Neal Asher - Cowl

‘Come on, let’s get him onto Wasp,’ she decided abruptly.

For Polly only, Nandru said, Of course, I don’t think he’ll live that much longer if Cowl or the Umbrathane realize he’s still alive. And if they don’t know yet, they can find out soon enough.

Between them, Polly and Tacitus picked up Tack and dropped him into Wasp’s rear compartment. Studying him, Polly saw that his injuries were extensive. He certainly had a compound fracture of his ankle, for bone was sticking out of his flesh. Deep wounds in his chest were seeping blood, and the medscanner Tacitus had pressed against his neck showed his vital signs on the wane. But it was unlikely he would die irrecoverably because, even if his heart stopped, Wasp possessed the facility to plug into a person’s neck and keep an oxygenated haematic fluid circulating around the brain, which was all Aconite needed to maintain someone’s life—other repairs she could perform in her surgical facility.

They headed back towards their hostess’s home, glancing back occasionally to check for any activity apparent in Cowl’s citadel, but all remained quiet out on the sea as if, having spat out the indigestible remains of some meal, the place was now contemplating what to eat next. As they reached her home, Aconite and the others came out to meet them.

‘Another man,’ snorted Cheng-yi, before heading back inside.

Lostboy stared long and hard at Tack before something seemed to go click in his mind. He jerked his head up, pointing out to sea. ‘The beast.’ They all turned to look.

Polly had wondered at the earlier stillness and now realized why. The Umbrathane customarily ceased their constant maintenance of the citadel and fled to its interior safety chambers whenever Cowl summoned all the energy from the geological taps for the purpose of linking to the torbeast. Now, the very air around the citadel seemed full of distortions and hints of nightmarish shapes, where the beast encroached upon the real.

‘Coming after him?’ Ygrol asked, stabbing a thumb towards the unconscious Tack.

Aconite shook her head. ‘Cowl would not expend such energy. He’d just send Makali out here, or fire a missile direct from one of the citadel’s emplacements.’

From Wasp, Nandru said, ‘But not a coincidence, I’d warrant.’

‘Certainly not,’ Aconite replied. ‘Cowl is no doubt acting on information obtained from this newcomer.’ She was studying her palm screen. ‘Our friend here has been comprehensively mind-fucked.’

They carried Tack inside and laid him down on Aconite’s surgical table. Polly was the last to leave the room as Aconite began pulling her medical machines into place.

‘He’s the one I dragged back… the one who tried to kill me,’ she said.

‘So Nandru has informed me,’ Aconite replied. ‘Be assured, though, that this is not the same individual. The one who attacked you was a human automaton programmed by your controlling government. That automaton has since, unless I am mistaken, been reprogrammed by the Heliothane. And since then, again, has had his programs and much of his mind ripped apart by Cowl. I don’t know how much there will be left of him—he might be another Lostboy by the time I’ve finished.’

Polly gave a small nod and exited the room.

Its hunger was immense, but each time it fed it pushed itself even further down the probability slope, yet it knew that if it could somehow feed enough, things would change for it. Thinking, as it perpetually did, in five dimensions, it was aware that oblivion lay in both directions on this temporal line. Allowing its consciousness to fall into the past, it dropped back to its secondary inception—from when its consciousness had materialized in the Precambrian. Pushing into the future, it found long slow starvation in a world in which it was the only life form, resulting, at its death, in the truncation of that alternate in vorpal and thus temporal terms. Only here, holding its position in what it defined to itself as the now, where up-slope energy was being fed down to it, could it maintain temporal life. Now, and always now, the energy being fed to it was huge—and growing.

The Maker wanted something of it, as he always did, but the torbeast was never anything less than utterly grateful and adoring. Every time he wanted something, the opportunities given for feeding far outweighed any concomitant pain. On many occasions the beast had suffered loss of its mass through attacks from the enemy, but with side-branched feeders it hoovered up biomass from alternates further down the slope, and this, though not commensurate, satisfied sufficiently its endless urge to feed. But this time there was something different. The promise this time was of unrestrained feeding on the enemy, the life system of a whole alternate to denude, without consequence—billions of human lives and vast biomass, with which it could achieve… all.

Drawing on the energy font, the torbeast shoved its mass over those alternates it had previously denuded, and which had been the cause of its fall down the slope. It manifested thus in the skies of barren Earths—a glimpse of organic hell—then shifted on. On a world where the sea was occupied only by single-celled organisms, it flooded out around another energy font, drawing all of itself through as, over the span of millennia, the first font died.

The beast’s substance drew in from its secondary inception point, and in from that future of its own death. In a wave of living tissue, kilometres high, it flooded across a barren continent, ripping aside mountain chains and tearing up the plains before it. Storms dogged its progress, cloud formations boiling across the sky above it, and lightning walked across its flesh. Then, reaching the ocean surrounding the continent, this wave broke into a chaos of filter-feeding mouths like stalked whales, plunging into the waters and driving a second tsunami ahead. Spreading out into the oceans, it fed, sucking up biomass by the kilotonne, digesting lakes of organic slurry, driving on in a global apocalypse. Only the heat of volcanic vents diverted this progress, as did the steam explosion from a volcanic island chain now swamped by the wave. At the font its substance poured in slower then slower. Then, with a thunderclap that blew hurricanes across the beast’s heaving landscape, the flow ceased. But by then the torbeast had met itself on the other side of the planet, and it now wholly occupied this alternate Earth.

A grey-skinned woman stooped over him. He recognized her in some fragment of his mind. At the foot of the table he could see the fleshy squid-like tentacles extending from the carapace of an autosurgeon and he felt their wet touch on his leg. As the bioconstruct straightened his ankle, pain briefly laced together the elements of his sentience, and he found enough strength to yell out and jerk upright. A heavy three-fingered hand stilled his protest by the sight of it, even more than the pressure it exerted against his chest to push him back down.

‘You surprise me,’ she said.

He gazed at her disparate arms and couldn’t find any meaning in her words at first. Then something meshed in his mind and he understood.

‘Why?’ he grated. But the question was not directed at her. Why am I? Why is this? Why everything?

‘I see that your shut-off point is graded somewhat above that occasioned by your trauma. Deliberate but cruel augmentation I think.’

That meant nothing to him. He blinked and listened to the sound of a storm outside.

‘I’m Tack,’ he mouthed silently to himself, and wasn’t sure what that meant either.

His mind consisted of disconnected monads, now shaping themselves to each other and searching for connection. On some level he realized he was rebuilding himself, but not quite in the same way as before—like a demolished house rebuilt with the same bricks, a house would result but the individual bricks would not be in exactly the same positions. Foundations did remain, but Tack had memory of things that no longer controlled him, found voids, and sought structure. With all the rage and love of a living man he sought to be, and felt dread, and a terrible yearning.