Vimana

by Mainak Dhar

  Maya's left hand was now around Aaditya's throat, and with his right he was trying to reach for a weapon he had holstered at his waist. The vimana was now at an altitude of perhaps a thousand feet and had come to a standstill as the two occupants fought for their lives. As Aaditya felt Maya's grip on his neck tighten, he hoped that the Devas had picked up his signal and would be coming soon.

  'I should have gutted you when I had the chance. You are a treacherous dog like your father was!'

  The mention of his father gave Aaditya new found strength and he leaned closer to Maya, brought his head up, the top of his head making hard contact with Maya's chin. Maya was unbalanced by the sudden move, and his grip loosened. Aaditya seized the opportunity and landed a blow on Maya's exposed neck with his right hand. Maya seemed to be winded for a second but then quickly recovered and struck back with an open handed blow to the face that sent Aaditya reeling back, bleeding from the nose. Aaditya was fighting with all the strength, anger and desperation he could muster, but even he knew that this was a battle he had little chance of winning. Maya was just too strong and too quick for him to take on in hand-to-hand combat. But if these were going to be his last moments, he would take Maya with him. The monster who had destroyed his life by capturing his father, and had later killed Kartik, would not walk away today.

  As Maya loomed over him, trying to strangle him again, Aaditya kicked out at the control panel with his right foot. The vimana suddenly lurched to the left and Maya was thrown hard against the wall. Aaditya grabbed for the weapon from Maya's holster, but before that Maya had picked up the blade Aaditya had dropped. He brought it down hard on Aaditya's right thigh. For a second Maya looked down at the blade sticking out of Aaditya's thigh uncomprehendingly, wondering why there was no bleeding or pain.

  And Aaditya resolved never again to curse the fact that he had one artificial leg.

  Before Maya could recover from his surprise, Aaditya brought up the weapon in his hand and fired a burst at point blank range into Maya's chest, and then another burst as Maya fell back hard, a spider web of cracks showing in the canopy where the Asura's head had struck it.

  Before Aaditya's eyes, Maya seemed to implode in on himself, his body collapsing into a red-hot dot and then reduced to a pile of smoking ash. That was when Aaditya knew he had perhaps finished himself as well. His second burst had opened a gaping hole in the side of the vimana, the craft was beginning to wobble dangerously as the cold air streamed in. Aaditya jumped into the pilot's seat but before he could do anything the vimana entered a nosedive.

  He suddenly heard Kalki's voice boom over the intercom. 'Maya, we've been under attack in the hangar, but all the attackers are dead or gone. What is going on up there?'

  With the last reserve of courage he had, Aaditya tried to still his mind. Even if he didn't make it, he didn't want Kalki to discover his deception.

  'This is Aaditya,' he said, grabbing an earpiece lying near the pile of ashes.

  'Where's Maya?'

  Aaditya's mind raced, trying to think of something to say. 'They must have sabotaged the vimana. There was an explosion. Maya is gone and I'm about to crash. I don't know what to do.'

  He heard Kalki bellow in rage as the vimana impacted the water. A split second later freezing water streamed in through the hole. He swam out, gasping at how cold it was. Once he had been a good swimmer, but now tired from the fight, slowed down by his artificial leg, and in the freezing ocean waters, the best he could hope for was to paddle about and try and survive long enough till the Devas got there.

  His whole body felt numb, and he began to give up hope. He looked up at the night sky, bright with stars, and watched as a couple of the stars seemed to blink brighter than the others. He was slipping into shock rapidly. Then the stars seemed to come closer. He thought he heard someone calling out to him. He heard a splash in the water nearby and strong arms grabbing him. He was too tired to resist, even if it was Kalki himself, but the last thing he saw before blacking out was Shiva's smiling face.

  'I've got you, son.'

  FIFTEEN

  The first thing Aaditya felt were Tanya's lips on his own, a wonderful and welcome sensation. He drifted in and out of consciousness, but remembered two things that kept him going. One was the knowledge of what his father had done and the second was hearing Tanya repeating that she loved him and was waiting for him. When he finally came to, Tanya was by his side, holding his hand, tears streaming down her face.

  'Hey, beautiful.'

  Tanya hugged him close. If it hadn't felt so good, he may have asked her to give him some space, since his body still felt like it had been in a car wreck.

  'Thank god you're back.'

  Aaditya looked at her, cupped her chin in both his hands and kissed her. 'Tanya, I love you. More than anything or anybody else in the world.'

  The next few days were spent filling in the Devas on what he had seen inside Kalki's lair, and about the one weakness in Kalki's base that he had learnt of.

  'December 21 is just a couple of weeks away. We should just hover nearby and attack whenever any craft takes off from his base.'

  Brahma looked at Shiva and silently shook his head, indicating his disapproval.

  'Shiva, if we just hover around his base all day, he'll suspect something is wrong. We need to wait for the day before we act.'

  Indra was sitting in a corner, lost in thought. 'Aadi, we should just launch a few nuclear weapons down that bloody tube when his craft come out. We can deal with them in the air and the nukes will wipe out his base.'

  Aaditya didn't need more than a split second to respond, Leslie and Jim's faces looming large before his eyes. 'There are thousands of innocent people there. We can't just slaughter them to get to Kalki.'

  Shiva started to object, but Brahma raised his hand, as if indicating that the debate was over. 'The boy is right. If we stoop to that level, we are no better than Kalki. Indra, we need to have a plan ready. The challenge is we need to time it with Kalki's plan. If we act too soon, he will suspect something is wrong.'

  That evening, Aaditya was seated with Tanya on a perch overlooking the main hangar. Their hands were intertwined, her head on his shoulders. For the first time, he had told anyone else about what he had learnt about his father's last moments. He had not realized it at first, but his eyes had filled with tears. Tanya held him tight.

  He finally left her only when Shiva sent summons to join them for a meeting. It was a chaotic affair, with every one of the Devas having his or her own opinion about what to do. Aaditya walked away feeling more than a little afraid. For all their power and technology, it was clear that the Devas had not really figured out any real way of stopping Kalki.

  On his way back he bumped into Ganesha, who called him over into his room, where he had been sitting in front of his monitors.

  'I've called Narada and Tanya as well. I thought we could chat about an idea I have.'

  Aaditya had never seen Ganesha this intense before, his normally jovial features obscured by a mask of intense thought.

  'Ganesha, what's on your mind?'

  'Here they are. Folks, just gather around.'

  Both Narada and Tanya seemed as clueless as Aaditya.

  'They're going about this all wrong.'

  Ganesha was pointing in the direction of the conference room where the other Devas were assembled. Narada tried to say something, but Ganesha continued speaking, cutting him off. 'They are angry, and they are afraid, and so they are doing nothing more than react to Kalki. We cannot win if we just wait for him to make his move.'

  Narada raised an eyebrow, the closest Aaditya had seen the otherwise unflappable Deva to losing his cool. Ganesha seemed to notice and raised a placating hand.

  'Hey, I'm not just complaining about them. I do have a plan where I think you and Tanya can help.'

  Tanya had been listening in silence but at the mention of her name, she spoke up. 'Ganesha, you heard what Kalki's plan is. We don't have a whole lot of time, and
with the kind of chaos he has planned, I don't know what I of all people can do to stop him.'

  Ganesha looked at Aaditya. 'Kalki told you that he was planning all of this to make it seem like the end time prophecies of various religions were coming true.'

  Aaditya nodded. 'Yes. The Mayan calendar, the Biblical Armageddon, the Hindu myths of the end of Kalyug. Every religion has predicted an end of the world as we know it, and he's going to set it up and project himself as the God who has come to claim his chosen ones.'

  'You know, Aadi, Kalki may seem crazy but once he was really bright. Spending all these years alone, feeling that everyone he once knew is against him, and with nobody to talk to other than psychopaths like Maya and those daityas, he probably has started to believe all this.'

  Aaditya thought back to the gleam in Kalki's eyes as he had been talking about his plan.

  'He does seem a bit….unhinged, I guess. I don't know about crazy, because he is way too dangerous to dismiss as just crazy, but he is intense in a really obsessed kind of way.'

  'Bingo. That's the weakness we need to exploit. He's obsessed with making these prophecies come true since they will set him as the God he so badly wants to be. So let's feed him something that leads him to act when we want him to act, so that we're ready.'

  Narada's eyes lit up as an idea struck him. 'Ganesha, you are a genius if you are thinking what I am thinking.'

  Aaditya and Tanya were both a bit uncertain. Ganesha got up abruptly. 'All this thinking has made me really hungry. Get me some sweets and Tanya, you need to pull off the best PR campaign of all time for this plan to work.'

  As everyone seemed to get busy, Aaditya wondered how he could make himself useful. Ganesha looked at him, a serious glint in his eyes. 'My boy, I will plot here with Tanya and Narada, but at the end of the day, we will need to take to the skies and smash Kalki's forces into oblivion. This will be a battle unlike any we have seen, so go and get yourself ready.'

  ***

  Two days later, a pastor of a small church in Cincinnati, USA, Baron Waterspoon, announced to a roomful of incredulous reporters that an angel had told him the world was indeed going to end on 21 December 2012. The press had already worked itself up into a frenzy with the date approaching, and religious nuts of all descriptions were crawling out of the woodworks. What made Father Waterspoon's comments more intriguing was that the angel had told him the specific time the world would end: fifty-four minutes after noon on the 21st of December.

  That announcement would likely have been forgotten or dismissed as the ravings of a man coming unhinged if at roughly the same time three more press conferences were not being held throughout the world. By a rabbi in Jerusalem, a mullah in Cairo, and a priest at a temple in Benaras in India. Incredibly enough, they all seemed to have the same story, and the same reported time for the impending end of the world.

  The first reporters to connect the dots assumed that it was a con job, but the mullah and the priest had never even been on the Internet, and never travelled outside their home cities, so coordinating such a plan across continents seemed to be a bit of a stretch. As the reports started flooding in the next day, it no longer mattered what the reporters thought. Public imagination, already raised to a fever pitch by the mass hysteria surrounding 2012, lapped the story up. The world was indeed going to end at 12:54 PM EST on the 21st of December, 2012.

  The plan that Narada and Tanya had put in place had worked beyond their wildest hopes. Holographic projections had been used to portray a very convincing angel to the priests, then Tanya had used all her contacts and PR skills to ensure that the story had been picked up and reported and blogged on till cyberspace was abuzz with nothing else. Like a pack of dominos, once they had set the ball rolling, the story took on a life of its own. Religious leaders, ordinary people, and even a couple of elderly sheepherders in New Zealand, all came forward saying that they had experienced the same vision.

  Now, sitting with the Devas in the conference room, Aaditya wondered if it had been the right thing to do. With the end of the world now seemingly confirmed, anarchists and criminals of all sorts were making hay. Governments around the world were struggling to cope with rioting and looting. Several had already started food rationing and supermarkets were surrounded by armed soldiers with automatic weapons to prevent looting. Aaditya looked at Tanya and knew she was wondering the exact same thing. Brahma must have guessed what several of them were thinking.

  'What is happening is unfortunate, but on balance, it is something we have to do. Ganesha is right; we cannot just wait for Kalki to strike at a time of his choosing. Now we know, or at least, we think we have a fair idea, that he will seize upon this hysteria and strike at the time we have dictated.'

  'How do we stop him? Do we try and intercept his forces when they're laying the charges?' Aaditya asked.

  Indra had been looking intently at a holographic map projected over his palm, and it disappeared as he looked up to reply. 'What we can guess is where he will lay his charges.'

  A larger map came up. Several areas were marked in red.

  'Brahma, I did the research you'd asked, and these are the largest underwater fault lines on this planet. The Anatolian fault off Turkey, the fault near the Andaman Sea off Sumatra, one off Alaska, one near the Dead Sea and the San Andreas fault off the US West Coast. If Kalki creates quakes and tsunamis at each of these at the same time, we are talking a true global catastrophe. And there's no telling what other quakes or faults may be triggered if all these go off at the same time. Here are our projections of what will follow.'

  Aaditya watched in silence as the map showed blue waves of water covering an ever increasing swath of land. When the simulation was over, more than half the landmass in the world was under water.

  Shiva sighed.

  'Knowing how sick he is, he may just trigger some other faults for sport. The problem, Aadi, is that he probably has the charges in place already, so we can't stop that. We have two options really-nuke the hell out of his base or go in there and stop him.'

  Aaditya was about to object when Brahma cut in. 'The morality of killing all those prisoners down there aside, the fact is that to do anything, we need that sphere to emerge from the water, only then can we think of going inside or firing into it.'

  They broke the meeting, agreeing to meet later in the evening. Aaditya had felt a surge of confidence when Ganesha had put his plan into motion. For a while it had felt like they had some measure of control over what was going to happen, but he was not so sure any more. They badly needed a plan, and they were fast running out of time.

  That evening, Aaditya was at the club, having a Coke with Tanya, and trying to not get too depressed by what was going on in the world. It was a losing battle, as the holographic TV sets floating in the air before them showed that whether or not Kalki ended the world, the human race seemed hell-bent on doing it on its own. Many cities were caught in an orgy of looting. Thinking they had one last chance to settle scores, a number of regional wars had broken out. North Korea had lobbed a few artillery shells into the South, and Iran was reported to be readying its missiles for launch. Al Qaeda suddenly seemed to be on a PR overdrive and had released three videos, all saying that the decadent non-believers were about to die, and those who followed them would get salvation.

  Aaditya remembered what Kalki had told him about human powers supporting him after the tsunamis and quakes he planned to unleash, and also the contacts he had seen between the daityas and terrorists in Afghanistan. He began to wonder if all of this was also a part of Kalki's plan and these were pawns he was using to create more chaos and instability.

  Durga and Shiva had come by to join them. The Devas looked as sombre as he did.

  'Shiva, should we tell the world's governments what's going on?'

  'We just debated that with Brahma, and it may actually make things worse.'

  Durga explained. 'Most governments and leaders are barely hanging on to sanity, and to some semblance of law and or
der. If at the last minute, we suddenly pop up and tell them what this is all about, it won't help. They won't be able to do anything to stop Kalki's plans, but if they lose further grip on the tenuous hold they have, we would just have caused more chaos and lawlessness.'

  'But do we have an idea of how we could stop Kalki all by ourselves? There's really no reason for him to get that sphere to the surface unless he feels his base is under attack. Without that, there's no way we could get in. I've seen the number of drones he has. He has few vimanas and Asuras to fly them, but he has so many drones that even if we all went in there, we'd have a tough time breaking through and getting into the base.'

  'Aadi, what are you thinking?'

  Aaditya looked at Durga. 'I'm thinking that we need a bit of a diversion. Kalki's plan after all is about destroying human civilization as we know it, and I agree we humans can be a painful lot. But since it's our world at stake, let's get some humans to help out, even if they do so for the wrong reasons.'

  Shiva and Durga both looked puzzled, but when Aaditya told them what he had in mind, Shiva's face broke out into a broad grin. 'You had been spending way too much time with that son of mine. You're beginning to think like him!'

  Shiva spoke softly into his earpiece and within minutes, Ganesha was there.

  'Son, I think you and Aadi have some plotting to do. Let me go and ask the others to get ready.'

  ***

  It was the dawn of 20 December 2012. Aaditya had never seen such a large crowd assembled in the main hangar before. All the Devas were there, with Brahma standing on a raised platform as he prepared to address his troops. Shiva and Durga were standing in a corner, watching the proceedings. Indra and Vishnu were near the platform, flanking Brahma. Narada was a few feet from Aaditya, and he saw with surprise that the Deva was carrying a handheld vajra and a long blade at his waist. Narada must have seen his expression.