Tom Aston - The Machine

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.

The correct path was obvious. At least on the balance of probabilities. The thick power cable snaked off in one direction. It would go down to the toward the reactor turbines. Not much point going that way.

From the other fork came the breathing. Stone cut his helmet light. The feet were stealthy, deliberate. He kept his position on the floor of the tunnel by the wall. Stilled his breathing as best he could. A dim light approached. The stranger came alongside.

‘Ying Ning,’ he said quietly as she came abreast.

She jumped half a metre. The first time Stone had managed to surprise her with anything.

— o0°0o-

Ying had managed to crawl through the rock fall after all, and she’d made her way to the shaft and the cage. But when she got there, the cage wasn’t there. It had gone. Ekstrom must have taken it. ‘This is bad without cage,’ she said. Something of an understatement.

She planted herself under Stone’s shoulder and he was able to move at three times the speed. She knew the way back as well. It was a matter of only a few hundred metres. Not that it made much difference to two people who were stuck at the end of an overgrown drinking straw eight hundred metres under a Sichuanese hillside called The Death Hole. You could say they had time on their hands.

Worse was to come when they finally reached the shaft to the surface. The cage had returned. It could scarcely be more obvious. Black humour assailed Stone’s senses.

‘Virginia’s disabled Ekstrom with a neat karate chop,’ joked Stone, deadpan. ‘She’s come down to render assistance, possibly in the form of a two minute video piece in front of the Machine. Hope you told her there’s no hair consultant down here.’

‘Huh?’ said Ying Ning. As well she might.

‘Either Ekstrom sent this cage down as some kind of trap,’ said Stone, ‘Or he’s still lurking down here with a nine millimeter pistol.’

‘I think trap,’ said the slim Chinese girl. There was, bizarrely, a gleam in her eye. ‘I like traps. We can get out.’ Stone simply had to admire her nerve. But she was right. It wasn’t exactly a plan, but something might come up, some slim chance, and it was better than sitting down here waiting to die. It was the old maxim. If you want something to happen, make something happen. An argument, a fight, anything. Then, if you're lucky, you'll see an opportunity.

They had to think ahead here. Get themselves ready, then go for it. Stone took a toolbox from the nearby engineers’ station and began to remove the cone-shaped fairing from the top of the cage. It would give a means of escape if the cage were stopped mid-transit. As Stone had to assume it would be. He tried not to think of the being trapped alive in utter darkness, in a tube five hundred metres into the rock.

They unbolted the fairing from the cage, no problem. That left three steel tubes of the frame at the top of the cage. Stone thought he might be able to squeeze through the gap, and Ying Ning certainly could.