Neal Asher - Cowl

‘Canolus always tended to be premature. What about Thote?’

‘Mid-Devonian. Took out a small percentage of its mass with a displacement sphere. Damaged his mantisal, however, and now we can’t locate him.’

Suddenly Goron felt very tired, but that was unsurprising considering he had been working non-stop for three centuries. ‘Get every weapon you can online, and send all non-essential personnel back through the tunnel. I want field walls projected out to one kilometre in every direction and displacement generators, set for proximity activation, scattered randomly in between. And if there’s anything I haven’t thought of, I want you to think of it.’

‘Every direction?’ asked Vetross.

‘Damned right. The rock underneath us won’t stop it—it would just need to go out of phase either physically or temporally.’

Vetross watched him hesitantly.

‘Have I missed anything?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then why are you still here?’

‘Because you are needed now, Engineer Goron. People are frightened.’

Goron turned back to the window and, resting his hands on his tool belt, sighed and stared at a view that he knew would soon be incinerated.

‘Impressive preparations, but it is all a matter of potential energy.’ The voice was utterly factual.

Goron turned. ‘Like I needed you to tell me—’ His words died in his mouth. Vetross was staring to one side, terrified, and Goron quickly understood her feelings.

Cowl was poised like an axle-spring stood on end, looming taller even than Vetross. Here was a nightmare they had lived with all their lives: a preterhuman of darkness and glass, utterly ruthless, utterly committed to his own ends. There was no question that death would result from this encounter. Cowl now opened the cowl over his face to reveal the nightmare underneath.

‘Go!’

Vetross shoved at Goron, simultaneously pulling a weapon from her coat. Goron pushed off from the wall, diving and rolling, taking his own devices from his belt. He glanced behind him, tossing an interface generator back. He did not question Vetross’s sacrifice, for both he and she had instantly calculated that for just one of them to survive this encounter, one of them must die, while the other must be extremely lucky. He dropped another generator, saw fire smear along one wall, and Vetross’s weapon spiralling away. Cowl’s hand was on her chest, sharp fingers penetrating between her ribs, then he slammed her round gunshot-fast into a window, cracking armoured glass and leaving a corona of her blood on it. Cowl was almost on Goron’s first interface generator when it fired up, slinging a wall of energy up before the dark intruder, but Cowl somehow pushed through it. The second generator went as Goron initiated a coded transmission while he ran. He threw a handful of seeker mines behind—bouncing down the corridor like ball-bearings. Another window smashed, then Cowl came rushing along the outside of the building like a spider. Goron turned into one of the access corridors. Smash again, and Cowl was now only a second behind him. Goron tore off a service-hatch cover and threw it in a flat trajectory at Cowl’s neck, then dived through the hatch, scattering more mines. Explosions, and the cover hurled back, slicing through his calf muscle. That sharp hand groped in after him just as the displacement field, which he had already set, initiated. The service chamber blinked out, and Goron rolled out into the control room of Sauros—ten seconds before he left the service chamber.

‘Change the defence frequencies right now!’ he bellowed coming to his feet and heading for the control pillar. His order was instantly obeyed. Then he operated virtual controls, calling up the immediate scene into the viewing gallery, saw himself turning, then a sudden distortion.

‘Anomalous warp—that’s impossible!’ someone said.

Five seconds later the distortion dissipated and Vetross was still dead. Cowl was gone.

‘That’s impossible,’ someone repeated.

Goron stared down at the pool of blood he was standing in, and didn’t have the will to get angry about such a ridiculous statement. Anything was possible—it was just a matter of energy, which Cowl evidently possessed.

It was vast, an animal so huge that its neck disappeared into the mist above the jungle every time it raised its head to crunch the vegetation it had torn from the low cycads. Leaf fragments rained down through the mist as it chewed, and they were the size of a car door. Its excrement would have totally buried Cheng-yi, and it could flatten him with one of its elephantine feet and not even notice. In his delirium he looked in awe on it feeding and wondered just how many tons of vegetation it could consume in a day. When it farted like a thunderstorm, he could not suppress mad laughter. His amusement soon ceased when the long neck looped downwards and it inspected him with piggy eyes.

Cheng-yi quickly backed away. But the dinosaur took a step towards him, knocking over trees as high as a house. He looked down at the musket he had stolen, and which had served him well enough when the world had still been sane, then he turned and ran. Dodging into a dense stand of cycads, he crouched in shadow, sweat trickling down from his queue and also soaking through his filthy clothing.

The monster shortly returned to its feeding, but the Chinaman’s nightmare was only beginning. He was no longer staring at the dinosaur. He was gaping in horror at the huge scorpion sharing his cover. Black and yellow, it was as wide as a spade, and he watched in panic as it scuttled round to face him, its vicious tail hooking up over its head. He backed away, and moved further into the undergrowth. But now, aware that the horrors here were not all reptilian, he began to notice other enormous insects: a bright blue dragonfly resting on the trunk of a giant horsetail, its armoured head the size of his fist and body the size of his arm, wings like sheets of fractured glass; a centipede the length of a python, and the colour of old blood, winding itself out from a hole in a rotten trunk; beetles big as rugby balls burrowing into leviathan turds; and some horrible clacking kin of the mosquito that kept trying to land on him, their probosces like hypodermics.

‘Go away!’ he shouted, and the jungle suddenly grew silent around him. It was in this quiet that his instinct for survival overrode nascent madness, and he remembered that the musket he carried was not loaded—emptied as it had been into the face of some grizzled forest monster, when the monsters had been still covered with hair. After thumping a rotting log with the butt of his musket, to make sure nothing was living in it, he sat down and, with sweaty shaking hands, reloaded the weapon. Then, feeling calmer, he moved on.

Seeing brighter light up ahead, Cheng-yi began trotting in the hope of getting out of the arboreal darkness. What he came upon was a band of devastation cut through the jungle. Tree trunks lay scattered everywhere on the ground, denuded of their vegetation. Peering to his right, he observed three more brontosaurs looming in the distance, bellowing to each other as they continued their forest clearance project. They rose up on their hind limbs to reach high foliage, their forelimbs resting against a tree until it just gave up and keeled over. Behind these giants a herd of lesser dinosaurs grazed on the remaining detritus of their passage, and behind them again, much closer to Cheng-yi, were carnosaurs—no higher than his waist—relishing the bonanza of insects exposed.

Cheng-yi knew at once that he must not let these smaller creatures see him. He stepped back into shade and kept moving. Soon he was no longer plagued by the mosquitoes, and the racket of deforestation grew distant. He stopped and, after checking it out for more leviathan insects, again sat on a fallen trunk. Resting his gun conveniently beside him, he took off his jacket to try and find some relief from the cloying heat. Closing his eyes he listened to the sound of a breeze sighing through the foliage, and found himself so weary he did not want to open his eyes again, did not want to move. Then a loud buzzing intruded. He flicked open his eyes just in time to anticipate an insect like a winged grey chilli pepper coming to land on his arm. He slapped it to the ground and, from under the trunk, a chicken-sized carnosaur darted out and snapped it up, then stood crunching it, while observing him with hawk eyes. Carefully, the Chinaman reached for his musket.