Neal Asher - Cowl

Suddenly Polly felt invaded by the presence of Nandru—something she had never felt before while all she could hear was his voice. Even when attending the calls of nature she had not felt his scrutiny, as he seemed to retreat to some place of his own on such occasions, as if only making his presence felt when she required it. But then she decided she was being histrionic. Nandru had just rescued her from having the tor cut away from her—along with a chunk of flesh sufficient for Thote’s purpose — so he had probably saved her life.

‘Thank you,’ she said, at last heaving herself to her feet and getting a wider view of her surroundings.

Polly was now seeing what she would have called desert, or perhaps tundra, for only these landscapes did she associate with such an absence of life. However, the temperature here was that of a balmy spring day, and the air felt neither freeze-dried nor baked dry of moisture. Under these conditions, the landscape — strewn with boulders, drifts of powdered and flaking stone, blackened with falls of volcanic ash and divided by a sparkling river—should technically be burgeoning with life. The only evidence of such was the occasional smear of green to leaven a monochrome vista. Walking woodenly, Polly headed for the river.

There was nothing alive in the sparkling torrent. Stooping down, Polly scooped up water in the container, and drank. The liquid was cold and tasted of soda. She hadn’t drunk anything so sweet in… a long time. She then refilled the container, pocketed it, and headed back for the seashore, wondering when she would die of shellfish poisoning.

With his breath held, and his understanding of the tor’s operation complete, Tack willed it to materialize its pseudo-mantisal. But that failed when a lack of breath forced him to will it back into the real. He folded out of interspace in midair, the straps of each pack grasped firmly in each hand, and plummeted into reedlike growth and lukewarm water. Then, treading over a mat of rhizomes and stirring up black silt, he waded towards an island made of either mud or rock, which he had glimpsed as he fell. An hour later, exhausted, and with hunger engendered by the parasite on his arm eating into his guts, he reached the mudflat abutting a contorted hook of stone. Crawling up across the muddy slope, still dragging his packs behind him, he finally reached the remains of a lava flow and rested gratefully.

Saphothere must already be dead, or rather would be dead some indeterminate time in Tack’s current mainline future. It didn’t help to contemplate that too deeply as, without expending amounts of energy not available to the Heliothane this far back, time travel was not accurate enough to correct such errors—to save Saphothere’s life. Now only the mission remained.

After a moment Tack stood up. Some distance ahead a gigantic tree reared out of the green battle between horsetails and ferns in a wayward promontory of forest hemmed in by the endless sea of sword-shaped emerald reeds. Gazing at this scene, Tack felt disquiet: that tree was not the right shape, the horsetails were tentacles beating at the ferns in seasonal slow motion, and the ferns themselves grew chaotically from their rhizome trunks. This seemed brute growth without complexity, a war rather than an environment, as if balance of coexistence had yet to be found. And the reeds were like dumb spectators to it all.

Just one glimpse was enough to tell him that he had arrived in the Devonian age. Here he knew that there might be a few tetrapods about, but that those ferns were loaded with cyanide, there was no fruit of any kind, and that all available tubers would have the consistency of saturated balsa and be as nourishing. He moved over to the other side of the lava flow, where it plunged down into deep water, and washed the mud from his suit. Returning above, he opened his supply pack, took out his concentrated rations and, seated on the stone, staring down the mudflat, began methodically to fill himself. He was very hungry. His tor was hungry.

As Tack understood it, a mantisal consumed a similar amount of nutrition from its temporary host as did a tor, and the length of its time-jump was also commensurate. But while the mantisal also needed to charge itself like a huge capacitor, the tor did not. It was a fact the Heliothane did not like to admit, that the tor was as far in advance of the mantisal as the hydrogen-powered aircar was in advance of the Model-T Ford. Without recharging, the mantisal jumped inaccurately—the error could be as much as a hundred million years. The tor always jumped accurately and greater control could be exerted at the point of exit. The only problem with the tors was being programmed to jump only in one direction in time: back towards Cowl. No heliothant had yet managed to change that programming.

While he continued eating, Tack noticed movement in the shallow trench his progress had left in the mud. Creatures similar to mudskippers were flopping and bubbling out of the water, gobbling up something he had disturbed to the surface of the mud. Which one of those might it be, he wondered. Could it be the one over there the size of a mature salmon, or the one with the purplish warty skin and eyes like tomatoes? Or was it this little one with whitish skin, sunken eyes, and large flippers that propelled it across the mud at such speed? Which one was his grandad a billion times removed? At that point the white one got too close to the warty one, and the ugly fellow snatched it up and chomped it down, so Tack assumed the warty one was the more likely candidate. This was life on land in the first days—beginning as it meant to continue.

Contemplatively Tack bit off a lump of protein concentrate and threw the remains out to the creatures. They slopped themselves away from it at first, then after a short time circled back in and began fighting over it. Eventually the warty one scuttled off with the prize in its thick lips. Replete himself, and then some, Tack set up his tent, crawled inside it, wrapped himself in the heat sheet and was instantly asleep.

With her regenerating arm locked around his neck and the snout of her weapon jammed up underneath his chin, Saphothere felt he was no longer in a position to resist Meelan. Thus sprawled on the ground, the both of them observed the incursion folding itself back into a fuzzy line in the air, as it closed then disappeared.

‘Right, get up. Put your hands on your head,’ Meelan hissed. ‘One wrong move and you know what will happen.’

She drew away from him, keeping her weapon aimed at his back, and stood waiting while he assumed the position. His carbine lay on the ground only a metre to the side of him, but even as he glanced at it two Umbrathane women stepped out from different parts of the jungle and began jogging up the slope. As they converged on the campsite both of them studied Saphothere with evident hostility.

‘Iveronica,’ Meelan acknowledged the woman Saphothere recognized as the leader of the Pig City Umbrathane.

Stepping forward Iveronica said, ‘I saw Coolis go, but what about the rest?’

The other woman, who could have been Meelan’s double, but for the fact that her lower jaw had been replaced by a metallic prosthesis, hissed, ‘Golan was dragged through with the tor-bearer. Olanda is on his way.’

Saphothere grinned at the jawless woman. ‘What did you say? That wasn’t very clear.’

Meelan belted him across the back of the head, knocking him down on all fours.

‘Soudan, we need him.’ Iveronica restrained the jawless woman, whose carbine was now trained on Saphothere’s midriff. ‘Put it up.’

‘What do we need him for?’ Soudan lowered her weapon. ‘Cowl has given us our way to him and soon all Heliothane will be extinct.’ She gestured to where the incursion had appeared earlier, and where eight thorny objects were scattered on the ground.