The Gravity Engine (2 page)

You are referring to the wives of our father the White Tiger, yes?

I am.

And you’re seriously asking me this question?

Oh come on, there have to be one or two he met while he was in the city …

Our father does not favour women with brains.

Rohan interrupted.
Wrong. Women with brains do not favour our father.

Number Two has a valid point
, William said.
Any woman with half a brain would steer well clear of him.

It was worth a try, we have financial issues and someone with access to the current trading figures would be very useful.

Hold on
,
William said, and was quiet for a moment.
Hey, leave it with me for a while. I’m dating a dragon who does that sort of thing in the Eastern Palace, he may have access to the info you need. I’ll see if he can help.

T
hanks, man, you’re the best.

Oh shit, I hear screaming. Someone missed
her turn with Dad. Later.

Michael sighed.
‘Clarissa would know what to do.’

‘Michael, Clarissa’s not the solution to everything.’

‘She is to me.’ Michael closed the budget folder. ‘Leave the gold where it is until William gets back to us. Trickle sell it as we always do, but we need to find another source of income – real Celestial income, not this Earthly crap – soon, because we all know what’s coming.’

‘Is it really?’

‘It is.’

Rohan studied him intensely.
‘How much can you see?’

‘Since I was promoted
to Number One, more than I want to. War, Rohan. War with demonkind – bloody, unrelenting, and brutal. There’s a good chance the Celestial will lose and we’ll all end up being tortured in the tenth level of Hell for a long time.’

‘
How long a long time?’

‘Long enough to regret accepting Immortality, brother.’

The next day
Michael was going through the metal commodity prices on the internet when Rohan came in and flopped into the seat across the desk from him, his grin wide.

‘Anything useful for me, or you just here to be decorative?’ Michael said without looking away from the screen.

‘We found a big nest. Really big nest. Hundreds of them. Want to come help?’

Michael dropped the mouse and pushed himself away from the desk, then stopped and wheeled himself back again. ‘No. I’m too busy. You can handle it. How many are you taking with you?’

Rohan’s voice went sly. ‘There’ll be Mothers, Michael.’

‘Dad would kill me.’

‘Dad’s in the harem. Come on, man, you really need to blow off some steam and if we run into more than half-a-dozen Mothers, it could get hairy. We may seriously need you.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Under Bezeklik.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Called Bozhikeli in Putonghua.’

‘Never heard of it.’

Rohan let his breath out in a long hiss.

‘I’m half-American and grew up in Hong Kong
,’ Michael said. ‘If you want someone more local as Number One, feel free to take the job yourself.’

‘Yeah, sure. Good try.’

Michael turned back to the computer, googled Bezeklik and went through to the Wikipedia article. ‘The Thousand-Buddha Caves?’

‘Those ones.
Hardly any Buddhas left, though, archaeologists stole most of them in the early twentieth century. Not much there but the caves – and a massive nest complex underneath. Our scouts estimate that the nest entrance is as old as the caves themselves.’

‘
Fifth to fourteenth century. Damn, that nest is
old
.’

‘We’re looking at seriously huge Mothers in there. Hopefully some Dukes as well. Should be a fun
field trip.’

‘We shouldn’t be wasting our time on Mothers and Dukes, we should be targeting military thralls that we can t
ame and add to our defensive army.’

‘Well, plenty of them too. Of course.
But this breeding colony will be producing high-level war demons and if we shut it down, it could gut their military forces.’

‘That’s halfway across the continent and on the Earthly Plane. I don’t have a whole day to waste doing this, Rohan.’

‘Big Mothers, Michael.’

‘You can handle it.’

‘And Dukes. And lots of military thralls to tame and present to Dad to add to his own army – you’ll be his favourite son for ages. Come on, man, it’ll be great fun. You haven’t drawn a weapon in anger for weeks.’

Michael turned to
argue with Rohan, and hesitated when he saw his brother’s desperation. ‘You really think you’ll need me?’

Rohan grimaced. ‘To be honest? Yeah.
I could only round up fifteen Horsemen with enough training and none of them are Immortal. We may be a little out of our depth here, man. The scout says there’s some really weird shit happening down there – the scout that returned, that is. Three were stationed in that area and only one came back, and he’s really disturbed by what he saw, and his memory seems to be wiped. The therapists are using hypnosis to help him recall what happened, but there’s something … wrong.’

Michael held his hand out over the desk and his sword, the White Tiger, appeared on it. He
stood and picked it up. ‘How are you planning to travel there?’

‘We’
ll borrow one of Dad’s choppers.’

‘All right, count me in.’

Rohan’s expression filled with relief.

‘But you’re writing the
report for Dad when we get back,’ Michael said.

‘Sure,
but I could copy the contents of the
People’s Daily
, hand it to him as a report, and he’d never know, because he never reads them.’

‘I know that
– I’ve done it too.’

The helicopter landed twenty kilometres away from the caves and Michael and Rohan quietly teleported the squad closer. They walked along the road to the tourist car park, a flat gravel area above the little valley that held the caves. The usual tourist-trap city had been set up, with camel rides and paid photo opportunities, but it was just on nightfall and all the stalls were closed.

Rohan signalled a couple of soldiers and
made them invisible to reconnaissance. The rest of the squad waited quietly until they returned and reappeared.

‘No surveillance we can see,’ one of the scouts said. ‘
No guards, no cameras, no civilians. All clear.’

Michael gestured for them to move out. ‘Number Two on point. I’ll bring up the rear.’

The squad moved into formation and went down the steps to the caves, which were set into the side of a river valley only a hundred metres across. The yellow earth formed a steep buttress on the other side, and the only greenery was some straggly trees and shrubs clinging to the bottom of the valley and the water from the river. There was no other habitation for kilometres, and nothing grew for a great distance on either side of the little valley. Several archways carved into the rock of the valley wall led away from a wide flat area that overlooked the water.

Rohan led them
into one of the entrances and through the narrow corridors. The cave complex wasn’t large; each opening led to a narrow corridor that went three metres into the hillside, ended with an altar, then looped back out again. Some held brightly coloured Buddhist murals but most were bare rock, scarred where the frescoes had been chiselled away.

‘The German
archaeologists took them,’ Rohan said as he led the team through the corridor. ‘Took them back to Germany where they’d be safe from the bloodthirsty local savages. Most of the paintings were destroyed when the museum holding them in Germany was bombed during a war between the bloodthirsty local savages.’

‘I believe it,’ Michael said.
He put on a fake British accent. ‘But our wars are different. When good white men go to war it’s all about honour and valour, none of this Oriental savagery.’ He saw the way Rohan was looking at him. ‘I know, I know, I’m one of them. So where’s the nest entrance?’

‘Of course
it’s the altar.’ Rohan gestured towards the wall, which held a fresco of an obviously European Bodhisattva; white skin and blue eyes. ‘I didn’t know there were gweilo Buddhas.’

Michael shrugged. ‘The
Wudang Energy Master is a Taoist Immortal. It could even be a picture of her.’

‘You’re right, it does look like her.’ Rohan checked around. ‘All clear.
Looks like I was right and they weren’t expecting us.’

‘
You’re right about surprise; I’m right about the Bodhisattva. Something has to go seriously wrong now.’

‘I hear you. On point.’ Rohan walked through the wall and Michael
waited for the rest of the squad to enter, again guarding the rear.

The tunnels on the other side looked exactly the same
, but they hadn’t been damaged. Tan earth walls led up to an arched roof and more frescoes covered the walls. Michael stopped and studied one: it showed a group of Buddhist pilgrims, some Asian and some European, wearing saffron robes and carrying lotus flowers. A description was inscribed under each figure, saying where they were from and their humanitarian achievements.

‘This isn’t what you’d expect to find in a
nest entrance,’ Michael said.

‘
It changes further along, according to the intel,’ Rohan said. ‘When they first entered, the scouts thought they’d just reached a part of the caves that had been hidden by an Immortal.’ He gestured with his head. ‘Come and see.’

The end of the tunnel opened into a large underground room with a domed ceiling, twenty metres across, decorated with
more Buddhist frescoes. Panels within the dome held depictions of the twenty-eight Buddhas, from the most ancient to the Maitreya Buddha Yet to Come. The walls were still the same tan earth, but it was buffed and polished to a sheen that made it appear to be shining gold. The frescoes hadn’t faded with the years; they still glowed bright as jewels.

‘I am so glad the archaeologists never made it in here,’ Michael said, turning to see the contents of the room with awe. ‘After we clean this
nest out we must do something about preserving this.’

‘The best method would probably be to lock it up,’ Rohan said, standing next to him and studying the brilliant ceiling. ‘Take a complete survey and digital record, and then make sure that
nobody ever enters again.’

‘When we return, remind me to liaise with the Phoenix’s people about preservation,’ Michael said. ‘They’re the materials specialists, they should have some good ideas, and they’re deeply protective of the Buddhist legacy.’

‘Sir.’

Michael glanced
sharply at Rohan, who was still studying the ceiling. He nodded and turned to the rest of the squad. ‘Be very careful not to touch anything. Let’s go.’

As they proceeded down the tunnel,
the frescoes changed. The colours shifted from brilliant blues and golds to red and black, and showed scenes of battle and conquest instead of peaceful offering and celebration. Michael stopped when he saw a fresco that didn’t show a Buddha or devotee at all – it depicted a Snake Mother in True Form holding a screaming human to her impossibly wide mouth. A red inscription below the Mother said,
Honoured Number Sixteen who brought more than a hundred humans for us to play with. Their skulls and bones adorn our nest and bring joy to our hearts.

Michael sniffed the air; the earthy scent from the tunnel walls
was strong, but there was a definite odour of nest from up ahead; death and decay.

Rohan nodded. ‘Now it gets intense.
’

As they travelled down the tunnel, the frescoes petered out to nothing and the walls darkened from gold to black. They descended steeply, the floor sometimes slippery with moisture. They all felt it at the same time and stopped. Michael worked his way through the group to Rohan at the head.

Michael sent his senses through the tunnels ahead of them and he and Rohan shared a look. There were at least three hundred small- to mid-sized demons ahead, with a group of twenty or so really big ones – either Duke or Mother level. Michael studied his own squad – he and Rohan were the only Immortals present – and nearly ordered them out.

What did the intel say about the level of training?
Michael asked Rohan.

The demons don’t appear to be trained, they are big but not warriors. This nest has never been attacked so they’re complacent.

Michael worked out the numbers and came up slightly positive on his own side. They could take them; and removing this many huge breeding Mothers from the Horde of Hell would give the Celestial forces a serious tactical advantage in the war to come. It could mean the difference between an improbable victory and a very likely Celestial defeat.

He nodded once
, sharply, and sent an order out to the troop.
Me on point; Number Two on rear guard. Have your weapons out and ready.