The Inhuman Peace Read online

  One of them made a faux lunge at him, looking to startle him perhaps, but he stared at them until they felt uncomfortable and turned away, sneering. Basic challenge dynamics: escalate or lose.

  And what did he have to lose? Twenty years of service to Her Majesty and this was what it came down to: walking through a city he had helped suppress, haunting the one coffee shop that would take his money. Staring daggers at teenagers who knew no better, who were just as lost as he was, trapped in a grey world with no beginning and no end.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ he said to no one in particular.

  Drake’s package, as always, had been precise. Duty assessment and physical at Musgrave Park Hospital, Belfast, just a little bit North from where he was. Straight to London afterwards. Musgrave was one of the best orthopaedic outfits in the Commonwealth, and also one of the best rehab centres. He hoped he didn’t need rehab.

  He was met at the gates of Musgrave, given a few respectful salutes – the men still knew his name here. He couldn’t hear the whispers trailing him past the gate, but he knew they were about him. Eliott Grimme. India, Hong Kong, Africa. The Grimme Reaper: the soldier who swapped the gun for the pen and had more blood on both than most would ever see in their lifetimes.

  He was escorted to the assessment unit, which was huddled up in the far corner of the Musgrave grounds like an interloper. There was a barrage of tests. Psychometric profiling in a cold, sterile chamber where lights gleamed like dead neon eyes. Cleared fit for duty. The neural safeguards were still in place.

  ‘Nobody wants the Reaper on the loose, eh?’ he said to the machine attached to him.

  ‘Just routine checks, sir,’ said a disembodied voice. ‘We’ve had problems with your line, you know, just some reinforcement algorithms. Now, this won’t take a second …’

  Then he was ushered to Withers Ward, where the bone surgeons plied their trade. The buildings loomed in the fog, warm lights adding slight haloes to the white columns – a calculated effect, he was sure.

  ‘I haven’t seen a Mark-III skeleton in years,’ said the surgeon, who looked too young. Like everyone else. ‘Now these were real combat frames. How long have you had it for, sir?’

  ‘It’s in my file,’ said Grimme.

  ‘I like to ask questions,’ said the surgeon mournfully. ‘It’s boring when you know everything.’

  Grimme disagreed. Ever been dropped into a hot zone with no intel, Doctor? Ever walked in expecting a few villagers with pitchforks and heard that bone-chilling scream ‘Aayo Gurkhaliii!’ echoing through the mountaintops just before the bullets begin and men shed red blossoms of death?

  But then the drugs began taking effect and the memories became fuzzy. ‘I’m reading a lot of damage on the skeleton, sir,’ said the young surgeon from a distance. He sounded disappointed. ‘Lots of bullet scarring, a few cracks in the outer layers.’

  ‘Leave the skeleton,’ he managed to slur before he went under. It had served him well. The Mark-IIIs had been built for bullets. You don’t throw away a good tool.

  When he woke up, there was with a little more oxygen in the lungs and a little more fibre muscle all over. The skeleton was activated, cleared for duty. He didn’t complain.

  ‘Take you a day or two to get used to the weight,’ said the young surgeon. ‘Fill in the form on the way out, sir.’

  He shook his head, knowing it would take him much longer. It always did.

  And onwards, to the last port of call, to a location no map would divulge and no Interitus would see. A man and a woman met him there. The man was large and well dressed, wearing the clothes of a public servant, though an infinitely superior one. His suit was an unassuming black, but the cut and the silver-grey shirt underneath spoke of the finest tailors England could offer. He leaned on a silver cane.

  The woman wore the colours of steel, with her Majesty’s Rose – white, black and red – pinning a red cloak that hung around her like a shield. Occasionally, the wind would blow and the cloak would shift ever so slightly to show the metal underneath. She carried a long, ancient rifle that might have been ceremonial, but looked like it could still put a bullet through anyone who assumed otherwise.

  Behind her loomed a wall, so vast and pitted and scarred that it looked like someone had stolen a chunk of the moon and planted it there in the gloom.

  ‘Grimme,’ said the man.

  ‘Drake,’ said the Reaper. ‘You’re not the original, are you?’

  The grey sky swirled and peered at them.

  ‘My … original wanted to retire,’ said the cloned Drake, public servant. ‘Takes a toll, you know, this business of empire.’

  ‘No rest for the wicked, eh?’

  ‘You have the message?’

  Eliott offered the message to the woman. It pulsed a soft white as soon as her fingers touched it. She unlocked her visor, read the message with inscrutable eyes and eventually nodded to the soldiers above. A subtle tension left the air. Snipers powered down, auto-defenses lost interest in Eliott and two vertical lines appeared in the scarred wall behind her, the section between them slowly sinking into the ground. She turned and appraised Eliott with lenses that had long since given up all pretenses of being human eyes.

  ‘Drake,’ she said. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Don’t we all,’ muttered Drake. ‘Grimme, shall we?’

  ‘Does it have to be this way? Can’t I take a bloody airship or something?’

  ‘The edict will not be argued around,’ said the woman, stiffly. ‘You travel in pieces, sir, or not at all. The auto-surgeons will reassemble you. Should you renege, one of mine will come for your head.’

  The edict of Hong Kong, that bloody legacy.

  Eliott Grimme sighed. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Just make sure there’s enough painkillers on the other end.’

  FIVE

  On the other end sat Nigel Penhaligon, Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. He was well over a decade older than when he had first set foot in Kandy as its first chief of police.

  Many things had changed since then. Governors had come and gone. Very few had lasted or managed to escape Ceylon alive. Ceylon, after all, was bit of a conflict zone, and the situation with the Chinese had to be handled carefully. And someone watching from the outside would have noted, with an increasing degree of sarcasm, that it was such a blessing that Penhaligon had existed in these turbulent times, maintaining order despite the ever-increasing burdens of his post, forced to pick up one institution after another to keep the government from failing. Surely it would not be too much of an irregularity if the charter lapsed here and there and the oddly religious post of ‘Chief Inquisitor’ became necessary, nay, critical, even more so than the Governor. Surely Penhaligon could be given some leeway to have his best men and women modified, because the job did have its dangers after all.

  Surely even the stodgy bureaucracy that had put Penhaligon there would have noticed him becoming a superpower in his own right.

  But men do not become powerful without first being able to assume control over the narrative around them, and Nigel Penhaligon had most quarters convinced that he was, in fact, the perfect man for the job. Most.

  And thus the most powerful man in Ceylon sat there, supremely confident in his fiefdom. Time had made him paler and turned his suit into a sarong and a shirt, a combination that he normally wouldn’t be seen in, but it was damn hot these days and sacrifices had to be made.

  He sipped his cooling tea, staring through the window at the crumpled mess of a man that the doctors had dumped on the operating table. His subordinates came to him with news several times, but each time he shooed them away, distracted. His eye fell on the fine blue streaks of the porcelain cup in his hands, now empty, and he spent what felt like many years thinking about how fragile it was, how hard to make, how easily broken.

  ‘That’s the leader?’ asked someone behind him, staring at the body being assembled before them.

  Penhaligon turned. B
ailey, the youngest of the novices.

  ‘No,’ said Penhaligon. He thought about sending the boy away, like all the others, but why not let him watch? He might learn a thing or two. He gestured to a seat next to him.

  ‘He doesn’t look like anything special.’

  ‘That’s because he’s not,’ said Penhaligon. ‘He’s a decoy. Damned terrorists never show their face,’ said Penhaligon. ‘Look,’ he pointed to the part of the face where the surgeon was removing skin, exposing the artificial muscle, carbon-weave and metal underneath. ‘Look at that. They took the face of the man we wanted to catch and built a copy on this one.’

  But this one had armor, is what he didn’t tell the boy. Damned clever assassin, taking on the face of our mark just to get close to us. Damned expensive one, too, judging by all the bodywork. He had a feeling he recognized the subcutaneous armor: Chinese tech, hastily assembled in a local factory.

  The boy peered at the glass, brought up a display, zoomed in. ‘Huh.’

  Penhaligon watched the boy. A decade ago he would have taken some pleasure at this corruption of innocence. Now he was just tired. The Lanka Resistance Front was a dangerously annoying development. He had a sneaking suspicion that they might actually have a mole in his operation, and sorting out this whole robot episode had been a chore and a half. And the heat was the straw that broke the camel’s back. There was only so much enthusiasm left.

  The intern looked nervous. ‘Sir, is it true what they say?’

  ‘What do they say, boy?’

  ‘That he, uh, the Reaper’s coming. Here.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Nigel Penhaligon. ‘It’ll be quite the party.’

  He turned back to the twitching body, remembering it all – Pestilence, War, the Reaper. Charlotte Plague, built to bring down the IRA. Biological warfare packed into a thing that walked like a woman, talked like a woman, but would never be touched by the diseases humanity could suffer. Gregory Mars, sent to India to quell the Gurkha Rebellion. Both, after months of massacring the enemy wholesale, switching sides, cutting devastating lines into British troops before the Tin Soldiers finally took them out. And Eliott Grimme – the Reaper, the last of the lot, the most faithful, the one who cleaned up both the IRA and the Gurkha messes – ordered to Hong Kong and condemned for taking the only course of action that would have actually worked. The Order’s greatest triumph and its greatest failure, all in three bodies that twitched and bled, but could never really die.

  He thought about the long chase, both man and machine exhausted by the end of it, and that terrible final battle – all those years on the shores of Goa. Grimme, obsolete and wounded, under fire by an entire platoon, and still charging, still charging …

  The surgeon was cutting the armor now, his fingers carving fireflies in the air. The body twitched like a puppet having its strings cut.

  ‘Ah. Sir,’ said the boy. ‘The meeting, it’s starting. Mahanayake wants to know if you’ll be there.’

  Penhaligon gave him the empty cup. ‘Waste of time. Tell Swan to fill in. Tell him to put a few people on the Zone, just in case someone tries anything funny. We’ll have the Reaper figure out how to sort this out from the lab, and everyone goes home happy. Tell Mahanayake the whole thing will be over in a month, at most. And call Hewage. Tell him we have the Reaper.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The boy saluted and sped away. Penhaligon went back to staring at the corpse on the chopping block. He had a bad feeling that things were going south, and not in a way that involved beaches.

  At least, he thought, like a man reaching for the gun under his pillow, he would have Eliott Grimme.

  SIX

  Jacob Bengali’s arrival went unnoticed by most of Kandy. Dr. Kushlani de Almeida, however, was not most of Kandy, and had stayed up precisely for this. As per custom, she checked her list of things to do after waking up and pushed the windows of her room open.

  Outside, Kandy gleamed – a city of gables laid out like a tablecloth over several hills and railway lines. It was Poya, the day of the full moon, and therefore a holy day. But the clouds were bad these days – thick and angry and choking – and so the Fake was being prepared for the night: a giant blimp that often ran election campaigns, this time reconfigured to look like the lunar surface, bathing the city in a soft white light. Every shop was shut, every supermarket and restaurant abandoned, and the temples struck back, reclaiming the darkness from the commercial neon with their prayers. Only the hotels stayed open. One, not too far from her window, ran pink and blue tracers against the clouds, sketching out the Union Jack over and over again. The lightshow crept closer to the Fake Moon until it settled right on the blimp. The British claiming yet another land as their own.

  The antique pendulum clock struck 5 a.m. The room was dark against the lit city outside, and the old furniture somehow made her feel curiously removed from what she saw outside the window, as if she was in a bubble of time in which she could hide forever.

  She made herself some tea – not the horrid perfumed English breakfast stuff, but silver tips; something clean and light to keep her head straight. Then she went down to the Post Office and called the office radiogram. The operator put her through to Hewage.

  ‘The evaluator is here,’ she said without preamble. ‘I’ve got him a room at Queen’s Court.’

  The sound of music drifted through the speaker. Violins, frantic, trumpets, a complex interplay. It was the kind of music they played for the bots.

  ‘Tchaikovsky, 1812 Overture,’ he said. She heard him typing on the other end. ‘So. Best we can do?’

  ‘And cheapest.’ Though they had probably felled a small forest to produce all the paper for the permission and visa forms. ‘I’ve a breakfast invitation with you. You’ll have to manage the rest.’

  ‘Understood,’ he said, surprising her. Then he sighed. ‘You know what happened today?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wife’s leaving, taking the kids.’

  She was at a loss for words. ‘Why?’

  ‘Word of the court case filtering down,’ he said. ‘In a stupid way. I think one of her brothers works for the Bandaranaikes. She seems to think we controlled the bots that killed all those people.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘She called me a murderer.’

  ‘If she believes that—’

  ‘She’s smart,’ he said, cutting her off. ‘If she believes it, more people will, soon. Let’s get this done. I’ll invite a few people who need to be there, a couple of journalists as well. See you in six hours.’

  Over the line, Tchaikovsky fired a cannon.

  Queen’s Court was upmarket. Kushlani deliberated over a saree, picked the black one with a dash of gold and borrowed the family car. Her father would grumble at her later, but she couldn’t just walk up to Queen’s Court. The car was smooth and electric, and she was tired. Her mind was on random access, rifling through the most useless things buried among her neurons. This combination turned the ride to Kandy into a series of impressions, half-formed – the endless traffic by the lake, crawling around a protest; an electromech policeman waving its arms futilely, whistling; a young man and a young woman furtively holding hands as they walked out of a restaurant; a score of government servants pouring in and out of the administrative quarter, a sea of white shirts and black skirts and sweat and empty wallets, too hot and too poor for avant-garde tech fashion. They blurred together, dreamlike.

  And then she was there. A wide driveway trimmed with green. An old colonial palace-mansion, renovated with smiling greeters and unsmiling Army types who checked her car for bombs and ran her blood profile ID. Inside, a different world – all marble and royal purple and soft lights; complexions became fairer, dresses shorter, jackets more pretentious.

  ‘He’s here?’

  ‘Just arrived, miss. Olive Lounge.’

  ‘Doctor,’ Kushlani corrected, attempting to be gentle about it, but it came out like a whipcrack. The hotel receptionist became even more confused than she no
doubt was on a daily basis. She almost rang up the hotel doctor before Kushlani brushed onwards, irritated. Feeling out of place in her saree, she found her way to the Olive Lounge, which was a stupid name for a room that had no hint of green in it whatsoever.

  Hewage had beaten her there, the old fart.

  ‘Ah, Kushlani. This is Dr. Bengali.’

  A dark-skinned man with a large, stooped frame darted forward. His hand was fortunately warm, his smile a bit strained. Probably travel fatigue.

  His accent was very difficult to place: English, but that slight over-perfect English from Singapore and the upper tiers of Indian and Sri Lankan society.

  ‘I was hoping to brief you, but—’

  ‘Oh, no need, no need. Mr. Hewage and I had a long chat over the basics.’ An inscrutable look passed between the two men. ‘Sit, please. Will you have some breakfast?’

  They had breakfast. Polite and professional, with Hewage speaking, snake oil salesman on full blast.

  ‘So in one month, the Big Match begins,’ said Hewage, sketching out the general scenario: at a specific time each year, every bot tribe would be driven into battle, spurred on by a training cycle carefully overseen by army men on the ground. A bloodlust among faux-children, a brutal and ugly battle painted over with scoreboards and live commentary. Entire nations would bet on which tribe would remain standing.

  ‘That’s an odd name for an annual bloodbath.’

  At the Hub, they called it ‘rebuild time’. The ‘dead’ would all be gathered, dumped on a supply train and shipped to Kandy, and for the next six months, Kushlani, along with her techs, would labour night and day to repair, rebuild or replace. The techs never watched the matches. ‘It hurts to see something you built die over and over again,’ one of them had told her on a lunch break. ‘I can’t describe it.’

  ‘Now, whoever your favorites are, a lot of them are going to die. The rest we’re going to capture, eh? This will be the last season of this particular model. We’re going to rebuild them to be safer. We’re going to rebuild our systems so we can track them better. Come January, a new version of the bots we all know and love will be in Colombo, perfectly controllable from the Hub itself, certified safe.’