R Virdi - Messenger

WE LOOKED TO OUR NEIGHBORS in times of war to be our enemies. It was the wrong place to look. We should have turned our gaze upward, to the skyto space. In our preoccupation with ourselves, we missed themthe others.

Picture this, if you will. One moment, I was checking out of three years of reserve duty in the Indian Army, putting down my rifle and walking up the old beaten path to the house. My little one shrieked and bounded towards me. The wife, eight months pregnant, looked on fondly.

The path was overgrown: it was my job to trim it, to keep the weeds from spilling over into the driveway. It needed cutting. The little one needed new shoes. The car had rusted a bit. It was mundane as far as a life goes, but I was happy have these chores to return to. A simple lifea good one.

The next thing I remember, my wife was gone, my child was gone, my house a smoldering ruin. And I was wading through fistfuls of ocean, screaming in rage and pain as I poured missile after missile into the Enemy.

IT STARTED, AS FAR as we know, with an asteroid. Or what we thought was an asteroid.

NASA did their jobs, running their instruments and coming back shaking. Ordinary asteroids are fused lumps of rock and ice that look like potatoes tumbling through space. This one looked like a sleek cigar of mostly metal.

The press went wild. They called it Oumuamua, Messenger, a Hawaiian name that meant little to us.

People who knew what it might beor suspectedcalled it Rama and waited with bated breath. Messenger zipped through our solar system and left. And those who remembered their Arthur C. Clarke heaved a sigh of relief. Sometimes you dont want it to be aliens, even if they might give you the grand tour of the universe.

A year later, another Oumuamuasmaller, sleekerslammed into the Moon. That first Messenger must have figured out what our instruments were like. By the time we knew it was coming, it was already too late. It hit the dark side of the Moon with the force of thirty-three nuclear bombs. A star blossomed on the dead lunar surface. The sun must have thought the Moon was winking at it.

There were those in the space industry who wanted to go look at this thing. Launch a probe, maybe a lander, figure out what the hell happened.

Its the damned Moon, we thought. Who cares what happens up there? Besides, who had the money for a space industry, anyway? The economy was tanking, populations were on the rise, the world was going to shit, and the only thing I paid attention to those days was my horoscope: Goals you are trying to reach slip out of your grasp. Work harder this week.

We should have paid attention. We didnt.

Within weeks, the first of Them landed. It streaked through the atmosphere, burning, screaming, and hit the south-west of India like the wrath of God. The explosion rocked the entire state of Karnataka. Downtown Bangalore became a smoking hole twenty feet deep with towers toppling around it like so many toy bricks. Glass shattered for miles around. Cars melted in the heat.

And something stood there in the carnage. Or tried to. Something burned, like wreckage, cracked and shattered with the heat of re-entry. Something with a great head and parts that spun and moved and steamed. Something with a mouth hung open, drooling fire and slavering.

Parts of my house cracked and steamed. From the ruins of my house came the awful smell of hair burning and flesh roasting.

It tottered. It screamed.

I tottered. I screamed.

It keeled over and died.

I keeled over.

I wish Id died.

THE ORDERS CAME THE next day as I lay empty-eyed at my friend Bhanus place, thinking of her. Thinking of my Divya and my Anisha. And the unborn child. In the background, the TV blared. An overly made-up news anchor blabbed on and on and on about lights in the sky.

Bhanu came shaking his phone at me. Arjun-ji! Arjun-ji! Theres more coming! Theyre calling us up! Theyre fighting!

My fists clenched. My knuckles cracked.

Lets go, I growled. Lets show them what all seven hells look like.

As I left, I saw the evening moon, climbing high in the sky: except where I had once shown my daughter the hare on the Moon, there was now a trickle of darkness, like a great black spider creeping around the edge.

AND THAT WAS HOW I became one of the first Shikari.

This is me now. They call me Vishnus Vengeance. A hundred-meter machine of gleaming alloy punched out by Tata-Leykham Industries. My fingers are steel. My fists can crush buildings.

Once I dealt out death, one man at a time, with my INSAS assault rifle, my fingers sweating in my gloves and my heart thumping at a thousand beats per minute. Now I cradle a gun ripped straight out of a Russian battle tanka smoothbore that I call Padma, Vishnus lotus. It is an apt name for this gun. It has laser sights and an autoloader that would make an artilleryman green with envy.

My fingers do not sweat, and my heart is a nuclear battery that will burn for five hundred years. I am a god of death.

And I wait in the darkness for my enemy.

It was not easy, becoming what I am. They only took those of us with nothing to lose. Not all of us who went in made it out. Those who didnt die went crazy. But I held on. My anger grew with time. I screamed their names in the darknessDivya and Anisha, Divya, Anishauntil the words turned into a mantra and became my will. And by the time the neuro-doctors strapped me in for processing and gave me the final contest forms, my hands shook so badly with anger that I snapped the pen and stabbed the paper. Maybe I was already insane.

Maybe I still am.

For when you take a mans reason for life away from him, what more does he have to fear?

My enemy is wading now. Unlike the first mistake, this one gleams silver. Long, sleek metal legs slam into the ocean floor. Blue circuit traces cover the turtle-like shell in the middle.

Babaji, the Enemy is a Spider-class, says Bhanu in my ear. I can vaguely hear the roar of helicopter blades underneath the crackling audio. Five legs, low center of gravity. I think we see a tail.

Babaji. My crew call me Father. I am their Head, their Commander...their god.

Telemetry confirms the Enemy is bearing three degrees to the left, speed thirteen knots, over, crackles another voice. That is Sanjaya. In the Mahabharata, the great Sankrit epic, Sanjaya is an advisor to the king: his is the gift of seeing things happening a great distance away. How fitting that a Sanjaya fulfils the same role for me today. He is a good kid, young, a little awkward, but as sharp as a fine razor when he sits at that screen. Babaji, I recommend you adjust main gun by 13-by-3. This should be a nice clean one, over.

I raise my gun and sight carefully. I stand still. It must be a strange sight: an iron giant standing in the ocean before a city.

I fire.

The 125mm projectile leaves the reconfigured tank gun with a thunderclap. The strike is instantaneous: the armor-piercing spike of tungsten slams into the Enemy at a thousand meters per second. It rips a shoulder clean off the grotesque creature. It screams from some hidden moutha sound that will give children in this city nightmares for decades to come. Instead of blood, it leaks lightning.

I fire again, and again, and again, walking forward as I do. My aim is true. Padma never fails me. Rounds slam into the monster, ripping chunks out of the carapace. Gleaming layers of soft white and silver dance in the moonlight. And now for my grand finale. I switch to a special rounda 145 monstrosity tipped with uraniumand fire right into the hole at its heart. The round arcs slow and hits with a dazzling light that blinds us all for a second. I can hear Bhanu and Sanjaya cursing.