'I've got you, son.'
FIFTEEN
The first thing Aaditya felt were Tanya's lips on his own, a wonderful and welcome sensation. He drifted in and out of consciousness, but remembered two things that kept him going. One was the knowledge of what his father had done and the second was hearing Tanya repeating that she loved him and was waiting for him. When he finally came to, Tanya was by his side, holding his hand, tears streaming down her face.
'Hey, beautiful.'
Tanya hugged him close. If it hadn't felt so good, he may have asked her to give him some space, since his body still felt like it had been in a car wreck.
'Thank god you're back.'
Aaditya looked at her, cupped her chin in both his hands and kissed her. 'Tanya, I love you. More than anything or anybody else in the world.'
The next few days were spent filling in the Devas on what he had seen inside Kalki's lair, and about the one weakness in Kalki's base that he had learnt of.
'December 21 is just a couple of weeks away. We should just hover nearby and attack whenever any craft takes off from his base.'
Brahma looked at Shiva and silently shook his head, indicating his disapproval.
'Shiva, if we just hover around his base all day, he'll suspect something is wrong. We need to wait for the day before we act.'
Indra was sitting in a corner, lost in thought. 'Aadi, we should just launch a few nuclear weapons down that bloody tube when his craft come out. We can deal with them in the air and the nukes will wipe out his base.'
Aaditya didn't need more than a split second to respond, Leslie and Jim's faces looming large before his eyes. 'There are thousands of innocent people there. We can't just slaughter them to get to Kalki.'
Shiva started to object, but Brahma raised his hand, as if indicating that the debate was over. 'The boy is right. If we stoop to that level, we are no better than Kalki. Indra, we need to have a plan ready. The challenge is we need to time it with Kalki's plan. If we act too soon, he will suspect something is wrong.'
That evening, Aaditya was seated with Tanya on a perch overlooking the main hangar. Their hands were intertwined, her head on his shoulders. For the first time, he had told anyone else about what he had learnt about his father's last moments. He had not realized it at first, but his eyes had filled with tears. Tanya held him tight.
He finally left her only when Shiva sent summons to join them for a meeting. It was a chaotic affair, with every one of the Devas having his or her own opinion about what to do. Aaditya walked away feeling more than a little afraid. For all their power and technology, it was clear that the Devas had not really figured out any real way of stopping Kalki.
On his way back he bumped into Ganesha, who called him over into his room, where he had been sitting in front of his monitors.
'I've called Narada and Tanya as well. I thought we could chat about an idea I have.'
Aaditya had never seen Ganesha this intense before, his normally jovial features obscured by a mask of intense thought.
'Ganesha, what's on your mind?'
'Here they are. Folks, just gather around.'
Both Narada and Tanya seemed as clueless as Aaditya.
'They're going about this all wrong.'
Ganesha was pointing in the direction of the conference room where the other Devas were assembled. Narada tried to say something, but Ganesha continued speaking, cutting him off. 'They are angry, and they are afraid, and so they are doing nothing more than react to Kalki. We cannot win if we just wait for him to make his move.'
Narada raised an eyebrow, the closest Aaditya had seen the otherwise unflappable Deva to losing his cool. Ganesha seemed to notice and raised a placating hand.
'Hey, I'm not just complaining about them. I do have a plan where I think you and Tanya can help.'
Tanya had been listening in silence but at the mention of her name, she spoke up. 'Ganesha, you heard what Kalki's plan is. We don't have a whole lot of time, and with the kind of chaos he has planned, I don't know what I of all people can do to stop him.'
Ganesha looked at Aaditya. 'Kalki told you that he was planning all of this to make it seem like the end time prophecies of various religions were coming true.'
Aaditya nodded. 'Yes. The Mayan calendar, the Biblical Armageddon, the Hindu myths of the end of Kalyug. Every religion has predicted an end of the world as we know it, and he's going to set it up and project himself as the God who has come to claim his chosen ones.'
'You know, Aadi, Kalki may seem crazy but once he was really bright. Spending all these years alone, feeling that everyone he once knew is against him, and with nobody to talk to other than psychopaths like Maya and those daityas, he probably has started to believe all this.'
Aaditya thought back to the gleam in Kalki's eyes as he had been talking about his plan.
'He does seem a bit….unhinged, I guess. I don't know about crazy, because he is way too dangerous to dismiss as just crazy, but he is intense in a really obsessed kind of way.'
'Bingo. That's the weakness we need to exploit. He's obsessed with making these prophecies come true since they will set him as the God he so badly wants to be. So let's feed him something that leads him to act when we want him to act, so that we're ready.'
Narada's eyes lit up as an idea struck him. 'Ganesha, you are a genius if you are thinking what I am thinking.'
Aaditya and Tanya were both a bit uncertain. Ganesha got up abruptly. 'All this thinking has made me really hungry. Get me some sweets and Tanya, you need to pull off the best PR campaign of all time for this plan to work.'
As everyone seemed to get busy, Aaditya wondered how he could make himself useful. Ganesha looked at him, a serious glint in his eyes. 'My boy, I will plot here with Tanya and Narada, but at the end of the day, we will need to take to the skies and smash Kalki's forces into oblivion. This will be a battle unlike any we have seen, so go and get yourself ready.'
***
Two days later, a pastor of a small church in Cincinnati, USA, Baron Waterspoon, announced to a roomful of incredulous reporters that an angel had told him the world was indeed going to end on 21 December 2012. The press had already worked itself up into a frenzy with the date approaching, and religious nuts of all descriptions were crawling out of the woodworks. What made Father Waterspoon's comments more intriguing was that the angel had told him the specific time the world would end: fifty-four minutes after noon on the 21st of December.
That announcement would likely have been forgotten or dismissed as the ravings of a man coming unhinged if at roughly the same time three more press conferences were not being held throughout the world. By a rabbi in Jerusalem, a mullah in Cairo, and a priest at a temple in Benaras in India. Incredibly enough, they all seemed to have the same story, and the same reported time for the impending end of the world.
The first reporters to connect the dots assumed that it was a con job, but the mullah and the priest had never even been on the Internet, and never travelled outside their home cities, so coordinating such a plan across continents seemed to be a bit of a stretch. As the reports started flooding in the next day, it no longer mattered what the reporters thought. Public imagination, already raised to a fever pitch by the mass hysteria surrounding 2012, lapped the story up. The world was indeed going to end at 12:54 PM EST on the 21st of December, 2012.
The plan that Narada and Tanya had put in place had worked beyond their wildest hopes. Holographic projections had been used to portray a very convincing angel to the priests, then Tanya had used all her contacts and PR skills to ensure that the story had been picked up and reported and blogged on till cyberspace was abuzz with nothing else. Like a pack of dominos, once they had set the ball rolling, the story took on a life of its own. Religious leaders, ordinary people, and even a couple of elderly sheepherders in New Zealand, all came forward saying that they had experienced the same vision.