Neal Asher - Cowl

‘Well, say something, then,’ she said.

I’m just as confused as you. That is clearly a manufactured product, and nothing will be manufactured for—as far as I can judge—over a hundred and forty million years.

‘Could it be alien?’ Polly asked.

If you’d asked me that before this shower of shit happened, I’d have laughed in your face. Now I don’t know.

Polly stood and stared out across the sea, and observed in the distance flying creatures that she doubted were seagulls. Tossing the container down where she had left her greatcoat, she decided to sideline this puzzle until the growling in her gut had ceased, and fell to gnawing on raw squid. Finally, as the little creatures became less appetizing, she walked back, gathering up her coat and the puzzling container, and headed up to the rocky margin of the beach. Pausing there to shake out her coat thoroughly and dislodge the sealice that had crawled inside, her gaze wandered back towards the stream.

The monster loomed over two metres high, though stooped forward so its hooked foreclaws hovered just above the ground. Standing still as it was, its green-and-black-striped body blended into the vegetation behind it, but its numerous bright-white teeth were all too visible—as were its yellow catlike eyes. Polly ducked down instinctively and pulled out both the automatic, now getting a little rusty, and the taser. Huddling close as she could to the rock face, she slung her greatcoat over herself and kept very still.

I don’t think your automatic will do the job, Polly. But then I don’t suppose its designer had allosaurs in mind. I suggest you time-shift right now.

Polly concentrated on getting the scale do her bidding, but the webwork seemed logy and slack within her—as exhausted as she herself felt.

‘ I can’t—it won’t work,’ she subvocalized.

Nandru said nothing for a while, and when he did speak there was no reassurance in his words:

It’s been fun, then.

Polly could feel a vibration in the rock as the allosaur approached, then suddenly it loomed above her, and then crashed down onto the beach, spraying pebbles in every direction. The tip of its massive tail whipped past her face as it continued on down the strand to the tideline, where it sniffed at the piles of squid, decided they were good, and started gorging. Frozen in terror, Polly watched it feed. Perhaps she should try to get away while it was distracted, but she was so terrified she couldn’t trust herself to stand upright. Once the creature had emptied the tideline of squid, it turned to head back the way it had come — and came straight towards her.

The allosaur was about to leap up onto the small cliff behind her, but paused and tilted its head from side to side as if to check the view with each eye. Closer now, with its nose only a metre away from her own and its fishy breath huffing warm all around her, it took a long sniff.

Panting from exhaustion, Saphothere led the way to an escalator composed of that strange flowing metal, then to an open cylindrical elevator shaft containing a circular platform one step up from the floor. As soon as they mounted this, it accelerated upwards till the platform finally came level with the floor of a domed chamber, which Tack surmised must be at the very top of Sauros. The moment they stepped off it, the elevator dropped away, leaving an open well.

For the very first time, Saphothere seemed at a loss as to what to do next, and stood clenching and unclenching his hands and looking around him.

Goron was standing by a wide pillar of twisted vorpal glass from which sprouted transparent spheres containing multiple interior and exterior images of Sauros, as well as complex shapes: three-dimensional flow-charts and scrolling formulae which Tack now recognized as representations of ten-dimensional Heliothane technology. The Engineer’s right hand was pressed inside a sphere as his left manipulated a virtual control panel. Tack saw at once that Goron’s trouser leg was soaked with blood and that he had tracked bloody footprints around the column. Other personnel manipulated consoles, while still others were enclosed in other bizarre constructs of vorpal glass, and were standing at the edges of the chamber like the gods of a civilization of glass spiders. Saphothere glanced at Tack, then nodded to one side. They walked over to the windows surrounding the chamber.

‘How did Cowl do that?’ asked someone nearby.

‘There’s only one explanation,’ Goron replied. ‘Somehow he knew our field frequencies. That’s not enough for an all-out attack, but enough for assassination attempts. He simply rode in with the torbeast.’ Goron surveyed all those in the room meaningfully before returning his attention to his controls. Another man, throwing off virtual gloves in disgust, stood up and walked over to stand beside Tack and Saphothere.

‘Palleque,’ Saphothere acknowledged.

Tack studied the newcomer, who was tall, white-haired, and tough-looking. Though this individual had reptilian yellow eyes and a twisted mouth, he could have been Saphothere’s brother.

To Saphothere the man observed, ‘It would seem Cowl is somehow receiving inside information. He came through and killed Vetross—nearly got Goron as well.’

Saphothere nodded dumbly, seeming too tired to reply. Palleque glanced at Tack disdainfully and looked about to make some comment.

‘Incursion. One-seventy, two-ten and lateral.’ Tack presumed the voice came from one of those enclosed in vorpal tech.

Palleque grimaced. ‘Three hours earlier and Cowl would have really fucked us over. But the torbeast won’t be getting through now we’re up to power again.’

‘The push?’ Saphothere asked.

‘Yeah. Like riding the top of a fountain and everything gets scrambled. The constant energy feed can’t be switched, so the capacitors have to be drained to the limit before we can shut off and stabilize. Took us an hour this time before we could even get the defence fields back up.’

‘I don’t think I need to hear any more of this,’ said Saphothere and Tack could see that he was angry, gazing at Palleque with suspicion. Palleque shot a further contemptuous glance at Tack before returning to his console.

‘Silleck,’ Goron said abruptly, to the speaker who was warning of the incursion. ‘Don’t use the D-generators this time. Take a direct power-feed from one of the abutments and put a laser into the flaw.’

‘Level?’ asked Silleck, the woman with her head and shoulders concealed in insectile technology.

‘Megajoule range—I want to monitor. Should the incursion move in, I want the level to rise comparatively,’ Goron replied.

Tack stared out of the windows at the developing incursion—a pillar of heat haze opening out on the smoking landscape, his gaze veering aside to the charcoaled vegetation and to the leviathan corpses of a dinosaur herd. He watched the incursion swell and then the flaw develop, opening into that hellish alternate. But before the monster could fling out any of its feeding mouths, smoke began to pour out—glaring emerald in lased light.

‘Must be running out of energy,’ Saphothere opined.

‘What must?’ Tack asked.

‘The torbeast. If it had been coming through inside Sauros, as we saw it in the abutment chamber, Goron would not have been fooling about with lasers. He’s using the laser to measure the energy potential behind the rift.’

‘It’s not holding!’ Silleck yelled.

‘Put a tactical into it,’ Goron stated.

A missile whipped out from somewhere below and Tack shaded his eyes. Arc light flickered and, once it went out, he lowered his hand to watch the expanding firestorm. This rolled towards the city, eating up everything on the ground that was not already incinerated. Tack prepared to get away from the windows but, seeing that Saphothere showed no inclination to do the same, he held his position. The fire reached them, roaring across all around them, and Sauros itself shuddered. Then the flame drew back into the centre of the blast, sucked in by ground winds feeding the blazing tree that rose before them. A tree that in time lost its fire and became a smoky ghost. Then the incursion was gone.