Chapter 25 - The Kraken Gate
In spite of my bruises, I awoke the following day in time to exercise in the grounds of the estate. I strapped my breasts. Jodhpurs and a sensible cotton blouse allowed me to jog around the lake twice before I settled into the Souficla forms, sucking in the chill mountain air and breathing plumes into the clear blue sky. There was a broken willow set back from the water’s edge that served as my opponent in the logerna. I danced around it, striking and withdrawing, striking and swirling; always moving. My hands and feet hammered the rough bark, hard enough to make them sting, even through the calluses. I stopped to wipe away the sweat that was running into my eyes.
‘May we join you, chief?’ Ankush and Mahkran.
Souficla had come from the east, which was why so many Gulreimian people were proficient at it. Mahkran was as good as any I had sparred with, but his brother Ankush was among the elite in his own country. I nodded, too winded to speak. They took their time folding their outer garments and putting them to one side. When they were barefooted, they bowed to me and then we all faced the rising sun and I began the exercises for the second time that morning. No longer alone, I was forced to apply greater rigour to the forms. The Malek brothers moved with a fluidity and precision that was breathtaking. I worked myself harder, trying to copy the way they flowed from one shape into another. For a while, I remained in perfect time with them, but the drameda was too punishing. I managed to scrape through to the end, gasping like a landed fish, and when it was done, I sat down and watched the brothers move through the logerna-en, sparring with each other.
On the way to breakfast, Ankush teased me about some of the passages.
‘Your rohten is good, the blade of your hand is strong, but the way you make a fist is sloppy.’ He showed me. ‘Your thumb must be tucked in well behind the fingers. It is the fat man hiding behind his friends as they fight.’
‘That’s how I make a fist,’ I complained.
Ankush smiled kindly. ‘Then all is well, and your enemies will be few.’
‘If only that were true, my friend. We’ve acquired a train load more of them in the last few days.’
‘Those were not your enemies, chief. They were people paid by your enemies.’
‘A intellectual distinction, Ankush, but when someone is trying to put a bullet hole in you, one does well to treat them like an enemy.’
By the time we regained the main reception room in the hunting lodge, the whole team, with the exception of Na-Su, had assembled. The room was generous, occupying almost the same floorspace of my entire townhouse. It had white oak floors, large windows and lavish drapes. The fresco of a hunting scene covered the entire ceiling. Of men, horses, bears and dogs there were plenty, but there wasn’t a single woman in the scene. We’re too damned sensible to waste time on such frivolous and cruel nonsense.
We’d hoped to collar Professor Maddison to give us a tour, but he was nowhere to be found. He probably still blamed me for Winslow Hall and was doing his best to avoid us. We were at best, a troublesome diversion from his main work, at worst we were the people who’d trashed decades of his work and killed many of his learned colleagues in Emberly.
I was wondering how to move things forward when Dr. Betz knocked and entered the room. Her uncle, it transpired, had asked her to give us a tour, but she didn’t need any encouragement. She made it clear that she was delighted to show us around. She was wearing a lab coat over slacks and a long-sleeved, primrose-coloured blouse; somewhat more practical attire than the last time we had met. Her generous auburn hair was tied back in a ponytail.
‘You beat us here!’ I said.
‘My uncle arranged for me to take the air-train the day after we met. I got here the day before you did.’
‘You’re already familiar with the setup?’
‘Absolutely. My work on field dynamics led to some changes that were incorporated at this site. I visited between university semesters, and anyway…’ she added with a wink, ‘I grew up here.’
‘Of course,’ I conceded. It occurred to me that we hadn’t conducted a security check on Dr. Jenniver Betz. I made a mental note to pass this along to Ellen. ‘Remind me, Dr. Betz, what was the subject of your thesis?’
‘“The Energy Requirements of Koulomb Field Containment in Relation to the Projection Distance”’ she rattled off. By the time I heard the last word in the title, I’d already forgotten all the previous ones. She might as well have been speaking Bakostanian.
‘Come on now!’ she said, turning on her heel. ‘There’s a lot to see, so let’s get started.’ She led us from the reception room into an immense dining hall, almost as large as the one back at the main house.
‘I thought that the Koulomb Gate was a secret.’
Dr. Betz favoured me with a flirtatious smile that would have melted the Omolit permafrost.
‘The application of the Koulomb Field to translocation is a closely guarded secret,’ she said. ‘However, the general principles of Koulomb Field Dynamics has been a subject of discussion since Frederick Koulomb discovered the existence of the field thirty-three years ago.’
The kitchens were even larger than the dining room they served. An army of cooks and serving staff were already at work preparing lunch. In addition to the new kitchen staff, many maids and valets had been taken on to serve the burgeoning numbers on the estate. All of these had been added to the list of people that Ellen and I had to put through the vetting process.
Dr. Betz explained the layout of the hunting lodge as we followed her around. The first floor was given over to bedrooms, and we learned that she had moved here from the manor house in order to be closer to the Koulomb Gate. She was the only one of the sixty-two scientists and engineers on the project who had made that choice. All the others had insisted on sleeping in the manor house. Obvious why…they want to be as far from the installation if the failsafe triggers again. I sighed, hoping that the marines could be relied on to defend the manor house.
As we continued on the tour, I was conscious of the frequent glances Dr. Betz cast in my direction. When I caught her eye on one occasion, she looked away quickly, a faint glow in her cheeks, and took up a lively conversation with Inigo. For his part, the young man looked entranced by the young scientist.
For the next part of the tour, we were led down two turns of a tight, corkscrew staircase. Numerous signs affixed to the curved walls forbade naked flames and smoking, and warned of the dire risk of fire or explosive gases. At the bottom of the steps, a doorway opened out into a catacomb whose vaulted brick ceiling was held aloft by regularly spaced pillars that marched out into the distance before us and to either side. From the top of each pillared span, a small incandescent light cast a dim pool of light on the floor below.
‘Electric lights!’ exclaimed Inigo. They were still a rare sight, even in Emberly.
‘Well spotted,’ said Dr. Jenniver Betz. ‘You saw the signs. We can’t risk gas lighting in here. The batteries give off explosive gases when they’re charging.’
We filed out, under the arched roof. The feeble bulb above us revealed a compacted earth floor and four pillars around which eight, large wooden boxes were arranged in a square formation. Every span was the same, creating a cross-hatch pattern of pillars and boxes, intersected by the paths that ran between them. The boxes were recognisable now as batteries, each topped with two thick brass terminals. From each terminal, thick wires ascended to a wooden track that carried whole bundles of cables under the arches towards the distant end of the basement. I was standing next to Dr. Betz.
‘How big is this place?’ I asked, unable to discern a wall in any direction, except the one behind us.
‘It’s approximately the size of a hurl-ball pitch,’ replied the young woman. ‘My great-grandfather liked wine. He had the place enlarged several times to accommodate his collection. Sadly, it was all confiscated during the revolution.’
Three pillars away, three men in overalls were working at something. Two were holding a ladder for their colleague who was partway up it, only his lower half visible. Dr. Betz saw me looking in their direction. She touched my arm.
‘We’re having to install extra ventilation to take the dangerous gases away.’ I tried to focus on the words, but the feel of her soft hands on my arm distracted me. There had been another question that I’d wanted to put to her, but I couldn’t bring it to mind. Then suddenly, the warmth of her hand was gone and she was leading everyone down one of the corridors of boxes, following the overhead cables to the far wall. Here, the huge bundles snaked down the wall. Dr. Betz took us to see where they came together.
‘Twelve-thousand cables from six-thousand batteries meet here. Each one is bolted to one of these twenty-four brass bars.’ She pointed out the terminals, each the diameter of my thigh. The dull yellow metal glinted where it was visible beneath the mat of cables. ‘The bars reach through to the interconnect room. Each is capable of conducting just shy of fifty-thousand amps.’
‘The interconnect room is where the power lines all meet up,’ said Inigo, keen to demonstrate his knowledge, and clearly more at home inside, away from the open expanse of the estate. ‘Is that right? It’s where the generator, the batteries, and the feeder lines to the control centre and the gate itself all come together.’
‘I can see someone has been paying attention,’ the young woman crooned. She knew her qualities, and playing the shy scientist wasn’t one of them. A moment ago, she had been flirting with me, but now her charms were directed at Inigo. He was clearly enjoying the attention, but I sensed he was holding himself in check, too interested, for now, in the machinery of the Koulomb Gate. Ellen was entirely unaffected by the charms of our guide and looked faintly bored by the tour. I cursed myself for my own lack of focus. Dr. Betz could flirt with whoever she wanted. It was childish, and of no consequence to me.
We went through a sturdy wooden door into a passage that led into an entirely different underground room, the generator. We’d come through onto a balcony that ran around another cavernous room. The air was damp, and there was a familiar smell of coal. Hundreds of gas lamps marked the route, and more hung in the beams overhead, apparently safe to use here. In the pit below us, two titanic, pewter-coloured steam engines lay silent, like brooding leviathans. Mechanics in oil-stained overalls were crawling over one of the engines while several people were mopping the flagstone floor. Beside the painted and polished iron plates, brass pipes and rivets of each engine was a flywheel, shrouded in a heavy framework supporting loops of shielded copper wire. The funnels from the engines extended up into large diameter ducting that was suspended from a gantry under the ceiling. I guessed this was to extract smoke and steam from this subterranean chamber.
‘These are the largest steam engines in all of Emberland,’ Dr. Betz proudly announced. ‘They power the alternators just there,’ she pointed at the flywheels, ‘and they in turn charge the batteries.’
‘Bigger than the setup in Emberly was,’ I observed.
‘At full power, each one is capable of powering the Koulomb Gate on its own. Only one is fired up to charge the batteries, but both run while the portal is active. That way, if one of them fails, we can keep the gate open.’
‘That only worked in Emberly if there was enough charge in the batteries,’ said Inigo. ‘Isn’t that right?’
‘Yes,’ said Jenniver. ‘You are an attentive student.’
I frowned. Director Harman had told me that the Lannerville installation had been a prototype. The one in Emberly had only been built once the theory had been proven, and yet much of what we had seen looked new, improved from the setup in Emberly, as though the upgrades had taken place long before the disaster at Winslow Hall.
‘Have there been a lot of upgrades to the equipment here?’
‘Oh indeed,’ replied Dr. Betz. ‘A great deal has been learned from the work in Emberly.’ She looked me straight in the eyes and then, when I returned her gaze, she lowered them demurely. It was the first sign of submissiveness she’d shown since she’d met us. It did something peculiar in my stomach, something that I’d not felt for a long time. Not since Benjamin.
‘How soon will this be up and running?’ I made a gesture, intended to take in everything we had seen. Dr. Betz was steering us towards two sets of double doors that looked as though they were designed to keep the noise of the steam engines out of the the control room.
‘Professor Maddison says seven days.’
‘Seven days?!’ Ellen’s surprise echoed my own. ‘I thought this place had been mothballed and would take a cycle or even two to bring back online.’
‘Director Harman has been most insistent,’ replied Dr. Betz. She brushed a strand of auburn hair from her face and managed to look ill-used and resigned, all at the same time. ‘We’re all working overtime and the engineers are doing shifts around the clock.’
I was shocked and said nothing as we entered the control room. It was almost identical to the one we had all seen in Emberly. There were the banks of pressure gauges, and dials showing voltage and current. Wires and brass pipes were racked neatly where they lined the side and back walls, but the wall that overlooked the portal chamber itself was glazed, from one end to the other; ten rectangles of thick, plate glass in a heavy iron frame.
Inigo broke the silence. ‘Where are we now in relation to what’s above ground?’ he asked.
‘All this is under the stables,’ replied Dr. Betz.
‘And the water for the steam engines comes from the lake?’
‘Why, yes. Have you seen the tower in the lake?’
We all nodded.
‘The tower is built on the site of a natural overflow that keeps the level of the lake constant. Water used to pour down it and through these caverns until my great uncle had it tamed. Sluice gates were fitted and the water diverted. Then, when work began on the this facility, a conduit tunnel was built that carries water pipes that run all the way into the room behind us.’
His look of concentration was like the edge of a razor; something had caught his attention and it wasn’t our tour guide. It wouldn’t surprise me if Inigo came up with one or two improvements to the facility while we were here.
‘How was it all excavated without disturbing the buildings above?’ asked Ellen.
‘The rock here in Lannerville is porous,’ said the scientist. ‘Much of it is riddled with caves. When Georgu Harman had the land surveyed, they discovered a set of caverns through which the excess water from the lake drained. Some structural work was done underground to ensure that the hunting lodge wouldn’t collapse, but the only use for the caverns, until Director Harman decided to house the Koulomb Gate inside them, was my grandfather’s wine cellar.
While the good doctor had been talking, we’d moved over to the observation window to gaze down onto the floor of the portal chamber. Below us, the huge, cartwheel-like dynamos lay motionless, and between them stood the platform where the portal would appear. It was busier than the engine room had been. Perhaps twenty engineers and scientists were working on the equipment, some on scaffolding alongside the Koulomb Field dynamos.
‘We can’t hear them at all,’ said Ellen, watching two engineers hammering rivets into place, high up on one of the dynamos.
‘Director Harman insisted we increase the level of protection around the gate room in case there’s a containment issue.’
‘You mean in case the Charg get through. Aren’t we here to see to that?’ I asked. Dr. Betz’s answer was smooth and delivered without any trace of accusation.
‘Of course, but my uncle discussed this with Professor Maddison. They agreed to adding another line of defence, you know, in case the failsafe doesn’t trigger?’
On the face of it, it was a sensible precaution, but suddenly I was very worried. Harman had requested new security features without consulting me, and his niece had asked me how to disable the failsafe. Were they looking for a way to protect the huge investment? Had they lost faith in me and my team? Then Dr. Betz dropped the bombshell.
‘Lieutenant Scott thought it was a good idea.’
I choked back a shout. ‘Lieutenant Scott has seen this?’
‘Oh no. He hasn’t seen it. He’s not due to arrive until this afternoon, but he has seen the plans and sent my uncle some recommendations.’
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