Cowl

by Neal Asher

  Then he focused on Polly once more. He stepped forwards, grabbed her by the arm that was not enclosed in the object, and hauled her fully to her feet. She tried to knee him in the testicles, but he turned his hip into the blow, and in a flash had the point of his knife poised just over Muse 184.

  He tilted his head and said, ‘Tack here. Mission status?’

  Polly watched his expression shift from puzzlement to outright disbelief.

  ‘What do you mean “doubled signal return”? Where’s my DO?’

  Almost irrelevantly, Polly noticed that his clothing was torn and burnt away over his chest, exposing the body armour he wore. This then was how he had survived the seeker rounds Nandru had fired from the tower.

  Bastard that … The voice whispered in her skull, its phrasing human but its tone machine-like. Perhaps all this clarity of thought was an illusion and she had recently taken some bad lysergic. But she must discount that possibility and react only to circumstances as she saw them. Right now she was a hair’s breadth from being killed. Certainly this man would think nothing of cutting her throat, then sawing off her arm to take the object wrapped around it back to his masters.

  His face pale with shock, Tack now dragged her towards dry ground, where earth was mounded against one of the ruin’s walls. He pushed her away from him down onto the patch.

  ‘Stay there and don’t move. You try to run and I’ll carve you,’ he said, then put away his knife and rolled up one bloody sleeve.

  Polly stared at him, then shifted again.

  IGNORE ALL IRRELEVANT DISTRACTIONS. Focus on the target. What was irrelevant? When his hand had closed on her arm, it had closed on the item that she had somehow put on, and which now seemed to be fused to her flesh. The pain he had felt was more than it should have been. Now he stared down in momentary confusion at his hand. His palm had been sliced open and there was a fragment like a thorn of coral embedded in his wrist, blood oozing out around it. She had been getting away. No distraction. He had felt the first shift and how he had been caught at the edge of it and drawn in, somehow, by this lump of material embedded in his wrist. Seeing the leafless trees and drowned landscape, he had for a moment considered the possibility of a memory lapse: one of those blank spots associated with reprogramming. However, his subsequent garbled communication with Operations had confirmed what was real. No one there had heard of his Director of Operations, and no one had heard of Tack either. And by their response to him he just knew they had been sending a kill squad to deal with an anomalous agent—himself.

  The girl had done something; moved them. This second time it happened validated his crazy idea about just what she had done. He gazed around and saw that they now stood upon a plain of drying mud, deep with cracks and scattered with growths of sea sage and plantains. There being no trees here, this time, he could see the distant sea wall straddled by a huge slab-facing machine. Nearby the ruins were not clearly defined, mounded as they were with mud and yet to be weathered out of the ground. To his right the thermal generating tower stood tall and pristine, and from it a macadam road led back through the old inner sea wall towards the industrial complexes outside Maldon. People were working in and around the tower, and from it a high-mounted crane was lowering a dismounted generator to a low-loader.

  Tack glanced down from this bewildering view and saw he was up to his ankles in the mud. With some difficulty he pulled his feet free. The dry mud was in his shoes, in his socks. The girl was sprawled in the mud and looking as bewildered as he felt, and now Tack realized he must keep her alive. He enjoyed books and the interactives as much as normal people, so he knew about the concepts of time travel, and how leading quantum physicists had stated that it might be possible.

  He looked up again to scan their surroundings. The first shift had taken them back to the time of one of the over-floods: two to ten years. This second shift had brought them back to the time just after the new sea wall had been built and the land area enclosed by it reclaimed. Tack had seen documentaries about the furore the project had caused, reclaiming land considered by all insurers as unsafe because of the chances of over-flood—a prediction subsequently proved to be true—and therefore a place deemed by all developers unsuitable for any sort of building. The project had cost millions, and millions more as it had rendered useless many of the thermal towers, which required sea water to operate. And this had all occurred half a century before Tack himself had been a twinkle in his creator’s test tube.

  ‘It would be inadvisable to go further,’ Tack warned the girl.

  She looked at him with her eyes wide, panicky. With slow deliberation Tack squatted down before her, making himself appear less threatening. He wondered if she had any idea what she was doing. He inspected his own injured limb and noted that, even though his hand was still bleeding, the wound in his wrist had sealed around the thorn. Distraction. Trying to exude calm, he rolled down his sleeve and looked at the girl.

  ‘You go any further back and this place will be under ten metres of sea,’ he told her.

  She glanced around then pushed herself upright. Her clothing pulled up dry mud with it; was packed with the stuff. She pulled her blouse out of her pelmet and flat pieces of mud fell out, contoured on one side to her body, as if she had been lying in it as it dried. Tack felt no confusion about this. Land levels change through time, she had travelled, the dry mud had been displaced by her body. It all made perfect sense to him. What did not make sense was why the trees and other parts of the landscape had not been dragged along too. Why her clothes, him, his clothes?

  ‘How have you done this, girl?’ he asked, expecting no coherent answer—she still looked bewildered, probably not yet grasping what was happening. Certainly all this had been caused by the object on her arm, about which he knew only his DO’s instructions: Come back with it, Tack, or don’t come back at all …

  ‘My name is Polly.’

  Tack considered for a moment. It was always best not to use the name of a potential hit, not to consider them as anything more than disposable. He considered what he should do now: a swift head shot would prevent her doing anything more, and he could next cut the object from her arm. But what then? He had no idea how to operate the thing, and suspected that she was only doing so at an instinctive level.

  ‘You have not answered my question,’ he said.

  ‘You’re going to kill me. Why should I?’

  Tack nodded and stood up, stepping closer to offer her his hand. ‘You must take us back … you must take us forward again.’

  ‘Why the hell should I!?’

  She rolled and came to her feet, backing away from him. Observing her expression, he was surprised at the sudden intelligence he saw there and realized he had little chance of gaining her trust. There was only one option: he must retrieve the object and learn how to use it himself. Stepping forward, he drew his seeker gun from its chest holster. Momentarily the controls snagged on his damaged clothing. He saw her take a deep breath and close her eyes.

  ‘No!’

  He fired, realizing as he did so that, in snagging the gun, he had switched it back to seeker mode. The bullet shot out, dropping its casing even as it left the barrel, opening its ceramic wings to swerve itself away to one side of her. Swearing, he slapped it back to manual. Then one moment he was sighting on her forehead, and the next moment his lungs were filled with brine.

  Water pressure closed over him like a vice and he did not know which way was up. He struggled and he kicked and fought. Breaking the surface, he spewed water and fought for every coughing breath. She was over there, steadily swimming away from him. He knew he needed to stay close, but it was all he could do to stay on the surface and breathe. The sea was rough, rain hammering down, and lightning stalked the horizon. She shifted again, leaving a hollow in the water that closed with a sucking rush. Gone.

  With a dogged determination to survive, Tack shed his coat and shoes and swam for the barely visible sea wall—the original that had been well inland after
the reclamation. Years of physical training, both when linked to a computer and in the field, enabled him to get to his objective through the cold rough sea, when many others might not have made it. After fighting his way through a mat of bladderwrack, he wearily pulled himself up onto the slabbed face of the wall and coughed dregs of burning salt from his raw lungs. His hand ached and he felt feverish. When he reached to pull the thorn from his wrist he saw that it had spread out into a small hard plate the size of a drawing pin, and was now covered with smaller hairlike thorns, which bloodied his fingers when he tried to pull the thing out. It came part of the way up like a scab, but when he released it to get a better hold, it drew back against his flesh. When he tried again with the tip of his knife, he found he could not move it at all. The thing had now bound itself to the bones of his wrist. He clambered to the top of the wall and looked around, shivering in his soaked clothes.

  He knew now that he had to be at least a hundred and fifty years back, in the time before the ascendency of U-gov. His DO was not yet alive, and both his programming and his training had no way to incorporate this. He tried to concentrate on essentials: right now he wanted to be warm and dry. He was also hungry and thirsty. His base programming allowed for that—for him to deal with these needs.

  AS HER SODDEN KNEE boots wrapped themselves to her legs like sheet lead, Polly fought to peel them off without swallowing any more sea water. Free of them at last, and now fighting to swim to a shoreline etched by the orange light of the setting sun, she felt horribly weary, but understanding came at last from the killer’s recent words: You take us any further back and this place will be under ten metres of sea. She had travelled back in time, just like in the movies or the interactives, but in none of those had the heroine been immediately drowned after transit—she always arrived at some hugely interesting point in history where she could influence important events of recorded history.

  Closer to the shore she saw wooden frameworks supporting vicious tubular nests of barbed wire. Up on stilts behind this defence was a wooden cabin and below it a sandbag bunker, from which protruded the recognizable twin barrels of a gun.

  Second World War, at a guess. Not many aircraft attacking during the First.

  ‘What?’ she managed, swallowing water. ‘What?’

  That’s an anti-aircraft gun. The onomatopoeic ack-ack, I should think.

  She really just did not have the breath at present to carry on a conversation with Muse, and she did not have the energy to wonder why the device attached below her throat was talking to her in such a conversational manner in Nandru’s voice. Struggling on, she could feel her reserves of energy depleting, and was beginning to notice that if anything the shore was now getting further away. But perhaps this was an illusion caused by the descending twilight. The sun was gone now and the shore was silhouetted against a sky of bright red and dull iron. Behind she heard the low thunder of engines and glanced back to see a squadron of bombers only just distinct through encroaching darkness.

  Now those are Heinkels with a Messerschmitt escort, it would seem. That confirms it.

  ‘Nandru … Nandru, is that you?’ she managed.

  She ceased swimming, to tread water, and realized to her horror that she was being dragged out to sea. The planes were closer now and suddenly she was blinded by a strobing of light. The sound impacted a second after, as guns all along the coast opened up and powerful searchlights probed the sky from somewhere further inland. Ahead, when the gunfire paused long enough for her eyes to clear, she saw more planes appearing high against the blood-red western sky.

  Spitfires probably … now that’s something I knew before … No, apparently I’m wrong: they’re more likely to be Hurricanes.

  ‘Nandru … what happened?’

  You know, my memory has never been so clear—it’s eidetic in fact—but every second … and those seconds are long in here … I find it harder and harder to distinguish between what’s my memory and Muse’s reference library.

  ‘You … died,’ said Polly, beginning to swim again.

  And so I did, but it seems my Muse uploaded a copy of me to your Muse. I didn’t know they could do that. There’s the facility for transferring recordings in the event of the bearer’s death, just so that vital battlefield intelligence won’t be lost, but apparently you’ve copped the lot … well, as far as I know.

  The red tinge in the sky was almost gone, lost in the fall of night and blasted away by cordite light as the guns hammered the air. Glancing up, Polly saw the fighter planes attacking and the flickering of gunfire like the distant glow of ignited cigarettes. Then suddenly she was pinned in the actinic glare of a new sun, and a grey wall loomed over her. Waves slapped her from side to side.

  ‘Frank, it’s a woman. What should I do?’ someone shouted.

  ‘Throw her the ring, you berk, and haul her in!’ replied an older voice.

  Trailing rope, a life-ring splashed in the sea beside her and, with a surge of gratitude to the unseen rescuers, she grabbed hold of it.

  You’ll probably be shot as a spy.

  Her current gratitude did not extend to this particular incarnation of Nandru.

  SYSTEMS, KEYED TO THE Dopplered light intensity of the red dwarf it was approaching, began operating inside the probe. It flipped over and extruded long struts from around the monopoles of its AG motors, spreading them out into space. Linking struts split from the main ones and joined to others, forming a structure like a spider’s web, but one that was ten kilometres across. Between these struts a silvery meniscus spread, which, like the rest of the probe, healed itself when it struck interstellar particles. It had only been a matter of luck that so far nothing larger than a hydrogen atom had got in the way—at such speed anything bigger might have obliterated the probe.

  Against the tide of photons, this light sail slowed the probe, but minimally. It further decelerated when the AG motors came back online—powered by the sail, which was also photovoltaic. As the probe drew closer to the red dwarf, light pressure on the sail increased, as did the supply of power to the AG motors. But it was ten years from the probe’s deployment of its light sail, before it fell into orbit of Proxima Centauri, and another two years before it found a dead, cold world orbiting that old sun, and went into orbit about that.

  Far above grey mountain chains and methane fogs, the probe folded away its sail, like someone putting away an umbrella after coming in from a blustery day. It then spent a year scanning and mapping the surface of the planet. Finally satisfied, it ejected a two-metre sphere of plumbeous metal which, on independent AG, descended to the surface. Landing on a plain of black rock, this miniprobe hinged down claw arms from where they rested up against its surface like the sepals of a flower, and from the ends of these, explosive bolts thumped down into the surface. From its underside a drilling head extruded and began to turn, a haze of dust all about it as it bored down. At a predetermined depth the probe tested a rock sample, using thorium dating, then began to scan more closely the detritus from the drilling. The layer it had been searching for was penetrated a metre away from where predicted, but geological activity accounted for that. Compressed in the rock, the layer was only a few microns thick, but there was plenty enough material in that layer for the probe’s intensive analysis.

  The results, immediately transmitted, took four point three years to get back to Earth: a confirmation that was a happy revelation to some, a source of dread to others.

  3

  Astolere:

  The two leaders of the remaining seven thousand troops, now pinned down by my brother’s forces, but in a position from which it would cost Saphothere greatly to expel them, have surprisingly surrendered—it has ever been my previous experience that Umbrathane always fight to the death. While they go to parley with Saphothere on Station Seventeen, I can only wonder at the extent of the plan. The Umbrathane were attacking because of our development of what is being called vorpal technology (a word from an ancient rhyme I have yet to find the time to
track down), so must have understood what they were facing. The failed attempt by the Umbrathane fleet to knock out the energy dam between Io and Jupiter confirms this: they knew the energy requirement for time travel to be immense, and had the fleet’s attack succeeded, then Saphothere would have been unable to plant the atomic. Still, I do not think that we can afford many dangerous ventures such as my brother’s, and I wonder at the consequences of what both we and the preterhuman, Cowl, are creating.

  TACK TRIED TO HOLD it at bay by concentrating on his immediate circumstances but, like the black wall of depression, an utter lack of purpose loomed in around him. U-gov did not exist in this earlier time, nor did the girl, nor the item she had bound to her arm, and this rendered his mission not only impossible but irrelevant. Slowly, inexorably, emergency programming was coming online, compelling him to return to the Agency for debriefing—only there was nowhere for him to return to. As he stumbled across a ploughed field in the pouring rain, he fought impulses he could not satisfy. He felt almost drunk or drugged, and could not control surges of emotion that one moment had him in fits of giggles and in another moment had him railing at the downpour.

  Ahead of him and to the right, Tack caught glimpses of artificial light through a thick hedgerow. Mud was clodded on his bare feet and between his toes, and spattered up his legs. It was also smeared up his front and on his face from when he had tripped over and thumped the ground like a child in a tantrum. Eventually reaching a gate in a thorn hedge, he stooped to pull up a handful of soaking grass to clean his feet, and found his eyes swimming with tears and his chest tightening with a surge of self-pity. Swearing at himself then, he stood up and vaulted the gate. On the other side was an asphalt lane and a little way along it the glow from the windows of a house. Scraping his karate-hardened feet against the macadam surface as he went, he … paused as a wave of something flowed up to him through the night, through and past. He drew his knife, clicked it open, and glared around. But disquiet remained as there now seemed an abnormality to his surroundings—strangely indefinable. Advancing on the house, he found himself sliding into total-combat mode like an animal on the defensive. Soon he was stepping past a gleaming Ford Capri, which in his own time would have been seen only in a museum. At the door he hammered on wood with muddy knuckles, the knife concealed behind his back.