Retribution (Shaitan Wars) Page 6

  That got Daniel’s attention. He sat up a bit straighter and his eyes focused on the screen a bit sharper. Jason could make out the change in Daniel’s disposition. He smiled and said. “Yes I thought that would get your attention. I have sent you a technical proposal made by two of the most wonderful people I know. I am sure you have not had the time to look at it yet, just go through the executive summary, it should not take you more than a few minutes. You can leave the technical details to your staff.”

  Daniel read through the summary and his eyes grew wider with every line he read. After he had finished, he asked. “Is it possible to talk to the author of the report right now?”

  “They have been waiting on the other end of the line for 12 hours Admiral, waiting for your call. I will connect them right now.” Said Jason with a smile as he connected Saloni and Stephan from their Darmstadt home. After the usual exchange of greetings, Daniel got down to business right away.

  “Your report mentions something about a short decision window, could you please explain what that window is, and how much time we have to take the decision Frau Jürgen?” Daniel asked.

  “Please call me Saloni, Admiral. I am still an American, despite being stuck with this handsome Goth in Germany most of my life.” Saloni smiled as she gave a naughty sideways glance towards her husband. “To answer your question. The window I mentioned is the time before the engines of the LTKS probe is switched off. For the plan to work optimally, we have to reprogram the probe and order it not to switch off the engines.

  The engines are programmed to switch off in just under 22 days from now, but considering the fact that it would take over 17 days for the signal to reach the probe, that leaves us with just 5 days. I would give the engineers at least 3 days to reprogram the mission and test it out once. In fact I would urge that we give the engineers as much time as possible so that no mistakes are made. It will be a complex reprogramming they would be doing under pressure. From that view point I would say the decision window would be between 12-24 hours.” Saloni replied to Daniel.

  “Understood Saloni. Herr Jürgen, I cannot imagine ESA handing over a premier and reasonably expensive program to the USC just like that. What is the catch that I am missing here sir?” Daniel asked.

  “There is no catch Admiral, but yes there are a few political issues that might crop up. Do not think about the cost Admiral, right now no politician can afford to publicly oppose contributing anything towards the war effort. The Shaitans have made sure of that with the Holocaust. The money on LTKS has already been spent, so there is no new budgetary allocation to be made, although ESA will probably insist on USC bearing further operational expense on the project in terms of manpower monitoring it for the next few years. I will take care of the administrative and accounting issues. As ESA director, I believe I have that much influence.

  Where things might get a bit sticky and I might need your help, would be to have a clear military justification for the project. It needs to look like it makes a sound strategic sense to change the nature of the project, so that it serves the long term defense interests of Earth, and not just retribution. Unfortunately EU still has its fair share of bleeding heart liberals, who would like to sabotage the project, given its final impact.” Stephan responded.

  “Understood and well appreciated Herr Jürgen. I am well accustomed to navigating those minefields, as Senator Golombek can testify. In this particular case, I have a genuine strategic justification. You shall have a formal request from USC along with the justification in your inbox within the next few hours. I am assuming you would be able to get me the ESA approval within the next 24 hours so that we can stick to the decision window.

  I would recommend that you start the reprogramming exercise immediately anyway, so that the engineers have the maximum time. I will be setting up a core team for this project right after this meeting, which will coordinate with the ESA LTKS team. Please have a liaison team set up, so that the handover happens smoothly. I will let you know the name and the members of this project as soon as I set them up in the next few hours.

  Now if there is nothing else, then I would like to profoundly thank you lady and gentlemen for what will surely be an invaluable contribution. I have work to do on this new project, as well as on a yet to be named project, that will be our main instrument of Retribution. So let us speak again after a few hours when we have finished our individual tasks.” Daniel summarized.

  While everyone was signing off, Saloni hesitatingly spoke up. “Admiral… I know it might be too much to ask, but could I please make a request? It is about what you mentioned about the business about ‘yet to be named project’. Would the USC consider this old lady’s request to name the project ‘Kali’?”

  Chapter 3

  Tomb Raiders

  Mars, South Pole, Ka-let dig site

  April 2084

  Yusuke was sweating despite the air being bone dry and bone chillingly cold. He knew that it was not the temperature that was making him sweat but tension and nervousness. He might be at the cusp of making the most amazing archeological breakthrough in human history – and he was not even an archeologist. The cold did bother him though, as it did for all the engineers and geologist working in the site.

  Yusuke was thankful that they were out of their Mars environmental suit and working in their shirtsleeves. It increased their comfort and speed of work drastically, but shirtsleeve was a metaphorical reference. It was so damn cold in here that they had to work in Hazmat suits all the time, and sometime take succor from the cold by slipping into the very damn environmental suit that they had longed to discard.

  There had been nothing hazardous that had been found on the site to warrant a Hazmat suit. They wore the Hazmat suit for insulation and warmth. No one had thought of packing woolens on their trip to Mars. It was cold in Mars, but comfortable inside their habitat and their environmental suits, which were the only two environments humans could survive on Mars.

  Now they were in the unique and unforeseen situation, where the air was breathable but it was so damn cold that the fingers froze within minutes. The rubberized Hazmat suits were light and flexible compared to the environmental suits, and trapped the body heat inside. It was considered a good compromise for working in the cold environment of the site between mobility and comfort. Still, the humans had to take refuge from time to time back in their habitat shelters erected on the surface or inside their environmental suits kept nearby, to escape from the cold.

  The very fact that they were out of their environmental suits and the clunky helmets was thanks to the incredible engineering of the Ka-let, such that an 80 thousand year old equipment could be made to work, albeit in a sputtering fashion. Credit needed to be given to the engineers, computer scientists and linguists, not just on Mars but also on Earth, who had jointly been able to figure out some basic aspects of the Ka-let language, engineering and their computing devices.

  The preservation of the machines had been helped in large measure by the cold, dry and oxygen less conditions on Mars that had preserved most of the equipment on the site with very little damage due to time. Oxygen reduced almost anything made of metal to dust with time. The other fact that helped in being able to pry open some of the secrets of the Ka-let was that unlike the Shaitans, whole engineering philosophy was so alien compared to the humans, the Ka-let had a remarkably similar engineering philosophy to the humans.

  Humans had been exposed the Shaitan engineering for quite some time by then however, and had grown familiar with it. That enabled them to transport the fusion reactor from the captured Shaitan camp to this site and be able to install it as the source of power for the site. Once that critical step had been taken, life and progress became a lot easier for Yusuke and his team.

  They had discovered the environmental control system in their first week of exploration itself, and by the second week they had suspected its function, when they traced the elaborate piping, filtration and exhaust systems. The remarkably preserved cond
ition of all equipment in the site made the engineers wonder what would happen if those machines were turned on. It was only after the symbols of the Ka-let began to be deciphered, that the engineers realized that they might actually be able to turn on some of the machines.

  The Ka-let were visual creatures like the humans. That much was obvious from the elaborate paintings and colors splashed on every surface possible. What excited the engineers though, was that the Ka-let had a penchant for etching their instruction manuals on the equipment itself. Every inlet and outlet was labelled and specifications written next to them. As they deciphered more and more of the Ka-let symbols and language, the engineers were emboldened as they understood their power systems, voltage required and whole lot of minutiae that goes into operating equipment, which most of us take for granted.

  Two weeks ago, just a few days after the installation of the Shaitan power reactor next to the dig site, the engineers got the go ahead to experiment with powering up one of the Ka-let equipment. The engineers chose the environmental control system as the first equipment to power up and test, since this was the machinery, whose function they were most sanguine about.

  It took them a day, but they were able to power up the machine. That didn’t mean that the machine started working. The mechanical parts still stayed stubbornly silent, but the machine itself lit up like a Christmas tree! It had been expected. Such an advanced species would not have uncontrolled mechanical machines that started moving on being provided power like some 20th century human machine. Even humans had abandoned such systems, every mechanical machine we made was controlled by computers, and so would this environmental system.

  All that was now needed was for someone to crack the computers of the Ka-let. Yusuke had winced when he remembered how much effort and time had been spent by Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan and the best minds on Earth to try and crack the Shaitan computer codes on Titan. He had expected a repeat of that kind of effort. He had been surprised when the engineers and computer scientists came back after just a week and declared that they now understood enough of computer systems to try and give the startup command to the environmental system.

  The computer geeks had explained to Yusuke that the Ka-let used silicon based computing for most of their day to day devices, and probably used quantum computing only for heavy duty computing applications, although no Ka-let quantum computer had been identified yet. This was remarkably similar to what we humans do, which helped the geeks to crack the system fairly fast. Just one more point to illustrate how similar these aliens were with us humans.

  No member of the Ka-let species had been found yet. It was possible that they had abandoned this place, or it was possible that the explorers have found the remains of a Ka-let but just hadn’t been able to identify it. After all no one knows how a decomposed Ka-let body would look like. There were many images of what was thought to be a live Ka-let on the walls of the site, but from the images one could not make out the scale, so there was no idea how big these creatures were.

  The first indication of that came from the control systems of the environmental system. They were placed at the level of an adult human hip and below. It was a level at which a human child would be comfortable operating, so that was thought to be the general size of a Ka-let. That fact had been suspected by many on seeing the size of the balconies that lined the walls of the enclosed canyon.

  That enclosed canyon, which was their site, was now going to be put to the test to see if it was really enclosed. Cursory visual inspection along the entire length and breadth of the canyon, as well as the ceilings indicated that the entire canyon should be airtight. The only opening was the one that had been dug by the Shaitans, and was now used by the humans.

  An airtight door was installed on the opening and the environmental system was turned on. It nearly turned into a disaster within the first few seconds, but was quickly shut down without causing too much damage. Despite the inspection of the engineers, the huge fans of the environmental systems had been worn away by time and had become structurally weak. A few of the blades broke and created such a massive racket inside the enclosed space of the canyon, that it scared the living daylights out of the engineers.

  It took a day for the engineers to fix the fans and restart the system, but this time they reduced the output further to just 20%. The environmental system was happy, sort of working at that capacity. It did not hum along nicely, there were a lot of creaks and groans reminding the engineers of the fantastic age of the machinery. They had to shut it down twice more to fix things that had come loose or needed to be changed.

  Now the environmental system was working relatively noiselessly. It took five days for the system to raise the atmospheric pressure to about 70% of Earth at sea level, and then it stabilized. The engineers realized that this must have been the default settings of the environmental systems, which indicated that this must be normal atmospheric pressure of the Ka-let in their home world, wherever that might have been.

  The environmental system was generating only oxygen and nitrogen to fill up the space. No carbon-di-oxide, argon and myriad of other gasses that are normally present in any atmosphere in trace quantities. Either the Ka-let did not grow plants in this canyon habitat of theirs, or they did not have a carbon cycle for food as the creatures of Earth did.

  The atmosphere within the canyon habitat though was getting distinctly breathable. Although only at 70% pressure, the air contained nearly 30% oxygen, which made breathing comfortable, as the lungs got enough oxygen despite the low pressure. Earth atmosphere contained only 21% oxygen. The environmental system was heating the air as it was generated, thus heating up the entire site to -4°C.

  The system could probably heat up the place a lot more if the output was raised beyond 20%, but the engineers decided to be prudent and let it be. It was better to let it operate at 20% and make the place habitable than to risk a total breakdown, which they may not know how to repair. Instead, human heaters were brought inside the enclosed canyon, to slowly raise the temperature.

  The temperature was rising, but very slowly. It would take weeks before Yusuke and his team would be able to operate without their thermal protection. That was not going to stop them from working on the site though. Every day they discovered new and wonderful things about the Ka-let, especially after their script had been deciphered to a reasonable degree.

  The Ka-let it seems were the antithesis of the Shaitans and similar to the humans in many ways. One of them being the need for personal possessions, unique to every individual. The Shaitan habitats were bare. They contained nothing other than their machines and objects which were functional to their survival or war in some way. Not a single piece of pottery or personal effects that one would find in any human habitat.

  This Ka-let site however looked very much like a human archeological dig. Most of the balconies led to rooms or niches where a small creature could live comfortably. Each of those rooms was littered with debris, which could only be personal effects. Majority of the small objects were made out of metal and carbon fibers. There was very little plastics found, perhaps their origin world was not rich in petroleum, which had fuelled the plastic revolution on Earth.

  There were no archeologists on Mars at the moment, but tens of thousands of them on Earth were following the digs from hour to hour, as the data packets reached Earth. The objects that created the most buzz amongst them however were made out of the simplest of material – mud. This advanced species of aliens had taken the time to use the soil of Mars, add water to make clay and then crafted objects from them. The objects were handmade, or more precisely made by whatever appendages the Ka-let had which was the equivalent of our hands.

  Like all handmade objects they had imperfections, and the clay still retained traces of paint on them. These aliens behaved amazingly like human beings! There were unique paintings on the walls of the rooms, which were not photographs but paintings. Looking at all these, one could not but get a sense of kinship with these long dead
alien species. These were kindred spirits.

  The only thing odd about those rooms was the fact that there was no door or any kind of entrance to those rooms. There were no stairs to go up to those rooms either. It took some time for the humans to figure out that the balcony, through which they had climbed up to those rooms were not for a view, they were the entrance!

  The Ka-let must have been natural climbers, and were probably very comfortable climbing vertically up the walls of the canyon to their niches/rooms. It is possible that the Ka-let had made their habitat along the lines of their origin world, and further back in time, this is how they must have lived as primitives – in niches dug on the walls of cliffs. Many animals and birds on Earth do the same, as a safe place of refuge from predators.

  While all these discoveries were telling the humans a lot about the anthropology and the culture of the Ka-let, the governments and the military were getting impatient to get their hands on the real prize as far as they were concerned – new technology. The biggest treasure trove of technology lay bang in the middle of the canyon, the biggest piece of machinery out there… the huge space ship parked inside.

  It was now agreed by broad consensus that the vessel was a spaceship, although initially there had been some speculation that it might not have been so. The space ship was large, larger even than the Shaitan troop carriers, which previously had been the largest spaceships humans had seen. The very act of parking such a large space ship in such a tight space demonstrated capabilities and technologies that the humans didn’t have. Most likely even the Shaitans couldn’t achieve this feat.

  That single fact in itself promised that there were huge technological advances to be learnt by getting into the ship and studying it. That is where the frustration of every person on the team lay. They had been trying for nearly half a year now, and they had not found a way to enter the ship. By now a dedicated team of navy, marines and engineers led by Capt. Trisha Strong had combed every square inch of the surface of the ship.