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 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.
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.
‘
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 was 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
