The waves wash against me in silence.
“Vishnu, I repeat, this is Command. If you can hear me, report for debrief immediately, over.”
I HEAR YOU, COMMAND, I say at last. I’LL BE THERE SOON.
And in the darkness, my hands shake.
COMMAND IS AN OLD MAN in battle fatigues, tall but bent with age, surrounded by a rolling office of technicians and soldiers who all seem to have the same face. The only one in nonregulation uniform is the psychiatrist, a woman dressed in short, strangely utilitarian green. They make me go over what happened.
I play back all my logs, explain my interpretation of the incident. The technicians make notes and parse the data, making incomprehensible noises to each other. The psychologist walks dangerously close to me, heels—who wears heels in a military base?—clack-clack-clacking against the steel, peering up at me. The old general is frowning. I have the strange feeling that I’ve seen him before, but for some reason—maybe because this place is shielded—my facial ID system isn’t working properly.
“And you’re one hundred percent positive you saw no signs of desyncing before this? One hundred percent?”
MY LAST DEPLOYMENT WITH HER WAS IN SEPTEMBER.
“Dammit,” he says. “We’re losing them faster than ever.”
“Perhaps it’s the upgrades, sir,” one particularly noisy technician volunteers. “The neural load on Kali must be very high already, and those six arms... It’s not like we’re built to operate six arms—”
The general quells him with a look. She mumbles and falls silent. The psychiatrist, meanwhile, has come to a stop in front of my arm.
“Vishnu-ji,” she says. “Why is your hand twitching?”
BATTLE DAMAGE, I say automatically. NEURAL FEEDBACK FROM REPETITIVE GUNFIRE. IT HAPPENS.
I don’t know why I said that. It’s not true.
The psychologist doesn’t believe me. But I am a god, dammit. You will believe me. My twitching hand curls into a fist.
“Leave us,” the general says to the psychologist.
She hesitates. “Sir, I am mandated by the High Court—”
“This is a military facility, Doctor Chaudury, and when I say leave, you can either walk out or be thrown out.”
He waits until her clack-clack-clacking has died down, then turns back to me.
“Lieutenant,” he says. “I’m talking to the man I once signed up and trained for this job. The man inside this tin hulk. You there, Officer?”
I AM VISHNU.
“Lieutenant Arjun Shetty,” says the general coolly, looking straight into my eyes. Eyes the size of his head. “They can put you in a glorified metal uniform, but you’re still the boy I took and trained into this.”
I AM VISHNU, SIR.
But suddenly I know him. And suddenly I can see the faces of the people standing around him. They’re not the same faces at all. The only thing they have in common is that they all look terrified.
“I know you’re dying in there,” he says, not breaking his gaze. “I know you’ve fought for your country and you’ve done us proud. But there aren’t enough of you. Not enough Shikari, not enough soldiers like you willing to put their hearts on the line for our country. So I’m going to give you an order: if you’re going to crack, you’ll tell us. You won’t hurt anyone. You were built to protect. Vishnu. Shetty. You are protectors. You don’t fall apart on us the way that bitch did, you understand?”
My fists clench and unclench. One of them is shaking, and I can’t control it, but I can still salute.
SIR.
They haul me into a metal coffin and take me home. On the way back, Sanjay keeps trying to tell me something.
“The DRDO research guys made a huge breakthrough, Babaji,” he keeps saying, over and over. “It looks like those creatures are silicon-based through and through. Silicon-based! It’s not armor but skin! Just like you, Babaji. They say it looks like every inch of that body can suck up silicon, basalt, carbon, all sorts of material, and use it to heal and grow. Their neurons look like transistors! They say the skin samples even look like they can replicate! Sand, Babaji, sand!”
THAT’S GOOD, I say, not really listening. I’m trying to keep my hands from shivering. Open. Close. Open. Close. There is a darkness closing in that is more than just the darkness of the transport vehicle.
“Explains why they hit the Moon, yah? All that material just lying around. They hit the Moon, replicate, replicate, leap down the gravity well to the Earth, and we have so much more silicon lying around, our crust is like twenty-five percent silicon . . .”
SANJAY. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING ON THE DAMNED MOON. JUST TELL ME IF THIS MEANS WE CAN KILL THEM FASTER.
Sanjay, for once, ignores me, too caught up in his own excitement. He starts yapping on and on about logic gates and electromagnetic fields and disruption flows. All I hear is “EMP” and “bomb.”
“That’s why that Japanese Shikari was doing so well, Babaji! The Matari, remember? Susanoo or some strange name like that. Electrical discharge weapons? Their Lightning Whip technology?”
THAT’S GOOD, SANJAY, I say slowly, letting the darkness take me. Open. Close. Open. Close. THAT’S VERY, VERY GOOD.
I DREAM. I DREAM OF darkness and moonlight on the ocean, of thunder and lightning, of a man screaming in pain as his wife and children die.
And in my dreams, the darkness rises and crashes into me, bowling me over.
I WAKE.
The ocean swells. My quivering hands: waves roll, I shake. Roll. Shiver. Roll. Shudder. Roll. Shake. There’s a voice in my ear and a terrible buzzing in my head.
The moonlit ocean touches my skin, and I taste the ghost of salt water in a mouth that no longer has anything to taste with.
Not far from me lies a dark and terrible shape, bleeding a thick ichor that turns the dark ocean silvery.
It wasn’t a dream. I’ve blacked out. The ruins of my delivery vehicle lie twisted and mangled on the shore. There’s a crater of some kind there that I can’t process. The road is twisted, tangled.
Am I desyncing? Is this fear that makes me shake? Fear is for ants. I am Vishnu. I get to my feet. Warnings, error messages. My servomotors are screaming. L3 and L4 command relay nodes are down; the backup routing system has taken over my entire left side. My secondary batteries have almost been ripped out of my ribcage. My cannon is almost out of bullets.
“Baba-ji—” Crackle, hiss.
The Enemy lies just a stone’s throw from me, bleeding but conscious. It reminds me of a time where I perused the Internet, looking at the bizarre crosses of creatures artists came up with. This one falls somewhere between a lobster and a scorpion. Four crustacean-like pillars support its bulbous body, all layered in glistening chitin. Segments of folded shell stretched out far behind its body. I can see where my bullets have blasted it to bits, gouging out silvery chunks of flesh the size of men. A pair of pincers, broken and shattered now, sit at the ends of knobby limbs protruding from below its flat skull.
A great eye turns in its face and rolls to greet me out of that nightmarish bulk. Curved, sickle-like mandibles erupt in a terrible grin from what might be its face. Something thrashes behind it, stirring up new waves that bow out to the sides before falling flat. Another of the appendages breaches the surface of the water, flailing alongside the first.