An Android Awoke (on Moon!) Chapter Ten
Episode Ten – Midgarden
In previous episodes: An android awakes on Moon. Selina becomes the first Mooninite to pilot the Earth-Mars spaceflight. Her friend, bio techie Neer, seems to be in trouble on Mars, so she investigates on Moon after returning from Mars via Earth, where she met Neer’s fiance, Hielsa.
In this episode: Selina finds an obsolete physical port in Neer and Hielsa’s original bio module and activates the device she and Illen had found in Neer’s old hab module on Moon. She returns to her ship and goes to the cargo hold, where she notices, and activates, Peg-Leg Lex.
Selina inserted the ship smoothly into the high Earth orbit synchronous with the largest bio module. The relative velocity of the two spacecraft showed her a docking time of 6 hours. She used the time to get some sleep and sustenance.
Lex smiled in his sleep in the cargo hold. His thoughts were branching, recurving, fracturing; his mind was building his version of reality, brick by metaphorical brick. He was picking up the nuances of expressive language and countenance.
They spiraled into the void, dancing on the smooth fabric woven by the universe’s gravitational waves.
The space between Earth and Moon was full of objects. Most were uninhabited permanently, and some required either routine or occasional as-required visits by humans from either body. A few were fully manned. Most of these fully-manned man-made objects were large mid-orbit stations, very useful for upgrading and supplying spacecraft that were docking en route for longer missions. The rest were laboratories of a variety of sciences, particularly bioengineering.
Selina’s ship was scheduled to dock with the oldest, most upgraded bio module hanging around between the pair of rocks hanging around the sun hanging on for dear life as it whirled around the arm of our spiral galaxy, itself being dragged like an enormous whorl by the Sagi black hole.
Six hours later, the crafts entered auto docking mode and alerted their crew. For Selina, this was old hat. She kept a sharp eye on the status displays and was ready for the vis comm from the bio module.
Opening the hatches and sailing into the anteroom of the bio module, Selina greeted the assembled crew and bumped fists with the chief, whom she had met on her previous visit.
“I see you didn’t rotate back to Earth, Heek?” She asked him as they floated to the farm module.
“Naah, I enjoy it way too much up here, Sel. Heard about your maiden voyage, all cool?”
“Oh yeah. Met Neer on Mars, too, but only like for a second. He seemed weirder than usual, you know anything about that?”
Heek laughed. “Does he need a reason? He didn’t even tell us he was going there; we found out when I met the new crew who were coming up instead of him and his team.”
Selina frowned as they sanitized in the pre-chamber before floating into the verdant bio zone.
The round plants wiped off Selina’s frown. The spherical artificial systems, their outer layers visible through the transparent growth chambers, seemed to shiver with every slight movement.
Heek noticed her wide-eyed wonder again. For a Mooninite, living greenery was quite hypnotic.
The plants at the end of the second farm were the oldest. Heer and Nielsa had nurtured them from the beginning, even before they had defied convention and pushed the bio lab into the furthest orbit of any Earth satellite yet, barring its natural one. The move gave amazing results.
Selina chose a few of the ripest produce for her trip to Earth. Earth and Moon squads indulged pilots because of the highly isolated nature of their responsibilities; the least they deserved was good food that had been grown specifically to induce a state akin to euphoria in its consumers.
Heek accompanied her back to her ship’s cargo module with the supplies. Selina liked Heek because despite having been the commander of the last space disaster, he did not let his inner demons show in his demeanor. Fifty-four crew and passengers had passed on on one sad Thirday when a micro asteroid ripped through their transport vehicle when they were nearing Mars orbit. Heek and his co-captain were in the control module, which separated successfully and entered Mars orbit, from where they were rescued the next Fourday by the Martians below.
Despite being blameless in such an unpredictable yet not unprecedented act of nature, Heek had voluntarily retired from piloting interplanetary ships and settled into the higher Earth orbits.
That is where he had come to know of (or sassed, to put it in colloquial terms of spacefaring slang) and quickly teamed up with Neer and Hielsa to push space food into haute cuisine orbits. He still maintained his habit of speaking with just a little too many puns, intended or otherwise.
Pardoning puns without commenting, usually sarcastically, did not come easily to Selina, but she made an exception when it came to Heek. He had helped her acclimatize to microgravity during her training visits to the various labs that spiraled in Eartoo’s gravitational potential well.
Heek had become a recluse by literally distancing himself from as many humans as possible. Mooninites were not inclined to fly towards Eartoo, as they felt way more comfortable without the extra gravity weighing them down. Earthers who went to Moon for either business or pleasure went in a straight shot. Only techies completely dedicated to furthering microgravity research stayed for long periods of time in the orbital labs. For example Heek, Neer, and Hielsa.
The trio had envisaged Midgarden, the bio lab Selina had just been in, as the epitome of space biology. They developed plants that had been gene edited specifically for microgravity. Finding a long-abandoned orbital laboratory, they collaborated with Earth and Moon squads for enhancing the characteristics of the new plant species with minimal raw materials & circularity. Waste was minimized through reduction, reutilization, and recombination, the new 3 R’s for the new Eartoo.
It was important to show people what they were doing, so they flew out masterful chefs from Eartoo and had them compete in a reality show that was titled Taste Tests in Space. Their plan was on the money, as public interest drove a shift in Eartoo’s eating habits after humankind saw how well science could generate and process food that contributed to making Eartoo greener.
Heek, perhaps, was trying to make amends to humankind in his own way, and Selina liked that.
Too often were people blamed for things they could not control. Without anybody being able to empathize fully with anybody else, or with no one empathizing with any one fully, it led to strife.
Selina had also seen TTS, and was a big fan of Hielsa’s space-themed cakes. She had picked up quite a few culinary skills during her long months spent aboard Mars-bound flights. Using the severely limited ingredients that had been designed right from the get go more for longevity than palatability (even though the days of distasteful but highly functional space food had long since evaporated into oblivion), she experimented with techniques that changed their textures and tastes. Microgravity allowed her to do cooking combos impossible to carry out on Earth, and on her third voyage she had spent most of her Waking Life recording umpteen kitchen experiments.
She streamed the successful ones to Hielsa, who was a wiz at global vibing. Very soon, Selina was not just famous for breaking into the elite solo interplanetary pilot clique despite her Mooninite lineage; she also became venerated among the younger generations for her vids that showed how plain synth meals could be transformed into delicious gastronomous experiences.
Gastronomy was alien to the android Lex. His mind was still scouring archives in the robot bay.
Selina and Heek made their way into her ship. While they waited for the cargo module and its airlocks to pressurize, she asked him what he thought about Martium and its special properties.
“Its future seems rocky, Sel.” Selina winced mentally but let it slide. She shared a bit with him.
“They say of the soil where Martium is, that there are no carbon compounds within miles of it.”
Heek laughed at the throwback to a popular meme about ancient Greek architecture delivered by a quiz master par excellence, Stephen Fry, sometime near the beginning of the 21st century.
“I don’t know about that. “They,” as you say, did not discover it before my…umm…incident.”
Selina cringed. She had not expected that asking about a newly discovered element would lead them to Heek’s unfortunate brush with nature. She fished within her mind for a subtle way out.
Heek was untroubled. He noticed her discomfort and smiled genially at her, putting her at ease.
“I’m sorry, Heek, I did not see that coming.”
“Hey, no sorries, puh-lease. What are you supposed to be, the Oracle of Delphi?”
“Wish that I were, wish that I were.”
“No worries, mate, and no hurries. Let’s get these beauties stowed safely and then we can talk about the red element. Also, I was totally kidding about not knowing about the carbon’s absence. Just because I have left Eartoo does not mean I am zonked out of the whole planet.”
Selina let out a relieved sigh. “You got me there, Heek. I talked to Hielsa about Martium and she said the actual experiments were being kept in the dark. That itself seemed peculiar to us. You?”
Heek shifted the plants’ cases that were hovering around them in the airlock. “We will table this for now, Sel. Your ship is way less shielded than my lab. You never know who is monitoring us.”
Selina bit her lip and wondered as they stacked the crates & cases containing the space plants.
She passed in front of the robot bay without a second glance, because the metal man hopping around her ship on the Bohr City spaceport launchpad was as far from her mind as Point Nemo.
Back in Midgarden, she followed Heek to the central habitat module, where they shared a plentiful lunch with the sparse crew of fourteen. Most of the labs had crews thrice that number.
It was a pleasant meal. Her point of de-orbit was still about an hour away, so the group resumed their duties after bidding her adieu. Heek gestured meaningfully towards the older, original part of the bio lab and they made their way to the modules where Neer, Hielsa and Heek had begun.
Selina stretched out in one of their old bunks to aid her system in digesting the rich space meal.
Heek was accustomed to the great food, and actively went about the module, flipping off the permarec so that they were not recorded or monitored in any way. Permarec was a necessary safety measure that all techie squads undertook. Glitches, like nature, were very unpredictable.
It was important for help to reach from the nearest possible human habitation or advanced automated support system in the case of erratic errors, whether human, mechanical, or natural.
Heek took a seat and clasped his hands, waiting for Selina to settle into a comfortable position.
“So. Martium. Solid ore, solid core. My friends in geo tech tell me it is not radioactive. At least, not in the way we know. But its energy signatures in the EM spectrum are… very weirdly wavy.”
Selina had read something somewhere somewhat like this. She recalled a zine on her plane.
“Someone wrote that it could help us create antigravity propulsion, theoretically. Could it?”
“Well, there’s no telling whether what people write is right. All we can do is wait for the techies to announce their findings at large, and then take it up from there in our chosen fields of expertise.”
“They aren’t generally so hush-hush about these kinds of things, are they? I remember the cheers Neer and Hielsa got for boosting this module into this orbit, just because they predicted that their new greens will flourish at this elevation. How long did it take for Eartoo and Moon to share and enjoy? Or are they worried that it might have dangerous or unstable characteristics?”
Heek smiled at the precious memory. He had been right behind the techie couple in the endeavor. He had piloted the first supply run from Eartoo to Midgarden, and helped name it, too.
“Yes, you are right. It seems they are trying to avoid a repeat of history. The part right after 1 ACE when Roos tried to grab Yook. What a shellacking they got from the Yooks, but once that war had been triggered, it took away so many resources from so many people who deserved them and for what? Feeding the ego of a bad bald maniac who fed off the fat of the Roos land?”
Heek was rightly indignant. Indigenous people were right in not taking kindly to being encroached upon, and fighting back tyranny tooth and nail. The outcome favored the righteous.
Wars are not forgotten by the families they ravage. Heek’s family had lost many members in the Yook-Roos War, and the sense of loss flowed through following generations of the descendants.
Selina rose into a sitting position and patted Heek’s arm; she did not want to commit another faux pas that reminded him of the past, so she swung her feet on to the floor of the hab module.
“I wanted to show you this,” she said, drawing out the obsolete oblong device that she and Illen had found in Neer’s old hab on Moon. Heek took it and turned it over and around, pondering it.
“Hmm…I’m digging around in that part of my brain that tells me I have seen this before, either with Neer or some other old technophile. What does this connector plug into? Seen it before?”
Selina told him how she had found the device, and Heek laughed at being reminded of Neer’s compulsive, secretive, anti-social furtive behavior. He twirled his floating seat around and peered at the device, then tapped it against his head, as if shaking loose some debris from his brain. Selina drank some water, as she felt the biofoods dissolve into her body and energize her.
“Eureka!” shouted Heek, startling Selina. He beckoned to Selina to follow him towards the dimmer end of the hab module, where a wall lined with control panels seemed to be in off mode.
“I knew I had seen this in Neer’s hands earlier! In fact he had a couple of these old comm sticks. One sol he was talking with the Hanle Observatory, and I saw him load some data into one of these things. When I asked him why they didn’t just stream the data, he said he wanted to add a few photos of Milky Way pulsars & gamma-ray bursts to his “personal collection.” Nerdy much?”
Selina laughed as Heek peered at the panels, but the front-facing side did not satisfy him, so he floated around and began to inspect the sides of the panels. In a minute he found a port that was a snug fit for the protrusion from Neer’s device. He plugged it in, but nothing happened.
It did not take even a minute for them to realize that this was a passive device, without an internal energy source, so they would have to activate the old control panels to look inside it.
As Heek booted up the panels, Selina floated into the adjacent module to check if Moon or Earth squad had left any messages while they had switched off permarec in the old module. She saw only regular status updates about the health of her ship and the time remaining to de-orbit for an Earth rendezvous, so she returned to where Heek had nearly finished booting up.
The screen lit up with green code. Heek navigated the system expertly and brought up the hardware ports, then went through them one by one to isolate the port with Neer’s device in it.
Selina watched over his shoulder as the device began blinking. She observed it for a few seconds to establish whether it was a steady blink, or some sort of code. She knew she could not put it way past Neer to embed messages in anything & everything related to his life or work.
It was not so in this case, at least, so she and Heek pulled up the data in the device. To decipher it, Heek activated the old algorithms that Neer and Hielsa had created when they were building Midgarden and wanted no interference from the more-or-less complacent Earth squad.
In a flash, they saw Neer’s intent in hiding the thumb-sized device. It was a paired comm, hard coded to track Neer’s bio signature – a highly sensitive issue that had not been approved by humankind because of serious consequences on privacy. Individual opinions differed, of course.
Neer had implanted a UPS, or Universal Positioning System, chip into one of his teeth. Such chips were standard inclusions in most androids to enable remote control and code upgradation.
Neer had distilled down the location tracker and microprocessor, made it human-safe, and put it in a molar with a shielding that made it impossible to track unless its hard code counterpart scanned for its unique signal. Selina and Heek looked at each other and nodded. As soon as it got the go-ahead with a touch from Selina, the device started a scan, spiraling outward from the bio module’s comm systems spectra. Heek began emulating the hard code so that he could link its output to the hab module’s local computer network. He kept it on a closed loop, but established a direct line of contact with the personal stream that went to and from Selina’s wrist comm. This way, when the device found Neer’s location implant, it would inform her privately.
“Why would Neer go to such lengths to ensure he could track his own location?” Heek asked.
Selina shook a negative. “I think he wanted to give this to Hielsa. The speed with which Mars and Earth squads fast-tracked him like a priority shipment to Mars probably did not give him enough time to explain and share with her. You know what, can I share this location when it comes through with Hielsa? Did you code in an option to forward it completely privately, Heek?”
“No, but we have time till your deorbit burn separation. I’ll update the patch ASAP,” Heek replied.
“Yeah, I also want to snap a pic of the device, so that I can find out more about where he got it.”
Selina snapped it while Heek tinkered with the code he had appended to Neer’s device’s code.
Zooming the snap on her wrist vis display, she looked right into the virtual lens at the top and middle of the holographic screen to bring up the contextual menus on the overlay display, and nodded at its top right corner to make it start listening to voice commands. Its red light blinked.
“Find this image in tech archives, focus on early hardware used for data and code storage. Go.”
An icon which indicated that permarec was off appeared on the screen. She jerked her head to the left for dismissing the pop-u and the results began flowing upwards as she flicked her eyes.
The device was a modified version of USB, or Universal Serial Bus, devices. The tech was rudimentary enough to have become obsolete. When people went to Moon in 20 ACE, optical storage had replaced hardware flash chips, and now, quantum processors were beginning to replace them. The rate of tech advancement had outstripped Moore’s Law even before 1 ACE.
Nanoelectronics had helped scale down the cost of resources for greater computational power, leading to quick adoption of technologies like flexible solar cells and portable potable water kits.
From the Becquerels had begun the harnessing of solar power, and humanity had never needed anything else once it began to be efficiently converted into electricity by new & newer technologies. Early artificial space objects helped refine these technologies until humankind had completely shifted to such inexhaustible sources of power driven by naturally cosmic processes.
And now, Martium was showing scientists that nature worked on a cosmic level, just not in the ways humans were used to seeing it perform wondrous miracles on Earth, living systems or not.
New thoughts are seeds for new innovations. Eartoo was built with the hope of embracing new.
Selina remained in deep thought as the time of departure for deorbiting maneuvers drew closer.
Lex was also in deep thought, but about different things. He had felt the vibrations of Selina and Heek passing him by when they were stowing the space plants in the bio-supportive cargo bay.
His newly-awake mind kept him static, but it felt the feeling of stiffness due to tension for the first time. It was surprising that staying motionless while asleep & while being awake are diametric.
When human minds want different things, we generally weigh the pros and cons according to our experience. Lex’s experience was limited to his relatively short existence. He looked for more narratives written in the first person by a human to attempt empathy with a human mind.
Machine learning became real that sol. Lex’s mind chanced upon a piece of fiction that depicted teamwork by a group of capable individuals, focused on achieving a goal for the good of people.
Something Must Be Done
Prologue : Six Months Ago
“I heard mention of a report on training schools being run in PoK; will you include that too?”
In response to my comment, QD looked up from the file he was frowningly reading through, and nodded to the gentleman seated to his left – my right – at the table. The man made a note on his pad, the page more than half-full already. QD went back to perusing the file, and I, to my ruminating.
After a minute or so, the note-taker spun his chair about to face his laptop, and started typing. QD continued turning the pages, making small annotations here and there. I sat and thought. It took another ten-fifteen minutes for him to finish. At the sound of the heavy flap of the manila folder closing, the note-taker spun his seat around to face the still open pad, and picked up his pen.
“We’re good to go, almost.”
“Almost?”
“Yes, almost. Apart from the few usual typos, the file” – he tapped lightly on the one he had been reading – “is close to perfect. Now, the typos I can handle, the rest is up to you. Shall we go get a signature?” I nodded, and all three of us rose and made our way to another, larger, plusher, and obviously more important office. The lady in the chair smiled congenially, and I felt calm as I smiled back – we’d met once before. She knew what I wanted, and that my team would go to any lengths.
“When it is convenient, I’d like to meet the entire team, Mr. A,” she said, as she took the file from QD and signed on the last page, gesturing to QD to help himself to the seal of her office, which he affixed below her signature, almost reverently.
“Absolutely, ma’am. They were all enthralled when I met them after meeting you last month, and I assure you they cannot wait to express their gratitude to you in person.”
She smiled genuinely with laughter in her eyes. “Always the eloquent one, aren’t you?”
I smiled back; there was no sarcasm from her. “It pays to be, most of the time, ma’am, don’t you think?”
QD was back at my side, and she nodded to him. “It is your support they need, QD. Give them all you can.” I looked at QD, and was relieved to see him smiling as he responded affirmatively. We bowed with our palms together, and she half-rose and bowed back. As the note-taker shut the door behind us, I felt, for the first time in my life, the fear of never again being able to be where I was today. The fear of never returning. I bit my bottom lip. We returned to QD’s office to discuss details.
Present Day
The evening had been cool and clear, and the night was expected to be no worse. As seven-thirty drew closer, my mind raced. All our minds raced. The seven of us sat in the middle of a large tent, in various stages of readiness, and in various states of mind. PS, HS, QY, AS, SK, SC and I. I looked at each, and wished I could know their thoughts better than I did. But then, I wish for a lot of things. I checked my watch and spoke.
“Seven o’clock. Time to lock and load, boys!” Everyone shuffled to their feet and retreated to the periphery of the tents, where wooden benches and the earth bore the weight of our equipment.
In the absence of any formal code of language, Hollywood lingo wasn’t unwelcome. We were all intelligent enough to know what the others meant. An officer paused at the flap, searching for eye contact with me. I gave a reassuring nod, held up all ten fingers, and he let the flap fall back into place and went away. I looked again at everyone, and QY’s eyes caught mine.
“Dude, you remember second year, or maybe third, I got one of these from home?”
He smiled and held up a black balaclava. I laughed out loud, indeed I did. By the time I told the story of the nomenclature for QY that had resulted directly from his owning this scary object of clothing, we were all smirking at the irony of it, and ready, too. I hefted my pack and led the way out.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Three Months Ago
This is outrageous; I found myself thinking as I read through the newspaper. Something must be done. And if I have to do this, I need a team which knows me, and I know them. Seven people from my past are able, I think, to do what I have in mind.
I started to daydream, letting thoughts, plans, ideas and scenarios wash over me endlessly, over each other, and drifted off to a sleep rife with similar convolutions the mind is capable of. When I woke up in the morning, I was disappointed that it hadn’t been one of those nights when one can recall the dreams; but equally surprising was my desire to start acting about the worst issues that plagued my country in a more practical manner. I thought things through over breakfast and picked up my phone. Sunday morning is the best time, I figured, to start calling people up to convince them.
After they were onboard with my hunch of an idea about a plan of action, it was time to reach outwards and upwards. I pulled every string at my disposal and got the email address I needed.
Three weeks later, when I had almost forgotten about the email I’d sent to that address, mainly because of the triviality of routine life that sucks us in forever, I got the call. It was the first time I’d talked to the man who would note down all the important points from everything that transpired between QD and me.
“Hello,” I said, frowning as I answered, because I felt annoyed at being disturbed by a call from a landline number. Probably some telemarketer or the other, selling a loan over the phone.
The man was quite clear and concise, coming to the point without even taking my name.
“We have given some thought to your views. Would you care to discuss them in detail?”
“Sure,” I replied. The image of the sentence ‘…I strongly feel my views deserve some thought.’ that I had written in my email crossed my mind, and I hastened to add, “Thank you for thinking about what I wrote, sir.”
“Thankfulness is not yet in order, Mr. A. Are you free later today?”
“I’ll make myself free whenever you require, sir.”
“A simple ‘yes’ will do.” I felt affronted, if only a little.
“Yes.”
“Should I send a car for you at your workplace or will you prefer your own conveyance?”
“My own, thanks. When and where should I arrive?” I felt inadequate talking to this man, and so my words came out in a rush – nervousness, I guess, had crept up on me.
“Anytime after six. The address you can find in my reply to your email. Good afternoon, Mr. A.” He was about to disconnect but I blurted to keep him on the line.
“Hello?”
“Yes?”
“Is this a test?”
I heard, for the first time, his smile, and I do mean I heard it. Later, when we met and I got acquainted with him, I realized that when he smiled, his mouth opened wide and he exhaled through his teeth, so it came out as a low, soft hiss. Over the phone, the hiss scared me outright.
“No, Mr. A, this is not a test. It is with regard to the email you sent us after digging into your contacts in our armed forces. You should know that your past history is very interesting, and sets you in excellent stead to act upon your views. We would like to discuss how we might collaborate.”
I let out a steady breath. “Okay, sir, I shall see you in the evening. Whose name shall I mention at the gate?” I asked, knowing fully well the usual red tape and the “referral” or “reference” system afflicting the workings of all things bureaucratic. I didn’t want to spend time dialing a landline number to get admission into the lofty corridors of democratic power.
“Yours, Mr. A.” I heard his hissing smile again. “Anything else?”
“No, thank you again. Good day,” I said, but what went through my mind as I hung up was, to put it mildly, tension. It took me an hour, alone on the topmost flight of stairs in my office building, and a half liter of water to calm down and redial the number. It was answered on the third ring.
“Yes, Mr. A?” There was no inflection, no irritation, just mild curiosity in his voice.
“Umm, hello, sir, yes, see, I was… I wanted to know, have I done anything wrong? Am I in trouble or something because of what I wrote in my email?”
“No, Mr. A, please rest assured we take you seriously. Oh, and since I have you on the line, try to write down whatever you feel is worth not missing, and bring along your laptop. I’m glad you called; we are always prepared for no-shows. At least, like I said, your past stands you in good stead.”
“See, sir, this is what I’m talking about. In good stead for what?”
“To help in building a good country for everyone, Mr. A. To act upon your expressed views in whatever capacity you can, and perhaps we can help you along a bit, eh? Isn’t that what you were looking for, or have we misinterpreted your intentions behind sending that powerfully worded email?”
I felt calmer, this guy wasn’t joking. “Not at all. Alright then. I’ll see you later, sir.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. A.” All sincere and courteous. Very nice. I could get used to this.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Present Day
I looked around in as controlled a manner as I could, given that I was oscillating on a thin rappelling rope, hung from a helicopter hovering about five feet above the treetops in a densely forested valley. Before descending below the treetops , I was trying to take as far a 360° view as possible, leveraging the height advantage of the chopper under which I was hanging. As soon as I found a firm footing on the ground in the little clearing below our chopper, I switched on the full array of my scanners and made a complete spin within fifteen seconds. Their furthest range was two hundred feet, and there were no life forms larger than a rabbit on my visor’s head-up display.
I spoke clearly and distinctly, so that my team in the hovering heli heard well. “Let’s go.”
Two minutes later, the chopper was gone and seven of us stood in an outward-facing circle, scanning our way towards our targets. While AS pinpointed our location and discussed our support’s real-time maps showing on his head-up display, we maintained a vigil on our scanners, thus forming a two-hundred-foot virtual sentry circle around us. Two or three big animals registered overall, and on AS’ go-ahead, we all took a bearing north by north west. It was smooth going into our first real mission. I didn’t bother switching on infrared vision output, since no human-sized life-forms were registering. SC led us through the thickets at a quick and silent walking pace.
AS said over the comm, “Support says there are less than half a dozen of these lame-ass terrorists, and there may have been a couple or more waiting for them beforehand, to welcome them. Are we gonna snipe them from here, or are we gonna slide right up and let them have a bit of our ammo?”
SC sniggered his usual snorting laughter, and it was heartening to hear it; I felt the mood lighten. We were nearing a couple of light bulbs, scattered in the way random lights are when one looks up at the surrounding mountains from the valley below. Just as the slope turned steeper, I halted. A solitary human-sized blip up the slope had appeared on my scanner. PS and I synced our scanners and searched in the direction of the blip. To increase our scanners’ accuracy, we moved a couple of yards to our sides so that their fields of sight overlapped and they could deliver a better output. This gave both of us an actual sight of the hefty man, even from two hundred feet away.
On his shoulder was slung an old AK-47. It was a dark night, yet, when PS and I looked at each other and nodded, both of us knew we had nodded to each other. Our training in similar scenarios kicked in. PS continued vigilance on the man while I tiptoed back to the team. I whispered into my mic, not because I feared getting overheard, but because I feared talking too loud in my excitement at making a real difference in the real world, not playing trigger-happy virtual games.
“Found them, boys. Thank the support team, AS, for spot on info, and Ops for a spot on drop. SK, this guy appears bored as hell, seems like he is on sentry duty or something. PS, anything?”
“This guy’s boring me, man. He’s playing around with his phone. These days there’s mobile internet even in these parts. Probably watching some stuff he can’t watch in his country. Maybe a good reason for risking his life crossing into India the hard way.”
“Cool. SK, you and PS take out this guy, the rest of us will make a narrow sweep, and we regroup at this guy’s position? Everyone good to go?”
Like before, I saw the nods despite the dark night, and heard my teammates’ set breaths.
“Okay then. Let’s go, split 2-5, 360-bio. Support, we are going silent. Keep watch.”
SK headed up to PS, they observed their target for a minute before heading out, about ten feet apart, guns hefted and safeties off. I walked sideways to my left, and switched the biomass scanner to 360° mode. Within three minutes, the two dots of PS and SK ahead of me had approached the gun-slinging dude. Barely pausing, they converged on the blip of the gunslinger and came to a halt. The rest of us began to converge towards them. I whispered inside my helmet.
“Check?”
PS and SK both said, almost simultaneously, “Check.”
I was happy. I licked my lips – hadn’t realized how dry they had become in the cold, fresh, but harsh mountain air – and smiled to myself. Perfect start!
“Awesomax. Check in, one.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
“Four.”
“Five.”
“Six.”
“Seven, over.”
“Let’s meet up, then, bio-90, and get the next of these terrorists.”
We regrouped where PS and SK stood, continuously scanning the areas in front of us. PS was using infrared binoculars with his visor slid up, and SK was bringing all our sensors to bear. I checked the gunslinger, who slept peacefully under the effect of the tranquilizer dart. He had a packet of biscuits in the pocket of his worn, dirty kurta; a spare magazine for his AK-47 stuffed at the small of his back into the waistband of his salwar. He wore black shoes that were way sturdier than those generally prevalent in the region. A plastic-strap watch with a plain analog dial, showing the time – 2215 hours. I instinctively checked it against my watch; I didn’t expect so much time to have passed.
It hadn’t. His watch was set more than twenty minutes ahead. There was nothing else on him, so I said, “AS, beacon this guy,” and got up to join PS and SK in checking out the nearest huts, easily identifiable by the solitary, bare yellow light bulbs that hung from two-ply wires and holders in the wooden lintels of their doors.
“Anything?”
“No, no activity, let’s get in range of the one on the right, up ahead, and check for people.”
“Right, team, you heard the man, let’s go, split 3-4, concentric arcs, watch the sides, okay? Anyone got anything to say? Alright then. Up the hill we go, boys.”
There was no one in the nearest hut as we took a good look around it, the three of us in front staying well clear of the pool of light thrown by the bulb. I looked at my HUD and spoke a single word, “West,” and switched back my scanner to 360°. I was relieved to see I was right on assuming that they had all understood.
As we moved towards the next basic stone-and-wood hut with bright indigo-colored whitewash on the outside walls, we organized ourselves again in two concentric arcs, three in the front and the four of us behind, with me at the rightmost of the outer arc. I switched my scanner to the longer range, narrower angle mode and swept my right flank; no discernible life forms. I focussed my attention on the hut we were approaching. The three dots leading us were almost at the edge of my visor, meaning they were almost one hundred and eighty feet ahead of me. Even the other three of my arc were dozens of feet ahead of me. I picked my way up the hill at a faster pace, catching up ground as the three leaders congregated and halted near the hut.
When we were all together, HS said, “Three guys inside. One way out farther up; he keeps walking on and off the edge due north. There’s movement inside, but only one guy is doing all of it.”
HS was standing a few feet ahead of us in a spot that gave him visual access to assess the hut, gazing forward while keeping out of the feeble light of the bulb.
SC said, “If they’re busy, they probably will be for more time. While they’re preoccupied, I say we find out if there are any others beside the guy up north.”
It sounded logical, I heard a couple of agreeing noises. “Okay, then, how about this. HS, SC, QY stay here, and we four head north from the left. Do not engage unless absolutely certain of discretion; we do not want these three inside to come running out. They’re sitting ducks right now.”
I looked around at the team, there were nods and shuffles as SC and QY moved themselves into better positions to sit guard over the hut. Passing around it, I scanned it and understood what HS had meant by “periodic motion,” it seemed that one person was shifting about around a table, and two others occasionally fetched him something from two different locations within the small hut.
We continued upwards, completely without any outward light that could give away our positions, and started to approach the pacing man from the left. As HS had said, we were soon able to see a blip about a hundred feet ahead of us, moving to and fro along short straight lines, but sometimes stopping and taking random obtuse and about-turns. It reminded me of how some people walk about while talking on the phone. I halted and whispered, “Wait.”
I turned around and confirmed what my scanner showed. SK was about fifteen feet behind me. I said, “AS, come up here, check this guy for audio,” and saw AS’s blip, a little below SK’s, start to move towards me. I turned back around to keep the erratic blip within my scanner, almost at the edge of its range.
AS came up and moved a couple of feet ahead of me. He extracted a small tube from the side pouch of his backpack. A soft click, like that of a torch’s slider making contact, emanated from his hand, and the front end of the tube opened out in a serrated cone. AS slid up his visor to peer at the soft blue readings on the body of the tube, and I continued to check around us for any more activity or life, finding neither. After about half a minute of intense peering, AS slid his visor back down to suppress his voice and spoke softly, almost only to me, but of course the team could hear.
“He’s on a low-grade satphone; I even picked up the crackling of the people on the other end. Could be a conference link-up, too. Support can probably trace it.”
“Share the frequencies with them. What’s this guy saying?’
I saw AS shake his head. “No go on that. Even if I got closer, I wouldn’t be able to tell, his lingo is too rustic and unfamiliar for me. He’s not happy, though.” I discerned a smile in his voice, and smiled to myself. We were certainly not going to make things any happier for this terrorist.
“Okay, let’s get back to the team. Sweep this side a little wider, and then start from the other side. Let this one finish his talk and I’ll shoot him once we are sure he is done. We don’t want their handlers to feel like something’s gone wrong with their supposedly foolproof plan.”
We retraced our silent way back to outside the hut, and waited. There was the usual occasional activity going on inside, although it seemed to have become a bit slower. The main thing was that when the two people not standing at the table didn’t move, they huddled together in the corner of the hut that was furthest from the table. Without a word, I touched SC on his shoulder and indicated that we were going around the right side, while he was to hold his position and keep an eye out for the man talking on the satellite phone. On seeing his affirmative nod, I waved to the three behind me in a wide, right-to-forward sweep, and we started out as before.
I circled to the right until I had the person still furtively speaking on his sat phone at the edge of my HUD, and then proceeded in a straight line to the hut. Approaching it going downhill, I could view the inside of the hut at a downward angle. I got down on my hands when I reached the thin strip of light that escaped through the square ventilation gap between the rough stone wall and the corrugated tin roof. Getting my face near the cold, sweet-smelling fresh earth, I slid up my visor to look inside.
The man who was showing up almost motionless on our visors was tinkering away at a rickety wooden table set near the niddle of the hut, building a bomb. The other two crouched behind his back, and I was looking at this deathly comical scene from behind and above them.
I got back up, slid my visor, and retreated about twenty feet to where I knew my three teammates were congregated, each looking a different way, hence overlapping each others’ scanner ranges to be sure that no random person or another terrorist, incase there were more, got wind of ur presence and raised an alarm.
“They are building a bomb in the hut; it’s reaching the trickier trigger-setting stages. These three aren’t going anywhere except to excrete, if they can manage that. Observers, fall further back, hold tight till the four of us get the guy up ahead.
“We four, spread out within range of one another between the talker and the hut. Whichever way he goes once he stops talking and heads back, drop him noiselessly. No calling, just be sure of your aim. Are we all on the same page?”
Seven assenting voices.
“Cool. Go silent.”
I hefted my gun and started off.
The talker moved less now, but he moved nevertheless. After ten-odd minutes of waiting in position, I whispered, “Anything else, anyone?”
A couple of clicks of the tongue and some negative uh-huhs confirmed my feeling that we were getting impatient. “AS, call support and find out if they did anything with this satellite link-up?”
Just something to kill the time, like we had on the previous couple of preparatory excursions. We heard AS and our support guy (that’s what we called them even when we met them, anonymity was a given when it came to counter-terrorism) exchange info. They had got a fix on the location of this guy right in front of us, and it was only a matter of a few more minutes that they would trace the call origination or destination location – either way.
I realized I had started looking in AS’ direction as I heard them talk instead of keeping my scanner towards the talker, and spun my head around just in time to see his blip halfway across my visor. He crossed the line of miniscule, fluorescent dashes that marked the halfway hundred-foot range, just as I announced to the team that he had begun his descent towards us.
I raised my gun to my shoulder and activated the infrared scoping. Combined with our visor, I had a precise targeting sight. The figure picked its way down the slope, and I kept my sight trained on his torso. As he came within range, I activated target lock, waited for him to come within fifty feet of me, and let the dart fly.
The man clutched his chest, drew in a sharp intake of breath, and fell over backwards.
I switched to normal vision and strode over to the body, drawing a small metal disc from my right knee pocket; running my gloved finger around its periphery, I located the little button, clicked it to activate its GPS location, and thrust it deep inside one of the pockets of his sherwani.
When we were done, the unconscious bodies would be picked up by support for further interrogation. Now, it was time to move on the bomb-builders.
“The talker is out. Form a circle around the hut.” I checked him for weapons and inside all his pockets, found a little currency that I stuffed back in – it would aid in gathering more information about the idiot – and laid the body out straight. Stepping over him to pick up his sat phone, I saw something glint on his chest; I double-checked and realized with a smile that it was a little bit of the steel of the needle of the hypodermic dart that had not penetrated his chest fully. I swept the area ahead of where he had been talking with his superiors, and walked back to complete the circle of our team’s blips standing more or less equidistant from the hut.
I checked the inside through the little gap between the roof and wall again. There was no change; the bomb’s insides seemed to be reaching a stage of togetherness. I smiled, in spite of the seriousness of what we were doing. No problemo, amigo, I told myself. I straightened up and spoke.
“Check outside perimeter, maximum range. AS, call in support. We’re breaking and entering, shoot to down, no fire-explosives. Check in on outside perimeter scan. Go.”
Just then, SC whispered, “Far south-east, small blip, possibly wildlife.”
“Who’s at SC’s side?”
“SK.” “HS.”
“Three of you, go check it out. Slow and easy.”
A murmur of assent went around, and I focussed on the three dots breaking the circle and moving back down to the valley below. They turned back from the edge of my HUD, and I heard their phraseful discussion about the animal, a four-legged ruminating variety. I turned back to the hut and cycled through all the scanners we had. When the three returned, I checked to make sure we were all back in position, and I whispered, “Right then. Back to work. Any problems, anyone?”
No silence had ever sounded better. Steady breathing surrounded me. I spoke.
“Go.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Two Months Ago
“The existing facilities are…well, pedestrian. Any decent football player could work through that in a day or two, given its run,” said AS. I nodded.
“What do you guys think?”
“Let’s sit in the shade and talk about this, no?” said SC, shielding his eyes from the sun.
I had to agree, and we retreated to the excellently supplied – even though hastily erected – canvas tent. It took the better part of the evening to get most – all would’ve been impossible – of our ideas and brainstorming written down. It was exhilarating.
The next morning, we discussed the details of exactly what we needed. I handed over a broad, plain manila envelope to the note-taker in the evening. The next morning, we received the same envelope, annotated in red ball-point ink. It took us two days of arguing, bickering, discussing, explaining, convincing, fighting, bad-mouthing, and plain conversing to make another envelope’s worth of notes. Upon receiving and examining this one, QD requested a meeting on-site, and arrived the next morning.
“You’re still over-budget, my friends.” Throughout all of our correspondence, verbal or written, he called us his “friends.”
“This task is still doable, but we still need to cut a few corners. We aren’t made of money, even for this essential part of maintaining our freedom. Seeing as this is an issue near and dear to each of you personally, I will ask each of you to strike off just one more thing from your lists of – if I may mistreat the word – needs.”
He handed the envelope to me, and I passed out our printed lists. We had a clipboard and an eraser-head pencil each; I felt irresistibly reminded of a scene in a movie in which the hero has to fill out a form and can’t find a place to lay it, so he drags a table, noisily, screechily, to his seat, much to the consternation of his fellow test-takers.
Suppressing my smile, I concentrated on the task at hand. QD had it right when he said those lists were important to us. It was a tough choice to let go of something I personally felt critical to our ultimate plan’s success. To decide to go ahead with it without one of those hard-discussed things meant a risk of regret: not only personal, but as a team. Anyway, I made my choice, firmly struck out the item twice to convince myself it was right, and tossed the clipboard onto the table in front of us.
It took a while for the last one to land on the table, but it did. The man who took notes collected the clipboards as QD rose to leave.
“Well, then. We shall meet again soon.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Present Day
I approached the front door, PS beside me. About a meter away from the brown wooden panel serving as their feeble fortress’ gate, I switched to infrared HUD and surveyed the inside of the hut, feeling so calm as to be almost at leisure.
The bomb-maker was still at work, and the other two still hunched in the farthest corner. I shouldered my gun, aiming for the bomb-maker. PS tapped my shoulder; I took my left hand off the barrel and gave him a thumbs-up without turning around.
I practiced shooting on entry, taking myself through the most practical sequence of shots twice. Holding my gun ready, I planted my right foot firmly and hit the door with the flat of my left boot.
A few seconds later, I carefully examined the store of explosive they had for the bombs they were planning to make. It was a low-grade RDX type compound.I heard the hum of the heli getting closer until it was a throb in our headsets, at which point in time I said, as loudly as I could without what I would consider impolite loudness, “Good job, ladko. Let’s get outta here. Anything that can’t wait till we are back in the air, anyone?”
Negatives floated into my headset from all six of my teammates. I suspected a few of them were smiling, and when we slid up our visors on the way back in the heli, my suspicions were confirmed in the best way possible. Every single one of us was grinning. I smiled, too. Something had been done.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Five Weeks Ago
“Okay, we’re gonna be practicing getting dropped-in by heli.”
I waited for the hubbub of excitement in our tent to subside.
“I go down first, take a three-sixty look around, and then give a go-ahead. Next dude follows me down, we put our backs together, and so on till the last of us. We stay till we’ve made a full-range scan of the surroundings, and then send the chopper back.”
“Where are these scans you keep talking about?”
“They’re getting here; we’ll do their first field test along with the drop-in practice.”
We were waiting for our first collective look at the silent chopper that would be ferrying us. I had seen them before, but only on the ground. AS and PS were familiar with the scanners, which had certainly helped in assuaging the others about the delays in procuring equipment. The preceding week had been fun, testing the weapons we would be carrying. Two days ago, we had finished with the tactical gear and close-combat weapons. Our expectations were high that things would continue to run on schedule.
We followed two mottos – train hard, fight easy; and never give in. Word from QD’s office was that today was the day of the heli; any minute now we would hear the choppers coming. As it turned out, so silent were the stealth helicopters that our tent started waving gently before we heard them!
We rushed out of the tent to witness a super-sleuth version of the country’s most advanced helicopter landing in front of us. It was exhilarating.
One of the pilots of the chopper waved at us encouragingly, beckoning us to approach. SC and QY reached the door first; the pilot glanced at his dashboard, flicked a switch, and within a minute, all seven of us were on board, as excited as kids on their first flight.
It was practically built, without protrusions and paraphernalia – a means of rapid transport, designed to be radar-evasive and super-silent. HS snapped out one of the headsets from the clasp on the steel mesh separating us from the pilots, put them on, and spoke to them.
“Take off! Take off! We’re all here!” he said, beaming around. Then he frowned, apparently concentrating on the pilot’s reply. After about thirty seconds, he nodded at the floor where he’d been staring, took off the headset, and smiled all around, as if he was proud of something he had heard them say. The rotors were slowing down, unmistakably.
“He says they’ve been warned about us and our youthful exuberance. He’s not going anywhere until we get the briefing they’ve come prepared with.”
We laughed our way back to the tent we were in two minutes ago.
We spent the next four hours learning – digesting – the knowledge the pilot officers gave us. As a bonus for our “good behavior,” as the senior-most of the three officers put it, we were to get our first practice drop at night – ideally the best operating conditions when we would embark on real missions against nefarious elements who threatened our nation.
We spent the next three weeks putting ourselves through many kinds of drills; some involving our chopper, fully geared up most of the time to build up our strength to peak levels, incorporating and executing mock situations.
We made up practice scenarios based on real events. Our support teams were with us very enthusiastically, and we filled our days and nights by taking half a dozen more practice run-throughs than we had scheduled originally.
After three weeks of this, on the fourth weekend, the chopper flew back to the air base for maintenance and upgrades, and we whiled away the time in the nearest idyllic town, going over the info on our first real mission repeatedly.
On the morning of the first day of the last week of our training, we flew back to the air base with the chopper so that final night-time drills could be run. It was fortunate we did, since we discovered that our GPS systems were taking time in syncing when they were disconnected from the central server. A simple code upgrade sufficed to render the GPS units in sync, and it felt like everything was ready on time.
Our communication and understanding with our support teams was fine-tuned; emergency procedures and situations-turning-catastrophically-bad had been argued about, pondered over, solved in theory, and finally laughed off as improbable.
QD had been sharing periodic updates on the enemy’s activities. It was important that they kept on doing what we were predicting they would do, so that we could do what we planned to.
Things were progressively looking like intelligence was spot on, but a bit of lax action by the enemy delayed their arrival at the place we knew they had isolated as a safe house to do their dirty work. At last, after two days of lounging around and getting comparatively lazy as all of us were wont to during our school or college days when we got to know each other, we got the final go-ahead. It was time to do something.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Present Day
I couldn’t wait any longer. After the usual exchange of greetings, QD had hunched over the file on his desk and not looked up. The note-taker wasn’t there – not that he was very unnecessarily communicative when he was. I thought it was a good starting point.
“Umm, so, where’s Mister…uh…” I said, hoping he’d fill in the note-taker’s name and I’d get his attention.
“He had some work. Not related to this work.” Not even a raise of the head. The red ballpoint pen made another scribble. I clasped my fingers together and breathed deeply. Patience. That was the key. No point coming across as arrogant or impatient, no matter how big a stunt you’ve pulled off, I told myself. Many people, much more experienced than us, had done deeds way more audacious and daring than our little in-and-out terrorist cell subjugation at night.
I glanced around the office, and tilted my head to read the spines of the books on the shelves. Being and Time caught my eye; I glanced at the remnant of the file QD was poring over. At least a dozen pages of thick, yellowish, official-looking material. Holding my breath, I slid my chair back, rose, and stepped to the shelf with the book on it. It was the Stambaugh translation. QD was still immersed in his file and raised no objection as I slid out the book and returned to my chair. Letting go of my breath as noiselessly as I could, I opened the book and started to read…
When I looked up, QD had his fingertips pressed together and was looking at me. I started; looking down at how many pages of Sein und Zeit I had flipped, I realized I had been reading for a while now. I smiled sheepishly, surreptitiously noting the page number I was on – I fully intended to borrow it from him, having read so much about it during my mind’s existential period.
“Sorry about that, I’ve always wanted to read this book, among many others,” I said, closing it and placing it on the table. QD smiled thinly, briefly.
“You can borrow it, Mr. A. I only request that you take care of it. Now, to business?”
“Of course. I was just waiting for you to finish your…err…file.” Instinctively I looked down where the file had been; it was not on the table anymore. I dismissed it from my thoughts and looked up again, “So did we get what we wanted to know? Did they talk?”
“Yes, it was beneficial, what you did.”
I could not help beaming from ear to ear.
“We thought it went as good as it could’ve.”
“I agree, and might I add that I thought you did a tremendous job, too.”
My smile broadened.
“So, this second outing of yours has quite a few differences from the first. I thought it is not too late to put off missions in broad daylight, but I trust you and your friends have gone over every little thing?”
“Yes, sir, we have, and we are good to go.”
QD paused at my words, and squinted at me, amusement and incredulity playing on his face.
“Good to go? Mr. A., you’re turning into a walking Hollywood cliche with your jargon.”
Having allowed himself the joviality in the moment, he turned his sight to the file I had brought with me. I passed it over, and he flipped through it in silence. It was quick; he had annotated it himself before sending it back to me last week.
All seven of us had marked our responses in green ink during the week, and he mainly looked at those. Nodding a few times as he finished the five-page compilation, he snapped the file closed and slid it back to me, nodding again as he said, “Well, let’s go get the signature.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
One Week Later
“Everyone seeing four in the south-east?”, I whispered.
There were no negative responses. We were together.
“Anything to add. Any new updates from support, AS?”
“Support says there is movement of approx half a dozen people between our targets’ location and the civilian area half a click north. Ground intel was unable to ID anyone positively.”
“Is there any more detail forthcoming in the next…” – I glanced at the digital clock in my HUD – “…four to six minutes?”
There was a pause, then AS said, “No.”
I looked around. We were on terrace-farmed hills, at the point of closest concealment. Even though there was a chance that the terrorists were farther up than my estimated two levels above where we crouched, I thought that unlikely, given the distance they were from us and the average width of the terraces. What if the group of people approaching them were more terrorists? There was a lot of noise coming from the edge of civilization that lay on the other side. A wedding, maybe.
I exhaled slowly. Time ticked away. I felt I should raise a question, and throw it out to the team. I heard myself repeat, “Anything to add?”
There were no positive responses. We held together, silent for the moment.
I took a deep breath, blinked the sweat out of my eyes, and said, “Advance together. Climb this level, stay low till the next embankment, and regroup at the next level’s edge. 360-bio. Okay?”
I paused longer than I was used to. We were in an unexpected situation. “Go silent.”
I dragged myself over the embankment beside which we had taken cover and crawled forward on my hands and knees. Slight rustles on both my sides told me I wasn’t alone. Within ten seconds of climbing over, I scanned my HUD and saw three dots on my left side, and three on my right. Just as I was beginning to breathe in the dark, almost moonless night, I heard a ping about three feet ahead of my head. Some soil kicked up, and I said, loudly, “Back to cover! Location compromised!”
We scrambled backwards until I slid feet first, face down, over the edge I had cleared not half a minute ago. More sniper fire thudded into the field above us in the darkness. These people were not taking chances – they had opened fire, which meant there was something big enough that they could not risk getting captured. That meant we had to capture them, or die trying.
I counted my fellow dots again. It was a huge relief that all of them were spaced a few feet apart from each other at the previous level. I tried to calm myself down silently.
“Check in, one.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
“Four.”
“Five.”
“Six.”
“Seven, over.”
I blinked away more salty sweat. This was the first real, live enemy fire we had encountered.
I wondered how the others felt. I imagined enemy scopes scanning the edge over our heads, waiting for a helmet to show, waiting for a movement giving away our position…best to ask, I thought. “Everyone, any ideas?”
“What does support say?” said PS. AS flicked a switch on his helmet; there was a snick in our earpieces and we started to listen in the middle of a sentence as, apparently, it was being read to AS. “…position, hostile action confirmed, repeat, our forces engaged with your targets. Maintain position, hostile action confirmed. Extraction plan is being worked out, two to five minutes. Standby on the open channel, confirm your status.”
AS said to support, “We are in safe cover, under sniper fire, awaiting orders, over.”
Support was always-on only in AS’ comm. It made it easier for us to plan our activities on the go, while AS coordinated the updates from them. After our first mission, we had just listened through the entire transcript of our headset conversations and jotted our signatures. Just for the record.
“So it was our backup that was coming in,” SC sighed with relief.
“Who do you think they ran up against? Para?”
“Could be anyone, this area is heavy-patrol anyway. I was surprised they were letting us come in this close,” said HS.
“Yeah, but think about this – if these – our targets, I mean – guys were waiting for their backup or support or whatever, wouldn’t they be looking with their backs towards us? How’d they see us?” said SK, almost done assembling a periscope.
“Yeah…but we knew they had good grade weapons, sniper rifles come with all sorts of scopes and scanners these days. Are you done with that, dude?” asked HS, and SK confirmed. He extended the retractable camera to its full height of over eight feet, and worked for a minute or two in finding a fix on our target site. There were definite echoes of gunfire now, coming from the other side of the targets. SK pressed a very final-sounding button on the periscope, and handed it to HS.
The best part about this particular specialty equipment was that once you locked a sight within its sights, so to speak, you could move it within a thirty feet sphere from that point, and it automatically oriented its compound lenses to give you a good view of the locked sight.
We took turns to look at the window from where their sniper had fired on us; it was empty. Movement could be seen inside the room to which the window belonged, however – frantic, life-depends-on-every-move movement. They were either making preparations for a final stand or making ready to bolt like the filthy bilge rats they were.
AS spoke, “Support says that our out-and-out attack party has managed to make it to within about a hundred meters of the front door of our target. If they reach it, there will be a siege, and our target is seemingly prepared for one. We – “ he paused to listen to the support team, then flicked the channel for all of us to hear again.
“Okay. We’re all on.”
I was surprised to hear QD’s voice.
“Helllo, my friends. Are all of you okay?”
“Yes, QD, thanks. What’s the plan?”
“Well, if it weren’t for the terrain, we would’ve droned them, now that there is out-and-out exchange of fire and we have the recording of them firing the first shot at us. However, that easy, painless option has been ruled out by the high command. I must ask – does your team have explosives?”
“Uh, yes, sir, yes we have.”
“Well, then, they can’t have a siege if they don’t have a fort, now, can they?”
“Understood. Please ask our support teams to coordinate extraction as per our actions.”
“We are on it, and tracking all of you minutely.”
Another sound of ‘snick’ in my headset told me it was just us seven again.
“Okay, you heard him. We gotta blow their fort to bits without getting our heads blown open like watermelons. Ideas?”
“We can cut a little to the left from here, keeping an eye on that window. The hill has a drop into the next one, we can advance up that crevice to within fifty meters of the target,” said PS.
“Once we get a look at the front side of the location and have all of them on our scanners, we can be more decisive,” said QY.
I nodded, and said, “Sounds good, dude. Everyone, let’s go, no silence needed on this one.”
We moved off along the embankment in single file. After five minutes of duck-walking, we reached the eight- to ten-foot drop in between the hills. Two minutes later, we were making our way up the ravine. A trickle of rain water ran below the rocks under our feet. The sounds of gunfire got closer. We kept on moving towards the battle.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Brief Flashback of a Memory From Six Months Ago
“Well, these are our primary weapons. Let’s test them out. We can’t use HK420 types, obviously.”
“No, of course not, that would make us as subtly moralistic as the criminal animals we are after.”
We had a good, long laugh at that. Our weaponry was not lethal, but it came close. Testing the guns, we found that they were better than anything we had imagined possible to make in India. There were no manufacturer’s markings. It was awesomax.
There were many missions in the days to come, but camaraderie came first and foremost.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Present Day
I didn’t really like the person in whose car I was currently occupying the back seat. I couldn’t tell if he liked me. His wraparound shades and heavy beard made it difficult to read his face. In the three-four minutes since I had been dropped off by the team at this man’s pre-occupied parking spot, he had only nodded in acknowledgement of the crude pass phrase. To be fair, I think he thought the same about my wraparound shades and heavy beard in his rear view mirror.
Suddenly, I caught a jerky movement out of the corner of my eye and instinctively made to reach for my side arm, but it was only him pointing out our target to me with a flick of his fat finger.
At the same time, AS’ voice sounded in my ear, confirming target sighting.
“Yup, that’s him, sitting right there.” So all our info was spot on, again. Good, good.
The best kind of missions were those founded on a solid bedrock of non-conflicting intel.
I looked around like a tourist and recognised our target, and got out of the car. Later, we went over the plan the final time while gearing up with whatever minimal gear we were taking, and set out. We parked at the predetermined spot, headed for the building, and split up 2-2-2-1.
The three of us in the lead team were ushered into a plush office which belonged to the target himself, having made prior appointments. As is usual with bureaucrats who have a penchant for bribery, it was a matter of just one bout of heavy drinking that we persuaded him to “enjoy” an evening about town with us, and we left the office in good spirits. He waved his staff driver away.
An hour later, all of us were back at our base. Our next unmarked, untraceable vehicle had arrived and was already idling, raring to go. Its driver was the recipient of the only call we made that entire day, with that SIM card destroyed once the plan was confirmed. It was a breeze when it went smooth. The only thing that remained was to cover the couple of thousand miles to our destination – without losing anyone on the way home.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The story stopped. It ended, but unfinished. Lex pondered mortality and morality. Why had those seven humans placed themselves in jeopardy, in mortal danger, voluntarily? Was it their loyalty to their country? Was it a pursuit of immortality in some form? How opposite words could mean if just one letter was missing, he thought. Immortality and immorality could easily be two facets of the same coin. Would it be immoral to try and become immortal? Was it even possible for biological beings to avoid death? As his searches showed him, it was not from lack of trying.
He did not know what death was. The closest thing to death that his brief experience of thinking had shown him was the slight stasis he had been in since ensconcing himself in the place of the android he had jettisoned from Selina’s spacecraft when it was getting ready to take off on Moon. He was usually shut down before transport, so this was the first time he thought about it.
Selina moved back into her spaceship and oversaw the procedures for deorbiting towards Earth. Both squads worked together to clear a corridor for her ship to land at Mount Kilimanjaro.
The spaceport at Kilimanjaro had been developed when snow had stopped falling on it circa 40 ACE due to global warming. In a show of solidarity, humankind banded together to stop further damage to fragile ecosystems and put aside petty differences to utilize technology to the max.
The unpredictability of the future on a galactic timeline makes it important to act in the present. Even in a miniscule time frame of 6 hours, things can go from calm to chaotic. Nature, by its very nature, is prone to digress, just like the human mind. Humankind has learnt from past patterns to expect local and global nature to act along predictable paths, but now and then, it just carves a new way. Hence, humans learn from their experience, both at an individual and societal level, try to keep calm, and carry on living their lives. There is not much else we can do.
Selina kept vigilance as the mostly automated deorbit burn happened. Earth and Moon squads squawked her gravity glide plan, laid in the course for her ship’s computer to follow, and waved.
She waved back & settled in mentally for the next two days of quiet solitude. Or so she thought.
