Cowl (29 page)

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Authors: Neal Asher

BOOK: Cowl
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‘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 her 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.
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.
 
T
HERE 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.'
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.'

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