Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (26 page)

A couple of the other Avatars inclined their heads in agreement.

“No, that’s not what I’m referring to,” said Parashurama. “The asuras. You guys must have wondered about them, surely. We are manufactured, manmade, and then demons appear out of nowhere, like magic? How does that stack up? Come on, I can’t be the only one who’s been thinking it’s a little fishy.”

“Hey, Matsya,” said Vamana. “He said fishy. Do you think it’s fishy?”

The Fish-man fixed Vamana with an imperturbable, glassy stare. “Ignoring your feeble attempt at humour, Dwarf, I must admit that there have been times when I have asked myself whether the asuras might originate from the same source as us. Might they not have been through the theogenesis process as well? Been human once, as we ourselves were?”

“Me, I’ve been having too much fun to care,” said Vamana. “How about you, Narasimha? Bothered about where your prey comes from? Or are you just happy to be hunting?”

“I am divine anger,” said the Man-lion. “I am the protector. I slew the blasphemous demon Hiranyakasipu when no one else could, and I did not think twice about it. Slaying asuras is what I am best fitted for by nature. I do not question it, any more than the lion questions killing the zebra.”

“Oookay, so it’s an unqualified ‘couldn’t give a toss’ from Narasimha. Krishna?”

“I have... had doubts. But Parashurama, you are the Warrior. The soldier. The loyal one who follows orders. You have led us. And all along, you have not been certain we are doing the right thing?”

“No, that’s not it,” said Parashurama. “Taking down asuras – no question it’s something that needs to be done, and we should do it. Lives are saved if we do, put at risk if we don’t. But I’m not stupid. I’m not some dumb grunt who gets handed a gun and told where to point it and just goes along with that. I don’t have any evidence to back up what I’ve been feeling, these suspicions I’ve had. But for a while my gut’s been telling me that the Trinity haven’t been wholly straight with us. And it’s been telling me that even more strongly since this India business blew up. What if –
what if
– the asuras were only window dressing? Just a way of getting the world onside quickly and easily. A showcase for us. A commercial. Letting people, and especially the Indian government, know what devas can do.”

“This is all very conspiracy theory all of a sudden,” said Vamana.

“But it’s perfectly possible that the Trinity created them too, so as we’d have something to fight. Something inhuman and obviously evil.”

“Supervillains,” I said.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Superheroes need supervillains,” I said. “They’re no good if all they have to defeat are petty criminals, smugglers, rapists, racketeers and so on. It’s asymmetrical warfare. Too easy for them. They need equals – opponents with abilities to match their own, with similarly outlandish names, motivations and looks. If I’m following what you’re getting at, Parashurama, you and the other Avatars were being presented with something similar, with the asuras. You couldn’t be chasing down a gang of bank robbers or rousting a drug cartel. That’s for the police to do. Demons, on the other hand – that’s clearly a job for supermen.”

Parashurama jerked a thumb in my direction. “Check out monkey brains here. Hanuman’s nailed it. Demons as supervillains.”

“Let’s get this straight,” said Vamana. “The Trinity set the whole thing up? They created the asuras? They planted them? Let them attack and kill civilians so that we could fly in and save the day? It’s crazy. Crazy talk.” He shook his head, but it was less a denial, more an effort to dislodge the idea from his mind before it stuck fast. “They wouldn’t do that.”

“The men who’ve lent us out to the Indian military wouldn’t do that?” said Varaha. “Wouldn’t turn dangerous creatures loose and send us in to mop up the mess and then exploit the publicity that results? Really?”

“Yes, thank you, Mr Sarcasm.”

“Not sarcasm. Cynicism. Justified cynicism, I’d say. The Trinity are businessmen. This has been a business enterprise – theogenesis, all of it. We – we are
product
. It’s so bloody obvious now. I was blind to it beforehand because I like to help people, I want to make a difference, I want to make the world a better place. Don’t snigger, Vamana. Don’t you dare. But I had my misgivings about us getting dragged into a war, even if we were the victims of an act of aggression. And in light of what that colonel just told us, and what Parashurama’s been saying... Jeez. Ever get the feeling you’ve been taken for a ride?”

“Why wouldn’t they have told us?” said Kurma. “The Trinity. Right at the start. Come clean with us. Why the subterfuge?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Varaha. “Would you have signed on the dotted line if you’d known it was all going to be a massive con? ‘You’ll be fighting demons, but don’t worry. They’re bogus. We made them specially for you.’”

“When you put it like that, no.”

“Exactly.”

“What really sticks in my craw is that Pakistan seems to know more about us than we do,” said Parashurama. “This whole situation stinks, and I’m saying we head back to base and get to the bottom of it. Who’s with me?”

It didn’t sound as though Parashurama was putting it to the vote. Rather, he had made his mind up and was expecting the rest of us to go along with him.

Myself, I was feeling a twisting in the pit of my stomach. There was betrayal in the air. Had we been fed a pack of lies? Were we, as Zehri had said, little better than weapons?

Back in the early 1990s, I spent a portion of my first paycheque from my very first
2000 AD
commission on a copy of
Uncanny X-Men
#137, the double-sized “Death of Phoenix” issue. It was a treat for myself, a pat on the back for finally scoring a professional comics gig after years of unpaid fanzine contributions and supporting myself with tedious freelance design jobs.
UXM
#137 is a classic, the culmination of everything that writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne had been working towards during their stellar 1980s run on the title. In those pre-internet days I bought it sight unseen from a mail order catalogue. It cost me £100.

The dealer advertised the comic as near-mint grade, and it was, and it came bagged and boarded to help preserve its integrity, too. But what he neglected to mention was that it was a UK edition, with the printed cover price in pence rather than cents. To collectors, a pence copy is worth way less than a cents copy.

I wrote him a letter complaining. He wrote back stating that he had never said in his catalogue that it wasn’t the UK edition. The fault was mine for not checking. Besides, I should have been able to tell by the sum he was asking for it. A cents copy would have been at least £50 more expensive.

So technically he hadn’t defrauded me. Morally, though, he had.

I’d only read the comic in a trade paperback collection before, and I’d always promised myself I would splurge out on an original once I could afford to. I wanted to cherish my
UXM
#137. I’d spent what should have been my rent money on it. It was a ridiculous extravagance.

But it had come with a catch. I had been swindled out of its true value. I don’t recall what I did with the comic in the end. I may have sold it on, at a slight loss. By the same token I may have burned it, a symbolic cremation, a funeral pyre for my naivety. Knowing me, probably the latter.

Hey
, you’re thinking to yourself,
am I reading this right? Surely he can’t be equating being stiffed by a dodgy comics dealer with the deception which appears to have been perpetrated on him and the Avatars by the Trinity. It’s one thing to be disenchanted about a superhero comic, quite another to learn that you have become an actual, bona fide superhero on the basis of a huge, murderous con. Get some perspective, nerd!

Dear reader, you may well be correct. The sensation was the same, though. The same sour taste in the back of the throat. The same painful awareness of others laughing at your idiocy and gullibility. The same dark, simmering resentment.

Only multiplied by a thousand.

30. EVEN A DEVA CAN DIE

O
N THE WAY
back to Meru the next morning we received a distress call from Chandigarh.

When we got there, the airbase was at full battle stations. Pakistani troops and armoured divisions had crossed the border and were storming into the Punjab. Indian forces had contained them at the Sutlej river, but further north the Pakistanis had encountered less formidable opposition. The cities of Amritsar and Ludhiana had fallen to them, and Pakistani tanks were now closing in on Chandigarh. A battalion of them, around fifty, was barrelling down National Highway 95 and would be within striking distance of the airbase in under an hour.

Air Marshal Venkatesan was the epitome of cool-headedness in a crisis. Yet beneath the unflappable exterior lay a man desperate for help – for anything that might give him a tactical edge.

“Sirs, I have no right to ask this from you, but if Chandigarh airbase falls, the Pakistanis will gain a stronghold and the Punjab is lost. I can put it no plainer than that. Will you fight alongside us?”

Though we had our own agenda to pursue, we could hardly refuse. Confronting the Trinity would have to wait. A few hours, what difference would it make? Venkatesan needed us. At the very least we could help hold the line until reinforcements arrived from Patiala to the south.

Venkatesan’s MiG-21s were already strafing the column of tanks with air-to-surface missiles, but Pakistani jets – Mirages and JF-17 Thunders – were providing effective air cover and few of the Indian pilots survived to make a second run. An HAL light combat helicopter had also scored hits with Nag anti-tank missiles until it too had fallen prey to the Pakistan Air Force. The PAF’s air superiority in the region was making it tough for Indian forces to curb their ground offensive.

Parashurama divvied us up into two groups. The majority went in Krishna’s chariot to meet the Pakistani tanks head-on. Kurma, Rama and I, however, were tasked with depleting the PAF air cover.

What this translated as was: jumping out of the
Garuda
onto moving jet aircraft.

I know, right?

But when you’re a fully revved-up, siddhi-enabled deva, nothing – even the craziest shit – is impossible.

With Captain Sylvain Corday, formerly of the Royal Canadian Air Force, at the controls, the
Garuda
ran rings around the PAF fighters. We soared above the theatre of combat and singled out individual Pakistani planes to home in on. Then either Rama would pull off some nigh-impossible shot using an arrow with a hollow, nitroglycerin-filled tip, sending it straight into the jet’s turbofan with devastating results, or else Kurma or I would leap from the doorway and freefall onto the fuselage. In the Turtle’s case this mean plunging straight through, breaking the aircraft in half. Me, I would land on all fours, smash open the cockpit canopy, and yank the pilot out. That or puncture the plane’s aluminium skin and rip out some vital part of the avionics. As the plane veered wildly out of control, Captain Corday would bring the
Garuda
alongside and I would leap back aboard. Kurma had to face the indignity of falling the rest of the way to earth like a meteor. Each time, the
Garuda
would swing by and pick him up from the impact crater he created.

Between us we downed over twenty PAF warplanes. The first time it was my turn, I nearly bottled out. God knows how fast we were going. Several hundred miles per hour. I’d never even done a parachute jump, and now I was supposed to propel myself, parachute-less, out of one supersonic aircraft to alight on another?

But that was Zak Bramwell being a wuss. Hanuman couldn’t give a shit about danger. Pouncing onto a fighter jet in midair was the sort of insane stunt he loved. Zak Bramwell might be wetting his pants, worrying about what if he overshot, what if he missed his target, what then? All Hanuman cared about was hitting his mark with style.

One time, atop a Mirage, I almost came a cropper. The pilot tried to shake me off by launching into a succession of barrel rolls. I lost my grip and went slithering aft along the plane, athough centripetal force kept me in contact with the fuselage throughout. I caught hold of the tail assembly and immediately set to work twisting off the rudder flaps. There was nothing the pilot could do after that except eject and watch his bird spiral into a nosedive.