A grinding noise drew his notice, and was quickly followed by a set of footsteps on the natural ramp overhead. Li risked craning his neck out from under the ramp, and saw that a man in a thick one-piece hooded suit was descending, walking away down the tunnel.
Li was still weakened, but not so much that he didn"t recognize a chance to further disguise himself. With any luck, the advantage of surprise should help him overcome the disadvantage of being wounded. He pulled his gun out from its holster, holding it by the barrel, and crept after the suited man.
A heavy blow to the head was sufficient to knock the man cold, then Li snapped his neck while he was comatose, since a shot would echo all through the mountain. He examined his victim"s possessions and found that they included various notebooks and folders, plus a small ident.i.ty card.
What, Li wondered, was so important that it merited such precautions? Sung-Chi Li would never be allowed to find out, of course, but this man would. His relaxed smile a.s.serting itself for the first time since he arrived at Tai"an, Li pulled the masking hood away from the body.
Nineteen.
sien-Ko consulted her clipboard; she had to look over the Hfigures two or three times to get over the distraction of wondering what had happened to sever her link to Mister Sin.
She had much important things to do than worry about him.
Well, one much more important thing, anyway; the only thing that she had ever considered important. "Withdraw the control rods by twenty per cent," she told the man operating the large levers below the observation window.
He moved one of the levers, needing to use both arms. In the huge cavern on the other side of the gla.s.s, winches buzzed into life to raise the six thick metal cylinders out from the shafts drilled through alternating layers of uranium oxide and graphite. The chains attached to the cylinders stretched taut and the topmost foot of each cylinder slowly rose from the water like a small volcanic island.
HsienKo turned back to where Ying was keeping a close eye on the dials and meters that filled the opposite wall. A faint electrical humming was gently filling the air, while the needles on all those dials quivered. "Power output three kilowatts and rising." He scribbled a quick calculation on his own clipboard. "Multiplication factor is zero point one five and rising."
The railway line had curved east around T"ai Shan"s foothills in its journey north, and was now moving slowly eastwards into the station. The engine was gasping out explosive puffs of smoke and steam as it slowed to a crawl, then stopped to hiss by the main platform. The Doctor shut everything off and leant out to look along the platform.
Woo craned his neck to see as well, expecting to encounter trouble, but in fact none of the bustling soldiers and railwaymen paid them any heed. Instead, they were all busying themselves at their appointed tasks moving cargo, refilling boilers, or whatever.
The Doctor quickly donned his hat, coat and scarf, and carried K9 off the footplate. Woo and Romana followed. The Doctor was shading his eyes with his hat as he looked up at the mountain which loomed over the rooftops to the north.
"You"re the one who"s been here already," the Doctor said to Romana. "So where are we going?"
"Most of the cave entrances seem to be near the peaks. It"s about a five-mile walk from here."
"We should manage that in a couple of hours. Come on."
"What about blending in?" Woo asked. "We"re not likely to be welcome here."
The Doctor shrugged. "They"d only take us to HsienKo anyway, so what difference does it make?"
"That thing in the plane was sent to kill us."
"I doubt that; more likely it was sent to kill you, or possibly to try to delay us."
"Me?"
"Yes; well, Romana and I have scientific knowledge that she wants, while you have a tendency to shoot at her friends all the time. I warned you no good would come of that."
"Then what do you suggest?"
"I suggest you head back to Shanghai where you"ll be safer.
HsienKo doesn"t seem to mean Romana or me any harm, which is a nice change, but I can"t have you getting yourself killed following us."
"Nothing changes faster than Tong loyalties. I think you and Romy would be safer with me along."
Romana shook her head. "That"s really not necessary."
"I didn"t come all this way for nothing. There is that dwarf, for one thing. I owe it a few cuts."
"Yes," the Doctor muttered. "She might think she can control it, but I don"t know how long for. One rule no killing."
Woo wasn"t sure how to manage such a feat while in combat, short of getting killed himself. Then what would Rondo do, he wondered. Rondo wasn"t really suited to the diplomacy of running a nightclub in the city. He cursed himself for letting himself get distracted by thoughts of the club again, but he realized he had never been away from it like this before. It was taking over his life. "I"ll see what I can do."
Sin shook a piece of slippery offal from the point of his knife and looked around. There were no more live humans in the vicinity, he noted with dismay. That was the trouble with feasting on human fear and death; they were so easy to kill that it was over almost before it had begun.
Cooling heat trails led out of the cave in two directions. He wasn"t sure which was which, but then he noticed the faint particulate blood trace that hung around one of them. It was an encouraging discovery.
Sin set off towards that trail.
Kwok had run out of breath after a short distance and tried not to listen to the screams. He wasn"t sure which was worse: the screams themselves or the silence once they had stopped. At least the silence enabled him to hear Sin moving off in the opposite direction, his tinny footsteps sounding like blood dripping into a bra.s.s bowl.
He wondered why HsienKo had been unable to stop it.
Was she all right? He had once tried to imagine life without her, but couldn"t get beyond the idea that he would simply die along with her. Anything else was too painful to imagine. He knew that he was being morbid, but something about these caves made that inevitable, especially with the newly dead who had just taken up permanent residence there.
Kwok steadied himself. He was a warrior, an officer of the Black Scorpion. Fear was something he should inflict upon others, not suffer himself. Now that Sin was gone, the first order of business would be to see whether any of the men were still alive.
He tried to rea.s.sure himself that there was no need to invoke harm to HsienKo to explain Sin"s behaviour. Not only was she busy with the reactor, but Sin"s mechanisms had probably been damaged by severing the power cable in the communications room. He had looked a little scorched in places.
Steeling himself, Kwok pulled a flashlight from his pocket and switched it on. With every step, he half expected Sin to leap out at him, sending his blood spraying through the air to cool as it fell.
The beam of the flashlight cast shadows that were distorted enough as it was without the added horrors of the shapeless mounds of glistening tissues that steamed slightly where they had been exposed to the air. As far as Kwok could tell, everyone was dead and Sin was gone.
The next question was whether Li was one of the dead. He went round each body in turn, trying not to get anything that had oozed onto his boots, but nowhere was the lanky and balding policeman.
Shaking his head, Kwok went to examine the junction box at the entrance to the grotto. He would have to repair the cables quickly if HsienKo"s plans for power coverage were to be fulfilled.
The cadmium control rods had now been pulled more than halfway out of the water in the reactor cavern, and HsienKo could see that most of the meters were reading at least three-quarter power. "Multiplication factor of point eight zero zero and holding," Ying announced. That was good, but not good enough; the reaction would not be self-sustaining until each neutron released precipitated exactly one successive fission.
Any less and the reaction would slow to a halt, while any more than one would eventually lead to an explosion.
HsienKo was a little uncertain. She knew that in the future there would be instruments capable of measuring such tiny discrepancies, but she wasn"t sure whether the equipment she had stolen from laboratories all over the world was good enough in this era. To have come so far only to back out at this late stage, however, would be a sure way to invite a forcible and fatal retirement. The Tongs did not take signs of weakness lightly. If the equipment wasn"t good enough...A quick death would be preferable to living without having achieved her aim.
"Pull the control rods completely."
The man operating the levers heaved on them once more, and the metal cylinders were dragged slowly from the reactor pile and clear out of the water. "Control rods are out."
When the telephone on her desk rang, HsienKo lifted the receiver, not grateful for the interruption. "Yes?"
"This is the railway station," the voice announced self-importantly. "The troop train expected from Jining didn"t arrive, but the Doctor, Romana and Yan Cheh have debarked from the engine."
"You say it didn"t arrive, but "
"The engine arrived, but with no carriages " There was a brief commotion and a heated exchange of voices at the far end of the line. "I"ve just been told that the engine separated from the carriages and left them stranded about a mile south-east of town."
"Very well." She put the phone down, then lifted it. Her hand paused over the dial while she looked back to Ying.
"Well?"
Ying was frantically scribbling formulae on his clipboard, an excited expression on his usually calm face. "Multiplication factor of one, and holding. Power output now fifteen thousand kilowatts," he breathed.
HsienKo drummed her fist on the desk, unable to resist the childish impulse to display her own tense excitement.
"Stabilize it. Keep a close watch on the multiplication factor; if it rises by even one per cent, lower the control rods back in by ten per cent."
"Shall I start transferring power to the primary coil?"
"Not yet. I want to see how stable this is going to be." She stood. "Continue monitoring the reaction while I go and greet our new friends."
Li had followed the concrete ramp back to its source. Two armed guards were standing outside a thick concrete wall that blocked off a whole section of the caves. Li had been wary, but the guards simply glanced at his pa.s.s and opened the heavy steel doors that were indented into the wall.
A small antechamber inside the doors held a small office for the guards and a weapons locker. Li still had the Browning, but it was good that there were other weapons available should he need them. He continued through the inner doors.
Inside was a wide concrete chamber, containing three large concrete cylinders which whirred with the pa.s.sage of air through the turbines within. Gleaming ducts formed fences across the floor to a bus-sized mechanism of pipes and tubes.
Temperature gauges were attached to it here and there, the differences in the temperatures of various pipes identifying the mechanism to Li as a heat exchanger of some kind. The roof was a good thirty feet high, with the uppermost ten feet of the wall on the left being an overhanging gla.s.s wall showing a control room behind it.
Ma.s.ses of thick cables disappeared into tunnels drilled through the walls, and it seemed reasonable to a.s.sume that this was the source of the cables which were threaded throughout the interior of T"ai Shan.
Clearly this was some sort of electricity generating plant, but of what kind and for what reason, Li couldn"t say. Perhaps, though, if he watched the other technicians, he might get some clue as to what was really going on.
Woo had felt permanently uncomfortable throughout the walk through Tai"an. The soldiers all around must know that he and the Doctor and Romana were enemies, and only the G.o.ds knew what they thought of K9.
Despite this certain knowledge, no one had stopped them or taken any action against them. They did, however, stop to stare at the newcomers with interest, and Woo began to get the idea of what it must feel like to be a westerner in China. Such staring crowds were things he had seen surrounding westerners on many occasions, as most Chinese had never seen a European. It was most unnerving.
At least in j.a.pan, where foreigners were considered lowlier than peasants, they were too polite to stare like that. The Doctor, of course, took it in his stride, as he seemed to take everything in his stride. "Doesn"t this bother you?" Woo asked.
"So long as they"re not shooting, nothing bothers me.
Where to, Romana?"
"That arch up ahead."
Beyond the archway, the mountain rose out of the fertile earth, the line of steps clearly visible, like a zipper. Woo"s eyes were drawn back to the archway. Several people were standing there, and all but one were armed. The exception, as he could tell from the white overcoat which wrapped her lithe but feminine figure and tied-back hair, was HsienKo.
She stepped forward to greet them with a cheery smile as they reached the archway. "Welcome. I"d been getting worried that you had encountered some trouble en route."
"Nothing a few years" holiday wouldn"t cure," the Doctor responded equally cheerily. He strolled over to the nearest of HsienKo"s guards, extending a hand. "How do you do; I"m the Doctor, this is Romana and that"s Yan Cheh. Where are you from, soldier?"
"Hebei."
"Aha. Never been there myself, but I hear it"s very nice at this time of year." He turned back to HsienKo. "Prisoners?"
"Not at all. I just wanted to greet you personally. I understand the train was attacked and since we"re only a couple of miles from j.a.panese-held territory, I want to know I have people I can rely on." Woo couldn"t help feeling a twinge of irony. If only she knew. The words didn"t quite ring true, though, but he couldn"t tell just what it was that made him think so. "I imagine you will want to see what I"m up to. I think it"s time that you did." She held out a hand each to the Doctor and Romana. "As you know I need no Dragon compa.s.s. I will take you directly to the peak." The Doctor and Romana exchanged a look. Then the Doctor shrugged, and they both took hold of one of HsienKo"s hands. HsienKo looked at Woo. "I do, of course, have only two hands. The sergeant here will bring you along." She stepped forward and vanished, along with the Doctor and Romy.
So that was it, Woo thought, he was the one who wasn"t required alive, so doubtless the guards were indeed here to take him prisoner. Before he could do anything about it, however, two of them had grabbed him by the shoulders, adjusting the geomantic compa.s.s they shared between them.
They dragged him forward and the mountain view ahead wrapped itself around his head.
K9 hadn"t a chance to do anything to stop the others being removed. He was unsure why they hadn"t taken him too; most likely their primitive minds didn"t understand what he was.
The low-level chronon bursts which had accompanied the vanishments suggested that they had not gone far, so K9 calculated that a journey to the summit of the mountain as promised would provide a roughly similar energy displacement.
It just meant that he would have to go the long way. He followed the road through the archway until he reached a quite compact temple which stretched a red gate across the road.
Beyond the gate, the road transformed into a steep pathway with many sections of steps.
If K9 had a heart, it would have sunk, as the radar pulse he sent out was reflected off some seven thousand steps.
Nevertheless, he had a duty to his master. When he reached the first step, his casing lifted up from around his traction system, giving him a good foot of clearance for his forward sprocket wheels to slide onto the top of the step.
Slowly, and with a great deal of whirring, K9 began to climb the mountain of T"ai Shan.
Twenty.
he Doctor and Romana stumbled dizzily, ove T rcompensating for the fact that they had moved without taking more than an illusory step. Romana recognized their surroundings as the grounds of the Jade Emperor temple. HsienKo released their hands and started walking towards the cave mouth, but the Doctor had turned to admire the view.
Romana had nothing against admiring beautiful scenery, but there was a time for everything. The Doctor pointed. "Ha!
So that"s what you"ve done with it." Romana followed the line of his arm, and saw the TARDIS standing against the red-brick wall of a huge gateway.
HsienKo turned back. "Your Time Cabinet has not been tampered with."