Vimana

Aaditya was now barely a hundred feet above the waves. Narada's vimana took another hit from a beam from the sphere, but he kept on going. The beams from the sphere were now reaching out at Aaditya too, and he flinched at a near miss. He was close enough to see the small gun ports on the sphere's surface that were firing and saw one swivel towards him. He was too close and going too fast to abort his run, so Aaditya prepared himself for the inevitable.

Just then, Narada maneuvered his vimana right in front of Aaditya. The beam from the sphere hit him near his tail, nearly splicing off the vimana into half. Aaditya watched in horror as Narada's vimana spiraled towards the ocean and impacted the water. But the sacrifice had given him the opportunity he needed. He was now headed straight into the opening on the surface of the sphere, which was rapidly filling the screen in front of him. Kalki must have released all his drones; they were now coming out in trickles of one or two. With Aaditya barely fifty feet away, the opening on the sphere begin to slide shut. He willed his vimana to go even faster. Just then a drone shot out. Without conscious thought, Aaditya destroyed it and then flew his vimana straight through the debris.

He felt the pitter-patter of the fragments of the destroyed drone hit his vimana, sounding like a hailstorm. He turned his vimana steeply to one side, and guided it through the opening moments before it slammed shut. Shiva and Durga were right behind him. He could hear Shiva's voice in his ears.

'We made it!'

Aaditya took a deep breath. He accelerated his vimana and shot into the depths of Kalki's base.

***

Aaditya flew into the open fields he had seen before with the gleaming giant pyramid looming in the distance. The only difference was that this time the landscape was not filled with workers tending to the crops, but an army preparing for invasion. As far as the eye could see, dark shapes of daityas massed around large landing craft. There must have been thousands of them-all awaiting Kalki's order to spearhead his invasion once the tsunamis had hit. Some of them looked up at the three strange vimanas that had suddenly appeared overhead. Aaditya was tempted to fire into their massed ranks or to destroy their hulking landing craft, but this battle depended on their ability to stop Kalki before he detonated his underwater charges. One or two of the daityas took potshots as they passed, but when Shiva fired two astras right into the middle of a large group, incinerating more than twenty of them, the others scattered for cover.

'Follow me!' Aaditya screamed into his headset as his vimana roared towards the hangar opening on the side of the pyramid. There were a few daityas there, but they scrambled away out of sight. It seemed that they had no idea that some attacking vimanas had made it all the way into the innermost recesses of Kalki's base. Aaditya brought his vimana down in a corner of the hangar. Shiva and Durga's vimanas landed close by. As he stepped out, he realized that Kalki had indeed sent out all his drones for the battle that was now raging overhead. There were no drones or vimanas in sight, and any daityas who had been standing guard were nowhere to be seen.

'Now, that wasn't so difficult.'

Shiva had barely spoken when a beam of red light slammed into his vimana, missing his head by inches. The three ran for cover behind Shiva's vimana, their handheld vajras at the ready. Aaditya leaned forward and saw a group of four daityas at the far end of the hangar. Each of them held a long rifle-like weapon and they were firing pretty indiscriminately at the intruders. Aaditya turned to Shiva to see what he was thinking.

'They can't shoot to save their lives, but they don't even need to touch us. If they keep us bottled up here long enough, we've already lost.'

In the chaos and adrenaline rush of the dogfight, Aaditya had almost forgotten just how much of a knife's edge their mission rested on. Each of them had a holographic display over their wrists that showed a timer counting down till the moment when they anticipated Kalki would trigger his explosions.

There were only twenty minutes left.

Aaditya felt Durga come closer to him.

'Which way is Kalki's command centre?'

Two doors lead out of the hangar. One, to the right, almost directly behind the daityas attacking them led to the quarters, where his room had been. The other, to the left, led to a short staircase that ended at the elevator that would take them straight to Kalki's command centre. Aaditya nodded towards the left.

Before Aaditya could say or do anything to stop her, Durga sprinted out from behind the vimana and ran straight towards the daityas who had been shooting at them. She weaved left and right as beams bounced off the floor and walls all around her and cartwheeled across the floor, landing in a crouch behind a drone engine. The daityas realized too late that she had neatly flanked them, and one of them disappeared in a puff of dust as she fired her first shot. The others took cover and fired back at her.

'Durga, wait!'

He felt Shiva tugging at his arm. 'Come on. She is buying us time. Let's get to Kalki.'

The two of them ran towards the stairs and then into the open elevator. From memory, Aaditya pressed the buttons he had seen Maya pressing. As the elevator climbed up, Aaditya clenched the vajra tightly in his hand, wondering what would greet them once the doors opened.

The doors slid opened and he sensed more than saw two figures outside. He was about to open fire when he saw who stood before him. Bloodied, bruised, and holding the long weapons the daityas brandished, were Leslie and Jim. They seemed just as surprised as he was at seeing them.

'Jesus, Aadi, it is you!'

'Jim, what's going on?'

Jim was about to answer when he suddenly brought his weapon up and took a step back. Shiva had just walked out of the elevator. Aaditya held the barrel of Jim's weapon and pressed it down.

'Relax, he's on our side.'

'Is he one of the Devas you talked about?'

Aaditya just nodded. Leslie quickly told him, 'About an hour ago, all hell broke loose. The daityas were really on edge, and we heard there was an attack of some sort. We had no way of knowing what time it was, but we put two and two together and figured out that today was D-Day. So we thought we'd help out.'

Jim tensed as he heard some movement around the corner and then continued, 'We had spread the word, and everyone knew what was going down. So we fought back. While you were flying around up there, we were taking down their pilots and destroying their planes down here. Some of us were trained to fight, but everyone joined in. Lots of them didn't make it.'

Aaditya saw a look of admiration on Shiva's face.

'That explains why more of their vimanas did not join the fight.'

Aaditya wondered what it must have taken for unarmed civilians to take on daityas. At that moment, he realized what Kalki had never really understood. As messed up as our world was, and as messed up as humans sometimes seemed to be, there still were a lot of good people out there. People who would sacrifice themselves to help others; people who would give of themselves without asking anything in return; people for whom love and loyalty meant more than power or money. They were people whom Kalki could subjugate and defeat, but never really conquer. People like Leslie, Jim and the other humans who had given their lives today. People like his father.

The thought gave him a renewed resolve as he rushed into the corridor.

'Shiva, Kalki's room is just around the corner, up some stairs!'

He ran towards the corner, only to be slammed against the wall by Jim, just as two beams of light passed, almost grazing his shoulder.

'There are two demons there. They're behind good cover, and we couldn't get past them. Going in there is suicide.'

With less than fifteen minutes left, Aaditya struggled to break out of Jim's grip. Shiva sat down on his haunches next to them, and told Jim and Leslie that Kalki's plan was about to be set into motion. The only way to stop Kalki was to get through the two daityas in the corridor.