by D. K. Mok
“This isn’t Arabian Nights. We’re probably supposed to use a key.”
“The key’s for the gate,” said Chris. “Getting in was the…”
She rummaged through her pack.
“Was it still the sign?” muttered Chris. “Damn, was it the humble man, the rolling man…do you remember what the riddle to get in was?”
“Langu—”
The rest of Luke’s sentence turned into a soft wheeze as his lungs gently deflated like an old balloon.
Chris turned around at a sound so faint it was like the noise made by a shadow falling. She followed Luke’s frozen stare through the narrow chasm to the clearing scattered with spires of rock. A shadow rushed from behind one boulder to another. It moved like a gust of air, and it was a very, very big shadow. Chris rummaged faster through her pack.
“Rolling… Words of the father… Sign will light the… Bugger.” Chris pulled out a scrunched set of papers wrapped around a squashed banana.
It was one of those unavoidable mysteries of the universe, like odd socks and people who didn’t replace the roll of toilet paper, that somehow there would always be a squashed banana at the bottom of a bag. Chris stared at the partly mashed banana. She hadn’t even bought any bananas.
“Sorry, I ran out of room in my pack…” said Luke, not tearing his eyes from the clearing.
Chris quickly scraped the fruit from the papers, shuffling through them with great urgency.
“Head, heart and spirit… Sign to light the way,” said Chris. “The next thing’s the Cherubim. Sign, light, sign.”
Chris looked up at the slowly setting sun, the late afternoon light flooding the canyon with a brilliant orange glow. Light. Sign. She dug her arm deep into the contents of her pack, groping through the branches, bags, and lint-covered toiletries. She turned at the sound of Luke gasping, a deep, hollow, sucking gasp of horror.
There was a low, subsonic rumble, as something large slunk out from behind a crag of rock in the clearing. Chris was suddenly reminded of why, if you believed a particular version of events, there was a time when apes were afraid to come down from the trees.
The creature was to a tiger what the Death Star was to a hat made from tin foil. At three metres tall and five metres long, it was the size of a caravan and could probably fit at least as many people inside. It had a ragged halo of tufts around its head, and its heavy coat hung in shaggy, matted grey and brown fronds, touched with tips of white as though it had just climbed out of some primordial sea. Most disconcerting of all were its eyes—solid orbs of turquoise the size of dessert plates, with sharp black slits down the middle. No gradients or flecks coloured its pupils, no white around the eyes—just an eerie, flat, electric blue from corner to corner. Staring straight at them.
It looked prehistoric.
It looked angry.
It bared its teeth in a snarl, and a thundering rumble emanated from it.
“That’s not a purr, is it?” asked Chris. “I’m not a cat person.”
“I think it can tell,” said Luke hoarsely.
The Verhkoyanskiy tiger padded quickly towards the chasm, then stopped in a semi-crouch, giving another low growl that seemed to thrum through the ground. At the same moment, Chris and Luke were both urgently assessing whether or not the tiger could fit through the chasm. Clearly, the tiger had no such reservations.
The creature suddenly ran towards the chasm, covering the ground in powerful bounds, and proceeded to ripple through the gap. Its fur pressed back effortlessly as it oozed through the narrow space in a solid core of menace.
“Sign the light—” Chris’s fingers wrapped around solid wood, and she pulled her crucifix from the bag. “Light—Sign— Oh, come on!”
Chris waved the cross in front of the wall frantically, and Luke promptly gave up all hope of survival. The shadow of the crucifix slid and pulsed across the surface of the wall, like experimental shadow theatre.
“Now would be good!” said Luke, as the creature burst from the chasm with a full-throated roar.
Something on the wall flickered as Chris swept the crucifix before it.
“Bunsen!” yelled Luke.
The caravan-sized tiger landed in front of them, its front legs bent in a predatory crouch. Paws the size of wading pools crunched the gravel and stopped at the familiar word. It took a crouching step towards them, teeth bared in clear hostility.
Chris moved the crucifix over the spot again, and saw the shadow on the wall grow darker, as though absorbing the light. She ran her hand over the section of rock, and it felt cooler against her skin. It was another kind of silica, maybe volcanic or…something else. These days, microchips used silicon for its superconductive properties, but could you actually build a computer out of rock?
The tiger made a lunge towards them.
“Bath time, Bunsen!” cried Luke, pressing back against the wall.
Bunsen flinched, dropping back and snarling. Clearly torn between drawing back and swiping Luke’s head off, the tiger darted forward, crouched, then jerked back as though from an open fire. It opened its mouth and a malevolent growl rumbled from the depths.
“Bath time!” yelled Luke, a note of hysteria in his voice.
Chris held the crucifix over the patch of silica, the shadow sharp and black as an abyss. She held her breath, trying to hold her hand perfectly still despite every other part of her shaking like an undergraduate on caffeine withdrawal.
Just as Bunsen was deducing that there was no actual water in visible proximity, let alone offensively fragrant suds, there was a deep underground rumble which did not come from Bunsen. The rumble seemed to rise towards them, breaking into a resounding crack as a perfect line split the wall, and two halves of rock slid back to reveal a pitch-black hollow, with stone stairs leading downwards.
Chris and Luke gaped at the opening. Bunsen’s face contorted into a snarl, ears flat as she edged closer towards swiping range. Chris and Luke looked at the deeply irate mountain of teeth and fur edging towards them, then at the carved stairs leading into the unknown.
Chris turned to Luke with a trace of something fantastic burning in her eyes and held out her open hand. Luke paused for the briefest moment before wrapping his fingers tightly around hers, and together they hurtled into the netherworld.
* * *
A boom thundered through the canyon like the herald of a storm.
Emir swivelled in the direction of the noise, almost expecting a flock of birds to launch dramatically into the sky. Before the tail of the swell rolled over their position, Docker was already sprinting down the trail, with Roman close behind.
“Find the target!” yelled Docker. “Scatter positions!”
In a loose formation they streamed through the canyon paths, wending through the fading echo. Boots pounded over the hard earth, the crimson light casting long, alien shadows across the ground. The rumble was starting to trickle away as they burst around a jagged corner.
Emir drew his gun almost before registering the looming shape before him, but Docker was already firing. Two steady shots as he ran towards the hulking form of the Verhkoyanskiy tiger. It was crouched before a doorway in the wall, one paw on the dry steps.
It roared in pained fury at the first bullet, launching away down the trail in a charge of muscle. By the second bullet, all that remained was a cloud of dust and a spatter of blood trailing across the sand. A low rumble shook the canyon, and the opening in the rock started to grind shut.
“Everyone through!” called Docker as Bale leapt through the doorway. “Emir!”
Emir raced towards the shrinking gap as Roman slipped through and down the stairs. Docker stood just inside the sliding rock face as Emir pounded the last few steps towards the fast-closing entrance. His foot hit the ground and the mechanics of it faded into a single-minded movement. He made a running leap towards the gap, launching forward into the darkness. He felt the closing walls scrape his shoulders before he landed solidly on the cool, dusty stairs.
/> Ragged breathing filled the darkness before a halogen lamp flared into light.
“I think we have some catching up to do,” said Docker dryly.
* * *
The motorcade snaked across the countryside with barely a noise beyond the soft rustle of grit on unsealed roads. It was an extremely modest procession by SinaCorp standards—two motorcycle scouts, three assault Jeeps, and an armoured four-wheel drive. All were equipped with patented silencer technology, and watching the vehicles churn over the road without a noise gave the disconcerting impression that both your eardrums had irreparably burst.
Spindly fruit trees dotted dried-up fields, and the occasional almond orchard billowed green against the unrelenting desert glare. Marrick looked thoughtfully through the deeply tinted vehicle window, ghostly traces of microchip lacework visible on the end pieces of her sunglasses.
“Nine years ago, Massari was a wasteland,” said Marrick.
Hoyle looked up from his electronic pad. He declined to comment that Massari still looked like a wasteland, just with more factories and mansions on the rugged skyline.
“Insufficient irrigation, struggling agriculture, unemployment,” said Marrick, the reflection of half-finished houses skimming past on her sunglasses. “SinaCorp came and provided training to the rural women. We funded a medical centre to create a healthy workforce, a school to prepare the next generation, and child care to free up an entire demographic of employees.”
And of course, the factories, thought Hoyle.
Smelters, manufacturing, construction, and recycling. He had the impression there was a telecommunications call centre somewhere here too. Hoyle had overseen the shipment of conversation booklets on sixty-two national sports and the local weather in one hundred and forty-three cities.
“Give people wealth, and industry will grow,” continued Marrick. “Supply and demand, the engine of human improvement. People don’t need charity. People need industry.”
To a significant extent, Hoyle agreed. There was something magnificent about a full-blown economy, buying and selling and seething in cycles of push and pull, like a living organism on the verge of tearing itself apart. It was one of the reasons Hoyle had originally gone into engineering. It had always fascinated him how animals didn’t just explode at the sheer mess of forces pulling in all directions—blood pulsing through arteries, peristalsis squeezing along endless intestines, muscles contracting, swinging bones attached to slender tendons, and a heart that pounded hard enough to drive it all. And somehow, instead of spattering across the walls or collapsing into throbbing goop, it all held together. Somehow.
It did, on occasion, go wrong.organs failed, immune systems over-reacted, cells went rogue, and in rare instances, animals exploded. Hoyle had witnessed this once, and aside from only wearing dark suits these days, he was certain it had not affected him psychologically in any serious way. The same thing happened to economies—they overheated, or were under-stimulated, or bad decisions were made in subprime mortgage markets. You had to know when to change gears.
Hoyle swished a finger across the slick silver pad.
“We’ll reach the Perison Base in twenty-four minutes,” said Hoyle.
Marrick watched a man by the side of the road, fitting an MP3 player to his donkey.
“They say you can’t fix the world in one lifetime, but it depends on how long that lifetime is,” said Marrick, her gaze seeming to stretch beyond the desert. “Is Scarab ready to go?”
“Primed and loaded. Shall I tell the extraction team to stand by?”
There was a pause, and Hoyle couldn’t tell whether Marrick was deep in contemplation or reading the GPS data on her sunglasses.
“Have them prepare the Wasp,” said Marrick. “Xian-Fei to pilot. I don’t want any screw-ups.”
Reflexively, Hoyle’s fingers started tapping across his pad, while his brain was occupied preventing his mouth from stating the obvious.
Certainly, the Wasp was an assault craft like no other. Barely out of beta testing, it had three-hundred-and-sixty degree manoeuvrability at six-hundred kilometres an hour, with stationary hover stability within seven millimetres at an altitude of over a kilometre. It was armoured to withstand concussive forces exceeding a direct missile strike, and it could function submerged to depths of over eight hundred metres. Xian-Fei could fly the Wasp through a hurricane, through a war zone, through a forest full of butterflies without so much as a scratch or a bug smear. Unfortunately, Xian-Fei was one of the most humourless people Hoyle had ever met, having been given away to a martial arts temple at six months, and capable of pulling out your Adam’s apple with her pinkie by age three. That, however, was not the problem.
The Wasp could only carry a single passenger, aside from the pilot.
“And the extraction team?” asked Hoyle.
“Take a closer look at the map, Hoyle,” said Marrick. “I don’t think we’ll be needing them.”
14
The stairs had spiralled downwards into a narrow tunnel, with smooth, straight walls of ochre clay. The flat, sanded ceiling extended about a metre overhead, and the floor was even grey schist, sloping visibly downwards. The air was cool and dry, with a strange, stale odour, like an untouched bedroom in a long-deserted house.
Chris and Luke had run as fast as they dared, half-expecting Bunsen to follow them inside. As they’d hurried along the corridor, they had heard muffled bangs coming from somewhere far behind them, but then it had fallen into a disconcerting silence. Without the reassuring noises of leaves, insects, or distant traffic, it was like being sealed in a tomb. Chris fell into a steady march, pacing herself for what could be a long walk, but acutely aware of how dangerous it would be if SinaCorp were to catch up.
There was no going back now. Travelling from continent to continent, wandering through museums and scouring books—that had been the easy part. Everything came down to what happened next, these last, crucial hours when it would all come together, or all would be lost.
Luke’s flashlight flickered and failed.
“Wait up,” said Luke.
Chris swept her beam of light slowly over the walls while Luke wound up his flashlight.
“Why can’t you use ethanol cells like everyone else?” asked Chris.
“Ask me again when your battery dies, and I’m still going. I thought you’d be into sustainability.”
“Not when I have to stop every ten minutes while being pursued by armed mercenaries in a secret underground corridor with limited air.”
Luke clicked his flashlight back on, and a greenish beam lit the floor.
“Is it just me or is it getting steeper?” said Luke.
The floor was, in fact, sloping more steeply downwards—not impractically so, but enough to make you hope very much that you wouldn’t be coming back the same way. Chris had a brief nightmarish vision of the ground turning into a near-vertical slide, sending them plummeting into the volcanic depths of the earth.
As the path took them deeper underground, the air took on a slight chill. The ground was becoming a little rougher, as though the builders had decided to go for a more natural finish. The walls were less evenly planed, with bumps and hollows where the clay had been casually layered on. Chris noticed she had to breathe much deeper, and more frequently, to get enough air.
“We should have brought a canary,” panted Luke.
“I did,” grinned Chris, slapping Luke on the shoulder.
However, it wasn’t long before Chris and Luke had to break out their breathing equipment, strapping small clear masks over their noses and mouths, connecting the hoses to compact tanks of oxygen. They had been unable to afford anything more sophisticated, and as it was Chris wasn’t sure how they were going to get home. Things like that just seemed to sort themselves out once all the excitement was over. However, she had the niggling feeling she’d been ignoring things which were actually more important than she’d realised.
She had been so focused on getting to the Tree of Lif
e that she had pushed everything else from her mind. She hadn’t allowed herself to be distracted by thoughts of the future, or the needs of others, or her own feelings. She had avoided thinking about anything beyond getting to that moment when she held the fruit in her hand. Somehow, once the smooth, solid flesh lay heavy in her palm, everything else would fall into place.
As the air grew steadily thinner, the shadows seemed to take on a physical weight, pressing in on their weakly waving beams of light. Chris alternated between three breaths of tank oxygen and two breaths of ambient air, ignoring Luke’s mutterings about brain damage.
“Am I starting to hallucinate, or are we getting bigger?” said Luke, checking the meter on his oxygen tank.
Halfway to empty.
Luke turned to look back the way they had come and was startled to see how steep the incline actually was. Sections of the path undulated like a fairground slippery dip, and anything further than about ten metres back was obscured by the sloping ceiling.
“The tunnel’s getting smaller,” said Chris.
She didn’t slow or look back. In the past hour, there had been several occasions when she thought she could hear something echoing faintly through the darkness behind them. Whether it was SinaCorp, the Verhkoyanskiy tiger, or something else lurking in the dark, she didn’t have time for it.
There was someone waiting for her, someone counting on her. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Just get this done and go home.
Luke had noticed the passageway getting smaller with increasing apprehension. He had also noticed the corridor looking progressively less like a hallway you would find in someone’s house and increasingly like something you would find wending its way under a prison wall. Smooth clay surfaces had given way to coarse gritstone walls, roughly hewn from the surrounding rock. The rust-coloured ceiling stooped in ragged chunks, blending into the walls.
A thick layer of sand covered the uneven floor, and Chris and Luke had to stoop to continue down the tunnel, skidding on the grit as the ground sloped ever downward. Chris was breathing exclusively from the oxygen tank now—the atmospheric air seemed to suck the oxygen from her lungs.