by Kylie Chan
‘On it,’ the stone said. ‘Tiger, information coming your way.’
The Tiger changed to human form. ‘I see.’ He strode to the policeman, who quailed with fear; the Tiger was still twenty centimetres taller than him in human form. The Tiger put his hands on Cheung’s face. ‘How much do you want wiped?’
‘Absolute minimum!’ I said. ‘The Jade Emperor’s forbidden me from wiping people’s minds. We were doing it too much when Simone was small.’
‘He may have stopped you but he never stopped me,’ the Tiger said. ‘Wow, this guy has it in for you.
He’s convinced you killed Ah Wu and Michelle. Nasty piece of work.’ He dropped his head slightly, staring into Cheung’s eyes. ‘Do you want me to remove his drive to pursue you as well?’
‘No. Just remove his memory of your True Form. I’ll do the rest; I need to deal with this cleanly. If anyone involved in the case starts showing with amnesia, they’re going to suspect we drug them and then we’ll really have the authorities down on us.’
‘Okay,’ the Tiger said, concentrating. ‘Damn, haven’t done anything this fiddly in a while. Human heads are so ugly, so full of shit. Okay, he only saw me as human. He never saw the students with the weapons; as far as he’s concerned, this is an ordinary office building.’ He glanced up at me, his hands still on the mesmerised Cheung’s face. ‘Need anything else taken out?’
‘I can take it from there,’ I said.
‘You got it.’
The Tiger released Cheung, who fell to sit in the visitors’ chair, his face blank. He shook his head and looked from the Tiger to me. ‘Where was I?’
‘You were telling Miss Donahoe that you don’t have any evidence of foul play on the boat and that it’ll be a verdict of death by misadventure,’ the Tiger growled. ‘And you were about to leave so she can get on with her job of managing her stepdaughter’s inheritance, which she happens to be doing extremely well.’
‘No,’ Cheung said. ‘There is more to this case. I wanted the documents relating to the ownership of the boat, please, Miss Donahoe, and all the records of maintenance.’
‘They’ve raised the boat, haven’t they?’ the Tiger said. ‘The gas oven had exploded?’
Tell the Tiger to butt out, I said to the stone, and the Tiger glared at me.
‘The boat has been raised. We wish to investigate further,’ Cheung said.
Good, that means they haven’t found anything and he’s just fishing, the Tiger said. Need some legal assistance? I have a few wives who would tear him to shreds in the courtroom.
I shook my head without looking away from Cheung.
‘Suit yourself,’ the Tiger said. ‘I’ll wait for you out there.’
‘I’ll provide you with all the documentation as soon as my staff find it,’ I said. ‘Would you like to wait for it here or have us send it down to you?’
He took a business-card holder out of his jacket pocket, slipped out a card and stood to hold it out to me over the desk with one hand. ‘Here’s the location of my office; have them send it there by courier, if you could.’
I didn’t miss the insult of the single-handed business card. ‘I will. Is there anything else?’
He put the card holder away. ‘I think we’re done here.’
I went around the desk and held the already open door. ‘I’ll have those documents to you as soon as I can.’
He nodded sharply to me and went out.
The Tiger came back in. ‘You need to get this demon stuff out of you so you can move your operations to the Celestial and not have to worry about this bullshit any more.’
‘I need a spacesuit so I can go ask Nu Wa to clear it from me. A tiger I know is supposed to be making me one.’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ he said. ‘Come and check it out.’
I poked my head out the office door. ‘How much really urgent stuff do I have in my in-tray?’ I asked Yi Hao.
‘Only two or three are of Earth-shattering importance, and they can wait a few hours,’ Yi Hao said. ‘You were supposed to be gone a week so everybody’s holding back until then. You’ll have a torrent of life-or-death urgent emails in four days.’
I turned to the Tiger. ‘Let’s go take a look.’
CHAPTER 17
The Tiger drove us himself in an open-top jeep. In snake form I took up most of the back seat. The road ended and we bumped across the desert, a thick plume of red dust following us.
‘This looks like Six’s bunker,’ I said as we approached a rectangular red building half-buried in the desert gravel. ‘Except bigger.’
‘Cheapest configuration to build if you’re going for a bunker,’ the Tiger said loudly over the roar of the engine. ‘Easy to secure as well: only one entrance, keep it heavily guarded, you’re damn near impregnable.’
‘So why did Six have two entrances, with the back one unsecured?’ I said.
‘What was behind the bunker?’
I remembered the configuration. ‘Nothing. Just a blank wall.’
‘So you had to go around the front to get to the back?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then no need to guard the back—unless people are flying in, in which case you’re a fucking idiot.’
‘That’s how we got in. But he didn’t strike me as that stupid,’ I said.
‘Well, he’s dead now, so you’ll never know why he left his back door wide open with a “come on in and visit” sign over it. Maybe he just liked it up the ass.’
‘You never change, do you?’
‘Nope.’
He slid the jeep sideways in the gravel at the front of the bunker, making me lose my grip on the back seat and crash my head painfully into the car door. ‘You’ve never been here before, have you?’ He took his hands off the steering wheel and rubbed them together. ‘This is going to be fun.’
He opened the door for me and I slithered out, my snout sore. I really wanted to rub it to make it feel better; not having hands was a royal pain sometimes. He led me to the entrance, which was guarded by two of his sons in full desert camouflage commando uniform, carrying automatic weapons and wearing sword belts.
‘Guns?’ I said.
‘Just in case,’ the Tiger said, nodding to the guards. ‘Guns may not work on demons, but you can never be too careful.’
The bunker was set into the ground so only about a metre of it protruded from the red gravel. The Tiger held out one hand and the wall disappeared, revealing a metre-wide stairway leading down inside the building.
‘Have you ever been visited here by anything other than demons?’ I said.
‘I’ve been ordered by the Celestial not to share that information.’
‘Good God, a Celestial tried to break in,’ I said with disbelief.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am, not allowed to say.’
‘Is what you have in here so damn good that a Celestial would try to break in?’ I said.
He smiled and held his hand out towards the stainless-steel door at the end of the narrow corridor. ‘Oh, yes.’
The door unlocked with a hiss of escaping air; the building had a positive pressure seal, with filtered air being constantly blown inside it. The pressure build-up meant that air would always travel out rather than in, and dust and gas wouldn’t enter the building. The door swung open; in cross-section it was fifteen centimetres thick with three twenty-centimetre-wide bars that slid into the wall.
The Tiger gestured for me to enter. ‘Ma’am.’
We walked into a corridor that ran the width of the building and turned a corner at each end. The walls and floor were plain grey concrete with neon lighting above. I stopped and looked left and right. The resemblance was uncanny.
‘What?’ the Tiger said.
I looked up and down the hallway again. ‘Do you have the same architect as Demon Prince Six?’
He raised one hand and gestured along the corridor. ‘Large central work areas surrounded by access corridors that are also buffers between the work areas and the o
utside as an extra precaution. It’s just common sense that if you’re going to make a building where you’re doing the occasional dangerous experiment, you build it like this.’
I thought about it, then nodded. ‘I see your point. So what sort of dangerous experiments are you doing?’
He walked left down the corridor and I followed him. ‘How about laser weaponry?’
‘No such thing,’ I said.
‘We’ve done it. Ineffective against demons so we’re not pursuing it.’
‘Don’t you dare sell that technology on the Earthly!’
‘Of course not.’ He grinned over his shoulder at me. ‘Wouldn’t even sell it to the Dragon—pissed him off most mightily.’
‘Good,’ I said.
We turned right, walked about ten metres and arrived at double doors with another pair of guards posted on either side. The guards presented their weapons when the Tiger nodded to them, then pushed the doors open for us. The room held benches, stools and large whiteboards. The benches were clear of any apparatus, but the whiteboards were covered in Chinese characters, English words and scribbled diagrams. A group of people sitting on stools in a circle in one corner of the room were having a discussion and making notes on clipboards.
‘Emperor present!’ one of the guards said loudly behind us.
The workers quickly scrambled off their stools and fell to one knee with their heads bowed.
‘You may rise,’ the Tiger said, and we approached them. ‘This is Lady Emma. Anyone got a snake phobia?’
The staff stared at me wide-eyed, but nobody moved. One woman actually smiled at me.
‘Good,’ the Tiger said. He pulled himself onto one of the stools. ‘This was a brainstorming session?’ he said.
The group nodded.
‘Result?’
They all shared a look, then shrugged.
An older woman raised her clipboard. ‘Can’t get the laser to destroy demons. They seem to be completely immune, just as they are to guns. We’ve tried making the beam hotter, but that just melts the equipment and it’s still not hot enough to hurt the demons. It’s a dead end, my Lord.’
The Tiger crossed his legs on the stool, relaxed. ‘How about we make a laser cannon about three hundred metres long and point it at the Dragon’s floating palace? Would it bring it down?’
The woman scribbled some figures on her clipboard, showed it to a colleague and a quiet discussion broke out. The woman nodded. ‘Yes, it would go down in flames.’
The Tiger leaned back. ‘What a delightful idea.’
‘Only if the Dragon’s in it, sir,’ she said with a small smile.
The Tiger hopped off the stool. ‘Clear up the laser, secure-store the records, destroy the weapons and take a two-week vacation, all of you. When you come back you’re reassigned. Dismissed.’
The staff fell to one knee again, then set about their work. The Tiger led me out of the room and we turned right. A bank of four industrial-sized lifts, large enough to take a truck, sat in the wall to our left.
‘Car park’s in the third basement,’ the Tiger said. ‘Hidden entrance about three hundred metres away.’ He pushed the button for the lift and then took us down to basement two. ‘Spacesuits are right down the bottom; there’s no chance of them exploding and needing to be ejected quickly.’
‘How often are things ejected because they’re going to explode?’ I said.
The Tiger crossed his arms and leaned against the lift wall. ‘Oh, once every couple of months.’
‘Funny thing,’ I said, ‘I never need to eject anything that’s about to explode from my research facility.’
He grinned down at me. ‘That’s because your research facility is old-fashioned and boring. Just like its master.’
I nodded my serpent head. ‘You have a point.’
The basement had a similar floor plan: a corridor running the circumference of the building and rooms in the middle. The Tiger led me into the first room, which was obviously where the spacesuits were manufactured. Two enormous fabric-cutting tables stood at one end; the robotic arms suspended above them held laser cutting tools. There were three sewing machines on tables to one side, and an arc welder, grinder and a blowtorch in one corner.
The Tiger gestured for me to follow him through double doors to the next room, which was the fitting room. My spacesuit—a long white cloth tube with a glass fishbowl helmet at the front—sat on a work table with staff fussing around it.
When the staff saw us, they fell to one knee then quickly rose. The Tiger guided me over to the table and I raised my head to examine the suit.
‘Pleased to meet you, ma’am,’ one of the scientists said. ‘This is it. The major problem you will have when you’re up that high is pressure—well, lack of it. Without the pressure of the air on your body, you’ll balloon out, which will kill you.’
‘Lack of oxygen will kill me first though,’ I said.
‘True. We didn’t have to worry so much about the issue of you generating heat, because you’re coldblooded. We’re really not sure how this will affect the design of the suit. Spacesuits for humans have a cooling system because heat builds up inside and isn’t released into the vacuum of space.’
‘We have two options,’ another scientist said. ‘A hard suit, or a soft suit like this one on the table. Normally, suits for humans have a hard, fibreglass upper-body section that holds all the electricals, and the rest of it is soft. With you, we couldn’t make any of it hard, so it’s a hundred per cent soft suit.’
‘We tried to make something out of the new technology we’ve been researching,’ another said. ‘Where only the head part has oxygen sent through it; the rest is pressurised by pressure stockings and no oxygen is sent in.’
‘Would being without oxygen damage the body tissue?’ I said.
‘Doesn’t do any damage to be in the water for a reasonable amount of time,’ he said. ‘Being without air is similar. As long as there’s pressure to keep the tissues intact, it should be fine.’
‘Beside the point though, because the elastic pressure suit isn’t robust enough yet,’ a third staff member said. ‘So back to this soft suit.’
‘It looks like a bunch of arm and leg pieces joined together with metal rings,’ I said.
The staff shared a look.
‘It is. Making pieces to fit from scratch takes a couple of months,’ the Tiger said. ‘Putting these together took a couple of days.’
‘It has metal ring joints between the soft fabric to allow you to move,’ another scientist said. ‘Whether or not you will actually be able to move in it is another matter.’
‘Would you like to try it on, ma’am?’ the first scientist said.
‘All right,’ I said.
‘We’d appreciate it if you could stretch out full-length on the table. That way we can see if we have enough pieces.’
‘What about life support?’ I said.
‘That’s an issue we haven’t dealt with yet. We may have to add a hard central core to attach it to.’
‘I doubt I’ll be able to move in something like that,’ I said.
‘Grow legs,’ the Tiger said.
I put my chin on the table, then pushed my head forward so I was able to slither up onto it. I stretched out alongside the suit feeling unpleasantly exposed.
One of the Tiger’s staff pulled out a tape measure and measured me. There was a soft discussion, then someone began to shuffle around in the equipment boxes.
‘Need a couple more pieces,’ the Tiger said. ‘Can you make yourself smaller?’
‘Not comfortably,’ I said.
‘Find any?’ the Tiger called to the woman who was digging around in the boxes.
‘Got a couple, they can go on the tail end,’ she called back. She returned with a few more arm pieces. ‘Perfect. Let’s try it for fit without the under suit.’
They unlatched the pieces and slid them along my body from my tail to my head, locking them together as they went. My body sagged
uncomfortably between the rings, but I waited patiently for them to put all the pieces together.
‘All the bits except the helmet are in place,’ the Tiger said.
‘Raise your head, please, ma’am,’ one of them said.
I lifted my head, the heavy suit limiting my movement. The rings slid down over my body and clattered together at my tail, leaving me uncovered.
‘We need to put the helmet on to make it stay put,’ one of the staff said.
The Tiger raised one hand to lift me into the air and I glided off the table onto the floor. One staff member held the helmet while the others gently shifted the rings back up towards my head. I helped them as much as I could. When all the rings were back in place, they put the helmet on my head and locked the rings. I was enclosed in fabric, the helmet just millimetres from the end of my snout.
‘This is very claustrophobic,’ I said.
Someone attached a hose to the side of the suit and stale-smelling cool air entered the helmet.
‘Try to move,’ the Tiger said.
The rings and the friction from the fabric made movement possible only with a massive amount of effort. I moved my body from side to side as I normally would, but only every second or third movement gripped the ground enough to push me forward. I managed to cross the room, then stopped to rest, dropping my head and panting.
‘Is it that hard?’ one of them said.
I nodded.
‘Well, she won’t be in microgravity so this obviously won’t work,’ the Tiger said. ‘Time for plan B.’
He raised me onto the table again and the staff unlocked the rings, releasing me into the extremely fresh air of the room.
‘What’s plan B?’ I said as I slithered off the table and onto the floor. The rings had bruised me and movement was uncomfortable, but the discomfort would disappear as soon as I changed back to human form.
‘A hard suit with wheels, like a mobility chair,’ the Tiger said.
I hesitated a moment, then said, ‘Make sure it has one of those flags on the back.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll find a suitable bumper sticker,’ he said. He nodded to the staff. ‘Good job, but it doesn’t work. Back to the drawing board.’