Neal Asher - Cowl

Saphothere opened out his phonelike device to expose two twisted screens, the lower of which switched on to show shifting virtual controls. He continued, ‘The defences of Sauros block external comlink communications because of the possibility of computer viral attack. This — ’ he held up the device—‘is an encoded tachyon transmitter imprinted to me. If anyone but me tries to operate it, they’d find themselves getting turned inside out through a vorpal singularity. The result is not pretty.’ His fingers followed the virtual controls, and the upper screen lit to show someone’s face. Saphothere addressed the face in the same language used by Coptic and Meelan, then he snapped the device shut.

‘What now?’ Tack asked.

‘Now we wait, if our friends over there allow us the opportunity.’

Saphothere pointed somewhere behind Tack, before returning the tachyon communicator to his pack. Whirling round, Tack saw three creatures approaching through the low vegetation, some hundred metres away. As these slim-boned dinosaurs moved, heads and tails extended horizontally, they stood no higher than a man’s waist, but every now and again they stopped to peer about them, raising their heads much higher. Their precise movements were reminiscent of herons, but their long hind legs were built for speed, their foreclaws for ripping apart living flesh, and though their heads were narrow and ophidian, they possessed mouths large enough to swallow the lumps they might rip from their prey.

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Tack, remembering an interminable film series on dinosaurs. ‘Velociraptors?’

‘Wrong. The name for these in your own time is troodon, or wounding tooth. Velociraptors are quite smallish feather-covered egg thieves, so they would avoid us. Hopefully these will too, as they usually go for smaller prey.’

‘And if they don’t?’ Tack aimed his seeker gun at one of the advancing creatures, but the gun refused to acquire—its template being for human recognition only. Tack lowered it again and punched in the code to set a blank template. Flipping up the square sight he aimed at the leading one. A small grid flicked up in the square and froze the creature’s image, which told him that the template had been established and his target acquired. He then acquired each of the other two creatures in turn. Saphothere watched him with paternal amusement.

‘I never scanned that weapon of yours,’ he admitted. ‘How does the round guide itself into the target?’

‘The initial charge fires a cased round,’ said Tack. ‘The case is dropped when quite close to the target, then the explosive shell opens wings powered by synthemuscle. The target template is uploaded to a micromind in the shell—running a program that is a direct transcription from the mind of a wasp attacking a human.’

‘Interesting,’ said Saphothere, then raised his own little gun and pointed it at the vegetation between themselves and the approaching troodon. The weapon emitted a muzzle flash like that of a machine gun firing in darkness. Involuntarily, Tack staggered back, blinking away after-images, as a swathe of vegetation a couple of metres wide ignited as if soaked in petrol. Squawking and cawing, the hunting dinosaurs turned tail and ran.

Quickly holstering his weapon, Saphothere nodded towards Tack’s seeker gun. ‘You see, such surgical precision was not really required.’

Feeling foolish, Tack returned his weapon to its holster and, following the direction of Saphothere’s gaze, spotted an object approaching at speed from Sauros itself. Soon this resolved into a hemisphere of grey metal, its curved surface facing downwards. Soundlessly, it settled in towards them and landed. Running around the inside this object was seating, and at its centre a single column supporting a basketball-sized globe.

‘In,’ Saphothere instructed, and Tack clambered aboard.

Once seated, Saphothere reached over to the globe, which split like a flower head to reveal a hand-shaped indentation.

‘Wrong person puts his hand in this thing and the globe closes, snipping his hand off at the wrist,’ Saphothere lectured.

As the hemisphere rose into the air, he gestured over the side with his other hand. ‘Now a little fire would not have put him off.’

Looking over the side, Tack did not need anyone to tell him that he was seeing his first tyrannosaur. As the monster stepped delicately through the vegetation, tilting its enormous head from side to side to observe the rising pall of smoke, Tack felt a surge of joy at the sight, tempered with gratitude for not being at ground level. Here was a creature that even the andrewsarchus might flee.

‘Beware the jabberwock, my son,’ said Saphothere. ‘The jaws that bite, the claws that catch.’

Tack looked askance at him.

‘Beware the jub-jub bird, and shun,’ the traveller continued, ‘the frumious bandersnatch.’

Tack peered back at the ground, wondering if he might see such creatures.

After blacking out again because of lack of air, Polly felt a creeping horror that this would happen to her again and again, until someone or something killed her. There was an aching weariness in her and the flesh felt loose on her bones. But, as was usual, the hunger impelled her more than the need for rest. Pushing herself to her knees, she looked around. The surrounding marsh was still and eerie, and even though the sun was shining the air was cold and damp.

‘Where and when the hell am I now?’ she asked, her voice rough. ‘And why didn’t I grab some food before I shifted?’

If you’d taken time to grab some food, I suspect you’d have received open-heart surgery without the benefit of an anaesthetic. As to when we are, I suspect that each jump you make takes you back a multiple of the previous one, so this is certainly more than a thousand years before Claudius came across the Channel to slaughter the ancient Britons.

By now she realized there was no going forward again. This time, as a sensation much like huge acceleration took hold of her, she’d been able to sense, somehow, the direction she must go in order to travel forward in time. At the root of her being she had known that the scale could take her forward, but all effort to shift in that direction had been thwarted—as for a swimmer fighting against a riptide.

Finally finding the energy to stand, Polly was alarmed by a nauseating movement, until she realized she was standing on a mat of reeds that ringed a small island. Moving inwards to firmer ground, she glanced from side to side and all she could see was an expanse of water dotted with more islands. Licking the water soaked into the sleeve of her greatcoat she found it salt, so it seemed that not only was there no prospect of food here, but nothing to drink either.

‘I wonder if I could get this thing off,’ she said, running her hand over the surface of the scale, which was now utterly smooth to the touch.

Why? Do you want to stay here?

The minimum she wanted was to be back in her own time, with access to the comforts of civilization, but with her head as clear as it was now. But she was ambitious for more. She wanted the advantages ‘Muse Nandru’ gave her and continued use of the scale, so she could choose exactly where to travel in time.

‘Somehow I have to learn how to control it,’ she muttered.

An unlikely possibility. Monitoring your blood sugars has confirmed that it is some kind of parasite, and that basically for it you are only an energy source powering each of its leaps through time. That’s why you feel so hungry on each occasion—it burns away every available resource inside you. On the plus side, you’ll never get to be a size twelve.

‘Fucking ha-ha.’