“Freeze!” someone shouted. “Hands where I can see ’em, Abdul!”
Laks wasn’t surprised. During the last minute or so he had begun to smell danger, and its odor was now very strong. He extended his hands out away from his sides and turned around slowly to see a man in a sort of military getup, standing about five meters away and aiming a shotgun at him. Approaching from the
direction of the compound, he’d crept up on Laks while Laks had been enjoying the vista.
Before either of them could take any further action, a light came on above, creating a pool of illumination around this man. A second and a third light appeared, catching him in an equilateral cross fire with the intensity of the midday sun. Three drones, making practically no sound, that had been stalking this guy through the night.
A fourth drone descended into the pool of light until it had interposed itself between the barrel of the shotgun and Laks. This one had a short tube projecting from an apparatus in its belly. The tube was on gimbals that enabled it to pivot this way and that, and to angle up and down. Initially the tube was aimed right at the man, but once it had got his attention it angled downward. A bolt of fire spat from it and dust erupted from the ground just to one side of the man’s boots. The drone jerked back from recoil as a loud bang reached Laks’s ear. A spent shell casing twinkled as it bounced in the dirt.
“You are surrounded,” said a woman’s voice from the drone. Perfect English with a light Indian accent. Laks thought it might be the same lady who did the recorded announcements at Indira Gandhi International Airport. With the same tone of mild regret that she might have used to inform passengers that their departure gate had been changed, she instructed this man to disarm himself and then march in the direction helpfully pointed out by “the arrow.”
Which raised the same question in Laks’s mind that it probably did in that of this security guard: What the fuck was the arrow? But no sooner had Laks begun to furrow his brow in puzzlement than an arrow appeared on the ground, drawn out by a scanning laser. There was enough dust in the air that Laks could see the laser beam and back-trace it up to its source: yet another drone hovering perhaps twenty meters above them. The arrow, painted on the dirt in brilliant emerald green, began right in front of the security guard’s boots and executed an immediate U-turn, pointing back in the direction of the main compound.
The guard had now recovered his wits to the point where he had put a plan together in his head. Not a great plan, but a plan. He took a couple of steps forward as if following the arrow, but then suddenly pivoted, dropping to one knee, and fired his shotgun at the closest drone—the one with the built-in gun. This shuddered back from the blast and skittered across the ground leaving a trail of shattered parts in its wake.
Immediately the green arrow disappeared. Or rather the cone of grainy green laser light shrank and collapsed inward until it was just scanning back and forth across the man’s eye sockets. “Fuck!” he shouted and bent his face downward. The back of his head was now just an incandescent blob of green laser light. Another gun drone hummed in from a different angle and fired a second round. The shotgun jerked and spun out of the man’s hands and came to rest on the ground out of his reach.
Holstered on the man’s hip was another gun—a semi-automatic pistol. Laks wondered if the drone would try to shoot that as well. But it seemed that such measures were not even necessary. The man raised his hands and laced his fingers together on the top of his head. The blinding blob of green light spread out and reconstituted itself as the arrow telling him where to go. He began to follow it; and it changed its shape in response to his movements and preceded him across the mesa as he walked back toward the compound.
“Abdul’s an Arab name!” Laks shouted after the man. But the man either didn’t hear, or chose to ignore it. En route his arrow met, and merged with, that of a colleague who was being marched along by a different squadron of drones.
The smell of danger abated in Laks’s nostrils, or, to be precise, whatever equipment the medics had inserted between his nostrils and his brain. It was replaced by the scent of smoke. He turned around. The ATV he’d noticed earlier had gained the top of the mesa and parked. Two men were getting out of it. One was smoking a pipe: the source of the smoke. The other, who had been driving, heaved a backpack out of the cargo storage area behind the
seats, got one arm through a shoulder strap, and began to lug it along in Major Raju’s wake. For the pipe-smoking man was he.