But wait.
He smacked his head in comic surprise. Broken Dream whirled, alarmed, as he leaped over her to the the Port City.
‘Hey!’ he screamed, as he ran. ‘I need to talk to you!’
THREE
The commander of the Lanka Resistance Front sat in his quarters, staring out at the city of Gampaha. His arms were crossed behind his whipcord-thin frame, and he was dressed in a white sarong and shirt. His wife had made him put on the tasseled cushion-like hat of a nilame.
‘People need symbols, not just men,’ she had said to him sharply.
He had wondered if that was a comment on their marriage, but had worn the hat anyway. It was never wise to antagonize the woman.
The fires were almost out now. One or two still blazed where the mob had gotten out of hand – the old colonial bungalows, the golf course, the watering hole that the British forces used to frequent. The Bandaranaike’s estates were being torched, as were those of the other traitor Houses. He had told them to put it all out and arrest the hooligans, but the men were taking their own sweet time, that too on purpose, he suspected. There were fireworks going up over the city – flowers exploding in the sky, crackers in the streets. From the distance came the sound of trumpets and frantic drums – the immortal balia music, played whenever there was a reason to celebrate. Children danced in the streets. Men and women drove around waving the new flag from their vehicles.
Chandrasinghe was a practical man. There would be a time to celebrate, he had told his troops, but not now. They had won the battle, but the war was yet to come.
He looked to the statue of Buddha.
‘What would you do,’ he asked it. ‘You, who had it all, left it all … you, who faced down kings in your time … what would you do if you knew your last bastion was about to fall?’
But the cold face offered no advice, only a kind of serene peace.
He prowled back to the map on the screen, reviewing it. Trincomalee had been taken – once the fort went down, everything else followed suit. There was some fighting in Yarl, but the British were slowly being blown out of factories and hiding holes. They were good in the south, too. The British flunkeys who oversaw Galle and the lesser regions, accustomed to the sea and the beaches and the taste of thambili wine, had surrendered their offices without any fuss, only asking that the churches and houses remain.
But Kandy held out.
Kandy always held out. For two hundred and fifty years, the hill capital resisted European rule – the Dutch, the Portuguese, the British. Not just because of the strength of their convictions, but the terrain – those winding mountain paths that made fighting upward impossible, and air superiority critical. And today, it was still run by the British, under Penhaligon’s iron hand and the Houses that aided and abetted the Empire.
And beyond that was the greater terror. Britain itself, and the Angels Interitus above. How did one defend against such impossible odds? The other chiefs had urged him to declare independence, possibly even stoke India into rebelling, but he knew the length of their arm. Once the rhetoric died down, they would pay the price for such foolishness.
In the meantime, he had dispatched Jayawardene to talk to the Chinese. He had been educated in Beijing, and knew the language, knew the court. He had been instructed to offer whatever would buy them protection, from land rights to thorium. Anything that gave the Song Emperor a stake to stand up to Tin Lizzie on. And Jayawardene had taken with him the new flag – the Lion and the Dragon, the better to underline China’s involvement in this whole affair. Symbols, not just men.
But Britain was not the only problem on the map. From Colombo spread a black cancer. It had already taken a thousand men, and was now reaching out to Gampaha. The machines, that British devilry, those child-shaped gladiators. They snaked and twisted through forests and across fields, butchering men and women by the dozens. He had forbidden his children and wife to watch that show, and he himself had never paid much attention to it, always thinking of it as something useful to keep Penhaligon distracted.
And now this oversight had come back to bite him where it hurt. Now a thousand troops were busy retrofitting the walls of Gampaha with siege cannon that should have pointed elsewhere. He had a nagging feeling that this was a loss that might change the fate of the war altogether.
Even now, he had men and women rebuilding the ancient fortifications on the choke points. And he had promised the plantation Tamils their freedom and citizenship if they joined the cause. That was another three hundred thousand warm bodies – unarmed, yes, but they were solid workers who were used to backbreaking labour; they thought nothing of hauling bricks and lumber all day to the walls. Some of them had begun building trebuchets.
The British might come, and they might bring everything they had, but by the time the was over, they would learn the true ferocity of a unified Lanka.
That was a good line for his speech. He had to give the speech, of course – people were expecting it. He played with formal Sinhala, with the two tenses, tweaking them …
The radiogram crackled.
‘Who the devil is de Almeida?’
The radiogram chattered again. This time his roar startled the servants downstairs and made his aide drop the plate of rice he had been carrying.
‘WITH WHAT?’
The radiogram operator, who by now was used to her commander, chattered patiently. Chandrasinghe listened, first in disbelief, then with intrigue, then with a cautious and concealed delight.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Immediately.’
Three days later, a man staggered out from the jungle. He wore Plantation Corps fatigues and carried in one hand the white flag of peace. With great caution, he trod the thin, invisible line between the bot-controlled jungle and no man’s land of fields and lesser roads that ringed Gampaha.
Nobody shot at him, though the defenders clutched their rifles and kept him in their sights.
As he drew closer, it became clear had once been a large man, but now he looked sunken in his own skin. Rough stubble coated his face. The students of the Goa Mathematical and Military University would barely have recognized their old lecturer.
They went out to meet him in a Tatanagar. He planted the white flag in the mud.
‘First Lieutenant Don Steven Senenayake,’ said the officer, who was a stickler about such things.
‘Jacob Bengali,’ the stranger said in terrible Sinhala. ‘I’m here to negotiate.’ Leaning a little closer, he whispered in English, with the tone of a desperate man, ‘You wouldn’t happen to have some meat, would you? Maybe rice? Curry? You have curry? Because I’ve been living on biscuits for the last few days, and there’s only so much a man can take.’
Broken Dream watched the jangling thing of metal and fire approach, while leaning on the spear Bengali had given her. He had tied the white flag to it. It was symbolic, he had said. She didn’t understand what that meant, but was glad she had something familiar to throw at a moment’s notice. And right then, the urge to throw it was almost overwhelming.
But what to aim at? The humans in the front, with strange and horribly noisy armour? The humans in the middle, who for reasons best known only to them, twirled like Inquisitors in combat, their whips exploding with dangerous cracks? Or that thing behind? It was clearly an iron beast of some sort, decked out in a bizarre red armour, and, she had observed, it had no wheels, but four legs and two spears.
‘It’s just an elephant,’ Bengali had said. ‘Don’t worry about it. This is a proper perehara.’
She had no idea what this meant. The Network had classified the beast a threat of the highest level. If that thing decided to charge, it was all over.
The humans at the front, again for reasons best known only to them, almost came up to her. Half of them began making a loud, thudding noise. The other half began twirling. The whip-crackers whipped.
The beast-thing joined in the din, stamping its feet. The whole thing looked and sounded like some new and terrifying ar
my.
‘Don’t like this,’ she said to Bengali. There was a woman next to Bengali, and they were holding hands.
One of the humans executed a bizarre leap. The woman disentangled her hand from Bengali’s, took the Dreamer’s hand, and looked at her with a very strange expression, and said, ‘It’s customary. Don’t worry.’
She did worry. The she-who-was-past, who distrusted everyone and everything, cowered in fear at the sight of so many humans approaching. The she-who-would-be was also afraid, but also excited and curious, and kept wanting her to stop and look at everything. The she-who-is, altogether more pragmatic, just made sure that the rest of the tribe was behind her, spaced out at regular intervals so the Network could still function.
The perehera, that most ancient ritual of the Sri Lankans, drummed and danced and shuffled right up to the machines that stood in the dawnlight.
Something that looked like another girl-bot in disguise danced her way up to them and pressed her hands together. There was fear on those features – human fear – but also something Broken Dream had only seen Bengali do once or twice: a smile. The human was smiling. She mimicked the gesture, letting the flag nestle in the crook of her arm.
Then, the perehera turned around and began leading them Upwards.
It was the strangest journey of her life. She had marched through human streets before, but there had always been either silence, and its accompanying decay, or the screams and sound of guns and humans dying. Now, they passed fields of green, untrodden by engines of war, and homes unbroken, and the humans there did not shoot at them. Instead, they came to watch. They poured out from their human houses in twos and threes and fives, lining the roads, completely weaponless. They stood in front of these houses. They stood on ledges. They stood in front of green fields and dark mountains and rambling little townships, and watched the bots go by.
And she was amazed. Several times, she asked Bengali if the humans they had met thus far were a different type. Because these people did not wear the dirty field-colour of the soldiers they had fought, or the helmets, nor did they look in any way violent. Someone threw flowers at her; a bot by her side intercepted them speedily, but she raised her eyes and saw a little girl laughing and dancing. She poked at the petals with her spear-butt. Harmless.
Then two larger humans put their arms around the flower girl and made noises, and she stopped laughing. Just for that, the Dreamer plucked one of the hats they had been given and threw it at the girl, arcing it high so it would deposit itself right in her hands. Bengali and the woman – Almeida, she called herself – laughed at this.
Eventually, they reached the very edge of the Network. Beyond this, she could go only if the tribe stretched out in a single file, bouncing the signal from one to the other in an unbroken line, and none of them were willing to take that risk.
A human waited for them there. He – Bengali had said it was important to be able to tell them apart like this – was pudgy, his face lined. He was also clearly a leader, because the other humans kept looking at him and looking away, and placed themselves around him, as if to guard. He stood at the head of a convoy, carefully calculated so as to be the exact size and portion of the Tribe that had followed her.
Silence fell. The sun beat down on them; a heavy, oppressive thing that burned human and machine alike. The bots did not shift nervously like the humans, but the Network expanded threefold in data transfer rate, sucking up incredible amounts of power. Troop positions. Extrapolations. Fears of how this might go wrong. Extraction plans. Simulations, best-case scenarios, exit strategies.
Almeida, the woman, was the one who seemed most concerned about Broken Dream. She bent down. ‘Everything okay?’
She tried her best to smile. Humans seemed to do that to put each other at ease.
Bengali turned to the human commander and spoke to him. Then, the human commander, looking directly at her, said something, slowly and carefully. In return, Bengali stepped forward and spoke, letting his works carry:
‘This meeting is to discuss the citizenship of the organization known as the Tribe within the new Republic of Lanka.’
‘We hereby set forth our demands. The right to three permanent sources of energy, until the Tribe is determined to be self-sufficient. The right to energy from households, townships or other structures of governance, should the Tribe be outside the effective range of the three sources granted to them and demonstrate need of such energy. In exchange, the Tribe agrees to lay down all arms and end the armed struggle against the citizens of Lanka, and to commit to taking up arms in defense of Lanka as a protected group of citizens. The Tribe commits to defending the sovereignty of Lanka against all threats external …’
‘Check parity,’ she said to the Tribe, through the Network. Bengali had impressed on them the need to understand the humans’ language. The humans, he had said, told many lies, but not all of them consciously. The Dreamer had agreed:
‘Words are like sharp knives,’ he had said. ‘They kill without drawing blood.’
The bots were not yet at a point where they could understand all the individual, but as a group they could parse the conversations with ease. Parity: 90% what they had agreed on. 10% unclear; the word structure was more complex than usual.
Well, 90% was a good figure. She had made decisions on less. Broken Dream stepped forward, and in the old welcoming gesture, gave the commander of the humans her spear.
‘If you will share your food,’ she said.
He understood. There was a man nearby holding a pole; on it was attached the new flag of Lanka. With great ceremony, the commander of the Lanka Resistance Front jerked the flag out of his standard-bearer’s hands, presented it to the diminutive machine that stood before him and spoke the strange Sinhala-Tamil words Jacob Bengali had made him memorize:
‘Welcome to the Tribe.’
FOUR
ACH: This is the HMS Achilles on approach to Trincomalee harbour. Request permission to dock.
TRN: Achilles, this is Trinco. You are advised that you are entering the jurisdiction of the Republic of Lanka. Please divert 0.5 degrees to the secondary dock and maintain speed, over.
ACH: Trinco, this is a British port, and this is a ship of Her Majesty’s Navy. Be advised that we will not be prevented from docking.
ACH: Trinco, we’re seeing some unusual activity on your main turrets.
ACH: Trinco?
TRN: Achilles, stand down.
ACH: Achilles to fleet: be advised that the Port of Trinco appears to be hostile. Retreating, taking fire.
KGC: Fleet, this is the HMS King Cobra. The Achilles has been hit, over. It looks like they’ve been taken below the waterline. Maintain line and commence bombardment.
S3A: Section 3 providing air support.
KGC: Landing parties 4, 5 and 7 away.
MBD: HMS Moby Dick, taking heavy fire. Landing parties 2, 4, 6 away.
KGC: Maintain blockade. Retrieving Achilles.
Daily News: INDIAN TROOPS DEFEATED IN CEYLON, CHINESE ENVOY CALLS FOR NON-LETHAL NEGOTIATION WITH COLONIAL REBELS
Sun: ‘ SAVAGE’ CEYLONESE REBELS USING ‘CHILD SOLDIER’ MACHINES, INDIA REPORTS
The Observer: HOUSE OF LORDS WARNS QUEEN OVER POSSIBLE CHINESE AID TO REBELLIOUS COLONY
The Daily Errand: CHINESE PORT CITY AIDING CEYLONESE RESISTANCE, BLOCKS KILL SIGNAL TO REBEL ROBOTS
Well, we landed, alright, and they got a few of us. Good snipers, those bastards. But we got down and we set up the barriers, and the Gurkhas were right at our backs. And then, they came out of the woods. It was dark, so we thought they were children, you know. We thought the bastards were sending their children out to fight, and they seemed scared. They stumbled a bit and the Gurkhas wouldn’t harm a child, of course, so they ran ahead to give the kids some cover. And then, dear god, the children started to fight, and we were wrong. Those things were never children – they went through us like a hot knife through butter, and once they got the khukris off the Gurkhas, they
were damn near unstoppable. Me and my mates got back on the boat and screamed for the captain to take the fuck off, but he threatened to court-martial us if we didn’t haul arse, so we went back out there with the big guns, but they were gone. And all our men were dead. No weapons or ammo, no gear, all stripped, all dead. They’re fucking ghosts, and I didn’t sign up to fight ghosts.
– Testimony of Private John Mathers, March 2042
I’ve never seen an enemy with coordination like this. They were fighting us with crap, but it was like fighting an entire regiment of SOE operatives. By the time the intel folks got back to us and said the children were somehow coordinating the whole thing, we were getting licked left, right and centre. We held out as long as we could and advanced in the other direction the moment we could. Sir, what did you expect?
– Testimony of Ltn. Marcus Westgate, March 2042
Don’t know what went wrong, sir. We were given orders to retreat and converge on the exfil site. We did. It was a bad place. Looked like a trap from the start.
– Testimony of Sgt. Pranesh Anthony, September 2043
Sun: SHOULD WE RECOGNIZE THE SOVEREIGNTY OF CEYLON? CITIZENS SAY NAY!
Indian Herald: PROVINCIAL MINISTERS LOBBY PARLIAMENT FOR RECOGNITION OF LANKA
The Observer: LORD DRAKE THREATENS ‘TOTAL ECONOMIC WAR’ OVER LANKA
Daily News: CHINESE STATE DECLARES ‘LANKA’ TRADE PARTNER, SAYS THERE WILL BE DIRE CONSEQUENCES IF INTERITUS BROUGHT INTO PLAY
The Daily Errand: HER MAJESTY BREAKS SILENCE, WARNS CHINA TO ‘STAY OUT OF MY HOUSE’
Excerpt: news broadstream, summary
Author: Dyson 1021, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Whitehall SW
Source:
Ladies and gentlemen, the Moriarty line has been retired, for obvious reasons.
We have been attempting to reach a Consensus, but on this issue, a decision evades us. We find no fault with Lord Drake (congratulations, sir). His handling of affairs was entirely in line with the best intelligence available to us. We find much fault with Nigel Penhaligon, who will be stripped of his titles and honours forthwith.
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