I ask you that any citizens of India who come under the rule of the Pakistani government be treated as generously as you would wish us, were our situations reversed, to treat your people. Whatever past offenses have been committed between our families, let us forgive each other and commit no new offenses, but treat each other as brothers and sisters who have been faithful to different faces of the same God, and who must now stand shoulder to shoulder to defend India against the invader whose only god is power and whose worship is cruelty.
Many members of the Indian government, military, and educational system will flee to Pakistan. I beg you to open your borders to them, for if they remain in India, only death or captivity will be in their future. All other Indians have no reason to fear individual persecution from the Chinese, and I beg you not to flee to Pakistan, but rather to remain inside India, where, God willing, you will soon be liberated.
I myself will remain in India, to bear whatever burden is placed upon my people by the conqueror. I would rather be Mandela than de Gaulle. There is to be no governmentin-exile. Pakistan is the government of the Indian people now. I say this with the full authority of Congress.
May God bless all honorable people, and keep them free.
Your brother and friend, Tikal Chapekar
Jetting over the dry southern reaches of India felt to Bean like a strange dream, where the landscape never changed. Or no, it was a vidgame, with a computer making up scenery on the fly, recycling the same algorithms to create the same type of scenery in general, but never quite the same in detail.
Like human beings. DNA that differed by only the tiniest amounts from person to person, and yet those differences giving rise to saints and monsters, fools and geniuses, builders and wreckers, lovers and takers. More people live in this one country, India, than lived in the whole world only three or four centuries ago. More people live here today than lived in the entire history of the world up to the time of Christ. All the history of the Bible and the Iliad and Herodotus and Gilgamesh and everything that had been pieced together by archaeologists and anthropologists, all of those human relationships, all those achievements, could all have been played out by the people we're flying over right now, with people left over to live through new stories that no one would ever hear.
In these few days, China would conquer enough people to make five thousand years of human history, and they would treat them like grass, to be mown till all were the same level, with anything that rose above that level discarded to be mere compost.
And what am I doing? Riding along on a machine that would have given that old prophet Ezekiel a heart attack before he could even write about seeing a shark in the sky. Sister Carlotta used to joke that Battle School was the wheel in the sky that Ezekiel saw in his vision. So here I am, like a figure out of some ancient vision, and what am I doing? That's right, out of the billions of people I might have saved, I'm choosing the one I happen to know and like the best, and risking the lives of a couple of hundred good soldiers in order to do it. And if we get out of this alive, what will I do then? Spend the few years of life remaining to me, helping Peter Wiggin defeat Achilles so he can do exactly what Achilles is already so close to doing-unite humanity under the rule of one sick, ambitious marubo?
Sister Carlotta liked to quote from another biblical git-vanity, vanity, all is vanity. There is nothing new under the sun. A time to scatter rocks and a time to gather rocks together.
Well, as long as God didn't tell anybody what the rocks were for, I might as well leave the rocks and go get my friend, if I can.
As they approached Hyderabad, they picked up a lot of radio chatter. Tactical stuff from satrads, not just the net traffic you'd expect because of the Chinese surprise attack in Burma that had been triggered by Peter's essay. As they got closer, the onboard computers were able to distinguish the radio signatures of Chinese troops as well as Indian.
"Looks like Achilles' retrieval crew got here ahead of us," said Suriyawong.
"But no shooting," said Bean. "Which means they've already got to the planning room and they're holding the Battle Schoolers as hostages."
"You got it," said Suriyawong. "Three choppers on the roof."
"There'll be more on the ground, but let's complicate their lives and take out those three."
Virlomi had misgivings. "What if they think it's the Indian Army attacking and they kill the hostages?"
"Achilles is not so stupid he won't make sure who's doing the shooting before he starts using up his ticket home."
It was like target practice, and three missiles took out three choppers, just like that.
"Now get us onto blades and show the Thai markings," said Suriyawong.
It was, as usual, a sickening climb and drop before the blades took over. But Bean was used to the sense of clawing nausea and was able to notice, out the windows, that the Indian troops were cheering and waving.
"Oh, suddenly now we're the good guys," said Bean.
"I think we're just the not-quite-so-evil guys," said Suriyawong.
"I think you're taking irresponsible risks with the lives of my friends," said Virlomi.
Bean sobered at once. "Virlomi, I know Achilles, and the only way to keep him from killing your friends, just for spite, is to keep him worried and off balance. To give him no time to display his malice."
"I meant that if one of those missiles had gone astray," she said, "it could have hit the room they're in and killed them all."
"Oh, is that all you're worried about?" Bean said. "Virlomi, I trained these men. There are situations in which they might miss, but this was not one of them."
Virlomi nodded. "I understand. The confidence of the field commander. It's been a long time since I had a toon of my own."
A few choppers stayed aloft, watching the perimeter; most set down in front of the building where the planning room was located. Suriyawong had already briefed the company commanders he was taking into the building by satrad as they flew. Now he jumped from the chopper as soon as the door opened and, with Virlomi running behind him, he got his group moving, executing the plan.
At once, Bean's chopper lifted back up and, with another chopper, hopped the building to come down on the other side. This was where they found the two remaining Chinese helicopters, blades spinning. Bean had his pilot set down so the chopper's weapons were pointed at the sides of the two Chinese machines. Then he and the thirty men with him went out both doors as Chinese troops across the open space between them did the same.
Bean's other chopper remained airborne, waiting to see whether its missiles or the troops inside would be needed first.
The Chinese had Bean's troops outnumbered, but that wasn't really the issue. Nobody was shooting, because the Chinese wanted to get away alive, and there was no hope of that if shooting broke out, because the airborne chopper would simply destroy both the remaining Chinese machines and then it wouldn't matter what happened on the ground, they'd never get home and their mission would be a failure.
So the two little armies formed up just like regiments in the Napoleonic wars, neat little lines. Bean wanted to shout something like "fix bayonets" or "load"but nobody was using muskets and besides, what interested him would be coming out the door of the building....
And there he was, rushing straight for the nearest chopper, gripping Petra by the arm and half-dragging her along. Achilles held a pistol down at his side. Bean wanted to have one of his sharpshooters him out, but he knew that then the Chinese would open fire and take Petra would certainly be killed. So he called out to Achilles.