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 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 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.