A cacophonous symphony of shattering polycarbonate and twisting metal announced Michael's arrival. The battle-mech, a hulking giant of painted steel and silent menace, shouldered its way through the bridge's viewing port as if the reinforced glass were mere sugar-pane. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of ozone, stale sweat, and cold fear.
The bridge of the INS Chennaiwas a tomb of humming electronics and paralyzed men. Officers and ratings alike stood frozen, a tableau of shock painted in the sterile glow of radar screens and system monitors. In the centre, trying desperately to muster a shred of the dignity befitting his lineage and rank, stood Captain Akshay Khan. His hands, trembling minutely, straightened the already-perfect line of his uniform jacket. He drew a shaky breath, puffing out his chest like a pouter pigeon.
"I, Captain Akshay Khan of the Indian Western Fleet, on behalf of the crew of this vessel…" he began, his English precise but layered so thickly with a distinctive, lyrical accent that the words seemed to swim in a sea of turmeric and cardamom. To Michael, nestled in the mech's cockpit, it sounded less like a declaration and more like a recipe read aloud during an earthquake. He caught the gist—surrender, conditional, demanding 'appropriate treatment befitting our status'.
Appropriate treatment?Michael's thought was a dry, internal scoff. Blimey, they've inherited all the stuffy pomp from their old colonial masters along with the language. Should I offer them tea and crumpets too?
With a flick of a mental switch, he silenced the cockpit's background orchestra of 80s synth-pop. His own voice, filtered through external speakers and polished to a crisp, Received Pronunciation sheen, cut through the anxious silence. "This vessel and everyone on it are now under my control. 'Appropriate treatment' is not on the menu. However, compliance will guarantee your continued existence. Nod if you understand."
Relief, profound and immediate, washed over Captain Khan's face. Survival. That was the key. His family's influence in Delhi would see him through any subsequent court of inquiry, provided he lived to see it. Thank the gods,he thought, the tension leaving his shoulders. He just wants the ship. We'll be traded for something, surely. A prisoner exchange. Anything is better than being smeared across the bulkhead by that thing.
He opened his mouth to voice his acquiescence, to agree in the clear, standard English he'd been taught at the academy.
"Stop," the mech's voice interrupted, flat and metallic. "Your accent is an assault on the language. A gesture will suffice. Do you submit?"
Akshay Khan, relieved, eager to please, offered the most natural, reassuring gesture he knew. He moved his head in a gentle, slow, side-to-side wobble, the classic Indian nod that signified understanding, agreement, and a sort of benign approval all at once.
From within the cockpit, Michael stared. The man was shaking his head. After all that, he was refusing? A flicker of incredulous admiration shot through him. "Well," the synthesized voice said, a note of grim surprise colouring its tone. "Got to hand it to you. More spine than I expected. As you wish."
The massive, riveted fist of the mech moved with a piston-like hiss. It was not a punch thrown in rage, but a clinical, almost dismissive backhand. The impact made a sound like a sack of wet cement hitting a wall. Captain Akshay Khan, descendant of warriors, pride of the Western Fleet, was abruptly and permanently relieved of his command, leaving a poignant, man-shaped dent in the hardened steel behind him. His final, fading thought was not of glory or family, but a sudden, glaring linguistic epiphany: The nod… he didn't know the nod means 'yes'… I should have… spoken clearer…
"Cheese!"
The cheerful exclamation, emanating from the monstrous machine, was utterly surreal. The mech had swivelled, and one of its massive, three-fingered hands was raised in a clumsy 'V' for victory—or perhaps for a snapshot—towards a 'Chetak' helicopter hovering like a nervous dragonfly a hundred meters off the port side. Michael could see the gleam of a cabin-mounted cannon tracking him, but he felt a bubble of grim amusement. Fear was a distant concept. The bridge was secure, its surviving occupants trussed up with their own belts and turbans by a few terrified, cooperative crewmen Michael had press-ganged into service. The bindings were, he noted with approval, exceptionally thorough. The men on the helicopter would not dare fire. Not with their comrades as a living shield. The calculus of the spectacle prevented it.
His initial objective achieved, Michael moved to phase two. The mech's systems were a marvel, its external speakers capable of projecting sound with crystal, resonant clarity. He took a breath he didn't need, and his voice, amplified to a godlike volume, boomed out over the hushed fleet and the watching city.
"Testing, testing. Can everyone hear me? Good." The tone was conversational, almost friendly. "Attention, Indian Western Fleet. This is your new neighbour speaking. I have taken command of the INS Chennai. I'm feeling reasonably charitable today. No one needs to get hurt. In exchange for the safe return of this ship and her crew, I require a ransom. One metric tonne. Of pure, 24-karat gold. None of that… reclaimed municipal alloy, please. I'm not a barbarian."
He let the absurd demand hang in the salt-tinged air. The silence that followed was profound, broken only by the whir of cameras and the distant, confused murmur of the millions watching from the shore.
"I know these things take time. Bureaucracy, vaults, weighing scales—tedious. So, I'll be generous. You have ten hours. Fail to deliver, and I will introduce this very expensive warship to the concept of spontaneous, volumetric disassembly. The clock starts now."
He cut the transmission. The demand was astronomical, yet he knew the numbers. A ton of gold was a king's ransom, but the Chennaihad cost twenty times that. They would pay. But first, they would try to be heroes.
Around noon, under the baleful stare of a hundred optical lenses and radar locks, the mech stirred. It turned with a groan of servos and simply walked through a reinforced hatchway leading below decks, leaving a crumpled, man-sized hole framed in twisted metal. Its progress through the ship's innards was not one of stealth, but of pure, industrial vandalism. Corridors meant for two men abreast were widened into garages as the machine barged through bulkheads, peeling steel like the skin of a fruit.
Its destination was a nondescript, heavily-sealed door stencilled with fading Devanagari script and English: 'ARMOURY – SECONDARY'. A single, thunderous kick from a hydraulic leg reduced the locking mechanism to scrap. The door shrieked open.
Inside, Michael's breath caught. It was a treasure cave. Racks of INSAS assault rifles stood in neat, pathetic rows—he knew their reputation, the jamming issues, the questionable metallurgy. Useless against what lurked in Detroit. But beside them… oh, but beside them were crates. Wooden crates stamped with cryptic numbers, their lids pried open by the mech's claws to reveal rivers of polished brass cartridges. And there, nestled like deadly eggs, were rocket-propelled grenades, their olive-drab tubes promising satisfying violence. Best of all, in a corner, lay the disassembled, oiled components of two heavy machine guns, boxes of linked 12.7mm ammunition beside them like presents under a tree.
"Jackpot," Michael whispered, a grin splitting his face. He worked quickly, loading the mech's arm-mounted cannons with long, serpentine belts of the heavy calibre rounds. The ship's main magazine, with its missiles and torpedoes, held no interest for him. This was the prize. He secured the door with a length of pipe twisted into a pretzel and headed back, a planter of destruction tending his violent garden.
He emerged onto the sun-blasted deck to a changed scenario. The air thrummed with a new, aggressive rhythm. Two more helicopters now hovered like predatory wasps over the bridge, ropes uncoiling, black-clad commandos sliding down into the heart of his domain. Simultaneously, from the seaward side, figures in combat gear were swarming over the rail, emerging from the sleek, wet back of a submarine that had surfaced with predatory silence. A pincer move, Michael thought, a flicker of professional respect cutting through his adrenaline. They're not completely daft.
The dance began instantly. Sniper rounds sparked harmlessly against the mech's curved helmet. Then the heavier chatter of 30mm cannons opened up, stitching a line of explosions across the deck around him. The machine weaved, its movements becoming a blur, leaving after-images in the humid air. Three rockets snaked towards him, their trails painting the sky. In the cockpit, alarms warbled. Michael's heart hammered against his ribs. He slammed the control yoke forward, pushing the reactor to 95%. The world outside dissolved into a streaking mess of sea, sky, and smoke as the mech jinked sideways with impossible speed. The rockets detonated harmlessly against the empty space he had occupied a millisecond before.
His own guns spoke then. A sound like tearing canvas, immense and prolonged. Tracer rounds etched lines of fire towards the hovering helicopters. The first Chetak seemed to stagger in the air, its underbelly disintegrating into a cloud of fiberglass shards and flame before it corkscrewed, silent and terrible, into the sea. The second pilot, in a panic, yanked his craft away, only to fly directly into the superstructure of a nearby frigate. The fireball that bloomed against the grey steel was blinding, the subsequent secondary explosions peeling layers of the ship away like the skin of an onion.
The submarine, seeing its air support vanish, attempted to slink away. In its haste, it bungled the maneuver. There was a grinding, metallic shriek that carried across the water as its propeller fouled the Chennai's hull. It wallowed, helpless.
Michael was on it in moments. His cannons hosed the dark hull, but the rounds only scarred the thick steel. Enraged, he reached over his shoulder. The 'sword' was not elegant; it was a six-foot-long slab of monomolecular-edged titanium, a brutalist's cleaver. He leapt, the mech's legs coiling and releasing with piston force. The blade came down in a shimmering arc.
The sound was not of an explosion, but of the world being torn open—a long, wrenching SCREEEE of steel yielding to unimaginable force. A three-meter gash appeared in the submarine's pressure hull, weeping oil and air. As he raised the blade for a second, terminal blow, a new flag was hastily run up from the sub's sail. It was small, white, and unmistakably made of cotton briefs.
The silence that followed was heavier than the gun smoke.
Aboard the flagship aircraft carrier Vikramaditya, Vice Admiral Madhra stared through his binoculars, the image of the white underwear fluttering from the crippled submarine burning itself onto his retina. His mouth was a dry, bitter line. We tried to put on a show,he thought, the despair cold in his gut. And instead, we have become the clown act for the entire planet.
They had tried to clear the crowds, of course. But Mumbai's shores were a living entity, and you couldn't herd a million people in an hour. The disaster had been broadcast in real-time, in high definition, to a global audience of hundreds of millions. Every network, every social media feed, was alight with the spectacle: the downed helicopters, the burning frigate, the sub with its… improvised flag of surrender. His career, he knew with absolute certainty, was over. The best he could hope for was a quiet desk in a forgotten naval annex, pushing papers until retirement.
His gloomy prediction was mirrored in a thousand unlikely places. In a Beijing office bathroom, a pudgy programmer named Zhang Wei, temporarily freed from the tyranny of code, scrolled through his phone. He had just finished watching a… stimulating… video of animated 'beast-girls' dancing, a guilty pleasure that left his phone screen slightly smudged. As he prepared to return to his cubicle, a push notification blared: "SHOCKING! Indian Navy Battles GUNDAM!"
Thinking it another Bollywood CGI extravaganza, he clicked. A minute later, he was staring, slack-jawed, as a hulking grey mech danced a bizarre, victorious jig on the deck of a warship, surrounded by dejected commandos. The sheer, audacious impossibility of it—the defiant, almost playful humiliation of a national military—sent a thrill through him that no viral video ever could. He let out a loud, involuntary whoop of delight, unaware that in the next stall, a balding colleague had just jumped in fright, creating a very different kind of liquid problem.
Back in the war room in Delhi, the atmosphere was funereal. A gathering of the nation's most senior officials and top scientists raged and pontificated.
"It is not of this earth!" declared one minister, his eyes wide. "A demon! We must anoint it with sacred bovine urine! Purify the vessel!"
"Perhaps a yogi," suggested another, earnestly. "I know a very good one. He can stop a beating heart for three minutes. Very reasonable rates."
The more rational minds, those from the Defence Research and Development Organisation, simply looked pale. Their preliminary report was a catalogue of awe and terror. The armour defied known materials science. The mobility suggested power sources decades ahead of anything in a lab. Its sensors, evidenced by its fluid, almost organic movements and that inexplicable dance, were a nightmare of reactive sensitivity. "Fifty years," the lead scientist muttered. "At least."
"But whose?" barked the Prime Minister, silencing the mystical and the mundane alike. "The Americans? The Russians? The Japanese with their cartoon obsession? Not the Chinese, surely… they are more… subtle."
No one had an answer. The only consensus, reached after hours of circular, panicked debate, was bleak. They would pay. They would gather the gold. And they would watch, with every satellite, drone, and radar dish trained on the Chennai, to see how a five-ton machine planned to abscond with a ton of bullion.
A tense, strange calm descended. The mech, its dance completed, had simply lain down on the foredeck like a great metal dog basking in the sun, its massive sword planted beside it like a warning flag. The hours ticked by. At around four in the afternoon, it stirred, rose, and ambled back below decks. The Indians, burned once, did nothing.
It was only when the gold—gleaming, ingoted, and absurdly heavy—arrived on a lighter alongside, and their hails to the mech went unanswered, that a cold suspicion dawned. A negotiator, white flag in hand, was sent aboard, his knees knocking audibly.
He found the bridge crew, tied up but unharmed. He found the secondary armoury, its door wrenched open, its stores of rifles, ammunition, and heavy weaponry utterly, completely vanished. As if swallowed by the sea itself.
Of the towering, grey, dancing war machine that had humbled a fleet, there was no trace. Only a scarred deck, a terrified crew, and the lingering, absurd image of a victory dance that had captivated and horrified the world. The Gundam, and its pilot, had simply vanished.