Neal Asher - The Engineer Reconditioned

It had to be further into the twenty-first century than I had at first thought. Any earlier and the boy would not have been armed as he was. This was Britain and projectile weapons had been banned for some time. In America any self-respecting mugger would have come at me with an automatic pistol. Here, at this time, muggers had taken to using juiced-up tasers; devices that threw out a wire-connected dart and zapped the recipient. I felt the sharp pain as it entered my chest and the flash threw everything into the negative for me. I didn’t go over. The jolt merely burnt away any vestige of my remaining self-control. I dropped the pack and the other items, and took two swift paces forwards. AD humans; so weak and slow. I swatted him on the side of his head and he fell. The one to my right was only just opening his mouth to yell a warning when I caught him by the throat, my thumb on his windpipe. Pressing with my thumb and opening myself, I became a well down which the energy field generated by complex molecular chains flowed. I drank of what is the very structure of time; the field of life which encompasses where we may travel, and delimits it. The consequence of this was a disintegration of molecular bonds. The boy became a steaming slurry held up by rapidly dissolving skin and clothing. I released what remained of him and shook slime from my hand before turning to his companion. Soon finished, I took up my acquisitions and headed for my arrival point, feeling fuller and more potent than I had a few minutes before, and less human.

“Have you fed well then, Marten?”

The voice that issued out of the night possessed a jarring familiarity. I turned and saw someone standing off to my right. He was unidentifiable in the darkness.

“Is that my name?” I asked.

“It is,” said the figure.

“Then what is your name?”

“Call me Hallack, if it suits you, or not. But listen first. You only have a few minutes left here and there are things you should remember,” he said.

“I feel there are many things I should remember,” I replied.

The man squatted down in the darkness. I moved to go towards him but he held up his hand.

“No closer to me, Marten. I would hold onto the force of my life.”

“What do you have to tell me then?”

“A brief story: In the year two hundred,” he gestured about himself with his hand, “the twenty-eighth century to these people, a creature was born that resembled humankind only in a rough approximation of form. It was called Cowl and it was brilliant, insane, and horrifyingly dangerous. It built an organic time machine that took it to the Nodus — the beginning of things — and there it tried to destroy the human race, or rather supplant it with a race of copies of itself. In the process it shoved itself off mainline time and we survived.”

“Is that all?” I asked contemptuously, but the surge of feeling this brief story had elicited was strong indeed.

“That is all for the moment,” said the man. “Your time to depart is upon you, and I don’t want to be here when it comes.”

I glanced at my watch; about a minute remained. When I looked up I felt that tugging at the inner core of me which I identified with travel in time. The mysterious man was gone. I moved away from him to my point of entry to this Earth. When the time on my watch reached precisely two hours, the Earth shifted away from me.

My new boots possessed a grip. I wouldn’t have slipped over unless during an interspace shift. Anyway, no footwear knowable would have kept me upright in such a situation. The sphere would not let me go and its attraction slammed me flat every time. If only it had done the same for my belongings. The sphere’s surface is matt and without indentation or hole. I had acquired many items of comfort during Earthward shifts only to lose them in interspace during some unknowable violent manoeuvre. Often I was pinned to the surface like a man crucified, only to see food and water, blankets and stoves go hurtling into grey space. I tried suction pads, epoxy glues, welding. But the sphere goes frictionless on these occasions. Nothing remained bar myself and, of course, the tor. I knew the name, but not what it was. I didn’t know how many shifts ago it appeared. Long enough for the human forearm that had appeared with it, ripped off at the elbow, to rot away, and for the bones to be flung away during a shift. Its appearance was that of a large coiled holly leaf fashioned of glass and bright metal and seemed a perilous thing for someone to wear on their arm. It stuck to the surface of the sphere like a burr picked up on the fur of a huge animal. I didn’t know why. This time I decided to use it as an anchor point for my belongings.

After securing my belongings to the tor with the nylon climbing rope, I spread out the sleeping bag and set up the stove. It seems too prosaic to mention that I enjoyed my first cup of tea in… an age. I felt low of course. The huge potency and euphoria I had felt at draining the two boys was gone as it always went as soon as my feet touched the black surface. I felt guilty as well and tried to buck myself with the only consolation I had, that is, should I kill a direct ancestor to myself in this manner I’ll shove myself off the main line and straight down the probability slope. This would confine me to the past of a line where I was never born and where time travel would be impossible. I would end up at some point in an alternate history and the sphere would be unable to draw me back… I think.

Twelve hours. The manoeuvres were coming earlier and earlier. Luckily I was on my back with the sleeping bag underneath me when the cold wind hit. I felt it only momentarily before I was seemingly encased in invisible steel. For a second I felt victorious as I had managed to clasp the neck of the whisky bottle at the last moment. Unfortunately the rest of the bottle was out of the field and it smashed as I was slammed back. I couldn’t see the rest of my acquisitions. As I lay there all I could see was the grey sky swirling in mind-numbing patterns and the occasional flicker of a black shape. One of those black shapes became distinct as a human form before being swept away. This was the first time I had seen this and it opened a world of speculation. Was I being pursued? If so, why? And: do my pursuers know who I am?

As the sphere shifted I felt its rage and its jealous protectiveness of me. I also heard the whispering murmur that is the nearest it comes to speech and, understanding none of it, was affected at a visceral level by it.

The manoeuvres lasted a further twelve hours. After that time I was delighted to discover my rucksack still secured to the tor. The stove was gone, all but one of the water bottles burst, and the crossbow smashed, but I had enough left to bring some comfort to my remaining hours before the next Earthward shift. On the button, twenty-six hours later, that occurred.

I stood on the black surface and waited while the grey faded to cloud-scudded blue and that black surface softened under me and became the wet sand of a beach. The gentle slap of waves encroached on my hearing and the call of a gull complemented my loneliness. Behind me were mud cliffs gradually being eroded by the sea. The presence of fossil belemnites and ammonites in the nearby rocks informed me that I had not gone too far back. When I walked to the head of the beach and inspected the flotsam and jetsam, a spherical coke can with its hologram surface providing the illusion of a fish swimming inside, showed me I must be somewhere and when in the late twenty-first century. I began to walk along the beach, feeling no inclination to go anywhere for supplies and definitely disinclined to encounter any people. The hunger was growing in me with alarming rapidity even then. I did not think I would be able to control it in even the limited fashion I had before. I had gone only a matter of paces when the woman called to me from the cliff top.