Tom Aston - The Machine

What an unholy mess. The Chinese guy with that gun had no idea what he was doing either. Only he had an assault weapon, and that meant he was calling the shots for now.

Stone kept the gun out of view, and waited for the sound. It stands to reason that a man should not run in front of a machinegun. Yet soldiers do it. Some are killed, some get away with it. Yet still they run in front of automatic weapons. Stone thought he’d learned that lesson. But he hadn’t.

Then a pause. Silence. The forest had taken over once more. Still as a forest should be at midnight. The Milky Way arced above them and there might even have been a shooting star above the trees. Stone was ready for it. Here it came. Click. The magazine being changed. Stone stepped out, brought the club down on the guy’s hand. Broke the wrist, hopefully.

A curtain of blue light had appeared from the direction of the mine workings, above the rise. The searchlight was dazzling all of a sudden, from over the rise, two hundred metres ahead. Game over. Panchen turned for trees with his handgun. Monks were running, scattering — out of the trees, back into the trees. And Carslake?

Stone knew what was happening with Carslake.

Stone crouched behind a tree for a minute or so — maybe two. The blue light was still there, eerie, washing over everything from over the rise ahead. Stone had assumed it was a searchlight, but it was not — it was just a huge eruption of milky, blue light, suffusing everything — the road, the truck on its side, and penetrating right into the trees behind him. The blue suddenly dominated the whole horizon to one side of him. He lay flat to the forest floor and made his way forward on his elbows towards the eerie blue light. It was brighter and brighter the nearer he got.

It took Stone about ten minutes edging forward on his elbows before he crested the ridge. There were no more trees, no more forest. Stone was looking over the edge of a crater, stretching away in front of him. One, maybe one and a half kilometres across. Bare, flat, dry earth. An unnatural barren circle in the verdant landscape.

The road dipped down into the barren crater, and there were high gates and a fence about a hundred metres in. Exactly as depicted in Ying Ning’s photo back in Hong Kong. The one Oyang had sent them. But the fence itself was somehow superfluous. There was something so unnatural about the place that no one was stepping in there by accident.

Stone was still lying in the last scraps of undergrowth. He needn’t have bothered. About twenty metres away, Carslake stood, staring wide-eyed into the crater. Like a conquistador looking out at the Pacific. Like he’d finally found what he’d been looking for all his life. He turned around to Stone. ‘Man, you cannot tell me that extraterrestrials have not been here.’

Stone could tell him that. But it wouldn’t have done any good.

People see what they want to see. In reality, there was nothing — nothing at all. The arc lights were bright — like stadium lights at night — and no doubt the alarm had been raised after the attack on the truck. But there was nothing to see, except to some tiny huts in the distance. It was the nothingness itself that was eerie. The unearthly light washing it milky blue. The silence of the crater, next to the cicadas, the bugs and the odd creak of the Sichuan pines behind.

Carslake had put down the radar set at the edge of the trees. Stone worked quickly on it, his fingers working the dials and switches of the radar. There was a high-pitched whine as the power supply was switched on. Stone smoothed out a flat patch of earth to bed the machine in, while Carslake plugged in the data collection unit and checked the connection. No warning lights. They were in business. He set the radar to run, taking its pictures of what lay beneath.

One thing was for sure. There may be nothing here on the surface, but if the gravity anomaly figures were correct, there was most definitely something beneath the surface.

The scan was done in under a minute. Carslake looked pleased with himself. This piece of kit was exactly the right thing, used to take pictures of underground workings, aquifers, rock formations. The software built a 3D image of what was below.

Carslake looked at the tiny screen on the data collection set, and as soon as it was finished, went back to staring, looking out over the crater. This was his Nirvana . Stone was glad of the quiet. He made a note to come back in the light, handed Carslake the data unit to carry, and led on through the trees to find the forest track back toward the monastery.

By the time they’d walked the seven kilometres back to Shanglan, there was a sign of dawn, perhaps an hour away in the East. The gathering blue light was beginning to dim the stars in the impossibly clear sky above. The band of the Milky Way was fading, but Venus stood laser bright on the horizon.

Perhaps Carslake had never heard of the words “stealthy” or “careful”. He strode along in the undergrowth, thrashing at the spring flowers with a branch. Stone breathed in the cool night air, soughing over from the Great Snow Mountains and the Himalaya. By the time they came in sight of the temple’s gold and red portal, Carslake was talking wildly again. Stone had to virtually gag the man as they made for the living quarters.

Early prayers had already begun. The smell of incense had met them hundreds of metres from the temple, and Stone could hear the soft chanting from the monks within. The eerie calm of the blue night air above the crater was still with him. He walked around to the temple and stood in silence to drink in the quiet chanting of the older monks, all inside the warm glow of the temple. Giyenchen was in their midst, shaven-headed and ecstatic, eyes closed to the world and cleansing his mind with nothingness. The solitary monk stayed without on the steps of the temple, the old guy with the lined face, spinning scripture reel in hand, humming his omm noises.

No sign of Panchen. That guy was going to need double helpings of cymbals and chanting to cleanse himself after what he’d done.

Stone stood tall and walked through shadow, as if from the front of the temple, and then straight inside the sleeping block at the back of the temple. Carslake pushed ahead of him. The blackened, wooden floor creaked, and a single oil lamp burned at the end of the corridor. Silent, undisturbed.

Then there was another creak in the floor ahead of them. Carslake’s tall figure shoved back past him, scrambling to get out. Idiot.

Stone span round like a top. It was all over. In the lamplight, the muzzle of an assault rifle peered malignantly round the door where he had just come in with Carslake. There was a determined Chinese eye looking at them over the barrel. Carslake changed tack. He walked straight up on impulse, as if oblivious of the gun. He certainly had some nerve. Or was it stupidity?

It could have been worse. The soldier smashed the butt of the rifle into Carslake’s solar plexus. He went down gasping in pain, like he couldn’t breathe.

Stone walked up slowly, and the gun was turned on him. Let’s see what he’s made of. Stone made eye contact with the soldier, and held it. Didn’t raise his arms. The soldier glanced down, and stepped nimbly over Carslake, keeping his weapon on Stone. He was tall, as tall as Stone. He didn’t break the stare, just advanced steadily, till the muzzle of the gun was a few centimetres in front of Stone’s cool, grey eyes. See you and raise you .

It’s difficult to stare down a bullet. Stone put his hands up.