Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (32 page)

Knuckleduster Ring and Hillbilly Moustache had semiautomatic pistols pressed to the backs of Krishna’s and Buddha’s heads. Diamond Tooth had just finished fastening a ball gag over Buddha’s mouth to prevent him speaking. He gave a signal to the other three, and all four of them plucked foam earplugs from their ears.

The Trinity did likewise.

Rama nocked an arrow.

“Come now, Archer,” said Lombard. “There’s no call for that. We’re all friends here still, despite what you might think. Besides, you could kill one of us, maybe two, but not before Krishna or Buddha gets a radical brainectomy. You’re fast but not that fast, and the four gents you see here are hardcore security professionals. Not like the rent-a-cops at Meru. This lot have black belts in not giving a shit about their personal safety or anyone else’s. True, fellas? You aren’t scared of dying, long as you get to take somebody with you.”

The four goons didn’t even crack a smile. That was how seriously they took the business of being badass.

“Pains me to say it, as a good Aussie,” Lombard went on, “but if you want serious shitkicking troppos on your payroll, go British. Ex-British special forces, to be precise. Costs a buck or two, but worth every cent. And no, Narasimha. Uh-uh-uh!” He wagged at finger at the Man-lion, who had crawled back to his feet and was sizing up the distance between him and the Trinity. “I’m watching you. Same goes for you as for Rama. You try anything, and at least one of your Avatar pals is toast. Got that? You don’t want to go losing another teammate, not so soon after poor old Varaha shuffled off his mortal dingdong.”

“We haven’t come for a fight,” said Parashurama. “We’ve only come for answers.”

“Yeah, we reckoned as much,” drawled Krieger. “But you can’t blame us for seizing the initiative, can you?”

“How did you know we were coming?” I asked.

“How do you think?” said Lombard. “What, you reckon you can just scoot around in the
Garuda
– an aircraft
we
built – and we wouldn’t know where you were? You must think we came down with the last shower. We’ve got a GPS transponder on that thing locked tight, beaming us a signal constantly.” He tapped his temple. “Pays to keep an eye on your assets at all times.”

“Takshaka’s ambush was just a diversion,” said Bhatnagar, “so that our men could get into position to neutralise the most vulnerable and most dangerous of you – Buddha. If we’re going to talk with you, we want it to be on our terms, without Buddha compelling us to agree to your demands.”

“The playing field is levelled,” said Lombard. “We have hostages and guaranteed command of our own free will. And that, my friends, is how you negotiate. In any business deal, you always make sure you’re holding the aces so the other blokes can’t have a lend of you. Doesn’t matter how powerful they are, long as the upper hand’s yours, you can’t lose. Devas, corporations – it’s all the same. It all comes down to leverage.”

“Then as equals,” said Parashurama, laying down his axe carefully and deliberately, “on a level playing field, let’s talk.”

¹
Come on, you get the reference, even if you’re not an X-Men fan. Fastball special? Wolverine? Colossus? Oh, never mind. Suit yourself.

37. DESCENT

T
HE FUNICULAR ELEVATOR
sank at a ponderous pace into the bowels of the earth, thrumming and trembling as it went.

It was Lombard’s idea to conduct discussions underground, out of the sun. “Outback heat’ll fry the arse off you. More civilised to talk in the shade, and you’ll be surprised how nice and cosy we’ve made things down below.”

Riding on the elevator’s platform were the Trinity Syndicate, the four goons, Buddha, Parashurama, Kalkin, Rama and me. The other devas remained at the pithead, in the mouth of the mine. If we didn’t return in an hour, they were primed to come down and raise merry hell.

Buddha was still being held at gunpoint, and still gagged. I was certain we could have freed him at any time and disposed of the four goons, but it suited our purposes to play along for now. The Trinity must have realised this. We were giving them the benefit of the doubt, pretending that they were setting the terms of the truce even though they, and we, were well aware who outgunned whom. Call it courtesy. Without the Trinity, after all, we wouldn’t have had the siddhis in the first place. As a wise man once said, with great power comes great responsibility. Not to mention great self-restraint.

“Here’s how it is,” Lombard said. “You blokes are showroom models. You’ll have figured that out by now. You’re the poster boys for theogenesis. No shame in that. And we’re damn proud of you. Isn’t that so, fellas?”

Krieger and Bhatnagar nodded in assent.

“Look at you,” the Australian went on. “Look at what you’ve done. Look how you
look
. You’re just about perfect. We couldn’t have asked for better.”

“Stow the flattery,” said Parashurama. “We’re not in the mood.”

“Right you are. But I thought you ought to know, you shouldn’t feel as though you’ve been used, as though you’ve been exploited somehow. We were going to come clean with you soon enough. Eventually. When the time was right. Which is sort of now. So there’s been a little economy with the truth, a little finessing of the facts. So what? No one minds really. Goes on all the time in business. You pretty much expect it. Nothing would ever get bought or sold if people were completely honest with one another. Guile oils the wheels of commerce.”

“
Bien sûr
, but this is not commerce,” said Rama. “This is us. Our bodies. Our identities. Our lives.”

“Don’t be so sensitive, mate. It’s all commerce. Everything is commerce. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded.”

“I pity you.”

“Yeah, thanks for that, snail eater. Your condescending opinion means a great deal to me.”

Rama’s hand twitched towards his bow, or rather towards where his bow would have been, slung over his shoulder, if he hadn’t left it up top. We had agreed to accompany the Trinity down minus any of our weapons – not that we were exactly harmless without them, but it made the Trinity feel that little bit safer and marginally evened the odds.

“So you lot are just the start of something,” Lombard said. “Our showreel. Thanks to you and your asura-bashing exploits, we have the attention of the world – and especially of the governments of the world. It’s fair to say that Epic News and my other media outlets have helped raise your profile and heighten brand awareness, but that wouldn’t have happened without you guys out there strutting your stuff, corralling and conquering demons, and doing it with such style and panache too.”

Still we descended, deeper and deeper. Wall-mounted service lights slid past at five-metre intervals, casting complex, gyrating shadows.

“Then came Kashmir. That was the decider, the acid test. Our Avatars could handle spooky, snarling nasties from the pages of the Vedas, but what about troops on the battlefield? Tanks? Guns? How would they acquit themselves in a more practical, mundane situation like that?”

“The kind of situation,” Krieger chimed in, “that nations have to face as a matter of course. War is a fact of life, and governments are constantly on the lookout for a military advantage over their enemies, anything that’ll give them strategic dominance.”

“Do you have any idea what the yearly worldwide spend on armaments is?” said Bhatnagar. “Even I don’t, and I should. It’s in the trillions. The American military alone has an annual budget of six hundred and eighty billion dollars. Defence is any country’s single greatest expenditure. It’s a big juicy pie, and who doesn’t want a slice?”

“You proved yourselves equal to anything the Pakistanis could throw at you, and they’re no slouches,” said Lombard. “You demonstrated that devas could swing the pendulum in a conflict.”

“So next on the agenda,” said Krieger, “has been making sure every government on the planet is brought in on the picture. Knows what you devas actually are and where you came from.”

“I’ve begun making overtures,” said Bhatnagar. “Calling up all my defence department contacts, and they’re extensive. Clueing them up. Telling them who deserves the credit for you, who created you. Most of them knew already, or had an inkling. Keeping anything a complete secret is so very hard these days. The reaction, so far, has been overwhelmingly positive.”

“Phone’s been ringing off the ruddy hook, to be frank,” said Lombard. “Word’s spreading fast. Everyone wants what we’ve got, from tinpot dictator to Pentagon grand high mucky-muck. Everyone’s after a piece.”

“A piece... of us?” said Kalkin. “You’re proposing to hire the Dashavatara out. Sell us to the highest bidder. India was just your first client.”

“No,” said Parashurama, shaking his head in dawning realisation. “That isn’t it, is it? Not us. What you’re selling is the ability to make more like us. The theogenesis process itself.”

“Bingo.” Lombard touched his nose. “The Warrior has nailed it in one. Brains
and
brawn, this kid.”

“We can’t keep sending you people off to fight,” said Krieger. “It was hard enough convincing you to go into Kashmir. You’re not some rental car we can just lease out again and again.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “Here was I thinking you were treating us like a commodity or something.”

“No,” said the Texan, missing my irony, probably on purpose. “We’re conscious that you have an altruistic streak, most of you. We selected you originally for theogenesis because each of you has, to some extent, a desire to do the right thing, to be better than average, to excel and set a good example. We needed, in effect, heroes, and heroes is what we got.”

“Even with Kashmir,” said Bhatnagar, “you wouldn’t have got involved if Pakistan hadn’t launched missiles at Mount Meru. It gave you the necessary impetus. Heroes avenge.”

“Please don’t say you set that up,” said Rama.

“Hell, no,” said Krieger. “But – full disclosure – we anticipated it, or something like it, was going to happen.”

“You
knew
?” said Parashurama, teeth gritted. I daresay if he had had his axe on him, he would have brandished it then, maybe even used it. As it was, barehanded he could still easily have knotted any one of the Trinity into a human pretzel, and looked ready to.

In response, Diamond Tooth ground his pistol harder into the back of Buddha’s neck. The other three goons also had handguns and were training them on us from the corners of the elevator platform. At any moment it seemed violence might erupt and bullets fly. We would undoubtedly win the altercation, but we might not all survive it.

Parashurama weighed up the pros and cons, and softened his stance.

“You knew,” he said again, this time not a question.

“We anticipated,” Krieger stressed. “The way the Pakistanis had been hassling us, their policy towards us, it was coming. It was all but inevitable. They wanted to draw us out. We let them.”

“They could have killed us all. Everyone on Meru.”

“Possible, but unlikely,” said Lombard. “That would never stand up in the court of international opinion, a massacre like that, wiping out the entire island. A calculated level of antagonism, on the other hand...”

“A huge gamble nonetheless.”

The Australian shrugged. “Life is risk. It’s a risk when I have that extra egg for brekkie, that extra tinnie of lager at sundown. Will this be the one that gives me the heart attack? The one that rots a final, fatal hole in my liver? You roll the dice and, if you’re lucky, it pays off and you can roll again.”

“But the war is about to go nuclear. That’s a risk you didn’t take into account.”

“Ah, it’ll never happen,” said Lombard, with a breezily dismissive wave. “They’ve been there before, those two, butting heads. One or other of them will back down. It’s always the way.”

“Not this time, I think. And they wouldn’t be at the brink if it hadn’t been for us ‘biological weapons.’ Us siding with India has turned a conventional conflict into something potentially far worse.”

“Don’t take it to heart,” said Krieger. “This was always going to be a tricky moment, geopolitically speaking. Suddenly there’s a new breed of human on the block, men like gods, soldiers equivalent to a whole platoon each. It was bound to cause some destabilisation, a bit of friction. Temporary, I’m sure.”