Eric Flint: In the Heart of Darkness

He paused for a moment, considering the tent. A faint sneer came to his face.

The Malwa would pay him a fortune for his knowledge. But Holkar never even considered the possibility of treachery. He was devoted to Belisarius as much as he hated the Malwa. And besides, like Raghunath Rao, he was a Maratha himself. The Princess Shakuntala-the Empress , now-was the rightful ruler of Majarashtra. She was his own legitimate monarch, and, with a mental bow, Dadaji Holkar acknowledged that suzerainty.

He resumed his progress toward Belisarius' tent. A little smile came to his face. Like many intelligent, well-educated men, Dadaji Holkar had a fine sense of historical irony. So he found his fierce loyalty to the memory of Andhra amusing, in its own way.

When the Satavahana dynasty had been at the peak of their power, the Marathas had been the most unruly of their subjects. Never, since its incorporation into Andhra, had Majarashtra risen in outright rebellion. But the Satavahanas had always been careful to rule the Great Country with a light hand. Now that all of Andhra was under the Malwa heel, the Marathas had become the most fervent partisans of the former dynasty. None more so than Dadaji Holkar.

A sudden bright flash on the horizon drew his gaze. Holkar halted, stared. Moments later, the sound of the cannonade rolled over the encampment.

He resumed his steps.

Soon, yes, Ranapur will fall. And the cobra will sate itself again. As it has so many times.

He drew near his master's tent. For a moment, he stopped, studying that simple structure.

Not much to look at, truly. But, then, the mongoose never takes pride in its appearance. It simply studies the cobra, and ponders the angles.

Holkar began pulling back the tent flap. Another rolling cannonade caused him to pause, look back. For a moment, his scholar's face twisted into the visage of a gargoyle, so driven was he by hatred for all things Malwa.

But there were no Malwa spies close enough to see that face. Such spies had learned quickly that the endless squabbles over women between the foreigners and their Kushan escorts seemed to erupt in sudden brawls which, oddly, injured no one but bystanders watching the scene. In the first days after the foreigners set up their camp, two Malwa spies had been accidentally mauled in such melees. Thereafter, the spies had kept a discreet distance, and reported as little as possible to their overseers, lest they be ordered to resume a close watch.

The slave pulled back the flap and entered the tent. He saw his master squatting on a pallet, staring into nothingness, mouthing words too soft to hear.

Hatred vanished. Replaced, first, by devotion to his master's person. Then, by devotion to his master's purpose. And then, by devotion itself. For the slave had closed the demon world of Malwa behind him and had entered the presence of divinity.

He knelt in prayer. Silent prayer, for he did not wish to disturb his master's purpose. But fervent prayer, for all that.

Across the ancient, gigantic land of India, others also prayed that night. Millions of them.

Two hundred thousand prayed in Ranapur. They prayed, first, for deliverance from the Malwa. And then, knowing deliverance would not come, prayed they would not lose their souls as well as their bodies to the asura.

As Holkar prayed, his family prayed with him, though he knew it not. His wife, far away in a nobleman's mansion in the Malwa capital of Kausambi, hunched on her own pallet in a corner of the great kitchen where she spent her days in endless drudgery, prayed for her husband's safety. His son, squeezed among dozens of other slave laborers on the packed-earth floor of a shack in distant Bihar, prayed he would have the strength to make it through another day in the fields. His two daughters, clutching each other on a crib in a slave brothel in Pataliputra, prayed that their pimps would allow them to remain together another day.

Of those millions who prayed that night, many, much like Holkar, prayed for the tenth avatara who was promised. Prayed for Kalkin to come and save them from the Malwa demon.

Their prayers, like those of Holkar, were fervent.

But Holkar's prayers, unlike those of others, were not simply fervent. They were also joyous. For he, almost alone in India, knew that his prayers had been answered. Knew that he shared his own tent with the tenth avatara. And knew that, not more than five feet away, Kalkin himself was pouring his great soul into the vessel of the world's deliverance. Into the strange, crooked, cunning, mongoose mind of his foreign master.

The sun beat down on a nightmare landscape. Once, these had been fields and orchards. Now, the ground was criss-crossed with deep trenches; stripped bare of any life beyond a few splintered trees, handfuls of crushed wheat, a single stalk of corn.

"Where are we?" asked Belisarius. He spoke in a low mutter. His eyes were closed, the better to concentrate on the images flashing through his mind. "And when?"

Near a place called Kursk,replied Aide. The facets flashed for a microsecond, translating the crystalline precision of Time's Arrow into the bizarre fiats of human calendrical custom. A millenia and a half from now.

A line of monsters surged onto the field. Gigantic things, tearing the soil with strange continuous belts-metal slats running over wheels. Forward, from cupolas, immense snouts protruded. The snouts belched flame and smoke. Emblazoned on their flanks were crosses-some, square with double lines; others, bent.

"Iron elephants," whispered Belisarius. "Like the ones the Malwa will build-but so much better!"

Tanks. They will be called tanks. These are the type which will be called PzKw V "Panthers." They will weigh 45 tons and travel up to 34 miles per hour. They fire a cannon whose size will be called 75 millimeter.

From the opposite side of the field, a new line of monsters-tanks-charged forward. They began exchanging cannon fire with the other tanks. Belisarius could sense that these new tanks were of a slightly different design, but the only feature which registered clearly on his uneducated eye was that, instead of crosses, their flanks were marked by red stars.

This was the best tank of that era. It will be called the T-34.

The battle was horrible and dazzling at the same time.

Horrible, in its destruction. Belisarius saw a tank cupola-

Turret.

— turret blown off.Tons of metal sent sailing, like a man decapitated. The body of the tank belched flame, and he knew the men inside were being incinerated. Saw men clambering from another burning tank, shrieking, their uniforms afire. Saw them die, suddenly, swept down by an invisible scythe.

Machine-gun fire.

Dazzling, in the speed of the tanks, and the accuracy of their fire. Like a vision of St. George battling the dragon, except the saint was a dragon himself. And his lance a magic wand belching flame and fury.

"How?"

Images of complex-machines?

Internal combustion engines.

Images of perfect metal tubes-cannon barrels, Belisarius realized. He watched as an object was fit into one of the tubes. A perfect fit. He wondered what it was until he saw the cannon fire. Cannonball, he realized-except it was not a ball. It was a cylinder capped by its own cupola.

"How can metal be shaped so precisely?"

He was inside a huge building. A manufactory, he realized. Everywhere he could see rolls and slabs of steel being shaped and cut with incredible speed and precision. He recognized one of the machines as a lathe, like the lathes used by expert carpenters to shape wooden legs for chairs and tables. But this lathe was much bigger and vastly more powerful. The lathes he knew were operated by foot pedal. No such lathes could rip through metal the way this one was, not even bronze. He watched a stream of steel chips flying from the cutting tool like a waterfall.