Neal Asher - Cowl

‘It hurts,’ was all Polly could say in reply.

The other woman shook her head, muttering something that sounded foul, then stepped back towards some thing squatting behind her. Polly felt her skin crawling when she got a good look at it. The size of a pony, it rested on four spiderish legs, its jointed neck jutting forward from the thorax, then slanting back to support a wasp-like head the size of a football. The thorax itself was translucent green and packed with circuitry in which lights constantly glinted. The wasp-striped body behind was covered by nacreous wings which the woman lifted up, like the lid of a box, to delve inside. Removing something from the robotic insect’s body, the grotesque woman came and squatted down beside Polly, indicating her injured arm before holding out a cylinder that hinged open in two halves to reveal a moist interior that seethed. Polly instantly made to back away from it.

She’s trying to help you, Polly. That’s some kind of wound dressing, I’ll bet.

Reluctantly heeding Nandru, Polly held out her injured arm and the woman closed the cylinder round it. At first there was alarming movement and pain then, thankfully, her arm abruptly numbed. Grabbing Polly’s upper arm, the woman hauled her to her feet.

‘Abas lo-an fistik trous,’ the woman said, then shook her head. Abruptly she reached over to Polly’s hip bag and neatly opened it with her twin-thumbed hand. Taking out Polly’s taser, she inspected the device for a moment before returning it and sealing the hip bag shut. That reminded Polly the automatic was still in her coat, but she felt no inclination to go back for it.

The troll woman then spoke words in what sounded like Chinese, then Russian. Finally she said, ‘Century human what is?’ before going on to try another language.

When Polly finally figured she had been asked a question, she replied, ‘Twenty-second.’

The woman paused, then said, ‘You are lucky… to be alive. Few attain… this… location, or survive long after their arrival.’

‘Why…?’ Polly asked, not sure exactly what she was asking.

‘Cowl normally kills before discarding. He must have been distracted—either that or he does not care any more.’ Suddenly the woman’s speech was totally lucid.

Polly stared at her rescuer in bewilderment.

‘It is complicated to explain. You will not be able to walk?’ Testing her theory, the woman released her grip—then caught Polly as she began to slump. ‘I see not.’ Abruptly the strange female ducked briefly and, slinging Polly easily over one shoulder, she stepped to the insectile robot and dropped the girl down on her feet beside it, gesturing to the compartment revealed by the hinged-up wings.

‘Not comfortable, but it is either that or on my shoulder.’

Polly nodded and the woman helped her into the cramped compartment, her legs dangling over the rear. Glancing round, she saw the robot’s head turn to inspect her briefly, then tilt slightly, as if in query, before facing forwards again. As the woman moved off, the robot followed her dutifully, the sharp tips of its legs driving deep into the ground in sequence. It moved just like an insect, and utterly silently, with no hydraulic sounds, no hiss of compressed air. Polly had half expected to be thrown from side to side, but the compartment remained precisely level all the time.

The woman led them away from sand and out across a fragmenting lava flow. Orange-brown clouds now scudded across the yellow sky and, to Polly’s right, the sea in which she had so nearly drowned reflected those colours. Wavelets foamed on a reef of jagged stones, and beyond, where the coast curved round, she now saw a huge flower-shaped citadel, from which she had obviously been ejected earlier.

Simulacra of life—excepting Cowl and this one here—and nothing else. Seems you have finally reached your destination.

‘And now what?’ Polly subvocalized.

Has anything really changed? You must just try to stay alive.

‘Maybe that’s not enough any more. Maybe I’d like to do something about that faceless bastard that fucked me over.’

A fatal course of action, I would suggest.

Polly gritted her teeth in growing anger.

With the pseudo-mantisal fighting against ablation with an outpouring of energy, Tack knew this would be the last shift, so he prepared himself. The ultraviolet light baking the Earth would be no hazard for him, since part of his augmentation had been an artificial epidermis resistant to such radiation, but the lack of oxygen was a problem. He donned the hated mask, before closing up his pack and shrugging it onto his back. With his carbine dangling before him on its strap, and the Heliothane U-sound injector clasped in his right hand, he now concentrated on the vorpal view of interspace. Cowl’s tor trap was likely to be automatic, so whether or not Tack was expected, it would try to drag him quickly down into Cowl’s abode and that Tack must not allow. He wanted to reconnoitre, get the feel of his prey’s location, then come at him from some unexpected direction. He no longer felt any great impatience or eagerness for his task, just a stolid determination reinforced by seeing the Elizabethan corpse back there. Above all, Cowl had to die because of the suffering he had already caused and because of what he intended.

The hyperspheres and infinite surfaces, the lines of light and impossible distortion appeared in Tack’s perception and he saw, in 3D representation, the trap swaying towards him like the funnel of a tornado. With rigid will, he grasped control of the webwork inside himself and forced the tor and its generated mantisal aside from the approaching funnel and down into the real. The webwork fought him, like a horse being urged at too high a jump, but Tack’s will was strong because, his physical being having been bolstered by food concentrates, the tor had not managed to weaken him with the lethal parasitism that became usual at this late point of the journey. The pseudo-mantisal evaded the funnel, folded out of interspace and bounced, splintering, onto a dusty plateau. Shattering all about him on its second bounce, it began to ablate as if hit by a molecular catalyser.

As the construct disintegrated, Tack tumbled out of it in a roll. Then he was up and running, the tor so tight around his arm it paralysed his hand. He dodged into a dried-out gulley eaten down through friable rock, then along its course and came up between butts of black volcanic rock. Glancing back he saw a white rocket flame curving out from the horizon, impelling a black polygonal container. The missile hit at his arrival point, and detonated, blowing up a pillar of fire that rolled out clouds of dust.

Tack allowed himself a nasty grin—in his paranoia Cowl had given away the location of his refuge. All Tack had to do now was track back along the missile’s trajectory.

Tack now stripped off his pack and slid down, with his back resting against the black rock, then pulled up his sleeve and studied the tor. It was a boiled-lobster red now, having filled itself with his blood as it sucked in the energy to fling itself to its intended destination. Inside him he could feel the webwork hardening again quickly. He pressed the injector against the tor’s hard surface, feeling a brief vibration, then removed it to see a spill of chalky powder around a cluster of pin-holes, through which the catalytic poison had just been injected. Slowly the tor began to change colour, veins of black spreading across its surface and its rubescence fading to white. Inside him, Tack felt the web was dying—retreating from his extremities. Eventually the tor hung dead on his arm.

Taking up his pack again, Tack strode through the billowing dust clouds from the explosion, and set off in the direction of the missile’s source. After an hour he reached the edge of the plateau and there made his camp—concealed behind a boulder starred with large quartz crystals. Inside his tent, well sealed against the external atmosphere, he paused to eat and drink his fill, before stepping outside, safely masked again, and heading to the plateau’s rim. Before him lay a plain veined with rivers, encroached on from one side by a field of frozen lava. Broken rock was scattered everywhere, the detritus of some ancient cataclysm.