Neal Asher - Cowl

‘Yes, I know—not a good place to be,’ she said, then wished she hadn’t spoken when the animal noises fell silent.

Pushing herself upright, she looked around at the darkness and at huge trees looming behind curtains of rain.

‘You’ve got nothing to say?’ she asked him nervously, terrified she might now be genuinely alone.

Oh, always something to say. But at present I’m trying to use one of Muse’s military logistics programs to calculate your acceleration back through time.

‘You’ll be able to predict what era I’ll arrive in next?’ Polly subvocalized, sure she could hear baleful movements out there.

Well, I have some dates to work with… within vague limits. Thus far it would seem your acceleration is exponential, though what the exponent is it’s difficult to ascertain. All I do know is that if the increase continues at its present rate… a few jumps more and you’ll be going back millions of years at a time.

‘You’re not serious?’

Oh yeah, but, as I said, the parameters are vague. If you follow the curve I’m now trying to plot, you’ll end up off the graph—achieving a jump that is infinite. But then I might only be viewing part of that curve and who’s to say you’ll be following a curve anyway? Thing is, you are now learning to control the shifts, and Christ knows what other factors might come into play. The next one might easily be one year or one million years.

‘Oh, screw this,’ Polly said out loud and reached down inside herself to grasp hold of that webwork and bend it to her will. This time there was no transition over that previous black sea and she was immediately into that Euclidian space she could manipulate, if only in a small way. She gave it a few seconds only, then pulled herself out, dropping down on her back into soft leaf litter in a raucous daylit forest. She gasped in a lungful of cold morning air.

Of course, every time you do that, you just screw up my calculations further.

Polly did not know whether to laugh or cry.

Cheng-yi dragged himself out from under the mounded dead and looked around in disbelief. The attacking unit of the People’s Army had bayoneted the survivors and the wounded ponies, then looted the bodies. All that now remained of the largest robber band in Miyi county was butchered corpses strewn along the valley. That none of their attackers had dragged Cheng-yi out and searched him he put down to his being covered in blood and the plenitude of loot elsewhere. Climbing unsteadily to his feet, Cheng visually checked himself from head to foot. None of the blood appeared to be his own, which was miraculous considering he had been riding beside Lao when the machine gun opened up, and there was not much left of him that was identifiable. Cheng gave a little dance and shook his fists at the sky, then he looked round again, completely at a loss.

What little drug smuggling or gun running they had managed across the Himalayas since Mao’s revolution, would not be available to him alone. And also, since that revolution, pickings had been poor in the Xiang region—most of the thieving already done by Party officials. Cheng was damned if he was going to rejoin China’s current society: thankless toil and the grey and boring clothing did not appeal to him. One option remained: he would head towards the coast, for Kowloon and Hong Kong, and see how his fortunes would fare. Not for one moment, as he exchanged his clothing for the best available remaining on the corpses, and looted them of anything the soldiers had left, did he feel any grief. They hadn’t been a bad lot, but none of them had really appreciated his qualities and, anyway, his emotional spectrum encompassed only terror and lust. The former came into play again when, just as he was ready to set out, the monster came.

The huge and horrible thing fed on the dead. He saw it bow down over the body of a pony and suck it down with a crunching gulping. The human corpses it took down with less trouble. Crouched behind a rock, Cheng-yi sobbed with terror as he listened to the macabre feasting, then when the sounds ceased, he choked back his sobs and held his breath. Perhaps it was gone now? Perhaps it had never been there…

Cheng-yi looked up straight into the mouth of hell poised above him and screamed. The mouth turned away and, from the flank behind, one of the monster’s scales fell and thudded in the dust beside the Chinaman. He watched as the scale, at first leaflike, coiled up into a cylinder as if rapidly drying. Lust was Cheng’s next emotion, and he did not hesitate to grab the thing up and pull it up over his forearm. Then, the monster gone, he wondered what madness it was that had made him see such monstrous visions. But this was not his last.

Engineer Goron:

It was some staffer of Maxell’s who had the idea of using cerebral programming on the next torbearer we managed to intercept. Sir Alex seemed the best option as he had been combat trained from birth. Our team had eighteen hours to work on him before his next shift and all seemed to go well: the programming took and there was even time to provide him with physical augmentation and a Pedagogue weapons’ instruction download. Apparently, though he accepted our weapons, he utterly refused to shed his armour. But even with his armour and his weapons and his new abilities, he must have failed. The team, remaining at the location where they had intercepted Sir Alex while they recharged their mantisals via a portable fusion/displacement generator, were attacked by the beast only minutes after his concurrent arrival beyond the Nodus. So we can only suppose that Cowl killed the man, but was angry enough to retaliate directly.

Pedagogue was an unseen presence directly downloading information into his mind and, with the true brutality of a surgeon, wrenching into shape those structures in his mind that could utilize it. But this, this he didn’t understand:

The trip was due to take another five hours. Tack knew there were three ramscoop fusion engines, set on outriders protruding from the main cylindrical body of the ship, belching white blades of flame. Mercury resembled a cindered sphere to his left, but with a sprawl of bright-silver installations spread in a maze across its sooty flank and cigar-shaped stations orbiting it. Tack was apparently standing before one of the triangular screens that ringed the bridge sphere—earlier in its life, the only place possible for humans to survive here. Now the ship was lethally radioactive. How such a vessel managed to operate in these conditions Tack was only momentarily bewildered to consider, but then, almost off-handedly, he dowsed the extent and capabilities of Heliothane materials and field technology.

Ahead, the sun loomed large—like a hole cut through space into some hellish furnace—and against it was silhouetted the tap itself. The thing was stupendous, like some vast tanker crossing an ocean of fire.

‘Why…?’ He didn’t really voice the question—it was just there.

Would you prefer…

Instantly Tack found himself submersed in some viscous clear fluid, and in a world of pain. He couldn’t scream as the fluid was in his mouth and lungs and, as he began to struggle, he discerned optic cables snaking away from the back of his head. Looking down, he saw himself flayed, red muscle revealed, tubes and wires connected down the length of him, metal cuffs enclosing his joints, the cowled head of some surgical robot excavating into the side of his chest. Then the horrific vision was gone and he was back on the sun ship, gasping and clutching at his chest, shivering. But the pain faded and the memory of pain swiftly blurred.