“I should very much like,” announced the diplomat, “to view the Lesser Spotted Elephant before I depart.”

Kabir’s face fell. He puffed out his cheeks and gazed determinedly across the shrubs. “I will try, my lord. I will try. But the Lesser Spotted Elephant is one of the most elusive creatures in India. It will take tremendous efforts of observation to spy.” In the back of the Jeep, Rudra nodded gravely and at once began to flick through his sightings records as if every desperate second counted.

Kabir and Rudra were excellent actors. Even if Kabir went a touch too dramatic at times.

“It favours the thickest of the weeds - the vegetation, I mean,” Kabir went on. A clutching hand arose from the steering wheel. “It worms its way into the heart of the thicket, which coils round its supple hide like the protective womb of a loving mother who-”

“Ahem,” Rudra interrupted, somewhat firmly. He was infinitely more subtle than this ham he’d been thrown in with, and his lightly quivering finger brushed the rows of figures in his open notebook for a perfectly calculated fraction of a second before settling on the most suitable coordinates. “I have taken a deep look into our records,” he said, his voice trembling with mock uncertainty. “I believe our best chance at this challenge will be the Abundant Tiger Lookout on the trail to the Crystal Clear Lake. At least three rangers have seen them this decade. They’re obviously thriving over there.”

“Let’s try!” said the diplomat. “A beautiful creature on a beautiful planet. I’ve still got a few hours.”

“Certainly.” Kabir was beaming in the driver’s seat. The nettles waved merrily in the breeze as far as the eye could see. “This elephant’s never actually been seen before ten past one.” Or after. “We could have a pint at the Heart of the Wild Lodge first if you fancy it. It’s on the way. Sort of. If you’re a bit lost.”

The diplomat bristled, which is quite literal because it boasted a number of painful-looking orange tipped spikes which now drew unconsciously up above its eye-stalks like a crown or a rather scratchy scarf. “I... I don’t follow. Surely the more time tracking the better? I should dearly like to see more of your magnificent fauna before I return to the port. We don’t have much land on my home planet, you know. Legs are a bit of a novelty.”

“Oh, we’ll show you legs,” replied Kabir nonchalantly. “Legs, legs and more legs. Legs coming out of your ears!” The diplomat looked a bit confused. Kabir hurried on. “But trust our expertise, my lord, we really do have time for a pint. They did take you to Vegas before coming to noble India, didn’t they? Don’t you want one more for, you know, the space-road?”

He hadn’t seen Rudra hissing at him like a startled cat from behind the throbbing bulk of the diplomat. Or maybe he had, and just really needed that pint.

“If you are referring to the ethanol which you are fond of ingesting,” said the diplomat, slowly, as if speaking to a child, “then no, because, as you should know, a single sip would cause me to shrivel up, then melt, spontaneously combust, and then explode.” It turned coldly from the humans and gazed out over the carrier bags, rippling like flags from their thorny posts. “Just the Lesser Spotted Elephant, thank you.”

Kabir started the engine and struggled off along the sludge. “I meant no offence, my lord. As you please, my lord.” And then, low enough to avoid the translation module strapped about the bulbous alien’s upper head, “Even though we’ll be a good ten minutes too early.”

Kabir knew that they would be ten minutes too early because all the animals were dead, gone, extinct, had been for years, and the robot/lab-grown/spawn of nightmare mechanical freak things which had attempted to take up their mantle ran to a strict timetable. Their natural habitat, the ‘Heart of Wild India’, as the Distraction Corps marketing team (read: Sharon in Manchester) would have it, was a ninety-acre patch of toxic wasteland just out of Jaipur, which had been selected for two important reasons. Firstly, its proximity to the airport meant that the police round about had just enough funding to keep nominal control of the area against the terrorists, anti-terrorist terrorists, and the anti-anti-terrorist and anti-terrorist activists which tended to haunt the rest of the country. Secondly, the wasteland’s disturbing history surrounding a particularly shady chemical plant kept the kids and the drunks and the vagabonds away, thus keeping up that whole illusion of being more than a five-minute drive from the famous Golden Star Two Strip Truck Stop on the highway out to New Delhi, the two types of strips on offer being fried chicken and progressively less clothed girls of an attractive nature. Where the chemical plant had stood, the local kids had soon given up on playing ‘floor is lava’ when it proved to be a little too realistic. The Distraction Corps didn’t want any embarrassing encounters with other people like those twats on the news wobbling around in puddles in canoes when it rained.

It was pretty important that the Distraction Corps didn’t have any embarrassments at all. Earth really did want to get into the League of Peaceful Planets, on account of a pretty tempting heap of weird tobaccos and stuff available to abuse should it shove its grubby foot through the portal at long last. When the diplomats came, it was the Mitigation Corps that met them first, but everyone knew we weren’t going to score many points on the serious governmental tours and policy reviews and things. That’s why it was called the Mitigation Corps. There was only so much convincing that all the people living in shacks at the edge of every city that got paid a dollar a day to shovel nuclear waste were in fact very happy boys and girls that did it for fun you could do with an organisation with ‘peaceful’ in its name.

No, if Earth was to pass the test, it would be with a jolly good scam, and everyone knew the desperate fate of the nice shiny corporations that would reap the benefits of that baccy lay with the Distraction Corps, which ushered the diplomats from the halls of oppression as quickly as the audits allowed for their ‘cultural enlightenments’ around the world. There was ‘Vegas’, which was actually a converted sewer with lighting and poker in Kentucky; ‘Ancient Rome’, an ingeniously arranged and painted slag heap somewhere in Nigeria; and, of course, for the discerning extraterrestrial naturalist, the ‘Heart of Wild India’ safari with which we are now so unfortunately familiar.

Earth had failed thirteen audits so far. However, on the fourteenth try, we were actually doing pretty well. A massive planetary crackdown had meant no bombs had gone off around any of the three diplomats since their arrival from the orbiting spaceport five days ago. There’d been a bit of a narrow escape involving a minor riot in London, but they’d got up a replacement Houses of Parliament in record time before the review. They’d even managed to pass off the oil slick in the Pacific as an unprecedented return of water’s natural colour following an extensive inquiry into measures to promote growth of ‘tuna or manatees or whatever’s supposed to live there’. It was all looking good.

And now, just before he went blobbing back onto the mothership to hand in his scores, the last alien diplomat left on Earth wanted to see the Lesser Spotted Elephant. Easy.

Except, after Kabir had coaxed the Jeep through Pesticide Pothole, and even successfully detoured the screaming youth as he melted into the slime by the verge of the main track (the mating call of the Greater Horny Shrieker, Rudra rapidly explained), and crawled up the buried lead-lined reactor which was all that remained of the factory after The Incident, and proudly announced their arrival at the clump of soggy-looking daisies that formed Abundant Tiger Lookout, the Lesser Spotted Elephant didn’t show up.

Rudra postponed his panic until eleven past one, just in case some feral gang had gotten in the machine’s way again looking for scrap metal. In reality, he maintained a stiff upper lip until twelve past. Then, he whipped out the notebook marked Exciting Records of India’s Most Elusive But Happy and Prolific Aniamls (they’d left the typo in for a bit of authenticity) and scoured the timetables again. Kabir was trying to catch his eye across the outer foothills of the anxious diplomat, but Rudra was frightened of what would happen if their eyes met. He checked the timetable for a third time instead.

Right time. Right place.

He looked up.

No elephant.

The diplomat was slowly rotating in its seat, in what Rudra hoped was wild excitement. “Which way do they usually come? Do they live in groups? What do they eat?” Yes, it was wild excitement.

Kabir raised his actor’s hand again. “The trial we three face is one of utmost endurance, for the elephant is cautious to a fault. Timidly, it edges out from its home in... in...”

“And because it’s so timid we need to shut up right now or else it will never come out,” Rudra insisted. He wished he’d had that laser eye surgery when he had the chance so he could bore a nice neat hole through Kabir’s forehead right now. At least the diplomat’s questions had ceased, though the seat revolutions had picked up a tad.

Kabir craned out behind the guest. “What the FUCK do we do now?” he mouthed.

But Rudra had already eased himself onto one leg, slipped the tablet from the right pocket of his brave explorer’s cargo pants, and placed it within the folds of his timetables. Now, he frantically punched at it, slowing down to study his notes whenever the quivering lighthouse top of the diplomat revolved towards his seat. “It’s broken down, hasn’t it? So I’ve alerted the authorities.”

“Which authorities?”

Rudra shrugged and looked out gloomily across the weeds. “Well, I don’t know what it actually is. So I’m getting out a mechanic, an electrical engineer, a vet, a priest, a rabbi and an imam, the mayor, and an undertaker to stand by for us in case the rest can’t help.”

Kabir’s hands waved desperately just above the back of his seat, his face scrunched in agony. “No, not the mayor! He’ll just find it and take pictures of it and get someone to write a flyer about how it means he should get funding for twice-weekly bins.”

Rudra considered, then he nodded grimly and typed some more. “Yeah, good point. Anyway, the others are on the way. And our friend here thinks it might take a while to spot anyway, so we’re all good.”

It did take a while. It took a really long time indeed before the replies started trickling in. By that point, Rudra was intimately familiar with every nettle leaf and every direction the poison-choked wind could blow every one, and the location of every type of factory just beyond the carefully concealed wall of shipping containers around the perimeter of the Heart, based on smell and sting alone. He was starting to appreciate the powers of his more overlooked senses, which was probably a good job because his eyeballs might not last long if this excursion didn’t go well.

The diplomat was still having the time of his life. Maybe the peaceful planets were boring.

Rudra acted out the eager search for a fake animal which wasn’t even coming for as long as he could bear, then he angled his arms away from the alien, glanced at his tablet, and sighed.

“What’s happening?” Kabir hissed.

“Lots of things,” Rudra whispered back. “The mechanic is blocked out fitting those nuclear missiles to the tanks they announced yesterday, the holy men are off looking at some random genocide or other somewhere, and the electrical engineer was on his way but got pulled for an emergency job fixing the prime minister’s jukebox.” He did a quick 360 of the scraggly plants, willing the elephant to appear. “So we’re on our own.”

Kabir nodded. It was all he’d expected. “Why don’t we get any training on things like this?” Now he looked like he wanted to cry.

“Money.” It was an elegant answer, and all that needed to be said. They looked at some brown leaves for a bit.

Kabir inclined his head towards the mountain of flesh that was called the diplomat. It was still spinning round, eyes bulging, subdorsal ventricles pulsing in pleasure. “Isn’t it happy just looking? You know, if the robot doesn’t come?”

Rudra flapped his hand at the forbidden word. “Hush! Animal. And quite possibly-”

“Ooooh!” groaned the diplomat from up high. “I should so dearly love to view this magnificent creature. I’d have said I’d seen enough to be happy, but then you spoke so eloquently of its habits earlier that I find myself enchanted. Do you think it will come?”

Rudra glared at his partner meaningfully. “Yes,” he said loudly, so the diplomat could hear. “My friend here does have a way with words. He’s right though - it is being elusive today. So Kabir here’s going to have to get out and look for it.”

“Perfect!” roared the diplomat.

It took Kabir several moments to register what had been said. He’d been staring enthusiastically in the opposite direction to Rudra as he spoke. Now he whipped round, eyes widening to rival the guest’s. “I am?”

“Not to actually look for it,” Rudra said urgently. “To pretend to be it. So we can save the day and go home and have a nap or whatever.”

Kabir looked across the Jeep, incredulous. “Pretend... to be an elephant?”

“Yes,” said Rudra. “It’s never seen a real one, remember. And this one never existed at all. So it could look like anything.”

“Anything?” said Kabir blankly.

“Well, you know. Not like you. Shake the bushes a bit. Make some noise.” Rudra pointed helpfully across the dirt. “Who knows, you might find a homeless person you could take some rags off to make fur.”

“Exactly!” spat Kabir. “Why me? There’s all sorts out there.” He gazed in horror through the weeds. “I might meet a drunk, or the anti-NBC-pro-JLT-alliance-of-PPMW militias. Or...” his mouth hung open, “a group of teenagers.”

But Rudra was ready. “Why you? Because you heard the diplomat too; this is all your fault. And besides, it’s a Lesser Spotted Elephant. You’ve got acne.” The real reason it had to be Kabir, Rudra had decided, was because he didn’t want to meet drunks, anti-NBC-pro-JLT-alliance-of-PPMW militia or teenagers either.

Kabir was running shaking fingers over the cheeks only his mother could love. “But if it’s lesser spotted, then you’ll have to go because you’ve got less spots.”

“But it’s still got spots,” Rudra snapped back. “I, in fact, have a perfect complexion. You really don’t want to see the Greater Spotted Elephant.”

Kabir opened his mouth, closed it again, and, covering his face in shame, shimmied out of the vehicle.

For a moment, Rudra watched quite happily as Kabir trudged off into who-knew-what down the edge of the mound. Then, he remembered he was still responsible for the fate of the world and tried to look solemn again. From somewhere far beyond, an explosion boomed out. That helped. “Attack call of the flying death-hawk,” he called up to the diplomat automatically. “Let’s stay really still and quiet so it doesn’t find us.” The alien undulated with joy, then did an impression of a lump of clay. Kabir did an impression of a person who tries when they’re at work and looked at some daisies.

After ten minutes, the Lesser Spotted Elephant appeared.

It looked alarmingly like Kabir, on all fours, with a roll of turf over his head and a twig taped to his back. Rudra realised he may have made a mistake.

The diplomat returned from the clay and sprang to life as the beast struggled ponderously up to the lookout. “Is... is that it?”

“Oh wow,” Rudra managed. The elephant pawed at a bush with its fingers, nuzzled its way inside, and muttered “Shit!” as it knelt on a stick. “Oh...wow!”

Luckily for the Distraction Corps, the diplomats aren’t at all used to unbridled sarcasm. It is even more elusive on peaceful planets than Lesser Spotted Elephants are around Indian airports. “It is! It is!” it gurgled happily. Rudra closed his eyes in relief.

“Rudra!” called the elephant from the protective womb of the bush. “Rudra! Is it the barrels with green labels that cause death or just that horrible itching for a week? I can never remember. I went through one down the bank.”

Rudra and the diplomat stared in silence for a moment. Then, the guide got his racing mind to cough up some words to babble. “No, it’s the red ones with the skull on it that kill you, Rudra,” he called, much too loudly for the distance. “But you won’t find anything nasty like that in the Heart of the Wild. Or anywhere,” he added hastily as the diplomat turned to him, “for the past seventy-nine years, since the Interplanetary Dangerous Pollutants Act of 2023. So you’re fine. So just shut up now because we’re trying to hear the elephant.”

“Oh, bugger,” called Kabir, and then, a second later, there followed a “Rurrrrgh” that might have been a Lesser Spotted Elephant, at four in the morning, bloated, constipated, hungover, and with a sore throat after a night on the lash with the lads.

A hand came out, covered in a hideous dirty yellow sock, and writhed like the last visible appendage of a drowning man. Rudra shuddered at the thought of who Kabir had just fought to bag such a precious piece of costume. “Awww!” he cried, letting the tension go. What a man. He’d misjudged him all this time. “Awww, spectacular views. One for the history books! Yes! You’re missing a treat way out there, Kabir!”

But when he looked at the diplomat, it wasn’t pleased. At least, it looked the same as when Rudra had taken a wrong turn from the airport and bumped into the child exchange on Happy Street. Definitely the same wrinkles.

“Isn’t it spectacular, my lord?” Rudra tried. Kabir stuck a lumpy schnoz out the bush and blew his last remaining shreds of dignity out onto the grass.

“I have concerns,” said the diplomat slowly, deeply, menacingly, “That this ‘elephant’ we are viewing is just another type of human. One that just looks a bit uglier than you (“Hey!” called the elephant in the background) so it’s scratching around in the wild while you live in the paradise that would otherwise be getting near-perfect scores from my audit.”

Rudra’s blood ran cold. He stared up at the blob, teeth grinding. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Kabir start to pull down his pants and edge his buttocks out of the hiding place. Boy, he was going for it now.

“Nah, you’ve got it all wrong,” Rudra blustered up at the solemn unmoving facial surface of the diplomat. “Racism was never invented on this planet. It’s true-” He scrunched up his eyes as a decidedly inhuman squelch erupted from the bushes. “It’s true that the elephants are very closely related to humans, but they could never be considered one of us due to their inferior intellect, contrasting hair colour and culture that we don’t understand. Completely separate things.” He suddenly pinched at his nose in the changing breeze. “And humans couldn’t make smells like that, could they, you dirty bastard? So, now we’ve got that cleared up....”

There was an explosion of noise in perfect surround sound. A rattle of bushes from behind, a clanging of metal feet by the Jeep, and above it all, the screaming and scrabbling of an all-too-human Kabir. “Oh my!” cried the diplomat, ecstatic. “That’s what we wanted! Oh my! Oh my!”

Rudra didn’t want to turn round. But he did it anyway.

Something orange and black was bearing down on the bush where Kabir wept and pleaded. Something at least four feet tall and double in length, hissing and steaming as its pistons pumped and its pumps pistoned, and then, halting before the guide, it lowered down into a crouch and waited.

“Stop! Off! Programme over!” Kabir babbled, head and shoulders bursting from the bush like a slightly less lifelike Roman bust. “Emergency shutdown! Test mode! Just fuck off!”

There was a small shower of sparks from about the robot’s head. Then its jaw lowered with an ear-splitting shriek of steel. The megaphone rotated smoothly from its spot in the predator’s throat.

“Meow,” said the tiger.

Kabir watched, entranced and shivering and terrified, as the megaphone slid back into the beast’s gullet. Then the jaw shut itself. Then the legs raised the huge bulk back to its feet.

Then it pounced.

“Yes!” the diplomat roared. “Rip it to shreds! Oh my goodness!”

Rudra turned away and cried out inarticulately as Kabir screeched and screamed even less articulately. And as he turned, his eyes fell on the seat next to him, where a discarded file that he should have been reading all this time was waiting to help. There was a very detailed section of timetables in there which clearly stated that a three-tonne juggernaut of battering ram paws and pointy metal teeth was due up here precisely every fifty minutes, and that this one had been nice and prompt.

The name ‘Abundant Tiger Lookout’ was a clue that had, for Kabir, been sadly ignored.

“Ooooooh!” groaned the diplomat. Its eyes had somehow gained several inches in girth. “Legs first! Let him bleed! Oh yes!”

Rudra welcomed its ghastly sighs. Sometimes, they blocked out the crunching of bones.

Once, as the torture went on and the Jeep jiggled with the shuddering thing beside him, Rudra let his hand slip to the pulse blaster in his pocket. He would have a clear shot at the tiger. Down in one hit. But the diplomat was having far too much fun for that. And besides, when he risked a quick peek after a particularly frightful gurgle, there wasn’t much left of Kabir by that point anyway.

One hour and thirteen minutes later, they pulled over at the perimeter wall by Heart of the Wild Lodge, just as Kabir had wanted earlier when he was alive and the elephant was dead and the planet was failing its fourteenth audit.

It wasn’t for a pint.

Rudra tried to get out and slumped back in the driver’s seat. He felt like he was one of those baby deer he’d watched in a state of confusion on that DVD when Vihaan had gotten his cases all mixed up again. He’d been expecting Wild College Animals 39.

“I’m sorry,” gasped the diplomat for the twentieth time. It had gone a rather alarming shade of embarrassed indigo. “You won’t report me, will you?”

“No,” said Rudra, flatly.

“I really am peaceful,” the diplomat rumbled on. “It was interesting watching that elephant... sort of stagger about, but when the tiger pounced and it snipped those toes off one by one and the blood squirted across the earth in such neat little squiggles-”

Rudra suddenly decided his legs would have to work after all. He wrenched open the door, fell onto his knees, and willed them into action. His stomach was ready for action regardless.

He left the flustered creature where it sat and found the wall of the toilet block by the bar without looking, hands outstretched, heels kicking. He thought that if he saw another human being he wouldn’t make it. He vowed never to purposely view an earlobe again. Or a nose. His guest had been very descriptive.

Rudra groped his way along with one hand, the other clutched about his clenching stomach as he retched. His fingers found another stomach too. “Watch it, bud!” rasped someone in a British accent, just ahead. Usually, Rudra wouldn’t walk past a Brit on the opposite side of a street, not since the Great Glasgow Battering of 2065, but times were desperate. He did some battering of his own as he shoved his way past into the empty cubicle.

After the deluge had subsided, he sat his other end on the toilet seat and gazed, shivering every now and then, at the back of the door. It was a lovely shade of white, he thought. The sort of white that dead people go. He’d seen lots of dead people in his time with the Distraction Corps. It went with the job. And now he could add Kabir Balakrishnan to that list. There was also the fact that he had made Kabir get out into the danger zone, without consulting the timetables. Not to mention the other quite inconvenient truth that he had sat and watched his colleague die when he could have so easily removed the threat with a point and a tap of his little finger.

Rudra noted with interest that the room also contained a sink and a packet of blue roll.

Another pertinent truth was that he had done the last after exposing a hidden weakness in an agent of the Peaceful Planets, thus manipulating the results of what would otherwise have been another failed audit through a beautiful masterclass of lies and deception. In other words, he’d done his job and he was a hero. One short drive to the airport, and he was done. Forever. The end of everything he had known for the past two years. The Mitigation Corps and the Distraction Corps, mission complete and riches en-route. Plenty for him in this. He could get away from it all. Fly out to Costa Rica tomorrow, buy his way in to one of those private communities deep in the rainforests he’d read about, away from the bombs and terrorists and women with sharp tongues for all time.

Well, as deep as the trees went these days, and until the conservation trusts sold the land out from under them, but maybe he’d get a few years peace. Then back to the grind if he had to, and then with all that weird alien smoke that made you see fairies while you plugged away at the trenches with the machine gun. And he’d have earned that, for everyone, all by himself. Just by letting Kabir die.

Satisfied, Rudra stood up. He found strength in his legs once more. He was the man he’d always known himself to be. A proud man. A legend. And one that got a bit squeamish when he heard tales about intestines getting pulled out of nostrils like really big bogies, but he’d never pretended to be a total badass anyway.

As he flushed, he wondered who’d programmed the tigers to be so bloody gruesome. Maybe some genius had always hoped for it to end this way. He’d have to find them and buy them a lasagne or something.

Then he turned and opened the door and got grabbed by the lapels of his safari jacket and pounded hard against the wall.

“Here ‘e is,” growled the Brit. One bloodshot eye loomed inches from Rudra’s own. “Little water-drinking shit.” Then he spat in Rudra’s face.

Another figure detached itself from the soot-covered lamppost by the corner of the lodge. For one blessed second, Rudra was pleased to see the official badge of the lodge’s catering staff pinned to the man’s coat. Then he looked down at what the man was holding in his hands and groaned.

“Here, mate,” said the second man, and as soon as he heard the Geordie speak Rudra really knew he was up the creek, not just without a paddle but with a leak in his boat, a hissing stick of dynamite taped to his back and a fifteen-foot mechanical crocodile trailing in his sorry wake. “What you think you’re doing, man? Pushing in like that, fifty credit fine.”

“I felt sick,” Rudra protested. But the first man only ground him harder into the bricks, and the manager only continued writing in his fines book.

“Aww, poor little sod. Anyway, parking without checking in, eighty credit fine. Maybe another twenty, just for being a prick. And...” At that, the first man suddenly dragged him out into the path and flung him towards the car park like a particularly ragged rag doll. “And for pissing without buying a drink first, you’re BLOODY BARRED!”

Rudra fell weeping to the ground. The list of fines came fluttering after him. The first man had seemingly decided that letting him go had not been such a good idea after all and came ambling up for a kick to the arse.

“What do you think we are, some fucking public service?” screeched the landlord. “The bloody Red Cross? The-”

“I say,” came a familiar voice from across the car park. The landlord fell silent. Arse Kicker paused, arse left unkicked. Both stared wide-eyed out past Rudra as if they’d seen a giant wobbling ball of purple jelly and orange spikes squelching their way, which they had.

“I must say,” declared the diplomat, in a similar tone to when it had been recounting its unfortunate meeting with the anti-please protests to Kabir and Rudra when they’d first met, “This does not seem very peaceful at all! Kicking a fellow human just because he had orally excreted due to the primal excitement of seeing an animal shredded... I mean, just because he felt unwell! This is preposterous.” The eye stalks came up to their full height, glowing like twin incinerators above the three men. “Why, you’re not nice at all! Not one bit! I shall have to file a report immediately. Earth is not a peaceful planet.”

Rudra, who had sat through the rant with his eyes closed and his hands to his face, got up, dusted himself off, and pulled out his gun. “No shit, Sherlock,” he muttered, and then he pulled the trigger and shot the diplomat dead. Together, the men stood and watched in fascination as the hulking creature disintegrated into little puddles of goo, and then they watched some more as the thirsty gravel of the car park sucked it down. From the windows of the bar, a crowd of thugs, bandits, rapists, arms-runners, smugglers, murderers and toilet-seat-leaver-upperers clapped, cheered, and went back to their assorted sins.

Rudra observed the last of the diplomat dry away, then he rounded on his assailants, who took one look at the leaf-strewn, teeth-bearing wreck of a man before them and raised their hands. Rudra tossed his pulse blaster carelessly to the ground, and the men shrank back as he reached out with one booted heel and crushed it into the concrete with a sigh that somehow sounded louder than a scream. Then, he pulled out a battered wallet and flashed some ID somewhere vaguely towards his attackers. “Congratulations,” he said, and though the Brits had braced themselves for an outburst of rage, the guide’s voice was calm. Business-like. “You’ve just got me another year in this shitty job. Oh, and stopped the world from getting some pretty decent baccy.” He looked sadly down at the weedy wreckage of the pulse blaster, the replacement of which would cost him his pre-order of Wild College Animals 40. “They say it’s the shit on Centurion 5. The shit. Good job.” He pointed a finger at the landlord. “I’m going back to the car now to make a call. Just so you know, that jelly-twat’s body isn’t gone.. yet. So if I were you I’d get packed up before the nukes get here.” He turned and stalked back towards the Jeep.

“Fine!” roared the Geordie after a moment’s silence. “But you still owe those credits. And you need to buy at least one drink! At least one! And then you’re barred.”

But Rudra wasn’t listening. His legs had gone all wobbly again. He sat in the Jeep for a while, staring out at the brown dirt and the brown sky and the drone of the factories beyond the wall, trying to control his breath. In. Out. In. Out. Then he fished his tablet out and called the Clean-Up Corps, the third one that they always hoped they wouldn’t need but always did. When it was done, he rested his forehead on the steering wheel for just a moment, relishing the smoothness of the worn leather. So close. So, so close this time. But no hallucinogenic alien cigar yet again. It was a shame, he thought, as he raked the Jeep into gear and got it out the gate and full blast down the highway. He’d liked Jaipur, and it was a bit of a bugger it all had to be vaporised, even worse when he had to leg it like this after such a long day.

But it might not work out too badly. They might execute him for this one.

A hallucinogenic alien cigar would have gone down very nicely indeed.