Cowl

by Neal Asher

  On waking, after long oblivion, to find some flesh miraculously back on her bones, Nandru told her, He’s her brother.

  And only later did she learn that she was the first of Cowl’s samples to survive.

  THE COLD AND PIERCINGLY bright light of the full moon precluded sleep, as did the itching underneath his dead tor. Sitting in the tent, Tack picked at the edges of the thing as if it was a huge scab, and just like a scab it began to peel away from his flesh, but was frangible and snapped like charcoal. Revealed underneath it was pink scar tissue—forming so fast because of the Heliothane boosting of his body. He continued snapping away pieces of the tor and, bit by bit, broke the thing off. His arm looked grotesque and felt as if it had been burnt, so he quickly applied a wound dressing taken from his pack. His arm ached as well as itched and he realized he had very little chance of sleep now.

  Once masked and outside again, Tack collapsed his shelter and stowed it away. Taking up his pack once more, he rounded the boulder and headed off. Cowl’s citadel now glowed both with internal light and reflected moonlight, looking even more beautiful. Tack observed it in awe for a while, wondering why he had expected something ugly. Then he negotiated the steep slope down to the plain.

  Within an hour he was back on level ground, then walking fast down a watercourse that wound in the general direction of the peninsula. He chose this route as a precaution against there being motion detectors aimed out across the plain above him. He suspected, though, that Cowl, if he entertained at all the possibility of the Heliothane getting through to him, would expect from them a massive assault, not a lone assassin.

  After a further two hours, Tack reached a shallow estuary debouching beside the shoulder of the peninsula. Here he searched around until he found a trench formed by a wide crack in the granite, through which a small rill bubbled. Aiming to follow this as far as it would take him towards his destination, he was pleased when it continued meandering as far as a point adjacent to the citadel. On a nearby slab he again erected his tent, then climbed up the side of the trench to take a look.

  Getting out to the citadel presented no problem. The sea would offer Tack more concealment than he had anticipated: since all his equipment was waterproof, by wearing his mask he could approach the place underwater. The problems started once he got inside it as, now gazing at the citadel through his monocular, he could see Umbrathane working on structures running round the outer surfaces of the lily’s petals.

  With the exception of those who had established Pig City, the Umbrathane had dispersed into cells as they had fled into the past, so presenting the usual problems of any guerrilla organization. It was not so much the damage they could inflict—their attacks were mosquito bites to the great beast that was the Heliothane Dominion—but the extravagant use of resources needed just to track them down. Saphothere had conjectured that Cowl might be gathering them to him—and this was the case. So, to locate Cowl, Tack must not only avoid the citadel’s security system, but its hostile Umbrathane population as well.

  Lowering the monocular, he decided that no matter what plans he made now, they would probably need to change once he entered the citadel. But the logistics programs Pedagogue had loaded him with were protean and his lethal skills at their peak. He must just go in and do what he had been sent to do. Sliding back into the trench, he opened his pack and began to extract those items that would assist him in the task.

  First he donned a weapons harness, with all its stick pads and pockets to carry the necessary devices. Sliding the carbine into its back holster, next to the climbing-harpoon launcher, he hooked a further power supply and another two-thousand-round box for it at his right hip. A spare carbine he considered for one long moment, then left aside.

  The five molecular catalysers—coins of red metal ten centimetres across, with a virtual console on the front—he pressed against stick pads in a line down one chest strap. Each of these was set to react with a different material, but each was also capable of being reset. Into one trouser pocket he emptied the pack of mini-grenades, and into the other he put the multispectrum scanner. The grenades were all set for a standard three-second delay—the countdown starting the moment they exceeded a one-metre proximity to the transponder in his weapons harness. Ten larger programmable grenades he attached around his belt; they were made of hard fragmentation glass and contained an explosive that made C4 look silly. His handgun, which could take the same explosive ammunition as the carbine, he adjusted for silent running—much like more primitive guns, with a silencer screwed onto the barrel, though this operated by slinging out a sound-suppressor beam in line with the bullet, generated by the same impelling charge.

  Then he took from his pack the less standard items. Five field generators he attached to the other chest strap, their power supply operated from a thermal battery that burnt itself out within a few seconds. He hoped he would not need these, as it would probably mean he was on the run. The two tactical nukes—like the one Saphothere had used on Pig City—went into a bag attached to the left-hand side of his belt. These he would use at his discretion. Finally he took out the last item: his seeker gun. It contained twenty rounds, and its system, via recordings, had already acquired Cowl. This he put in his thigh pocket, there being no position provided for it on the harness. He was ready.

  As he climbed out of the trench and headed down to the sea, sealing his hood and pulling on his gloves, Tack wondered vaguely why he had not been provided with a long-range missile launcher, or one of those excellent Heliothane scoped assault rifles. But he dismissed that thought as he entered the water. It did not once occur to him to wonder how, once his mission was completed, he would be able to get away from this place and this time. His programming did not allow him that.

  17

  Engineer Goron:

  We know that many thousands of torbearers have been dragged back through time towards the Nodus, but how many survived the journey we have no idea. It is also a matter for conjecture whether any who did survive the journey then survived their encounter with Cowl. His utter disregard for human life makes this seem unlikely. I have to admit to feeling some guilt at our contribution of Tack to that likely offhand slaughter, though with what is at stake it was wholly justified. But it makes me question our own regard for human survival, evolutionary imperatives and all that these entail. Is not Cowl the summit of our own aspirations? And does not our attitude to him prove the falsity of our world view?

  THE ROBOT DID NOT have a name, so Polly christened it Wasp and altered its programming so that it recognized when it was being addressed. Originally Aconite had designed it for one simple purpose: to check if those of Cowl’s samples who were caught on the ledge were still alive. For Wasp’s wings not only served as a lid for its rear compartment; it could fly. Polly did suggest that it might be worth building an aquatic robot to retrieve those falling into the sea, but Aconite demurred. The woman liked to swim and had no wish to dispense with her reason for doing so. Consequently Polly learnt to swim as well, soon being able to cover the hundred metres out from the beach as fast as Aconite herself. But thus far neither she nor Aconite had managed to retrieve any survivors, so the accumulation of bones and slowly decaying corpses below the citadel continued to grow. Polly spent six months with Aconite before things changed.

  Wasp tells me she’s got a live one.

  Immediately Polly rolled from her bed and stood up. Stepping naked into her shower cubicle, she switched it from water spray to UV-block, and closed her eyes while the moving shower head coated her skin with a substance that prevented her getting flayed by the ultraviolet outside. The block being quickly absorbed, she stepped out of the shower, pulled on the skin-tight garment that served as both clothing and wetsuit, slipped on her boots, whose loose upper material immediately tightened around her ankles, then took up her mask and headed outside. Aconite was trudging up the slope, with Wasp, heavily laden, following as usual.

  ‘At last,’ said Polly as she walked down to the troll
woman, aware that the average had now become a live one for every two thousand dead, and that every death seemed to bruise something inside Aconite. Polly had come to realize that from childhood on it had always been Aconite’s purpose to clear up Cowl’s messes, to leaven his ruthless violence, and try to protect him from his own destructive impulses. She it was who had found for him a pre-eminent position amongst the Heliothane; and she it was who had come with him into the past, to continue performing her childhood duties.

  ‘I had to knock him unconscious,’ Aconite explained, holding up a sharp and perfectly maintained short sword in her heavier hand.

  Studying the muscular man with his short-cropped grey hair, Polly recognized the leather armour he wore. She had seen similar armour on a corpse jammed under a deadfall in a stream in Claudian England. Tacitus Publius Severus, was the second rescuee.

  After the Roman, who, they soon learnt, had encountered a Heliothane intercept squad at the beginning of his journey came three more almost in a rush. One was a feral boy without a name and without even a language, whom Polly dragged from the sea, and whom Aconite identified as from the dark age of the neurovirus. Aconite cured him of his affliction and surgically implanted a cerebral augmentation to compensate for his partially destroyed brain; while Polly, being one to give names, called him Lostboy. Wasp, for the first time, brought in a man who had managed to cling to the ledge over the sea, and understandably he screamed all the way, beating at the robot with the rusting musket he still grasped. Identifying this little Chinaman, they made the mistake, because of the musket, of thinking him from an age earlier than from which he had actually come. He had been a thief during China’s Cultural Revolution. They learnt from him how his robber band had been ambushed and slaughtered, by the People’s Army, and how the torbeast had come to feast on the dead before leaving him his tor. The musket he had stolen from a Prussian soldier in a different age, and in yet another one claimed to have shot a dragon with it. The Neanderthal, Ygrol, smashed Wasp’s sensor cluster with a bone club, fell twenty metres into the sea, swam ashore, then shouting all the way charged Tacitus and Lostboy, whose watch this was. With the flat of his gladius, Tacitus knocked the man out, dumped him on Wasp, then had to guide the robot back like a dog, when its sensor cluster finally burnt out.

  ‘Why are they always men?’ Polly asked, puzzled.

  Because you are an exception, Polly. That you survived is a near miracle: men are built stronger, and most ages of Earth are hostile to women. Only in that distant future from which Cowl and Aconite came are women the physical equals of men. Look at those four. You have a boy who was feral; a Roman soldier who served most of his life in one of the toughest armies that ever existed; a Chinese thief and, unless I miss my bet, sometime murderer; and a Neanderthal who beats his next meal to death with the remains of his previous one.

  Dangerous people: Polly had realized that as each of them had arrived. But after receiving educative downloads from Aconite’s Pedagogue, they soon learnt how dependent they were on the heliothant, and kept themselves in line.

  ‘Why me?’ Polly asked—a question she had not asked in some time.

  Survivors from concentration camps asked the same: how come I was caught so late? Why did that soldier’s gun jam? Why was I chosen to load the furnaces? How was it they missed me under the mounded dead? Luck and statistics, Polly. Luck and statistics.

  Polly knew all about statistics. Aconite had showed her only a few days after her arrival. Silently gesturing Polly to follow, the heliothant woman had led her down a spiral stair to the basement of her house.

  ‘They are all dormant,’ explained Aconite. ‘Their programs run and erased the moment Cowl removed the recorded genetic information.’

  Around every wall of the chamber ran racks stacked with the smooth carapaces of tors. There were thousands of the devices.

  Polly fought for a suitable response. ‘If … if all he wants is a genetic sample … why bring the whole person? He could take just one hair, a piece of skin.’

  ‘To provide necessary nutrition for the tor. And because my brother just does not care.’

  ‘Why do you collect them here?’ Polly asked, realizing with a lurch that Aconite’s interest in Cowl’s samples might not be as altruistic as she had first thought. Did Aconite really want to save lives, or just to collect tors?

  ‘One day the torbeast will sink into oblivion, so its temporal link to these will be severed. Then, on that day, wars will be confined to their era.’ Aconite gestured to the tors. ‘Those I recruit will make certain of that, for I will use them to police the ages.’

  She dreams of peace, the rule of law, and right good justice. I bet every age has its idiots like her.

  Polly did not consider Nandru’s bile worth a response.

  THE SEABED WAS LITTERED with bones, and above it drifted the occasional negative-buoyancy corpse. Tack noted that most of the bones were from arms, so from that he knew that many torbearers had not made it all the way back here intact, yet amid this decay he saw few tors and wondered why. The sheer numbers horrified even him. Recent reports of the megadeath this monster had caused had not brought home to him Cowl’s utterly callous ruthlessness so much as did these sad thousands. Trudging through the skeletal remnants, weighed down by his weaponry, he finally reached a supporting leg of the citadel where it entered the seabed, and observed thick cables running down it into the detritus, then away along the bottom into misted depths. By scanning, he established the leg to be solid basalt. He fired his climbing harpoon upwards. Snaking out a thin line of braided carbon filament, it struck high, bonding with a dull chemical flash. Not bothering to hook the launcher to his harness, for the water was supporting most of his weight, he started its winder and it hauled him up.

  Twenty metres from the bottom, and five from the surface, the basalt ended, the rest of the support being fashioned of metal. After scanning, he found it to be aluminium alloy, hollow, and filled with sea water. Tack pressed a catalyser against it and set the device for limited dispersement. He knew it was unlikely that this place had been built without anti-catalytic defences, so adjusting it to an unlimited setting would not dissolve everything made of this same alloy above him, but would only alert Cowl to his presence. Swinging aside on the line, he watched as the thing glowed, then a reaction spread out from it, as of pure magnesium dunked in water. The catalyser dropped away, grey and frangible, and broke up while the reaction continued. The sea grew cloudy with oxides, and pure hydrogen bubbled to the surface. When the hole was a metre wide the reaction abruptly ceased. Tack swung into the cavity and crouched on its lower rim, from where he sent a signal to detach the harpoon, which he rewound into its launcher. Leaning into the hollow of the leg, he fired directly upwards, watched the bonding glow above and hauled himself up again.

  Soon he was out of the water and suspended below a domed ceiling. Scanning the metal above, he was momentarily surprised not to detect a sensor net. But then the theory still applied that Cowl had prepared himself for a mass attack rather than a lone assassin. The second catalyser got him through this ceiling into a floor space strewn with ducts, vorpal optics, and the dust and detritus that had fallen through the gridwork floor above. Here he took out one of the tactical nukes and set it for a one-hour delay, then jammed it under a duct, before going up to check the floor above him. He did not have to use another catalyser for access this time as the entire gridwork consisted of movable panels. Climbing through into a wide triangular corridor, he drew both his carbine and his handgun—the carbine set on microwave pulse—and advanced, glancing sideways into rooms that contained generators and silos, tangles of piping, and control consoles and other tech. From his psychological profile, he knew that Cowl would control all this complex from a central point—the nectary of the flower. Now Tack must find that point and the easiest way to do that was to get someone to tell him. Luck was with him, but not with the two Umbrathane he discovered working on a torpedo-shaped motor located under the floor
panels.

  The female was passing tools down to the male as Tack, moving cautiously, spied them around a bend in the corridor. He pulled back and observed them covertly for a second while he decided what to do. After a minute, carefully aiming his carbine, he waited until the male stuck his head above the floor plates, then fired once. The man’s head split with a crack and a flare of greasy flame, steam and brains blasting up into the woman’s face. As the man then collapsed back into the floor spaces, the woman forward-rolled, and came up groping for something on her belt. Tack’s next two shots exploded first her biceps then her knee, and she went down with a yell. In an instant he was standing over her, holstering his carbine as she groped for the laser cutter on her belt. With his handgun he blew apart the elbow of her undamaged arm, snatched away the cutter, then jammed one of his ration packs into her mouth as a gag. Crushing down on her chest with one knee, he pressed the silencer into her eye and paused to scan up and down the corridor. No sign of action. After a moment he dragged the wounded female into one of the side rooms and, behind the insulated cowling of a generator, subjected her to interrogation techniques that owed as much to his prior U-gov training as his subsequent education by the Heliothane. When he had finished, he dumped what was left of her under the floor with her dead companion, kicking their tools in after them and sliding the grating back into place. Then he set off to find the central control sphere, about which she had told him as much as she could possibly bring to mind.