Tom Aston - The Machine

At first she’d thought it might be Stone tracking her through the streets, given his height, but now she could turn and peer at a distance through the trees, she could see it was not. It was a white Western man, but if anything taller still than Stone. He loped through the forest like the yeti, with long brown hair in a ponytail and a scruffy red bandana around his head.

Ying Ning walked off down one of the forest paths and stopped once more, checking behind her. He was coming the same way for sure. What did he want? Ying Ning was used to the attentions of the Gong An . It was sufficient with the Gong An just to get away. In China there were plenty of crowds to blend into, plenty of scooters and bikes to “borrow” if she needed to. This was different, because she needed to know what this guy behind her was up to. She needed to ID him as Stone had asked her. She retraced her steps while he was out of view for a few seconds, then cut off into the trees, her staccato tip-toe steps making barely a rustle in the undergrowth. She crouched on her haunches, still on tiptoe, then rose to pass silently out onto the tiled path only twenty metres behind the man.

Now she could see him. Five centimeters taller than Stone, she guessed, and bigger in the shoulders, just as Stone had said he would be. He was wearing heavy boots, which scraped on the path as he ambled along untidily. He also had on a heavy leather jacket, like he was some kind of biker. It must be killing him in this humidity. She followed him with silent, velvet steps for another fifty metres, before the big lunk realised he’d lost her. He stood there, his long arms dangling in simian fashion, and looked around him, peering obviously through the trees for Ying Ning’s spiky hair and fox-like face.

Inevitably he turned, and when he did, Ying Ning was standing behind him in her skinny black jeans and black T-shirt, a hand placed questioningly on an angular hip. She was looking directly into his Aviator sunglasses.

Carslake, he was called. Stone had told him to meet up with Ying Ning, and finally he’d found her. She’d brought him back to her place. Stone had never met Carslake in person, but he’d met men like him. He’d suggested Carslake grab a flight to China to be on the spot when he discovered the location of the Machine. He knew the American wouldn’t pass up chance to find a real UFO. Carslake might look like a nutjob — a madcap UFO blogger — but Stone knew people like Carslake can be useful.

Big, clumsy, slightly dirty looking: everything about Carslake said lazy . He took long loping strides, and somehow still dragged his boots on the ground. He spoke with a slow drawl, as if he couldn’t be bothered to speak any faster. The unkempt stubble on his face was because he couldn’t be bothered shaving rather than any fashion statement. And that black leather jacket — well, Stone liked the jacket. It was a cool jacket. Heavy, old, very good quality. But in the sauna of Chengdu? And Carslake wore it all the time. As in all the time . Probably wore it bed.

‘Being in China is kinda like camping,’ said Carslake, conspiratorially to Stone. ‘You never get properly clean. You take a shower, but as soon as you put your clothes on, you feel dirty again.’

Coming from him, it made Stone smile. Ying Ning merely took another drag on her cigarette and shook her head. ‘ Yang guizi make excuse to be dirty ,’ she said, paying Carslake’s casual racism back in kind.

Carslake helped himself to another of her cigarettes and lit up using her red star Chairman Mao cigarette lighter. ‘I don’t know how you smoke this Chinese shit,’ he said, examining the characters on the carton. ‘You ain’t got any American smokes? What the hell brand is it anyway?’

Ying Ning had brought Carslake back into a house she was using on the outskirts of the sprawling city. It was one of a few hundred small houses built by a main highway, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. No streets had been laid, however. They walked from the roaring four-track highway through clouds of dust, or through mud if the rain had just fallen. It being Sichuan, trees and weeds were rapidly gaining a hold in the brown, rutted mud of the “streets”.

How did Ying find these places? The house was small, with two tiny bedrooms. It was newly built, unpainted and unfurnished. But clean. Stone had returned there from Virginia Carlisle’s place to find their old friends Bao An and Lin Xiaohong infesting the place. Then Ying Ning arrived with the tall American. Stone had been feeding tidbits of information to his blog, and finally, Carslake had been interested enough to get off his sofa in LA and fly to Chengdu. Which was good, because Stone had asked him to bring something very useful with him.

This guy was more than a courier though. Despite appearances, Carslake’s type can be very useful. Because although people like Carslake might look lazy, it was often because they were obsessional and independent-minded. They focused on one thing, and the rest of life could go hang. That was Carslake. Stone had seen his blog — UFOWatch. Crazy, perhaps delusional, but Carslake had obviously done very little for the past few weeks but research the private life of Steven Semyonov. Carslake’s earlier blogs made out that Semyonov was an alien. Now he seemed to have gone back that on that opinion. Or maybe he was just embarrassed to come out with it face to face in front of Stone. Whatever. It made no difference since the guy was dead.

When it came to personal skills, however, Carslake might struggle. He had lived his life on the Net, and the transition to real life was proving a challenge. It was easy to state wild opinions, and come out with wild theories and sexist insults online. But he wasn’t on the Net anymore, and Carslake’s casual contempt for both women and the Chinese was experiencing a rude awakening in the face of Ying Ning’s scathing wit and derision. Bao An and Lin Xiaohong did little other than snigger when Carslake was around, with Ying Ning feeding them with a succession of one-liners in Chinese. They laughed at him at odd moments. He must have felt like an overgrown circus freak within twenty-four hours of arriving.

There was something fascinating in the dynamic with Carslake and Ying Ning. True to type, Carslake was too thick skinned to be bothered by them busting on him in Chinese. He ignored Bao An altogether, and with Ying Ning he adopted a new policy of appearing intelligent, while cranking up the slow-witted, derogatory comments in her direction.

Stone wondered if Carslake “liked her”. Good luck with that. If Carslake ever came on to Ying Ning, she’d eat him alive.

‘I’m talking about research , Miss Ying-Tong-Bing-Bong,’ Carslake would say. ‘Which is more than any of you motherfuckers has done.’ He claimed he had researched Semyonov’s background, and that the man was human after all, although he didn’t elaborate. Stone parked that one. If Carslake knew about Semyonov’s background, Stone would find a way of making him talk about it. A bottle of Chinese vodka would probably do the trick. Or even a carton of Marlboro.

‘Anyhow, Cutie Pie, are you going to tell us how we’re gonna find Semyonov’s Machine? I gotta get home for the basketball playoffs.’

Cutie Pie? Cutie Pie? Carslake was trying too hard now. But what the hell? It was free entertainment while it lasted. And he wasn’t a bad man. For all his front, and lazy arrogance, Carslake had had the presence of mind to list an even more incorrect location for the Machine on that blog of his. With any luck, Virginia Carlisle and her cohorts from GNN would be scouring barren forests in the wrong end of Sichuan by now.