by Abhishek .
“So let’s talk business now,” Hamasaki resumed. “We don’t want to incarcerate you. Or rather, we won’t charge you with theft if you agree on working with us on the mission we have come here for.”
The three of us listened intently.
“I... I had never thought this would be coming, Hamasaki- san. Hikaru? You really work here, for them?” Vivek asked the young Japanese boy, a little older than me. I remembered Vivek talking about Hamasaki-san’s nephew as a brilliant young intern at ISRO. From the way Vivek leaned forward and spoke to the boy it was apparent that he had grown close to him. The boy named Hikaru dug his chin into his chest, unable to meet Vivek’s eyes.
“Do you question our mora....”
“What business are you talking about?” Vivek interrupted.
Hamasaki paused, almost as if he as calculating his next move. “I think you know why we are here, Vivek.”
“The teleporter?” I asked.
Hamasaki extended his palms and smiled. “Perfect! We need to shut it down and you are going to help us do that.”
“Shut it down? Are you mad?” Lifana burst out. “That is the only way I can return!”
“Why would you want to do that?” I asked him. “We have got to find Ram, who is probablhy in Asr-Gawa now.”
“You don’t know the big picture yet, do you?” Hamasaki sighed. “You see, Asr-Gawa is running short of a crucial fuel called Makto. It’s an element that has a lot of energy condensed into it but has a relatively less mass. Asr-Gawa has been surviving on this element for years now and just like oil over here, Makto has started to exhaust.”
“Yeah, Lifana mentioned it,” I decided to be silent about Bor’s diary.
“So Asurians are pretty vocal about their loss, aren’t they?” Hamasaki looked at Lifana who stared coldly at him. “As I was saying, Asr-Gawa is short of Makto and they need to extract it from somewhere. Do you know how they are doing this? From the colossal teleporter here in Egypt and in a number of different places on our planet, they are teleporting all the silicon and its compounds that we have on Earth to Asr-Gawa. This will reduce Earth’s mass by 25-30% and you know what will happen thereafter,” Hamasaki spoke gravely.
“Earth will... spin out of orbit, into cold outer space,” I muttered in horror. “But how do you know about this?”
Hamasaki glanced at the old and tall man standing near the doorway. He was strange looking with similar clothing as the others, but didn’t look Asian.
“Our Technician is Asurian. But forgive me, my children! I cannot disclose anything else. Now, it’s your turn. Do you want to save Earth? If you do, then join us and we will drive away the Jargantaans from every teleporting station.”
Vivek scratched his head and Lifana bit her lip. The Japanese surely knew a lot. Deep down, my gut told me that they were correct, especially because we had seen the Jargantaan base below the citadel but for Lifana, her planet was doomed and this was the only choice they had left.
“I wasn’t completely aware of such an operation going on,” Lifana said, looking at the two of us. “But obviously this is how my planet can survive. I know that we are stealing your resources and leading you to your extinction but this is the only way!” Lifana was on the verge of tears.
A long pause ensued; a tense wait before a final decision.
Vivek spoke up. “I feel that you are speaking the truth, Hamasaki-san. Come what may, I don’t think you Japanese can forget your sense of honour by lying to us after speaking about your patriotism. We will come with you to the citadel. Then we shall think about the fate of the two planets but before that, we will come.” Vivek turned to me. “What do you think, Mathias?”
I nodded in agreement. Both of us shared the same gut feeling.
“But, what about us?” Lifana screamed. Vivek got up and held her by her shoulders.
“Lifana, those people out there are Jargantaans! They cannot be up to anything good for Asr-Gawa or Earth. I am sure their actions are not for saving your world. Don’t worry. If God can create such a beautiful tangle of reality in our universe, God can save both our realms too.”
For a moment, Lifana’s eyes widened in fright as she muttered, “God!” She closed her eyes and started shivering.
It looked to me as if she was genuinely scared of God. Can’t be, must be scared out of her wits now in a strange world and now surrounded by hostile people.
“Brilliant! So, we start tomorrow morning, first thing! You guys can rest today,” Hamasaki said as if his talks of business were over and he had nothing more to say. All of them trooped out of the room in the most orderly and military fashion, leaving the three of us thinking about the future of our homes.
Kapittel 57
Mathias’s story
Alexandria, Egypt
March 16, 2017, Thursday, 0630 hours EET
“Hey, Ram! Where do you think you’re playing?” a rotund but larger and elder schoolboy called out. Ram pivoted on his small heels and looked up at the boy and his gang following him. Slowly, the plump kid blotched out the sun and towered over little Ram. “This is my place, kid! Do you want a kick in the butt?” the bully’s accomplices guffawed in childish voices.
“But I always play here, Simon,” Ram whimpered.
“I don’t care! Get out of here!” the boy called Simon tried to push Ram away when I found myself grab his arms. The kid shoved me away and I barely managed to keep my stance.
“Don’t hit him!” I protested. All the kids raised their eyebrows at my bravery.
“You little newcomer. You know how small you are? What are you? Five?”
“Seven!” I yelled. Simon pushed me and this time I fell on my back.
“Well, I am nine! And that makes you a child! So don’t you confront me!”
I stood up and pounced on him. “What if I did? You don’t own this playground!” The surprise element was on my side as I pummelled him vigorously before his friends could come to his aid.
His friends were about to come to his aid when a teacher smacked them on their heads. “Go away from here! Simon, you are going to meet me after school in my office. Is that clear?”
The boy nodded sullenly and ran away. Some of his friends whispered to him “He is pretty strong, that new boy” while others praised him for using impressive vocabulary like ‘confront’.
The teacher was no other than Mrs Dawson. I brushed away the dirt from my clothes and she asked me if I was fine. “Thank God I came here at the right time! You did the right thing Mathias!” She looked at Ram and said, “I wanted to let you know, Ram, an uncle of yours has come to meet you. He is waiting at the doors to the playground.”
Ram squinted his eyes and noticed a man standing in front of the whitewashed doors. In my mind’s eye, I could only discern the shape of the man far away.
“Come with me, Mathias!” Ram beckoned me and together we jogged towards the doors.
“Thank you, Mathias. You are very strong.”
I didn’t reply. My anger and sadness after my parents left me hadn’t ebbed away just yet and while the pain still stung me, I could battle any demon that came in front of me, be it the bully Simon or the monster beneath Ram’s bed that he was afraid of every night before he went to bed.
I stopped at the border of the playground while Ram jogged up to his uncle. I remembered his strangely recognisable voice from the moment he had met Mrs Dawson; yet for some reason I could not place it. The person seemed to be East of Suez for sure but I couldn’t figure anything after that.
I tried listening to the conversation between Ram and his uncle but they weren’t audible. So I crept closer to them, hiding behind trees like a seven-year-old James Bond. Slowly, their whispers came to me like a sequence of hisses which eventually amplified into muffled words. However, the only and the last thing that I heard clearly was when Ram’s uncle bent on his haunches and asked Ram, “Oh, what is that Ram? Is that a torch that you’re holding?”
“Yes,” he reluctantly showed it to his uncle. The
man tossed the sleek black torch in his hand.
“Do you always have this on you?”
“Yes. My daddy gave it to me.”
“You’re a good boy Ram. Oh, I think there is something wrong with the batteries over here. See?”
“But it works just fine?” Ram said incredulously.
“No, no! I’ll fix it for you.”
Ram nodded.
I watched the man, his face blurry in my dream, open the battery compartment of the Maglite and look around surreptitiously. I pressed my back against the tree and peered back at them just when the man inserted a small blue chip in between the cells and turned his head at me, his dark eyes sending a secret message to me. My little body went taut when he pointed a thin finger at me. I was sure that I would’ve choked to death on the breath caught up in my throat if I wouldn’t have been gently patted out of my slumber.
* * *
“Mathias,” Lifana whispered into my ear softly. “We need to go. Remember our appointment with the Japanese? The operation where you all want to stop the only way I can reach home?” I pushed away the blankets and jumped up to my feet. The dark eyes still haunted me and I shook my head to push the thought away. Strange how I could only remember Mrs Dawson in my dreams. The dream about Ram’s uncle also haunted me. How come I never asked Ram about his uncle even when he was searching for his father?
“I am sorry, Lifana, but this is the only way we have to stop Earth and seven billion people from freezing and dying in outer space. Try to understand.”
Lifana turned away her face, devoid of any emotion except despondence, and walked away to her room in a gait that clearly showed that she had given up. No longer did she have the same zeal, the charisma and the bright open eyes that she had when we first met her. She had the despondent look of a refugee. A dimensional refugee stuck in our dimension.
Kapittel 58
Mathias’s story
Alexandria, Egypt
March 16, 2017, Thursday, 0715 hours EET
“Let’s go my soldiers! Oh, I should click a picture of those alien faces when they see us arrive!” Hamasaki rubbed his palms gleefully. He was standing on the threshold, beside a groggy- eyed Vivek. “We shouldn’t wait any longer. The sun has risen and the day calls for us! Those aliens need to be driven away from our planet and you, are going to help us do that!”
He squeezed Vivek’s shoulder. Even though Hamasaki seemed warm, close inspection would have shown that Vivek winced slightly, becoming oddly alert. After the Japanese Curator’s appearance in our hotel room and the transpiration of his motive, all of us calculated our moves in front of him.
Another old man, but much older than Hamasaki-san, entered the room with Hikaru following him closely. The old man seemed to have a distinct military air around him and looked severe and a bit shrivelled up. He said something in Japanese and Hamasaki-san bowed to him and then pointed out towards Vivek.
Hamasaki introduced the old man as General Kiyoshi, the Supreme Commander of these Japanese troops.
The old man took another look at us and then just turned away and left the room.
“Freshen up. Breakfast’s ready,” with that, Hamasaki turned and walked away. Vivek closed the doors and sat beside me. I tied the laces of my sneakers and looked up at him.
“I am very confused, Mathias. What will this lead to, you know, whatever we are doing? Where are we headed exactly?”
After a moment of stillness, I replied, “We are in search of truth, Vivek.”
“What truth?”
“Whatever we are doing, is unveiling the works of another entity, a greater power that bears responsibility for the sprouting of our civilisation on Earth. Vivek, I am in search of my origin which supposedly lies in Asr-Gawa. But after all that we have been through, I think our mutual objective is to find the truth behind God and realising how tiny we are, compared to all that is going on in the universe. Come to think of it, can you even imagine the worth of everything that we have found up till now, the magnitude of it? We have found out Noah’s ark and discovered links that connect every mythology on our planet; that everything might have been inspired from the same set of events but interpreted differently! So, don’t worry about us going off track. We are in search of eternal and universal truth that may benefit humanity as a whole.”
Vivek had a faraway look in his eyes but his question seemed to have been answered. He sighed and smiled at me before he went into the toilet to get ready for the day ahead.
* * *
The sun had risen quite high above the Mediterranean, by that time. The warmth of the African sun coursed through my cheeks, turning them slightly red. I smelled the salty mist of the sea while standing on the ancient stone harbour of the now extinct Lighthouse of Alexandria. “The entrance is sunken into the lower wall of the citadel.” I pointed down at the choppy surface of the dark aquamarine waters. “We’ll have to get down there to enter the Jargantaan base.”
Kiyoshi blurted out something in Japanese, as forcefully as his old throat could allow him.
“How do you know all this?” Hikaru translated.
“We had been there yesterday. We swam down to the subterranean cave. Mind you, it’s quite tight and you’d have to drill through the stone because we spied on the Jargantaan men through an orifice the size of a watermelon,” Vivek replied somberly.
Hamasaki called out to another man who clearly wasn’t Japanese. He looked European to me with his blond streaked dark hair and strong jawline.
“Hey Dan, have you loaded all your stuff?”
The man stroked his salt and pepper beard and said curtly, “My name is not Dan.”
“Yeah, yeah, Dan... Daniel... all the same,” said Hamasaki dismissively.
The man glared at him but went about his job.
Hamasaki yelled brusque commands in Japanese and the hundreds of troops galvanised into action. They looked like a private army of sorts. No doubt the creation of General Kiyoshi and now in a mission which most of them would not understand. Some of them cordoned off the citadel area while some moved to the vans that flanked a colossal truck. Others prepared their artillery and some stationed themselves in sniper positions. One group of soldiers, clearly held in higher regard, held custody of a strange looking ancient artefact. It reminded me about the cauldron Ram was discussing with Hamasaki-san, though I could not recollect the name.
All of us strode over to the middle of the walkway that stretched from the mainland, connecting the ruined harbour. Meanwhile, a makeshift crane lifted a huge submersible with a belly big enough to accommodate all the Japanese troops.
The local people were cordoned off, with some of them watching curiously at the scores of Japanese people, but obviously the local law authorities had been influenced somehow to help these men and they had deployed personnel to ward off the locals.
“We took all precautions. Even though we were travelling to the Mediterranean, we didn’t want to miss out on our bathyscaphe,” Hamasaki splayed out his arms in delight. “Look at how sleek it is. Look at the dark and robust hull! It is powered by Makto! A thousand elephants will not be able to put a kink in that armour! That’ll take all our soldiers down to the entrance that you showed.”
“You guys work in secrecy, don’t you? I mean, even the Japanese government doesn’t know about your existence and the Makto, does it?” I asked
Kiyoshi-san looked at us, the sacks beneath his eyes wrinkling even more.
“No, not at all,” Hikaru translated his words. “The government isn’t strong enough for an organisation driven by such ideals. They will know once we have achieved domination. After that we will automatically get the mandate from the people.”
“So... how do you get all your money?” I shrugged.
Hamasaki chuckled. “We have assumed the guise of a beer company. Our brand is one of the most widely sold beer brands in Japan and Southeast Asia. Believe it or not, business is the aorta of our militaristic and nationalistic fraternity!”
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br /> “Beer, huh? Is it some holy Japanese beer, also propagating Japanese control?” Vivek grinned, arms akimbo.
Hamasaki walked over to Vivek and whispered in his ear, “Believe me Vivek, battles may be fuelled by sacred thoughts, but there is nothing holy about any war.”
All of us shuffled into the bowels of the black bathyscaphe and as the submersible plunged into the blue-green waters, the silence left us in an incandescent red light. We were cramped up on our metal seats, stealing our eyes away from the hundreds of Japanese soldiers. They looked at us scornfully and we got the idea that they didn’t like outsiders. I wasn’t sure about why this man Daniel was working for them but he sat in a corner, just like us, away from the brotherly troops.
In just a while, an announcement rang through the speakers and a vacuum door opened up, flooding the entryway with water. The regiments marched out of the bathyscaphe neatly, like horses galloping through ankle-deep water, ready to storm the Jargantaan base.
No sooner had we reached the end of the damp stone cave than we were pushed up against the walls.
“Cover your ears! Quickly!” Hikaru yelped. Soon thereafter, an explosion boomed through our chests, disengaging many shards of black stone.
“Ike! Ike!” yelled a general.
The soldiers ran into the gaping hole in the previous rock face. Lifana, Vivek and I ran in behind the troops and caught a glimpse of a dumbstruck Jargantaan, moments before he was seized by the Japanese soldiers.
“Try not to kill! Seize the aliens instead!” Hamasaki shouted while he walked briskly into the base. He noted that if we didn’t move further into the base, we would be cornered helplessly near the orifice. “Move in! Take control of the entire floor!”
The troops divided into four groups. Two of these marched into the peripheral gangway, neutralising any Jargantaan who came in their way. In a few minutes, they had diffused around the cavern while two more groups marched into the network of central metal gangways that stretched across the cavernous space. We were dragged into the middle of these two groups.