Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“American citizen!” he shouts as the soldiers slip past, their suits now camouflaged in mirror and infrared. “American citizen!” A subadar with an exquisitely groomed moustache pauses to survey Thomas Lull. His unit badge bears the eternal wheel of Bharat. He casually cradles a multitask assault gun.

“We have mobile units to the rear,” the subadar says. “Make your way there. You will be cared for.” As he speaks the helicopters reappear over the train, now half ablaze. “Go now, sir.” The subadar breaks into a run; the lead helicopter locks its belly turret onto him and fires. Thomas Lull sees the officer’s uniform glow as it absorbs the laser, then the Bharati soldier brings his weapon to bear and fires off a Sam. The helicopter pulls up and peels away in a spray of chaff, the little missile zig-zagging after it, a line of fire across the night. A rain of tinsel the colour of burning shatabdi falls around Thomas Lull and Aj. Recognising a more potent threat, a squad of riot control bots has taken position along the top of the train attempting to hold off the Bharati troops with stun lasers and riot control chaff. The firelight catches on the chromed joints and sinews. The humans take them one at time with EMP fire. As each bot tumbles from the train it releases a clutch of fist-sized subdrones. They bounce, unfold into scurrying scarabs armed with spinning strimmer-wires. They swarm the soldiers; Thomas Lull sees one man go down and turns Aj away before the wire flays him to the bone. He sees the subadar kick one off the toe of his boot, raise his weapon butt, and smash it to pieces. But there are always too many of them. That is the tactic. The subadar calls his men back. They run. The scarabs skitter after. Thomas Lull still clutches his passport, like a tract waved in the face of a vampire.

“I think it will take more than that,” the subadar says, snatching Thomas Lull by the arm and dragging him in his wake. Beyond the line of vehicles men with flamethrowers fade out of stealth into visibility. And Thomas Lull realises that Aj has slipped his grip. He yells her name. He does not know how many times this night he has called that name in that lost, crippled by fear tone. Thomas Lull tears himself away from the Bharati officer.

Aj stands before the scurrying, bounding line of combat bots. She goes down on one knee. They are metres, moments away, flay-wires shrilling. She raises her left hand, palm outward. The onslaught of robots halts. By ones, then by two, tens, twenties, they spin down their weapons, curl up into their transit spheres. Then a Bharati jawan darts in and whirls her away and the flamethrower men open up, fire on fire. Thomas Lull goes to her. She is shivering, tearful, smoke-smeared with the strap of her small luggage still twisted in her hand.

“Has somebody got a blanket or something?” he asks as the soldier moves them through the line of cars. A foil spaceblanket unfolds from somewhere, Thomas Lull pulls it around Aj’s shoulders. The soldier backs away; he has seen aeai strike helicopters and fought robots, but this scares him. You do well, Thomas Lull thinks as he guides Aj towards the laager of troop carriers. We would all do well.

Each of the five bodies has its fists raised. Mr. Nandha has seen enough death by fire to understand that it is a thing of biology and temperature but an older, pre-Enlightenment sensibility sees them fighting swirling djinns of flame. It would have been demonic at the end. The apartment is still sooty with floating polycarbon ash, drifts of vaporised computer casing. When they settle on Mr. Nandha’s skin they smear to the softest, darkest kohl. It takes a temperature of over a thousand degrees to reduce plastic to pure carbon soot.

Varanasi, city of cremations.

The morgue crew zip black bags shut. Sirens from the street; the firefighters pulling out. The scene is now in the hands of the law agencies, last of which is the Ministry. SOCO boys brush past Mr. Nandha, recording videos on their palmers. He is trespassing on another’s bailiwick. Mr. Nandha has his own comfortable methodology and for him simple observation and the application of imagination yield insights and intuitions police procedural might never apprehend.

The first sense the crime assails is smell. He could smell the burned meat, the oily, sweet choke of melted plastic from the lobby. The stench so overpowers all other senses that Mr. Nandha must focus to extract information from it. He opens his nostrils for hints, contradictions, subtle untogethernesses that might suggest what has happened here. An electrical fault among all the computers, the fire investigation officer had immediately suggested. Can he pick that unmistakable prickle of power out of the mix?

Sight is the second sense. What did he see when he entered the crime locus? Double doors forced open by fire department hydraulics, the outer the standard apartment block fascia door; the inner, heavy green metal, dogged and barred, the latches warped by fire service jacks. They could not open the door? They trapped themselves in their own security? The paint is seared from the inside of the inner door, blackened raw metal. Proceed. The short lobby, the main lounge, the bedrooms they had been using as their memory farm. Kitchen; skeletons of cupboards and racks on the wall, melamine peeled away but the woodchip intact. Chipboard survives. Ash and blackness, one thing fused into another. The windows have blown inwards. A pressure drop? The fire must almost have exhausted itself. It would have burned smoky and black. They would have asphyxiated before the windows blew and fresh oxygen kindled the fire djinn. Melted stubs of computer drives flow into each other. Vikram will rescue what is rescueable.

Hearing. Three thousand people in this apartment pile yet the quiet on the fire floor is absolute. Not even the chirp of a radio left burbling. The firemen have withdrawn their cordon but residents are reluctant to return to their homes. There are rumours that the blaze was a revenge attack by the Awadhis for the shatabdi massacre. The neighbours on either side only knew what was happening when the wall grew hot and the paint started to blister.

Touch. The greasy, coagulating smut of soot in the air. A black floating cobweb settles on to Mr. Nandha’s sleeve. He goes to wipe it, then remembers that it is ten percent human fat.

Taste, the fifth test. Mr. Nandha has learned the technique from cats, a flaring of the nostrils, a slight opening of the mouth, a rasping of the air across the palate. It is no elegance but it works for little hunters and Krishna Cops.

“Nandha, whatever are you doing?” Chauhan the State Pathologist bags up the penultimate corpse and slaps the despatch notice on the plastic sack.

“A few preliminaries. Have you anything for me yet?”

Chauhan shrugs. He is a big bear of a man with the callous joviality of those who work among the inner doings of the violently killed.

“Call by me this afternoon, I may have something for you by then.”

Vaish, the police inspector in charge, looks up, disapprovingly, at the trespass.

“So, Nandha,” Chauhan says as he steps back and his white-suit team lift the bag on to the stretcher. “I hear your good woman is rebuilding the hanging gardens of Babylon. She really must be missing the old village.”

“Who is saying this?”

“Oh, it’s all the word,” Chauhan says, noting down comments on the fourth victim. “Doing the rounds after the Dawar’s party. This one’s a woman. Interesting. So, green fingers then, Nandha?”

“I am having a roof-top retreat constructed, yes. We’re thinking of using it for entertainments, dinners, social get-togethers. It’s quite the thing in Bengal, roof gardens.”

“Bengal? They’ve all the fashions, there.” Chauhan regards himself as Mr. Nandha’s equal in intellect, education, career, and standing; everything but wedlock. Mr. Nandha married within jati. Chauhan married below subcaste.