Neal Asher - Cowl

‘I see,’ said Tack woodenly.

And see he did. He saw Callisto, a moon of Jupiter, exploding, with the blast contained in some unseen barrier and the moon just winking out of existence. Four hundred million Heliothane gone in less time than it took to draw breath.

‘Cowl, having made his alliance with the Umbrathane, and passing on much of his research, caused a temporal anomaly on Callisto, where his research facility was based, putting a picosecond future version of that moon in exactly the same place as the original. The physical composite of the two moons, forced to exist however briefly in the same place, went in a fusion explosion, the energy generated thereby powering his flight, and that of the Umbrathane fleet, into the past.’

‘And I am supposed to kill this… creature?’

‘Yes, that is your task.’

Back aboard the virtual ship, Tack was bathed in incandescence. The screens now revealed a side view of the sun tap. It was a leviathan wood planer shaving the fiery surface of the sun, raft-like at its two extremes but humped in the middle. The view was filtered—it would have incinerated him otherwise. Then, suddenly, he was gazing upon the vast cliff that was just one side of the tap. This close it seemed to extend to infinity in every direction, beyond planetary scale—immensity impossible to encompass. He blinked and drew his attention away from it, studying his closer surroundings. The inside of the ship had become a furnace: plastics were beginning to smoke, coatings were peeling from metal surfaces, spots of red heat were appearing on bare metal, and smoke-hazed air being drawn away through vents. And so the unreal world Pedagogue had created came to an end. When the ship’s fields collapsed, actinic light obliterated everything and Tack began to wake.

She was running out of air, and now the force of her will was pushing the scale in some other way. She found herself being dragged sideways back into that dimension of black sea underlining a grey void, but drawing along with her part of the previous place. From the scale itself barely visible lines of light sprang out and turned back in on themselves, all looping at precisely the same distance out from it, so she appeared to rest at the centre of a huge, luminous dandelion clock. Then this spheroid took on a glassy quality, the light draining out of it and its surface splitting and coalescing into veins and ribs, as of water poured onto something greasy. Encaged in this cocoon she fell, gulping at nothing in the darkness, consciousness fading. But still she had some will left and attempted to force her way back into her own reality. Around her the black sea rose up, and gravity grabbed her and slammed her down on a floor of hyaline bones. She gasped in frigid air, grateful for each painful breath. Rolling upright, she found herself still encaged in the sphere, hovering now over frigid ground, a dark grey sky above, strange frozen trees to her right and a snowy plain to her left. Terrified that she would be snatched away from breathable air again, she scrabbled for a gap in the cage wall, but even as she found it and fell through, the cage itself began to fold away into that other place.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Polly managed, recovering her breath after landing on her back on the unforgiving ground.

Well, as about the nearest thing to an expert in temporal travel we have here, I have to say I haven’t a clue.

Polly looked around, then hugged her arms close around her body. ‘I thought it was your expert opinion that it was supposed to be warmer before that last ice age.’

Sorry, but there were more than one of them. You got a few in the Pleistocene age, but I thought you were beyond them, then some in the Carboniferous… Let’s just hope you’ve not gone that far yet. This is probably just some sort of hiccup: a bad winter, maybe a bad millennium. You’ve been covering millions of years, remember.

Polly tried not to think too much about that. Absentmindedly she opened her coat and removed from her hip bag a remaining lump of eohippus meat, and methodically devoured it.

‘Any idea at all what period this is?’ she asked.

None whatsoever. The thing that manifested around you might have altered the circumstances, and your previous time-jumps have been too out of kilter for me to easily work out a curve. I would guess you’re getting pretty near to dinosaur country, though.

Polly grunted an acknowledgement and continued eating as she stared about her. ‘Perhaps I’m just in the Arctic here—you said my position in space seems to be changing as well.’

I don’t think there was an Arctic, as we know it. I’m not sure, but I think that, in the region of time we should be entering, even the poles weren’t frozen over.

Polly nodded and started walking towards some nearby trees, since there she might find some shelter from the cold, and might even be able to get a fire going. At the forest edge she found it heavy going, as the snow had drifted thickly against boulders and fallen trunks. Eventually she reached a clearing and scanned the surrounding vegetation.

Looks like bamboo over there. That’s odd.

Polly immediately spotted what Nandru was referring to: the segmented trees spearing up like telegraph poles. Below these she discovered mounds of dry tendrils—light as balsa and only the thickness of her finger, segmented like the trunks they had dropped from. These fragments ignited easily and they burnt with a smell of pine. Polly was quickly able to build up a big fire, since it was apparent that every tree here was dead and their wood freeze-dried. It rapidly made the transition from campfire to bonfire: flames roaring up from the plentiful fuel. Polly sat on a nearby stump to soak up the heat. Scraping up handfuls of melting snow, she quenched her thirst. Then she noticed a strange regularity to the stump, and abruptly stood and stepped away. The fire’s heat continued to melt the snow and reveal what lay underneath it.

It was soon revealed as the head and forelimbs of some huge creature. The beaked head was covered by a large bony shield adorned with three lethal-looking horns.

Triceratops. Polly had seen enough films to recognize it.

‘I bet dinosaur meat tastes like chicken,’ she said, trying find some levity to quell the panic growing inside her.

Sixty-five million years.

Polly was appalled; she almost instinctively reached out to shift, and again found that glassy cage materializing around her. The shift this time was brief and the grey was suddenly displaced by a subliminal glimpse of burning jungle, furnace red, choking smoke and hot ash below a cyanosis sky. Intense heat washed over her, flames clawing in through the glassy structure around her, before she shifted again just to stay alive. Again jungle: cycads and tree ferns and horsetails, huge, strangely shaped trees which were mostly trunk and bole, with a minimal head of greenery. As the cage disappeared, smoke dissipated around her—having been transported through with her. She collapsed on her knees, coughing desperately.

It brought the atmosphere of that last place along with it. It’s almost as if the scale has conceded to your needs, so it can get on with its own journey without you fighting to control it.

That was not Polly’s most exigent concern at that moment.

You know, I think you just witnessed the dinosaur extinction.

Polly knew that. Her concern was that she was on the side of it she would rather not be.

Panicked by her discovery of the frozen triceratops, the girl shifted back beyond the vorpal sensor, and Silleck did not know if she survived the meteorite impact and firestorm that had preceded that killing winter and placed a full point at the end of the dinosaur aeons—that mercy killing of the diseased and dying populations of the great beasts. This, as Silleck knew, ended another of those long-drawn-out evolutionary wars between the large animals of Earth and their constant viral killers. Only humans had survived such a conflict, just.