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Authors: Neal Asher

BOOK: Cowl
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‘Less than an hour, its personal distance contracted to a few hundred kilometres,' Saphothere replied. ‘But it would kill itself and its rider in the process.'
Tack nodded, too weary to ask anything further. Folding his arms and bowing his head, he closed his eyes and fell into a dream world, where Klein bottles endlessly filled themselves and hollow people built tesseract houses.
 
BEING INTERFACE TECHNICIAN, SILLECK commanded the respect of many and the distrust and horror of some. As she strode along the moving walkway towards the lift that would take her up into the control room of Sauros, she spotted other Heliothane surreptitiously noting her shaven head and the scars on her scalp from the penetration of vorpal nodes. But she was used to such attention and ignored it as she thought about the coming shift of the city. Goron had summoned her early because she was his most trusted interface technician, so that meant she would have an hour or more to scan through various
vorpal sensors scattered throughout time and across alternates. It was perhaps the best part of her job—such voyeurism.
Reaching the lift shaft, she stepped on the platform and as it took her up she ran her hand over her scalp. Her head ached slightly, as it always did nowadays, for there was never enough time for the damage done by the penetrating glass fibres from the nodes to heal completely. Stepping off the platform, she noted that Goron had not yet returned from the abutment chamber. She nodded to Palleque—who always seemed to be here—then headed to the interface wall, seeing that already one of the other technicians was linked up.
The man stood with his head and shoulders enclosed in the vorpal sphere, which was also packed with translucent and transparent mechanisms. Through this distortion, nightmare hints were visible of his open skull and of glassy pipes and rods interfacing directly with raw exposed brain. From the back of this sphere, like a secondary spine, a mass of ribbed glass ducts followed the curve of his back down, before entering a light-flecked pedestal and then down into the floor. From this spine, vorpal struts spread out like the wing bones of a skate, to connect it to various mechanisms in the surrounding walls, ceiling, floor and adjacent connectware, so that the man seemed to hover at the centre of some strange mandala—the human flaw in an alien hyaline perfection.
Silleck headed to the middle of the three spheres located along the wall, beside the man, and ducked underneath to thrust her head up through the gelatinous material. As she pressed her back up against the glass support spine, she immediately felt her head and face grow numb. Her eyesight faded, as did her hearing. There was no pain, but she could feel the tugging as automatic systems opened her scalp, removed the screw-in plugs of false skull, and began to drive in the nodes of vorpal glass. She knew the fibres were growing in from the nodes when her vision began to flick back on as from a faulty monitor, and she began to hear the bellowing of some dinosaur. Soon she was seeing the standard view for which her equipment was set: from outside Sauros. Then the connection began to firm and that view feathered across time and she was seeing, and
comprehending,
Sauros over a period of hours, present and future. And if that was not enough, she began then to see up and down the probability slope, possible cities, a maybe landscape, might-have-been dinosaurs. Without the connectware and the buffering of the technology surrounding her, such sight would have driven her mad.
Eventually Silleck stabilized her connection and focused on the specific, as
there was no use yet for her to have such an all-encompassing view—that would only be required during a city-shift or an attack. Scanning the near present and near future, she found little to interest her, so began to tune into the tachyon frequencies of the nearer vorpal sensors. Through one such, she observed a boy being pursued by a couple of early Cro-Magnon women. But because she had seen this all before she knew he would escape with the roasted squirrel he had snatched from their fire, would sleep under a thorn bush, then be shifted back through time by his tor, to somewhere beyond available sensors. Anyway, there had never been much interest in such individuals, for the boy was clearly from the time of the neurovirus and would not survive many more time-jumps. No, it was the view from the next sensor that most interested Silleck. The girl fascinated her, and Silleck had not yet had the free time to view everything that happened to her on this latest brief jump. The jump in itself was interesting because both ends of it were encompassed by the ten-thousand-year life of this particular sensor. Focusing her awareness, Silleck connected into the sensor near the end of its life and tracked back through time until she found what she wanted.
The girl, Polly, turned, groping inside her greatcoat for the automatic Silleck had seen her shoot at the juggler some hundreds of thousands of years in the future. Already the cold had begun penetrating her inadequate clothing, and her hand shook as she pointed the weapon into the haze of the blizzard. Adjusting the sensor, Silleck viewed the animal out there in infrared, and could hear the muffled thud of heavy paws, then a low growling. The girl pulled the trigger, then cursed herself and groped with shaking fingers for the safety catch. Out of the snowy blur a shape loomed: huge and shaggy, and with enormous, unlikely looking teeth. Polly squeezed off a shot, and in the half-light the muzzle-flash momentarily overloaded the image Silleck was viewing, so the technician did not see the snarling retreat of the beast. Polly now glanced behind herself, perhaps realizing for the first time that she stood on the edge of a cliff, over which the storm was blasting. Far below her lay an icy plain being crossed by a herd of woolly mammoths. Polly turned back, no doubt hearing the furtive approach of the beast that Silleck could clearly see. The creature had been
big
, and that shot, the technician realized, had only pissed it off.
‘Really, and there I was just thinking about finding a ski lodge,' Polly said out loud.
It was this seemingly insane monologue that had first drawn Silleck's attention in the woodland, where the girl had first met the juggler. It was only on
further scanning that the technician realized Polly wore some kind of AI device that seemed rather advanced for the time the girl had come from.
Polly closed her eyes then, and Silleck observed the temporal web responding to the girl's will, drawing her into interspace. She disappeared moments before the beast, a large bear, hurtled out of the storm, then came to a skidding stop by the precipice and looked about itself in confusion. That was as far as Silleck had got the last time she had looked through this sensor. Now she drew back down its time-line to the point of its arrival, after being fired into the past from New London. She then tracked uptime to the temporal signature of Polly's arrival, some five thousand years later.
The girl materialized in mid-air, the tor unable to adjust, during such a short forced jump, to ground level. She hit the ground and rolled, searching desperately for the weapon she had just dropped. It rested on an icy surface, underneath which were tangles of waterweed and small fish swimming sluggishly. After snatching up the gun, she looked around.
She stood upon the same cliff top as before, but there was no blizzard or huge animal, just rocks and dirt and the bare bones of a tree stripped of its bark by a constant icy blast—all below an anaemic sky. Polly buttoned up her coat and moved away from the edge of the precipice. Still cold, Silleck observed—the girl had managed to miss a brief interglacial period.
‘Yeah, yeah, you and my mother both,' Polly said out loud.
The probe not being sophisticated enough to tune in to the other side of the conversation, Silleck contained her annoyance and continued to watch as Polly walked away from the cliff. Shortly she came to a scree slope descending to a stream that was mostly ice but in which some water still flowed. She stooped down beside it, cupped her hand to sample some. Moving along the stream's course, she took some bread from her pocket and ate.
Boring
, thought Silleck, phasing forward quickly as the girl followed the stream to a river that descended in occasional waterfalls down the mountainside—the moving water forming only a small percentage of it, the rest of it frozen into weird hyaline sculptures, like teeth, or many-fingered hands grasping the rocks. Soon she came in sight of the lower plain, where the river terminated in a wide pool. A bear had broken through the ice, and Polly watched it lunge into the water, then pull back without anything to show for its effort.
‘Is that the creature I saw before?'
Unheard, Silleck replied,
No, but possibly a far distant ancestor
.
Crouching, Polly continued to observe the hungry creature. She waited
cautiously until it headed away and was well out of sight before making her way down towards the pool. Silleck adjusted the probe to X-ray and observed salmon skeletons swimming under the ice. The girl would be starving because of her tor's parasitism, but Silleck could not see how she could possibly get herself a meal. Suddenly inspired, Polly groped in her bag, and took out some device and fired it into the water. Silleck linked into data storage in Sauros to identify that item as an early defensive taser, then wryly observed its effect. Jerking violently, two large salmon floated to the surface. Not even bothering to take her boots off, the girl waded in and scooped them onto the shore.
Well done,
Silleck told her.
Well done indeed.
‘Sure,' said Polly to her AI companion, taking out a knife. ‘You never heard of sushi?'
As the girl feasted on raw salmon, Silleck heard Goron say, ‘We're ready for the shift. Let's have you all online,' and reluctantly withdrew from that distant time.
 
THE EXIT FROM THE time tunnel was much like its entrance: possessing the triangular distortion that it was painful to look at and with huge abutments poised over its three corners. The mantisal rose into albescent space beside a tornado of rainbow heat haze which penetrated to the centre of the triangle. Only as they moved away from this did Tack notice distant walls and realize they were in some vast chamber. Eventually reaching one wall, they entered a passage, delving into a horizontal city composed of either buildings or machines, then into a long curving tunnel.
Tack decided that he definitely wasn't in Kansas. They ascended into what must be vacuum and the close glare of the sun, between the giant buildings of a vast city complex that, as the mantisal rose, Tack now saw bordered the face of a gigantic disc.
‘How is it we can breathe?' Tack asked, once he remembered to breathe again.
‘The mantisal generates oxygen as a waste product, after absorbing the carbon from the CO
2
we exhale.'
That sort of answered Tack's question, but not quite.
‘I mean … how come the air isn't lost from inside here?' He waved at the open spaces between the struts.
‘In simple terms: a force field, generated all around the inside of the mantisal, contains it—though a more correct description would be a temporal interface.'
‘Oh, that's all right, then.'
Saphothere shot him a warning look, which Tack acknowledged with a shrug before returning his attention to the fantastic view.
Here were towers of such immensity that they could have contained the entire population of a major city from Tack's own time; titanic engines—their purpose unknowable to him; and huge domes covering dense forests, parks, and in one case a sea in which leviathans swam and upon which ships rode. Tangles of covered walkways and transport tubes linked these structures, and various transports, some of them mantisals, swarmed about them. Above this city, perhaps unloading their cargoes, hovered enormous spaceships constructed of spheres bound together by quadrate dendritic forms. The centre of the disc was void except for a single immense dish, and nothing moved above that, for there space was distorted by the transit of lethal energies.
‘New London,' Saphothere announced.
Tack could think of no sensible response.
The mantisal was now heading towards the edge of the disc. Apparently this environment was not harmful to it, for Saphothere seemed in no hurry to get it to any destination. Below them the city unrolled and just kept unrolling. Tack looked up towards the sun, which was surprisingly dim. He should not be able to look directly at it like this.
‘Do you see the sun tap?' Saphothere asked.
Sun tap?
The man had repeatedly referred to that, but Tack had never wondered what it might mean. Silhouetted against the face of the orb he noticed a rectilinear shape, minuscule in proportion, but then, to the sun, so was planet Earth.
‘How?' Tack was at a loss.
‘It sits in the chromosphere, using more than half of the energy it generates to power the antigravity engines that hold it in place. Entering the same AG fields, the sun's radiation accelerates and is focused into a microwave beam with which you could fry Earth in half a second.' He nodded towards the distortion above the dish. ‘A fraction of that beam hits splitting stations, before reaching here, and is diverted to conversion stations spread throughout the solar system, which in turn provide the energy for our civilization.'

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