Hell to Heaven (27 page)

The woman scribbled some figures on her clipboard, showed it to a colleague and a quiet discussion broke out. The woman nodded. ‘Yes, it would go down in flames.’

The Tiger leaned back. ‘What a delightful idea.’

‘Only if the Dragon’s in it, sir,’ she said with a small smile.

The Tiger hopped off the stool. ‘Clear up the laser, secure-store the records, destroy the weapons and take a two-week vacation, all of you. When you come back you’re reassigned. Dismissed.’

The staff fell to one knee again, then set about their work. The Tiger led me out of the room and we turned right. A bank of four industrial-sized lifts, large enough to take a truck, sat in the wall to our left.

‘Car park’s in the third basement,’ the Tiger said. ‘Hidden entrance about three hundred metres away.’ He pushed the button for the lift and then took us down to basement two. ‘Spacesuits are right down the bottom; there’s no chance of them exploding and needing to be ejected quickly.’

‘How often are things ejected because they’re going to explode?’ I said.

The Tiger crossed his arms and leaned against the lift wall. ‘Oh, once every couple of months.’

‘Funny thing,’ I said, ‘I never need to eject anything that’s about to explode from my research facility.’

He grinned down at me. ‘That’s because your research facility is old-fashioned and boring. Just like its master.’

I nodded my serpent head. ‘You have a point.’

The basement had a similar floor plan: a corridor running the circumference of the building and rooms in the middle. The Tiger led me into the first room, which was obviously where the spacesuits were manufactured. Two enormous fabric-cutting tables stood at one end; the robotic arms suspended above them held laser cutting tools. There were three sewing machines on tables to one side, and an arc welder, grinder and a blowtorch in one corner.

The Tiger gestured for me to follow him through double doors to the next room, which was the fitting room. My spacesuit—a long white cloth tube with a glass fishbowl helmet at the front—sat on a work table with staff fussing around it.

When the staff saw us, they fell to one knee then quickly rose. The Tiger guided me over to the table and I raised my head to examine the suit.

‘Pleased to meet you, ma’am,’ one of the scientists said. ‘This is it. The major problem you will have when you’re up that high is pressure—well, lack of it. Without the pressure of the air on your body, you’ll balloon out, which will kill you.’

‘Lack of oxygen will kill me first though,’ I said.

‘True. We didn’t have to worry so much about the issue of you generating heat, because you’re coldblooded. We’re really not sure how this will affect the design of the suit. Spacesuits for humans have a cooling system because heat builds up inside and isn’t released into the vacuum of space.’

‘We have two options,’ another scientist said. ‘A hard suit, or a soft suit like this one on the table.
Normally, suits for humans have a hard, fibreglass upper-body section that holds all the electricals, and the rest of it is soft. With you, we couldn’t make any of it hard, so it’s a hundred per cent soft suit.’

‘We tried to make something out of the new technology we’ve been researching,’ another said. ‘Where only the head part has oxygen sent through it; the rest is pressurised by pressure stockings and no oxygen is sent in.’

‘Would being without oxygen damage the body tissue?’ I said.

‘Doesn’t do any damage to be in the water for a reasonable amount of time,’ he said. ‘Being without air is similar. As long as there’s pressure to keep the tissues intact, it should be fine.’

‘Beside the point though, because the elastic pressure suit isn’t robust enough yet,’ a third staff member said. ‘So back to this soft suit.’

‘It looks like a bunch of arm and leg pieces joined together with metal rings,’ I said.

The staff shared a look.

‘It is. Making pieces to fit from scratch takes a couple of months,’ the Tiger said. ‘Putting these together took a couple of days.’

‘It has metal ring joints between the soft fabric to allow you to move,’ another scientist said. ‘Whether or not you will actually be able to move in it is another matter.’

‘Would you like to try it on, ma’am?’ the first scientist said.

‘All right,’ I said.

‘We’d appreciate it if you could stretch out full-length on the table. That way we can see if we have enough pieces.’

‘What about life support?’ I said.

‘That’s an issue we haven’t dealt with yet. We may have to add a hard central core to attach it to.’

‘I doubt I’ll be able to move in something like that,’ I said.

‘Grow legs,’ the Tiger said.

I put my chin on the table, then pushed my head forward so I was able to slither up onto it. I stretched out alongside the suit feeling unpleasantly exposed.

One of the Tiger’s staff pulled out a tape measure and measured me. There was a soft discussion, then someone began to shuffle around in the equipment boxes.

‘Need a couple more pieces,’ the Tiger said. ‘Can you make yourself smaller?’

‘Not comfortably,’ I said.

‘Find any?’ the Tiger called to the woman who was digging around in the boxes.

‘Got a couple, they can go on the tail end,’ she called back. She returned with a few more arm pieces. ‘Perfect. Let’s try it for fit without the under suit.’

They unlatched the pieces and slid them along my body from my tail to my head, locking them together as they went. My body sagged uncomfortably between the rings, but I waited patiently for them to put all the pieces together.

‘All the bits except the helmet are in place,’ the Tiger said.

‘Raise your head, please, ma’am,’ one of them said.

I lifted my head, the heavy suit limiting my movement. The rings slid down over my body and clattered together at my tail, leaving me uncovered.

‘We need to put the helmet on to make it stay put,’ one of the staff said.

The Tiger raised one hand to lift me into the air and I glided off the table onto the floor. One staff member held the helmet while the others gently shifted the rings back up towards my head. I helped them as much as I could. When all the rings were back in place, they put the helmet on my head and locked the rings. I was enclosed in fabric, the helmet just millimetres from the end of my snout.

‘This is very claustrophobic,’ I said.

Someone attached a hose to the side of the suit and stale-smelling cool air entered the helmet.

‘Try to move,’ the Tiger said.

The rings and the friction from the fabric made movement possible only with a massive amount of effort. I moved my body from side to side as I normally would, but only every second or third movement gripped the ground enough to push me forward. I managed to cross the room, then stopped to rest, dropping my head and panting.

‘Is it that hard?’ one of them said.

I nodded.

‘Well, she won’t be in microgravity so this obviously won’t work,’ the Tiger said. ‘Time for plan B.’

He raised me onto the table again and the staff unlocked the rings, releasing me into the extremely fresh air of the room.

‘What’s plan B?’ I said as I slithered off the table and onto the floor. The rings had bruised me and movement was uncomfortable, but the discomfort would disappear as soon as I changed back to human form.

‘A hard suit with wheels, like a mobility chair,’ the Tiger said.

I hesitated a moment, then said, ‘Make sure it has one of those flags on the back.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll find a suitable bumper sticker,’ he said. He nodded to the staff. ‘Good job, but it doesn’t work. Back to the drawing board.’

‘My Lord,’ the staff said, and stood quietly waiting to be dismissed.

‘Want to see some of the other stuff happening here?’ he asked me. ‘Come and check out the lab where we have your blood sample. My kids have been having a field day with it, and they want at least a litre more.’

‘Have you cloned me yet?’

‘Not for want of trying.’ He turned to the staff. ‘It’s late. Start again tomorrow. I’ll make the fibreglass foundry available to you.’ He winked at one of the women. ‘When are you on next, Doriene?’

She blushed. ‘Next week, sir.’

He beckoned her towards him. ‘Come here, lovely.’

She approached him shyly and he grabbed her around the waist, pulled her in and kissed her long and hard. He released her and she fell back, breathless and bright-eyed.

He grinned at her. ‘See you next week, sweetheart.’

‘I cannot believe your own wives call you sir,’ I grumbled as we went out the double doors and down the corridor to the next room.

The Tiger stopped and crossed his arms over his chest. ‘So when you were training with Ah Wu and he was teaching you the arts, you never called him sir? Student to Master?’

I rose on my coils. ‘Once we were out in the open about our feelings, no. If I did, he’d correct me.’

He shook his head and turned away. ‘Stupid bastard.’

‘Up yours, Devil Tiger.’

He turned back to me and spread his hands, irritated. ‘What is this thing with the devil tiger? In the
last twelve months it seems everybody’s saying that! Where did it come from?’

‘Lok talks.’

‘That dog needs his balls cut off.’

‘So, my friend, do you.’

‘Humph,’ he said, and opened the next set of doors.

This was a pathology lab, with benches holding rows of glass test tubes and chromatic DNA tests. A centrifuge, loaded with more test tubes, spun in one corner.

‘One Twenty-Eight’s on your case,’ the Tiger said.

The son heard us and came out from behind the barrel of an electron microscope. He appeared to be about twenty, but something about him suggested he was much older. He was Chinese, but with a shock of pure white hair and the tawny eyes of his father. He smiled with the same charismatic roguishness and I shook my head.

‘You have been cloning,’ I said.

‘Nope, just the occasional sapling falling not too far from the tree,’ the Tiger said.

One Twenty-Eight strode to his father and clasped his arm around his shoulder; he was about twenty centimetres shorter than the Tiger. They shared a brief embrace then turned to me, both grinning the Tiger’s little-boy grin.

‘Asshole overload,’ I said.

They bowed at exactly the same time, their grins not shifting. One Twenty-Eight fell to one knee to me, then jumped up and returned to the centrifuge, beckoning me to join him.

He pressed a button and the unit stopped. He flipped open the lid of one of the chambers and pulled a test tube out with a long pair of callipers. ‘This is
your blood,’ he said, moving the test tube so I could see it more clearly. ‘Normally, when you centrifuge human blood, the platelets sink to the bottom as a red layer and the clear plasma fills the rest of the tube. In your case…well, see for yourself.’

The top half of the test tube contained plasma, the next quarter held red blood cells, but the bottom quarter was black, oily demon essence.

One Twenty-Eight became serious. ‘How do you control that?’

‘That was after I’d spent some time on the Celestial as a snake,’ I said. ‘Usually the demon essence is about half.’

He shook his head and returned the test tube to the centrifuge. ‘With that much essence in your blood you should change to demon the minute you return to the Earthly. I don’t know how you manage.’

‘The stone helps me,’ I said. ‘I also have help from Kwan Yin.’

‘Ah,’ One Twenty-Eight said, understanding. ‘That explains it.’

I couldn’t help it; I smiled even though I knew it wasn’t a good look. ‘You’re a scientist. What she does is so far removed from science it doesn’t matter.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘I research what I can, and then just accept wonders like her. I let her be her and don’t worry about how she does what she does. That’s the essence of the Tao.’

‘You’ve attained the Tao, you’re an Immortal,’ I said with wonder. ‘You should be a single-digit son.’

‘No, he shouldn’t,’ the Tiger said.

One Twenty-Eight shook his head. ‘It’s a long story, but who cares anyway. What I care about is how we can change you back. How long does it take you to reduce from half to a quarter demon essence?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘So if you stayed on the Celestial for a month, it would vanish completely?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘The process slows down; it reduces by a fraction of its existing amount. It’ll go down by half each week. At the end of six weeks, the amount that it reduces by is negligible.’

‘You’ll never completely remove it if that’s the case,’ he said.

‘And I’ll never walk the Celestial Plane as a human.’

‘Can you remove it?’ the Tiger asked his son.

One Twenty-Eight paused, thoughtful. He opened the canister on the centrifuge, pulled out the test tube containing my blood and studied it again. Then he put it back and shook his head. ‘No. Nobody on the Celestial can fix this. The only one who would have even a remote chance is the Demon King himself. He may be able to manipulate the demon essence and clear her blood.’ He turned to us. ‘Have you tried to negotiate something with him?’

‘He wants to impregnate me in exchange,’ I said.

One Twenty-Eight sucked in a quick breath. ‘Spawn of you and the King? That would be very bad.’

‘How bad?’ the Tiger said.

‘I’m not even considering it, so it doesn’t matter how bad!’ I snapped.

‘Lady Emma’s been taught by the Dark Lord himself; he’s given her advanced skills in energy control,’ One Twenty-Eight said.

‘Lot of good it does me with my blood full of shit,’ I said irritably. ‘I can’t do
anything
with energy while I’m in human form.’

‘What about serpent form?’ One Twenty-Eight said.

I hesitated, then: ‘The energy is different.’

‘Beside the point, ma’am. Your cauldrons have been sparked and your gates have been opened; this is near impossible in a normal human. You’re a powerful demon, I can see that, and you are one step closer to Celestial than anything the King has access to. Spawn from you and the King would have unique skills and an edge over anything else in Hell.’

‘Yep, that sounds bad,’ the Tiger said.