All around Kandy, bets had been made, post-match drinking already planned, and now people sat, glued to their screens, watching the carnage unfold. It was entertainment at its finest.
Under Broken Arm’s guidance, the tribe dragged all manner of filth – from polythene to rusted iron to chipped, stained concrete – from the mountain of trash that sat squat behind them to home, to mutant crows and pockets of gas that burst every so often. Since time immemorial, they had taken things to the mountain, cleaning up the streets of this ghost city. They knew exactly where to look for iron, for heavy things that could be thrown, for padding that could be turned into shields.
Because they were in battle.
It was with a group they had generally avoided in the past. No names had been exchanged, no callsigns established. They had come in the darkness of the night, cutting down the Cinnamons, gutting them for food and turning whatever buildings remained into outposts. They fought with rocks and traps. Across the face of the Galle Face Green, stretching all the way into Havelock, were webs of plastic and old nylon, some of them still containing the struggling figures of bots who had wandered in.
Broken Arm had to intervene. The Cinnamons were allies. Her tribe took what weapons the Cinnamons were willing to part with – spears, most of the time – and fought back in fierce guerilla battle. Early on she had established the idea of ambushing the enemy when they came to check on their traps. Her forces had now taken seven outposts from the Sons of Cinnamon, and the battle damage showed. The sun, with its cutting lance of heat, fell on legs that sparked and pseudoskin so badly flayed that some of them looked like grinning skulls crowned by flaps of flesh.
Sky, who had scouted around, had brought back the numbers, the locations, the enemies. Steel rods, bent by patient, painless hands, became hooks for tearing down walls. When they were ready, the tribe charged out of camera range and towards their new enemy.
‘UNWISE’, said the Port City as they passed it. ‘UNWISE. NEW AGENT ACTIVITY DETECTED. UNITY IS STRENGTH.’
Broken Arm did not understand what this meant.
SIX
Eliott Grimme, like Bengali, had a job to do. Unlike Bengali, he went to work immediately.
One of the greatest military strategists to ever walk the earth had pointed out that all warfare was based on calculation. ‘Before doing battle, in the temple one calculates and will win, because many calculations were made,’ Sun Tzu had written, referring to the need to withdraw and think things through before commitment.
Through the ages, men and women had hewed to this word, though with varied results – the humans, too biased, too limited by their norms and principles and hatreds; the machines, too inflexible, too prone to constructing beautiful plans of such great complexity that they fell apart at the desertion of a single brigade; and then finally, him.
The midpoint. The organizing principle. The machine that bled. The Reaper.
Every morning, he woke up to grey concrete. The room was comfortable and came with the two Inquisitors who would wake him up. He would pace the corridors outside, following the rambling corridors, stopping short whenever the prospect of the outside came into play. The thin copper-wire runt would follow. The fat one would guard his door.
This hospital was a part of the greater corpus of the Inquisitor headquarters in Kandy, and had been designed for efficiency, not intuitiveness. Sometimes, he would emerge onto an assembly point, empty except for Inquisitors guarding the doors. Other times, he’d emerged onto a training ground, where dozens of tuned bodies in camouflage fatigues drilled in that strange native martial art of theirs called Angampora – all leaps and grapples and holds, modified to work with pistols and rifles.
Penhaligon ran an odd ship – part mafia, part police station, part elite commando corps. Sometimes Grimme would emerge in the police-like heart of this operation – endless halls of humans processing cases, reporting to Inquisitors that lounged lazily and stalked between lanes of tables like vampires sniffing their prey. At the long end of these halls was an office with Penhaligon’s name on it. The rich and the powerful apparently came to pay obeisance there.
Ceylon, Taprobane, Serendib. He flipped through every single piece of information Penhaligon could supply him – histories, population reports, weather. Island-nation, Crown colony, tropical temperatures, very high humidity. Seven million people. Two main hubs: Kandy, where he presumably was, functioned as the seat of government, while the Trincomalee port was the commercial centre. What used to be Colombo was now dust and shrapnel. The rest of the island was either a factory – there were tons of those automated farms that extracted everything from tea to titanium – or a homestead; a feudal village handed over to some harmless Brit who had earned a second-class retirement. Some of them bred and multiplied and ran their villages like slaveshops. Others went native and took local mistresses. Or maybe the local mistresses took them.
Axiom one: Know Heaven and Earth.
Grimme set up a preprocessor and went to sleep.
It was the first trick he had learned after that very first operation, where he stopped being Captain Eliott Grimme and started becoming the Reaper. The processors spliced into his brain were old now, but they still let him design the commands he needed, and translate those commands for his brain cells to work on. Not everyone survived being able to manipulate your own brain, of course – War and Plague had been the best examples of how badly things could go wrong.
But he was the Reaper, optimized for this kind of thinking, the last and arguably the greatest of his lineage. His brain still worked, and the processors still ran their firmware, and the preprocessor began its work. In the darkness, it sifted through everything he had, extracting, reordering and unpacking information. Maps unfolded in his mind. Information. Knowledge banks slowly packing themselves into his head. The parser, glitching all the while, dipped into the stream of history, pulled out images like fish. He saw an island, green and dotted with strange white domes, where people came to worship. He saw ships visit, all creaking timbers. He saw brown men in ridiculous dresses – all tassels and gold and silk – being visited by white men in iron. The ships were fought off, the men in iron killed. More ships came, more men, until the last of those in tassels whimpered in a cell barely large enough to contain them.
Then came geography. For this, he had the Inquisitors turn the cooling all the way up in the room. He slipped into the bathroom, took off his clothes and curled up gingerly in the bathtub, waiting for his skeleton to start sending the first of many thousands of overheat warnings. Geography compute was a serious task.
He spent the next twenty hours in a terrible fever, every available neuron press-ganged into service, every synapse overclocked. His skin burned. Water rose from the bathtub in a dense fog. What little intelligence remained misfired, struggling feebly to keep his heart pumping and his head above water. Several times he came to find himself numbly reciting lines that had once struck him on the field of battle, lines tied to the flicker of flame and the charnel stink of the the trench:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief
The preprocessor burned through every single map at his disposal, gobbling up landscapes, spitting out terrain markers. Choke points. Cover. The roads that snaked from Trincomalee in the east, from the harbour, to the city of Kandy. The railroads that ran down from there, single-minded, into Colombo. The roads that followed, ever winding. It pulled out the hills of Kandy and quantified the steepness of the climb. The swept down rivers and established flood markers—
A knock on the door. ‘Sir, Penhaligon would like to see you for lunch.’
‘Later.’
‘Sir, he—’
‘Later!’ he growled. The knocker retreated hurriedly, and then ther
e was only …
There is shadow under this red rock,
Come in under the shadow of this red rock
And last, it came to Colombo – Colombo by the sea, a city of a million people reduced to rubble in a single instance. A great, corrupt oasis of steel and tar and concrete, warped and twisted, home now only to poison and weeds and a sea breeze that carried the cries of things that had once been seagulls.
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
A mountain of trash, inexplicably dumped in one corner. Buildings toppled and old tanks parked in the streets, blocking off almost all the exits. A few embassies whose main structures had survived the Angelstrike, and automated cannons running long after the humans inside had been reduced to bone powder. A post-apocalyptic set piece of city-sized proportions.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
And beyond Colombo? The Chinese Port City. Here there was emptiness. He felt the preprocessor and its army of worker neurons rummage hard. There were no schematics anywhere, but he had seen these in Hong Kong. Great floating domes made of what looked like glass, but in reality was a translucent nanoweave skin, self-healing, that could double as an armor and solar array.
It would have the usual precautions, of course. Spore-cannons capable of spraying that entire city with nerve gas. Banks of conventional guns that could send uranium-tipped rounds through anything in their line of sight. Banks of Chinese Marines – vat-cloned off a perfect model, power armor, nasty hundred-kilo railguns. One of those Confucian AIs running the show. This one probably just played courier, trading Chinese goods for British ones, running up shipping and handling bills, a genius reduced to playing shopkeeper.
It must be bored out of its shell.
The preprocessor, which had sensed his thoughts, slowed itself down patiently until his reverie was over. It read the legal agreements and staked out a no-fire zone, then neatly packed away the irrelevant, the unnecessary and the bloated, leaving him with what he needed: a battle map.
‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust,’ his lips said to the choking, humid cold.
It was late when he rebooted again. His skeleton had thrown him into battle conditioning and gotten him out of that tub. By the time his higher functions came online, a dozen repair processes were crawling through his body, checking subsystems for nonexistent damage. He shut them down and fumbled his way downstairs, top-heavy because of the changes that damn surgeon had made. A few days, bah. It always took longer. Reflexes trained over decades for a lighter, faster body almost threw him off balance and were shelved for retraining.
The fat Inquisitor was outside the door. He didn’t seem to speak much, and he just led Eliott to the belly of the building. A series of entrances. An airlock. Two more Inquisitors – young, Ceylonese-English mixes by the looks of them – opened a door. A smooth carpet, a stuffed lion head beneath the Imperial crest, a table set for lunch, untouched. It smelled of fresh paint. Sixteen chairs stood before the captain’s table, like supplicants praying to a wooden god. There were people in there, most of them in uniform, some obviously drunk, all in a careless ring around Penhaligon, who stood like a dark vampire in their midst. There were soldiers playing cards in a corner.
The reek of arrack hit his system. Officers angled away from the circle, curious, but not curious enough to welcome him in.
Penhaligon smiled; a thin tightening of the lips. ‘Gentlemen, meet Eliott Grimme, the man you’ve heard so much about,’ he said, guiding Eliott gently from one circle to another. ‘Captain … ah, this is Colonel Wattegama, Perera, de Andrado. Ratwatte, here, come talk to Mr. Grimme.’
A chorus of rituals – how-do-you-dos; pleased-to-meet-you-sirs. Hands stretched out to be shaken. Eliott spurned the automated human contact, ignored the looks they gave him, half-offended, half-afraid. There were shades of white skin, Eliott noticed, and even where the Ceylonese name held higher rank; the whitest went first.
‘Pleasure to meet you, sir,’ said a cultured voice with a thin veneer of a London accent on top. Eliott found himself shaking hands with a dark, heavyset, bespectacled man who squeezed his hand like a python strangling its prey. ‘Thank you very much for helping us out with the situation here. Whatever you need, come talk to me.’
Penhaligon gave the man a pointed glance and led Grimme away, murmuring, ‘It would have been better if that bloody family hadn’t caused this mess in the first place. Fucking Bandaranaikes think they own the place. And try not to make Khan suspicious; he’s obviously here from India. How’s progress?’
‘On schedule. I have the topography. We need to talk people, supply trains, transport.’
‘Good. Mason, take Mr. Grimme, show him around.’
Mason was the thin Inquisitor. ‘Food,’ he said to Mason. ‘I need food.’
Mason hesitated. ‘Rice and curry, sir? Or bites?’ A man, dark-skinned, uniformed and sober, sprung into action, and seemingly produced a plate from thin air. Sandwiches – trying very hard to be polite, but there was too much butter, not enough meat. Eliott ate a few anyway. It was inefficient, but the body could extract some useful elements out of the mess.
Penhaligon tapped his glass gently. The circles closed around him, the conversations slowly descending into silence.
‘Gentlemen’, he said, ‘before we begin dinner, let’s go over the situation a bit. Firstly, Ceylon. Lovely place. Crown colony. We’ve got a lot of resource operations here, but I think we all know the big picture here. Some of you … Molligoda? You were around when the Chinese first came here and the whole madness exploded in Colombo, yes?’
‘Yes, sir. And then we flattened them, sir,’ said an old man who sagged heavily over a bloated belly. He beamed around at the table. ‘Angelstrike took out the entire city, heh!’
Your city, though Grimme. Sellout.
‘There you are. God bless our souls, gentlemen, we fired an Angels Interitus down on a city of a million people just to prove a point. The Chinese got the message, asked for permission to dredge up some land off the ruins and set up a trading center. So now, the real point of this island is to serve as a neutral go-between zone between the Chinese and us. There’s a delicate balance to keep here, and we’ve kept it so far, so before I go any further, a toast to us for a job well done.’
They cheered and raised glasses the colour of tea. Molligoda was the first to down his drink.
‘Now, unfortunately, we have a situation,’ said Penhaligon, suddenly quieter. In the hush, they all leaned forward, the cheer wiped from their faces. ‘You all know the situation with the bot business. A few glitches, huge to-do. Two of them got into Kandy right here and killed a few good citizens. Our Bandaranaike’s uncle was involved, weren’t they?’
Dark glances. The one named Bandaranaike, decked in the livery of a major, flushed a deep purple.
‘No one’s blaming you, Bandaranaike. Shit happens and flowers grow on it.’
‘Sir,’ said Bandaranaike, who seemed to have some difficulty speaking.
Penhaligon tutted, like a disappointed parent. ‘But I’m afraid it’s time for some professionalism in this circus. Her Majesty’s government have demanded that we test, certify and pass through all manner of red tape, and the upshot of that is we may not have a Big Match next year.’
Eliott was surprised at the dismay on people’s faces. It seemed genuine.
‘But we do have to try and get each and every one of those little machines hauled back here and tested before we send them out again. I’ve brought in one of my associates, Mr. Grimme, who you’ve now met. He’s much older than I am, and dare I say very, very good at his job. Some of you may already know who he is, some of you may not. All I can say is, don’t bother looking up his files, gentlemen, it’s far beyond your place to do so. I’ll handle the politics. If things go according to plan, this is basically just an exercise in collecting
puppets. No shots fired. No heroes, no martyrs. We play this game until every one of those bots are recalled and back in Dr. Hewage’s lab, at which point the technicians figure out safer ways of doing things.’
People tried not to look Eliott in the face. Someone muttered, ‘Hong Kong’.
‘And by the way, nobody tries to shut Hewage’s operation down. Nobody interferes. No scapegoating this one, or Mr. Grimme here may pay your families a visit. Clear?’
‘Sir,’ said Molligoda. Others nodded and agreed. Penhaligon’s expression brightened immediately and he clapped his hands.
‘Wonderful. Wonderful. I always told my boys that you were men of reason. Dinner?’
Eliott looked at the strange concoction that was put in front of him. A smorgasboard of colour on white; browns, yellows, greens.
The arrival of food seemed to trigger something in the small crowd. Everyone sat down to eat, some less steadily than others. More sober, dark-skinned men turned up to serve them. There was an odd dynamic between them. Though they were soldiers, they seemed more like servants – slightly stooped, nodding eagerly at the officers, who turned back and ordered as though they were talking to children.
‘They’re Tamil, sir,’ said Mason, who had seen Grimme staring. ‘The Yarl affair got them all demoted.’
This meant nothing to him, but he filed it away for reference. The Indian major, more polite than the rest, sat down next to him. Everyone except Penhaligon ate with their hands. He watched them carefully and mimicked them. Large portions. No food above the second digit. Doable.
The rice was ridiculously rich, loaded in carbohydrates; he could break that down for energy. More protein was required. He sent Mason back for more, and more, until most of the guests had stopped eating and began staring at this pale, thin waxwork of a man who had demolished six plates of rice, and was now well into his seventh.
Penhaligon coughed discretely as he began to order the eighth. Grimme looked at the stares around him. Of course. Among humans, he would have kept the energy intake low. The Tamil soldier, instead of food, brought him a bowl of water with a lemon in it, and he washed his hands like the rest of them. The soldier seemed startled to be thanked, and scurried away.
The Inhuman Peace Page 9