Cowl

by Neal Asher

  Palleque grinned. ‘Now here’s the good news. You won’t even need that. When Sauros—’

  The energy discharge hit the rock like a thunderclap. Shrieking, Palleque staggered back, his hand pulling free of the manifold, but leaving most of its incinerated skin behind. Down on his knees he groped for his weapon with his free hand, while Cowl looked on.

  Stepping out from the surrounding cycads came Goron and four other Heliothane.

  ‘You treacherous fucking snake!’ spat Goron.

  Palleque pulled his weapon free, but another shot slammed into his bicep and spun him round, the weapon bouncing from his grasp.

  Goron turned to the fading image of Cowl. ‘By all means, please, come and visit us. If you don’t, we’ll be coming for you.’

  From Cowl there issued a hissing snarl. Goron raised his weapon and fired it straight into the manifold. The communicator fused on solid rock, all translucence behind it disappearing. Goron turned to his companions and directed two of them towards Palleque. ‘I don’t want him to die or suffer any unnecessary pain now.’ He glanced at the rock. ‘That will come later.’

  SHE WAS COMING OUT of it. Her legs felt cold and numb where they lay in the water, but at last she was able to move her arms a little and, driving her elbows into a scree of rock flakes and broken rainbow shell, she was able to drag herself clear of the cold brine and roll over onto her back. Then, still gasping, she gazed up at an anaemic blue sky smeared with washes of white cloud. Her body felt cored with lead, and as feeling returned to her extremities they felt bloated. But that core was diminishing with her every breath. Eventually she managed to heave herself up onto her knees and survey her surroundings.

  The rock pool her legs had been soaking in was bright with anemones, odd shellfish, red algal growth and green weed like discarded tissue paper. She shuddered to see that it also was full of movement: trilobites sculled about in its depths like great flattened woodlice. This pool was just one amid many others left by the retreating tide, in a band of rock lying between the slope of the beach she was now kneeling on and the sand flats stretching out beyond to the distant spume of the sea. Nothing else was visible to her yet.

  ‘How did you do that?’ she managed, when she could get enough spit into her mouth.

  I might as easily ask you the same question.

  ‘No but … you never said …’

  Muse is linked deeply into you and it is linking deeper all the time. Perhaps two time-shifts back I became aware that its monitoring systems were connecting up with your … tor. The last time you shifted I saw … felt how you did it, and knew that I could do it too.

  Suddenly Polly felt invaded by the presence of Nandru—something she had never felt before while all she could hear was his voice. Even when attending the calls of nature she had not felt his scrutiny, as he seemed to retreat to some place of his own on such occasions, as if only making his presence felt when she required it. But then she decided she was being histrionic. Nandru had just rescued her from having the tor cut away from her—along with a chunk of flesh sufficient for Thote’s purpose—so he had probably saved her life.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, at last heaving herself to her feet and getting a wider view of her surroundings.

  Polly was now seeing what she would have called desert, or perhaps tundra, for only these landscapes did she associate with such an absence of life. However, the temperature here was that of a balmy spring day, and the air felt neither freeze-dried nor baked dry of moisture. Under these conditions, the landscape—strewn with boulders, drifts of powdered and flaking stone, blackened with falls of volcanic ash and divided by a sparkling river—should technically be burgeoning with life. The only evidence of such was the occasional smear of green to leaven a monochrome vista. Walking woodenly, Polly headed for the river.

  There was nothing alive in the sparkling torrent. Stooping down, Polly scooped up water in the container, and drank. The liquid was cold and tasted of soda. She hadn’t drunk anything so sweet in … a long time. She then refilled the container, pocketed it, and headed back for the seashore, wondering when she would die of shellfish poisoning.

  WITH HIS BREATH HELD, and his understanding of the tor’s operation complete, Tack willed it to materialize its pseudo-mantisal. But that failed when a lack of breath forced him to will it back into the real. He folded out of interspace in mid-air, the straps of each pack grasped firmly in each hand, and plummeted into reedlike growth and lukewarm water. Then, treading over a mat of rhizomes and stirring up black silt, he waded towards an island made of either mud or rock, which he had glimpsed as he fell. An hour later, exhausted, and with hunger engendered by the parasite on his arm eating into his guts, he reached the mudflat abutting a contorted hook of stone. Crawling up across the muddy slope, still dragging his packs behind him, he finally reached the remains of a lava flow and rested gratefully.

  Saphothere must already be dead, or rather would be dead some indeterminate time in Tack’s current mainline future. It didn’t help to contemplate that too deeply as, without expending amounts of energy not available to the Heliothane this far back, time travel was not accurate enough to correct such errors—to save Saphothere’s life. Now only the mission remained.

  After a moment Tack stood up. Some distance ahead a gigantic tree reared out of the green battle between horsetails and ferns in a wayward promontory of forest hemmed in by the endless sea of sword-shaped emerald reeds. Gazing at this scene, Tack felt disquiet: that tree was not the right shape, the horsetails were tentacles beating at the ferns in seasonal slow motion, and the ferns themselves grew chaotically from their rhizome trunks. This seemed brute growth without complexity, a war rather than an environment, as if balance of coexistence had yet to be found. And the reeds were like dumb spectators to it all.

  Just one glimpse was enough to tell him that he had arrived in the Devonian age. Here he knew that there might be a few tetrapods about, but that those ferns were loaded with cyanide, there was no fruit of any kind, and that all available tubers would have the consistency of saturated balsa and be as nourishing. He moved over to the other side of the lava flow, where it plunged down into deep water, and washed the mud from his suit. Returning above, he opened his supply pack, took out his concentrated rations and, seated on the stone, staring down the mudflat, began methodically to fill himself. He was very hungry. His tor was hungry.

  As Tack understood it, a mantisal consumed a similar amount of nutrition from its temporary host as did a tor, and the length of its time-jump was also commensurate. But while the mantisal also needed to charge itself like a huge capacitor, the tor did not. It was a fact the Heliothane did not like to admit, that the tor was as far in advance of the mantisal as the hydrogen-powered aircar was in advance of the Model-T Ford. Without recharging, the mantisal jumped inaccurately—the error could be as much as a hundred million years. The tor always jumped accurately and greater control could be exerted at the point of exit. The only problem with the tors was being programmed to jump only in one direction in time: back towards Cowl. No heliothant had yet managed to change that programming.

  While he continued eating, Tack noticed movement in the shallow trench his progress had left in the mud. Creatures similar to mudskippers were flopping and bubbling out of the water, gobbling up something he had disturbed to the surface of the mud. Which one of those might it be, he wondered. Could it be the one over there the size of a mature salmon, or the one with the purplish warty skin and eyes like tomatoes? Or was it this little one with whitish skin, sunken eyes, and large flippers that propelled it across the mud at such speed? Which one was his grandad a billion times removed? At that point the white one got too close to the warty one, and the ugly fellow snatched it up and chomped it down, so Tack assumed the warty one was the more likely candidate. This was life on land in the first days—beginning as it meant to continue.

  Contemplatively Tack bit off a lump of protein concentrate and threw the remains out to the creatures.
They slopped themselves away from it at first, then after a short time circled back in and began fighting over it. Eventually the warty one scuttled off with the prize in its thick lips. Replete himself, and then some, Tack set up his tent, crawled inside it, wrapped himself in the heat sheet and was instantly asleep.

  WITH HER REGENERATING ARM locked around his neck and the snout of her weapon jammed up underneath his chin, Saphothere felt he was no longer in a position to resist Meelan. Thus sprawled on the ground, the both of them observed the incursion folding itself back into a fuzzy line in the air, as it closed then disappeared.

  ‘Right, get up. Put your hands on your head,’ Meelan hissed. ‘One wrong move and you know what will happen.’

  She drew away from him, keeping her weapon aimed at his back, and stood waiting while he assumed the position. His carbine lay on the ground only a metre to the side of him, but even as he glanced at it two Umbrathane women stepped out from different parts of the jungle and began jogging up the slope. As they converged on the campsite both of them studied Saphothere with evident hostility.

  ‘Iveronica,’ Meelan acknowledged the woman Saphothere recognized as the leader of the Pig City Umbrathane.

  Stepping forward Iveronica said, ‘I saw Coolis go, but what about the rest?’

  The other woman, who could have been Meelan’s double, but for the fact that her lower jaw had been replaced by a metallic prosthesis, hissed, ‘Golan was dragged through with the torbearer. Olanda is on his way.’

  Saphothere grinned at the jawless woman. ‘What did you say? That wasn’t very clear.’

  Meelan belted him across the back of the head, knocking him down on all fours.

  ‘Soudan, we need him.’ Iveronica restrained the jawless woman, whose carbine was now trained on Saphothere’s midriff. ‘Put it up.’

  ‘What do we need him for?’ Soudan lowered her weapon. ‘Cowl has given us our way to him and soon all Heliothane will be extinct.’ She gestured to where the incursion had appeared earlier, and where eight thorny objects were scattered on the ground.

  ‘Information,’ said Iveronica. ‘Cowl won’t be pleased that we didn’t capture the torbearer.’ She glanced aside. ‘Here’s Olanda now. That’s all of us?’

  ‘Yes, all,’ conceded Soudan. ‘That fucking primitive got Oroida and burnt Golan before she jumped him. I doubt she survived the drag-through—she was a real mess.’

  ‘He was augmented,’ said Iveronica, her face expressionless as she gazed at Meelan. ‘That’s why he first escaped. Golan and Oroida knew this. They made an error.

  Soudan was glaring at Saphothere, and did not seem to register her companion’s words. She was probing her prosthetic jaw as if she felt it might fall away.

  ‘Obviously not as genetically advanced as your fellows,’ said Saphothere. ‘How long ago in your time has it been since I just missed hitting that sack of shit between your ears?’

  With a snarl Soudan swung her weapon back up. But then a shot hit Soudan squarely between the eyes, spraying Iveronica with pieces of her bone and brain. Saphothere rolled smoothly, snatching up his carbine and firing at the Umbrathane leader as she shook the bloody mess from her eyes. Meelan turned, just as smoothly, and put a cluster of shots into Olanda’s chest, flinging the man back in an explosion of gore. Fire cut up into the sky as Iveronica went down, one leg blown away at the knee. She tried to bring her weapon to bear, but further shots from Saphothere smashed away her weapon and her right arm.

  Saphothere stood and glanced round at Meelan. ‘That could have gone better.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Meelan tightly, as she holstered her weapon and strode over to stare down at Iveronica. ‘I don’t see any of them getting up again.’

  The Umbrathane leader, Iveronica, looked up at the two of them.

  ‘Why?’ she managed, as she bled into the dirt.

  ‘Seven thousand of our people were on Callisto,’ spat Meelan. ‘When you sat in your nice comfortable ships and leapt back through time with Cowl, what of them?’

  ‘Losses … were inevitable,’ said Iveronica.

  ‘You could have picked them up. Callisto was under your control once Cowl erected the phase barrier. You didn’t bother because my kind of Umbrathane has always been cannon fodder for your kind. My people were reduced to less than atoms.’

  ‘Many have died in our cause.’ Iveronica managed to push herself up onto her remaining elbow. The bleeding from her shattered arm had ceased as her body already began to repair itself. ‘And you have betrayed them all.’

  ‘Do you need to hear any more?’ Saphothere asked Meelan.

  Meelan turned and stared at him for a moment, then abruptly stooped, her right hand closing around the supine woman’s throat and her left hand catching her flailing left arm. With a raised eyebrow Saphothere looked on while Meelan slowly choked Iveronica to death. When it was over, he said, ‘You know, putting that mine on Tack was a bit risky.’

  ‘Not really.’ Meelan stood, still staring down at the dead woman. ‘No paralytic on the glass, and I set it to detonate far enough away from him to cause no damage as long as he was wearing that suit.’

  ‘I meant when he threw the damned mine at you,’ said Saphothere, shouldering his carbine and turning away.

  After a moment Meelan followed him and they walked down the slope to where the incursion had manifested. Reaching the bottom, Saphothere turned over with the toe of his boot one of the many active scales discarded by the torbeast—one of the tors Cowl had made it leave behind for his Umbrathane allies.

  ‘Well, friend Tack was a little more dangerous than we supposed,’ said Meelan finally. ‘I think Coptic could attest to that. Anyway, who are you to talk about taking risks?’ She held up her hand and shifted it in its brace, inspecting it closely. ‘Maxell is not best pleased with us, you know.’

  ‘Of course I know. She made that plain when I finally brought Tack to New London. Apparently she didn’t think I should have risked losing him for the sake of finding and destroying Pig City.’

  Meelan turned to look at him. ‘She perhaps sees the bigger picture.’ She gestured back at Iveronica. ‘Like she did.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Saphothere conceded. ‘But even Maxell would have to agree that the results have been … gratifying.’ He again nudged one of the tors with the toe of his boot. ‘Iveronica would have stayed in her stronghold and never have gone to Cowl until no other option was available. With Pig City gone, and her energy sources destroyed, she and those who survived with her became just as much refugees as any other Umbrathane, and like them, needed tors to escape nasty Heliothane killers like myself.’

  Meelan snorted. ‘Yes, everything has worked very nicely. But why this?’ She was still inspecting her hand.

  ‘Veracity.’

  Closing her hand into a fist, Meelan abruptly spun round and drove it into Saphothere’s torso. He accepted the blow without retaliating, dropping down on one knee and clutching his gut.

  ‘Veracity,’ she spat.

  Regaining his breath, Saphothere said, ‘Iveronica would have wondered about why only you and Coptic survived, and perhaps have been less inclined to give you the energy feed leading to Pig City. Being badly injured, your continued hatred of Heliothane would be believed and they would understand how you had neglected to scan Tack.’

  ‘And why atomics?’

  Saphothere stood. ‘I had to destroy those generators and there was no time to set up catalysers or conventional explosives. I knew there would be survivors and you would be amongst them—your mantisal, though damaged, was within easy reach. I also knew that with the generators destroyed it wouldn’t be possible for Iveronica to get more than a few mantisals here—I did not want hundreds of umbrathants turning up. And I knew you would be amongst the riders. It could only work this way.’

  ‘Survivors,’ said Meelan, staring at him bleakly. ‘I got out about a second ahead of the blast, with an enteledont trying to chew my head, and just rode out the bleed-over of that blas
t into interspace.’

  ‘Comes with the territory.’

  ‘I sometimes wonder precisely what your priorities are, Saphothere.’

  ‘You know my priorities, Meelan. And you knew the dangers when you signed up with me,’ Saphothere replied. ‘Also I hope you fully understand how things are most likely to go from now on.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ Meelan hissed.

  THE GLASSY SKELETON AROUND her was veined with red, like glowing wires centred in cloudy black, and the air inside it stale yet again. To Polly it seemed like an engine pushed to its limits—a malfunctioning hydrocar driven to the point where the components of its engine were growing red hot. Every now and again it vibrated, as if something was going out of balance prior to some final smash. When this was becoming unbearable, she found she did not need to use much force of will to push herself out of this hell. Just looking into the grey and black, and contemplating summoning up that place of hyperspheres and endless surfaces, was enough to push her out into the real again.

  No sea was visible, or audible, this time. She glimpsed twilit sky through boiling black smoke, a river of fire snaking down from the boiling caldera of a volcano, while a cataclysmic roar filled her ears. The stink of sulphur was strong and acrid. She sneezed as something salty and stinging went up her nose, then tasted grit and ashes in her mouth, stumbled away over whorled stone, the heat from which she could already feel through her boots, and that same stone shook and jerked under her like a dying beast. A boulder the size of a family car hammered down to her right, deforming around its glowing core rather than breaking, as it bounced once, smashing the larval crust beneath it to release gouts of yellow vapour, then crumping down a second time, much of its bulk penetrating down into a gas-formed cavern.

  This is not a good place.