She had watched the troop deployments again, counting all the way, breaking into encrypted channels. The Kandyan plan called for five thousand troops to swarm down to Gampaha. They were about a thousand short. She was willing to bet some of them had showed up on the LKRF lines.
‘They did,’ said Mahasen, who had smuggled her in. ‘The people know what they want.’
She tried not to snort.
‘Well, at least I’m here,’ she said. ‘Thanks, kid.’
He had done a double-take at the Peacekeeper at her side, but if the Inquisitor she’d killed had been his friend, he said nothing.
This convoy was one of Kandyan ones, ostensibly under Mahasen’s command. They were halfway to Penhaligon’s base of operations when the explosions began. A dull thump shook the earth. The road shuddered and cracked beneath her feet. The lights in every building flickered and went out.
There were screams in the distance. Then, two more explosions, of which one was behind them.
Sixsmith jumped out of the car and raced to the closest high building, her implants propelling her into a burst of speed fast enough to outrun a jungle car. Two leaps and she was four floors up, hanging onto a windowsill by one arm. She bent the arm at an impossible angle and flung herself towards the rooftops. In a second, her feet were on the concrete roof and her eyes were scanning every hill and valley she could see from here. The main city was a firefly of flickering lights, the generators kicking in and failing one after the other.
And then all went dark. In the dawn light, Kandy suddenly became a dead city, huddled in the shadow of the hills. And there: people. Marching. Torches.
‘You’ve got mobs,’ she shouted down to Mahasen.
This close, they were within range of Penhaligon’s communications network. She had tuned her radiogram to his channels, effortlessly bypassing their primitive encryption. Now the radiogram began spitting out orders like bullets. A thousand soldiers – poorly armed, poorly trained – detached themselves from the march downwards and began to pour back into Kandy, into the streets that were too narrow to fight in, into slopes that could be defended almost forever by a few men.
A roar went up from the mobs. It looked like the thousand soldiers that were missing had turned up on the other side. The pop and crackle gunsong of cheap firearms began. And behind it, deeper – the slow pound of mortars and the kodithuwakku cannons.
Penhaligon’s voice roared through the radiogram, ordering all Inquisitors to charge the mobs, kill them all, leave nothing standing.
This was her chance. Back to the car. ‘Get me inside,’ she ordered Mahasen.
So simple, she thought, once you knew how power worked over here. The convoy rumbled up the hill and to the fortress that dominated the horizon of Kandy. There were gates and an airship parked all the way up top. The cars halted just inside the gates.
‘Ready?’ asked Mahasen. He was nervous, she saw. His voice shook slightly. There was sweat on the copper strips in his face.
‘Just do it,’ she said.
They walked into the belly of the beast.
A series of entrances. An airlock. Two Inquisitors opened a door. Two more shadows peeled off from among the shoulders and joined them – a whip-cord-thin man whose skin shone with lines of silver, looking like a less crude version of Mahasen; and a hooded of the red-lenses-for-eyes variety.They had eyes only for Sixsmith.
‘Special envoy from Goa,’ said Mahasen. ‘Boss needs to see her now.’
She looked around haughtily, as if expecting a red carpet, and looked the two Inquisitors in their way, and sniffed slightly.
‘I don’t appreciate waiting,’ she said, in the poshest voice she could affect.
So easy.
They passed a warren of paths, tunnels and assembly points, all clearly designed by algorithms rather than by hand, all filled with Ceylonese soldiers in full camouflage gear counting crates. They passed by halls filled with jungle cars being inspected, where men and women were idling around, checking their guns with a nervousness that somehow leaped from them to Mahasen. There were elevators and stairs. Curious eyes raked over them and flitted back hurriedly. Snippets of conversation drifted to Sixsmith.
‘Signal from Goa—’
‘No, no, we have them boxed up, they’ll never make it up the road.’
‘Stop fucking around and shut up!’
So easy. She barely noticed the layout of the place she entered. Everything had turned into one single intention: to kill. All that mattered was that there was a door, and Penhaligon’s guard – the feral one they called Angulimala – stood outside. It had a club over which crawled a telltale sheen. Some kind of nanobot weapon?
The blank metal face looked from her to Mahasen, and she felt a powerful static build up inside her – a noise that set all of her implants on edge.
And then it opened the door for them.
Inside, the waxwork man was pacing, his fists clenched. His dark coat fell about him in perfect folds.
‘Penhaligon,’ she said.
He turned around. She shot him in the head twice.
Form 3 completed.
She swiveled in the same movement, placing herself behind the desk. One second later, the two Inquisitors who had come with came charging. Mahasen pulled out a sword from somewhere – it looked stupid, honestly – and with one swing, cut the woman’s head off. The man’s eyes she shot out.
And then, the brute Angulimala came in through the door, swinging that dreadful club. She emptied the next ten bullets into him. They were armour-piercing rounds and ripped deep into the giant’s frame. Still the club connected once, knocking her into a corner like a rag doll, doing some serious damage to her right leg.
Christ, what did they put in these things? There had to be some anti-regulation circus shit in there somewhere. She limped upright.
Mahasen grappled with Angulimala, and she realized the purpose of those implants on the young Inquisitor’s face and hands – he was spraying radio noise, clearly confusing the brute.
An incoherent mess of error messages began spewing into her brain. She suppressed them, switched to her backup gun, a submachine affair she’d picked up off a dead soldier somewhere, and sprayed bullets.
The giant fell to its knees, soundlessly.
She fired six more bullets into the thing before it finally collapsed, twitching.
‘Holy shit, Sixsmith! Holy shit! holy shit!’
She ignored him. ‘Can you get me to the airship?’
‘Wait,’ he said. Mahasen stared at her, breathed hard and wiped his sweat away. ‘Okay. Okay. Angulimala went mad. Okay.’ He shut the door, took out his radiogram and dialed something.
‘Chandrasinghe. Done. Yes, done. Distract the ones down there. Yes, now, now!’
There an almight bang as something blew in the bowels of the base.
‘Come on, we’ve got to get you to a doctor.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, suddenly tired.
The rest of it was a blur. She remembered pounding up a runway. Then falling, then being half-dragged. She remembered Mahasen commandeering an airship – the pilot was gabbling, and he had to hit him once across the face to make him shut up. The airship lifted, its ponderous balloon inflating to its full and impressive size, and its engine blades rotated upwards for maximum lift.
Below them, Kandy was tearing itself apart. Someone had stripped down the Union Jacks at the base and tried to hoist a different flag: a lion and a dragon on a field of black. Strange. They were tossing bottles of liquor with lit cloth wicks. At who? She no longer cared or understood. The hills crawled with people that threw these things at each other and fled screaming in pain. She could smell blood and the stench of charred flesh. They were killing themselves, while everyone else played games with them. The clouds whirled over the grey city.
And then, they were up in the air, leaving the city behind them.
She stumbled a bit, making her way to the cabin. Mahasen kept trying to talk to her. There
really were an awful lot of error messages. What the hell was that club? She sat down heavily on the bed, tore open her fatigues and peered at her leg. There was some blood. She wiped it away. There was some more blood. And beneath that, a lake of grey nanorot, slowly but inexorably spreading inwards to her skeleton. It had already lanced underneath her skin.
‘Oh, Penhaligon, you bastard,’ she whispered.
Mahasen was still trying to talk to her. The concern in his face was touching. His light brown skin was an unhealthy shade of pale.
‘Your boys winning?’ she asked, because that was all the kid ever seemed to think of.
‘You’re hurt,’ he said.
‘Yeah, it comes with the job,’ she tried to say lightly. ‘Listen, I need you to help me get a message out. And exfil.’
‘Of course. All planned.’
‘You ever met Drake, kid?’
‘Drake who?’
‘Drake’s a piece of work, no doubt about that. You’ve met him? When? That must have been a clone. Drake’s clones run half the fucking government. You know he really wants this place, right?’
The cabin tilted, and Mahasen vanished from sight.
‘You know, it’s a bit fucked up, the way things are now,’ she told the ceiling. ‘You get a call. You can’t bloody say no, all you can say is, “yes sir, no sir, I’ll pack my bags right away, sir.” And you end up in a shithole getting shot at. I’ve got five more years before my contract is up. And you know what? This body needs maintenance. Needs money. You want to leave the service, you better be filthy rich before you do, because you sure as hell will fall apart if you can’t pay for maintenance. We had a joke, me and my mates – the only way to retire is to die.”
‘You’ve said this before,’ he said, somewhere in the distance. ‘Exact same words.’
She laughed. Or tried to. ‘Memory’s going,’ she mumbled. ‘There’s a bit of conditioning your lot don’t get, that’s setting neural pathways. High-speed reflexes. Cost is you say the same shit sometimes. Patterns. Optimized patterns. Anyway. A-A-A-any – Shit, wait, I need to recalibrate—’
‘Sixsmith, don’t fall asleep, don’t—’
‘Look, I’m not going to last long,’ she tried to tell him. ‘No, listen to me, listen to me. You know Drake? You’ve met him? Must be a clone. Drake gets control, he gets to waltz in like a hero. You’re going to die, you know that? And maybe Drake eventually gets into bed with Iron Lizzie and they have a kid and the kid grows up to become the emperor of the known universe. Damned if I know. Drake’s been playing this game for a long time, kid, your lot are fucking amateurs compared to him. You see where I’m going with this. This is how the world works. It’s them on top and us below. We’re all fucking fools, we’re all slaves, like those damn bots, except we-we have ...
‘Fuck. Hand me that towel. I think the rot just hit the bone. Fuck. It’s got the bone.’
‘You know they built us off the old Pestilence template? Bu-bu-but cheap, you-you-know, not-not-AI, still hu-hu-man. That-that-that’s what they told us.’
Water on her face. ‘Sixsmith,’ said Mahasen’s voice. She still couldn’t see him. Come to think of it, she realized she couldn’t see anything. The ceiling of the cabin stayed exactly as it was even when she tried to move.
Fuck. The nanorot had got to her brain.
‘When we touch down,’ she tried to tell the kid. ‘Find a transmitter. I don’t know how. Maybe you can use my radiogram. Send a message to this address. Call sign is Nest.’
‘Say Songbird says Form 3 is done. Form 3, get it? Not 2, not 4 – those mean entirely different things. Say it’s done, but Songbird can’t sing anymore.’
‘Ask for Goa to send the cavalry.’
‘You understand now, kid? This is all … what’s the word you Buddhists use, cause and effect, and we’re just pawns in their game. You, me, even Penhaligon. Well, I’m a bishop … ish. I just checked the king, and the king’s rook checked me out. And you, you’re going to get fucking roasted when Goa comes in.’
Sixsmith shuddered. The last few words had been slurred. The greyish hue was spreading now, slow tendrils of darkness spreading out from where the metal met her skin. Her cat eyes looked like thin slits of pain.
‘Th-this is-is how th-the-the world works. On-top-top-top-top us—’
Mahasen reached out, both terrified and terribly sad, and took her hand. It had been a long time since he had held anyone’s hand.
On the bed, Sixsmith shuddered. The darkness was leaking into her eyes now.
‘Us-us-us-below—’
VII: Convergence
ONE
They put Bengali in a hotel. Or rather, what had once been a hotel, and was now a tottering ruin of tile. Lightshafts peering in through savage holes. Ornate tiles, cracked and shattered, spread out from under his feet to where a pool had once been – it was now a dry, crusted pit. Balconies grinned down at him like broken teeth. Even the mosquitos had moved on.
He had always wanted to come to Colombo, and now here he was. From the arches that had once been doors, from the gaping eyes that had once been glass windows, he could see a dead city outside – a brown city, a thing of ash and dust.
It was a far cry from the comfortable bungalow he had stayed in not so long ago. There was no green grass, no servants. Instead, there were machines at every door, watching him.
The silence was terrible.
His captors, too, were part of the silence. They had brought him water – bottles stolen from soldiers, with battered army symbols stamped on the rude plastic. Perhaps they had seen others drinking. Then came the hunger, and they brought him parts of people – an arm, a leg, a stinking mess of intestines. When his yells of disgust died down, they conferred among themselves and brought other things, such as a wire fixed to a portable generator, sparking. He had scrambled away from that. Puzzled, they began bringing him anything and everything, and watching what he did. The boots and trinkets from shops were of no use to him. The books he kept. The can of motor oil he tossed into the pool. And then, finally, someone found a packet of biscuits.
Those he wolfed down greedily. They watched from the banisters, their little child-like bodies perfectly still. When he woke up, he found several hundred packets of the same type of biscuit in a neat mound next to him.
It took him days to convince them that humans needed more than one type of energy. That he needed to move his bowels and wash his face and all those things. They watched these activities with fascination. He could almost sense their astonishment, and in his lonely vigil, he cackled, once, seeing it from their point of view. How inefficient! How grotesque!
Eventually, she came to see him. He knew it was the Dreamer – the bot Eliott had spoken of – because as soon as she arrived, the other bots crossed over to her side of the shattered hotel, leaving him and his bits and bobs of tribute alone. Tribe on this side. No Tribe on the other. The message was clear.
She crossed over. She was a small thing, with an odd, mismatched jaw.
‘You’re her,’ he said.
She said something in that strange fusion language of theirs. It was familiar, yet distorted beyond all usefulness. Bengali listened, dismayed. Everything had been so much clearer when he had been plugged in through the bot, using its comprehension models. Here and there, he could pick up hints of Sinhala and Tamil in her speech, word-shapes that he had once used, but fused in unfamiliar forms. He tried to indicate that they could perhaps talk if they let him do so through a bot, but the moment he drew close, the spears came out and he halted, suddenly afraid.
She studied him. Then she sat down. Little fingers reached out and opened a packet of biscuits. She took out several, peered at them and then stuffed them into her mouth.
Seconds later, she was making choking sounds, peeling rags off herself and stuffing them in her mouth to bring out the pieces of biscuit that had just gotten inside her vocal equipment. The other bots stepped closer to him, their spears extended and eyes glinting.
/>
‘No, no, no,’ he said frantically, sticking his tongue out. He grabbed a bottle of water, sipped it, then spat it out. ‘This way! Do this!’
She mimicked the action, spraying water and machine oil and biscuit all over him.
They stared at each other. And then, the corner of her mouth crinkled, as if in a smile. He found himself smiling back in an almost automatic response. Really, it was like being smiled at by a child.
That did it. They all smiled. The tension left the air. He figured that he’d passed some sort of hidden test. The Dreamer left, and that night the entourage brought him clean clothes, with only a few specks of blood on them.
It was almost civilized.
The next time she came to see him, she had someone else with her. Bengali recognized him immediately.
‘Grimme?’
‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘Apparently, you’re not entirely stupid.’
‘What the hell are you in? Is that Chinese armour?’
Grimme sat down. Heavily. Tiles cracked under his weight. He looked like a pale shadow of the supersoldier Bengali remembered. Half his face looked like it had been scratched away, and one arm hung limp, even in the power armour. ‘Don’t harp on. I’m not too excited about it, either. Just using this because my internal battery’s shot.’
‘I thought … we thought you were dead!’
‘Alright, technically, this version of me isn’t going to last much longer.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve already been uploaded. Always wanted a clone, now I’m realizing it just sucks to be the original.’
‘Upload? To where? To who?’
The girl-bot appeared again, a dead bot in her hands. She laid it at Bengali’s feet gently with a tenderness he had never seen before in these things, and said something to him. He caught the words ‘human’ and ‘Sky’. For some reason, she kept pointing up, where the cracked panes of glass still showed the clouds beyond, and then pointing down to the dead machine.
The Inhuman Peace Page 24