computer the size of a refrigerator was at least 15 years if not 50 years away. Something that can be cheaply put in a missile warhead and did not require a refrigerator to cool it to near absolute zero temperature was a dream as of now.

  The real progress humans had made had been in space based weapons. Humans had always been good at unleashing destructive power. It seemed to be embedded in our nature. Most people agreed now that the alien ship was not armed.

  It had simply used its own parts as a kinetic kill device. It was possible that the aliens did not have any conception of weapons, but it was thought unlikely by most. The first ship was an unarmed scout and would be followed by armed ships later was the
general feeling.

  Since we have not seen the alien weaponry, we could not be sure how much more advanced they were compared to us, but no one was doubting that they had to be more advanced. The weaponry was however one aspect where military planners were less worried that other aspect of our technological inferiority.

  One of the basic paradigms of warfare and military planning is that a weapon has to be good enough for the task it has been assigned. It doesn’t need to be any better. They had to design weapons which could kill alien ships reliably.

  They had done some remarkable improvements to the warhead to adapt them for space usage and specifically to kill ships. They were not so worried about warheads, they were more worried about the delivery system, meaning the missiles and the targeting system. This was the Achilles heel of human weaponry.

  There was however a fundamental problem about using nuclear bombs, or any bombs for that matter in space. There are three things that kill in a bomb on earth. First is the heat, second is the pressure wave it generates in the air, and third is the shrapnel that fly around, some are parts of the bomb itself, while others are part of the things lying around, which get shredded and blown out by the pressure wave.

  Bombs spread their effect all around in 360° and hence are very effective when thrown in the middle of a crowd, where it can spread its mayhem all round killing people in all directions.

  The same conventional bombs are however not so effective against the armor of a tank. It is not as if the conventional bomb did not have enough power to pierce the tank armor, it did. However the energy of the bomb got spread around in all directions in a 360° sphere. Only a small fraction of that sphere was facing the armor of the ship, just a few percent of it in fact. Thus most of the energy is wasted, not leaving enough to penetrate the armor of the ship.

  The same problem is faced when using a nuclear bomb against the hull of the ship multiplied many times over because you have none of the advantageous effects, which the atmosphere provides in space. There is no pressure wave generated in the air, since there is no air. There are no shrapnel flying around because there is nothing there. Even the casing and other parts of the nuclear bomb is heated so much that it doesn’t even turn to gas, but into plasma.