How the hell did one fly this beast?
He looked over at Kartik and saw an earpiece tucked into his left ear. He plucked it out and placed it inside his own left ear. Within a couple of seconds, he heard some transmission. He could not be entirely sure but the voice seemed to belong to the ash-covered monster who had knocked him out.
'Are you there? Please acknowledge.'
Aaditya looked behind to see the three saucers circling him. They could have shot him down at leisure but perhaps they wanted to capture the craft he was in. They had him boxed in, one on either side and one behind and slightly above his position.
'Hi…this is Aadi. Kartik is out cold and we are surrounded by enemy craft. What the hell do I do?'
There was an ominous silence before he got a reply. 'We have a problem here. Now, I'll try and keep you alive. Just don't try and be a hero.'
So, surrounded by enemy craft, and in one he had no idea how to fly, Aaditya finally got a chance to live his dream of being a fighter pilot. At that moment, he would have happily traded all his flying dreams for a lifetime attending Donkey's classes and dealing with impossible assignments on Economic History.
FIVE
Aaditya didn't know how high he was flying so it was hard to judge distances, but the three pursuing craft were now bracketing him, one flying on each side of his craft and one directly behind him-on his six o'clock, as fighter pilots would say. His craft was now hovering in the sky. He was far from calm but realized that if they had wanted to destroy him, they would have done so easily by now. Instead, it looked like they wanted him to surrender. A new voice came over the headset. He had not heard this voice before. It was deeper than either Narada's or the ash-covered man's voice.
'Aadi, I gather that you are not new to flying. We have retrieved your NCC records, and you've got hundreds of hours in microlights and gliders.'
'Fat lot of good that will do me now.'
The voice that responded was slow, deliberate, and if he was trying to calm Aaditya down, he was beginning to succeed.
'The basics are no different, just the user interface is. Now tell me, your father was a fighter pilot, was he not? So you grew up around pilots and fighters, and the exploits of IndianBader on the Internet tell me that you know your way around fighters.'
Aaditya had no idea how they knew all this about him, but it helped to calm him.
'What's your name? If my life depends on you, let me at least know who I'm talking to.'
'My name is Indra. Now, as you may have gathered, they don't want to shoot you down. They will box you in and perhaps more of them are on the way to capture you. Look behind you, do you see the red tipped vimana behind you?'
Aaditya turned around and said he did.
'That is the vimana of Maya, who I gather you have already met.'
Aaditya remembered the snake-eyed man and shivered in spite of himself.
Then it struck Aaditya. 'How do you know who's behind me?'
'Because I am on the way. I should be there in less than five minutes.'
Aaditya let out a sigh of relief. Help was on the way, but how the hell would he get out, if Kartik could not be revived? Indra helped out, sensing his predicament.
'Look in Kartik's right ear. There is a small round plug there. Place it in your right ear.'
Aaditya did so, and for a second was struck by an intense headache. He gasped in pain.
'What was that?'
'Don't worry, it's calibrating to your brain.'
What the hell did that mean?
'Now, just go with your instinct. What you think, the vimana will do for you. Just don't speed away or do any drastic maneuvers-get a hang of it till I come.'
Not sure how this would work, Aaditya asked himself where he was and what his bearings were. To his amazement, a holographic 3D map emerged out of thin air on his left. His vimana was represented by a blue dot, and the three enemy craft were depicted in red. He saw numbers below each dot. Those below his craft read 20,20500,217. There were a smattering of green dots, but all much further away.
'Indra, what are these numbers? Speed, altitude and bearing?'
'I told you it wouldn't be difficult to get a hang of it. It displays in units your mind relates to. In your case, I guess speed in kilometres per hour, altitude in feet and bearing relative to our base. The red dots are the asuras, and the added number below each is the range in kilometres from your vimana. The green dots are aircraft of your people.'
Your people. That was a strange way to put it.
When he wondered where he was, the map began displaying place names, showing that he was several hundred kilometres to the northeast of Delhi.
The enemy craft were no more than two kilometres away, and as he watched, the one behind him edged closer. He now saw another blue dot appear on the display. It was four hundred kilometres away and closing in at more than a thousand kilometres per hour, swooping down from an altitude of more than eighty thousand feet. His mind boggled both at the craft's performance and the fact that his radar, or whatever instrument the craft used, could pick it up at such a range.
'Now Aadi, don't move at all. I don't want to lose the advantage of surprise.'
On his display, Aaditya saw two yellow dots separate from Indra's vimana, and streak towards the craft around him at an impossibly high speed. He had barely had time to look around when the craft on either side exploded into giant fireballs and disappeared as if nothing had ever been there.
'Get out of the way now!' Indra screamed into his ears.
It seemed weird at first, but Aaditya mentally asked the craft to accelerate and willed it to bank sharply to the right. His first turn was way too sharp, and he soon found himself in a dive. In a fit of panic, his fingers grasped at thin air, trying to find the controls to pull up.
'Calm your mind, son.' Indra's voice boomed into his ear and he forced himself to sit back, and while hardly calm, thought, pull up.
The craft came out of the dive. Still not used to the control system, Aaditya found himself involuntarily moving his body to the right or left as he maneuvered, but recovered enough to restore the craft to stable flight. He took out his lucky patch from his pocket and clutched it tightly in both hands. In part, it was like a safety blanket, helping to calm his nerves. In part, as he moved his hands, he used the patch like a joystick, so that he not only used his thoughts, but also hand movements that were more familiar, to control the craft. It seemed to help, as he managed to stop himself from abruptly jerking his craft around.
His problems were far from over though. His display showed the remaining red dot zooming in towards him.
Think you're at your damn PC. Think that this is another newbie out to earn his glory by trying to take on IndianBader. Once you thought you could be a fighter pilot-now don't be a chicken.
He hoped that would be enough to give him courage. However, soon he found himself facing a new danger, when a yellow dot separated from Maya's craft and moved towards his vimana. Aaditya noted that it was moving much slower than Indra's missiles. He did not dwell on that for too long, since he quickly realized that being shot at in a video game was very different from having a missile home in on you in real life. He moved his craft into a series of tight turns, but the missile kept closing in.
Do something to throw the missile off!
No sooner had he thought it when a flash enveloped his craft, temporarily blinding him. When he opened his eyes, the yellow dot was gone, and so was Maya's craft, which his display showed as speeding away at a speed of more than two thousand kilometres per hour. He looked out the window to see a craft just a few metres to his right. In the cockpit, he could make out a man, who raised his hand in a wave, as Indra's voice echoed over his headset.