The Machine

by Tom Aston

  Stone roared again as the pain overwhelmed him. He knew what Ekstrom was doing, but couldn’t fight back. Ekstrom twisted him so Stone was lying on his front, then took a strap from his breathing set, tied Stone’s hands and left him lying on his back.

  ‘A good place I think,’ said Ekstrom. ‘Now, you will tell me how to power down the Machine. Otherwise I go up the hill, and I take the brake from the transport truck, which will roll down the hill, with all its load, and collide with the crown of your head.’ He tapped Stone on the top of the head. ‘Your skull is thick, for sure, Stone. But not thick enough. You are killed in a tragic accident. You see, Stone. I like accidents. Even Semyonov can’t object to accidents. He’s an honest man, Semyonov, but he is desperate for his Machine. He will work with anyone to get it out. Even you. And if you have an accident, he works with me. He won’t ask too many questions. About as many questions as he asked about Carslake’s death, I should think.’

  Ekstrom was far too near to the truth for Stone’s liking. Semyonov was too sick for the luxury of a conscience. His Machine, his legacy, his monument — were all that mattered to him. Semyonov had discovered Oyang’s money grubbing and weapons trading. But done nothing, just escaped the hassle. He hadn’t given a crap about Carslake either.

  ‘Last chance, Stone,’ called Ekstrom calmly from the top of the slope. ‘You will be killed in an accident, and I will ask Semyonov how to proceed. He will tell me. You know he will.’ Stone was lying face down, looking straight up the slope. He could hear Ekstrom shoving the Machine upright, back up onto the truck, and pulling the transformer back into place next to the liquid nitrogen chiller unit. Any second now, the truck would come speeding out of the mist. Stone’s only hope was to some how slither out of the way using his good leg.

  Ekstrom’s face appeared grinning out of the mist. He was bent over, like some kid on a home-made go-kart, trundling, whirring down the hill, picking up speed. The whirr became a deafening rattle of rimless wheels on the rocky tunnel floor. Stone was scrabbling on knee and chest to his right. Hands still tied behind his back. No hope. Pathetic. Ekstrom would just steer the truck at him, wherever he went. Stone looked at his short blond hair, and those white Swedish teeth in a childish grin of satisfaction.

  The dead boom of a handgun. Shocking and familiar. A red gash appeared on Ekstrom’s head. About the length of a ball pen. Blood spattered over the roof of the tunnel and arced over Stone’s back. Ekstrom’s body tumbled limp over the front of the truck. Jamming the wheels of the truck. The truck slewed off, slammed into the wall. Ekstrom came to and slithered down the slope, shaking his head like he was concussed.

  Semyonov’s Machine slid off the truck again, and the alien intelligence rolled pathetically past Stone to the bottom of the slope, like a trashcan falling from a dumpster. It stopped with a jerk, held again by the power line from the battery unit. It nestled by the first of the steel pit props. Ekstrom reached out his hands and crawled down towards it.

  Chapter 73–11:31am 14 April — Garze Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China

  The pain, the ankle, still welling up, throwing stars into his eyes. Then a creaking, pulling, crumbling sound behind Stone. Shit. What now?

  ‘You should stay home, Rockhead, and leave to me,’ she said scampering past him down the slope with a handgun. ‘Trouble is following you. Don’t need go looking for more.’

  Black jeans, spiky hair, those black cotton pumps on her feet. Velvet steps along the tunnel. No suit, no helmet, no mask. Ying Ning. Trouble didn’t need to follow her. She had her own personal supply. And if she got any closer to the Machine that gun was going to fly right out of her hand.

  She walked straight up to Ekstrom, four metres from him, and four metres from the Machine. The gun was still in her hand. Ekstrom was below the Machine on the slope, trying to escape. He was getting to his feet, blood running from his head. That was no more than a bullet graze on his skull.

  ‘Stop! Stop there, Ekstrom,’ she called. The gun was still there. In her hand.

  ‘You won’t do it, little lady,’ Ekstrom sneered.

  You bet your arse she will. Our Swedish friend obviously hadn’t heard she’d done for Carslake. But Stone wasn’t going to disabuse him. Ying Ning held the gun trained on Ekstrom.

  ‘You can’t shoot straight, honey,’ goaded Ekstrom. ‘Missed last time. You need to get nearer if you want to kill me.’

  ‘Stay back!’ called Stone. ‘It’s magnetized!’

  Ying Ning advanced two steps. ‘Nearer,’ said Ekstrom. ‘You don’t want to miss, do you? Closer.’

  ‘Stay back, Ying.’

  ‘Why you want this Machine, Swedish?’ she said. ‘What can you do? It belongs to Chinese people.’

  ‘I was helping Mr Semyonov,’ said Ekstrom. ‘He’s sick. I wanted to bring the Machine out for him.’

  Some hope. Ekstrom was a snake, but not as clever as he thought. He was the killer who won by being cooler, harder. By caring less. But he’d just met his match. She was a real killer, this woman. Stone watched her calm the situation, get the man at his ease. A static target. Then execution. Cold-hearted. Saving Stone’s life back there had been pure accident. Stone was absolutely expendable to Ying Ning. So, even, was Semyonov. Ying Ning was here for the Machine.

  The handgun clicked. Misfired — as Stone half expected. Ying Ning must have figured it too. That’s why she’d delayed, and why she’d come so near. The gun was some novel plastic weapon. One of Oyang’s less successful ventures.

  But Ekstrom wasn’t figuring. He was looking at the steel pit prop coming away from the rock wall, dragged in by the Machine. He risked it. Turned around and ran down the tunnel. Ying Ning’s gun clicked a second time, as a slab of ironstone bigger than a man fell from the tunnel ceiling.

  ‘Ta ma de ShinComm!’ Cursing in Chinese, Ying Ning threw the gun down the tunnel after Ekstrom. She turned back to Stone. ‘You know how to power down? This Machine will trap by falling rocks. We need to power down.’

  Ying Ning didn’t waste time with people. Forget injuries and near death, she was worried about the Machine. Stone’s broken ankle and hog-tied arms were beside the point.

  ‘Untie me and I’ll tell you,’ shouted Stone. ‘And pull me away from those rocks before we both get crushed.’

  She untied him and dragged him back up the hill. There was another catastrophic fall of rock. She limped him over to the massive battery unit and they both hauled on the power cable, which led from the battery, to pull the Machine free. No use. The black cylinder was buried under the ironstone which was still falling, its magnets sucking the rocks towards it. The tunnel would be blocked any minute.

  ‘There’s no point powering down,’ said Stone. ‘We can’t get near and it takes too long. We need to reconnect the nuke power to the battery unit, otherwise the whole thing’s going to die.’

  Stone limped back up the slope with Ying Ning, dragging his useless right foot, and holding onto the wall. Ying Ning had already found the thick power cable which snaked away to the reactor, who knows how far away beneath them down the warren of tunnels. It was fifty metres back, wound up on a metre-wide wooden drum. Between them, Stone and Ying Ning managed to drag it down to the battery stack of the UPS and get it connected again. Someone would have to come back and dig the thing out, but for now the Machine was definitely staying put. Connected to the power source, it would carry on down there, thinking its great thoughts indefinitely.

  Another cloud of freezing mist had already formed around the nitrogen-cooling unit on the slope. The fumes rolled imperceptibly downhill. Ying Ning was in the there, wafting at the mist and kicking her foot out, Kung Fu style, to find a way through the rock fall, but there was another baleful creaking and thumping noise.

  ‘We’re blocked in,’ said Stone. ‘Even if we could scrabble through some how, we’ll be crushed in another collapse if we try it.’

  ‘We can’t stay here.’ Ying Ning was pulling away at the piles of ironstone. But more wa
s falling.

  ‘There could be another way. Which way did you get in here?’

  ‘This way.’ She pointed at the rock fall.

  ‘There could be another tunnel that loops back round, behind where we found the Machine.’

  She was still digging. Like a caricature of a dutiful communist miner, tirelessly hurling the rocks behind her. ‘Dangerous back there,’ she shouted. ‘Radiation. Uranium.’

  ‘I know. But we have to give it a try,’ said Stone. ‘The rock’s coming down here faster than you can dig it out.’ The cloud of mist was thickening, too. It wasn’t seeping away through the rock fall. ‘You’re wasting your time.’

  Stone watched on for another minute, until another two metre slab of rock came down. He grabbed Ying Ning’s leg to pull her out, but she kicked back fiercely at him, and continued digging.

  Stone gave it up. He was in no state to help her, or even stop her. He began to hobble back up the slope away from the rock fall, balancing once more on the wall. His ankle was swelling badly after Ekstrom gave it a thorough twisting. He couldn’t put any weight at all on it. It seemed an age just to get back to the top of the slope.

  Stone ripped a strip of wood from the wooden drum to use as a stick, and found the helmet Ekstrom had kicked so elegantly from his head. He’d need that flashlight. There was no light at all past the sign. He looked once again before he stepped through into the blackness.

  ???

  ???!

  The characters had a macabre look about them this time. He went on into the mine.

  — oO0Oo-

  Each step gave a shooting pain. Stone was breathing heavily. It was surprising how much effort it was to walk with this foot. And how easy to stumble in the darkness. Stone was losing track of time, of up and down. He was disoriented — had no idea whether he’d been curving left or right. And he’d imagined a dozen times that he could see smaller passageways leading away through the rock — and every time he’d hobbled over to check, there were none. Just shadows in the rock.

  With the broken ankle and the slight bend in the tunnel, it was impossible for Stone to say how far he’d come. It was blackness behind him, and blackness in front. No sign of Ying Ning either. Maybe she’d broken through the rock fall. More likely she’d been crushed. Whatever. There was no way he could have pulled her out of there in the state he was.

  He knew if he was going to get back to the shaft to the surface, he would have to go left and left, or right and right. But up to now there had been no fork, no turns, no branches at all. This was bad. The other way, where he’d reconnoitered beyond the cage and the shaft, there had been a network of passages. Here there was only one tunnel. It did not bode well. The other thing he realized was — it was getting hotter. It wasn’t just the effort of walking with that shattered ankle. The rocks themselves were getting hotter.

  At last he came to a fork, a split in the tunnel. Stone eased himself down into a sitting position on the warm rocks, exhausted by the pain. He forced himself to stop and think. He had to make the right decision here. He was in no position to use “trial and error” with that ankle. He had to evaluate. Look for any kind of clue.

  But there were two tunnels, hewn into the rock, looking just the same the same. Stone flicked his head from side to side to examine the scene with his head torch. The tunnels were the same.

  It was then he heard the breathing, shallow and calm, from the darkness of the left hand tunnel.

  Chapter 74–12:36pm 14 April — Garze Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China

  The correct path was obvious. At least on the balance of probabilities. The thick power cable snaked off in one direction. It would go down to the toward the reactor turbines. Not much point going that way.

  From the other fork came the breathing. Stone cut his helmet light. The feet were stealthy, deliberate. He kept his position on the floor of the tunnel by the wall. Stilled his breathing as best he could. A dim light approached. The stranger came alongside.

  ‘Ying Ning,’ he said quietly as she came abreast.

  She jumped half a metre. The first time Stone had managed to surprise her with anything.

  — o0°0o-

  Ying had managed to crawl through the rock fall after all, and she’d made her way to the shaft and the cage. But when she got there, the cage wasn’t there. It had gone. Ekstrom must have taken it. ‘This is bad without cage,’ she said. Something of an understatement.

  She planted herself under Stone’s shoulder and he was able to move at three times the speed. She knew the way back as well. It was a matter of only a few hundred metres. Not that it made much difference to two people who were stuck at the end of an overgrown drinking straw eight hundred metres under a Sichuanese hillside called The Death Hole. You could say they had time on their hands.

  Worse was to come when they finally reached the shaft to the surface. The cage had returned. It could scarcely be more obvious. Black humour assailed Stone’s senses.

  ‘Virginia’s disabled Ekstrom with a neat karate chop,’ joked Stone, deadpan. ‘She’s come down to render assistance, possibly in the form of a two minute video piece in front of the Machine. Hope you told her there’s no hair consultant down here.’

  ‘Huh?’ said Ying Ning. As well she might.

  ‘Either Ekstrom sent this cage down as some kind of trap,’ said Stone, ‘Or he’s still lurking down here with a nine millimeter pistol.’

  ‘I think trap,’ said the slim Chinese girl. There was, bizarrely, a gleam in her eye. ‘I like traps. We can get out.’ Stone simply had to admire her nerve. But she was right. It wasn’t exactly a plan, but something might come up, some slim chance, and it was better than sitting down here waiting to die. It was the old maxim. If you want something to happen, make something happen. An argument, a fight, anything. Then, if you're lucky, you'll see an opportunity.

  They had to think ahead here. Get themselves ready, then go for it. Stone took a toolbox from the nearby engineers’ station and began to remove the cone-shaped fairing from the top of the cage. It would give a means of escape if the cage were stopped mid-transit. As Stone had to assume it would be. He tried not to think of the being trapped alive in utter darkness, in a tube five hundred metres into the rock.

  They unbolted the fairing from the cage, no problem. That left three steel tubes of the frame at the top of the cage. Stone thought he might be able to squeeze through the gap, and Ying Ning certainly could.

  ‘Ready?’

  She nodded.

  Stone took a deep breath and picked up the phone. An American voice answered, but this time it was Semyonov. Which was a surprise, and not altogether a pleasant one. What had happened to Virginia? Was Semyonov now co-operating with Ekstrom just as the Swede had said he would, to get his precious Machine out of the hole? It looked like it.

  ‘Stone,’ said Semyonov’s flat New England voice. ‘Is that you? Are you there?’

  ‘It’s Stone. Can you wind us up?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Give me two minutes,’ said Stone and hung up, his mind racing. He’d agreed with Ying Ning they’d squeeze into the cage together. It gave them both a chance at least. And two people in the cage would probably die sooner than one if it came to it.

  Stone climbed in first and tried to hook his bad ankle behind him. It was excruciating again. Then it was Ying Ning’s turn to somehow squeeze in with him. In she came, slinky as ever, somehow fitting in around him. He thought of the time she’d sat athwart his lap to seduce him in Shanghai.

  Stone remembered for a second of the prisoner of war stories he’d read as a child, where the prisoners stripped naked — to create the extra millimetres of space they needed to escape the prison camp through a tight bend in a culvert pipe. Was it weird to think like of being naked with Ying right now? He should have succumbed to Ying Ning's seduction in Shanghai. What the hell had he been thinking?

  Stone and Ying Ning were locked into the cage, unmoving for about thirty seconds before the c
age slid smoothly upwards and the utter darkness of the half-mile tube began. Stone was willing the cage up every single metre of its progress. He hoped Ying Ning was too, but it didn’t look like it. She was either meditating, or sleeping. More likely she was scared shitless, but she was incapable of showing any emotion. Any genuine emotion at any rate. The cage rattled slowly upwards, at what seemed like about half the speed it had done before. Was it the extra weight? Unlikely. Stone feared the worst.

  Which was borne out after what Stone reckoned was about half the ascent. In fact, knowing Ekstrom it would halfway to the exact metre. Anyhow, the cage slowed to a crawl, then finally stopped altogether, with four hundred metres of solid rock above and below. Stone had half expected it, but had shut his mind to the possibility. Ekstrom was torturing them. He was going for mental torment, and Stone would be lying if he said it wasn’t working. Even Ying Ning’s eyes were screwed tight.

  Ekstrom could have walked away off the site and left them stranded for a slow death. That might appeal to him. He would really get a hard on about that. But it wouldn’t work. If Ekstrom left them there stranded for a slow death, there was a decent chance they would be discovered and rescued. Stone weirdly found himself hoping that they would be stranded there for a few hours or days.

  But such feelings pass, when you’re stuck in cage hundreds of metres into the rock. He tried to take refuge in analysis again,

  Rationally, there were two things which could come next: either they would continue upwards, or the cage would go into freefall, and they would have a mercifully quick death as the cage hit the bottom. If the cage went upwards, it would probably stop again and again, to torment them.

  Sure enough, after who knows how many minutes, the cage began to move slowly upward once more, resuming its painful crawl. Ying Ning’s eyes screwed even tighter. She wriggled imperceptibly for space. It was getting to her. There was a danger one of them was going to freak out in there and it could be her. Stone was almost glad of the exquisite pain in his ankle to take his mind off it.