Neal Asher: Cowl

Interdiction find.

A seeker round whined past her and hit a sapling just ahead, blowing it in half. Another round whined overhead, made a strange whuckering sound, then spiralled into the earth directly in front of her and exploded. She leapt the smoking hole and just kept on running. The shots were missing her and she just did not understand why.

Provish was right. In the fucking tower! In the t —

That was Airan, the remains of whom Tack passed only a minute later. The seeker round had taken off his head, which was especially unlucky for him because he, like Tack, had taken the precaution of wearing a moly-Kevlar undershirt.

Firing again at the girl dodging between the trees, Tack watched in amazement when the round—programmed to hunt her down—veered left and slammed into the remains of an old brick wall. With no time to check his weapon, Tack thumbed off its programming facility, took careful aim, and held his finger down on the trigger. Retaining their casings the rounds now went where he aimed. Trees flared and burning bark showered down, as the girl jumped a drainage ditch. Too many trees and she was moving fast. Tack sprinted after her, only to hear a familiar whining behind him. The round fired from the tower slammed into his back, knocking him face-down next to the ditch. He struggled upright and another round exploded on his chest knocking him backwards into the ditch. Briefly he caught a glimpse of the girl turning and sprinting back towards the ruins, then he blacked out.

Well, there went the super-killers and you are still in one piece, little Polly.

Gasping, Polly stumbled into the ruin and flopped down in some shade with her back against the breeze-block wall.

‘You fucking bastard, you nearly got me killed!’

Only a little bit and, anyway, you’ll get paid because now I have their money and their precious objet d’art.

Polly stared across at the thing he referred to and once again felt a powerful urge to just go over and pick it up—to slip it onto her forearm like a piece of baroque jewellery. What the hell was it? It looked organic rather than made, was a tube seemingly rolled from a holly leaf the length of a person’s forearm, that leaf itself fashioned of white and silver metal. As she contemplated it, she found herself standing, inexorably drawn to it. Somehow, it had the same attraction for her as a roll of drug patches. She could feel the yearning, the addiction…

I’ll be with you in a moment. Just you wait there for me.

Polly squatted by the object, reached out and touched it. Inside her something snapped shut and she knew exactly what she had to do.

Polly, keep away from that! I said, fucking keep away from that!

It was heavy. She had to take it up with both hands, and as she did her hands bled. The pain was ecstasy. She slid it over her right forearm. Skin peeled and flesh parted like earth before the plough. She screamed as blood jetted from slit arteries, and she fell to her knees.

Don’t! Don’t! It comes when you touch it directly!

Very quickly she ceased to bleed. She stared at the thing. It was bonding to her flesh. She could feel it bonding to the bones beneath. Looking up, she saw Nandru running towards her, his weapon braced across his chest.

‘What the hell have you done?’ he shouted.

The air distorted, and something harsh inside her dragged her upright. She could feel something washing through her like citrine fire. The drugs and the dullness they induced were going. Elements of her mind blossomed and opened out. True wakefulness hurt as no physical pain possibly could, and she understood why so many humans spent most of their lives fleeing it.

‘Oh Jesus.’

In the distortion Nandru turned to face a flaw in reality. The flaw opened out to expose two vast rollers of living tissue turning against each other. Polly realized they were land and sky composed of living flesh. Out of this, looming into the day, came a living door, throated with teeth and shadows, and lipped with razor bone—the horrifying terminus of some huge trainlike tentacle that stretched back into that landscape of flesh.

There came a roaring sound, a high-pitched keening, then the stench of carrion.

No! No! I don’t want to…

It closed on him, drawing him in

Casualty link established. Uploading…

Nandru was gone, eaten alive. She watched him go, torn apart and ground away.

Then the flaw snapped shut thunderously, and all distortion fled. Polly saw everything clearly now and did not for one instant believe she had been hallucinating. Just as she wasn’t hallucinating the killer, Tack, who was walking out of the trees towards her.

He was gaining on her. That first burst of adrenalin had taken her some way but she was quickly tiring. The thing on her arm had made her thoughts oh so clear, but it had not repaired a body damaged by years of drug abuse. Glancing back, she saw him raising and lowering his seeker gun as she dodged amid the trees. He was aiming at her legs, and in his other hand she saw the ugly glitter of a knife. Her shoulder clipping a tree, and with brambles tangled round her feet, she sprawled and knew terror. The killer was so close. Then he was standing over her, a look of cold satisfaction on his face, his mirrored eyes reflecting the surrounding green.

‘Get up,’ he said.

Polly looked into the mouth of the gun, then at the knife. As she stood he holstered the gun and she knew only panic at what he intended to do. She turned to flee as he stepped in with the knife held low for a disembowelling cut. He grabbed her arm, then grunted in pained surprise and released her. Glancing back while stumbling away, she saw he was walking after her now, knowing he had her. Polly had to escape. The flaw — that distortion. She felt herself reaching out with something within her that was linked to the thing on her forearm. Twisting that something, she fled in the only direction available to her and fell into waves of darkness below featureless grey. Screaming only blew what air remained from her lungs, and in her next breath she took in nothing. Then came a slow wrench as if she had just penetrated some meniscus. Suddenly she was face-down in cold and dark; salt water filled her mouth. Pushing down, her hands sank into slime. She jerked herself up, breathed and shook her head to clear her eyes, and found herself lying in a foot of sea water under the same trees as before. Only now the trees were without leaves and the air was cold. Heaving herself to her knees, she observed crabs scuttling away through the water nearby.

‘What is this?’ The killer was still with her, standing up to his calves in the water and looking around disbelievingly.

Then he focused on Polly once more. He stepped forwards, grabbed her by the arm that was not enclosed in the object, and hauled her fully to her feet. She tried to knee him in the testicles, but he turned his hip into the blow, and in a flash had the point of his knife poised just over Muse 184.

He tilted his head and said, ‘Tack here. Mission status?’

Polly watched his expression shift from puzzlement to outright disbelief.

‘What do you mean “doubled signal return”? Where’s my DO?’

Almost irrelevantly, Polly noticed that his clothing was torn and burnt away over his chest, exposing the body armour he wore. This then was how he had survived the seeker rounds Nandru had fired from the tower.

Bastard that… The voice whispered in her skull, its phrasing human but its tone machine-like. Perhaps all this clarity of thought was an illusion and she had recently taken some bad lysergic. But she must discount that possibility and react only to circumstances as she saw them. Right now she was a hair’s breadth from being killed. Certainly this man would think nothing of cutting her throat, then sawing off her arm to take the object wrapped around it back to his masters.