Cowl

by Neal Asher

  With Meelan’s back now towards him, he reached round, closed his hand on cold metal, and threw the object at her, whipfast. The mine blew only centimetres from where he had been lying, but by then he was rolling down the slope towards the forest, paralytic glass fragments thumping the back of his suit. In the flash’s after-images he glimpsed Meelan spinning round and raising her weapon. Thrusting down with the flat of his hand, he changed the course of his roll as a series of explosions cut in a line down the slope towards him. Finally getting his feet underneath him, he sprang up, cartwheeled away on one hand while drawing his weapon with the other, and sent a spray of shots up the slope. A horsetail exploded into fibrous pulp right next to him as he dived headfirst into the cover of greenery. As plants continued to explode around him, he offered up thanks that both Umbrathane and Heliothane were so arrogantly self-assured of their fighting skills that they rarely relied on weapons like his seeker gun.

  Deep in the jungle, the continuing explosions now behind him, he was caught unawares when a white hand snaked out from behind a giant club moss to grab his shoulder. He thrust his weapon up towards a white face, and was a microsecond from pulling the trigger before its identity registered.

  ‘I thought she’d killed you!’ Tack exclaimed.

  ‘Apparently not,’ Saphothere replied, staring up at the mountainside Tack had just left.

  Tack turned to look and saw two mantisals had just appeared. Later, learning that Saphothere had left his tent briefly while Tack dozed, he was grateful that even superhumans like Saphothere needed to take a shit occasionally. The traveller began climbing the tree they were standing beneath. Tack followed him up and soon they obtained a better view of their ravaged campsite.

  Their packs had been propped against a rock face behind Saphothere’s incinerated tent. Even as they watched, the group of Umbrathane set their defences, then leaving behind only two, a man and a woman, the other six, including Meelan herself, began scouring the jungle below. Tack handed back the monocular Saphothere had passed him.

  ‘I recognize a couple more of them from Pig City,’ he observed.

  ‘Well, there would have been some survivors,’ Saphothere replied.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Tack asked.

  Saphothere’s face was locked in an angry grimace. Then he looked around. ‘It’s turning dusk. We hit them in full dark. Then you grab a supply pack and your weapons, and just go on from here.’

  He scrambled down from the tree and Tack followed, knowing that when the traveller said ‘go on from here’ he meant the moment Tack grabbed those packs he must take his implant offline and allow the tor to take him back in time. From that point he would be on his own, if he survived the coming fight. Dubiously he considered their current collection of weapons. Saphothere had wisely taken a carbine with him into the jungle and had an assortment of proximity mines hooked on his belt, while Tack possessed only his hand weapon. Though containing a hundred-round clip of explosive ammunition, that was not sufficient if you went up against eight heavily armed Umbrathane.

  ‘What about you?’ Tack asked, as they pushed through undergrowth.

  ‘I survive—or not. But your mission is vital and you must carry it out.’

  ‘Why not just summon the mantisal here and we could get supplies elsewhere? ’

  Saphothere looked at him. ‘We cannot afford the time.’

  There it was: another of those pronouncements that just didn’t make sense to Tack. Nevertheless, he nodded as if he understood.

  Saphothere explained, ‘When Coptic and Meelan hit us first, I was prepared to accept that as just luck on their part. But her tracking us here and being so well-prepared, I am not inclined to accept as coincidence. They are getting inside help, but most importantly they are somehow securing the energy for accurate time-shifting.’

  ‘Cowl,’ said Tack.

  ‘Maybe,’ Saphothere replied. ‘Now, this is what you must do.’

  Shortly afterwards Saphothere signalled that they should now proceed in silence, sliding through the foliage, stepping only on sure ground, utterly alert. Even their comlinks were unusable in this situation as they could be detected. But their clothing shielded them from infrared detectors, and the natural motion of the foliage from motion detectors. This was to be dangerous and bloody.

  When Saphothere motioned for Tack to now head off separately, he did so. It was only seconds later that the firing started.

  ‘WHAT IS YOUR NAME?’

  Thote’s voice was calm, soothing.

  ‘Polly.’

  ‘It is good to meet you, Polly.’

  Polly felt herself getting lulled.

  Don’t go all slushy for the first dick you’ve encountered in a hundred million years, Polly. You can bet your arse he’s not just your tour guide.

  Nandru’s words were iced water in her face and reminded her that always, in her past, whenever someone was being nice to her they wanted a piece of her.

  ‘If you’re here to help me, then start by telling me what the hell is happening to me,’ she suggested succinctly.

  The man flinched visibly and got a distant look on his face. After a moment he smiled again and held out his hand to her.

  ‘Come with me to my camp and I’ll try to explain.’

  Polly took his hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. She noticed how his gaze kept straying to the arm on which the scale clung, concealed by her sleeve. Pushing for some clearer reaction she could read, she released his hand, pulled up her sleeve, and held out her forearm before him.

  ‘Do you know what this thing is?’

  ‘It is a tor: an organic time machine that is dragging you back to the beginning of time—to the Nodus. You are one of Cowl’s samples.’

  Instead of asking the questions that clamoured for attention after such a statement, Polly said one thing only, ‘I don’t want to go.’

  The man nodded and slowly began to walk away from her. She could feel a tension in him; that he was holding something back. She had much practice in reading men’s body language. She followed him across the rockscape to a campsite, where supplies were neatly stacked and a pot bubbled on a compact stove. Thote gestured to a blanket spread on the ground and Polly sat down, while he squatted by the bubbling pot and stirred it.

  ‘You are stretched out like elastic from your own time. There is admittedly a small risk in removing the tor; it is a living parasite and made to cling to and draw its host back in time until removed and read by its maker, Cowl. I too can remove it, though, and once it is removed you will immediately fall back to your own time. I take it you want to return there?’

  Now that sounds a little too easy to me. Watch out for this fucker.

  ‘When I left my own time someone was busy trying to kill me.’

  But no, she had dragged the killer along with her … and what did that mean? Would he still be there on her return? Would he have never left? Thote looked at her as if reading her mind.

  ‘You won’t return at the exact moment you left. You’ll arrive in what would naturally be your own time. You have been travelling for some days now, personal time, so that means you’ll arrive back the same number of days after your departure.’

  Easy as sucking eggs. He’s lying to you.

  Polly did not want to hear Nandru. It all seemed so perfect. She didn’t want to be chewed on by bad-tempered dinosaurs. She didn’t want to run into this Cowl, whose name alone sounded ominous. But Nandru was right—this whole situation stank.

  ‘Why do you want to do this?’ she asked the stranger.

  ‘I’ll do anything to thwart Cowl’s plans.’

  Thote ladled what smelt like fish stew into a bowl and handed it to Polly.

  ‘Here, you’ll find this tastes better than anything you’d find on the shore.’

  Polly took the proffered bowl and sniffed it. The food smelt delicious, with chunks of white meat and pieces of fibrous vegetable floating in a thick sauce. She dug in and raised a spoonful to he
r mouth. It was in her mouth and she was already chewing, when she noticed the avid look on Thote’s face. As a sudden bitterness froze her tongue, she spat the food out and threw the bowl at him, then stood, reeled, staggered back. He stood up also with a calm satisfaction.

  He gestured then to a nearby rock crevice, where lay the remains of some other time traveller, the tor still wrapped like a coral on one arm, but gathered round bare bone. Empty eye sockets, bare ribs exposed through decaying clothing, some mummified flesh remaining, blond hair fallen from a bare skull.

  ‘That will be your future if you keep going. There’s a lot of time still between here and the Nodus, and few can survive the journey.’

  Polly tried to shift, tried to suborn that webwork inside, but her will seemed flaccid and confusion was filling her head.

  Well, what a surprise—the guy’s not at all nice.

  ‘You can’t go on, Polly. Even if you do survive the journey, Cowl will kill you.’

  ‘Like you give a shit,’ said Polly thickly. She concentrated harder, trying to get hold of something, anything inside her. But the drug blurred her perceptions, ate into her concentration. Thote could sense what she was trying to do. His eyes narrowed for a moment, then he relaxed.

  ‘Too late now, primitive,’ he said. ‘And, to a certain extent, I’m sorry to have to do this to you. But for two years now I’ve been fishing interspace with what’s left of my mantisal from this shit hole.’

  Polly tried to hurl a curse at him, but her mouth felt like some dentist had injected half a pint of novocaine and all she managed was to dribble down her chin.

  ‘What I intend to try has been tried once and failed once.’ He gestured to the skeleton. ‘I think I have it now, though—desperation refines the thought processes. You see, Cowl is sampling genetics, which is why it doesn’t matter to him if you reach him dead or alive. You are just a portable food sack for your tor, as it already has your code locked inside it—and that’s all Cowl needs to find out if he is managing to destroy the future.’ Thote shrugged. ‘All I really need do is graft some of your skin into a vorpal strut, plasticize the tor, and wrap it around that. The field should then be magnified enough to include me—even though I am not the actual sample.’

  Polly’s vision was growing black around the edges, but she retained enough to see the shattered remnants of silvery cagework come folding into existence to one side of Thote. He drew an ugly commando knife from his boot, then stepped towards her.

  I think we’ve seen and heard about enough now.

  The webwork slammed into life with more power than ever. Thote’s scream of rage echoed after her into black and grey, as her own silver cage materialized around her.

  SOME SORT OF PROJECTOR, stabbed into the ground like a garden lantern, shrieked a warning only seconds before an explosion ripped out of the jungle wall. Tack stepped out, triggered a burst of fire towards the one visible umbrathant, then dropped and rolled as horsetails sheared over behind him. A man to Tack’s left was turning his carbine towards the jungle when his legs fragmented below the knee. Saphothere came out so fast he was stepping on the man’s shoulder before the same man had fully collapsed, then went into a roll from which he managed to shoot backwards, taking off the victim’s head, before disappearing into shadow. Tack was back into cover by then, running at full pelt, slamming through foliage, then out and accelerating around the foot of the mountain. More explosions behind him. Someone screaming. Turn and head upslope, legs hammering down hard as spring steel. Foliage breaking behind him. Down, roll, fire. The umbrathant following him was gone—then springing up again from behind a boulder, firing his carbine, the scree slope erupting at the spot from where Tack leapt. Disappeared. Tack firing at the rock face immediately behind the boulder, his rounds set for timed detonation rather than impact. The man standing up to fire again, then screaming as Tack’s rounds detonate about his feet. A second’s hesitation. Enough. One explosive shell spreads the man’s brains up the rock wall. And Tack was moving on again.

  All the way upslope now, the battle flashes shielded by the mountain flank. The rock wall runs up the mountain like a spine and curves round above him. Already seen and studied. His weapon back in its holster, Tack heads up it like a spider, sprints across a stony plateau, drops down beside a three-metre waterfall, then descends the course of a stream in bounding strides on slimed rocks, shooting one brief puzzled glance at strange amphibians glowing with blue light in a shallow pool. Then upwards, scrambling a fern-covered slope. Finally gazing down on the encampment.

  Saphothere is there, pinned down on a slope, a man and a woman firing towards him but not daring to emerge from cover. No sign of Meelan or the other one. Perhaps dead? Tack fires a single burst and the man fragments, the woman rolling aside with a horrible scream, her bare rib bones exposed. Then Tack is down the slope—the two packs resting just below him—his implant coming offline, and the temporal web inside him hardening like glass. He hits the ground and comes up in time to see a column of distortion howling up into the night, near Saphothere, bulging and breaking open on a nightmare landscape beyond. The beast breaking through! Flesh-light floods the area, in which Tack sees an explosion tossing Saphothere into the air, and Meelan hurtling in from the side, hitting him in a flat dive.

  Fucking go!—over com.

  Grabbing up the two packs, Tack allows the tor to take him, just as the woman with her ribs exposed hurtles down on him like a hammer. Night folds into another night. Tack glimpses the substance of the torbeast built up behind the incursion, like a forest trying to force its way through a keyhole. Hanging onto Tack’s jacket, the wounded woman turns her gun towards his face. His boot goes in below her ribs, into exposed intestines. Screaming, choking blood filling her mouth, she loses her grip and tumbles away into night.

  A feeding mouth uncoils out of midnight and Hoovers her up. Ignores Tack completely.

  15

  Modification Status Report:

  My daughter is a failure that nearly killed me while she was still in my womb. Obviously my decision to retain the alleles is the cause of this—those alleles displacing both wholly and partially the alterations I made. As she continues her growth in the amniotic tank, I see that she possesses no exoskeleton, merely a toughening and discoloration of the skin. Her sensory grid is viable, but nowhere near as efficient as planned for. Her interfacing organs have been stunted by the growth of those damned human features: eyes, nose and a normal mouth, and all the concomitant sensory apparatus to support them. She has also lost some of her bilateral symmetry, which I now see is due to the fiddler-crab gene I used to supposedly make alterations to her mouth. Sometimes I damn the lack of logic in genetic evolution, when a gene controlling eye colour might also control something like fingernail growth. My instinct is to flush the tank, but much can be learnt from this growing child and, having learnt, I will try again.

  THERE WAS NO REAL danger to him in venturing outside Sauros—other than the stringencies of the environment—since Cowl would never bother to expend the energy required just to hit an individual heliothant of Palleque’s minor status, so consequently there were no restrictions on such ventures for him. Had it been Goron out here it would have been an entirely different matter, for the Engineer’s assassination would be an utterly demoralizing blow for the Heliothane, as it had nearly proven. Pausing on a slope made spongy by centuries of ferny growth and decay, Palleque raised his monocular and gazed back at Sauros.

  Goron rarely left the city and, even if he did, Cowl might be disinclined to attack, suspecting a trap. The recent attack upon the Engineer inside the city had been unexpected and nearly successful because Cowl had known the shield frequency, enabling the preterhuman to pass through the defences at a particularly vulnerable time. And now some pertinent questions were being asked at all levels of the Heliothane.

  Hooking the monocular back onto his belt, Palleque removed a small locator and saw that he did not have far to go. The communicator was on the other
side of the mountain, where he had established it in a body of granite. By now it would have grown its shielding of vorpal crystal all through the surrounding rock and would be ready to use. Glancing upslope he saw that the ferns ended where the cold wind had denuded the mountainside of vegetation. On reaching this firmer ground he picked up his pace. The Triassic push was a while away—on Sauros time—so he did not hurry because of that. He hurried because he realized time was running out for himself.

  At the mountain’s peak he paused to look back at Sauros again, and considered how arrogant were so many assumptions about that place. Gazing down the rear slope, he observed a swathe of devastation cut through the vegetation by a herd of sauropods, and the ensuing activity which that elicited from the attendant carnosaurs. But that would represent no problem—he now recognized his surroundings and no longer needed the locator. The communicator lay only a hundred metres below him and, by taking the slope in long bounds, he shortly reached it.

  Like the wing of a downed aircraft, the granite outcrop speared up from the spread of cycads crowding this west face of the mountain. Arriving there, he pocketed his locator and reached out to press his hand against the grey rock face. Immediately the stone took on a translucence and a vorpal manifold rose to the surface to meet and bind with his hand. In the darkness behind it, a beetle-black non-face turned towards him.

  ‘The attack was unsuccessful,’ said Cowl.

  Palleque nodded. ‘Goron had made preparations of which no one but he was aware.

  ‘He used a displacement generator.’

  ‘I’ve since learnt he had them placed at intervals inside Sauros, when it was first built in New London. I now have their positions mapped.’ Palleque took his palm computer from his belt and pressed its interface patch against the necessary position in the manifold, squirting the information across. As he took it away again, he scanned about himself, suspicion wrinkling his brow.

  Cowl bowed his head towards something, then raising it up said, ‘For this to be of any use to me I will need to know a future, Sauros-time shield frequency.’