Tom Aston - The Machine

‘You want to tell us something?’ asked Stone.

Another slide came up on the screen. ‘This photo was sent to Junko Terashima,’ she said. ‘From a contact high up in ShinComm, called Oyang. But we don’t know where this place is. Junko said she didn’t know. But Oyang claimed that’s where the technology is coming from.’ It was a photo of a high electric fence, with seemingly nothing behind it. Stone leaned forward to the screen and zoomed in once more. No lab or factory, just a few small huts in the distance, with rolling, parched landscape behind, and a clear blue sky, like it was in a desert. The fence was four metres high, electrified, with cameras. It was meant to look menacing.

‘Junko received this photo in USA from Oyang. That is why she comes to Hong Kong.’ said Ying Ning, playing with her Communist cigarette lighter. ‘And Junko say this place is the reason why Semyonov came to China.’

‘This is the Machine?’ asked Stone.

Ying Ning nodded. ‘Oyang sent her this photo,’ she said. ‘He said it was the reason Semyonov came to China.’

‘And it was the reason Junko came to Hong Kong. But now she’s dead, and so is Semyonov,’ said Stone.

Ying Ning nodded.

‘Sounds like we need to have a chat with your Mr Oyang,’ said Stone.

Ying Ning laughed and shook her head. ‘Oyang? And finish up like Junko? Maybe you are stupid, Rockhead. But I take you to Shanghai to show you something. You will be surprised.’

Ekstrom froze the video clip on his widescreen monitor at two minutes thirty-three seconds, and scribbled some notes on his iPad. He hated deskwork as a rule — but this wasn’t so bad. He zoomed with the SmoothVision slider, and looked at the range indicator on the weapon. 780 meters to the wall of the Afghan compound. The infrasound weapon was run at 95 per cent power with focused beam for 85 seconds.

He resumed the video and slid forward to eleven minutes on the clip, to see the first results of the firing. Two kids lying prone in a dusty lane, a woman in her twenties and a young girl in a doorway, an old man with a donkey collapsed on top of him. Then a video of the inside one of the “dwellings”, as he was meant to call them. Shitholes more like. The video showed a woman lying half-naked in a scuzzy bedroom with clay walls.

And so on. In the eight and a half minutes between the weapon discharge at a range of nearly half a mile, and his men reaching the site, the whole village had stayed incapacitated. Four had been killed by the eighty-five second burst. Three children under five, including one breast-feeding baby lying with his inert mother, and an elderly man. These small children had suffered major hemorrhage in the ears and lungs. They had died from inhalation of blood, with no one able to help them.

Ekstrom had ordered the bodies brought from the village and laid out together under the trees. The first sign of recovery from the villagers was at twelve minutes, and the last at twenty-two.

Forty-four adult villagers and adolescents had been used for the second phase of the work. They had been tied in pairs to trees, and exposed to the weapon at a range of 250 metres through a one metre thick compound wall. Varying power discharges and exposure times were tested, with the figures written neatly on their foreheads in black marker pen. Those who survived the test, by reason of having a lower dose of the sound weapon, Ekstrom personally dispatched them with a single shot of his.22 automatic to the forehead, after ensuring their heart function and blood pressure had been recorded, along with their time of exposure, in black permanent marker on their chests.

The mean exposure of the infrasound weapon required for human adult death was 113 seconds, with a standard deviation of 25 seconds

Details of non-human deaths were not recorded, which in hindsight had been an error. The men responsible for letting the two Afghan boys escape were docked two days pay each. The village was declared sterile of native Afghans at 13:34 in the afternoon and the airstrike to dispose of the collateral bodies called at 14:13. Ekstrom ordered his men to move out 14:07, returning with three men on foot at 14:33 to verify that the bodies had been destroyed.

Though he enjoyed the detail and neatness of a job well done, Ekstrom would be lying if he said he enjoyed anything more than the incendiary weapon striking at the bodies through the line of trees. He watched it a dozen times, zooming in and out. In real time and in slow motion, Ekstrom watched the trees waving gracefully in the firestorm, and the skin peeling back from the faces of his victims. Most gratifying.

Sometimes he had to pinch himself. Did he really get paid to do this? It was his dream job.

Ying Ning sat astride Stone’s lap, her face centimetres from his. ‘Try not to become excited ,’ she said with casual irony, massaging her butt into his groin. It was another of her "tests". Stone was sitting in a chair with Ying Ning facing him, holding a hypodermic syringe. He closed his eyes once more as the Chinese girl rubbed his brow with alcohol gel, and then jabbed the needle in.

‘You nice and still, Rockhead,’ she said. ‘Bao An wriggles like a girl!’

‘I bet you do too,’ said Stone.

Ying Ning didn’t respond to this kind of thing. She held her hand steady with the needle. Considering she was smoking at the same time. The injections were to create swelling under the eyebrows, lips and chin. Just enough to fool the facial recognition systems they would encounter at all points of entry to the People’s Republic. Ying Ning, Stone and the two Chinese lads would all travel on false ID’s.

Ying Ning was a hard-bitten operator. Difficult for Stone to read, with a flint-hard exterior. She said nothing about herself, and made no attempt to establish a connection with Stone. Sure, she used her sexuality, and she tried to ridicule him. But that was just an attempt to unsettle him — a defence mechanism. At best she flirted — but then so do lots of insecure people. Stone had no human connection with Ying Ning at all, whereas with Carlisle, who he despised, that connection was instant.

And it had to be like that. What Ying Ning was doing was dangerous. China21 was illegal, and Ying Ning would be executed, probably in public, if she was caught breaking the rules. China is a tough country, run from the top. Everyone knows the rules, and individuals don’t matter that much. The greater good always comes first. People know the penalties for stepping out of line, and mostly they don’t do it.

Stone was getting the measure of Ying Ning, and could only guess she had some kind of death wish. Mere idealism wasn’t enough for what she was doing. She was now taking a further step, beyond her tirades against capitalists and profiteers, to challenge the very core of what ShinComm and the Chinese state were up to. It was dangerous stuff.

As for Stone. He’d supposedly been deported, back to England. Now he was using a false ID and setting out into Mainland China in search of Oyang — whose last friendship group, comprising Semyonov and Terashima, had not exactly fared too well.

There was also the issue of Professor Zhang and the Gong An . Stone could find himself “disappeared” if they caught up with him in China.

As Ying Ning sat on his knee, flirting and making the injections, it was clear that Ying Ning enjoyed the danger. She was doing this for the same reason as Stone. For all the repressed anger, even guilt, Stone felt about Hooper, he was now being swept along by the desire to find out about Semyonov, to find out about the Machine. Because Stone got off on this stuff in the same way that Ying Ning did.