Neal Asher - Cowl

Fucking go! — over com.

Grabbing up the two packs, Tack allows the tor to take him, just as the woman with her ribs exposed hurtles down on him like a hammer. Night folds into another night. Tack glimpses the substance of the torbeast built up behind the incursion, like a forest trying to force its way through a keyhole. Hanging onto Tack’s jacket, the wounded woman turns her gun towards his face. His boot goes in below her ribs, into exposed intestines. Screaming, choking blood filling her mouth, she loses her grip and tumbles away into night.

A feeding mouth uncoils out of midnight and Hoovers her up. Ignores Tack completely.

Modification Status Report:

My daughter is a failure that nearly killed me while she was still in my womb. Obviously my decision to retain the alleles is the cause of this — those alleles displacing both wholly and partially the alterations I made. As she continues her growth in the amniotic tank, I see that she possesses no exoskeleton, merely a toughening and discoloration of the skin. Her sensory grid is viable, but nowhere near as efficient as planned for. Her interfacing organs have been stunted by the growth of those damned human features: eyes, nose and a normal mouth, and all the concomitant sensory apparatus to support them. She has also lost some of her bilateral symmetry, which I now see is due to the fiddler-crab gene I used to supposedly make alterations to her mouth. Sometimes I damn the lack of logic in genetic evolution, when a gene controlling eye colour might also control something like fingernail growth. My instinct is to flush the tank, but much can be learnt from this growing child and, having learnt, I will try again.

There was no real danger to him in venturing outside Sauros — other than the stringencies of the environment—since Cowl would never bother to expend the energy required just to hit an individual heliothant of Palleque’s minor status, so consequently there were no restrictions on such ventures for him. Had it been Goron out here it would have been an entirely different matter, for the Engineer’s assassination would be an utterly demoralizing blow for the Heliothane, as it had nearly proven. Pausing on a slope made spongy by centuries of ferny growth and decay, Palleque raised his monocular and gazed back at Sauros.

Goron rarely left the city and, even if he did, Cowl might be disinclined to attack, suspecting a trap. The recent attack upon the Engineer inside the city had been unexpected and nearly successful because Cowl had known the shield frequency, enabling the preterhuman to pass through the defences at a particularly vulnerable time. And now some pertinent questions were being asked at all levels of the Heliothane.

Hooking the monocular back onto his belt, Palleque removed a small locator and saw that he did not have far to go. The communicator was on the other side of the mountain, where he had established it in a body of granite. By now it would have grown its shielding of vorpal crystal all through the surrounding rock and would be ready to use. Glancing upslope he saw that the ferns ended where the cold wind had denuded the mountainside of vegetation. On reaching this firmer ground he picked up his pace. The Triassic push was a while away—on Sauros time — so he did not hurry because of that. He hurried because he realized time was running out for himself.

At the mountain’s peak he paused to look back at Sauros again, and considered how arrogant were so many assumptions about that place. Gazing down the rear slope, he observed a swathe of devastation cut through the vegetation by a herd of sauropods, and the ensuing activity which that elicited from the attendant carnosaurs. But that would represent no problem—he now recognized his surroundings and no longer needed the locator. The communicator lay only a hundred metres below him and, by taking the slope in long bounds, he shortly reached it.

Like the wing of a downed aircraft, the granite outcrop speared up from the spread of cycads crowding this west face of the mountain. Arriving there, he pocketed his locator and reached out to press his hand against the grey rock face. Immediately the stone took on a translucence and a vorpal manifold rose to the surface to meet and bind with his hand. In the darkness behind it, a beetle-black non-face turned towards him.

‘The attack was unsuccessful,’ said Cowl.

Palleque nodded. ‘Goron had made preparations of which no one but he was aware.’

‘He used a displacement generator.’

‘I’ve since learnt he had them placed at intervals inside Sauros, when it was first built in New London. I now have their positions mapped.’ Palleque took his palm computer from his belt and pressed its interface patch against the necessary position in the manifold, squirting the information across. As he took it away again, he scanned about himself, suspicion wrinkling his brow.

Cowl bowed his head towards something, then raising it up said, ‘For this to be of any use to me I will need to know a future, Sauros-time shield frequency.’

Palleque grinned. ‘Now here’s the good news. You won’t even need that. When Sauros—’

The energy discharge hit the rock like a thunderclap. Shrieking, Palleque staggered back, his hand pulling free of the manifold, but leaving most of its incinerated skin behind. Down on his knees he groped for his weapon with his free hand, while Cowl looked on.

Stepping out from the surrounding cycads came Goron and four other Heliothane.

‘You treacherous fucking snake!’ spat Goron.

Palleque pulled his weapon free, but another shot slammed into his bicep and spun him round, the weapon bouncing from his grasp.

Goron turned to the fading image of Cowl. ‘By all means, please, come and visit us. If you don’t, we’ll be coming for you.’

From Cowl there issued a hissing snarl. Goron raised his weapon and fired it straight into the manifold. The communicator fused on solid rock, all translucence behind it disappearing. Goron turned to his companions and directed two of them towards Palleque. ‘I don’t want him to die or suffer any unnecessary pain now.’ He glanced at the rock. ‘That will come later.’

She was coming out of it. Her legs felt cold and numb where they lay in the water, but at last she was able to move her arms a little and, driving her elbows into a scree of rock flakes and broken rainbow shell, she was able to drag herself clear of the cold brine and roll over onto her back. Then, still gasping, she gazed up at an anaemic blue sky smeared with washes of white cloud. Her body felt cored with lead, and as feeling returned to her extremities they felt bloated. But that core was diminishing with her every breath. Eventually she managed to heave herself up onto her knees and survey her surroundings.

The rock pool her legs had been soaking in was bright with anemones, odd shellfish, red algal growth and green weed like discarded tissue paper. She shuddered to see that it also was full of movement: trilobites sculled about in its depths like great flattened woodlice. This pool was just one amid many others left by the retreating tide, in a band of rock lying between the slope of the beach she was now kneeling on and the sand flats stretching out beyond to the distant spume of the sea. Nothing else was visible to her yet.

‘How did you do that?’ she managed, when she could get enough spit into her mouth.

I might as easily ask you the same question.

‘No but… you never said…’

Muse is linked deeply into you and it is linking deeper all the time. Perhaps two time-shifts back I became aware that its monitoring systems were connecting up with your… tor. The last time you shifted I saw… felt how you did it, and knew that I could do it too.