Penumbra

by Eric Brown

  Bennett cried out and pushed on the controls, sending the Viper into a steep dive. The liner seemed to bob up and out of view, and for a split second Bennett almost allowed himself a sigh of relief. Then he saw before him, and impossible to avoid, a forest of antennae and guidance probes bristling from the underbelly of the starship.

  They scythed through them, a series of sickening thumps conducted through the cabin. The tug yawed wildly, spinning out of control and hurtling towards the swollen cargo blister on the rear underbelly of the liner. For all their speed, the silver blister seemed to approach in slow motion, expanding before the Viper like a blown bubble. Bennett dragged on the controls, less from intent than sheer blind hope, and miraculously the liner vanished.

  He was about to congratulate himself when something hit the Viper. One second they were drifting in the welcome void of space, and the next they were swatted by a terrifying and powerful force.

  Bennett swore and stared through the viewscreen above his head, hardly able to believe what he was seeing.

  The starship had phased out, washing the Viper in the molten backblast of its ion-engines. The temperature in the cabin was climbing alarmingly and Bennett felt his skin beginning to burn. The tug swirled out of control like a leaf in a hurricane, the jets incinerating the vessel’s paintwork and melting the viewscreen.

  ‘Get the suits, Ten!’ Bennett screamed, expecting the viewscreen to crack and the tug to depressurise at any second - and then the alarm sounded, an ugly, pulsing double note that almost deafened Bennett. The tug was floating, becalmed. The viewscreen held, a blurred mess of scorched plasti-glass.

  The alarm dinned in his head and Bennett fought to control his breathing. He fumbled at the controls, trying to kill the noise.

  Ten was scrambling around in the confines of the tug, attempting to find the suits.

  Control was yelling: ‘What the hell were you doing, both of you?’

  ‘The Viper rejected the rewritten flight-path!’ Bennett yelled back.

  The alarm cut off, to be replaced by the Viper’s calm, synthesised voice: ‘Cabin depressurisation. Advise immediate evacuation.’

  Bennett felt his pulse quicken. ‘Ten! Those suits!’

  ‘You were slow, Bennett!’ Control went on. ‘You should have seen the liner long before you did, taken evasive action.’

  ‘We were on an original flight-path, okayed by you! I wasn’t exactly expecting company!’

  ‘That’s not the point—’

  ‘And fuck you!’ Bennett shouted. He turned to Ten Lee. ‘Where the hell are those suits?’

  She was floating, twisted, behind the seats. She stared at him with a calm expression which, in the circumstances, he found maddening. She indicated the empty suit storage unit. ‘They aren’t here.’

  ‘Jesus Christ . . .’ Bennett said.

  ‘Repeat: cabin depressurisation. Advise immediate evacuation.’

  Ten Lee resumed her seat and regarded the monitor. ‘We have seven minutes before the tug breaks up, Bennett.’

  His visor screen flared. He blinked and made out the hunched head and shoulders of Matheson, the flight manager.

  ‘Hope you both enjoyed that little roller-coaster ride. I want a full report and systems analysis in my terminal in six hours, got that?’

  ‘It was a program error,’ Bennett began. ‘And what the hell are you doing to get us out?’

  ‘I’m not bothered what the hell you think it was, Bennett. I need to find out what went wrong out there.’

  ‘Hey - and who equipped this fucking pile of junk?’ he began, but Matheson had cut the connection.

  Ten, professional to the last, was reporting a list of damages back to Control. Bennett stared at her. She seemed calm, composed. Her voice was even, her expression neutral.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated on not spilling the contents of his stomach.

  ‘Major functions damage,’ Ten Lee said. ‘The tug is inoperable. Control’s sending out a salvage ship.’

  Bennett stared at her. ‘Christ, Ten, we’ve got five minutes to live and you don’t even bat an eyelid.’

  She shrugged, regarding the screen of her visor.

  ‘Okay, I know. You don’t fear death, right? You’re past all such fear . . . Well, just between you and me, I’ve yet to learn that lesson and I’m shit scared.’

  He was aware of the tremor in his voice and shut up.

  ‘Repeat: advise immediate evacuation.’

  ‘How long before that damned tug gets here?’ he said.

  Ten Lee glanced at him and smiled, something mocking in the regard of her slanting eyes. ‘Calm down, Joshua. Panic can benefit no one.’ She raised a small hand and pointed. ‘Look, the salvage ship is here.’

  Bennett stared through the damaged viewscreen and made out the hulking silver blur of the salvage vessel as it slowly approached.

  His visor flared and Matheson stared out at him. ‘Bennett, Theneka,’ he said, something ominous in his tone. ‘This is just to tell you that you’re both suspended for ten days until we get to the bottom of this. Out.’

  Ten Lee raised a hand, forestalling Bennett’s protest. ‘We have nothing to worry about. It was a systems error, after all. Calm down.’

  Bennett lay back in his couch, closed his eyes and awaited the pick-up.

  * * * *

  2

  Rana Rao crossed the crowded foyer of the Calcutta police headquarters and paused before the plate-glass door. In the second before it swished open, she caught a glimpse of her reflection. The sight of herself in the trim khaki uniform often caught her unawares. She saw the girl she had been in her surprised eyes and thin face, and the woman she was now in her lieutenant’s uniform, and she found it hard to reconcile the two images. She sometimes felt guilty at the privilege conferred by the uniform; she wanted to tell people that she was nothing special, that she too had once been the lowest of the low.

  She stepped through the glass door and stood beneath the red-and-white-striped polycarbon awning. Rain lashed down, drumming on the awning, bouncing off the slick tarmac of the busy road. The monsoon clouds piled over the city had brought a premature twilight to the afternoon. All along the wide pavements paan sellers, fortune tellers and laser beauticians switched on their orange glow-tubes and huddled beneath stolen scraps of polycarbon.

  Rana looked up and down the street for her car. No doubt it was stuck in the traffic. Her driver was old and slow, which she didn’t mind most of the time. But today she had a meeting with a street-kid she was helping; she had arranged to meet her at a certain time and a certain place, and she knew from experience that street-kids didn’t wait around. When the whole city is your home, you move from place to place in search of the necessities of life: food and baksheesh.

  ‘Rana-ji! Over here!’

  The gnarled head of her driver emerged from the side-window of the battered patrol car, lodged in a line of stalled traffic ten metres away.

  Rana was about to make a dash for the car when her communicator clicked in her inner ear. She twitched her lower jaw to activate the connection and snapped, ‘Yes? Lieutenant Rao here. Who is this?’

  ‘Commissioner Singh.’ The voice, weighted with forbearance, sounded in her ear. ‘Have you set off yet, Lieutenant Rao?’

  ‘Not yet, Commissioner.’ She peered along the line of traffic to her driver and waved that she would be with him shortly.

  ‘Jolly good. I will come with you today, ah-cha?’

  ‘Ah-cha, Commissioner. I’m just outside the building. Please hurry. My driver’s waiting.’

  Commissioner Singh cleared his throat with censure and cut the connection. Rana cursed the fat, pompous pig. He liked to ‘get his hands dirty’, as he said, from time to time. See how his men were coping on the front line. Rana could have done without his ignorant presence today. He would frighten the kids away. She had worked hard to gain their trust over the years, to show them that she was an exception to their generally correct assumption that
all cops were corrupt.

  A minute later Commissioner Singh stepped through the sliding doors. He was not alone, Rana saw with dismay. In his wake shuffled a subservient private, turbaned like Singh himself.

  The commissioner nodded. ‘Lieutenant Rao, Private Khosla.’

  Khosla nodded. She knew the tall, gangling private. He was a file-shuffler in the computer division, one of a few young men who resented Rana her position of lieutenant and showed it by jibing her whenever they met. Not today, though; Khosla was on his best behaviour, toadying up to the commissioner. She wondered why he was coming out with them on this patrol.

  The introductions over, Singh looked imperiously up and down the street. ‘Where is your car, Lieutenant?’

  ‘Over here.’ Rana led the way, dodging through traffic to where her driver had leapt from the car and opened the passenger door. He had seen the commissioner and was working for his tip. ‘Thank you, buba.’ Rana smiled with feigned grace and slipped into the passenger seat.

  Her driver goggled, then quickly whipped open a rear door. ‘Please, sir . . .’

  Singh slumped heavily on to the back seat, leaned forward and tapped Rana on the shoulder. ‘So what is your agenda today, Lieutenant?’

  The car started up and inched down the street.

  ‘I’m going over to Howrah to talk to a group of children who live beneath the bridge,’ she replied. ‘They’ve formed a co-operative: shoe-shining, tailoring, tattooing . . . This sort of enterprise is to be encouraged.’

  ‘Ah-cha, but what about the Choudry girl?’

  Shiva! So that was why the fat pig was with her today. Vandita Choudry had run away from home three weeks ago, a home where, Rana knew, she was being beaten by her father. She had fallen in with the group of children who lived beneath the Howrah bridge. It was Vandita who had first suggested the co-operative, and Rana had helped them get it started. Of course, she should have picked up Vandita Choudry and returned her to her father, but Rana didn’t play by the book. The kids knew this and respected her.

  Rajiv Choudry was a Brahmin and a big-shot in engineering, and he was no doubt putting pressure on Commissioner Singh to find his daughter.

  They crawled through the jhuggis to the south of the city, kilometre after kilometre of drab slums, dilapidated polycarbon and polythene shacks little bigger than com-screen kiosks housing entire families. Overhead, bright ad-screens hovered like giant butterflies beneath helium-filled dirigibles, their gaudy images offering the poor glimpses of an unattainable other world.

  Amid the blare of horns and tangle of metal that was the usual congestion of traffic by the Howrah bridge, Rana’s driver slowed and indicated to turn off down a track to the wharf. Rana caught a glimpse of a gaggle of kids, Vandita among them, beside the water. The Choudry girl saw her, waved and ran towards the car.

  ‘Keep straight on, buba,’ Rana told her driver. ‘Not this side of the bridge, the other.’

  The car accelerated, turned on to the bridge, and Rana began to breathe again. She stared back at the commissioner; he had suspected nothing. He probably wouldn’t have recognised Vandita from any other street-kid, anyway. It was amazing how even a Brahmin girl, with plaited hair, Chanel perfume and expensive shoes, could soon discard all the meretricious trappings of wealth and blend in with her barefoot peers.

  They crawled across the bridge in a procession of slow-moving traffic. The space not taken by vehicles was packed with pedestrians, a surging crowd of humanity making its way back and forth across the bridge in a never-ending flow.

  They turned off the bridge and Rana told her driver to pull up on the bank of the Ganges. She climbed out and walked to the edge of the wide river, Singh and Khosla joining her. A gang of kids, Dullits by the look of them, bathed their skinny brown bodies in the filthy shallows.

  Khosla was shaking his head. ‘These days it seems there are more kids than ever,’ he said. ‘It is an insurmountable problem.’

  Rana stared at him, doing nothing to conceal her dislike.

  ‘You are right, Private,’ she said, emphasising his rank, ‘it seems there are more street-kids than ever. But at monsoon time each year this is always the case. You see,’ she went on, as if explaining the obvious to a simpleton, ‘many children have nowhere to live other than in the storm drains. So when the rain falls, the monsoon drains fill up, driving the children out and on to the streets. When the monsoon stops, they will return to their homes.’

  She fell silent, staring at a young boy dunking himself repeatedly in the brown water.

  ‘And as to your claim that it is an “insurmountable problem”,’ she continued after a short while, ‘I would dispute, first, that it is a problem, and then whether it -whatever “it” is - is insurmountable. The only people the kids pose a problem to are the rich, who don’t like to be reminded of their guilt, and the tourists, who can go to hell. The children provide the means for a thriving economy to flourish. If you talk to the kids, you will find that in most cases they’re perfectly happy living on the streets. As for it being an insurmountable problem, well, if the government were to invest in more schools and jobs . . . but then these kids are only kids, aren’t they? They have no power, no vote.’

  She stared at Khosla until he looked away. She caught the superior smile that played on his lips. She knew what some people said about her back at headquarters, that she loved street-kids because she had never known the love of a man. Well, she might never have known the love of a man, but that wasn’t the reason why she felt compassion for these children.

  Commissioner Singh cleared his throat. ‘That is all very well, Lieutenant, but I am more concerned with the runaways, the children who leave good homes and families to live on the streets. It is all very tragic for their families.’

  Rana felt a tightness within her chest. ‘It’s also tragic for the children that they feel they have to run away in the first place.’ She glanced at the commissioner. ‘They have a lack of love and affection in their lives.’

  Khosla looked at her with an expression that said, What do you know about love?

  Not much, Rana admitted to herself, staring across the river to the lights of the ad-screens floating above the city, but I know something about the lack of it.

  She pulled a sheaf of pix from the hip pocket of her trousers and walked towards the kids dancing about on the muddy river bank to get dry.

  ‘Can I talk to you?’ she said to them in Hindi. ‘I’m Rana and I’m looking for this girl. I wonder if you’d be able to help? Look, these pix can buy you food.’

  She passed a dozen pix of Vandita Choudry to the gaggle of kids bustling around her to get a closer look. The pix showed a version of Vandita that bore no resemblance to what she looked like today: she was prim in a red Western-style dress, short white socks and plaited hair tied with ribbons. The kids were more bothered about the promise on the reverse of the pix: each one could be exchanged for behl puri at certain stalls along the Howrah bridge.

  When Rana returned to Singh and Khosla, Singh said: ‘Where are the co-operative kids? I thought we were going to question them, Lieutenant?’

  ‘I was going to talk to them,’ she said. ‘But they seem to have disappeared. Well, they have better things to do than talk to me. Maybe another day.’

  She was going to suggest they return to the car when a tiny figure squeezed from the press of humanity flowing from the bridge and ran across to her. Rana glanced at Singh and Khosla, but they were watching the antics of the Dullit kids who were playing kabbadi, with the pix as prizes.

  Rana hurried across to the girl. ‘Vandita,’ she hissed in Hindi. ‘I’m with my boss today. We can’t speak.’

  Disappointment showed in the brown eyes of the twelve-year-old.

  Rana glanced back at the commissioner. He was watching her, but clearly didn’t recognise Vandita. The girl had traded her red dress for a torn brown smock, was barefoot, and wore her hair long and tangled. In just two weeks Rana had watched Vandita turn from an u
nhappy little rich girl into a happy, confident child revered by the children she helped to look after.

  ‘Ah-cha. We can talk for two minutes, but no more. They’re looking for you. Your picture’s all over.’

  Vandita laughed. ‘I’ve seen it. They’ll never find me.’

  ‘How’s work?’ Vandita and another girl cleaned cars and bicycles for ten rupees a time. Rana was trying to get them to spend a little of their earnings on school classes set up by private foundations around the city.

  ‘Lieutenant!’ Singh called impatiently in English. ‘When you can spare the time . . .’