by Barry Kirwan
She inspected the comms unit, and her lips stretched into a smile. "Sir, this is in pretty good shape. If we could…" – she sought the right word, feeling like they were burglars – "… borrow some of this and hook it up to our system, we could contact Earth again."
Blake nodded, and then his eyes flashed to the doorway as a flood of sunlight rushed in, accompanied by the creaking of hinges on the rusted hatch. She’d heard no footsteps, and spun around awkwardly in the cramped cabin to see a silhouette: human at least, no suit either. Blake’s pistol was already drawn, but she left hers where it was as the man pulled the door closed behind him and she got a good look at him: a tanned, lean figure in khaki shorts and threadbare tee shirt, unshaven for a few days. He was shorter than both of them and had open sandals on his feet. He put his palms together in front of his chest like he was praying, and gave a short bow.
Before either of them could speak, the newcomer greeted them in a lilting, almost musical, voice. "Welcome to my home."
Indistani! She’d had several good Indian friends at the academy, before the reunification with Pakistan and Bangladesh after the War, so she recognized the accent well enough. She smiled at the man, and without thinking, being closer to the door than Blake, held out her gloved hand. After a heartbeat’s hesitation, the man stepped forward and took it, at first gingerly, then he shook it firmly, with both hands. Kat saw the man up close now, probably early thirties, with deep brown eyes, seemingly back-lit whites surrounding the irises. Kat turned to introduce Blake.
"My name is Katrina Beornwulf, and this is…"
Blake holstered his weapon, but left the securing clip undone – she didn’t doubt he could draw it fast if required.
"Captain Blake Alexander, Eden Mission, New World Alliance, Sir. And you are?"
The man considered Blake, then turned to Kat.
"Why are you wearing your helmet?"
Kat cast an ignored glance at Blake. The man continued in his Indistani-English accent. "The harm from this planet will not come from its atmosphere. Please, both of you sit down." He gestured to the makeshift bed. Kat again looked questioningly to Blake who, clearly having never encountered a protocol for this particular scenario, indicated to Kat to sit, but gave a firm shake of his head when Kat gestured with a finger to her helmet. Not surprised, she sat, as did Blake, though he remained at the edge of the cot, on his guard. The man opposite pulled up the cushion in front of the computer terminal.
"You know, after a hundred years of computers, even us Indians have nearly forgotten how to sit cross-legged on the floor." He beamed at them.
Kat smiled back, hoping to compensate for Blake’s iron regard. She guessed what he was thinking. It looked as if there had been a struggle in the cockpit, and one crew member was alive, the other dead, possibly killed before the crash. But she couldn’t believe this man a murderer, or even capable of killing; his whole demeanor was so gentle. No, she thought – genteel, that archaic word almost lost by its near irrelevance to modern Earth’s post-War manners, though she’d grown up in such a household in Oxford. She hadn’t missed either that he referred to himself as Indian and not Indistani, but then he didn’t fit the bill of a separatist either.
The man’s brow creased as he focused on Blake. "Please forgive me. I am somewhat unaccustomed to speaking. My name is Rashid. Rashid Vishnaru, from Trivandrum, Indistan. Or India, as I’m afraid I cannot help but think of it. I have been here for eleven months, after a one year voyage to get here."
Kat’s eyebrows lifted. A whole year! Three months had been bad enough.
"We alternated our time in stasis. You see it was a covert mission, and we did not have the best technology. Not the best at all, I’m afraid."
Kat wondered what he meant by that, but deemed it better not to speak unless the Captain spoke first. Blake, however, said nothing. Of course, she thought, this guy hasn’t seen anyone for a long time; he won’t need too much incentive to talk. But as if Rashid could hear her thoughts, he fell into a silence, and stared down.
After a long, awkward pause, Blake spoke. "What happened to your crewmate? Why did you crash-land here? And, in fact, what are you doing here at all?"
Rashid nodded three times, once for each question, still eyeing the floor. Then he took in a deep breath, and looked up to Blake, eyes steady.
"I have thought of this a lot – how to tell it. And I will, but first I must make some tea. You see I had been gone for two days already before I saw the trace of your craft amongst the stars. I made it back here just in time only by running for hours on end, like my old quadrathlon days." He smiled, flashing white teeth, jiggling his head sideways in that way Kat remembered her male Indian friends would do at the academy, confusing the hell out of their female admirers, as a "yes" was easily mistaken for a "no". Rashid got up and went to the third corner of the module, the first two occupied by the computer terminal and the comms set, to a compact sink unit and micro-fusion boiler. It instantly fired up and within thirty seconds he had poured boiling water into an authentic china teapot. Kat was amazed he’d been able to bring such a homely artefact on a deep-space mission.
Rashid paid diligent attention to everything he did, Kat noticed, wondering how she would have fared under such circumstances. She realized there must be an underlying discipline to this man, a strictness of routine to maintain some semblance of structure, to avoid one day simply waking up screaming and barking mad.
"You can take your helmet off, you know," he said, gesturing to Kat, and then looked to the Captain. "The complete biospheric analysis is there, filed under Eden Environment Analysis 12. It is a metal. One we do not have on Earth. Very hard, very tough, but inert – no, not inert - implacable, but no harm to you."
Kat stared at Blake, but his gaze remained implacable, too.
"Thanks," Blake said, "but we’ll have to get it checked out by our science officer, all the same."
Rashid set down the pot and picked up two cups. "A shame, I bet it is a long time since you had real tea, Katrina Beornwulf. You must miss it."
Against her own will, Kat’s memory called up the taste of steaming fresh brewed tea, her mouth salivating uselessly. She sighed. As an English girl in the USA she’d always been stupefied by the fact that no one in America really knew how to make a decent cup of tea: she’d decided years ago it must be due to some deeply ingrained post-colonial resentment. But Rashid clearly did.
"And you, Sir, you are the Captain. If I am not very mistaken, a man of action more than a man of words, a military man. So, not trusting me yet, you will also miss out on my wonderful Earl Grey chai." He put the second cup back. He made a decision, then set the teapot and one cup on the makeshift chair, and sat down, cross-legged on a home-made cushion on the floor.
"There," he said. "I have to wait a few minutes. As my father used to say, you can hurry neither good tea nor a good woman." His eyes gleamed.
Blake leant forward. "Your crewmate was killed before you crashed, wasn’t he, Rashid? Which can only mean –"
"Yes. I… killed him."
Kat drew back.
"But I am not a murderer." He clasped his hands together, took a breath. "We were only a month away from Eden. We were both to be awake for the final leg of the journey. A day after I came out of my stasis, I was working in the aft compartment, checking the medical kit, when Azil –" he glanced through the hull in the direction of the small burial mound outside "– he called to me and said: 'Hey! Will you come and look –’". He did not finish. Stopped, just like that, you see, in mid-sentence." He glanced from Blake to Kat. She sensed what was coming.
"So, this was very unusual," Rashid continued. "I was still carrying the medical kit as I walked through to find him standing in the middle of the cockpit, staring at a most beautiful vision. Azil turned to me, and a chill swept through my bones. I knew in an instant something was very wrong. Azil was no longer Azil. His face was feral, his muscles flexed. He looked first at me, then past me, to the weapons locker."
Rashid, his eyes still far away, picked up the spoon, lifted the lid off the pot, gave the tea a single stir, shook the water off the spoon with a whip-like flourish, and replaced the lid. Blake remained mountain-still throughout, never taking his eyes off Rashid.
"During the War, I was a commando in the Indistani Special Services."
Blake’s head shifted, ever so slightly, and even though Rashid seemed to be staring into the past, not even looking in the direction of Blake, he appeared to detect it too. Peripheral vision. She’d heard that some commandos were trained in it so much they could never switch it off.
"Yes," continued Rashid, "I do not look like one now, nor act like one, nor do I care to kill anymore, but for my Mother country – well, I was younger then. And the enemy was so terrible." He picked up the pot and poured a small amount into the cracked blue and white cup. He swilled it around, warming the china. Kat wished she could smell the aroma.
"During that time, one of our men suddenly turned on us during a mission. At first we thought he was a traitor, but he became wild, like the stories we’d heard of ghosters, though we never saw any of those." Kat’s eyes flicked to Blake, but this time found no reaction in his captain’s tightly-wrapped stare.
"Later, after that man had been disabled, having killed half my platoon, we took him back. He’d been implanted, you see." He looked to Blake for a sign of recognition of this term, and Blake nodded. Kat had a fleeting vision of Zack going berserk in the cockpit, no doubt inspired by her last nightmare. She crushed the image. Rashid poured tea, the steaming liquid sloshing noisily into his cup.
"So, you see, this time I knew straight away what had happened to Azil. The contorted face, the hollow eyes. He recognized he had lost the element of surprise, and I was between him and the weapons locker. I had to act immediately, and turned to grab a pistol. But he was standing at the pilot’s console, and he flicked the control into manual and fired the starboard thrusters. The effect was devastating. The cockpit – in fact the whole ship – lurched and began to spin. I was thrown to the other side of the cockpit, pressed against the hull. He was reaching for the controls to start separating the ship. Of course at that speed, spinning like that, we would have disintegrated. He saw that I had no weapon and so for a few seconds ignored me, his obvious encoded goal being mission termination. I was still holding the medical kit when I remembered what was in it. I managed to grab the back of his seat and kicked the lock at its base. As the centripetal force swung his chair around to face me, my left hand struck out with the scalpel from the kit, slicing straight through his harness, puncturing his heart."
Rashid lifted the cup to his mouth, closed his eyes, savoured its scent, and then took a respectful sip.
After an audible, unassuming gulp, his eyes rejuvenated by the tea, Rashid pressed on. "But in those few seconds he had done a lot of damage. It took me two hours just to stabilize the ship, and we were now way off course. He had activated some kind of communications system virus, which sent a destruction message back to IVS, so they would think we had been lost."
"I thought of leaving Azil in space, but it was not his fault, and he deserved a proper burial, so I kept him in stasis. When I reached Eden, the angle of approach was too steep, but I had no back-up systems. I was down to manual control."
Blake spoke up. "You did a hell of a job landing in as few pieces as you did."
The creases in Rashid’s forehead vanished. "You are too kind, Sir. I had been aiming at a sea area, but hit turbulence that deflected me by one degree. Four of the eight chutes tore up on entry, and in the last minutes, as I saw this pristine world about to become my grave, my astro-engineering training saved me."
Kat and Blake’s eyes met while Rashid took another sip of tea; she had no idea how he had survived, and wondered if Pierre would have guessed.
"The stasis pod," Rashid said. "I remembered an old professor setting us an exam question to do with stasis and the so-called inertial dampening effect. It concerned the theoretical possibility of using a stasis field to counter the effects of severe acceleration, or in my case, deceleration. Well, I failed the question in the exam, but I had nothing else to lose, so I threw myself into a stasis pod having maximized its field strength. It did not completely work, but, well, you saw the cockpit and can imagine the impact stress."
Rashid leant back against the hull.
Blake stood up, and went over to the micro-kitchen, and picked up the second cup. He squatted down in front of Rashid and held it out. Rashid straightaway sat back up and filled it, eyes sparkling.
Blake clinked cups with Rashid.
Kat watched as Rashid’s eyes brimmed, and she found herself staring at Blake, this man who, just when she thought he’d understood him, completely surprised her.
"So," Blake said, "you aimed for the sea, and landed in a desert."
"Ah, well," Rashid said, re-filling his cup. "Not exactly. You see, when I landed, there was no desert here. There were trees, grass and a pristine lake a kilometer away. I used to swim in it, and the water kept me alive for months." He sipped again from his cup. ‘The desert came later."
She thought of their Lander. They had touched down close to the edge of the desert, but still in the bluish-green, bushy grassland. She pictured her nightmare – in it, the ship was definitely in the desert, surrounded by barren rocks. She could see and feel her feet pounding into the sandy ground in front of her, racing for Zack and the ship’s sanctuary, knowing that whatever was behind her, chasing her, would reach her first. How long, she wondered. How long have we got?
Chapter 23
Mumbai Tower
Vince stepped into the glass cylinder, a weapons detector at the foot of the IVS building, wondering if it would detect his DNA-masked subcutaneous knife. The glass door rotated closed behind him as he placed his feet on the footprints marked on the floor. He felt a tingling as waves of technology he wasn’t familiar with swept up and down his body. Outside, four Indistani guards watched him closely. He noticed the safety switches on their pulse rifles were in the "off" position, and their forefingers lazed above the triggers. He forced his breathing to appear normal, trusting in the principle that there were as many geniuses of subterfuge as there were of detection.
He faced the two buttons in front of him – one red, one green – ignoring the camera pointed at his face. After ten seconds, the green button lit up, and the glass door in front of him opened. He’d heard grim accounts of what happened if the red light came on. The tube wasn’t bullet-proof.
He stepped outside, poker-faced, knowing the security guards would misread it as Western arrogance, and so think him too stupid to be a serious threat. One of them frisked him and directed him to an elevator set apart from the others. Only inside the lift did he physically relax. Without looking down, he flexed his right forearm inside his black business suit – his Chorazin uniform would have invited more intrusive searches – to check the silicate stiletto glazed with sim-skin was still in place, hugging the contours of his arm, and still pliant. If he fully clenched his forearm for three seconds, the soft knife would detach, and the side currently touching his arm would solidify upon contact with the air, creating a sharp throwing weapon that would drop into his ready hand. He’d only had to use it in action once; it had taken two seconds for him to prime it and kill his surprised captor. He hoped it wouldn’t be necessary this time; one stiletto would not be nearly enough if things went wrong. Although not officially at war, he was deep inside hostile territory.
As the executive elevator rocketed upwards, he retraced his steps. He’d arrived an hour earlier, feeling relaxed, not like he’d just travelled inter-continentally in a sub-orbital jet. Using his secure vid-phone, he’d called a sleepy Louise to keep an eye on Micah. He’d watched for a reaction from her but got none. As long as she gets her job done.
Vince had entered the IVS structure at ground level – Mumbai had a relatively low rad-score, never successfully targeted by a nuclear weapon during the three years of
the War. IVS HQ had used sophisticated guidance-corruption devices to send any inbound missiles into the sea, the mountains or, in a few ingenious cases, back to their point of origin. IVS had powerful friends and could call upon one of the largest surviving armed forces if needed; after all, IVS had offered refuge to the Indian government during the War.
The immense IVS building, a towering monument in grey steel and Prussian blue diamond-glass, was built in the crude shape of the deity Kali, the first two hundred floors layered like a pyramid and so resembling a skirt, a hundred and fifty more stories forming the torso, and thirty more spreading out like an expanded thorax, leading to the buttresses that jutted out like breasts, and finally a cylindrical top fifty floors high serving as the head. Most extraordinary, however, were the eight arm-like structures that stretched outwards and curved upwards to palms serving as take-off and landing pads, one and a half kilometers above ground level. It was the first time he’d seen it outside of the holos, and despite himself, it took his breath away.
The Kali Tower had caused a storm for many years before the war, in part because of its blatant Hindu origins in a Hindu-Muslim co-aligned country, but also because of its audacity. But after the War, especially with the destruction of the Taj Mahal and other sacred sites, it had become a symbol of Indistani resilience. To Vince, the building spoke of a force not to be trifled with – IVS were deadly serious about business.
The lift decelerated smoothly as it arrived at floor three hundred and eighty. He brushed aside a moment of nausea caused by the rapid ascent and drop in air pressure, and faced a long frosted-glass corridor. As he walked along it, he could see there were offices on the other sides of the mottled glass, but he couldn’t make out anything detailed. No one was in the corridor, so he walked towards the end, where a single door was ajar.
Once inside the voluminous empty office at the end of the "arm", he stared downwards. The view of old Bombay seethed below. He couldn’t make out individual people but could just make out buses, and ant-like columns of what must be the tundra-fuelled tuk-tuks. There were also sky-taxis buzzing around Kali’s skirt level. The rest of the buildings around the Tower were indiscriminate brown shapes stretching into the distance, all serving to emphasize by contrast the power of this place.
