Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (33 page)

The elevator was nearing the end of its long, slow slide. Bright illumination glared up from below.

“Year from now,” Krieger continued, “everyone’ll have adjusted and acclimated. There’ll be a new status quo.”

“Same occurred after the Yanks nuked the Nips at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” said Lombard. “The world was shaken for a while, but settled. People got used to the idea of an atomic age. They learned to, if not love the Bomb, at least accept it.”

“What you’re saying is we’re seeing the beginning of a new arms race,” said Kalkin.

“That’s about the long and the short of it, yes.”

“With devas in place of atom bombs.”

“Devas, asuras, gods of every stripe, not necessarily Hindu. We chose the Hindu pantheon as our starter set because... Well, Vignesh, turban-top gods was your brainwave. You explain.”

Bhatnagar met the barbed comment with a long-suffering nod. “The Hindu pantheon lent itself best to the goals of theogenesis. It met our criteria. The Dashavatara were the perfect way of showcasing what the process could do, the range of augmentations we could make, from amphibious Matsya to size-changing Vamana. There was also the sheer quantity of worship we could channel in order to provide power, thanks to the devotions of my countrymen. No other set of deities is as varied or as venerated in the modern age as the Hindus’. We considered the ancient Greek and Roman pantheons, the Egyptian gods too, but simply no one believes in them any more. Nor are they as formidably powered as devas, as intrinsically superheroic.”

“But that isn’t to say that individual nations won’t be able to draw on their own indigenous pantheons if they want to,” said Krieger. “It’s possible that theogenesis could be used to recreate members of the Shinto Kami and the Chinese Celestial Bureaucracy, for instance. There are the orishas of the Santeria tradition in South America and the voodoo loas in the Caribbean. Older civilisations like the Inuit, the First Nations of Canada and the Native Americans still cleave to their ancestral belief systems, loaded with moon gods, trickster gods and such. Go looking hard enough, you’ll find pockets of polytheism everywhere, ready to be explored and exploited.”

“And it wouldn’t be that hard to resurrect the dead religions either,” added Lombard. “Enough Mediterranean Europeans would start worshipping Jupiter or Zeus again, or whoever, if they were convinced it was for their own good. Tell them the security of the region depends on it, their own theogenised fighting force is relying on them, and you’ll see. They’ll be pouring libations and sacrificing cows like nobody’s business. It’d be as if Christianity never happened. You can count on it.”

“Is this your sales prospectus?” I said. “The pitch you’ll be using to flog your merchandise?”

“Something like,” Lombard said with an amused smile. “How governments customise and tailor our process for their own ends, that’s up to them. It isn’t our concern. All we’re after is signatures on contracts and big fat funds transfers.”

The sheer avarice in his eyes, and Krieger’s and Bhatnagar’s, was both mesmerising and repulsive. It had a slick, greasy glow to it, like the rainbow sheen of spilled petroleum.

These three cared about nothing – nothing – except their bank balances. They were already wealthy beyond most people’s dreams, and still they craved more, more, more. The world might burn, millions might die, but their pursuit of profit trumped all that. Money mattered. Anything else came a poor second.

The elevator juddered to a halt.

Everybody looked at one another across the platform. Hillbilly Moustache’s finger tightened on the trigger of his gun. Parashurama glanced at him sidelong, then at Diamond Tooth and Buddha, gauging distances, angles, timing, trajectories.

Tense seconds passed. I braced myself for action.

Then Lombard said, “Come along. Let’s give you the tour. There’s heaps to see, and more to tell.”

38. DEMON DEPOT

T
HERE WAS A
broad central corridor, a main artery with dozens of narrower side corridors branching off at right angles. Everything was brilliantly lit and decked out with polished white tiling and smoothly rendered plasterwork. You might never have known you were a couple of thousand feet below the surface of the earth, but for the slight sense of pressure in your inner ear and the muggy warmth of the atmosphere which no amount of discreetly whirring air conditioning could quite dispel.

“Power comes from a geothermal plant,” said Lombard, genial tour guide. “Cost a buck or two to put in, but it’s free electricity for life. That’s the living quarters we just passed. Humble but adequate. Down there’s our communications hub. What’d I tell you? All nice and cosy.”

He was right. It was hard to imagine these corridors as tunnels, former mine workings where men had once toiled in dense heat and dust with drill and pickaxe. The place was tidy, well appointed, and spotlessly clean. We could have been anywhere, a research installation, an office building, some high-spec corporate HQ, you name it.

Until, that was, we came to the demon depot.

A couple of code-locked, bank-vault-solid doors gave access, via an antechamber, to a room lined with cubic cells. Each cell had a thick plexiglass front, and while most were empty, a couple of dozen of them were occupied.

Asuras prowled to and fro in the confines of these prisons – nagas predominantly, here and there a rakshasa or a vetala. Hunks of raw bloody meat littered the floor at their feet, alongside the digestive end products of the meat. The smell inside the cells must have been rank, although it didn’t seem to trouble the demons.

Standing before the cells was Professor Korolev. He was carrying out some sort of inspection, tapping notes into a tablet. His shirt was sunset orange with repeating silhouettes of palm trees, cocktails and parrots.

He took in the arrival of devas, Trinity and gun-toting goons with scarcely a bat of an eyelid.

“Afternoon, gentlemen. Welcome to Yamapuri. My little joke. Is not really hell. But is home of asuras, yes, like Yamapuri.”

The surprise on the faces of us devas must have been all too apparent, because he went on to say, “What, you are thinking they are just coming magically out of nowhere, like rabbits out of hats? You fell for that story?” A mirthless chuckle. “Well, why not? Is good story. ‘Karmic balance. Can’t have good without bad.’ Hah! Asuras are manufactured, same as devas. Exact same procedure. Reverse transcriptase enzyme in aerosolised form, followed by session in Induction Cocoon. What works for gods works just as well for gods’ opposites.”

The asuras had noticed us and sprang to the front of their cells, pawing and pounding at the plexiglass. A cacophony of muffled thuds and growls filled the air.

“Down! Play nice!” Korolev barked at the demons. To us he said, “They don’t like you. Is only to be expected. You are their mortal enemies. If that glass were any less strong, right now would be pandemonium in here. Asuras out for blood.”

“Who are they, then?” I couldn’t help but ask. “They must have been people once. Who would allow themselves to be transformed into something like that?”

“Allow themselves. You make it sound as if they are volunteering.”

“They were forced into it?”

“Is simpler than that,” said Korolev.

“They are, or were, the type that nobody’d miss,” said Lombard. “People from between the cracks.”

“Tramps, you mean. The homeless.”

“Some of them. Real bottom feeders. Blokes who’ve fallen so low, they don’t even know how to get up again. Druggies. Alkies one bottle of meths away from complete renal failure. The dregs of society.”

“But also mental patients,” said Krieger. “The incurably insane. The ones who’ve been languishing in clinics and institutions since they were kids and would probably die without ever seeing the outside world again. We took them away from that.”

“It’s remarkable how modest the bribes were,” said Bhatnagar. “The clinic directors didn’t need much of an incentive to have these difficult, life-term inmates taken off their hands. They were happy to be shot of them. As I recall, the most we ever paid anyone was a brand new full-spec BMW.”

“You could say we did the loonies a favour,” said Lombard. “We gave them their freedom.”

“Freedom to become your unconsenting patsies?” I said. “Freedom to be turned into monsters?”

“Not monsters,” said Korolev adamantly. “Look at them. They are beautiful.”

“And you’re sick. Sick in the head.”

The professor cut me a flinty stare.

“And the hobos,” said Parashurama. “The ‘bottom feeders.’ You just kidnapped them off the streets?”

Lombard canted his head towards the goons. “We had snatch squads like these guys operating in five major cities. They worked quietly, discreetly, after dark. An alleyway, a bloke lying in an intoxicated stupor, the back of a van – it wasn’t the hardest thing on earth to do. And the upshot? One less piss-soaked bundle of rags to trip over on your way to the office. One less waste-of-space dero milking the welfare system, pissing your and my taxes up the wall.”

“If we made a naga out of a drooling cretin in a straitjacket,” said Bhatnagar, “is that such a bad thing? Isn’t that, in fact, simply repurposing? A clever use of resources?”

“Yeah,” said Lombard. “And if a bludging tramp becomes a vetala, isn’t that kind of fitting? Now he’s literally a bloodsucking leech.”

“It’s all three of you, isn’t it?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Singly, on your own, none of you would ever have done this. You’d never have had the nerve or the lack of scruples.”

“You underestimate us.”

“But together, as a threesome, you can somehow justify it. Justify anything. It’s not so terrible when there’s someone else to share the responsibility. The burden of shame gets spread out until it’s light enough to carry. Each of you probably tells yourself you’re not the bad guy, it’s the other two. They’re the ones who are doing wrong, and you’re just going along with it.”

“That’s it, Hanuman. Bonzer, mate. You’ve sussed us fair and square. What are we going to do with ourselves, now that you’ve completely bulldozered us with your psychological insights?”

“The asuras we killed,” said Rama. “Was it absolutely necessary to keep them as trophies in the tower at Meru?”

“Necessary as a nipple on a tit,” said Lombard. “Well, no, preserving them like that wasn’t. That was just vanity. Like the vodka-swigging boffin here, we’re proud of them. They
are
beautiful, in a fucked-up way. Incinerating them would have been a pity. A waste. So we made an exhibition out of them instead. Works of bloody art, they are, and why shouldn’t we keep them and display them for our own personal enjoyment? Doesn’t do any harm.”

“The main thing was you guys always brought them back to Meru after they were dead, just like we told you to,” said Krieger, “so there was never any physical evidence left lying around. Call it protecting our intellectual property. If a government or a rival company were ever to get hold of one of the corpses, they’d put their best scientists on it and have the thing dissected within hours.”

“Which would open up the possibility of them figuring out the theogenesis process and reverse-engineering it,” said Bhatnagar. “Then, at a stroke, we’d have lost our exclusivity. All our time, investment and effort would be for nothing.”

“I still say theogenesis cannot be reverse-engineered,” grumped Korolev. “Is impossible. Without crucial component...”

“The stone lotus,” I said.

“You know about that?”

“If we know about the asura necropolis, then we know about the lotus too. Duh.”

“
Da
, of course. But I am thinking you have no idea of its origins or how is connected with theogenesis.”

“Maybe you should tell us.”

“Maybe you’ve been told enough already,” said Lombard. “Maybe we’d prefer to keep some secrets secret.”

“What I’d like to know,” said Parashurama, “is what you plan on doing with these live asuras here. I’m guessing you have no use for them any longer. Having us fight demons is off the agenda now. That phase of the masterplan is over, and this bunch are therefore surplus to requirements. We are certainly not going to cooperate any more. We are not going to go out and kill demons for you in public, not now we’ve learned what – who – they truly are. Makes me sick to think we believed we were slaying asuras when we were actually murdering innocent civilians. They weren’t enemies but victims.”