Cowl

by Neal Asher

  RUNNING ALONG THE SHORE, Polly looked back up, but, unable to see either Nandru-Wasp or the citadel through the dustfall, she hurried to catch up with Aconite. The dust now fell so thickly it formed conglomerated flakes. Polly glanced over at the water, at the slow roll of the waves humping up the beach, and in the confusion of the moment it took her a second to understand that there was something strange about these waves: they seemed too sluggish and produced little foam; they had the appearance not of sea water waves but of ripples in a thickening soup. Along the strand there now accumulated a mound of gelatinous fragments.

  ‘What is that?’ She pointed, as she came up beside Aconite, who did not seem in good shape.

  ‘Hydroscopic,’ Aconite said, pausing to press one hand against her blood-leaking ear.

  The meaning of the word flowed easily to Polly from the Muse 184 reference, access to it, she had soon discovered, now so much easier without Nandru in the way. She stooped, picked up a handful of the dust, raised her mask, and spat into the gritty substance. The dust quickly absorbed her saliva; single grains expanding into gelatinous blobs a hundred times their original size.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘The basis of Metazoan life—of us, too, eventually,’ Aconite replied, as she set out again.

  Soon they reached the estuary and ran along the bank of the river to where the water was shallowest. There they waded across through a thixotropic flow of jelly till they reached the other shore, knocking away blobs of the gelatinous substance clinging to their clothing. As they laboured up the hill, Nandru-Wasp thrummed overhead, bearing its new load.

  ‘What … what is Cowl going to do?’ Polly gasped.

  Aconite did not have the breath to reply. She turned to Polly, then stumbled down on one knee. After Polly helped her up, they struggled on. Then a figure loomed out of the dust storm. Tack didn’t hesitate: he grabbed Aconite and slung her over his shoulder, then turned and ran up towards the house. Polly was struggling to catch up and, reaching the door behind them, she looked back and caught a brief view of the citadel, a glow igniting underneath it—and spreading.

  Once inside, Tack put Aconite down on her feet and she staggered over to lean against a table.

  ‘Shut the door,’ she rasped.

  Polly did as instructed, stripping her mask off as she returned. Tack and Aconite removed their masks too.

  Aconite turned to Nandru-Wasp, who was squatting amid the detritus of her home. ‘Can you find the generator start-up code?’

  ‘I should think so,’ Nandru replied.

  ‘Then start the fucking generators!’

  After a pause, a low humming vibration permeated the house.

  ‘Now turn on the vorpal feed.’

  The tone of the hum changed, its pitch climbing in degrees until it escalated beyond human hearing. Polly felt again something of what she had experienced when she had shifted—a reminder of the last horrible stages of her journey into this past, a hint of the tor webwork in her flesh and bones and in the very air around her.

  ‘That’s the best we can do,’ said Aconite, moving to a sofa and slumping down, to rest her head back and close her eyes.

  ‘What’s your brother doing?’ Tack asked.

  With eyes still closed, Aconite said, ‘My brother wanted to start again with a clean slate when he tried to avoid the omission paradox. He wiped out all pre-Nodus life on Earth by distributing a network of molecular catalysing engines across the ocean bottom. They do not destroy themselves like the weapons version, so that network still exists.’

  ‘Why does that affect us? I don’t understand,’ Polly asked, sure she could now see glowing lines showing through the outer walls of the house.

  Aconite’s eyes snapped open. ‘Where can my brother go now? Outside the Nodus the Heliothane will hunt him down. They’ll never give up, no matter how inaccurate their vorpal jumping may be—he’s too dangerous. The only place for him is to get beyond reach down the slope. So he has started those engines and the reaction will kill all nascent life existing in every drop of water on Earth—which would have had no temporal effect before this time. It won’t end that nascent life because the dust will blow from land to sea. But enough of it will be wiped out for long enough, to shove him down to the bottom of the probability slope, where it starts here in the Nodus.’

  ‘But then what, for him … for Saphothere?’ Tack asked.

  ‘Maybe there his alternate will slide into oblivion, maybe a new and distinct time-line will develop and create its own slopes. The strength of the paradox he is creating would have dragged us down with him, but here, with the vorpal skeleton of this house carrying a huge temporal charge, we may yet hold.’

  ‘He’s shooting his father,’ observed Tack.

  ‘Precisely,’ Aconite replied. She waved towards the window, from which Cowl’s citadel was visible. Polly moved over to it and Tack came up behind her. Through waves of falling dust they saw the citadel shimmering, the glow in the sea underneath it blooming and spreading to the horizon, and felt the tension drawing the air taut, as a whole world tried to fold away. The house now began to quake and Tack wrapped an arm around Polly’s waist. Then suddenly light speared down through the citadel and began turning it into ineffable interspace. The house lurched in response to the turning, then juddered as if hit with a missile; fragments of wall material clattering down. Another violent wrench threw Polly and Tack to the floor, and sent things crashing down throughout the interior of the house.

  Then stillness.

  Tack helped Polly stand and they moved to the window. Cowl’s citadel was gone, the glowing in the sea was gone. The dust storm was now settling.

  A BILLION YEARS IN the future, in one possible future, a tachyon signal instantly caused thousands of displacement generators to switch on, where they had been placed on the ceramic shielding of thousands of giant antigravity motors. A second was all that was required, as in that second everything moved: sun, solar system, galaxy … Displaced spheres of tightly packed ceramo-composite components, sheered-off pure metal coils and optics, and silicon-controlling matrices appeared outside the motors, where their temperature rose some thousands of degrees. Metals burnt in bright primary colours, silicon melted, components shattered and the spheres flew apart. Down ducts wide enough to swallow Earth’s moon, walls of fire travelled from these gaseous explosions. From outside, the sun tap blinked with a million stars as flame vented into the chromosphere and joined that fire.

  With its antigravity motors no longer focusing and transmitting the candent energies below, the vast device now suffered the true brunt of its proximity to this fusion inferno. The ceramic materials of its construction were created to take huge temperatures, but not this. The underneath of the tap began to melt and ablate. For long minutes, like a drop of water dripped onto a hot plate, it skated on the vapour of its own destruction. It now glowed with an intensity as impossible for a human eye to view directly as were its surroundings. Then it distorted, structural plates the size of continents buckling and springing free. Now firestorms raged out through the gaps as further unprotected components, planetary in scale, felt the savage bite of the solar furnace. Then, as if the fiery elementals had tired of toying with this example of human hubris, gravity closed its fist and dragged the sun tap down into harsher flame. The only sign it left was a smear of cooler red on the sun’s surface, and that lasted minutes only. And by then the back end of the microwave beam the sun tap had been transmitting reached New London and that vast source of power was cut off.

  In the Abutment Chamber of New London, Heliothane soldiers watched in horror from behind the heat shields of their attack rafts as the fore of the torbeast fountained from the interface and treed out over them and came down: thousands of open mouths eager to rend and feed. Then light died as the power that kept apart the mono-singularities in the abutments shut down. It took less than a second for the three huge devices to slam together at a central point, severing this fraction of the mons
ter that had shown itself, and incinerating much of it in the subsequent heat flash. The tree fell, writhing and burning, yet containing life still, and the Heliothane rafts attacked, cutting apart necks and smashing mouths, killing any of it that still moved.

  THE LAST SHIELD GENERATOR burnt out, so nothing remained between Saphothere and Cowl. The Heliothane killer casually pointed his weapon at Cowl’s torso and half expected to feel a lack of satisfaction in this moment, but he could not feel better about what he was going to do.

  ‘You saw and felt the shift,’ Cowl told him. ‘We are now so far down the probability slope you will never again travel in time unless I can do something.’

  Saphothere shrugged. He had seen interspace through the gaps in this control sphere and of course he had felt the shift. He was not sure what Cowl had done, but it seemed unlikely he was lying or that it could be undone. Saphothere was fatalistic about such things and, in his heart, had never expected to return from this last mission. He glanced across at the corpse of Meelan and then to the shattered remains of Coptic.

  ‘And how should I respond to that?’ he asked.

  ‘You can survive here. There will be Umbrathane still alive in this citadel. We can build something.’

  Yeah, thought Saphothere—now he knew Cowl was lying.

  ‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘I was always better at destroying things.’

  With improbable speed for one so injured, Cowl leapt towards him. Saphothere triggered his carbine, hitting the black shape in mid-air and stepping aside as it flailed past him, smoking and with pieces of its carapace splintering away. Cowl hit the ground then writhed round, coming up into a crouch. Hissing, he opened his face. Saphothere concentrated his next shots into that and killed him there.

  Saphothere briefly relished the moment, then went to pick up his second carbine from behind the fallen transformer. Touching the transformer’s surface, he found it only warm, and seated himself there with his carbines resting beside him. He took out a hip flask containing the last of his stash of nineteenth-century whisky, and sipped at it. Then he waited for the Umbrathane to come.

  THE WORMHOLE COLLAPSED FROM both Sauros and New London. It took one and two-thirds years, it took all time and none. Like a hair singed at both ends by lighter flames, it contracted—huge forces closing it down to non-existence. Inside this contracting tube the torbeast raged against impenetrable surfaces—utterly confined in a self-referencing universe—without alternates on which to feed, without even time—and, in that infinite moment, the vast forces of this collapsing universe closed down on the beast’s leviathan mass. But the Heliothane plan to crush this monstrosity out of existence failed, in the end, as mass and force found balance.

  To human perception, motionless in interspace, rested a perfect black sphere nearly a kilometre in diameter.

  Inside this the torbeast howled.

  Forever.

  EPILOGUE

  SAUROS WAS A RADIOACTIVE ruin and the surrounding area uninhabitable. Only three mantisals had survived the battle, sitting nearby, a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase. One of them was dying, much of its complex internal workings wrecked by the EM pulse from a tactical nuke directed against the torbeast. Six survivors were chosen to take the remaining two uptime, and with luck return to New London. Their journey would be long and dangerous as, without the energy feed from the wormhole, their jumps would be short and they and their mantisals would require long intervening rests. It would take them over twenty time-jumps. However, they were envied by the other survivors, which was why Goron had made their selection utterly random and why he and Palleque had discounted themselves from it. Those who remained then had to move to safety.

  The march through the mountains to find a cleaner environment had cost the lives of eight survivors, but the Engineer felt certain they would have died anyway, so severe were their injuries. No lives were lost to the local fauna, with Silleck and the other interface technicians keeping an eye on the immediate future. There had, in fact, been only the one attack from a small pack of carnosaurs, most of which had ended up suffering the same fate they had intended for their human prey. The creatures had tasted of chicken.

  As he fed a large worm onto his hook, Goron gazed across at the city of tents now occupying the river valley they had selected. He was glad to see that it was slowly transforming into something more permanent, which he hoped meant that most of the survivors had now accepted their fate—to live and die here—though some things he had recently overheard made him doubt that.

  Palleque had managed to rig a catalyser to fuse sand dug from the river bottom, and by using wooden moulds was producing building blocks and slabs. He was even managing to produce sheets of rough glass, and claimed he would soon be able to do better. His industriousness had helped greatly to eliminate the distrust many heliothants felt for him. Others were prospecting for ores which could be catalysed into pure metals. Still others hunted, while some were clearing the level ground lower down for the planting of crops, once seed suitable for that purpose was gathered.

  ‘Power generation within a month,’ promised Palleque, not taking his gaze off the float he had cast out into the deep pool they were sitting by.

  ‘You’re optimistic,’ Goron replied.

  ‘As soon as we obtain the required rare metals, I’ll be able to use the catalyser to produce photovoltaic cells—probably in sufficient number to tile the roofs of the houses we build.’

  ‘I thought you meant real power,’ said Goron.

  Palleque turned to him. ‘About a year still before we can build generators and they’ll only be driven by steam, wind or water.’

  ‘So by then we should have a nice viable mini-civilization going here.’

  ‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic.’

  ‘I am enthusiastic about that, but not about some of the other things I’ve been hearing—about our building a base for vorpal technology and eventually managing to go home.’

  ‘People need hope.’

  ‘Hope I don’t mind, but when that moves into the region of blind faith I start to get a little edgy. You know as well as I that, at the present rate of progress, it would probably take us a century to build the technological base for any useful form of time travel, by which time the building of such a base would have forced us so far down the probability slope we’d never possess the required power sources to travel anyway.’

  ‘There are other reasons for hope,’ said Silleck, who had just climbed up onto the same slab of rock.

  ‘And they would be?’ asked Goron, turning to regard her. He was worried about this woman, as he was about all the other interface technicians like her. All of them were turning quite strange, with their constant four-dimensional view of the world.

  ‘To learn that,’ said Silleck, ‘I suggest the both of you get off this slab quickly before you get crushed to death.’

  Goron peered past her and saw how the other interface technicians were gathering some distance back, and that other heliothants were filtering down from the tent city to join them. Both Palleque and he hit the winders on their rods, then quickly followed the technician from the slab. When Silleck suggested something, it was best to do it quickly because you knew she was looking at the consequences of you not doing so.

  ‘What’s happening, Silleck?’ Goron asked.

  ‘We are finding we can feel and see things … deeper, further … and we have sensed this coming for some time. At first we couldn’t be sure, as there’s a lot of echoes and aftershocks disturbing interspace. But now we are sure—this is solid.’

  Goron felt this explanation turbid at best, but turned his attention to the vacated rock slab, on which all the technicians were now concentrating. Silleck suddenly grinned and some of her fellows laughed out loud. That was the thing about the lot of them—you could never tell a joke in their presence, as they would always know the punchline before you said it. A minute after, a line of light speared down into the centre of the slab’s surface, and o
ut of it folded a great domed house, its walls and roof cracked and flaking away to expose its vorpal superstructure. First, out of an arched entrance, emerged a large insectile robot that Goron instantly recognized, so he figured who was going to step out next. This second figure was closely guarded by a Roman soldier, who fingered the pommel of his gladius as he eyed the spectators.

  ‘I’ve found you at last, Engineer,’ said Aconite.

  ‘So you have,’ Goron replied.

  Aconite looked around. ‘I have the means to transport those who want to go, back to New London. But I also have an alternative proposal.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ said Engineer Goron.

  WHILE POLLY GAZED UP at the aircars in the far distance over Maldon Island, Tack studied their surroundings.

  The nettles were dead and dry in the cavity walls and the grass was brown and crunched underfoot. There had been a temporary over-flood, and crab carapaces were scattered like confetti on the grass. A U-gov clean-up team had been here to remove the corpses, and the carcass of the Ford Macrojet that Nandru had destroyed. The only evidence now of what had happened was the scorched vegetation and some shattered trees. Closing his eyes, Tack sensed the temporal web inside himself, located their position in time, and their position on the probability slope.