Neal Asher - Cowl

Silleck now drew herself back down the aeons to where Sauros settled into the soft ground of the Jurassic. The city’s bones were still creaking, and the inner sphere had not yet turned to bring the floors level, but already Engineer Goron had abandoned his station to head for his customary place at the viewing windows. But the interface technicians remained where they were: Sauros, though slowly building up its energy reserves after such a journey, was still vulnerable to attack.

Silleck scanned the nearby slope, where the city was multiplied to infinity in all its incarnations, as if sitting between two facing mirrors. She scanned up and down time as far as she could without using sensors dropped in other ages, but there seemed no danger. Then she pushed her awareness downtime to a vorpal sensor often visited by her fellow technicians, to a brief period at the end of the Triassic and somewhat downslope, which had been named by them ‘the boneyard’.

Here there was some wrinkle in time that many torbearers missed. But it was a trap for many others, which killed their momentum should they fall into it. Thus they were caught for many days and without nutrition became the food for their own parasitic tors. Many of them were starving and half-dead when they arrived, and found no succour in this barren place. Silleck gazed down at the hot dry landscape, where human bones had been cleaned by grave beetles and small vulpine pterosaurs. She chose one scattering of bones and tracked it slowly back in time, seeing it reform, become fleshed and reinflate with moisture, and the brief instant when the tor reappeared enclosing the arm it had later torn away and disappeared with.

The man, who wore a turban and sarong, had walked for many days following a half-seen figure, before just giving up and sitting down to die. The figure, Silleck discovered, was an Australian aborigine, who survived and prospered in this arid hell, before being again taken away by his tor. There were other scatterings of bones, and other desiccated corpses. But it was all too grim, and the interface technician took herself back to one of the furthest sensors resting in the Permian epoch, where she knew another torbearer had been observed, but even as her awareness arrived in this sensor she began to pick up the waves of disturbance travelling uptime and upslope, through interspace, and knew that something was coming.

Gazing across the waves to where the plesiosaurs were mating — rolling in the sea, their great flukes arcing up fountains of water, their long necks slamming against the surface, and then rising and intertwining—Tack found he had acquired a deep and secure certainty about so many things. Foremost was the conviction that Cowl had to die, there was no question of that, and any of the wretched Umbrathane who got in his way should be eliminated as well. Raising his gaze to the dome enclosing the aquapark, and to the hard starlight beyond, he felt impatient to be on his way. At the sound of someone stepping onto the viewing deck behind him, he turned whip fast.

‘Be calm, Traveller Tack,’ said Maxell.

She much resembled the woman who had slammed him against a corridor wall in Sauros. Her skin had that same amber translucence, though her eyes were blue and her hair a straight waterfall of white. But unlike the other, she would not be slamming him into any walls. For, since being taken offline from Pedagogue and coming out of the regrowth tank, Tack had quickly discovered that he was now the physical equal of many of the Heliothane, and superior to very many more. His musculature had been boosted, his martial skills greatly enhanced, and the body of knowledge now available to him was huge. However, he realized that many of these people still viewed him with hidden disdain, for to attain such new heights had required his body to be stripped down and totally rebuilt, with everything from bones being increased in density to cerebral grafts. He even possessed implants, which were anathema to them. Their pragmatic view was that if any man was not strong or clever enough to survive using his natural gifts, then he died—plain and simple.

‘What type of plesiosaur are they?’ Maxell asked him, nodding at the sporting creatures.

‘Elasmosaurus,’ Tack said quickly, giving them their twenty-second-century name despite her having asked in the language of the Heliothane, and despite his having access to over three hundred other languages.

Maxell frowned at this. ‘Still keeping to your old habits, I see,’ she said, now switching to the same language. ‘It appears we could not root everything out of you.’

Tack held up his left arm, displaying the tor, which had now attained full growth. ‘Does that really matter? I know what I have to do now, and you know that you can do no more to improve me. This thing on my arm started to reject once you tried genetic recombination. And no one else can wear it.’

He had been told that they had first tried to remove the parasitic scale from him in order to place it on someone else, but had failed. He also knew that, had they succeeded, he would have been dispensed with like so much garbage, and there remained in him a core of resentment over that. What puzzled him was why this knowledge had not been kept from him.

‘We already know why it started to reject. Cowl is using them to sample the future, so recombination would have defeated the tor’s initial purpose. It read your genetic code the moment it attached.’

She came up to stand right beside him and pointed down at the sea, where a huge shark was cruising past, doubtless attracted by the thrashing of the plesiosaurs. There was no guard rail along the edge of the platform, but that did not surprise Tack from a people who walked bare-faced through vacuum. The Heliothane did not coddle themselves with their technology. The lack of a rail was just another sign of their life view—if you’re stupid enough to fall in, you deserve to get eaten.

‘There will be sharks in that era, but no elasmosaurus—they were most prevalent in the late Cretaceous.’ She turned to look at him. ‘I sense you have been impatient, and wonder why we delay. The simple answer is that Engineer Goron’s shift back into the Jurassic has not been without some difficulties. Even now the tunnel has not restabilized, though we predict conditions will be ready for your transit through it in eighty hours.’

Holding up his tor-covered arm again, Tack asked, ‘Do I use this thing to take me from Sauros onwards?’ An implant kept the tor in abeyance, but he could still feel the thing’s temporal field webbing the inside of his body.

‘No, because your supplies will be limited by what you can carry, and though you can obtain food during much of your journey, there is still a large stretch of it where food would not be easily available. Saphothere will take you, by mantisal, as far back as he can.’

Tack was glad to hear that—if there was ever such a thing here, he considered the man his friend. Saphothere no longer showed disdain for Tack, rather respect. But then those entitled ‘Traveller’ were not so insular in their thinking as the rest of the Heliothane.

‘After that I go on by myself- and tear Cowl’s throat out,’ said Tack viciously.

‘Oh yes, certainly that.’ Maxell smiled.

Tacitus peered down through the spray at the rowers and damned himself for the sudden sympathy he felt for them: they were the spoils of war, slaves and the property of Rome, not citizens. Anyway, should they be freed from their chains their ending now would be no different from everyone else on this galley if it went down. In this sea they would all drown. He looked up to where the weird lights still played about the mast and reefed sail, asked a blessing from Mithras then made his way forward.