The odds are on the cheaper man.
Below its
wings, the earth was a blue curve against the black infinity of space.
It swung in its orbit, its sensors probing
the planet below, licking at oceans and mountains with electronic eyes, probing
beneath the desert sands with ground-penetrating radars. Its computers whirred,
each a miracle of engineering, processing information at a fair fraction of the
speed of light. Beneath its wings, the pods of communications sensors listened
in on the voices of the planet below, from lovers’ tiffs to business
discussions, from a politician talking to a general to a punter placing a bet
on a horse. And once in a while it turned its eyes outward, because it was not
alone here.
To men of only a few decades before, it
would have been a thing almost of magic. The money and effort that had gone
into creating it would have fed and clothed several nations for years, run
schools and hospitals without count. Its eyes saw all, its ears heard all, like
a god of ancient times. And like a god, too, it could strike out of a cloudless
sky, calling down thunderbolts and divine fire on those it found wanting.
Day or night, cloud or shine, nothing was
proof against it. No enemy submarine base, no oil well, no pharmaceutical
factory or railway marshalling yard but was naked to its surveillance. It could
destroy unerringly, without pity or rancour, those who posed a threat to its
masters – or those who might, someday, pose a threat, hypothetically speaking.
It was all the same to it.
Deep beneath the earth, in an underground
bunker which cost more than the health budgets of entire countries, a man sat
back from his monitors and stretched. Before his eyes, the information feed
scrolled, showing him what the sentinel in the sky was seeing. For a moment, he
paused the image on the white domes of a nuclear reactor somewhere in an
oil-rich nation. There was nothing new there, but on each orbit he did this,
taking photographs for analysis. The image was so clear he could clearly see
men standing near a truck, talking. He grinned, white teeth flashing in his
tanned face, imagining how with a finger on a button he could cause missiles to
be launched which would wipe out the men, truck and all.
Rolling his muscular shoulders under his
uniform, he scanned the readouts which showed him the craft’s path in orbit.
Suddenly, he frowned, hunching forward. Something was approaching, at a high speed,
on a trajectory which would bring it close to that of the craft. His fingers
hovered on the buttons which would fire rockets to make an emergency change of
orbit, and with his other hand he readied launchers which would, on command,
send forth missiles to eradicate the oncoming object. The craft was
well-provided with the means of offence and defence.
Then, abruptly, he relaxed, sitting back.
The cameras showed the object to be merely a chunk of space debris, part of
some long-forgotten satellite. Meanwhile, the computers showed that it would
comfortably miss, so there wasn’t even a need to change orbits.
Rubbing a hand absently on the rich leather
upholstery of his seat, the man looked forward with anticipation to the
weekend. He was planning on taking his wife and daughter to the beach. He deserved
the holiday, he thought. It had been a long time since they had been down to
the seaside.
For a moment he let his thoughts drift to
his brother, who had been laid off from his job as a teacher and last he’d
heard was working as a short-order cook, making hamburgers. He frowned slightly
and dismissed the thought. His brother’s problems were his alone.
Taking his eyes from the screen for a
moment, he glanced at the clock on the wall. Forty minutes to the next shift. He
wished he could knock off a few minutes early. There was, anyone could tell,
hardly any kind of risk.
After all, he thought, scanning the
readouts on his screens, what could possibly stand up to something like this?
Why, he thought, I'll bet we can beat off an alien invasion now. I'll bet we can do that.
Impatient to be gone, he looked towards the clock again.
Thirty-seven minutes to go.
*********************************
The
jezail was almost two hundred years old, and almost as long as the boy was
tall. It was a work of art, its curved stock inlaid with ivory, its barrel
bound by hoops of brass. One of the boy’s forefathers had used it at the Battle
of Maiwand, and it had become a treasured family heirloom in the time since.
Nobody had ever thought it would be used again.
Until now.
The boy had never been to school, and did
not know how to write his name. He was perhaps fourteen years old – he was not
quite sure – and short for his age, a shock of blue-black hair escaping under
the edge of his pakol to fall over
his forehead. His clothes were the same dun as the dust of the hills, his shoes
cracked leather, and when he lifted the old rifle to his shoulder he staggered
slightly under its weight.
Below him, the road was a white scar
through the rocky plain, and the village a smear of smoke behind the nearest
hills. It was along that road that the Enemy would come.
Stopping, the boy carefully measured out
the powder from the horn at his waist, tapping it into the barrel of the
ancient weapon and ramming it home with a scrap of cloth at the end of a stick.
He fumbled in the leather pouch slung around his neck and extracted a lead ball.
It was rough and chunky but slipped down the muzzle easily enough, the rifling
gripping the soft metal.
Spreading a little more powder in the
firing pan, he lay down behind the rock and waited for the Enemy to come.
The boy had not meant to be lying here with
a gun. Normally, at this time of year, he should have been helping his
grandfather in the fields. But the Enemy had burned his grandfather’s fields
because of the poppy crop, and then one of the Enemy’s drones had bombed his
father’s old truck. His father and elder brother had both been in the truck at
the time.
And then last night the Enemy had come in
the night, smashed down the door, and stormed into the house shouting
unintelligibly, even into the women’s quarters. Nobody knew what they’d wanted,
so couldn’t give it to them. When his grandfather had objected, one of the big
foreigners had knocked him down with the butt of his rifle. The old man had not
lived out the night.
That was why the boy was lying here now.
Suddenly he stiffened, his eyes narrowing. Far
away, a line of angular shapes was coming along the road, trailing dust. He
shifted the jezail, bringing up the long barrel, propping the end up on a
flattened stone as a convenient rest. His entire body became still, like a
piece of the rock itself. Only his eyes moved, tracking the Enemy.
The first of the angular vehicles stopped,
as he knew it would, near the smear of black marking the ruined poppy fields.
The turret turned, its questing cannon like an elephant’s trunk sniffing the
air for danger. Behind the shield in the turret, one of the big foreigners
stood, a bulky figure in blotched brown uniform, made all the more huge by
helmet and body armour. The man’s head turned, eyes beneath mirrored sunglasses
scanning the hillside in the boy’s direction.
For the hundredth time, the boy wondered
why the Enemy had come, what they wanted. He had heard they were from a land
far away, a land so rich that it was virtually beyond imagining. What could a
country so rich want from something so poor as his own land? It was a mystery
beyond understanding. That man down there, for example – he was bigger than
anyone the boy had ever seen, his skin smoother and his teeth whiter even at
this distance than the wrinkled visages and stained grins of the villagers.
What could such a man want from his people that they were willing to kill those
who had done them no harm?
Softly, with infinite care, the boy took up
the slack of the jezail’s trigger. The ancient weapon’s butt slammed into his
shoulder, its report like a thunderclap in his ears. The centre of the Enemy’s
face vanished in a smear of blood. Slowly, like a collapsing statue, the man
threw out his arms and tumbled off his turret and into the dust.
Hardly daring to breathe, the boy lay
behind his rock and watched the rest of the Enemy blast at the hillside with
machine guns and cannon. The firing lasted a long time, but none of it struck
close.
After the foreigners had gone, carrying away
their dead, he came down from the hill and went back to the village.
He was a man now, the only one left of his
family, and his mother would have need of him.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2012
