River of Gods (28 page)

"Sir, sir, I have a key."

The inspector hauls a heavy metal Allen key out of his pocket on a
chain, fits it to a hex nut, and begins to crank the door open. The
inner carriage door is blackened with soot and beginning to buckle
and blister. "A few more moments, sir."

The door cranks wide enough for six hands to haul it open. Thomas
Lull flings the luggage into the dark and himself after it. He hits
awkwardly, falls, rolls on rocks and rails. Aj and the railwayman
follow him. He pulls himself upright to see the interior of the
carriage they have abandoned light startling yellow. Then every
window detonates outwards in a hail of crumbed glass.

"Aj!" Thomas Lull shouts through the tumult. He has never
heard noise like it. Screaming voices, wailing, a jagged tangle of
cries and roars and language multilayered and shattered into
incomprehensibility. Revving engines, a steady hammer of missiles.
Children's fear-stricken shrieks. And behind all, the sucking, liquid
roar of the burning train, steadily consuming itself from both ends
like vile incense. Hell must sound like this. "Aj!"

Bodies move everywhere in every direction. Thomas Lull has a sense of
the geography of the atrocity now. The people flee from the head of
the train, now a series of actinic detonations as electrical
switchgear blows, where a deep line of men in white advances on them
like a Raj army. Most are armed with lathis, some carry edged
mattocks, hoes, machetes. An agricultural army. There is at least one
sword, raised high above the horizon of heads. Some are naked, white
with ash, naga sadhus. Warrior priests. All carry a scrap of red on
them, the colour of Siva. Flames glint from missiles; bottles, rocks,
pieces of smashed train superstructure hailing down on the passengers
who crouch and scurry, not knowing where to look for the next attack,
dragging bundles of luggage. Gunsmoke plumes up into the air. The
ground is strewn with abandoned, burst baggage, shirts and saris and
toothbrushes trampled and scuffed into the dust. A man clutches a
gashed head. A child sits in the middle of the rush of feet, looking
around in terror, mouth wide and silent with a terror beyond cries,
cheeks glossy with tears. Feet trample a crumpled pile of fabric. The
pile quivers, struck by hurrying shoes. Bones crack. Thomas Lull now
senses a purpose and direction in the flight: away from the men in
white, towards a low line of huts that has become visible as eyes
adjust to the dark of Bharati countryside. A village. Sanctuary.
Except a second wave of karsevaks runs from behind the burning rear
of the train, cutting off the retreat. The stampede halts. Nowhere to
tun. People go down, piling up on each other. The noise redoubles.

"Aj!"

And then she is there in front of him, like she's come up off the
ground. She combs glass crumbs out of her hair.

"Professor Lull."

He seizes her hand, hauls her back towards the train.

"It's all cut off on this side of the train. We're going the
other way."

The two wings of attackers hook towards each other, closing a
half-encirclement. Thomas Lull knows anything in that arena is dead.
There is only a small gap to the dark, desiccated fields.

The families flee into it, dropping everything and running for their
lives. Ash swirls and storms in the updrafts from the train fire;
Lull and Aj are now within missile range. Rocks and bottles start to
clang off the carriages, shattering into glassy shrapnel.

"Under here!" Thomas Lull ducks under the train. "Watch
out for this." The undercarriage is lethal with high-voltage
cables and drums of pressurised hydraulic fluid. Thomas Lull crawls
out to find himself looking at a wall of car headlights. "Fuck."
The vehicles are parked in a long line a hundred metres from the
train. Trucks, buses, pickups, family cars, phatphats. "They're
right round us. We're going to have to try it."

Aj snaps her head up to the sky.

"They're here."

Thomas Lull turns to see the helicopters roar over the top of the
train, fast, hard, low enough to swirl the flames up into a fire
tornado. They are blind insects, combat bots slung from their
dragonfly thoraxes like eggs. They carry the green and orange
yin-yang of Awadh on their noses. Counterinsurgency pulse lasers
pivot in their housings seeking targets. Deep under Delhi, helicopter
jockeys recline on gel beds watching through their pineal eyes,
moving their hands a centimetre here, a flicker there to instruct the
pilot systems. The three helicopters turn in the air above the parked
cars, bow to each other in a robot gavotte, and swoop down on their
drop runs. Gunfire cracks out from beyond the line of headlights,
bullets smack, and white from the spun-diamond carapaces. From ten
metres they release their riot control bots, then climb, spin, and
open up with the pulsers. The bots hit the ground and immediately
charge. Cries. Shots. Men come running from between the cars into the
open space. The helicopters lock on and fire. Soft bangs, dull
flashes, bodies go sprawling, crawling. The pulse lasers flash the
first thing they touch to plasma and pump it into an expanding shock
wave, whether clothing or the ash-daubed skin of a naked naga. The
karsevaks go reeling, stripped bare-chested by laser-fire. The
counterinsurgency bots clear the vehicles in a leap like something
from a Japanese comic and unfold their riot control shock-staves.

"Down!" Thomas Lull yells, shoving Aj's face to the dust.
The men flee but the springing bots are faster, harder, and more
accurate. A body crashes beside Thomas Lull, face scorched in
second-degree sunburn. Steel hooves flash, he covers his head with
his arms, then rolls to see the machines hurdle the train. He waits.
The helicopters are still up there. He plays dead until they pass
over, frail craneflies never intended for human occupancy. "Up!
Go, now! Run!" A prickle of suspicion on the back of his neck
makes Thomas Lull look up. A helicopter turns a sensor cluster on
him. A gatling pulser swings to bear. Then smoke billows between man
and machine, the aeai loses tracking and the helicopter dips over the
train, turrets stuttering laser fire. "Get behind the cars, down
behind a wheel, that's the safest place," Thomas Lull shouts
over the tumult. Then they both freeze in their flight as the air
between the cars seems to shiver and the wash of light from the
massed headlights breaks into moving shards. Men in combat gear fade
into visibility. Thomas Lull pulls his passport from his pocket,
holds it high like an Old Time preacher of the gospel.

"American citizen!" he shouts as the soldiers slip past,
their suits now camouflaged in mirror and infrared. "American
citizen!" A subadar with an exquisitely groomed moustache pauses
to survey Thomas Lull. His unit badge bears the eternal wheel of
Bharat. He casually cradles a multitask assault gun.

"We have mobile units to the rear," the subadar says. "Make
your way there. You will be cared for." As he speaks the
helicopters reappear over the train, now half ablaze. "Go now,
sir." The subadar breaks into a run; the lead helicopter locks
its belly turret onto him and fires. Thomas Lull sees the officer's
uniform glow as it absorbs the laser, then the Bharati soldier brings
his weapon to bear and fires off a Sam. The helicopter pulls up and
peels away in a spray of chaff, the little missile zig-zagging after
it, a line of fire across the night. A rain of tinsel the colour of
burning shatabdi falls around Thomas Lull and Aj. Recognising a more
potent threat, a squad of riot control bots has taken position along
the top of the train attempting to hold off the Bharati troops with
stun lasers and riot control chaff. The firelight catches on the
chromed joints and sinews. The humans take them one at time with EMP
fire. As each bot tumbles from the train it releases a clutch of
fist-sized subdrones. They bounce, unfold into scurrying scarabs
armed with spinning strimmer-wires. They swarm the soldiers; Thomas
Lull sees one man go down and turns Aj away before the wire flays him
to the bone. He sees the subadar kick one off the toe of his boot,
raise his weapon butt, and smash it to pieces. But there are always
too many of them. That is the tactic. The subadar calls his men back.
They run. The scarabs skitter after. Thomas Lull still clutches his
passport, like a tract waved in the face of a vampire.

"I think it will take more than that," the subadar says,
snatching Thomas Lull by the arm and dragging him in his wake. Beyond
the line of vehicles men with flamethrowers fade out of stealth into
visibility. And Thomas Lull realises that Aj has slipped his grip. He
yells her name. He does not know how many times this night he has
called that name in that lost, crippled by fear tone. Thomas Lull
tears himself away from the Bharati officer.

Aj stands before the scurrying, bounding line of combat bots. She
goes down on one knee. They are metres, moments away, flay-wires
shrilling. She raises her left hand, palm outward. The onslaught of
robots halts. By ones, then by two, tens, twenties, they spin down
their weapons, curl up into their transit spheres. Then a Bharati
jawan darts in and whirls her away and the flamethrower men open up,
fire on fire. Thomas Lull goes to her. She is shivering, tearful,
smoke-smeared with the strap of her small luggage still twisted in
her hand.

"Has somebody got a blanket or something?" he asks as the
soldier moves them through the line of cars. A foil spaceblanket
unfolds from somewhere, Thomas Lull pulls it around Aj's shoulders.
The soldier backs away; he has seen aeai strike helicopters and
fought robots, but this scares him. You do well, Thomas Lull thinks
as he guides Aj towards the laager of troop carriers. We would all do
well.

Each of the five bodies has its fists raised. Mr. Nandha has seen
enough death by fire to understand that it is a thing of biology and
temperature but an older, pre-Enlightenment sensibility sees them
fighting swirling djinns of flame. It would have been demonic at the
end. The apartment is still sooty with floating polycarbon ash,
drifts of vaporised computer casing. When they settle on Mr. Nandha's
skin they smear to the softest, darkest kohl. It takes a temperature
of over a thousand degrees to reduce plastic to pure carbon soot.

Varanasi, city of cremations.

The morgue crew zip black bags shut. Sirens from the street; the
firefighters pulling out. The scene is now in the hands of the law
agencies, last of which is the Ministry. SOCO boys brush past Mr.
Nandha, recording videos on their palmers. He is trespassing on
another's bailiwick. Mr. Nandha has his own comfortable methodology
and for him simple observation and the application of imagination
yield insights and intuitions police procedural might never
apprehend.

The first sense the crime assails is smell. He could smell the burned
meat, the oily, sweet choke of melted plastic from the lobby. The
stench so overpowers all other senses that Mr. Nandha must focus to
extract information from it. He opens his nostrils for hints,
contradictions, subtle untogethernesses that might suggest what has
happened here. An electrical fault among all the computers, the fire
investigation officer had immediately suggested. Can he pick that
unmistakable prickle of power out of the mix?

Sight is the second sense. What did he see when he entered the crime
locus? Double doors forced open by fire department hydraulics, the
outer the standard apartment block fascia door; the inner, heavy
green metal, dogged and barred, the latches warped by fire service
jacks. They could not open the door? They trapped themselves in their
own security? The paint is seared from the inside of the inner door,
blackened raw metal. Proceed. The short lobby, the main lounge, the
bedrooms they had been using as their memory farm. Kitchen; skeletons
of cupboards and racks on the wall, melamine peeled away but the
woodchip intact. Chipboard survives. Ash and blackness, one thing
fused into another. The windows have blown inwards. A pressure drop?
The fire must almost have exhausted itself. It would have burned
smoky and black. They would have asphyxiated before the windows blew
and fresh oxygen kindled the fire djinn. Melted stubs of computer
drives flow into each other. Vikram will rescue what is rescueable.

Hearing. Three thousand people in this apartment pile yet the quiet
on the fire floor is absolute. Not even the chirp of a radio left
burbling. The firemen have withdrawn their cordon but residents are
reluctant to return to their homes. There are rumours that the blaze
was a revenge attack by the Awadhis for the shatabdi massacre. The
neighbours on either side only knew what was happening when the wall
grew hot and the paint started to blister.

Touch. The greasy, coagulating smut of soot in the air. A black
floating cobweb settles on to Mr. Nandha's sleeve. He goes to wipe
it, then remembers that it is ten percent human fat.

Taste, the fifth test. Mr. Nandha has learned the technique from
cats, a flaring of the nostrils, a slight opening of the mouth, a
rasping of the air across the palate. It is no elegance but it works
for little hunters and Krishna Cops.

"Nandha, whatever are you doing?" Chauhan the State
Pathologist bags up the penultimate corpse and slaps the despatch
notice on the plastic sack.

"A few preliminaries. Have you anything for me yet?"

Chauhan shrugs. He is a big bear of a man with the callous joviality
of those who work among the inner doings of the violently killed.

"Call by me this afternoon, I may have something for you by
then."

Vaish, the police inspector in charge, looks up, disapprovingly, at
the trespass.

"So, Nandha," Chauhan says as he steps back and his
white-suit team lift the bag on to the stretcher. "I hear your
good woman is rebuilding the hanging gardens of Babylon. She really
must be missing the old village."