Neal Asher - Cowl

‘I’m sorry I tried to kill you,’ Tack said emotionlessly.

He’s sorry. Well, that cuts no mustard on my fucking beef.

‘Go away, Nandru.’

Well, excuse me.

Polly felt the presence of Nandru fade as he took the other option now available to him: shirting his awareness into Wasp.

‘Are you really?’ she sneered at Tack.

He looked confused for a moment, pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead, then went on, ‘I killed Minister LaFrange, Joyce and Jack Tennyson, Theobald Rice and Smythe. I cut off Lucian’s fingers one by one until he told me the file-access code at Green Engine, and then I gutted the guard who tried to stop me breaking in there.’ Then he looked up, staring past her as if at something beyond the wall of the tent and beyond this time. ‘The bomb in the protest meeting against U-gov killed forty-eight people and maimed twelve.’

He fell silent, and she knew he was enumerating further killings and tortures in his mind.

‘Why did you come out here?’ she asked, uncomfortable with the ensuing silence.

His gaze tracked across to her. ‘I needed to think.’

‘Nice thoughts you have,’ she observed.

He flinched. ‘How could they be otherwise? I’ve led such a nice life.’

‘But it wasn’t exactly your fault,’ Polly conceded.

His stare was blank. ‘Yes, I accept that I had only as much control over my actions, before the moment Cowl took my mind apart, as any other machine. But that doesn’t help. It was me who planted that bomb. It was me who raped the teenage daughter of a certain terrorist, to force him to come after me. It was me who led him into a trap and blew his kneecaps away, me who worked him over with scopolamine, a scalpel and pliers, until I had extracted the required information. And it was me who then tied a kerbstone to him and dumped him off the New Thames Barrier.’

‘Did he deserve it?’

‘She didn’t.’

Polly was at a loss. She had followed him here expecting the man to be involved in something nefarious—and perhaps to have the satisfaction of putting a cluster of explosive bullets in his back in repayment for past intended hurts. But this was something else, though what she did not yet know. Maybe he truly felt remorse, or maybe that was just what he wanted her to think.

‘So you have suddenly become such a moral human being?’ she queried.

Tack snorted. ‘It’s not morality—it’s empathy. I cringe when I remember the things I did. I can still hear the sound of the wirecutters going through Lucian’s fingers and the sounds he made. I can remember the girl’s fear, then disbelief, then pain, every word she said to me while she begged for mercy, and I can see how I destroyed something essential.’

Polly sat back and crossed her legs, wondering at her own reaction. She had never killed anyone, but she had caused pain because of her lack of empathy. As for morality, previously she had never known the meaning of the word.

‘Aconite told me that’s the true mark of a criminal,’ she murmured.

‘Cruelty?’ Tack asked.

‘No, lack of empathy. The true criminal cannot conceptualize the experiences of his victims. He cannot feel their pain, or in any way understand their trauma. The true criminal is not a social creature. We were discussing her brother at the time.’

Tack shook his head. ‘In U-gov terms, I was not a criminal. I was merely their agent—the ungloved hand of their justice.’

‘They were the criminals,’ said Polly. ‘What they did to you was in many ways as bad as the things you inflicted on others. They suppressed your humanity and made you their absolute slave.’

‘Knowing who to blame doesn’t make me feel any better. There’s a grey area… Why didn’t I kill that terrorist cleanly rather than let him drown?’

‘Perhaps you felt his actions justified that punishment?’

‘Perhaps.’

Polly gazed at him for a long moment as he stared at his hands. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Tell me all those things you did.’

He looked up at her, a faint smile twisting his features. ‘Catharsis?’

‘Maybe.’

And so, in terse, leaden sentences, Tack told her. When he had finished, Polly reached out and pressed her hand down on his.

‘Where do we go from here?’ Tack asked.

Confused by what she was feeling, Polly leaned forwards and kissed him on the lips. For a moment it appeared he did not know how to respond, then he reached out to press his hand against the back of her head, returning the kiss with a kind of desperation.

Sorry to break up this romantic moment, but a shitstorm just arrived.

Polly sometimes wished Nandru had a face she could slap.

Modification Status Report:

That pain again. Perhaps I should have removed him at the foetal stage and continued his growth in the tank as I did with Amanita, but in me there is the abiding instinct to nurture my creation. Perhaps it is only that I should have made some modification to my womb to withstand the abrasion of his hardening carapace. Blood tests have shown that, unlike his sister, he is not poisoning me. His prematurely developed immune system is so alien it does not seek to attack his mother, whereas hers was just human enough to recognize the vessel that contained it. But there’s something… I am reluctant to run another scan, as that process in itself can be damaging to delicate tissues, and truthfully I do not want to find out if there is anything going wrong.

Damn… it’s just not stopping… getting worse… must scan… must…

As he ran the whetstone along the edge of his gladius, Tacitus could see that Cheng-yi was angry. The man was angry at Polly’s continual rejection of him, angry at the low regard in which Aconite held him, and now he was angry that all his hard work to teach mahjong to the Neanderthal was paying off- for Ygrol was beating him. But the Chinaman would not start getting openly offensive—he’d tried that once with Ygrol already and suffered concussion for the following three days. The Neanderthal tended to react either with smiling delight or with his club. There was no middle ground.

Living up to his name, Lostboy was sitting staring blankly into space, and Tacitus wondered if his own and Cheng-yi’s addition to the boy’s programming had been to the good. Aconite’s Pedagogue had taught them enough to construct a program that would enable the boy to swim, and to load it, but their knowledge was certainly not anything like as extensive as the heliothant’s. Tacitus was even considering wiping what they had installed and going to ask Aconite what had gone wrong, when the outer door whoomphed open and the Umbrathane intruders entered, discarding rain capes and removing their masks.

Holding her carbine in readiness across her stomach, Makali marched to the centre of the room, her five fellows spreading out behind her as she scanned the surrounding area.

‘Where is the killer?’ she demanded.

Tacitus merely continued sharpening his sword, while Cheng-yi and Ygrol quietly proceeded with their game.

‘Very well, then tell me where that piece-of-shit heliothant is,’ Makali spat into the silence.

Tacitus felt a familiar surge of anger, and the whetstone slipped. He put a bloody finger in his mouth and watched while the umbrathant marched over to the mahjong table and swept its pieces onto the floor.

‘I asked a question!’

‘I think you asked two questions,’ Cheng-yi smart-mouthed.

Makali backhanded him and he went flying out of his chair to sprawl on the floor. Tacitus stood. This was bad, not because of Makali’s violent behaviour, but because of the expression now on Ygrol’s face—he had been about to win the game.