Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (16 page)

The man who appeared at the end of the corridor was short, balding and dressed in chino shorts and a breathtakingly ugly Hawaiian shirt. He was frowning through his bifocals at the tablet in his hand, but when he noticed me he didn’t just give me the once over and carry on. He stopped in his tracks and his frown intensified to a scowl.

“Who are you?” he challenged. His accent was Russian, Eastern European, something like that, thickly guttural.

“It’s all right.” I flourished the swipe card, again cunningly obscuring the photo with my thumb. “I’m allowed to be here. Clearance Level Beta.”

“That isn’t what I asked, my friend,” said the man, whom I’m going to call the Professor for the time being. “I have asked who you were, and I am asking it again. Name?”

“Uhh...”

Here’s a handy tip. When someone – particularly someone who belongs somewhere where you don’t – demands to know your name, the most useful response is not “Uhh...” You’d be far better off giving your actual name, or failing that a made-up one, and straight away, soon as you’re invited to. “Uhh...” would suggest you’re having to think about your answer, which in turn would suggest you’re trying to avoid the truth or fabricate a lie. That, then, arouses suspicion.

“Let me see this,” the Professor said brusquely, and before I could pocket the swipe card or, I don’t know, swallow it or something, he had snatched it from my grasp and was squinting at it. “You are not Aanandi.”

“Um, no. No, I’m not.”

“So what the hell are you doing here, with her swipe card?”

“That’s a very good question,” I said, “and the explanation is –”

And I turned tail and started running.

The Professor was an oldish geezer, didn’t look to be in great shape, potbellied from too many hours sitting on his backside fiddling with his test tubes. I didn’t think he was going to give chase, and I was right.

He didn’t have to. A couple of taps on his tablet interface, and an alarm started to
whoop-whoop
.

He also didn’t have to give chase because he still had my, or rather Aanandi’s, swipe card. I charged up to the nearest door back to the third ring, and couldn’t open it for the simple reason that I had nothing to insert into the relevant slot. You needed a swipe card to travel both ways through the complex, outwards as well as inwards.

To summarise: I was buggered. Without the swipe card there was no hope of escape.

Or was there?

I gatecrashed into a lab, an unoccupied one on the edge of the ring. The alarm continued
whoop-whoop
ing, a discreet but insistent sound, loud enough to raise a commotion in this building but not be audible beyond. I scrambled over to the windows and fumbled with the catch on the nearest of them. Just as I got it undone, the Professor appeared in the doorway, accompanied by two security officers.

“That is him!” the Professor yelled. He jabbed a finger at me, quite unnecessarily seeing as I was the only other person present and there was no one else he could be referring to. “Improper clearance. No right being here. Not one of my assistants. I have never seen him before in my life.”

I thrust the window open as far as it would go, which was about forty-five degrees, and stuck a leg out. Straddling the sill, I began squeezing myself through the gap. The security guys were dashing towards me.

Have I said that I was on one of the upper storeys? Perhaps I should have mentioned it. At the time, I myself had forgotten. I wasn’t thinking straight. I just wanted to be out of there.

I swung my other leg over the sill, and then, guess what?

I fell.

Quite a long way.

Onto quite a hard surface.

Knocking myself unconscious for quite a while.

I know, right?

¹
Things like cell lysis homogenisers, spectrophotometers and gel electrophoresis analysers. I can reel off the names. Just don’t ask me what any of them’s actually
for
.

19. AN ELEVENTH MAN

I
CAN MAKE
light of it now, but it was a drop of some twenty feet, and my fall was broken by a shrubbery of strelitzia, but not so much by the flowering plants themselves as by the stone surround of the raised bed they were planted in. I felt a tremendous thwacking
crack
at the back of my head, and that was it. Lights out.

The first sound I heard when coming to was voices. They were talking low and urgently. About me.

“Cut him loose,” said one. “Pay him off, let him go, make sure he doesn’t forget about the gagging clauses in his contract. That’s my first instinct. But failing that... We
have
been talking about expanding the line.”

“Agreed,” said a second voice. “Let’s make him the offer. He’s a suitable candidate, maybe even the ideal one, and he’s right here under our noses. It’d save us having to search for anyone else.”

“Or c) none of the above,” said a third. “He’s been a nuisance, and nuisances are like dog shit. They need to be bagged and binned.”

The last was Lombard speaking. The other voices were Bhatnagar and Krieger.

I prised open my eyes. Pain was spiking through my skull, but it was someone else’s pain, someone else’s skull. Everything seemed fuzzy and glowy. I was ripped to the tits on some kind of wonderful medical-grade analgesic, and it took me some time to grasp that I was lying on a bed and not simply hovering in midair. It took me a little longer to register that the room I was in was a hospital-style single occupancy ward, a sickbay somewhere in the second ring.

The Trinity’s voices faded in and out of intelligibility. At some point they became aware that I was awake. They peered over me, their heads like balloons, wafting and bobbing.

“Zak,” said Lombard. “Zak, Zak, Zakko. Three words: what the fuck?”

“Uh, I, uh...”

“Pinching Aanandi’s card. Breaking in. Poking around. Strewth, what was going through that pinhead brain of yours, mate?”

“I, ummm...”

“We have security systems for a reason. Some things are classified because they’re not safe for any old drongo to know. Why couldn’t you be content with what you had? Why’d you have to go snooping? What is
wrong
with you?”

“Er, you... I...”

Articulacy wasn’t going to be possible right then. I had to accept that. The drugs were doing a fantastic job of keeping pain at bay, but they’d shrunk the language centre of my brain to the size of an amoeba.

I had no choice but to let Lombard rant on. He was halfway between angry and despairing, like my mother that time when I was seventeen and borrowed her car to drive to a convention in Birmingham where the great Frank Miller was guest of honour.
¹
Lombard used more swearing than my mother had, but otherwise it was little different. More had been expected of me. I should have been better than this. I should have thought twice.

Once he was done chewing me out – and I was so away with the fairies, it made little impact – Bhatnagar stepped in. He struck a more conciliatory note, but in essence he was telling me I was finished at Mount Meru. I had crossed a line. Breached a trust.

“We should be giving you your marching orders,” he said. “Unless...”

He moved aside to make way for Krieger.

“My colleagues both have a point,” said the Texan. “That was an asshole move, Zak. Truly. You’re lucky we don’t take legal action, sue you for industrial espionage or anything we like. We can have you in jail so fast, you’ll be bending down in the shower to pick up the soap before you even realise where you are. But we don’t want to do that. We wouldn’t be in this room, we wouldn’t be troubling ourselves to talk with you, if we didn’t have something else in mind.”

However pharmacologically stupefied I might have been, I could tell that what was coming next was important. I strained to pay every bit of attention to Krieger’s words.

“You see, the Dashavatara took a hit yesterday in LA,” he said. “Kalkin’s going to be fine. That’s the good news. The bad is that it’s shown they’re vulnerable – more so than we anticipated. We foresaw the odd injury, but with Kalkin it was touch and go. The docs here struggled. We came
this
close to losing the guy. And it’s too soon, way too soon in the show, for us to be a man down. Ten can’t become Nine. It won’t look good. It won’t play well.”

“Superheroes have to last,” Bhatnagar chimed in. “They can take their licks but they have to persevere. It’s part of the paradigm.”

I would have nodded but was afraid of what this might do to my head, which felt as fragile as an eggshell, so instead I grunted in agreement. It was true – indomitability was a crucial ingredient in the superhero recipe. Superheroes could be hurt, they could appear to die, they could even genuinely die, but they always had to come back, to keep slugging, to conquer the foe. That was what made them better than us and worthy of our adoration; not their powers per se, but the dogged, unflagging dedication with which they used them.

“What we need,” said Krieger, “is backup. A reserve member. Someone we can trot out should the worst happen.”

“A twelfth man, like in cricket,” said Bhatnagar. “Only in this case, an eleventh.”

“Me, I’m not in favour of the idea,” Lombard grumbled. “Tampering with the original concept – it doesn’t sit well with me. The Ten are ten because the mythology says there are ten of them. We start screwing around with that, who knows where it’ll end up?”

“But the mythology is quite explicit,” Bhatnagar insisted to his colleague. “There is room for an eleventh. I explained this to you. Rama is well known for having –”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Krieger, butting in. “Zak doesn’t have to know everything just yet.”

“Sure, no, not everything,” I slurred. “’S cool.”

“We reckon you may have the right credentials, Zak,” said Bhatnagar. “We’ve been at pains to match each selectee to the Avatar he becomes. Parashurama is an ex-soldier. Krishna, a cowherd in the Vedic tradition, was an actual cowherd before theogenesis. Kurma – a speleologist, resilient, unafraid of confinement and tight spaces. Kalkin – once a professional equestrian. We call it ‘vocational determinism.’ Type reflects type. It makes the change from base state to Avatar smoother and more...
organic
, for want of a better word. More logical. An evolution rather than a metamorphosis.”

“Your profession, your background, your interests, should suit you well to being the deva we have in mind,” said Krieger.

“Hold on,” I said, but it came out as “hol’ ah.” Meaningless.

“I still disapprove,” said Lombard, adding with a disgruntled sigh, “But the other two are keen, so what can I do? The Trinity’s a fucking democracy, worse luck.”

“When you’re a little more compos mentis, Zak, perhaps we’ll talk again,” said Bhatnagar. “We just wanted to, as it were, plant the seed.”

They departed. I tried to urge them to stay and explain further, but it was no use. I even raised a hand to grab Bhatnagar’s arm, or thought I did, but the hand seemed to go nowhere. I looked at it and saw that it was attached by a cannula to an intravenous drip – as good as a shackle.

Time passed, and I dozed fitfully, and between dozes I wondered whether the Trinity had even been here. Could be I had dreamed their visit.

Medical staff came in at intervals to check on me, examine me for signs of concussion, feed me. I had a call button so that every time the pain started to swell I could summon someone to adjust the IV’s delivery of blessed relief and send me back to doped-up la-la-land.

One morning, after a couple of days of this, I awoke to find Aanandi at my bedside. I was feeling less groggy than before. The splitting headache was more or less gone, and with it the need for the analgesic.

“Hi,” I said.

She smiled in greeting, but I can’t say she looked happy.

“So,” she said, “an upper-storey window. Genius.”

“I panicked.”

“They were worried you might have given yourself a subdural haematoma.”

“I hit my head. No vital organs there.”

“I’ll say. Because only a brainless moron would have used my swipe card.
My
swipe card.”