The Great Zoo of China

by Matthew Reilly

  While Hamish was racing around the airfield in his fire engine, CJ was speeding along in a different kind of truck.

  After seeing the pack of red-bellied black dragons disable the emplacements on the perimeter of the worker city and then depart, she, Lucky and Li had flown down from their vantage point on the hill.

  They headed straight for the electricity substation just inside the arc of emplacements.

  The substation was deserted, its walls streaked with blood.

  Lucky landed in front of a large warehouse and CJ and Li dismounted. Li threw open a sliding door to reveal several electrical repair trucks parked inside.

  He went straight to the largest of them, an oversized white truck. This vehicle had a regular cabin but a specialised rear section which was filled with electrical spare parts.

  ‘This is the worker city’s main cable repair truck,’ Li said. He threw open one of its compartments to reveal a spool of thick copper cable, black insulation rubber and a very high-tech-looking silver box that was covered in digital displays. ‘High-voltage cable and an insulation-repair unit,’ he said.

  CJ gazed at the parts.

  ‘These dragons are smart,’ she said. ‘Smart enough to bring down the domes. But what they don’t realise is that while they can destroy things, we can rebuild them. We can fix the outer dome. Repair it. I needed the dragons to succeed at this end and then head off to the airfield. Now, while they’re attacking the airfield, we’re going to repair the emplacements at this end. We needed to fail before we could succeed.’

  ‘Provided the others can hold the airfield long enough . . .’ Li said.

  ‘That’s right. Which means we don’t have much time. Here, you drive.’ CJ held open the driver’s door for Li. ‘We’ve got to get to that middle emplacement.’

  They zoomed out of the shed.

  It was a short drive to the middle emplacement, barely a kilometre, but the movement of the cable repair truck in the streets of the otherwise deserted city caught the attention of the eastern grey dragons.

  They swooped from their perches atop some nearby apartment buildings, dive-bombing the truck.

  A prince landed on top of the speeding truck, leaned over the front edge and smashed the windshield with a grey fist but, amid the hail of glass that washed over him, Li swerved, bringing the truck under a concrete overpass and the dragon hit the underside of the ramp and, with a screech of metal, was swept off the roof.

  Emerging from the underpass, the truck turned onto the final stretch of road leading to the emplacement—just as a second grey prince came roaring in, only to be crash-tackled by Lucky, zooming in from above, and the grey prince thrashed in pain as it hit the road, its intestines spilling from its belly.

  Only fifty metres to the emplacements.

  Li risked a smile. ‘We’re gonna make it . . .’

  As he said it, the repair truck was hit with ferocious force by a grey emperor that CJ hadn’t seen coming and which Lucky would never have been able to stop.

  The immense dragon came roaring out of the sky and it lashed out at the truck, swiping it with one of its foreclaws.

  The truck was lifted clear off the road and fell onto its side before it went sliding—on that side—at speed, down the road.

  Both CJ and Li were wearing their seatbelts so they were held in their seats as their world turned sideways.

  CJ lay against her window, with the road speeding by only inches from her face.

  They slid for some time—as they did so, their truck actually spun laterally—so when at last it began to slow, they were facing back toward the worker city.

  With a lurch, the side-turned truck came to a stop.

  Still fastened in her seat, CJ found herself looking through her truck’s smashed windshield back down the road on which they had come.

  Boom.

  Four huge claws landed right in front of her: the giant forelimbs of the grey emperor.

  Then the impossibly huge head of the emperor appeared outside the windshield, two feet away from CJ’s face. It opened its massive jaws and growled. Saliva stretched between its fangs.

  ‘We almost made it,’ CJ said. ‘Almost . . .’

  She closed her eyes in exhaustion and waited for the end.

  But for some reason the emperor didn’t attack. It bellowed with rage at CJ’s face.

  CJ opened her eyes.

  It was right there. It had them, but why wasn’t it—

  CJ flipped down her visor and saw some dazzling red laser grid-lines separating her from the dragon. Her truck’s slide had ended just outside the electromagnetic dome, inches outside it.

  CJ released the breath she’d been holding. ‘Now that’s what I call close.’

  Beside her truck stood Lucky, also on the safe side of the dome. Since the yellowjacket no longer had the pain chip in her head, she had been able to pass through the dome unhurt.

  CJ unbuckled her seatbelt. ‘Come on, Li, let’s get this truck upright again and do our thing.’

  It took a little help from Lucky to right the truck, but soon CJ and Li were driving it up to the outer edge of the gigantic hole in the ground nearby, the hole into which the middle emplacement had fallen.

  Frayed cables stuck out of the hole on three sides: first, the main power cable coming in from the north; and second, the two lesser cables branching off to each side, connecting that incoming cable to the other emplacements.

  Thanks to the emplacements over at the airfield, the pulsing laser dome cut across the hole, separating CJ and Li from the pack of grey dragons now watching them from the other side.

  Li backed the truck up to the edge of the void and got to work.

  CJ helped as much as she could, unspooling replacement cable and holding insulation rubber while Li did the technical stuff.

  As Li had said, reattaching the copper cabling wasn’t that hard. It was insulating the new joints that was time-consuming. If the new connections weren’t perfectly insulated, with no bubbles or imperfections, the new cabling wouldn’t transmit enough power.

  That was the function of the high-tech silver box: it was the insulation-repair unit that sealed the thick rubber layer around the new joints. But it worked slowly and they had three reconnections to make.

  As Li worked, CJ kept an eye on the pack of grey dragons on the inner side of the dome. They looked like a flock of giant vultures, peering at their prey.

  There were perhaps twenty of them, of all sizes, and they just glared balefully at the two humans working at the cabling not ten feet away.

  ‘Okay,’ Li said. ‘The first reconnection is done.’

  ‘Only the first?’ CJ said. ‘Can’t you work any faster?’

  ‘I’m trying to . . .’ Li said, moving around the edge of the hole.

  As she glanced worriedly at the grey dragons, CJ wondered what was happening over at the airfield. If the emplacements at the airfield fell before she and Li reconnected the cables here, not only would all the dragons at the Great Zoo be free, these grey dragons would pounce on Li and her in a heartbeat.

  It was a race now, pure and simple.

  Either she and Li succeeded or they died.

  She keyed her radio earpiece. ‘Bear? You copy? How’s it going over there?’

  The radio squawked. Hamish’s voice came in over the sounds of roars and explosions.

  ‘Hey, Chipmunk! It’s a clusterfuck of monumental proportions over here! They’re trying to bring down the middle emplacement! We’re harassing them but we won’t be able to hold ’em out much longer. You?’

  ‘Working as fast as we can. Out.’

  CJ spooled more cable to Li as he commenced the second reconnection. This required him to stand even closer to the grey dragons and they growled at him ominously. But the young Chinese electrician kept his cool as he worked barely three feet away from their drooling jaws. He waited patiently for the insulation unit to join this connection. It beeped.

  ‘Second connection is done . . .�
� he said.

  Li moved over to the other side of the hole to begin the final reconnection.

  ‘Miss Cameron,’ he said, ‘stand by the truck, please. Once this last cable is connected, we will be ready to restart the power. To do that, you must first disconnect the truck from the main power cable: that is the switch marked DISENGAGE EXT SOURCE. Then you must throw the big blue switch labelled OPEN LINE.’

  CJ saw both switches on a nearby panel. ‘Got it.’

  Li kept working. He rejoined the cable. Then he stepped in with the insulation unit.

  ‘Almost done . . .’ he said.

  CJ looked from Li to the dragons. ‘Come on . . . come on . . .’ she whispered.

  Over at the airfield, surrounded by fire and chased by dragons, Hamish’s fire truck whooshed past an outlying hangar.

  Consumed by their battle with the dragons, neither Hamish at the water cannon nor Syme in the driver’s seat saw a panel in the floor of the hangar slide aside and a platform rise up out of the ground.

  On that platform was a 6,000-kilogram fine aluminium/ethylene oxide thermobaric bomb.

  It was about twenty feet long with a pointed nose and tailfins.

  Second in power only to a nuclear warhead, it was the most powerful conventional weapon in existence. Its blast would vaporise all things within a three-hundred-metre radius while the ensuing shock wave would suck the very oxygen from the air, asphyxiating any living thing within a ten-mile radius.

  At the same time, two other thermobaric devices emerged from underground chambers around the Great Dragon Zoo, powered by independent emergency reserves: the first appeared inside the electrical substation in the worker city while the second rose up from a concrete chamber buried three hundred feet beneath the Halfway Hut, the watchtower-like cable car station situated halfway between Dragon Mountain and the main entrance building.

  This device was lifted on a hydraulic elevator that rose within the struts of the hut until it came to a clunking halt just below the cable car station, the height from which it could do maximum damage.

  Inside the Chinese bunker behind the airfield, a technician reported: ‘Colonel Bao, the three thermobaric devices are in place and ready for detonation.’

  Bao stood. ‘All personnel are to retreat to the alternate command centre on the lowest level of this bunker.’

  The colonel and his staff, along with Hu Tang, caught a secure elevator to the alternate command centre, ten levels below ground.

  There, a series of display screens showed Bao real-time images of the airfield above: the dragons, the speeding fire truck, the flaming hangars. Those images were overlayed with an ultraviolet filter so that he could also see the red laser grid of the electromagnetic dome still in place.

  He inserted a key into a console. Three red buttons shielded by clear-plastic safety latches illuminated.

  Bao flicked open the three safety latches.

  Then, as he watched the dome outside, he held his finger poised over the buttons that detonated the thermobaric bombs.

  Kirk Syme brought the fire truck round for another pass at the dragons gathered around the middle emplacement. The big red fire engine came rushing in, sirens wailing, lights flashing.

  The dragons had excavated a substantial hole by now, so large that the foundations of the emplacement were exposed.

  Hamish had his water cannon ready to go, but then something unexpected happened.

  The emplacement toppled into the hole.

  Sparks sprayed outward as the emplacement tore away from its cabling and fell into the hole created by the dragons.

  ‘No!’ Hamish swore. ‘No . . . !’

  He keyed his radio. ‘Chipmunk! We’re cactus! The dragons just wrecked the main emplacement here!’

  Inside the underground bunker, Hu Tang saw the red grid of the dome wink out . . .

  . . . and then, to his absolute horror, he saw the superking and two emperor dragons swoop out over the line of emplacements.

  The dome was down.

  The dragons were out.

  ‘God help us all,’ Hu Tang breathed.

  Beside him, Colonel Bao reached for the first red button.

  A zoo is a place for animals to study the behaviour of human beings.

  –UNKNOWN

  The Larger Nest

  Thirty seconds earlier, as Li performed the final reconnection, CJ flipped down her visor.

  She saw the thin red grid of the dome separating the Chinese electrician from the pack of grey dragons on the other side.

  And then the grid vanished.

  Just blinked out.

  Gone.

  The dragons rose, their wings spreading, their jaws opening.

  Li’s head was bent over his work. He was oblivious to what had just happened.

  ‘Last reconnection is . . . done!’ he shouted. ‘Hit the switches!’

  CJ flicked the first switch, disconnecting their truck from the main power line. Then she slammed down on the big blue switch labelled OPEN LINE.

  A grey king roared at Li from a distance of three feet and readied itself to pounce at him when—whack—the dazzling red grid sprang back into place between them, and the dragon lunged into it only to fall instantly, like a boxer punched square in the face.

  ‘Whoa,’ CJ gasped.

  Over at the airfield, Colonel Bao’s finger was mere millimetres away from pressing the first detonation button when a technician shouted, ‘Look! The dome! It’s back up!’

  Hu Tang snapped up to see, on a screen, a fleeing dragon hit the dome and drop out of the air. The dome was indeed back in place.

  ‘It’s been restarted from over in the worker city!’ another tech called.

  ‘How many dragons got out?’ Bao demanded.

  ‘I counted three,’ someone said.

  ‘I did, too,’ Hu Tang agreed. ‘One of the fire-breathers and two emperors. All red-bellied blacks.’

  ‘Only three,’ Bao said. ‘We can handle that.’

  Then he was up and moving: ‘Initiate the tracking chips for the three escaped dragons and send some gunships from Guilin to kill them! Get the internal power reconnected! I want somebody to tell me how the hell that dome got back online! And I want some fucking training units found so we can stun all the remaining dragons into fucking submission and drag them back into the valley! It’s time to reclaim our zoo.’

  CJ keyed her radio. ‘Bear, this is Chipmunk. We got the dome back up.’

  ‘We could tell. But some of the dragons got out in the few seconds that the dome was down. A fire-breather and a couple of emperors.’

  ‘One of the fire-breathers . . . shit,’ CJ said.

  ‘And who knows where they’ll go.’

  ‘I know where they’ll go,’ CJ said flatly. ‘They’ll go to the larger nest and open it.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘I have an idea. And I have to get there fast to stop them, or else the whole world is going to have an unstoppable dragon problem.’

  Twenty minutes later, CJ found herself flying alone with Lucky over the spectacular moss-covered landforms of southern China.

  She still wore her heat suit with the hood thrown back plus her lightweight helmet. She also still had her flamethrower slung over her shoulder, its liquid propane canister on her back underneath the heat suit, and her MP-7 with the grenade launcher duct-taped to it.

  Dawn was coming.

  The eastern horizon glowed pink. The beautiful landscape—lush, green and wet—glistened in the early morning light. A low-lying mist ran between the sheer-sided buttes and the steep mountains like a river. The near impenetrable rainforests of these parts meant there were few villages here.

  CJ had left Li back at the worker city with instructions to get to the airfield. She suggested he drive there the long way, in a wide circle staying outside the dome—and, if he could, repair the main emplacement there. She even said he should inform his Chinese superiors that it was he who had fixed the emplacements at the worker
city; but he needn’t tell them he did it at CJ’s urging or with her help.

  After a few minutes’ flying over this lush terrain, CJ beheld a singular landform: a wide meteor crater. It was perfectly round, like Meteor Crater in Arizona, only smaller. Over thousands of millennia, its vertical walls had crumbled in places and a lake had formed in its middle. A small forest had grown at its fringes, around the base of its inner wall.

  The low-lying mist surrounded the crater, a soup of thick grey cloud.

  CJ heard Na’s voice in her head, from when she’d been talking to Seymour Wolfe about this very land formation yesterday:

  ‘Crater Lake was created by a nickel meteorite that hit here about 300 million years ago.’

  And Zhang’s voice from the tour:

  ‘Our dragons—our archosaurs—survived the Alvarez Meteor 65 million years ago by hibernating deep beneath the surface of the Earth underneath dense nickel and zinc deposits.’

  And Hu Tang’s comment about the nickel deposit underneath the Nesting Centre:

  ‘Our zoo is built on top of the second-largest nickel deposit in these parts; the largest is over at Crater Lake about fifteen kilometres to the northwest.’

  The largest nickel deposit . . .

  CJ figured that the bigger the nickel deposit, the bigger the dragon nest—

  A blaze of orange light flared up from the inner wall of the crater and CJ saw a round hole at the base of the crater there. It looked like a tunnel.

  Two red-bellied emperor dragons peered down into the tunnel, their backs to CJ.

  Then another blaze of light flared out from within the tunnel and the black superking emerged from it. The two emperors immediately slithered into the tunnel and large chunks of melted soil—soil that had accumulated in the dragons’ tunnel over the years—began to be flung out from within it.

  ‘Shit,’ CJ said aloud. ‘They’ve already started digging for the nest.’