The Expanding Universe 4: Space Adventure, Alien Contact, & Military Science Fiction (Science Fiction Anthology)

by Craig Martelle

  It tottered. It screamed.

  I tottered. I screamed.

  It keeled over and died.

  I keeled over.

  I wish I’d died.

  ***

  The orders came the next day as I lay empty-eyed at my friend Bhanu’s place, thinking of her. Thinking of my Divya and my Anisha. And the unborn child. In the background, the TV blared. An overly made-up news anchor blabbed on and on and on about lights in the sky.

  Bhanu came shaking his phone at me. “Arjun-ji! Arjun-ji! There’s more coming! They’re calling us up! They’re fighting!”

  My fists clenched. My knuckles cracked.

  “Let’s go,” I growled. “Let’s show them what all seven hells look like.”

  As I left, I saw the evening moon, climbing high in the sky: except where I had once shown my daughter the hare on the Moon, there was now a trickle of darkness, like a great black spider creeping around the edge.

  ***

  And that was how I became one of the first Shikari.

  This is me now. They call me Vishnu’s Vengeance. A hundred-meter machine of gleaming alloy punched out by Tata-Leykham Industries. My fingers are steel. My fists can crush buildings.

  Once I dealt out death, one man at a time, with my INSAS assault rifle, my fingers sweating in my gloves and my heart thumping at a thousand beats per minute. Now I cradle a gun ripped straight out of a Russian battle tank—a smoothbore that I call Padma, Vishnu’s lotus. It is an apt name for this gun. It has laser sights and an autoloader that would make an artilleryman green with envy.

  My fingers do not sweat, and my heart is a nuclear battery that will burn for five hundred years. I am a god of death.

  And I wait in the darkness for my enemy.

  It was not easy, becoming what I am. They only took those of us with nothing to lose. Not all of us who went in made it out. Those who didn’t die went crazy. But I held on. My anger grew with time. I screamed their names in the darkness—Divya and Anisha, Divya, Anisha—until the words turned into a mantra and became my will. And by the time the neuro-doctors strapped me in for processing and gave me the final contest forms, my hands shook so badly with anger that I snapped the pen and stabbed the paper. Maybe I was already insane.

  Maybe I still am.

  For when you take a man’s reason for life away from him, what more does he have to fear?

  My enemy is wading now. Unlike the first mistake, this one gleams silver. Long, sleek metal legs slam into the ocean floor. Blue circuits traces cover the turtle-like shell in the middle.

  “Babaji, the Enemy is a Spider-class,” says Bhanu in my ear. I can vaguely hear the roar of helicopter blades underneath the crackling audio. “Five legs, low center of gravity. I think we see a tail.”

  Babaji. My crew call me Father. I am their Head, their Commander…their god.

  “Telemetry confirms the Enemy is bearing three degrees to the left, speed thirteen knots, over,” crackles another voice. That is Sanjaya. In the Mahabharata, the great Sankrit epic, Sanjaya is an advisor to the king: his is the gift of seeing things happening a great distance away. How fitting that a Sanjaya fulfils the same role for me today. He is a good kid, young, a little awkward, but as sharp as a fine razor when he sits at that screen. “Babaji, I recommend you adjust main gun by 13-by-3. This should be a nice clean one, over.”

  I raise my gun and sight carefully. I stand still. It must be a strange sight: an iron giant standing in the ocean before a city.

  I fire.

  The 125mm projectile leaves the reconfigured tank gun with a thunderclap. The strike is instantaneous: the armor-piercing spike of tungsten slams into the Enemy at a thousand meters per second. It rips a shoulder clean off the grotesque creature. It screams from some hidden mouth—a sound that will give children in this city nightmares for decades to come. Instead of blood, it leaks lightning.

  I fire again, and again, and again, walking forward as I do. My aim is true. Padma never fails me. Rounds slam into the monster, ripping chunks out of the carapace. Gleaming layers of soft white and silver dance in the moonlight. And now for my grand finale. I switch to a special round—a 145 monstrosity tipped with uranium—and fire right into the hole at its heart. The round arcs slow and hits with a dazzling light that blinds us all for a second. I can hear Bhanu and Sanjaya cursing.

  The Enemy screams one last time and falls. Mission accomplished.

  I make my way to the smoldering corpse and stare down at it with an almost human-like fascination. I’ve seen these before. Nothing’s new…except the smell. I don’t take it in with the clinical—analytical—dispassion I’m supposed to.

  A pixelated curtain of static white, tinged with hints of obsidian threads, washes over my vision. The hulking monstrosity is gone, and something makes it way to tickle my senses. Something I should have forgotten.

  It’s an acrid odor, clinging to the inside of my skull with hooks, refusing to let go. It’s the smell of the past—of burning buildings, searing ozone, sizzling flesh—of a life gone by. Something I’d been made to forget, something human.

  Shikari don’t smell. We process. We analyze threats. We neutralize them.

  The jarring white carpet fades and my vision returns to normal. I brush it from my mind and bend to grab hold of one of the construct’s legs. A quick tug tells me the limb will hold under the weight and the tug of the ocean. I wrench on the creature and move toward the shore, keeping my mind on the task of retrieval.

  We shouldn’t be studying these things, hauling them back to shore. We should be burying them. A few more rounds would turn each corpse into slag fit to sink to the ocean floor to join centuries of refuse.

  I wade through the water, giving no mind to the waves crashing harmlessly against my body. Every impact does nothing but jar a memory out of me. I remember the days when, in what little free time I had, I paddled against the water and fought to not drown under high crests of seafoam.

  Now I tower above it all. The waves do not touch me the way they used to. I near the shore, monster in tow, when another bout of discordancy lances through me, body and mind. My limbs grow distant and weary. Vishnu’s Vengeance is nothing but a hollow dream. I’m no longer of steel strength and resolve, of lightning computer thoughts and processes. I’m of something hot and heavy—something weary. A spot in my chest, something I’d left behind, burns and beats out of sync. Something wracks lungs I don’t have, feeling like they’re being wrung by iron cables till every bit of air is squeezed out of me.

  I remember tottering. I’m screaming.

  And it passes again.

  My fist tightens around the leg I’m holding. The shore nears, and a crowd gathers along it. Strobing lights cascade off the tops of vehicles to spread out of the sands ahead, bathing the grains in faint blue. I twist and heave to pull the monster’s carcass through the final bit of water, sending up a new row of waves to crash before the onlookers. An alarm cuts through the din, wailing, and giant radiation holograms light up the air, almost as tall as I am. Ants—men—in white hazmat suits form a wary perimeter around the corpse. I need to remember they’re people. People: soft, organic, thinking—always thinking, worried, letting emotions drive them.

  Curiosity. That’s what’s their minds. That itch. The yearn to know. They had to understand what I’d killed. But what’s there to understand?

  I was supposed to kill it. That’s all you could do to one of those. And I did my job. It should burn, much like a home—people, a little girl and her mother.

  Everything flashes, and I become myself again. Vengeance. The thoughts leave me, and I am free to watch the little dots of white run toward the monster. They slow the closer they get. They inch, much like insects, concerned the immobile mass would somehow find a second life and wreak havoc again. It wouldn’t. Vishnu—I—had made sure of that. I’d made it burn. And it wasn’t enough.

  More ants scurry around the fallen enemy, making their way close enough to touch its legs. They likely whis
per among themselves over the marvel of creation the thing is.

  I don’t see it. All I see is a burning house, a fading pregnant woman, the ashes of a little girl.

  The coldness flickers again. Then, all feeling, like the visions, fade.

  Scientists motion at neighboring crews to bring their tools over. They cut through its body with methodical precision, loading the bits onto heavy machinery so they can haul it off to wherever.

  Curiosity. One word. Five syllables. The promise of understanding. It’ll make the fight easier. That’s their thinking. It’s what drives the little insects before me into their joyous circle around the harbinger of our doom.

  Shikari are not to be curious. We’re decisive. We burn what needs to be burned.

  My vision refocuses on the enemy and I raise my cannon. The small forms, clad in white, do not register as anything important. They’re nothing more than concentrated pillars of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Base elements. The enemy still lay before me. It wasn’t gone, not completely.

  But I could fix that.

  I feel the charge rush through me as the cannon arm primes. I know what comes next.

  The house on fire, smoldering ruins and bodies, and smoke blanketing the air above.

  My arm grows distant and hollow, unresponsive. I stop, aware of what I was trying to do. The cannon lowers, and I turn my back to the people on the shore, fixing my gaze on the horizon.

  Am I a man dreaming that I am a machine, or a machine dreaming of being a man?

  ***

  Back in the hangar, anxious tech-priests scuttle around me, tapping, tinkering. Little two-legged ants crawling everywhere. Phantom itches on my skin.

  “It’s not the radiation, Babaji,” says Sanjaya, a worried voice in my ear. “Your outer skin registers a few rads, but the inner skin is completely untouched. Electronics, neural conduits, all in perfect working order. Your gun arm might need a re-servicing, but that’s it.”

  I KNOW WHAT I SAW. I KNOW WHAT I FELT.

  “I know, Babaji, but I can’t explain it,” he says, a desperate note entering his voice. “It’s not hardware.”

  “Maybe you need some rest,” says Bhanu.

  Unasked, the question on all their minds, the problem none of them will say out loud: Babaji, maybe you’re desyncing.

  LEAVE ME, I growl.

  They bow and back away. My children fear me. I sigh, the hangar reverberating with the emptiness I feel inside. But before they can leave, an alarm screams, and the voice of Command and Controls drills into my skull.

  VISHNU TO BAY SIX. VISHNU TO BAY SIX. WE HAVE A SITUATION.

  Bay six. My main reactor re-ignites. I break into a run, ripping cables out of my plugports. This is not good.

  ***

  Bay Six is fifty kilometers away, a vast fortress that dwarfs my own waterside dwelling. My bay is low, sleek, and modern—designed to be broken apart, towed down to wherever I’m needed, and re-assembled. Bay Six, on the other hand, is an immense thing built out of ten-ton blocks of stone. It is more than a launch pad, it is a temple. A shrine.

  To the greatest and most fearsome of all of us.

  A shrine to Kali, Goddess of Destruction.

  My target is along the coastline, which lights up on my heads-up display. My steel feet claw small valleys in the soil. The lights of Chennai strobe in and out in the background, throwing small shadows of me onto the floodlit waters. For a moment I am a man again, with outsized legs, chasing a metal giant in the darkness.

  Bay Six, all towers and spires, sits on a high artificial hill. The whole thing is lit up in a ghastly red. Alarms blare from inside. I can’t jump, but one push from me and the gate crumbles, and my steel bulk is in the main courtyard.

  It’s a large place, almost ten square kilometers of stone and buildings. There should be people here, a veritable army, but nothing. There are vehicles, but they lie scattered and abandoned. The army flags are burning. The stone is slick and coated with a thick black.

  SANJAYA?

  Oil, I think. I follow the oil trail inside. Bay Six has three courtyards, one inside the other. I pass through the second courtyard, and here the metal of the military gives way to something older and more sinister. Giant stone frescoes adorn these walls, depicting the Mother Goddess in all her aspects: Kali creating, Kali destroying, Kali dancing on the body of her consort, clutching the severed heads of her enemies in her four arms, her tongue lolling with madness.

  Except here, instead of the black-skinned goddess I grew up knowing, Kali is a metal giant. As I draw closer, the shapes resolve themselves: Kali, four-armed, wearing a skirt of human heads. Kali, holding her own severed head in her hands, the head drinking oil out of the stump of her metal neck, trampling a couple in the throes of passion.

  The oil that I’ve been following is everywhere. It coats the walls. It drips from the severed heads of the statues and the frescoes.

  SANJAYA?

  A hiss, a whine of static. “Babaji...signal...block…reports...Kali...full desync,” comes the familiar voice. A hiss, a crackle. “Power...authorized...”

  The voice fades away. I have a bad feeling about this.

  The Kali technicians have always been more than just technicians. They worship her. My children call me father, but Bay Six... We’ve all heard the stories. It’s no small thing to see your gods come alive. And servicing the Mother Goddess has always been more than just an oil change.

  I prime my lesser cannon and break through into the third and final courtyard. And I stop, and I shudder, even though I cannot feel horror in this frame.

  Ants lie everywhere, lit by the flames that adorn the walls. In the flickering, I can see white hazmat suits. Cultist robes woven with technician insignias. Army uniforms. Great piles reach up to my knees, staked through and pinned with great metal rods. Arms wave and mouths scream in agony. From them ekes a slow, unceasing river of what I had mistaken for oil.

  And above them, kneeling, is the four-armed Shikari herself. The firelight flickers across her red metal skin. The gaping maw is open in a terrible silent parody of laughter, the arms wrapped around her body, shaking. A necklace of severed heads bleeds onto the carapace.

  KALI, DESTROYER OF ALL THINGS.

  The gaping mouth closes, the great metal face droops to one side, the eyes shine a terrible and brilliant red.

  VISHNU, PRESERVER, PROTECTOR, she greets me. HAVE THEY SENT YOU TO TAKE MY TOYS AWAY FROM ME?

  I raise my main gun in response. She shakes her head, and out of the throat comes something like a chuckle.

  YOU THINK YOU COULD TAKE ME? She roars, spreading her four arms wide. Flames sprout from her mouth, charring the closest of the piles. ME, THE FIRST, THE MOST TERRIBLE?

  I CAN TRY, I say, BUT I’M NOT HERE TO FIGHT. POWER DOWN, KALI.

  She screams at me, a sound that will carry clear to the cities nearby and make grown men tremble, and leaps. It’s a noise that could make my unflexing steel buckle and warp. But I’m ready. I leap back and fire, aiming for the knees. My trusty Padma spits hellfire. Kali’s left knee explodes. The great arms miss me by mere feet.

  She makes no attempt to defend herself, but claws at me, as if to rip me apart with just her hands. I swing out of the reach of the crushing arms. My autocannon rake her sides as I roll. She staggers, crushing corpses, swearing. Her curses are a stream of napalm. I kneel in the slick ooze and fire again. She slumps, red eyes confused.

  WHY? HAVE I DONE SOMETHING WRONG?

  THIS IS TERRIBLE. THIS IS EVIL.

  The great head lolls about. Something is happening inside. WE ARE TERRIBLE! WE ARE GODS! THEY WORSHIP US AS GODS! WORSHIP DEMANDS SACRIFICE!

  I look down at the screaming heaps of dying men and women. WE WERE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT THEM.

  She wavers, as if confused. And then some part of her—the part that once knew love and duty, the part that signed on a dotted line—regains control, and she realizes what she has done. She screams, a long, wailing shrie
k that will haunt my nightmares forever.

  ***

  “That’s the fourth,” says Sanjaya softly. “Kali-Shikari is too unstable. I think they’ll retire the whole line.”

  “It’s the arms,” says Bhanu, who has studied these things. “Too many arms, too much weaponry. Too different from the human body-map. I’m going through her technicians’ logs, and it turns out she’s had the symptoms for months. Memory loss, confusion, the shakes. Nobody reported it. They were too busy worshiping her.”

  They speak to me from the comfort of a helicopter gunship, safe in the distance, as I accompany the long train towing the bodies of men and women out of that terrible place. Long lines of the living, men and women, are converging on the site, the charnel stink keeping them away from me, but still close enough that I can hear their wailing. The families of the dead, probably. There are picket lines and a politician holding court. I pause to look at them, and they shake and back away.

  “Six hundred staff,” says Sanjaya. “She butchered six hundred.”

  IT’S NOT JUST THE ARMS, I want to tell them. SHE BECAME WHAT THEY THOUGHT SHE WAS. SHE BECAME A GOD.

  But I don’t. Instead, once the train is done and the officials have made the appropriate noises, I wade into the ocean. The waves wash over me. The moon is bright tonight, like an iridescent pearl, and the water rocks me gently as my feet sink into the ocean floor.

  “Babaji?” tries Sanjaya, ever faithful.

  LET ME BE, I tell them, weary beyond all measure in a body that can never feel tired. Kali’s scream still rings in my head. LET ME REST.

  It is hard to see a Shikari gone bad. It starts with little things—anger, memory loss, small tics and tremors. The human mind is a fragile thing. We were meant for a fleshy prisons, not these bodies of steel and alloy that they put us in. Touch. Taste. Adrenaline. Dopamine. Oxytocin. Emotions. These things matter. The software that they wrap around us tries to simulate this stuff, but nothing’s perfect. Eventually, the sheer wrongness of it gets to you. Once the neural feedback loops kick in, you’re done for. Anxiety, terror, depression—they told us this in boot camp. It starts with the shakes. Then the blackouts. Time lost, unaccounted for. Then the hallucinations. Psychosis. The fragmentation. And not always in that order.