The Inhuman Peace

by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  Eliott took three of Penhaligon’s Inquisitors. He had Mason, that annoying Inquisitor pup. Lakshmi, whose files said she had been modified for sight and hearing. And Senanayake, who was your bog-standard modification, standard speed supplement, nothing special – just a faster policeman. They were terribly junior.

  He let them handle the soldiers and went to look over the aircraft while they were in the throes of being pumped with helium. They were old British Aerospace dirigibles, second-rate bureaucratic designs built with the cheapest parts available.

  Eliott waited until the minion in charge ran out of steam and excuses.

  ‘It’s crap,’ he told the man. ‘But it’ll do.’

  They would actually do very well. Largely silent, very little runway space required. The grey shapes floated off into the sky. Nothing leaked, nothing creaked. In the city, lights came on inside houses and apartments – someone had seen, someone had heard, someone knew the army was on the move. Children ran to the rooftops to gape in silent wonder at the dirigibles that swarmed over the city and then vanished, carrying their cargo towards Colombo.

  The plan was simple. They would fly over to Colombo. The first wave would be five fireteams of twenty. They would set up camp on the perimeter of the Colombo Entertainment Zone, mop up any stragglers, and make sure nothing got through – after all, the whole reason they were here was because a couple of bots had escaped the net – and make their way into the city, grid by grid. Every bot they shot would be collected and transported back to camp. Every time they extended they would leave behind a few men to organize the paths and make sure supplies got through. Eliot had fixed in his mind the image of soldiers extending like a claw into bot territory, mapped precisely down to the roads they would take and the junctions that formed the knuckles; and when the job was done, the claw would retract and return.

  The minion, as it turned out, was also the pilot, and was now attempting to impress Lakshmi with tales of daring flights over Nepal. Eliott wanted to tap the man on the shoulder and tell him to go find a woman with less metal in her bones, but it was vaguely amusing.

  The other crew members filed in: an assortment of soldiers, handpicked from among those who had faced the bots and returned. Eliott intended to be the spearhead of the strike team. He wanted proven quantities.

  The ugly bulb of the Gampaha base fell away and the trees folded in. The wind blew them towards a road snaking south and west, towards Colombo, and they followed. They saw the dust of the ground troops mobilized ahead of time; and then they overtoop the troops, cutting as the crow flies toward their destination.

  Senanayake, sitting in the back with the machine gun, counted the settlements in Sinhala as they went past. Their unfamiliar names were turning into a kind of meaningless music. Yaa-goda. Batu-wath-ther.

  ‘Look, you can see Knuckles,’ Lakshmi said, pointing at the mountains behind them.

  ‘Dhumbara-Kandhu-Waeti-ya,’ Senanayake said slowly.

  Lakshmi mimicked the man’s accent perfectly. ‘Dhumbara kandhuwaetiya.’

  Delighted, Senanayake began tossing more words at her, the names once more ebbing into that soft, incomprehensible music. They were young Inquisitors, clearly new to this game. There was still some of that light, boastful cheeriness about them; that little spark of humanity. It would take years before they learned to shut up, before the dull silence crept in, and they truly became one of the Inquisition.

  Eliott went back to staring at the forest behind them. And thus they rolled on, the aircraft eating up the miles. So far there had been no resistance.

  Eventually they came to large house atop a hill, looking over the rest of the town – what was once social snobbery had turned, over time, into tactical viability. This was where he had sent the first waves of political canon fodder, and he had to admit they had picked a decent place before they pushed too far and died. The house had high walls, a good line of sight on everything. Three jungle-cars with bloated balloon tires were parked in front. Iron spikes had been driven into the ground and strung with electric wire. Beyond the wire he could see the white train station that had once been an entry pointed into the city. It reached out with rusted overhead passes. They were close.

  The airship engines cut thrust for landing, and as they drew closer Eliott began to hear the sounds of commotion.

  ‘Radio back to the main column, set up the perimeter, make ready,’ he barked back to the pilot and Senanayake, leaping out of the airship, ‘and someone tell me what the hell the noise is all about.’

  It took ten minutes longer than it should have, but eventually they found a corporal who was comfortable with his English and took him to the first of the corpses, just down the hill from the house.

  It was a machine, though it looked for all the world like a dead child – barely four feet tall, curled up against a wall. It wore a cloak of tattered rags and was bound from head to toe in strips of cloth and paper. Only its arms and feet, gleaming metal, gave it away. It stank.

  Eliott’s hands touched it gently, pushing it around until he could see the face. A cracked and shattered parody of a boy’s face, leaking oil, came into view.

  ‘All patterned after children, sir,’ said the corporal. ‘Very small. Cheap. Very fast though.’

  ‘How fast?’

  The soldier waved his hands. ‘Ten, fifteen kilometers an hour?’ he said. ‘They don’t get tired. Wijesinghe and Marathan say you have to shoot the head—’ he gestured at the guts, where there was a flap-like door, and a hollow chamber where the abs would be – ‘Or they run out of fuel there.’

  Eliott examined the stomach. There clearly was an empty space for charging nodes; into this the Ceylonese engineers had fitted a small cage, some sort of rudimentary battery terminals. There was some kind of black sludge in between. Eliott smelled it. Some sort of chemical, placed between these nodes. He rattled the cage and it came off in his hand. Behind it were the original charging nodes.

  He examined the amperage figures on the plastic case and almost rolled his eyes. How ridiculously inefficient. These people had taken a design clearly meant for fast charging off whatever current was around and hotglued in a chemical battery converter clearly meant to force the bot to live in a near-constant low-power state, starving for energy. And from that came all this drama of the Big Match.

  Only the Ceylonese could make something worse and, in the process, more profitable.

  They saw more child-robot corpses ahead. There was one, cut nearly in half by the gunfire. A girl’s face, twisted around, stared accusingly at them as they marched past.

  The stink hit them first. The sickly-sweet, rotting smell, with faint undertones of rust.

  There, on the ground, was a grotesque figure. A man in army fatigues lay spreadeagled in the centre, corpse bloated beyond all imagination. He had six arms.

  ‘The boys here say that’s the third one,’ said Mahasen, who had been leading the other team. The thin Inquisitor was on his knees beside the corpse. ‘It’s got the local lads spooked.’

  Eliott peered at the corpse, touching it ever so delicately.

  It was an ordinary soldier. Volunteer Rifles. Two of the arms were his, four had been ripped off from the others, Eliott assumed, and laid around the soldier with great precision. His head rolled as he touched it. It was someone else’s. The whole thing looked like it had been assembled with meticulous care.

  Lakshmi swore. ‘Can robots do this?’

  Eliott shrugged. ‘They’re your robots,’ he said. ‘Ever seen them do something like this?’

  ‘Not my robots, sir,’ said Lakshmi. ‘To answer the question, yes, sometimes, but only to other bots.’

  ‘Well,’ said Eliott. There was little else to say. Penhaligon hadn’t told him much about the machines, other than the numbers they expected. ‘I hope it’s not like Hong Kong.’

  ‘What did they do in Hong Kong?’

  ‘Nailed the local politicians into trees and let them bleed out. Humans respond better to sp
oradic, extreme violence. Sends a clear message. Machines pick up on those things.’ It didn’t matter, anyway. The cost of doing business. ‘Do we have eyes on the next site?’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ said Senanayake.

  ‘And the supply drop?’

  ‘Still there, sir.’

  The background music began. Penhaligon had told him to listen for it. The angry violins of Beethoven’s Fifth in C Minor. The roboticists had class, he had to give them that.

  ‘Set up,’ said Eliott. ‘We’ve got shooting to do.’

  TWO

  The first encounter went bad really fast.

  Perhaps it was the fact that the soldiers were still setting up camp, and falling behind schedule, and thus still in their fatigues, guns off aside, heaving and groaning over crates and sorting equipment. Perhaps it was Eliott himself who failed.

  Eliott, looking out over at the train station in the distance, and wondering whether they should have more lookouts, barely had time to react – a strangled cry from the sentry ahead, a burst of gunfire – and then in front of him was a swarm, child-like shapes leaping from the buildings in uncanny silence.

  Eliott reacted. The first one to reach him, he smashed upwards with both fists. He leapt forward. Something sharp and pointed whistled at him. He pivoted, catching it in his hands, and threw it into the fray, pinning two of them to the ground.

  He was slow. He was slower than he remembered being. They chittered and ran around him.

  ‘To arms!’ he shouted at the idiots behind him. ‘Drop the crates, pick up your guns! All sentries to action stations!’

  Something aimed a terrific blow at his groin. Not enough to imbalance him, but there was real momentum in the punch, far more than a human could have mustered. He seized the arm, ripped it out of its socket, kicked the face in, shattering the childlike mask right down to the sparking circuits underneath. A spear went slicing past his leg. Another tried to grab him from behind and collapsed under his kicks, sparking.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Lakshmi. She moved with blurred speed, leaping from jungle car to jungle car, shooting. Six bots charged her and collapsed like surprised puppets, their heads shot right off. She reached for the one machine-gun they had managed to mount – naked saved for a few pieces of cardboard – and the world erupted in hellfire. Bots jerked and danced before her and collapsed.

  Good. At least someone was thinking. He turned back, the old combat routines kicking in. A punch to a jaw here, a kick there; pistol in his hands, a cheap Chinese thing; two shots; an execution; two more and a bot exploded in front of him. Five more bots remained. He heard the loud braaaaaat-brraaat of assault rifles behind him.

  The bots looked from him to the smoking ruins at his feet, then at his hands, then back at him, and lowered their spears, circling warily. One of them was a girl. They were trying to flank him. Tactics, he thought. Improvisation. Not bad. Too bad they didn’t seem to understand ammunition, or reloading.

  Or maybe not.

  As he watched, two of them dropped their spears and brough out two old Indian assault rifles, exactly the kind he’d sent out on the sacrificial lambs. They aimed at him. They fired...

  But whatever they had learned during the span of their brief existence was just a shade too slow. The first had barely aimed when he dodged past and shot its legs out. The bullets bounced off the plate in his chest. He ripped the second gun muzzle out of his enemy’s hand and smashed it into its face. Two shots with the pistol sent two circling attackers stumbling back, sparking wildly. He kicked in the face of the closest one, using his weight to crush the little thing like tinfoil. He picked up the assault rifle it dropped and shot the other. Two rounds and the rifle clicked. Empty.

  One to go. He reversed the gun, holding it like a club, and waited for the charge.

  But the girl-bot hung back, its spear pointed at the ground. It looked at him quizzically, tilting its head to one side, staring at his arms and legs, where the spear thrusts had cut away the clothes and skin, and flayed it open to reveal the metal underneath. Then it turned and fled, melting back into the jungle like a ghost.

  Silence fell. The smell of gunfire hung heavy in the air. He circled around, saw Mason peeling a bot off his own back. There were bodies everywhere – the bots sparking and twitching, mask faces smiling; at least three humans screaming and twitching. The smell of blood and shit hung faintly in the air. A soldier crawled out of the wreckage with a crude metal spear jutting through his chest and cutting tracks in the dirt. All the jungle-cars he could see were toppled; some had dents in them, as if small bodies had smashed into them with hellish velocity. Black, dripping streaks coated the one jungle car still upright. The airship they had come in was burning.

  Senanayake emerged from where he’d taken cover, looked confusedly around and tried to get the dying humans to stand. The fact that he had a shard of metal stuck in his arm seemed to be making it more difficult.

  And Lakshmi …

  Those looked like pieces of her over there, by the fallen tree. Not too far from the machine gun.

  Beethoven skittled in triumph over the carnage.

  ‘Bloody idiots,’ growled Mason, angry at the sight. ‘Medic? You, you, you, get the Inquisitor upright. Someone get those guns set up! Go! Go!’

  Eliott turned back to the bodies as Mason chivvied the distraught soldiers, barking orders left and right. Something was odd. He hunted among the cracked and warped bodies, keeping one eye on the spot where the girl-bot had vanished. Finally, he found what he was looking for: a bot that was still alive.

  It lay pinned to the ground with its arms torn off – a poor metal simulacrum of a human child. One leg was crushed, the other spasmed, with damaged neurofibre sparking. The whole body was wrapped in rags, like a crude caricature of skin. Had they done that to themselves, or was it done for them? The porcelain-thin face turned to him, the plastics that shattered so easily twitching, trying to formulate words. the eyes moved, the eyebrows twitched. He felt strangely disquieted. There was a powerful sense of wrongness here.

  He shot it twice and turned to his crew. Mason was shrieking commands, trying to get the soldiers together and hauling that useless young Inquisitor in line. Eliott listened, standing absolutely still, tuning out the panic of the soldiers. The buildings had cut off all line of sight, and the music was annoying, but if he listened closely, he could hear the sounds …

  … of dozens of tiny feet running their way.

  ‘Snipers!’ he called. ‘Snipers, now! Everybody else get back!’

  He leaped into the car, rifle at the ready. Mason gunned the engine and they roared off, back the way they had come. Eliott could see the shapes of little children emerging from the jungle, spears in their hands.

  A little bit more …

  A little bit more …

  The snipers began firing. Their thunder filled the air. Ancient lead and steel smashed into metal bodies. The gunmen worked from the outside in and the inside out, as per their instructions. Faces, childlike and smiling, and long limbs wrapped in cloth tumbled everywhere he looked.

  ‘Clear!’ Eliott called.

  There was a cheer. The soldiers and Ministry cleanup crew he had hidden in the buildings came running out. The bots – some legless, some armless, some shot in the gut battery – were netted and hauled into the darkness.

  ‘Have you heard from the other teams?’

  Mahasen dialed, waited, listened.

  ‘Confirmed,’ he said. ‘All three locations. Wait. Wait.’

  In the distance, a gunshot.

  ‘They’re okay. They have overwatch. They’ve got … twenty, sir. Close to what you said they would.’

  Eliott reloaded. ‘Get more men,’ he said. ‘Get every working vehicle running and get them over to that train station. That’s where they’re coming from.’

  That was the first wave.

  How had the trap been sprung so early? Eliott had no patience for questions on the battlefield, and yet this he asked
of himself as he bullied the laggardly soldiers into position.

  ‘Be ready,’ he said to the snipers, setting them into overlapping fields of fire; here on on a highrise, there, another on the crumbled ruins of what might have once been shops. ‘Be ready. Watch the trees! Set up here. Cover this road! Good.’

  Mason exchanged the wounded for fresh men. The gauntlet staggered and rearranged itself in a line stretching from the house to the train station. And then, when Eliott was ready, they began firing into the sky.

  The bots, thankfully, did not understand why an enemy would make noise. They did not understand Eliott and Mason, standing there in the back of their noisy jungle car, such an easy target. They charged from the ruins of what had once been the real heart of Colombo – the train station, the warren of buildings outside the fort – and into the line of snipers.

  Ten. Twenty. The guns blazed. The music shifted bizarrely into Chopin’s angry Op. 10, No. 12, chaotic and hammering – a dirge for Poland’s long-dead revolutionaries. The Ceylonese snipers grew used to the job, counting kills among themselves. Thirty. He felt – finally! Subsystems slowly coming online, warming up to tasks that had once been second nature. He felt his tracking improve. He felt his eyes adapt. He felt himself come alive; it felt like being young again.

  The soldiers at Eliott’s call, led forward by Senanayake, began to grow bolder, joining Eliott at the ambush. They expanded slowly outward, drawing in ever-larger crowds of bots to their deadly net, stopping just before the raw stench up ahead became too overpowering. Eliott, peering through the sights, saw the mountain of trash at the heart of the city, and shouted for the forward positions to throw flared into the trees.

  A bullet whizzed over him, missing him by inches. He ducked. The bots came.

  Five? Ten? A dozen? Twenty? Thirty? Forty? Fifty? The sun slipped slowly over the horizon, and the trickle slowed down. Eventually, the music stopped. He leaned back in the back of the jungle-car, watching the mountain of trash.