Cowl

  Some sort of ship? Perhaps even a city?

  ‘There’ll be people there, then! It must be where this canister came from.’

  Don’t be so sure. Who’s to say it’s humans that occupy it?

  ‘OK, but I have to get there.’

  Polly then remembered the roving carnosaurs and did not greatly rate her chances.

  ‘I’ll wait … perhaps later those things will go away.’

  An hour or more passed, but the beasts kept venturing in and out of sight below her. Eventually Polly had the clever idea of securing the coat, by its sleeves, between two springy branches, and then lay back on it with her legs on either side of the trunk. After that she slept deeply, only waking next morning to the sounds of the carnosaurs barking excitedly. She herself was still hungry and thirsty, but the scale had obviously taken enough nourishment from her, for the webwork was ready inside her for another time-jump. She gazed out again at the great sphere nestling in the green expanse, and felt a leaden frustration. To ever get there she must travel through kilometres of jungle, yet she was unable safely even to climb down from this tree. There was only one option.

  ‘Screw this,’ she said and shifted, intending to make the leap as brief as possible. But the webwork gripped her hard and took her all the way down.

  INTERSPACE WAS A CHAOTIC nightmare of glimpses into the real, into the vast and terrible landscape of the beast, into twisting nether-space and the incandescent distortion of Heliothane weapons. Forces buffeted the mantisal with its rider and passenger, though not the sort that threw them about, but those that stretched them thinly as the mantisal deformed: at once being drawn into a worm shape, smeared over impossible surfaces; folded again into another solid shape, yet in another dimension. The scream Tack saw first as a bright red halo around Saphothere’s face and a red glow on the inner surfaces of the mantisal, before he managed to dispel the synaesthesia, and he actually heard it. Briefly Tack glimpsed a neck, kilometres long and rising up out of shifting midnight, topped with a nightmare head the size of a continent. Then the mantisal returned to the corporeal world like a ball ejected from a tennis machine. It slammed against dry earth, distorting for real this time, bounced in a cloud of iron-tasting dust, bounced again and again, then rolled to stop against a massive tree.

  Tack unlaced his arms from protecting his head and struggled upright. He glanced at Saphothere, who lay spreadeagled in the bottom of the mantisal, then turned to two of the packs, quickly unstrapping them from the construct and tossing them outside onto the dry ground. Then he turned his attention to the traveller. Maybe his back was broken and it would not be a good idea to move him. But nevertheless Tack gripped Saphothere under his arms and dragged him out. It was a rule of travel: get out of the mantisal quickly so it can return to its natural environment before the real world kills it—every other priority was secondary. Clear of the construct, he watched it as it jerked away from the tree and rose until touching the higher branches. It tried to fold away, but distorted, and instead went two-dimensional. It tried again and managed it this time. Tack glimpsed nightmares as it went and smelt burning flesh.

  Saphothere looked wasted: his face skeletal, eyes sunken and lips drawn back from his teeth. His skin was icy and there was no heartbeat. Tack ripped open a pack and removed the medkit. Finding what he wanted, he pulled open Saphothere’s shirt, placed a pulse tag against his neck, then, in a technique unchanged in millennia, injected adrenalin directly into the traveller’s heart before placing a discharger against his chest. The light on the discharger flicked to green and Saphothere’s back arched. It went red and he collapsed. Green again, then again, then the discharger shut off—the pulse tag on his neck now displaying the hesitant thump of his heart.

  Tack rocked back on his heels and looked around. They were again at the edge of a forest, which seemed their mantisal’s favoured location for bringing them out of interspace, as it gave them an easy option for avoiding hostile fauna. The dusty plain was African red and scattered with scrub and trees similar to acacia, but with yellowish needles rather than leaves. The forest rim was a dense wall of conifers and the occasional giant club moss, from which issued strange hoots and slithering movement. There seemed no immediate danger, but Tack made sure his gleaming new Heliothane carbine was ready to hand before returning his attention to Saphothere.

  The diagnosticer revealed dehydration, starvation, cracked ribs, and the fact that both Saphothere’s radius and ulna were broken. The traveller’s spine still being intact, Tack dragged him back beside the tree and made him comfortable with a heat blanket and inflatable cushion, before setting up a drip to feed him a mixture of saline, glucose and vitamins. He then took out a scalpel and, with no more ado, sliced open Saphothere’s forearm, rested one knee on the hand and pushed and twisted to get the bones, now visible, into position. He then set two bone clamps in place before using an organic glue to stick the split flesh back together. There wasn’t much blood, but then Saphothere’s heart was beating at a rate barely noticeable.

  Now, with as much achieved as he could manage, Tack took time off to assess their situation. It was possible that the mantisal would never be coming back. Its cataclysmic arrival here might have been due to Saphothere’s loss of control, or the distortions in interspace caused by the battle around Sauros, or it might be because the mantisal had been damaged by those distortions, into which its needs must return. This being the case, Tack knew he would have to leave Saphothere here and continue his mission alone. All that was required was for him to take his implant offline and allow the tor to take over.

  But not yet. Despite their violent first encounter, and Saphothere’s subsequent contemptuous treatment of him, Tack now felt he owed the traveller. This feeling was not due to programming, which was now such that his mission came before all else, but due to the way Saphothere’s treatment of and regard for Tack had slowly changed.

  Taking up his carbine, Tack stood still and looked around. There was food in the two packs, and in the two others still strapped inside the mantisal, but it was necessary to save that for the latter stages of the journey when food would not be available. But Tack was also aware that when Saphothere awoke food would be his primary need. At a rough guess he supposed them to now be in the early Jurassic or late Triassic age, so there should be plenty of meat available at least. The only problem was that this available meat might well regard them in the same light, so Tack could not leave Saphothere’s side. Glancing up, he saw a flock of pterosaurs flapping over and considered taking a potshot at them, but they were very high and the chances of bringing one down close enough were remote. Refocusing, he saw that the tree above him contained fruit resembling mangoes. Accessing the huge body of knowledge Pedagogue had loaded into his mind, it took him some time to elicit that he was contemplating the outer glossy coats of a fruit much like the walnut. Propping the carbine by the tree, he jumped up to catch a low branch and hauled himself higher. Climbing with ease and speed, he pulled out his Heliothane carbide hunting knife to cut the fruit open and sample it. It was so unripe and bitter he spat it out, then tossed the fruit itself away. Where it thudded into the dust, the first of the three herrerasaurs emerging from the forest dipped its nightmare head for a sniff—before continuing to stalk towards Saphothere.

  Tack just reacted, dropping ten metres straight down to land on the monster’s back. The spine gave way under him with a dull crack, one of the long hind limbs splaying out at an angle, but its tail still whipping from side to side. Tack’s boots slid down either side of its back ridge, and he hooked one arm under its chin and wrenched its head back, terrarium stink in his nostrils, then drew his knife across its throat, the hot blood gushing over his hand. He rolled away in time to see a second herrerasaur coming at him, its mouth open in a gushing hiss. He cut at it, sending it dancing backwards, and turned to see the last of the three stamp over its writhing companion to leap towards him. His knife angled in the wrong position, he instead caught the loose skin of its t
hroat wattle in his other hand, and shoulder-rolled the monster, head down, into the other assailant. Both uninjured herrerasaurs went down in a dusty squirming tumble, then came up snapping at each other, but with almost telepathic consent turned on Tack again. He realized these two were just not going to stop. Any mammal might have given up by now, but these things represented ferocity honed down to its most basic elements. Snarling, their heads dipped only half a metre from the ground, they advanced. Almost regretfully Tack started to reach for the Heliothane handgun holstered at his hip.

  Then the ground before him erupted in a blinding flash, throwing the closest monster back, blinking in confusion. A second then a third detonation followed, eventually causing the creatures to turn tail and run.

  Leaning up against the tree, holding Tack’s carbine, Saphothere croaked, ‘Can’t … leave you for a second.’ With its snub barrel he indicated the dying herrerasaur—before sliding down the trunk and slumping back into unconsciousness.

  SILLECK HUNG EXHAUSTED IN her vorpal connectware, watching the torbeast withdrawing into ancient past and lower orders of probability, just as she watched Vetross falling further and further down the slope.

  Irretrievably dead.

  Silleck had but a moment to contemplate that before she became aware of the tachyon signal coming in, using vorpal sensors positioned throughout the wormhole as stepping stones. It was a single private transmission for Engineer Goron, so the interface technician knew it could only be from Maxell—no one else had the pull to send messages this way. Momentarily shutting out exterior connections, she watched the engineer receive the communication then head away. Connecting back in again, she tracked him away from the control room and into the immediate future, where he summoned a mantisal and embarked along the wormhole and she wondered why he had been summoned to New London now.

  It was over then. Goron’s departure signalled more than anything that there would be no further attacks from either Cowl or his beast for the present. Silleck considered disconnecting as she was so tired, but like many of her kind she was addicted to this near omniscience. Godlike she threw her awareness back to a vorpal sensor she had abandoned when the attack had begun, and tried to find what she had merely glimpsed. The sensor she turned a hundred-and-eight degrees into interspace, and there saw the Neanderthal hurtling along in the silver cage of his pseudo-mantisal.

  The glassy cage surrounding him was uneven in its formation, and in the dark interspace it reminded Silleck of some vastly expanded translucent plankton travelling above a shifting, but dead, sea bottom. The man was braced inside it and though he could not possibly understand what he was doing, she could see that he was willing himself back into the real before his tor took him to the limit of suffocation. And it worked. Turning the sensor slowly back into phase with the real world, Silleck followed him out of that dark realm, between a brightly starlit sky and a sea turned silver by moonlight.

  Silleck observed his panic, but his mantisal did not fade away and drop him into the moonlit sea—tors possessed enough of their own mind or instinct to try and keep their hosts alive during the bulk of the journey. Instead it slid sideways to where dense forest formed another sea, then drifted down to an apparently rocky shoreline. Then finally the cage began to fade as it approached the ground. The Neanderthal braced himself for a bone-jarring impact on rocky ground, but instead hit pliant mud and bounced, as the glass-like structure faded and passed through him into the ground. He rolled and came up onto his knees, pulling a bone club from his hide clothing, then he stood and looked around. When no danger was immediately apparent, he scuttled to a sandy space between edifices of the dried mud, curled himself up in the most protected niche he could find and was still. Silleck tracked ahead.

  The sun had begun to peak around one of the monoliths of mud, and was warming the Neanderthal’s feet before he awoke, which he did as if someone had touched him with a hot iron. He stood and headed towards the forest. Twenty feet from the trees, he hesitated—perhaps having already had some nasty experiences in other forests. Silleck noted the colourful fan-shaped leaves of the trees and realized they must be early ginkgos. Expanding her vision, she saw that the man had arrived on an island and was lucky in that, for there seemed to be no big reptiliomorphs in evidence. Not that such a primitive needed a great deal of luck. Observing the stains on the club he held, Silleck surmised he would be more able to survive the trials of these past times than many others. Though, of course, like the girl he would be unlikely to survive all the way. Cowl wasn’t interested in his samples surviving.

  OTHER STATIONS SIMILAR TO their own hung geostationary above the planet like barrage balloons, while white ceramic ships moved in constant transit between them and the installation built on the dark side of Mercury. That installation resembled a metallic mosaic imprinted on black, though occasionally blotted out under the shadows of passing storms, which in turn were lit up as if by interior flashbulbs, as those storms discharged their electric power.

  ‘So the sum purpose of the beast’s attack was for Cowl to ride in on its energy front just to get to you?’ Maxell asked.

  ‘So it would seem. Cowl knows from previous experience that he cannot break our defences in one all-out attack. That he managed a limited penetration at all is due to the fact that he had been provided with our defence frequency at that time. And he has yet to learn that our defences are not always so well maintained.’

  ‘Risky—allowing such an attack,’ said Maxell.

  ‘For veracity,’ said Goron. ‘A gambit to give him the confidence to commit when he hears the greater lie.’

  Maxell nodded and was silent for a moment before saying, ‘I’m sorry about Vetross.’

  ‘She knew the risks.’

  Again a longer silence, Maxell changed the subject. ‘The storm cycle will be impossible to maintain once the “greater lie” achieves its purpose.’ She was gazing at the main screen. ‘We’ll lose most of this, which means a refugee population of twenty million to transship back to Earth Station.’

  ‘If all goes well,’ Goron replied, as he casually manipulated the image on a screen before him. This showed a transparent computer diagram of the sun tap, with the locations of thousands of points within it.

  ‘Timing is everything,’ said Maxell.

  ‘Now there’s a statement that can never be contested.’

  ‘It will work?’ she asked him.

  ‘The sun tap was not designed for this. The excess of redundancy was built in, and many of the autorepair systems operate faster than anything less than catastrophic failure. But, yes, it will work—the displacement generators will do what is required of them. That, however, is not why you asked me here.’

  Maxell did not look round. She continued, ‘And Mars?’

  ‘You know the new mirrors will work better than the old and that now we do not need the energy to create an environment but only to maintain it. Our loss will be great but sustainable. When are you going to get to the point?’

  Maxell turned towards him. ‘Only a select few of you on Sauros know what is going to happen. How do they feel about this? And, most importantly, how do you feel?’

  ‘Three hundred years and you’re asking me how I feel?’

  ‘I am.’

  Goron stood up from his console and walked over to stand beside her, his hands clasped behind his back as he gazed out at the view. ‘We few who know, know the consequences of our actions: the ending of the greatest threat the human race has ever encountered, and as a result the survival of the Heliothane Dominion. Those who will die … I mourn them already, as I mourn Vetross, but their sacrifice is unfortunately necessary. Veracity permits it to be no other way.’

  ‘But the Dominion’s survival may not be something you’ll see. You know that, without an adjacent interspace source of energy, mantisals cannot jump accurately. We’ll have perhaps two hundred years of concurrent time. I’ve calculated the chances of us getting a mantisal to you—one mantisal, not the hundreds th
at may be needed.’

  ‘As have I, and it’s roughly one in a hundred thousand. And that’s discounting our slide down the slope.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll do well enough.’ Goron shrugged. ‘And there’s always the chance Saphothere could bring us tors, if he survives making his kill.’

  ‘There is also a chance that the technology will become available …’

  ‘I know. But I know too that every day we exist after the event, and every day Saphothere does not come, will push us further down the probability slope. And things will change here. We’ll be praised as dead heroes and quickly forgotten.’

  ‘I’ll not forget.’

  Goron turned to her. ‘So really all this was about was saying goodbye?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all.’

  ‘Then goodbye, Maxell.’

  14

  Traveller Thote:

  It was a close-run thing with the Roman. Keeping him on life support, we nearly managed to remove his tor and interface it with a mantisal. I subsequently see that it is just a question of using a quantity of the old bearer’s genetic material as a buffer, plus some method of fooling the tor’s propensity for pattern recognition. However, it seems I am not going to get a chance to try out my theory as Maxell has cancelled all energy allocations for this kind of work, and it seems Goron’s project now has prime status. I am now to return to other duties subordinate to the Engineer. I do not mind, for we must choose the best option we can find … to kill our enemies.

  ENDLESS SEASHORES. IT APPEARED that the vambrace was intent on bringing him back into the world in the same sort of location each time. The gods were casting him into places to fight battles he did not understand at their whim. He just kept himself honed and focused on survival. He hated his gods.