Neal Asher - Cowl

‘Everything I told you is true,’ said the man, his voice less quavering now.

‘Well… tell me what you were trying to do?’

‘Just take your supplies.’

Tack realized that fifty years alone here had also impaired the man’s ability to lie convincingly.

‘No, that’s not it.’ Tack hauled himself up onto his knees. Thote’s gaze flicked to Tack’s left forearm and quickly away. ‘It’s my tor you were after. But surely you know you couldn’t use it — it’s genetically keyed to just me.’

Thote’s expression wrinkled with contempt. ‘Is that what they told you, primitive? Is that their explanation to you for sending you alone on your pathetic mission?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Tack growled.

‘Like the girl who passed through here fifty years ago, you’re just a piece of temporal detritus. In your case primed and filled with poison, then sent on its way.’

Here was another one of those arrogant Heliothane, like others in Sauros and New London, who obviously thought Tack a waste of time and energy. With a kind of weariness he noted the old heliothant turning himself slightly sideways to present a smaller target. Any moment now he would try for Tack’s gun.

‘What girl?’ Tack asked, trying to forestall the inevitable attack.

‘She called herself Polly. Just another of Cowl’s uptime samplings.’

Polly.

Almost from the instant Traveller Saphothere had captured him, Tack had forgotten the girl who had been the reason for him ending up on this insane journey. He felt a sudden loneliness—a craving to be with someone from a more familiar era. Almost distractedly he watched Thote tensing to make his strike.

‘Don’t try it,’ Tack warned. ‘Tell me about this Polly. What did you do with her?’

‘Drugging her was simple,’ said Thote. ‘I put just a bit in the food I gave her, since I needed to keep her alive.’

‘Why alive?’

‘Because at the moment of a torbearer’s death, the tor itself begins to feed directly on the substance of its host’s body and thereafter shifts unremittingly back to Cowl.’

‘What happened?’

Thote looked momentarily puzzled. ‘She should not have been able to. The drug acts on the cerebrum first before paralysing the nervous system.’

‘She escaped?’

‘She…’ Thote fell forwards, his legs sagging, then abruptly he twisted round, the staff leaving his hand in a glittering wheel towards Tack’s head. Like a spring uncoiling, he then hurled himself forwards in a flat dive. It was well done, and had not time and bad diet left the man so weakened, he might have been a formidable adversary. But he was not quite fast enough. Tack ducked under the flying staff, sidestepped quickly and brought his gun butt down on the back of Thote’s neck. He stepped away as the man hit the ground, rolled and came up in a crouch.

‘No,’ warned Tack, but he wasn’t getting through. Thote had that look in his eye: he didn’t care. This was his last chance. Tack pulled the trigger as the man came at him again. Five rounds hit Thote square in the chest and flung him back. He collapsed in the cold ashes of his own fire, coughing blood from his shattered chest, then just tipped over into a foetal curl. Tack walked over to check his pulse; it was best to be sure. Confirming Thote was dead, Tack turned and picked up his packs, then went into the man’s hut to find somewhere to sleep.

Engineer Goron:

The fusion explosion was contained within the temporal barrier, but even so a wash of radiation bled through the phase change. It did not take long to calculate that the bleed-over was not concomitant with the explosion that utterly erased Callisto. Had this been the case, the entire Jovian system would have been irradiated. It is certain that the bulk of the vast energy output from the explosion powered a time-jump no one believed possible. Cowl has taken himself all the way to the Nodus and, as far as we can ascertain, the Umbrathane fleet is scattered throughout the ages between then and now. The spatial shift, predictably, was towards Earth. I have to admit that what the Umbrathane might do does not bother me greatly, as I have little doubt that their ships will be unusably radioactive and so will need to be abandoned. But Cowl … a creature capable of snuffing out four hundred million lives so easily? Even the two Umbrathane prisoners, Coptic and Meelan, agree that something must be done now, probably because their troops also died when Callisto was obliterated.

In the rock pools there were trilobites and white slugs with hinged shells on their backs. Feverish, and aching with hunger, Polly caught both types of creature by hand, and swallowed them still alive and kicking.

Disgusting, Polly, absolutely disgusting.

Nandru was standing right behind her, for she could see his reflection in the water. But when she turned, he evaporated. She gulped down more, stuffing the horrible creatures into her mouth, all briny and stinking while her teeth chomped through their green-packed innards. Eventually she forced herself to her feet.

The sea had begun rushing back across the plain of frozen lava, and not wishing to be caught by the fast-approaching tide, she turned back towards the foothills. She was aiming for a patch of still-warm lava back there, where she had slept much of the previous night, but the tor would not allow her this luxury. Its webwork turned steely inside her and dragged her down like a claw. She shifted yet again through night, in a cage glowing incandescent, to a place barren and hammered by filthy rain. There she managed to drink her fill of bitter water, then was shifted again. In another place, duned with black sand, she staggered towards a horizon, where she hoped to find relief, something. Inside her greatcoat her ribs were now protruding. At her side walked Nandru, a frown puckering his brow.

I think it knows you will find no food here, and thus nothing to nourish it with, so it is feeding on you—using you up, killing you.

‘Help me.’

And how is he supposed to do that, young lady? He’s only a hallucination.

The boat captain, Frank, was standing there, chuffing on his pipe, Knock John naval fort standing tall in the sands behind him. Polly supposed that the droning in her ears must be the sound of bombers flying over.

‘Stop it… make it stop.’

I cannot, and if I could, how would you live here?

That was Nandru, really speaking to her. She stared at the great maunsel fort and realized she was only seeing memory, not reality. When Fleming, the man from military intelligence, eyed her, seeming about to ask a question, she turned away from him. And in doing that she saw her own footprints stretching ahead of her, and realized she had been walking in a wide circle. As if impatient with this impasse, the tor shifted her again. And the nightmare not only continued—it grew worse.

Polly was too exhausted, too utterly depleted to care any more, and knew that the future span of her life encompassed maybe this shift and one more, but no more than that. Her clothes were now as baggy on her body as her skin was on her skeleton. She was like a fleshless waif staggering out of Belsen, whom food would probably not prevent from dying. Around her the glassy cage glowed incandescent, as if she had been trapped within tangled rods of white-hot steel, and she could see little beyond it. The shift back into the real she felt as a violent sideways motion, reminiscent of that preceding her arrival in Thote’s time. Around her the world bled back into existence, in shades of iron and glass, but the cage did not dematerialize. Instead it dropped to a flat metallic surface, deforming on impact as if made of dough, while vapour began to pour from it. Within the vorpal struts the glow faded down to red filaments, as the glass itself began to splinter and crack. Polly weakly nudged at one strut and it snapped like a sugar stick. Just then a figure loomed over her and began tearing open the rest of the cage.