Neal Asher - Cowl

‘There. The anaesthetic doesn’t work, but this will.’

Blackness interminable, filled with leviathan structures falling against each other and bonding. Then terrible thirst and a massive hand supporting his head to the cool rim of a glass against his lips. He drank cold water.

He’d earlier seen the girl Nandru Jurgens had used, and whom his Director of Operations had subsequently ordered him to kill, but that he discounted as hallucination. This grey-skinned woman, with her strange hands and penetrating golden eyes, he could not deny. He stared at her as she withdrew the glass, and operated some control to raise the backrest of the surgical table further, but then she moved away about her tasks amongst the esoteric machinery that surrounded him.

Now he observed his naked body. Pipes ran from his chest to a wheeled machine nearby, and fluids—dark, clear, bloody and translucent blue—ran through those pipes. He saw that the wounds in his chest were now just sealed lines and that the autosurgeon had withdrawn, leaving an organic-looking surgical boot enclosing his foot and ankle.

‘You’ve been unconscious for three days and I’ve repaired most of your internal injuries. The bone glue is very effective, but I wouldn’t advise any gymnastics just yet,’ the woman warned him, her back turned to him.

The voice was as calm and modulated as that of a professional killer, Tack thought. He wondered if it was this about her that bothered him, but, no, he hadn’t heard her voice before, had he? He realized then what was familiar about her. Though distorted, she had much of the physiognomy of another.

Cowl.

With a lurch of dread Tack instantly realized that Cowl must not see into his thoughts again. Now, Tack’s mind being in such different order, he realized that in his eagerness, Cowl had not delved deeply enough. The being had not heard the one called Thote saying, ‘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.’ And Cowl had not felt Tack’s later puzzlement at why he had not been provided with weapons capable of a distance hit, nor why he had been so ill-prepared for a fight involving time travel.

The woman turned to him. ‘Can you now speak?’

‘I can.’

‘Good. Cowl’s mind-fuck doesn’t usually leave behind anything human, but it would appear that your mind, being so accustomed to programming and reprogramming, has retained its facility for self-organization. I suspect this is because he reamed you through your interface, thus leaving many natural, unconscious structures intact.’

‘What are you to Cowl?’ he asked.

‘I’m his sister.’

Tack scanned the room for suitable weapons. Though a traitor, she was still Heliothane, so she would be strong and fast. But it seemed imperative he escape, and to do so it would be necessary to kill her. Then suddenly he felt how utterly wrong it would be to try and kill this woman who had tended to him, and his thoughts fell into brief confusion, out of which he re-arose, sick with anger. His immediate reaction had been caused by remaining emotional outfall from his Heliothane programming, but he should not think like that. Now he knew that he had never been an assassin, that from the very moment Saphothere had found him he had been manipulated: his sum purpose that of a sacrificial goat. He owed the Heliothane nothing.

‘Don’t let that worry you.’

For a moment Tack thought she was reading his mind, then he got back on track. ‘Your brother nearly killed me, and tore my mind apart. So I shouldn’t worry?’

‘No, Tack. What he did to you was a response to the assault upon him. I will not define that as your attack, because we both know you had no choice in the matter. And, anyway, the result of Cowl’s violence, whether intended or not, is that you are now alive in a way that you never were before.’

It was true. Tack could now make choices, decisions, and with all that came a concomitant confusion. Perhaps he actually owed Cowl more than he did the Heliothane? But no, what good Cowl had done for him was by default, and to sway in that direction would be like holding out the hand of friendship to a crocodile. From the beginning of his life Tack had never been able to choose sides for himself, to choose anything really. But now he possessed free will, so had to ask himself which side he might choose, and if he should choose any side at all. Just for a second he wished for the easier road of external programming. Just for a second.

‘Does Cowl know about what you have done?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t share my brother’s views, nor his hatred.’

‘Which side are you on—Heliothane or Umbra?’

‘My own, Tack.’

And there it was, and he made his choice.

Seeing this war from both perspectives, Tack realized, in the perspective now utterly his own, that he did not think anything could justify what Cowl had been doing—his negligent slaughter of the torbearers. And he was utterly aware that the information Cowl now possessed was precisely what the Heliothane wanted him to possess. However, Tack could not forgive the lies and the programming forced upon himself, nor the Heliothane’s ruthless extermination of the Umbrathane.

Asking himself which side he was on, he found his answer the same as Aconite’s: my own.

In interspace Saphothere murdered his mantisal by driving a tor thorn into its sensory juncture and breaking the thorn off. Shortly after this Meelan did the same, then also the third passenger, and they watched while the three thorns melded, then sprouted fibrous connections into the bioconstruct. By this means they subverted the process that would cause the tors they now wore to generate their own pseudo-shells and thus separate the three of them. Shifting back in time, they arrived in Silurian evening, unloaded their supplies and disembarked before the mantisal dematerialized. Then they made their camp in a shadowy clearing surrounded by tree ferns and arboreal gloom.

‘I feel as though I have killed a trusted pet,’ said Saphothere.

‘It was necessary,’ Meelan replied, as she watched the third member of their group move off with the collapsible water container.

‘I wonder how necessary. We are just a sideshow to the main event.’

‘Don’t get all maudlin on me, Saphothere. You know how important our sideshow really is. Cowl does not know the truth, which is why he has failed thus far to influence the future, but he could still send us all down the slope into oblivion upon learning that truth.’

‘Even without his pet?’

Meelan did not reply immediately as she had opened a rations pack and was stuffing her mouth with food. Eventually she said, ‘We know he has an energy source—he’s had three centuries behind the Nodus to prepare one—so he is still dangerous. We mustn’t forget that what he has made he can make again while he still lives.’

‘There is a second important—’ began the big man, returning with a filled water container, before his words were cut off by a cough. He started again, his voice grating, ‘There is another important aspect to our mission—access to tors.’

‘For “aspect” substitute “hope”,’ suggested Saphothere.

‘We have five to spare already,’ Meelan observed.

‘Of how many thousands that we’ll need?’ asked Saphothere.

‘Well, in that you are optimistic—you think so many will survive?’ Meelan asked.

‘Cowl will have a supply,’ said the third member.

‘See, more optimism,’ said Meelan.

The big man started to say something, but now broke into a longer fit of coughing.