Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“That’s because I’m very very scared,” Thomas Lull says. He pushes Aj past the next door open on to the night. He does not want her to register the screams and the sounds he recognises as small-arms fire. The bogies are almost empty now, they plough their way through one, two, three, then the car staggers sending Thomas Lull and Aj reeling as a deep boom rocks the train. “Oh Jesus,” Thomas Lull says. He guesses that a power car has exploded. A roar of acclamation goes up from the mob outside. Thomas Lull and Aj press on. Four carriages back they meet a wide-eyed Marathi ticket inspector.

“You cannot go on, sir.”

“I am going on whether it’s past, over, or through you.”

“Sir, sir, you do not understand. They have fired the other end, too.”

Thomas Lull stares at the inspector in his neat suit. It is Aj who pulls him away. They reach the intercarriage lobby as smoke forces its fingers between the inner door seals. The lights go out. Thomas Lull blinks in darkness, then the emergency floor-level lighting kicks in casting an eerie, Gothic footlight glow into the crannies and crags of human faces. The outer door remains fast. Sealed. Dead. Thomas Lull watches the smoke fill up the carriage behind the inner door. He tries to find purchase on the rubber seal.

“Sir, sir, I have a key.”

The inspector hauls a heavy metal Allen key out of his pocket on a chain, fits it to a hex nut, and begins to crank the door open. The inner carriage door is blackened with soot and beginning to buckle and blister. “A few more moments, sir.”

The door cranks wide enough for six hands to haul it open. Thomas Lull flings the luggage into the dark and himself after it. He hits awkwardly, falls, rolls on rocks and rails. Aj and the railwayman follow him. He pulls himself upright to see the interior of the carriage they have abandoned light startling yellow. Then every window detonates outwards in a hail of crumbed glass.

“Aj!” Thomas Lull shouts through the tumult. He has never heard noise like it. Screaming voices, wailing, a jagged tangle of cries and roars and language multilayered and shattered into incomprehensibility. Revving engines, a steady hammer of missiles. Children’s fear-stricken shrieks. And behind all, the sucking, liquid roar of the burning train, steadily consuming itself from both ends like vile incense. Hell must sound like this. “Aj!”

Bodies move everywhere in every direction. Thomas Lull has a sense of the geography of the atrocity now. The people flee from the head of the train, now a series of actinic detonations as electrical switchgear blows, where a deep line of men in white advances on them like a Raj army. Most are armed with lathis, some carry edged mattocks, hoes, machetes. An agricultural army. There is at least one sword, raised high above the horizon of heads. Some are naked, white with ash, naga sadhus. Warrior priests. All carry a scrap of red on them, the colour of Siva. Flames glint from missiles; bottles, rocks, pieces of smashed train superstructure hailing down on the passengers who crouch and scurry, not knowing where to look for the next attack, dragging bundles of luggage. Gunsmoke plumes up into the air. The ground is strewn with abandoned, burst baggage, shirts and saris and toothbrushes trampled and scuffed into the dust. A man clutches a gashed head. A child sits in the middle of the rush of feet, looking around in terror, mouth wide and silent with a terror beyond cries, cheeks glossy with tears. Feet trample a crumpled pile of fabric. The pile quivers, struck by hurrying shoes. Bones crack. Thomas Lull now senses a purpose and direction in the flight: away from the men in white, towards a low line of huts that has become visible as eyes adjust to the dark of Bharati countryside. A village. Sanctuary. Except a second wave of karsevaks runs from behind the burning rear of the train, cutting off the retreat. The stampede halts. Nowhere to tun. People go down, piling up on each other. The noise redoubles.

“Aj!”

And then she is there in front of him, like she’s come up off the ground. She combs glass crumbs out of her hair.

“Professor Lull.”

He seizes her hand, hauls her back towards the train.

“It’s all cut off on this side of the train. We’re going the other way.”

The two wings of attackers hook towards each other, closing a half-encirclement. Thomas Lull knows anything in that arena is dead. There is only a small gap to the dark, desiccated fields.

The families flee into it, dropping everything and running for their lives. Ash swirls and storms in the updrafts from the train fire; Lull and Aj are now within missile range. Rocks and bottles start to clang off the carriages, shattering into glassy shrapnel.

“Under here!” Thomas Lull ducks under the train. “Watch out for this.” The undercarriage is lethal with high-voltage cables and drums of pressurised hydraulic fluid. Thomas Lull crawls out to find himself looking at a wall of car headlights. “Fuck.” The vehicles are parked in a long line a hundred metres from the train. Trucks, buses, pickups, family cars, phatphats. “They’re right round us. We’re going to have to try it.”

Aj snaps her head up to the sky.

“They’re here.”

Thomas Lull turns to see the helicopters roar over the top of the train, fast, hard, low enough to swirl the flames up into a fire tornado. They are blind insects, combat bots slung from their dragonfly thoraxes like eggs. They carry the green and orange yin-yang of Awadh on their noses. Counterinsurgency pulse lasers pivot in their housings seeking targets. Deep under Delhi, helicopter jockeys recline on gel beds watching through their pineal eyes, moving their hands a centimetre here, a flicker there to instruct the pilot systems. The three helicopters turn in the air above the parked cars, bow to each other in a robot gavotte, and swoop down on their drop runs. Gunfire cracks out from beyond the line of headlights, bullets smack, and white from the spun-diamond carapaces. From ten metres they release their riot control bots, then climb, spin, and open up with the pulsers. The bots hit the ground and immediately charge. Cries. Shots. Men come running from between the cars into the open space. The helicopters lock on and fire. Soft bangs, dull flashes, bodies go sprawling, crawling. The pulse lasers flash the first thing they touch to plasma and pump it into an expanding shock wave, whether clothing or the ash-daubed skin of a naked naga. The karsevaks go reeling, stripped bare-chested by laser-fire. The counterinsurgency bots clear the vehicles in a leap like something from a Japanese comic and unfold their riot control shock-staves.

“Down!” Thomas Lull yells, shoving Aj’s face to the dust. The men flee but the springing bots are faster, harder, and more accurate. A body crashes beside Thomas Lull, face scorched in second-degree sunburn. Steel hooves flash, he covers his head with his arms, then rolls to see the machines hurdle the train. He waits. The helicopters are still up there. He plays dead until they pass over, frail craneflies never intended for human occupancy. “Up! Go, now! Run!” A prickle of suspicion on the back of his neck makes Thomas Lull look up. A helicopter turns a sensor cluster on him. A gatling pulser swings to bear. Then smoke billows between man and machine, the aeai loses tracking and the helicopter dips over the train, turrets stuttering laser fire. “Get behind the cars, down behind a wheel, that’s the safest place,” Thomas Lull shouts over the tumult. Then they both freeze in their flight as the air between the cars seems to shiver and the wash of light from the massed headlights breaks into moving shards. Men in combat gear fade into visibility. Thomas Lull pulls his passport from his pocket, holds it high like an Old Time preacher of the gospel.