Cowl

by Neal Asher

  The allosaur was about to leap up onto the small cliff behind her, but paused and tilted its head from side to side as if to check the view with each eye. Closer now, with its nose only a metre away from her own and its fishy breath huffing warm all around her, it took a long sniff.

  PANTING FROM EXHAUSTION, SAPHOTHERE led the way to an escalator composed of that strange flowing metal, then to an open cylindrical elevator shaft containing a circular platform one step up from the floor. As soon as they mounted this, it accelerated upwards till the platform finally came level with the floor of a domed chamber, which Tack surmised must be at the very top of Sauros. The moment they stepped off it, the elevator dropped away, leaving an open well.

  For the very first time, Saphothere seemed at a loss as to what to do next, and stood clenching and unclenching his hands and looking around him.

  Goron was standing by a wide pillar of twisted vorpal glass from which sprouted transparent spheres containing multiple interior and exterior images of Sauros, as well as complex shapes: three-dimensional flow-charts and scrolling formulae which Tack now recognized as representations of ten-dimensional Heliothane technology. The Engineer’s right hand was pressed inside a sphere as his left manipulated a virtual control panel. Tack saw at once that Goron’s trouser leg was soaked with blood and that he had tracked bloody footprints around the column. Other personnel manipulated consoles, while still others were enclosed in other bizarre constructs of vorpal glass, and were standing at the edges of the chamber like the gods of a civilization of glass spiders. Saphothere glanced at Tack, then nodded to one side. They walked over to the windows surrounding the chamber.

  ‘How did Cowl do that?’ asked someone nearby.

  ‘There’s only one explanation,’ Goron replied. ‘Somehow he knew our field frequencies. That’s not enough for an all-out attack, but enough for assassination attempts. He simply rode in with the torbeast.’ Goron surveyed all those in the room meaningfully before returning his attention to his controls. Another man, throwing off virtual gloves in disgust, stood up and walked over to stand beside Tack and Saphothere.

  ‘Palleque,’ Saphothere acknowledged.

  Tack studied the newcomer, who was tall, white-haired, and tough-looking. Though this individual had reptilian yellow eyes and a twisted mouth, he could have been Saphothere’s brother.

  To Saphothere the man observed, ‘It would seem Cowl is somehow receiving inside information. He came through and killed Vetross—nearly got Goron as well.’

  Saphothere nodded dumbly, seeming too tired to reply. Palleque glanced at Tack disdainfully and looked about to make some comment.

  ‘Incursion. One-seventy, two-ten and lateral.’ Tack presumed the voice came from one of those enclosed in vorpal tech.

  Palleque grimaced. ‘Three hours earlier and Cowl would have really fucked us over. But the torbeast won’t be getting through now we’re up to power again.’

  ‘The push?’ Saphothere asked.

  ‘Yeah. Like riding the top of a fountain and everything gets scrambled. The constant energy feed can’t be switched, so the capacitors have to be drained to the limit before we can shut off and stabilize. Took us an hour this time before we could even get the defence fields back up.’

  ‘I don’t think I need to hear any more of this,’ said Saphothere and Tack could see that he was angry, gazing at Palleque with suspicion. Palleque shot a further contemptuous glance at Tack before returning to his console.

  ‘Silleck,’ Goron said abruptly, to the speaker who was warning of the incursion. ‘Don’t use the D-generators this time. Take a direct power-feed from one of the abutments and put a laser into the flaw.’

  ‘Level?’ asked Silleck, the woman with her head and shoulders concealed in insectile technology.

  ‘Megajoule range—I want to monitor. Should the incursion move in, I want the level to rise comparatively,’ Goron replied.

  Tack stared out of the windows at the developing incursion—a pillar of heat haze opening out on the smoking landscape, his gaze veering aside to the charcoaled vegetation and to the leviathan corpses of a dinosaur herd. He watched the incursion swell and then the flaw develop, opening into that hellish alternate. But before the monster could fling out any of its feeding mouths, smoke began to pour out—glaring emerald in lased light.

  ‘Must be running out of energy,’ Saphothere opined.

  ‘What must?’ Tack asked.

  ‘The torbeast. If it had been coming through inside Sauros, as we saw it in the abutment chamber, Goron would not have been fooling about with lasers. He’s using the laser to measure the energy potential behind the rift.’

  ‘It’s not holding!’ Silleck yelled.

  ‘Put a tactical into it,’ Goron stated.

  A missile whipped out from somewhere below and Tack shaded his eyes. Arc light flickered and, once it went out, he lowered his hand to watch the expanding firestorm. This rolled towards the city, eating up everything on the ground that was not already incinerated. Tack prepared to get away from the windows but, seeing that Saphothere showed no inclination to do the same, he held his position. The fire reached them, roaring across all around them, and Sauros itself shuddered. Then the flame drew back into the centre of the blast, sucked in by ground winds feeding the blazing tree that rose before them. A tree that in time lost its fire and became a smoky ghost. Then the incursion was gone.

  ‘That finished it. It’s dropping back down the slope,’ said Palleque. ‘It can’t sustain this level of loss at the moment.’

  ‘How long before it hits us again?’ Goron asked.

  ‘Twenty minutes is the most we have,’ Palleque replied.

  Goron stepped away from his controls and limped over to join Saphothere and Tack.

  ‘Engineer,’ said Saphothere, with a brief nod.

  ‘Can you manage a short-range shift?’ Goron asked abruptly.

  ‘I can,’ replied Saphothere, looking even more tired.

  ‘Then get him out of here.’ Goron pointed at Tack, then turned and headed to his controls.

  Tack glanced at Saphothere, who with a second nod indicated the elevator shaft. There would be no time to rest here—it was time to go.

  THE BREATH OF THE allosaur hot in her face, Polly knew that not to act would be to die. Thumbing its charge wheel all the way over, Polly fired her taser straight at the dinosaur’s nose.

  With a snarling roar the creature jerked backwards, losing its footing and collapsing on its hindquarters. It shook its head vigorously, sneezing and snorting, then swivelled round, throwing up a shower of pebbles with its tail as it accelerated away. The higher cliff on the further edge of the beach it only just cleared, sprawling on its chin as its hind feet scrabbled at the edge. Then it was off into the forest, still bellowing.

  You are one lucky fuck.

  Polly wondered at Nandru’s definition of luck. She had survived, that was all. Slumping with her back against the rock, she waited until she felt her shaking legs could bear her, then stood up and walked back towards the stream. She was desperately tired, but dared not sleep, so concentrated on the possibilities the container had raised. After washing it out, she inspected it closely, but found nothing that revealed its origin to her.

  ‘Perhaps there are other time travellers?’ she suggested.

  That would now seem the most likely answer.

  ‘Then I must find them.’

  Nice idea, but how would you go about that?

  Still, the item had given her renewed hope that she might somehow escape from this insane journey. She looked around. Perhaps if she searched this whole area carefully, she’d come across some other indications of human presence. Just then a roar from the jungle discouraged that plan.

  Can you shift again yet?

  ‘Yes, I think I so,’ she replied. With shaking hands she filled the handy container to its brim with water from the stream.

  As she concentrated oh the shift, Polly saw the strange structure growing around her
once more, and the world sliding away. Jungle turned grey and black and she was weightless in a cage of glass bones over that midnight sea.

  13

  Engineer Goron:

  The project is vast: to tap energies directly from the sun and use those energies to bore a hole back through time so that every age will become accessible, using a drill bit that will be a large fortified structure. And Maxell has agreed because this is the only way we will ever get to Cowl, or to those Umbrathane who escaped along with the preterhuman. Trying to establish bases piecemeal just does not work, as the torbeast hits them before they can be adequately defended. The only true way to establish any downtime base is to travel inside it as it moves back, as if in some vast armoured car. We will, in time, locate the preterhuman and make him pay for the dead of Callisto, but still I cannot help but feel that such a grand design is demeaned by pursuing such comparatively petty ends—so am I then guilty of hubris? We transferred our wars and exterminations from the surface of the Earth, and continued them in the solar system; how hateful it is that now we even carry them back through time as well. But, though I bemoan this, I will still go armed into that valley. Damnation! Am I a sentimental fool in that I just want to witness dinosaurs?

  ‘IT’S GONE,’ SAID SILLECK.

  Returning to his control pillar, Goron could feel the sweat sticking his shirt to his back, and in some deeper part of himself noted that he was trembling.

  Have you really fucked up, Cowl—have you underestimated us?

  It seemed unlikely that Cowl would make any mistakes and that a kill could be made now, but Goron had to try, for that possibility and for Vetross.

  ‘Is there enough energy available for short-jumping inside Sauros?’

  Palleque glanced round. ‘Vetross?’

  ‘If we can,’ Goron replied. ‘But there’s an opportunity here that cannot be missed … so we have to try.’ He turned to Silleck and awaited her reply.

  ‘We’ll have capacitance up to a high enough level for someone to short-jump within ten minutes, just so long as that someone is not you. You were too close and the risk is too great of a short-circuit paradox getting out of control.’

  Goron gazed at Palleque, who winced as if in pain and turned back to his consoles.

  ‘Who’ve we got available? What travellers?’ the Engineer asked generally.

  ‘Traveller Aron is rested, and here, and possesses the same facility as Saphothere for this sort of thing,’ said Palleque, his back still turned.

  ‘Send him to the location and meanwhile patch this through to his palm computer,’ the Engineer ordered, now calling up the recording he had been readying and watching it play out in one of the vorpal spheres. He saw an image of himself standing at one of the viewing windows, with Vetross at his shoulder, as behind them the incursion developed—a nacreous pillar splitting the air. Out of this pillar, like some demon sliding into the world, stepped Cowl—and Goron watched Vetross die. The recording now tracked Goron’s escape—then Cowl stepping away through a second incursion. The same recording repeated, and he watched Vetross die again and again.

  ‘Are you getting this, Aron?’ he asked.

  ‘Getting it,’ the voice of the Traveller confirmed. ‘How long will I have?’

  ‘Silleck?’ Goron asked.

  ‘The potential energy levels available to Cowl are huge, but what he will do with them we don’t know. I estimate Aron will have a minute at most.’

  ‘Impressive preparations, but it is all a matter of potential energy.’

  Cowl’s words, but what did the being mean by them? Cowl must have known what Goron would try.

  ‘What weapons do you have, Aron?’

  ‘A launcher—the missile containing a displacement generator set for the Earth’s core. I’ll hit the incursion as he appears and with luck fry the fucker.’

  ‘Are you at the D-generator for yourself now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then be ready. Silleck will send you back the moment we have the capacity.’

  Long minutes dragged by. Goron felt the sweat drying on his back and his wounded leg was now beginning to ache. He glanced down at the blood he had tracked across the floor. If they now succeeded, Sauros would be tipped some way down the slope, and all in the city would possess memories of two sets of events. But Vetross would be alive. He knew that if the blood disappeared it would mean a short-circuit paradox had developed, and the resulting cascade would drag them irretrievably down the slope. He was thoroughly aware of the dangers.

  ‘I’m sending him now,’ Silleck said at last.

  The scene replayed, interfaced with the now. In the shimmer of displacement, Traveller Aron appeared to one side of Goron and Vetross. But something was wrong, as his appearance elicited no reaction from the other two. Aron raised his launcher to his shoulder, and it spat a missile towards Cowl as the being stepped from the incursion. The missile struck the edge of Aron’s still-operating displacement field, flinging out a spherical boundary. Aron lowered his launcher and faded—displaced back to his point of departure. The scene had been changed not at all: Cowl killed Vetross and pursued Goron, then was gone.

  ‘What happened?’ the Engineer asked, his mouth dry.

  ‘The potential energy,’ Silleck replied. ‘Cowl fed it into Aron’s displacement sphere to keep it out of phase. The same would happen to any other we could send, had we the time or energy to spare.’

  As Goron allowed that Vetross was irretrievably dead, and that this chance at Cowl was past, Silleck went on to tell him, ‘The torbeast is returning.’

  Goron realized that this second attack, just like the first, was not with any hope of the beast destroying Sauros, but to drain available energy and prevent them repeating their attempt to change this particular fragment of the city’s past. He knew that by the time the new attack was over, and by the time they were up to capacitance again, that event would be too far down the slope to retrieve. They had failed, but then Cowl too had failed in what must have been the dark being’s original purpose: to kill Goron.

  FOOD WAS PLENTIFUL SO long as you were not squeamish, but there was nowhere Polly felt she could safely sleep. This was not so much because of the predatory dinosaurs but more because of predatory insects. Already there was a lump half the size of a tennis ball on her arm, just above the scale, where something like a giant ant had crawled up it while she was dozing against a rock. Screaming curses as she stamped the arthropod into yellow slurry had brought her no satisfaction—only larger predators to investigate.

  Run was Nandru’s considered advice when she became aware of birdlike eyes observing her at the level of her own, and a long beaky mouth opening to expose translucent razor teeth and a black forked tongue. She ran, dodging between fallen trees, then dropped and rolled through the hollow under a toppled log, delaying her immediate pursuer when it jammed itself under, trying to follow her. But behind it others of its long-legged kind closed in with frightening speed. The first of those leapt onto the log and tried to smash its way through a wall of twigs and branches. Polly drew her automatic, took careful aim and pulled the trigger. The explosion sent bark flying from the log, and the creature on top of it fell back. But it was immediately replaced by another, and Polly was pulling on an unresponsive trigger. In her pocket her taser contained only one last charge, so she turned and, following some primeval instinct, jumped up into the first climbable tree. She began to haul herself up, couldn’t—something snagged her coat. Glancing down, she saw one of the carnosaurs gripping the hem in its teeth. As it worried and tugged, the material ripped and a great strip of the fabric tore away, and the release in resistance propelled her up into the tree.

  The four creatures below sounded like barking dogs as they tore the piece of her coat into tatters. Then, dissatisfied with this sport, they mooched around, staring up at her hopefully. Polly took out the automatic and examined it. The slide had jammed back—the gradual rusting taking its toll.

  Look after your weapo
n and your weapon will look after you, as my old major used to say. Which didn’t help him when a bomb stuck under a cafe table cut him in half.

  ‘Just tell me how to get this working again,’ said Polly.

  Clean the rust from all the working parts, then just oil the damned thing. But he sounded doubtful whether it would ever work again.

  Meanwhile Polly took out her taser and propped it securely in open sunlight. Making herself as comfortable as she could, she finished the last of the water from the canister. Then she began to concentrate on the automatic, rubbing away the rust with the edge of her coat and scraping the more inaccessible crevices with a nail file. How long this took her, she had no idea, but the sun had dropped out of sight behind the trees. Now the action of the weapon seemed much better, but still not as smooth as previously.

  Without lubrication it will start to rust and jam again.

  Polly searched through her sparse belongings till she discovered something effective. When the gun had been suitably lubricated with lipgloss and eyeliner, she inserted the clip, then stretched a condom over the weapon to keep out the damp.

  I would applaud you, had I hands.

  The gun safely back in her coat pocket, Polly attempted to get some sleep as she was horribly tired. After dozing for a while, she gazed down and noticed that the four carnosaurs were still putting in the occasional appearance, so felt no inclination to climb down. Instead she climbed higher to see if she could look out over the canopy.

  ‘Oh, my God.’

  Misted by distance and shimmering behind heat haze, an enormous sphere rested on a sea of greenery. She stared at it open-mouthed. Was this some moon fallen to Earth—or some strange geological formation? Focusing on it more closely, she could just discern irregularities on its surface, and indentations that could only be windows.