Cowl

  Living up to his name, Lostboy was sitting staring blankly into space, and Tacitus wondered if his own and Cheng-yi’s addition to the boy’s programming had been to the good. Aconite’s Pedagogue had taught them enough to construct a program that would enable the boy to swim, and to load it, but their knowledge was certainly not anything like as extensive as the heliothant’s. Tacitus was even considering wiping what they had installed and going to ask Aconite what had gone wrong, when the outer door whoomphed open and the Umbrathane intruders entered, discarding rain capes and removing their masks.

  Holding her carbine in readiness across her stomach, Makali marched to the centre of the room, her five fellows spreading out behind her as she scanned the surrounding area.

  ‘Where is the killer?’ she demanded.

  Tacitus merely continued sharpening his sword, while Cheng-yi and Ygrol quietly proceeded with their game.

  ‘Very well, then tell me where that piece-of-shit heliothant is,’ Makali spat into the silence.

  Tacitus felt a familiar surge of anger, and the whetstone slipped. He put a bloody finger in his mouth and watched while the umbrathant marched over to the mahjong table and swept its pieces onto the floor.

  ‘I asked a question!’

  ‘I think you asked two questions,’ Cheng-yi smart-mouthed.

  Makali backhanded him and he went flying out of his chair to sprawl on the floor. Tacitus stood. This was bad, not because of Makali’s violent behaviour, but because of the expression now on Ygrol’s face—he had been about to win the game.

  ‘Ygrol,’ Tacitus murmured warningly, stepping forward.

  ‘Far enough, Roman.’

  Tacitus had not even seen the Umbrathane male move round the room to come up behind him. He froze, feeling a hand on his shoulder and the barrel of a handgun pressed against his cheek.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t think I’m serious.’ Without even looking in the direction she was pointing her carbine, Makali pulled the trigger. Lostboy’s head blew open, flowering around the blockish cerebral augmentation, which clattered onto the floor as he slid from his chair. ‘I’m serious.’

  Flinging the games table aside, Ygrol came up with a roar, his bone club raised. Tacitus felt his mouth go dry as he saw how fast two of Makali’s fellows shot in front of her, one of them stamping on Cheng-yi’s head in passing as the Chinaman tried to rise. The first to reach the Neanderthal knocked away his club, then both umbrathants dragged him to his chair and forced him down into it. No matter how Ygrol strained he could not get up, and bellowed as Makali strolled forward to pick up the bone club and inspect it. She turned to Tacitus.

  ‘Where is the killer? And where is Aconite?’

  Aconite almost certainly knew about the arrival of these intruders, Tacitus supposed, but perhaps she was taking needed time to prepare, so he kept his mouth firmly shut. Without taking her eyes off Tacitus, Makali brought the bone club up hard to smash into Ygrol’s face. Still seeing no reaction from the Roman, she turned on the Neanderthal and began to lay into him. As blood spattered her face and prosthetic arms, Tacitus realized that any answer he might give would not alter the outcome of what was happening here. Cowl had let Makali off the leash.

  It was over in a minute, Ygrol’s broken head lolling to one side.

  ‘Well now,’ said Makali. ‘I guess we’ll have to see what I can do with that sword of yours.’

  ‘I’m here,’ spoke a new voice.

  Aconite had entered the room from her research area. Tacitus could see her rage and he prepared himself to do whatever was required of him.

  ‘I think you’re a little late for this party,’ said Makali, inspecting the blood runneling in the circuit patterns on the bone club she held.

  Aconite clicked her fingers and a sudden deep droning filled the room, along with a blast of air. Wasp rose vertically into view, its wings a blur behind it, and a glistening sting extruded into view. It drove forwards as one of the umbrathants turned towards it. He bowed over as it slammed into him, the sting going in through his chest and out of his back. Then the sting flicked and discarded him. Tacitus reversed his sword, its blade alongside his ribcage, and thrust back into the umbrathant behind him, turning as he did so. There came a gagging crunch from the man, and muzzle fire skinned the Roman’s cheekbone. The bone club became a blurred wheel in the air, before it was caught and shattered in Aconite’s massive hand. Pulling his gladius free from his dying captor, Tacitus threw it underhand, spearing its way towards Makali’s back. Then a shot smacked into his chest and he staggered back, stumbling over the umbrathant he had impaled. He saw Makali whip round, impossibly fast, catching the gladius by the handle, bringing it over her head and almost casually squatting down to drive it through Cheng-yi’s back to pin him to the floor. With teeth bared she pulled some device from her belt and aimed it at Wasp. The room whited out for a second, then the robot dropped out of the air and crashed to the floor.

  ‘You think we didn’t know?’ said Makali.

  The same white-out again. Now Aconite falling like an oak tree.

  Tacitus slid down, with his back to the wall. He stared down at his shattered body—he had done his best.

  SILLECK WAS ONE OF the few interface technicians who had survived, and like all of them only because she had torn herself away from her vorpal controls. Now, with open wounds in her scalp and undetached nubs of vorpal glass embedded in her skull like little windows into her brain, she suffered a headache that just would not go away. Only time would cure that, as the damaged tissue of her meninges healed around the vorpal fibres entering her brain. But she would never be rid of the facility to slide into a perception that stepped one dimension above that of her fellow, un-interfaced Heliothane. Gazing across the mountainside, she observed the survivors setting up their camps for the coming night; while, sliding into further perception, she saw them preparing to do this, and their camps already made. Watching also the endless flow of the beast into the wormhole, she saw images that both repelled and fascinated her.

  This ability, Goron reassured her, would prove essential in the coming years, as there were few dangers on this Earth that could slip past guards able to see into the future—if only for a few minutes. Because of this extended perception, and because her gaze kept straying back to the beast, she was the first to see it happen.

  She stood and walked upslope to Goron, who sat Buddha-like on the mountainside, the section of control pillar resting on his lap. His eyes were closed, for he was either asleep or meditating. She eyed Palleque who, despite what Goron had told them all, she still distrusted as she did all fanatics.

  ‘It’s happening,’ she told Goron at last.

  The Engineer opened his eyes and gazed towards Sauros. ‘There was always the possibility it would be endless, though not for us.’

  Silleck and the rest of the survivors had been waiting for a feedback cataclysm that would have swept them away from this mountainside in an ashy wind. Now this was not to be.

  Then it all ended as suddenly as it had begun. The flow of torbeast attenuated, the roar of its progress dropping away. It broke up into trailing tentacles of raw flesh and spills of putrid dead matter—and then it was gone.

  ‘And there it is,’ said Palleque, standing up.

  Goron reached inside the control sphere and did what he had to do. Just inside the ravaged structure of the city, the three abutments began to slide towards a centre point, closing the wormhole entrance. As they drew closer, Goron shaded his eyes, though the light was not really so intense, being to the infrared end of the spectrum. Dull thunder echoed and what remained of the city deformed under an intense burst of heat.

  Silleck felt the heat on her face—and in her dry eyes.

  RELAYING WHAT NANDRU WAS telling her, Polly said, ‘Aconite and Wasp were in the tor chamber when Aconite went charging out. Wasp followed her into the residential room, when suddenly some system inside Wasp cut in and it threw Nandru out. But he had time to see that Ygrol was dead—
that you don’t display that amount of brain to the air without needing a body bag shortly after.’

  ‘Tell Nandru to describe exactly what else he saw,’ said Tack.

  Polly tilted her head for a moment, and her eyes narrowed. ‘One of them held a gun to Tacitus’s head. Two were holding Ygrol down in a chair and it seems Makali had just beaten his brains out. He didn’t see the other two, though.’

  ‘They’re probably all dead,’ said Tack.

  ‘But if they are not, we have to do something for them,’ Polly replied.

  Resting his carbine across his shoulder, Tack stared at her. He was sick of these Umbrathane and Heliothane eternally killing each other and dragging others into the conflict. He was his own man now and he wanted no more of it. He also did not want to be forced into a position where he himself would have to kill again. However, Aconite had arranged to have him dragged from the sea, and she had subsequently put him back together. He owed her. And, at the last, he now wanted to gain Polly’s respect—and whatever else she might be prepared to give. In that moment he felt, with a lurch, his life beginning again, and knew he could not renege on his new responsibilities. Fucking hero, he thought.

  ‘Whatever’s happened there, we’re too late to stop it. But let’s see what we can find out,’ he said, his stomach turning over at such a positive statement.

  He led the way up from the river bed, circling round to come down on Aconite’s house from the mountainside. As they climbed, the rain turned to drizzle, then a wind picked up and blew that away. The cloud began to break, opening on stars and the first hint of topaz dawn behind the mountains. When the house finally came into view below them, lemon sunlight was already bathing the coastline beyond and flecking the sea with gold. The citadel, to their left, looked no different. Still, around its high points, bestial distortions crowded the sky.

  ‘Why does that happen?’ Tack asked.

  After a moment Polly replied, ‘Aconite says Cowl’s energy source comes from thermal taps penetrating down to a geological fault running out from here. From that power source he feeds energy to the torbeast when he wants it to do his bidding, and that same energy feed opens a rift through to the beast’s alternate. The beast always attempts to come through here to access that source directly and what we are seeing is the result of that.’

  ‘But Cowl won’t let it through.’

  ‘No, I don’t understand the tech he uses, but he prevents the beast from coming totally into phase. It is only a few degrees out, but enough for it to produce no more effect than this.’

  ‘And if it came through?’

  ‘Cowl would end up as dead as us.’

  Tack remembered those thick cables snaking out into the sea. Judging from them, he supposed the energy being utilized must be immense. However, it did not even compare to that transmitted by the sun tap, as no cables could ever carry that load. Glancing down at the house again, he abruptly caught Polly’s shoulder and dragged her down. They observed an umbrathant guard emerge and walk around the back of the house to urinate against the wall.

  ‘Here’s what we’ll do,’ Tack said.

  POLLY WALKED CASUALLY UP from the river towards the house, as if she had just been out for a pleasant stroll. The Umbrathane woman by the door called inside, and a man quickly joined her. Polly kept her gaze level on them, not daring to look up any higher. She raised a hand in a friendly wave. When she was still five metres away, Tack, leaping down from the roof, brought his right foot down squarely on top of the Umbrathane woman’s head and, as she crumpled, snapped out his left foot to catch the man under his ear. By then Polly was flat on the ground—as instructed.

  Tack forward-flipped off the woman, hit the ground on his feet, and rolled aside as shots splintered rock where he had been a fraction of a second before. Coming upright, he spun round, his foot coming up in an arc accelerated by the weight of his strange surgical boot. Straightening his leg at the last, he slammed the boot up into the man’s throat. To his horror, he glimpsed Polly bringing to bear her handgun in what to Tack seemed slow motion. The woman, having hit the ground on her shoulder, was coming upright again, her weapon swinging towards Polly. And then Tack realized he would not be able to do this without killing.

  He swung his carbine round towards the woman, but shots from the man shattered the barrel of the weapon. The Umbrathane woman hesitated for a microsecond, assessing the greatest danger. She began to turn towards Tack just as he dropped his carbine and flung himself back. A hole opened up in the woman’s forehead and she began to drop. The man began yelling and swung towards Polly. But why was he moving so slowly? Then Tack realized the man had probably just seen his lover die. That did not slow Tack as he hurled himself forward. Closing in, the carbine swung back towards him. He caught the barrel, turning as he did so, its fire scoring his stomach. He jerked the weapon towards him, out of the man’s grip, spinning it up around his back and over his shoulder. Catching it in his other hand, he fired it, slinging the man backwards. It was over. It had taken less than six seconds. Not much time to extinguish two lives.

  ‘Accurate shooting,’ said Tack, as Polly walked over to him.

  Coming to a halt, Polly holstered her handgun, then gazed down at the two dead umbrathants. She said, ‘Mortuus est. Mortua est.’

  Tack looked at her queryingly.

  ‘They’re both dead,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, certainly that,’ he replied.

  Polly looked up, eyeing the carbine Tack held. ‘I knew a juggler once, called Berthold, who would have been impressed by the way you moved there.’

  Tack gazed down at the two corpses, and could not find it in himself to be so flippant. When they entered the house, they found more dead inside. First there was the Chinaman.

  Tack stooped down by Cheng-yi, checked the pulse at his throat then attempted to remove the sword. The weapon was so deeply embedded in the composite floor, it would not have yielded without Tack’s augmentations. Tossing the weapon aside, he turned the body over and studied it, before switching his attention to Ygrol. No need to check the Neanderthal’s pulse—his thick skull was broken open and most of his brain mashed.

  ‘They shot Lostboy, too,’ said Polly.

  Tack stood and walked over to stand beside her. Only half of Lostboy’s head remained, and on the floor nearby lay his cerebral augmentation. Polly picked it up and carefully placed it on a table. ‘Perhaps Aconite can save something,’ she said.

  Tack looked at her askance.

  She tapped a finger against the blood-smeared device. ‘They killed the animal part of him, but most of what was human is in here,’ she explained.

  Then a sound spun them both round, and they saw Tacitus slumped against a wall in a pool of his own blood. Polly rushed over and pressed her finger against his throat.

  ‘He’s still alive, but we’ll have to get him into the surgery,’ she announced.

  As Tack stepped over the dead umbrathant, he noted the wound in the man’s upper chest. So Tacitus had not gone down without taking one of them with him. Passing the carbine to Polly, he stooped to pick Tacitus up and turned towards Aconite’s surgery. Polly darted past him to inspect the fallen Wasp and the dead umbrathant beside it. Tack supposed the intruders had swaggered into this place as arrogantly as any of their kind, but encountered some nasty surprises.

  ‘I don’t feel safe about staying here,’ he said. ‘They must know we’re still about, and those outside might have sent off some sort of call.’

  ‘I’ll not abandon him,’ said Polly.

  ‘Then I’ll check things out,’ said Tack, laying Tacitus on the surgical table. ‘Do you know how to operate this stuff?’ He gestured to the surrounding equipment.

  ‘What I don’t know Nandru can tell me—he uploaded a lot from Wasp’s database.’

  Taking the carbine, which Polly handed back to him, Tack watched for a moment while she cut open the Roman soldier’s clothing, and placed a monitoring device against his neck. Then acknowledg
ing that she seemed to know what she was doing, Tack went off to search the house.

  Polly assumed that Aconite herself had been dragged off to the citadel, but Tack was not so sure. It seemed to him that the Umbrathane intruders had come here simply to eliminate a potential threat. The house was a big place, so it was likely that he would find Aconite dead in one of its many rooms. With methodical caution he began at the top of the house in the attic, wondering at the precise purpose of the exposed vorpal substructure of the building visible there, with all those linked-up machines and heavy power cables. On the next floor down he found mostly sealed rooms, but one door was open and in it he thoughtfully eyed the racked carbines, catalysers, grenades and some other weapons he did not recognize. On the ground floor he checked all the living quarters, but ignored the many rooms that were sealed. The laboratories and research areas showed no sign of damage, so he did not spend long in them—just checking that no more bodies were visible. It was in the cellar he found the tors, and now understood why there had been so few lying on the seabed along with the arm bones. Here he felt the subversive control emanating from these parasitic devices and noted how many of them lay on the floor. He realized that they were regrowing their thorns, and that this process had forced some of them out of the racks. But Aconite, or her body, was not here either, so he closed the door and returned to Polly.

  ‘We must save her,’ Tacitus groaned, as Tack came back into the room.

  Tack observed that plumbing and wiring now linked the Roman to several surrounding machines. He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘All I need is an affixed and internally linked carapace, then I’ll be able to move …’ the soldier croaked.