Neal Asher - Cowl

Saphothere looked wasted: his face skeletal, eyes sunken and lips drawn back from his teeth. His skin was icy and there was no heartbeat. Tack ripped open a pack and removed the medkit. Finding what he wanted, he pulled open Saphothere’s shirt, placed a pulse tag against his neck, then, in a technique unchanged in millennia, injected adrenalin directly into the traveller’s heart before placing a discharger against his chest. The light on the discharger flicked to green and Saphothere’s back arched. It went red and he collapsed. Green again, then again, then the discharger shut off—the pulse tag on his neck now displaying the hesitant thump of his heart.

Tack rocked back on his heels and looked around. They were again at the edge of a forest, which seemed their mantisal’s favoured location for bringing them out of interspace, as it gave them an easy option for avoiding hostile fauna. The dusty plain was African red and scattered with scrub and trees similar to acacia, but with yellowish needles rather than leaves. The forest rim was a dense wall of conifers and the occasional giant club moss, from which issued strange hoots and slithering movement. There seemed no immediate danger, but Tack made sure his gleaming new Heliothane carbine was ready to hand before returning his attention to Saphothere.

The diagnosticer revealed dehydration, starvation, cracked ribs, and the fact that both Saphothere’s radius and ulna were broken. The traveller’s spine still being intact, Tack dragged him back beside the tree and made him comfortable with a heat blanket and inflatable cushion, before setting up a drip to feed him a mixture of saline, glucose and vitamins. He then took out a scalpel and, with no more ado, sliced open Saphothere’s forearm, rested one knee on the hand and pushed and twisted to get the bones, now visible, into position. He then set two bone clamps in place before using an organic glue to stick the split flesh back together. There wasn’t much blood, but then Saphothere’s heart was beating at a rate barely noticeable.

Now, with as much achieved as he could manage, Tack took time off to assess their situation. It was possible that the mantisal would never be coming back. Its cataclysmic arrival here might have been due to Saphothere’s loss of control, or the distortions in interspace caused by the battle around Sauros, or it might be because the mantisal had been damaged by those distortions, into which it needs must return. This being the case, Tack knew he would have to leave Saphothere here and continue his mission alone. All that was required was for him to take his implant offline and allow the tor to take over.

But not yet. Despite their violent first encounter, and Saphothere’s subsequent contemptuous treatment of him, Tack now felt he owed the traveller. This feeling was not due to programming, which was now such that his mission came before all else, but due to the way Saphothere’s treatment of and regard for Tack had slowly changed.

Taking up his carbine, Tack stood still and looked around. There was food in the two packs, and in the two others still strapped inside the mantisal, but it was necessary to save that for the latter stages of the journey when food would not be available. But Tack was also aware that when Saphothere awoke food would be his primary need. At a rough guess he supposed them to now be in the early Jurassic or late Triassic age, so there should be plenty of meat available at least. The only problem was that this available meat might well regard them in the same light, so Tack could not leave Saphothere’s side. Glancing up, he saw a flock of pterosaurs flapping over and considered taking a potshot at them, but they were very high and the chances of bringing one down close enough were remote. Refocusing, he saw that the tree above him contained fruit resembling mangoes. Accessing the huge body of knowledge Pedagogue had loaded into his mind, it took him some time to elicit that he was contemplating the outer glossy coats of a fruit much like the walnut. Propping the carbine by the tree, he jumped up to catch a low branch and hauled himself higher. Climbing with ease and speed, he pulled out his Heliothane carbide hunting knife to cut the fruit open and sample it. It was so unripe and bitter he spat it out, then tossed the fruit itself away. Where it thudded into the dust, the first of the three herrerasaurs emerging from the forest dipped its nightmare head for a sniff—before continuing to stalk towards Saphothere.

Tack just reacted, dropping ten metres straight down to land on the monster’s back. The spine gave way under him with a dull crack, one of the long hind limbs splaying out at an angle, but its tail still whipping from side to side. Tack’s boots slid down either side of its back ridge, and he hooked one arm under its chin and wrenched its head back, terrarium stink in his nostrils, then drew his knife across its throat, the hot blood gushing over his hand. He rolled away in time to see a second herrerasaur coming at him, its mouth open in a gushing hiss. He cut at it, sending it dancing backwards, and turned to see the last of the three stamp over its writhing companion to leap towards him. His knife angled in the wrong position, he instead caught the loose skin of its throat wattle in his other hand, and shoulder-rolled the monster, head down, into the other assailant. Both uninjured herrerasaurs went down in a dusty squirming tumble, then came up snapping at each other, but with almost telepathic consent turned on Tack again. He realized these two were just not going to stop. Any mammal might have given up by now, but these things represented ferocity honed down to its most basic elements. Snarling, their heads dipped only half a metre from the ground, they advanced. Almost regretfully Tack started to reach for the Heliothane handgun holstered at his hip.

Then the ground before him erupted in a blinding flash, throwing the closest monster back, blinking in confusion. A second then a third detonation followed, eventually causing the creatures to turn tail and run.

Leaning up against the tree, holding Tack’s carbine, Saphothere croaked, ‘Can’t… leave you for a second.’ With its snub barrel he indicated the dying herrerasaur—before sliding down the trunk and slumping back into unconsciousness.

Silleck hung exhausted in her vorpal connectware, watching the torbeast withdrawing into ancient past and lower orders of probability, just as she watched Vetross falling further and further down the slope.

Irretrievably dead.

Silleck had but a moment to contemplate that before she became aware of the tachyon signal coming in, using vorpal sensors positioned throughout the wormhole as stepping stones. It was a single private transmission for Engineer Goron, so the interface technician knew it could only be from Maxell—no one else had the pull to send messages this way. Momentarily shutting out exterior connections, she watched the engineer receive the communication then head away. Connecting back in again, she tracked him away from the control room and into the immediate future, where he summoned a mantisal and embarked along the wormhole and she wondered why he had been summoned to New London now.

It was over then. Goron’s departure signalled more than anything that there would be no further attacks from either Cowl or his beast for the present. Silleck considered disconnecting as she was so tired, but like many of her kind she was addicted to this near omniscience. Godlike she threw her awareness back to a vorpal sensor she had abandoned when the attack had begun, and tried to find what she had merely glimpsed. The sensor she turned a hundred-and-eight degrees into interspace, and there saw the Neanderthal hurtling along in the silver cage of his pseudo-mantisal.