by Samit Basu
A phone call later, and two soldiers march out of the building. One binds Tia to him with a pair of handcuffs, and the other picks up Mukesh. They head back inside.
Mumbling to himself, the guard heads back into his cabin.
A few minutes later, Tia emerges, retching, from his toilet and hits him on the back of the head with a brick. He seems more amazed than hurt at this, but when another Tia appears, carrying another brick, and they both smite him on either side of the head, he goes down. The Tias merge, and she picks up her phone.
“Aman,” she says. “I’m at the Kashmir base. Can you get into the system here?”
“Tia? What the hell? How did you —”
“Later. Can you get in and shut them down?”
“Wait. Let me look. I’m got a satellite link outside, but… no. No wireless inside. No radar, even. And they’re underground. What do you plan to do?”
“Thought I’d talk to this Jai myself.”
“No, listen. Just try and get the prisoners out. Don’t go anywhere near him. Leave that to Vir.”
“No point telling me. I’m not the one inside.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You talk too much.”
Tia hangs up, sits by the unconscious guard and begins to read his dirty magazine.
Jai leads Vir and the Commander to a huge underground hall, large enough to be an aeroplane hangar. It’s empty except for a makeshift gym in one corner, expensive exercise equipment and absurdly large weights arranged in rows. A stench of leather and stale sweat fills the entire hall.
“It’s not much of a Danger Room, but it’s all we’ve managed to put together at short notice,” Jai says.
“Where do you keep your people?” the Commander asks.
“All over the building. We’ve built this very good high-security prison right at the bottom. That’s where we keep the powers we can use, but don’t quite trust yet. There’s a science wing, where we run experiments, physical, psychological — we discovered fairly early on that people had been given powers that were manifestations of their ambitions. I wanted to be the greatest warrior in the world, and here I am. But people mostly want useless things — more money, to be skilled at dancing, revenge, celebrity lovers. Whatever the nature of each power and the identity of the forces that gave them to us, one thing is certain — our bodies have been tampered with. A team of very good doctors are in the process of finding out how. For this we’re using people whose gifts have absolutely no military potential.”
“What have you found?”
“We’re still working on it. Simple processes like blood transfusions or organ exchanges haven’t yet produced any powered humans. But we’ll crack it eventually.”
“You’re using humans — ordinary people — for your tests?” Vir says.
“Nothing you need to worry about. We’ve mostly got Afghans — they run into Pakistan to escape Americans, and the Pakistanis give them bigger guns and send them to us. We’ve been practising combat ops by the border — you should see their faces when they meet us. I thought I’d put them to good use before we kill them.”
“You’re creating superpowered mujahideen? You’re insane!” the Commander cries.
“You’re not a very good negotiator. Look, my boys are here,” Jai says.
Two men walk into the hall. One is balding, bearded, bespectacled, middle-aged, and the other is Barack Obama, the forty-fourth President of the United States.
“Meet Jerry and Vivek,” Jai says. “Jerry used to be a poet, but he lived in Mumbai. Couldn’t write with all the noise around him, phone ringing all the time, needing to check his email every two minutes, couldn’t move out of the city because his wife earned the money and called the shots. He got a British Council fellowship, went to London, and what can you do now, Jerry?” Jai asks the bearded man.
“I create a blue thing,” Jerry replies.
“A blue thing. See what a good poet he is? Jerry creates silence. Launches an electromagnetic pulse that shuts down everything nearby for a several minutes.”
“And I guess Mr Obama, or Vivek here, can change his facial features,” says the Commander, looking suddenly very impressed.
“More than that. I’d have preferred it if he could have done the whole instantaneous-morphing thing the demons of the Ramayana could do, but Vivek was an actor — ex-National School of Drama, the whole method actor nonsense. Never earned a rupee, of course, but now he can become anyone — not just look like them. Give him a few days to rehearse and enough background material, and at the end of it he looks, talks, even thinks like they do.”
“Amazing,” says the Commander. Vivek strides over and shakes his hand with a firm, warm and presidential grip.
“Delighted you could be here,” he says.
Tariq materialises beside Jai.
“And then there’s Tariq, of course. He would have been a deadly weapon just as he is, but we’ve found out that with the help of satellite imagery and even civilian-accessible technology like Google Earth, he can go anywhere he needs to. Very useful for low-budget international assassinations.”
The Commander stirs uneasily. “You understand that I find it difficult to respond with full coherence, given the circumstances,” he says.
“Of course,” Jai says. “And what you must understand in turn is that I mean well. We want the same things. The very last thing I want is any sort of conflict with the Indian armed forces. Not because you could harm me in any way, of course, but because we’d be losing out on the greatest opportunity in our history. And all my men are not invincible.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Vir says suddenly. “He’s changed. He wasn’t like this.”
“No, Vir,” says the Commander. “He’s behaved… irresponsibly, but his record is excellent. I see your point, Jai, but after all you’ve done, I don’t think our superiors can trust you. Would you be willing to operate under Vir’s leadership? If so, I will speak in your favour.”
Jai’s smile is cold. “I’m not sure how to put this best, Commander,” he says. “I sense your willingness to work with us, and I can wholly understand how much effort it must have taken. But let’s face facts. In our present situation, it really doesn’t matter whether you trust me or not. I was always very fond of Vir — I’ve known him for years, I see myself as his mentor in many ways. And I always saw him as an integral member of my elite unit, but then he went and complained, like a whiny little schoolboy. So if we are all to be one happy family, I’m afraid it is now Vir who must earn my trust.”
“And how would he do that?” asks the Commander.
“You haven’t met the rest of my team,” Jai says.
“Where are you taking me?” Tia asks. “We’ve been walking for ages. I want to meet Jai!”
“He’s busy,” the soldier replies. “Sorry, but I have to lock you in. He’ll see you later, when Poison’s up.”
“All right,” Tia says. “Reasonable. Is there a place in this building where you keep lots of weapons?”
“Like I’d tell you,” the soldier says, laughing.
He doesn’t even notice when other Tias, handcuffed to nothing, appear behind him, simply stopping as the one handcuffed to him walks on. He does notice, though, when a handcuff chain tightens across his throat, cutting off his startled yell, and another Tia dives at his legs, sending them all to the floor in a struggling heap. The guard tussles with four Tias until he’s relieved of his gun and the key to the handcuffs.
“So tell me again,” Tia says, idly pointing the gun at the guard’s right eye, “where do you keep the big guns?”
A huge shaven-headed man and a little girl in a school uniform, white shirt, grey skirt, striped tie, enter the hall.
“We need to leave,” Vir says quietly to the Commander.
Tariq appears beside the Commander, gun pointed at his head.
“Perhaps you should step aside, sir,” Jai says.
As Tariq pushes the Commander to a corner of the
hall, the poet and the President back away, towards the door. The schoolgirl and the shaven-headed man advance slowly towards Vir.
“You first, Sher,” Jai says.
The shaven-headed man nods. Then his muscles swell up, and dark lines appear around his body, swirling contours that converge into thick black stripes. His spine bends forward, his face contorts, fur sprouts out all over his body. His clothes rip as his torso thickens. Moments later, an eight-foot giant with a tiger’s head and paws stands in front of Vir. He growls, a low, ominous rumble that fills the underground hangar.
Vir flies up into the air as the tiger-man lunges at him, misses and lands heavily on the floor. He’s up in an instant and airborne, but Vir swerves aside, and Sher misses again.
“Fight him, damn it!” Jai yells at Vir.
“No,” Vir says. “Stop this, sir. We can still find a way out of this.”
“What happened to you? What happened to your spine?” Jai responds.
“I met someone who showed me how wrong this was. How we need to work together to change the world.”
Jai laughs out loud. “I’d like to meet this friend of yours and congratulate him for being a really original thinker,” he says. “Oh, this endless war, this senseless violence!” He spreads his arms out and assumes an expression of infinite sorrow. “People fighting for millennia over nothing! If only someone had thought of this before! We could all get together and make the world perfect!”
“I know it hasn’t happened before,” Vir says, “but it could happen now. We’re superhumans. And we all have so much in common.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. Could you come a little closer? No? Princess Anima, the Evil Flying Muscle Monster is feeling shy. Could you bring him here, please?”
The schoolgirl steps forward. Her face transforms as well: her eyes grow, becoming huge ovals that stretch across half her face. Her nose shrinks, her skin changes colour. In a few seconds, she’s a pretty, pink, horrifying real-life approximation of a Japanese cartoon. Fairy wings sprout on her back. Two samurai katanas, crackling with green flame, appear in her hands.
“Flying Double Moon Death Charge!” she screams, her voice as cute as sleeping rabbits. She flies up into the air, swinging her swords, tendrils of light trailing behind her.
Vir hasn’t met Anima before and doesn’t want to meet her now. He swerves to avoid her but she’s faster than he is. The swords sweep in glittering arcs and slash across his skin, criss-crossing streaks of unimaginable pain. He screams aloud as the green light crackles into his bruised skin, burning a large cross in his uniform.
Anima lands on the ground on one knee, head bent, swords tucked beneath her arms and perfectly aligned to her back, a classic samurai pose. She raises her head, sees Vir and laughs, a sweet, innocent, bell-like laugh as he wobbles groggily in the air. And then she’s off again, zipping through the air towards him, her hand flickering faster than the eye can see.
“Stars of Destruction!” she cries.
A stream of three-pointed shuriken, ninja throwing stars of green light, slam into Vir’s face. Dizzy, hurt, blinded, he crashes to the floor as Anima soars above him and lands lightly across the hall. She stands coyly, one hand across her mouth, another archly placed on her hip, her manga eyes brimming with amusement, and her laughter tinkles out again. This time it grates across his ears like chalk across a board.
Vir groans and attempts to rise, hears a soft padding noise, smells rank, fetid breath, and suddenly his head is trapped between Sher’s tiger jaws, the all-powerful stench of rotten meat filling his nostrils. The monster shakes Vir from side to side, trying to snap his neck. Failing, he bites him again, dagger-like fangs scratch across Vir’s face but still don’t draw blood.
Roaring in frustration, Sher swings a mighty paw into Vir’s stomach and the flying-man skids far along the floor before finally rolling to a halt. Sher reaches him in one unnaturally graceful pounce. He kneels astride Vir and hammers a succession of punches into his chest. Vir stops thrashing about after the first barrage and merely twitches in response to the second. The floor beneath him cracks and splinters.
“Come on, soldier,” Jai sneers. “Make it interesting.”
Vir doesn’t move. Sher lifts up his head by the hair and lets it go, Vir falls limply to the floor.
“You’ve made your point, Jai,” says the Commander, visibly trembling. “I would like to leave now, with your permission. I’ll arrange a meeting between you and the Air Chief Marshall.”
“Of course you will,” Jai says. “But why are you in such a hurry to leave? The show’s only just started. No one’s even dead yet.”
Seven Tias, armed with a devastating array of weapons, burst through a door. A company of guards sitting in a dark room full of glowing TV sets put up their hands obligingly.
The Tias look curiously at the screens around them. Each one connects to a camera that shows a padded cell. Some of the cells are empty, but several clearly contain superpeople.
“Keys,” a Tia demands.
A guard tosses her a set of keys and the guards all watch appreciatively as Tia-with-the-keys multiplies herself tenfold.
“Will someone be nice enough to lead us to the cells?” a Tia asks. “We really don’t want to shoot you.”
“That’s good, madam,” a guard says. “But whatever it is you’re trying to do, give up. You should surrender before Jai and his men get here. They are not nice like us.”
“Take us to the cells,” Tia says, shaking her gun in what she hopes is a menacing fashion.
“Cells won’t open with just these keys,” the guard says. “You need swipe cards from the science wing.”
“Let’s go there, then. I’ve got time.”
The Tias rush out with two guards in tow. The other guards return to their perusal of the screens.
“Two hundred rupees says Sher kills the last one.”
“Tariq,” says another.
They gather round and lay their bets.
“Hey,” suggests a guard after a while, “do you think we should, you know, sound the alarm?”
An alarm rings out.
“Tariq,” Jai says. Tariq nods and disappears.
“I’ve seen enough,” says the Commander. “You can lead the team. I agree to all your terms, whatever they are. Now let Vir go. He’ll be useful.”
“No,” Jai says. “He dies tonight. I don’t deal well with betrayal.”
The Commander struggles with this for a moment or two.
“Very well,” he says. “But if you don’t let me leave in the next fifteen minutes, I won’t be able to stop the air strike on this building. I wasn’t bluffing about that.”
“Yes, you were,” Jai says. He turns away from Vir with a reluctant sigh. “Would you like to know what I think happened, Commander? I think you were lying to me in my office, and you tricked Vir just as I did. Because, you see, if the Air Marshall, or the Prime Minister, or the Pope, or anyone with half a brain and a phone at his disposal learned about me, this valley would have been crawling with soldiers. I think Vir came to you and told you his story, and you decided to come here and get yourself a crack team and an overnight promotion.”
The Commander considers blustering his way out of this, but after a few seconds of trying to look indignant his shoulders sag.
“Now let’s be reasonable, Jai,” he says. “They’re never going to take you back. You’re not — you’re more than human now. Different. Hell, they’d have locked that poor boy Vir up if he’d gone to them. You wouldn’t stand a chance. Unless you’re working under someone they do trust. A bridge between the uppermost tiers of the military and its finest team.”
“In other words, you.”
“Yes. I believe in you, Jai. I always have. And these powers you have… Imagine what you could do with my help. With my guidance.”
Jai reaches out and snaps the Commander’s neck.
“What are you looking at?” he yells at Sher and Anima, who are staring at
the Commander’s corpse, puzzled. “Get back to work!”
Three Tias run into what looks like a hospital ward. Beds are arranged in rows down the middle of the room, around forty people lie in these beds. Doctors scuttle about, adjusting drips, taking readings, playing with their BlackBerries. Charmed by this vision, a Tia fires her gun into the air, and the doctors dive for the floor.
“Sliding card thingies that open cell doors! Hand them over!” Tia yells.
A buxom nurse holds up a wobbling arm, and a Tia snatches a card from it.
A gunshot rings out. Tia turns to dust. The nurse screeches. Two more bursts of gunfire, and the other Tias also fade away.
The card flutters to the floor.
“Where else are they?” Tariq bellows, teleporting to the other end of the ward.
Seven more Tias rush in and dive for cover as Tariq appears in their midst, spinning and shooting at random. Other voices cry out; two doctors are hit. A white sheet near Tariq turns red. All over the room, patients dive for cover, hurling their sheets aside.
For two agonising minutes, Tariq and Tia shoot at each other. Tariq flickering up and down the hall, firing continuously; Tia rolling, ducking and diving, leaving a body behind at every turn.
The gunfire stops suddenly. Tariq is gone. Tias emerge from behind beds, whirling about, picking cards off corpses. At one end of the room, a Tia tosses a sheet off a seated figure and receives a bullet to the face.
Tariq is back, shooting at random and vanishing.
“Everyone stay down!” a Tia screams. She runs to the centre of the ward and stands, gun extended, and spins around. Five more Tias blossom in a circle, their gun barrels forming a six-pointed star. They fire simultaneously.
Tariq materialises and is mowed down. His body flickers for a few seconds and then moves no more.
“Is anyone alive?” a Tia calls. Moans and whimpers answer her. “Come with me,” she says.
* * *
The tiger-man’s claws rake Vir’s face lazily.
“Hey, Jai,” Sher says. “I think I’m done.”
Vir opens his eyes. He grabs Sher’s paws, sits up straight, head-butting the tiger’s muzzle. As Sher yelps in pain, Vir rolls him off and jumps up, shaking his arms, ready for round two.
