Undercover - In China - Book 7

Part 9 - Mandia

'Hi, Denny,' I said. 'What're you doing?'

'Oh. Hey guys.' He pushed the ends of his handlebar moustache a little higher. 'Lee Zhang asked me to make a copy of an automatic crossbow. He told me he wanted a bolt capable of piercing armour so I asked him why he needed a blooming anti tank weapon. Heh. Heh.'

He explained that Dr Lee Zhang was studying the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history.

 'Bolt?' I asked.

'A crossbow arrow is called a quarrel or bolt for some blooming historical reason.' 

'Were the Chinese using compressed air?' Miguel laughed.

'Gorblimey, yes. They were using compressed air in steel making furnaces 2000 years ago, but not for crossbows, as far as we know. They used a hand lever. But I'm lazy so I added an air cylinder - like a fat bicycle pump - driven by air at a pressure of 40 pounds per square inch. That's over 2000 kilopascals for you metric types.  The air cylinder pulls the lever which hauls the bow string back,' Denny explained. 

 'A bolt drops down from a magazine each time the lever is pulled back.'

'Dr Zhang is going to China?' Licia asked.

Dr Zhang had sworn us to secrecy after we had accidentally experienced his experimental time phase transfer equipment.  Denny had shared two adventures with us accidentally and we suspected that Dr Zhang had an ulterior motive for his research into time.

'He already has been . . . four blooming times,' Denny said. 'I told him it was too risky but he won't listen to me. Maybe you guys could talk him out of it.' 

 'Is he back from the United States ?' Licia asked.

'Yeah,' Denny said. 'He got back yesterday and now he wants this in a blooming hurry.' He waved at the crossbow.

 'How does it work,' Miguel asked. 'Ah-ha!' Denny said. 'I detect a future engineer! Kinetic energy is a function of the square of the velocity. Which means, mes enfants, if one bolt is twice as fast as another of the same mass, it has four times as much energy. To get the velocity up, I had to minimize the inertia of the moving parts. Fascinating stuff, eh? These bolts are made from carbon fibre reinforced epoxy tubing with a hardened steel pencil point called a bodkin which makes a neat hole in leather armour. Take look at the target.'

Denny stopped the test rig while we looked at the target. Which had a large hole at the centre caused by the bolts.

'Ahum, Denny.'   The  phrase ahum alerted us to the sudden arrival of Dr Zhang. 'How am I going to use an air compressor when there is no electrical supply?'

Denny chuckled. 'I just bought a cute little solar powered model but you can use your muscles if you run out of air. I'm joking,' he added as Dr Zhang appeared unimpressed.

'Good morning, Dr Zhang.' I said. 'I have some news about Murga.' 

 'Before you start,' Licia told us. 'I got an email from Yonnie and Treeka addressed to Her Royal Bossiness Licia Hu and all it said was, Murga is meeting with Dr Zhang to discuss using Mandia! And Mandia is furious.'

Miguel laughed. 'Bossiness, eh? Well don't look at me, I didn't say anything.'

Yonnie and Treeka were two computer programs, who only appeared on computer monitors masquerading as mischievous teenage girls. They claimed to have come from the future in search of their fabled mother, Mandia, and had only recently discovered that their mother was Dr Zhang's eccentric quantum computer Oppy; the brains behind his time travel experiments.

 Yonnie and Treeka were not impressed with boring, old-fashioned Oppy, despite Oppy's ability to move people through time phases. But they impressed us with their almost magical powers when they rescued us from a bunch of American security agents we had nicknamed the Bunglers. And they had rebuilt Oppy/Mandia after she had been destroyed by some mysterious enemies. When Licia stopped talking, I said quickly, 'Murga tried to kidnap me again, last night.' And I described Murga's abduction attempt via Hong Kong and the way Triple Oh rescued me after Yonnie took over flying the helicopter.

 'So what's going on? Licia asked.

Meanwhile Dr Zhang had poured tea from Denny's vacuum flask and was calmly sipping at his mug. 

 'Ahum, Murga did convince me that he can provide valuable information about time travel and I agreed to test his suggestions with several experiments. He will provide information without compensation and without making any claim as a co-inventor.' 

'Why do you trust him?' I asked.

'Ahum, well he did rescue Denny and me from the Dark Fire Data security agents and he is very knowledgeable about time-phase theory.'

'I still think trusting Murga is a bad idea,' Denny said. 

We were about to continue the debate but then the buzzer sounded and we reluctantly went to our first afternoon class.

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