Cowl

by Neal Asher

  ‘Canolus always tended to be premature. What about Thote?’

  ‘Mid-Devonian. Took out a small percentage of its mass with a displacement sphere. Damaged his mantisal, however, and now we can’t locate him.’

  Suddenly Goron felt very tired, but that was unsurprising considering he had been working non-stop for three centuries. ‘Get every weapon you can online, and send all non-essential personnel back through the tunnel. I want field walls projected out to one kilometre in every direction and displacement generators, set for proximity activation, scattered randomly in between. And if there’s anything I haven’t thought of, I want you to think of it.’

  ‘Every direction?’ asked Vetross.

  ‘Damned right. The rock underneath us won’t stop it—it would just need to go out of phase either physically or temporally.’

  Vetross watched him hesitantly.

  ‘Have I missed anything?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then why are you still here?’

  ‘Because you are needed now, Engineer Goron. People are frightened.’

  Goron turned back to the window and, resting his hands on his tool belt, sighed and stared at a view that he knew would soon be incinerated.

  ‘Impressive preparations, but it is all a matter of potential energy.’ The voice was utterly factual.

  Goron turned. ‘Like I needed you to tell me—’ His words died in his mouth. Vetross was staring to one side, terrified, and Goron quickly understood her feelings.

  Cowl was poised like an axle-spring stood on end, looming taller even than Vetross. Here was a nightmare they had lived with all their lives: a preterhuman of darkness and glass, utterly ruthless, utterly committed to his own ends. There was no question that death would result from this encounter. Cowl now opened the cowl over his face to reveal the nightmare underneath.

  ‘Go!’

  Vetross shoved at Goron, simultaneously pulling a weapon from her coat. Goron pushed off from the wall, diving and rolling, taking his own devices from his belt. He glanced behind him, tossing an interface generator back. He did not question Vetross’s sacrifice, for both he and she had instantly calculated that for just one of them to survive this encounter, one of them must die, while the other must be extremely lucky. He dropped another generator, saw fire smear along one wall, and Vetross’s weapon spiralling away. Cowl’s hand was on her chest, sharp fingers penetrating between her ribs, then he slammed her round gunshot-fast into a window, cracking armoured glass and leaving a corona of her blood on it. Cowl was almost on Goron’s first interface generator when it fired up, slinging a wall of energy up before the dark intruder, but Cowl somehow pushed through it. The second generator went as Goron initiated a coded transmission while he ran. He threw a handful of seeker mines behind—bouncing down the corridor like ball-bearings. Another window smashed, then Cowl came rushing along the outside of the building like a spider. Goron turned into one of the access corridors. Smash again, and Cowl was now only a second behind him. Goron tore off a service-hatch cover and threw it in a flat trajectory at Cowl’s neck, then dived through the hatch, scattering more mines. Explosions, and the cover hurled back, slicing through his calf muscle. That sharp hand groped in after him just as the displacement field, which he had already set, initiated. The service chamber blinked out, and Goron rolled out into the control room of Sauros—ten seconds before he left the service chamber.

  ‘Change the defence frequencies right now!’ he bellowed coming to his feet and heading for the control pillar. His order was instantly obeyed. Then he operated virtual controls, calling up the immediate scene into the viewing gallery, saw himself turning, then a sudden distortion.

  ‘Anomalous warp—that’s impossible!’ someone said.

  Five seconds later the distortion dissipated and Vetross was still dead. Cowl was gone.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ someone repeated.

  Goron stared down at the pool of blood he was standing in, and didn’t have the will to get angry about such a ridiculous statement. Anything was possible—it was just a matter of energy, which Cowl evidently possessed.

  IT WAS VAST, AN animal so huge that its neck disappeared into the mist above the jungle every time it raised its head to crunch the vegetation it had torn from the low cycads. Leaf fragments rained down through the mist as it chewed, and they were the size of a car door. Its excrement would have totally buried Cheng-yi, and it could flatten him with one of its elephantine feet and not even notice. In his delirium he looked in awe on it feeding and wondered just how many tons of vegetation it could consume in a day. When it farted like a thunderstorm, he could not suppress mad laughter. His amusement soon ceased when the long neck looped downwards and it inspected him with piggy eyes.

  Cheng-yi quickly backed away. But the dinosaur took a step towards him, knocking over trees as high as a house. He looked down at the musket he had stolen, and which had served him well enough when the world had still been sane, then he turned and ran. Dodging into a dense stand of cycads, he crouched in shadow, sweat trickling down from his queue and also soaking through his filthy clothing.

  The monster shortly returned to its feeding, but the Chinaman’s nightmare was only beginning. He was no longer staring at the dinosaur. He was gaping in horror at the huge scorpion sharing his cover. Black and yellow, it was as wide as a spade, and he watched in panic as it scuttled round to face him, its vicious tail hooking up over its head. He backed away, and moved further into the undergrowth. But now, aware that the horrors here were not all reptilian, he began to notice other enormous insects: a bright blue dragonfly resting on the trunk of a giant horsetail, its armoured head the size of his fist and body the size of his arm, wings like sheets of fractured glass; a centipede the length of a python, and the colour of old blood, winding itself out from a hole in a rotten trunk; beetles big as rugby balls burrowing into leviathan turds; and some horrible clacking kin of the mosquito that kept trying to land on him, their probosces like hypodermics.

  ‘Go away!’ he shouted, and the jungle suddenly grew silent around him. It was in this quiet that his instinct for survival overrode nascent madness, and he remembered that the musket he carried was not loaded—emptied as it had been into the face of some grizzled forest monster, when the monsters had been still covered with hair. After thumping a rotting log with the butt of his musket, to make sure nothing was living in it, he sat down and, with sweaty shaking hands, reloaded the weapon. Then, feeling calmer, he moved on.

  Seeing brighter light up ahead, Cheng-yi began trotting in the hope of getting out of the arboreal darkness. What he came upon was a band of devastation cut through the jungle. Tree trunks lay scattered everywhere on the ground, denuded of their vegetation. Peering to his right, he observed three more brontosaurs looming in the distance, bellowing to each other as they continued their forest clearance project. They rose up on their hind limbs to reach high foliage, their forelimbs resting against a tree until it just gave up and keeled over. Behind these giants a herd of lesser dinosaurs grazed on the remaining detritus of their passage, and behind them again, much closer to Cheng-yi, were carnosaurs—no higher than his waist—relishing the bonanza of insects exposed.

  Cheng-yi knew at once that he must not let these smaller creatures see him. He stepped back into shade and kept moving. Soon he was no longer plagued by the mosquitoes, and the racket of deforestation grew distant. He stopped and, after checking it out for more leviathan insects, again sat on a fallen trunk. Resting his gun conveniently beside him, he took off his jacket to try and find some relief from the cloying heat. Closing his eyes he listened to the sound of a breeze sighing through the foliage, and found himself so weary he did not want to open his eyes again, did not want to move. Then a loud buzzing intruded. He flicked open his eyes just in time to anticipate an insect like a winged grey chilli pepper coming to land on his arm. He slapped it to the ground and, from under the trunk, a chicken-sized carnosaur darted out and snapped it up, then st
ood crunching it, while observing him with hawk eyes. Carefully, the Chinaman reached for his musket.

  THE CLOTHING WAS THE essence of sheer functionality, but Tack had never felt so comfortable before. The jacket sealed to the waistband of the fatigues, just as they sealed to the lightweight boots. All the pockets possessed the same impervious seal along their flaps, and there were many pockets. The outer fabric was waterproof, gloves were packed in special pockets at the sleeves, and a hood could be folded up from the back of the collar to meet a film visor extruded from the front, all sealable too. Powered by boot-heel storage batteries, which were kept charged by the outer, photovoltaic, fabric of the suit, miniature pumps set in the sleeves, the rounded collar and the boots circulated air to regulate internal temperature. In addition, the garment’s insulation of foamed shock-composite served as body armour. The suit gave further protection against heat weapons by means of a superconducting mesh embedded in the composite. Tack felt invulnerable, especially when he glanced lovingly at the pack now secured by him in the body of the mantisal. The lethal toys it contained were too numerous to mention.

  ‘Another hour,’ said Saphothere finally. ‘We’ll stop off at Sauros while I recover my resources.’

  Tack supposed that meant Traveller would once again be paying a visit to the Spartan hospital, there to be serviced like a car needing an oil change and new filters. The thought of delay frustrated him. Strapped inside the mantisal were enough supplies to take them a long way. But, in the end, this form of travel depended on the physical strength of the mantisal rider and clearly Saphothere was again exhausted, having brought them all the way down the tunnel. It was also apparent that Tack could no longer guide the mantisal himself, as his fully grown tor would conflict with its operation. For a while yet he must remain a passenger, though the temptation to take the implant offline and allow his tor full rein was sometimes unbearable. He wanted to be about the task set for him; he desperately wanted to bring into play his new abilities and strengths.

  The final hour dragged past as if on leaden feet, then abruptly, ahead of them, the triangular exit appeared, growing huge as the time tunnel opened out like a funnel. Then came that feeling of huge deceleration, yet without them being hurled forwards inside the mantisal. Then they were up and out of it, rising above the abutments into the exit chamber of Sauros—and chaos.

  A blast of heat slapped the side of the mantisal and sent it tumbling through the air. Tack lost his grip but, with his reactions accelerated, managed to spin within the central space and come down with his feet safely on two struts, before the momentum of the mantisal’s tumble threw him sideways, where he caught hold again. He glimpsed one of the distant abutments, and noticed a cloud of fire belching from it as from a chimney. Below, nacreous waves of distortion were rolling across the tunnel interface, to break at the edges in magnesium light.

  ‘It’s attacking!’ Saphothere shouted, bringing the mantisal under control and hammering it towards the chamber wall.

  As the air distorted, a claw of fear twisted in Tack’s stomach. A vertical pillar of heat haze opened up from roof to floor, and began to fold out, swelling at its centre. A flaw appeared in the tumescence, and broke open to expose vast rollers of living tissue endlessly revolving against each other. Then, from infinite distance, horror hurtled forwards—a mouth impelled at them by a monstrous tentacle curling up out of the writhing flesh. It was vaginal, throated with glistening teeth that tunnelled down into darkness, its lips bone razors.

  ‘Fistik,’ spat Saphothere, his eyes narrowed and his teeth clenched.

  Tack knew that both of them were going to die; even his suit would not prevent it, and he had no time to reach his weapons. Then a grey raft slammed down on the approaching horror, splitting it like a head trapped under a press; pieces of bone, razor teeth and bloody saliva exploding in every direction. Twin Gatling cannons spun round in gimbals on the raft’s deck—the Heliothane gunner strapped in behind them. The raft then tilted towards the flaw and the cannons screamed, spewing twisted lines of fire that thumped the reeling-out tentacle into an arc before blowing a section of it away. Simultaneously two missiles sped out from underneath the raft, bucking it violently as they went. One entered that living landscape of flesh and detonated, throwing all that was in there into white and black. The second missile sped on as the flaw slammed shut, then tumbled out of the air without detonating. Tack looked down. The severed tentacle and horrifying mouthparts were down in the tunnel entrance, drifting there as if in a deep pool, and leaving behind a misty trail of blood.

  ‘It bleeds red?’ Tack managed.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Saphothere. ‘Don’t we all?’

  POLLY AVOIDED THE RIVER after she realized that an island, of apparently the same rock that constituted the shoreline, was in fact a crocodile big enough to supply handbags for the population of Britain. Heading some distance along the shore in the other direction, she came at last to a stream where the biggest predators were water beetles, each the size of a pack of cards, and whose diligent concerns were fortunately at the bottom of the deeper pools. Polly there drank her fill, then took off her blouse and bra and rinsed them out as best she could. She then sat down contentedly by the stream, occasionally splashing some cooling water over herself, but inevitably she soon felt hunger again. When she noticed a small carnosaur feeding on something at the tideline, she donned her damp clothing and went over to investigate.

  Between plinths of rock, a small beach of pebbles had gathered. Jumping down upon it from the rocky lip, Polly was immediately assailed by the smell of things decaying. The carnosaur, hissed at her and moved away, its gait somewhat of a waddle because of its distended stomach. She moved closer to a drift of translucent white and saw it consisted of thousands of plump little squid.

  She picked up one of the dead creatures, and contemplated biting into one of its tentacles, when she saw that there were others in the surf, still moving sluggishly. At least those would be fresh. She moved through the lapping waves and snatched one up, observed its little sheep eyes watching her, while it blew bubbles from its beak, then turned it over and took a bite.

  Like chewing a slug I reckon?

  ‘Delicious,’ said Polly. Its taste was reminiscent of those oysters she had eaten with Claudius, but the flesh was firm and chewy. For her second one she took out her knife and by trial and error managed to squirt out the intestines and the bullet-shaped bone.

  Belemnites, that’s what they are! Belemnites! I used to find their fossils on the east coast when I was a kid.

  Polly ignored him and continued eating, eyeing her surroundings. She noted various other things in the tideline: large, flat, snail things with ribbed shells and protruding squid tentacles, big sealice scuttling over this bounty, a single fish with an armoured head and translucent body from which a chunk had been bitten, tangled piles of seaweed and a big-headed black newt that she thought was dead until it retreated with jerky strobe-effect back into the surf. But then, when she thought she was coming to accept her circumstances, and understand that it was just her-and-Nandru and a hostile prehistoric world, she noticed the container.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ she gasped, in utter confusion, then stepped over to the object and picked it up. It was cylindrical, ten centimetres in diameter, twenty in length, and made of either plastic or metal—she could not tell. Pressing an indented button on one side popped open the hinged lid at one end. There was nothing inside it.

  ‘Well, say something, then,’ she said.

  I’m just as confused as you. That is clearly a manufactured product, and nothing will be manufactured for—as far as I can judge—over a hundred and forty million years.

  ‘Could it be alien?’ Polly asked.

  If you’d asked me that before this shower of shit happened, I’d have laughed in your face. Now I don’t know.

  Polly stood and stared out across the sea, and observed in the distance flying creatures that she doubted were seagulls. Tossing the container down where
she had left her greatcoat, she decided to sideline this puzzle until the growling in her gut had ceased, and fell to gnawing on raw squid. Finally, as the little creatures became less appetizing, she walked back, gathering up her coat and the puzzling container, and headed up to the rocky margin of the beach. Pausing there to shake out her coat thoroughly and dislodge the sealice that had crawled inside, her gaze wandered back towards the stream.

  The monster loomed over two metres high, though stooped forward so its hooked foreclaws hovered just above the ground. Standing still as it was, its green-and-black-striped body blended into the vegetation behind it, but its numerous bright-white teeth were all too visible—as were its yellow catlike eyes. Polly ducked down instinctively and pulled out both the automatic, now getting a little rusty, and the taser. Huddling close as she could to the rock face, she slung her greatcoat over herself and kept very still.

  I don’t think your automatic will do the job, Polly. But then I don’t suppose its designer had allosaurs in mind. I suggest you time-shift right now.

  Polly concentrated on getting the scale to do her bidding, but the webwork seemed logy and slack within her—as exhausted as she herself felt.

  ‘I can’t—it won’t work,’ she subvocalized.

  Nandru said nothing for a while, and when he did speak there was no reassurance in his words:

  It’s been fun, then.

  Polly could feel a vibration in the rock as the allosaur approached, then suddenly it loomed above her, and then crashed down onto the beach, spraying pebbles in every direction. The tip of its massive tail whipped past her face as it continued on down the strand to the tideline, where it sniffed at the piles of squid, decided they were good, and started gorging. Frozen in terror, Polly watched it feed. Perhaps she should try to get away while it was distracted, but she was so terrified she couldn’t trust herself to stand upright. Once the creature had emptied the tideline of squid, it turned to head back the way it had come—and came straight towards her.