The New Space Opera 2 (42 page)

An older man tenderly touched Kipps's epaulet. He had clearly studied English, so he could almost pronounce it. “That was my boy.”

“That was your boy,” Kipps repeated.

“My boy sold a can of Coke to Captain Joe Kipps,” said the older man.

“Yeah, I'm him.”

“You are the hero who killed ibn Timur.”

That legend was not true. Kipps had been staring at a console in Diego Garcia when the nuke-terror leader had been killed. Kipps hadn't pulled the trigger. The administrative process of killing ibn Timur had gone on for a couple of days.

The great global guerrilla had been crazy enough to head for a classic dug-out cave-complex bunker, instead of his usual posh hangouts in downtown London, Hamburg, and Paris. Since this cave was in the ass-end of nowhere, without his usual dense crowd of protective civilians, everybody got a lick in on him. Indian long-range artillery pounded him. American rockets from subs in the Persian Gulf. Russian mothballed bombers, and off-label French cruise missiles. Even the starving Chinese, who had every kind of domestic difficulty, got to avenge Xinjiang.

Killing ibn Timur was a global carnival of excess. There was nothing left of the guy but smears of DNA for the British SAS.

So Kipps hadn't really killed ibn Timur. He hadn't done that any more than he'd ever bagged a tyrannosaur. Kipps had, however, invented a homemade technique of following cold fronts across Central Asia and looking for vapor plumes. Air came out of underground caves—if there was anyone alive in there. And even if they warmed and filtered their air—because they knew damn well that space satellites were watching for them—there would be moments when the caves hadn't caught up to the outside atmospheric conditions.

Then the unfriendly skies would see a little geyser. A steam-vent from the interior schemes and machinations of the world's smallest and craziest nuclear power. Somebody might see that. For instance, some humble but capable Navy tech, who knew something about geology and never got bored while staring at barren landscapes.

Kipps had put in a Recommendation for Battlespace Action. In a way,
that was somewhat like pulling a trigger. If he hadn't seen that detail, maybe it wouldn't have happened.

“Yes, sir, I am Joe Kipps.” He thumb-tapped the ribbons on his chest.

A great deal of ruckus followed from that little gesture.

 

Brigadier Karwal could not disperse the crowds. The slum-crowds of Dharavi were so densely packed that they lacked any place in which to disperse.

However, Karwal retrieved Kipps from the crowd without any casualties. It was done in a brisk and efficient way by goons who had had a lot of practice at doing such things.

“What were you thinking?” Karwal said.

Kipps had lost his jacket, his hat, and his phone. Some especially vigorous worshipper had torn off his shirtsleeve as a memento. “I wanted to see the big town.”

Karwal rapped on the bulletproof glass with the head of his cane. Then he barked instructions to his driver. Kipps knew just enough about Indian languages to know that Karwal was not speaking Hindi. Malayalam, maybe.

“Dharavi is the blast site,” said Karwal, tucking his sunglasses into his handkerchief pocket. “You were inside the blast site. That's why they wanted to congratulate you.”

“It's radioactive here?”

Karwal spread his hands. “Life is radioactive, my friend. Radios are radioactive! Let's not be superstitious.”

“I was drinking Coke in a bomb crater.”

“Worry about the climate. It's much scarier than the Bomb.” The rocket-like roaring from the enormous crowd was fading. The locals hadn't lost their burning interest in Kipps. A worshipful fraction were doggedly trailing Karwal's armored limo. They did not presume to touch the car, however. Nor did they profane the car's black, smoked windows.

Jumping into Karwal's limousine was like being swallowed by a whale.

“Where are we going?”

“You can stay with me, Joe. Too many rich boys in that big hotel. They're stupid.”

“Okay.”

“I have something to show you.”

Kipps always learned stuff when Karwal showed him things. They were never things civilians knew about, but they were real things. War was a kind of poverty with bullets. There was nothing like being there.

Kipps tore the loosened sleeve from his shirt. “I heard that you got married.”

“I did marry. And you divorced your wife. So I heard.”

Kipps nodded. “Americans do that.”

“Divorce is bad for you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You got restless,” said Karwal. “You went to reconnoiter. To surveil. Like your old days at the front.”

“That's right. Like our old days.”

“No
special
reason to leave your hotel? Just so curious, just so restless?”

“Well, it was that. That, and those three goombas in the lobby who were trying to scope me out.” Kipps shrugged. “I get it about them. I was a drone jockey once. We blew people away, out of a clear blue sky. We were assassins. But now I'm Space Navy. I'm in the reserves now. No active duty. I wouldn't harm a fly.”

This frank confession seemed to relax Karwal. “It's peacetime.”

Kipps judged that peacetime was treating Karwal okay. Karwal was in a white linen suit. This was no cheap airport limo. This machine was a little well-seasoned, but it was one of those head-of-state, civilian-armored-vehicle limos. The kind that used to ooze in and out of Green Zones.

“We ran out of Pakistanis willing to fight us,” said Karwal. “Then we demobbed. We went back to the Informal Urban Area. I got a job in security. Then the mafia came.”

“The mafia.”

“The Bombay mafia. They didn't understand my war on the front. Rich boys living too easy back here, just with their little atomic bomb. They thought they were still in charge.”

Kipps said nothing.

“Joe, what would you have done?”

“Against a goddamn mafia? That's what, a ‘lightly armed civilian militia'? Standard counterinsurgency. Kick their doors in.”

“We shot them. The Indian government didn't expect that from us.”

“You're in the government now?”

“The mafia was in the government. I am a poor man, Joe. I am a nobody from the slums.”

“Ah. That makes sense.”

“So, no, I'm not in this government. I'm in the mafia. I'm a Bombay don now. I'm a slumlord.”

Karwal folded a gaudy movie scandal-sheet mag, hunted down a bluebottle fly and swatted it against the window.

“A society takes a few atomic bombs,” Kipps offered, “things get a little strange.”

“I'm very pro-American. Pro-American mafia.”

“That's great to hear.”

“Before you Americans gave us space support,” said Karwal, “we were losing. Because it was their country, or they thought it was. We died like flies, and they died like flies. Then we died like Americans. They continued as flies.”

“They're inside your Line of Control now.”

“Everything outside our Line of Control dies like flies, Joe. They die like little gnats.” Karwal rubbed his mustache. “Also, you fed us. In the famine, you sent us grain. That's why the Chinese died like flies. The Chinese weren't even in our war.”

“Americans can't feed a neutral and starve an ally. That just makes no sense.”

“The Chinese never understood Americans. They don't know how to make you happy.”

“Mass production is overrated,” said Kipps. “I got three little cars on the surface of Titan—just three cars, they're not Ford Model-Ts…but that's how I earn my living. I scan terrain from orbit and I ride around on three little robot cars. I'm looking for frozen fish.”

“I have a space program, too,” said Karwal.

“Yes, sir. You surely do. The Indian space program is world-class. It's almost a hundred years old.”

“No,” said Karwal, shaking his head in genteel embarrassment. “I don't mean the Indian government.
I
mean that I have a space program. I am a space hero, too.”

“I see,” Kipps said.

“We can't pacify civilians with mere bayonets. That does not end an insurgency. We have to give the people a productive stake in the new order.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kipps. He remembered all that. That was right out of the handbook.

 

The chauffeur drove them to a locale that Kipps mistook for a junkyard. Kipps was wrong, because the urban poor of Bombay cheerfully inhabited the junkyards. They could sell the contents.

This was a toxic zone for radioactive debris. Despite Karwal's bluff atti
tude, the Indian government, prodded by foreign advisers, had segregated the most contaminated ruins and dragged them here.

Still, no amount of earnest warning about rad-waste could stop Indian wildlife. The atomic junkyard had swiftly become a booming Indian urban wilderness. Not a park but a feral jungle, with waist-high saw grass, clouds of pigeons, weed-trees, clambering vines, mosquitoes, bats that ate the mosquitoes, snakes that ate the bats…Cement and blast debris had to be the world's least promising ecosystem, but this crazily thriving heap had one great advantage: no human beings. Without people to repress it, the crazed fertility of the great subcontinent was surging back.

Karwal, using his limousine phone, ordered Kipps an untorn shirt and another Coca-Cola. They left the limo at the towering razor-wire limits of the waste dump.

Karwal hastily bent his efforts to the display of his slum-built “space program.” It was something he and his colleagues had been working on—some kind of popular movement. The works, apparently, were either stationed or somehow hidden inside the dump.

Local people began arriving…not in a boisterous, hollering mob this time, but respectfully, even tenderly. They were bringing gifts. Candles, and flowers, and little trays of food. Nothing too elaborate or fancy, just heartfelt tributes, things a man or a woman or a child could bring in two cupped hands.

The first gift-givers were really anxious that Kipps should see them paying him obeisance. They were burningly eager to catch the eagle eye of their space hero. It really meant a lot to them. Some even recited brief little well-wisher poems and prayers. But once the heap of tributes started building up—waist-high, neck-high…it achieved a critical mass.

The gift-bearers weren't even looking at him. They were too busy piling up their spontaneous shrine.

Eventually, a pretty young woman brought him a long cotton pajama top. Grateful, Kipps pulled off his sweating, torn shirt.

There was an immediate torrent of photographs.

Indian journalists. They'd been waiting for him to make a misstep, and stripping off his torn shirt in public was everything they needed.

“I think I'm screwed now,” he told the young woman.

“It's all right,” she told him. “They are photographing me. Not you.”

“You do look familiar,” he lied.

“Don Karwal sent me,” she said, “because I have good American English. I studied theater in New York for three years.”

“That's a nice town, New York…But it's kind of small.”

“Soon they will ask you—everyone will ask you about me. You say: ‘Miss Neeta Dhupia and I are just good friends.' This is Bombay, so that's all you need to say. ‘Just good friends.'”

“Right.”

“They just make up the rest. It's all fantasy. But Bombay loves fantasy. Without fantasy, we don't live.”

“Your don has a lot of connections.”

“The don is our Badshah.” She nodded. “He says you are a hero and his brother. He says you can have anything you want. The don says you are a restless sailor on shore leave.”

She waited for him to say something.

“A whiskey and soda?” she said at last, delicately. “A neck massage?”

“I need a sketchbook,” said Kipps hastily. “I want a pencil. I want good ones. An architectural notebook and a fancy drafting pencil. I need those things right away.”

Miss Dhupia whipped a rhinestone gizmo from her shoulder bag and began to shout in it.

The feral sun was setting, but sound trucks arrived with night-piercing searchlights. Drones whined overhead. A phalanx of snack carts arrived. Somebody opened a fire hydrant.

Kipps tapped the bare skin of Miss Dhupia's pearl-powdered shoulder. “Can you clue me in here? What are we supposed to see?”

“Do you believe in life in outer space?” she said.

“I don't. I'm strictly secular.”

“You don't believe in spaceships? But you pilot spaceships.”

“That's different.”

“How about those robots on Titan? Space robots are UFOs. If you're from Titan.” She smiled triumphantly.

Four young men in postmen's uniforms came tearing through the crowd. It was a dense and increasingly excited mass of human beings, so the postmen were shouting and shoving and clawing and lashing out with their shoulder bags.

They burst through the crowd's perimeter like marathon runners.

They delivered a plastic-wrapped artist's sketchbook and a set of colored pencils.

Miss Dhupia accepted delivery, smiled sweetly for the cameras, and handed the booty to Kipps. Then she glided into a better camera angle and handed the booty over again. Finally, they went through the routine a third time while she delivered some lines in Hindi and Urdu.

“I hope nobody gets killed over this,” said Kipps, unwrapping his sketchbook.

“There may be fatalities,” said Miss Dhupia serenely, “but the police cannot reach us, because the masses would intervene. Besides, the government police are not here, because of the
darshan
in Dubai. Also, you killed ibn Timur. If the police come here, they will praise you.”

Karwal bustled over, accompanied by a small riot squad from a private militia company.

Kipps had seen men like these in plenty, in the war.