They had flown by helicopter to Ningbo, to be met by Semyonov’s personal airliner.
Semyonov’s Chinese-made MA600 airliner was painted matte black. Which suggested he only travelled at night. The plane had followed the silver banner of the Yangze westwards, past the brightly lit cities and towns, on past the Brocade City, and now they were over the black wilderness of Western Sichuan.
Stone, Virginia and Carslake sat up front, while Semyonov was on a gurney to the rear with a small medical team.
‘Underground nuclear tests? Shoot! I hope not,’ said Virginia. She was trying to explain the layout of the crater, without even having seen it herself. She’d listened to Semyonov and made notes on lined paper in her All-A student’s handwriting. Now she was relaying the information to Stone and Carslake.
‘The monks said there’d been nuclear tests,’ said Stone. ‘Why else would that huge circle of ground be barren?’
‘That would mean it’s dangerous, right?’ she said.
‘Er… yes,’ said Stone. Carslake rolled his eyes. He had to stop doing that with women.
‘I don’t think so. Steven would have told me,’ she said. ‘Let me tell you what Steven said, ‘The “anomaly”, he calls it.’ Then she read from the notes in front of her. ‘The anomaly is the result of an asteroid strike from seventy million years ago. The reason there were mines here, for iron and all manner of unusual metals, is that they were present in the asteroid. This asteroid created a gravitational and magnetic anomaly.’
Carslake’s eyebrows had shot up his forehead. It made Stone want to laugh. Virginia had just explained Carslake’s precious underground radar pictures. The whole mystery.
Virginia read on, ‘”Chinese miners discovered three percent fissile uranium isotopes deep underground during the Nineteen Sixties.”’ She stopped herself. ‘What the heck does that mean?’
‘It’s like finding enriched, reactor-grade uranium lying around in the ground’ said Stone. He wondered himself how he knew some of these things. A macabre interest in the technology of death, if he was honest. He went on, ‘What I think Semyonov means, is that three percent of the uranium they found was of the fissile isotope, Uranium 235.’ Stone felt his ears register a pressure increase. They would be landing soon. In the crater.
‘Fissile? As opposed to what?’ she asked.
‘The decayed Uranium 238,’ said Stone. ‘The Uranium 235 decays much more quickly, and that means it’s rare. In the four billion years the earth has been around, wherever you look on earth, the uranium had decayed to where it’s only 0.7 percent fissile. That’s why you have to enrich it to 2.7 percent to make nuclear fuel, and even more to make a weapon. I guess the three percent concentration here was because the uranium landed in the meteor.’
Virginia looked at him suspiciously. ‘Sometimes you sound like a real professor. It’s not a great look, Stone.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ he said. There was renewed activity at the back of the cabin, where the medical team in white suits and masks were preparing Semyonov for the landing with padded plastic straps.
Virginia continued, ‘You could be right though. This is what I wrote when Steven was telling me. I have to read Steven’s words verbatim, because I’ve no idea what it all means.’ She began to read. ‘“It was known that at three percent uranium 235, a natural nuclear reaction could occur in the ground. French scientists had identified the phenomenon at a site in Gabon, West Africa in the early Sixties. All that was needed was ground water, which would act as a neutron moderator.” I mean, what the hell? “It would also naturally control the reaction. As the water boiled off in the heat, and pressure increased, the fission would stop, and begin again when water re-entered the deposit.”’
Stone was gently clapping his hands. You had to hand it to Semyonov. ‘How fascinating is that? They discovered the reactor grade uranium, and realised that all they had to do was to force water into the ground, and they would have a permanent supply of nuclear energy, self-regulating, spouting right out of the ground. No wonder Lin Biao was interested.’
‘So what difference does any of this make?’ asked Carslake. ‘I mean, did they build the reactor or what?’
‘It looks like the discovery was reported to Lin Biao, and nothing was pursued after his death,’ said Stone. ‘Meanwhile, the spoil from the mine threw poisonous heavy metals around the crater and killed off all the trees and plants. That explains the barren crater. There was no nuclear test.’
‘Jeez,’ said Virginia. ‘No wonder they closed the place up. Anyhow, they blew up the workings in 1980 when they saw what damage the pollution had done.
‘What about the Machine?’ said Carslake. ‘Where is it? We have to go into a poisoned fucking mine?’
A grave, strained voice spoke from behind them. ‘The Machine is held in a cylinder, twenty inches in diameter.’ It was Semyonov. ‘As Virginia said, the mine is closed, the workings were blown in 1980. But the Machine and all its data are held in that cylinder. It’s five feet long and twenty inches in diameter. Half a mile below the ground.’
‘If the mine is blocked, how did it get in there?’
‘A shaft,’ said Semyonov. ‘We drilled a service shaft a half a mile deep and lowered the Machine into the deepest of the old workings. The shaft is barely twenty-two inches wide. That’s why the cylinder had to be so small.’
‘Hold on,’ said Carslake. ‘You’re talking about the whole of the information from the whole of the Internet here. Plus some incredible level of processing power to analyse it. How does it fit it something barely bigger than an office file server?’
‘Supercooled to minus two hundred. The most efficient, densest database ever built.’
‘It must eat the power,’ said Carslake. ‘How the hell do you supply that much power half a mile below ground? I didn’t see any power lines around the crater.’
‘I think we know the answer to that,’ said Stone. ‘There’s plenty of power down there already. It’s the reason he chose this mine, with it’s own nuke power source. Did you design all this, Semyonov? Or did…’
‘Correct,’ said Semyonov, voice still straining. They were coming in to land. ‘It designed itself. Even chose the location. Who knows what else it’s done in the weeks its been down there.’ There was a roar of the cool night air outside as the undercarriage deployed. ‘Carslake was right all along,’ said Semyonov. ‘There is an alien intelligence at the bottom of that hole. But I created it.’
It was still three hours before morning prayers when the black turboprop droned over the monastery. Panchen stirred, half-awake on the wood floor of his cell. There was a creak from the wooden boards of the corridor. A small creak, from a light body. Velvet steps. Panchen sat bold upright, his neck and shoulder muscles taught in the perfumed darkness. That tiny creak from the floorboards. He’d heard it before.
She slid past the door, and he smelt her soft musk. She spoke in Chinese.