Neal Asher - Cowl

‘Whatever’s happened there, we’re too late to stop it. But let’s see what we can find out,’ he said, his stomach turning over at such a positive statement.

He led the way up from the river bed, circling round to come down on Aconite’s house from the mountainside. As they climbed, the rain turned to drizzle, then a wind picked up and blew that away. The cloud began to break, opening on stars and the first hint of topaz dawn behind the mountains. When the house finally came into view below them, lemon sunlight was already bathing the coastline beyond and flecking the sea with gold. The citadel, to their left, looked no different. Still, around its high points, bestial distortions crowded the sky.

‘Why does that happen?’ Tack asked.

After a moment Polly replied, ‘Aconite says Cowl’s energy source comes from thermal taps penetrating down to a geological fault running out from here. From that power source he feeds energy to the torbeast when he wants it to do his bidding, and that same energy feed opens a rift through to the beast’s alternate. The beast always attempts to come through here to access that source directly and what we are seeing is the result of that.’

‘But Cowl won’t let it through.’

‘No. I don’t understand the tech he uses, but he prevents the beast from coming totally into phase. It is only a few degrees out, but enough for it to produce no more effect than this.’

‘And if it came through?’

‘Cowl would end up as dead as us.’

Tack remembered those thick cables snaking out into the sea. Judging from them, he supposed the energy being utilized must be immense. However, it did not even compare to that transmitted by the sun tap, as no cables could ever carry that load. Glancing down at the house again, he abruptly caught Polly’s shoulder and dragged her down. They observed an umbrathant guard emerge and walk around the back of the house to urinate against the wall.

‘Here’s what we’ll do,’ Tack said.

Polly walked casually up from the river towards the house, as if she had just been out for a pleasant stroll. The Umbrathane woman by the door called inside, and a man quickly joined her. Polly kept her gaze level on them, not daring to look up any higher. She raised a hand in a friendly wave. When she was still five metres away, Tack, leaping down from the roof, brought his right foot down squarely on top of the Umbrathane woman’s head and, as she crumpled, snapped out his left foot to catch the man under his ear. By then Polly was flat on the ground—as instructed.

Tack forward-flipped off the woman, hit the ground on his feet, and rolled aside as shots splintered rock where he had been a fraction of a second before. Coming upright, he spun round, his foot coming up in an arc accelerated by the weight of his strange surgical boot. Straightening his leg at the last, he slammed the boot up into the man’s throat. To his horror, he glimpsed Polly bringing to bear her handgun in what to Tack seemed slow motion. The woman, having hit the ground on her shoulder, was coming upright again, her weapon swinging towards Polly. And then Tack realized he would not be able to do this without killing.

He swung his carbine round towards the woman, but shots from the man shattered the barrel of the weapon. The Umbrathane woman hesitated for a microsecond, assessing the greatest danger. She began to turn towards Tack just as he dropped his carbine and flung himself back. A hole opened up in the woman’s forehead and she began to drop. The man began yelling and swung towards Polly. But why was he moving so slowly? Then Tack realized the man had probably just seen his lover die. That did not slow Tack as he hurled himself forward. Closing in, the carbine swung back towards him. He caught the barrel, turning as he did so, its fire scoring his stomach. He jerked the weapon towards him, out of the man’s grip, spinning it up around his back and over his shoulder. Catching it in his other hand, he fired it, slinging the man backwards. It was over. It had taken less than six seconds. Not much time to extinguish two lives.

‘Accurate shooting,’ said Tack, as Polly walked over to him.

Coming to a halt, Polly holstered her handgun, then gazed down at the two dead umbrathants. She said, ‘Mortuus est. Mortua est.’

Tack looked at her queryingly.

‘They’re both dead,’ she said.

‘Yeah, certainly that,’ he replied.

Polly looked up, eyeing the carbine Tack held. ‘I knew a juggler once, called Berthold, who would have been impressed by the way you moved there.’

Tack gazed down at the two corpses, and could not find it in himself to be so flippant. When they entered the house, they found more dead inside. First there was the Chinaman.

Tack stooped down by Cheng-yi, checked the pulse at his throat then attempted to remove the sword. The weapon was so deeply embedded in the composite floor, it would not have yielded without Tack’s augmentations. Tossing the weapon aside, he turned the body over and studied it, before switching his attention to Ygrol. No need to check the Neanderthal’s pulse — his thick skull was broken open and most of his brain mashed.

‘They shot Lostboy, too,’ said Polly.

Tack stood and walked over to stand beside her. Only half of Lostboy’s head remained, and on the floor nearby lay his cerebral augmentation. Polly picked it up and carefully placed it on a table. ‘Perhaps Aconite can save something,’ she said.

Tack looked at her askance.

She tapped a finger against the blood-smeared device. ‘They killed the animal part of him, but most of what was human is in here,’ she explained.

Then a sound spun them both round, and they saw Tacitus slumped against a wall in a pool of his own blood. Polly rushed over and pressed her finger against his throat.

‘He’s still alive, but we’ll have to get him into the surgery,’ she announced.

As Tack stepped over the dead umbrathant, he noted the wound in the man’s upper chest. So Tacitus had not gone down without taking one of them with him. Passing the carbine to Polly, he stooped to pick Tacitus up and turned towards Aconite’s surgery. Polly darted past him to inspect the fallen Wasp and the dead umbrathant beside it. Tack supposed the intruders had swaggered into this place as arrogantly as any of their kind, but encountered some nasty surprises.

‘I don’t feel safe about staying here,’ he said. ‘They must know we’re still about, and those outside might have sent off some sort of call.’

‘I’ll not abandon him,’ said Polly.

‘Then I’ll check things out,’ said Tack, laying Tacitus on the surgical table. ‘Do you know how to operate this stuff?’ He gestured to the surrounding equipment.

‘What I don’t know Nandru can tell me—he uploaded a lot from Wasp’s database.’

Taking the carbine, which Polly handed back to him, Tack watched for a moment while she cut open the Roman soldier’s clothing, and placed a monitoring device against his neck. Then acknowledging that she seemed to know what she was doing, Tack went off to search the house.

Polly assumed that Aconite herself had been dragged off to the citadel, but Tack was not so sure. It seemed to him that the Umbrathane intruders had come here simply to eliminate a potential threat. The house was a big place, so it was likely that he would find Aconite dead in one of its many rooms. With methodical caution he began at the top of the house in the attic, wondering at the precise purpose of the exposed vorpal substructure of the building visible there, with all those linked-up machines and heavy power cables. On the next floor down he found mostly sealed rooms, but one door was open and in it he thoughtfully eyed the racked carbines, catalysers, grenades and some other weapons he did not recognize. On the ground floor he checked all the living quarters, but ignored the many rooms that were sealed. The laboratories and research areas showed no sign of damage, so he did not spend long in them—just checking that no more bodies were visible. It was in the cellar he found the tors, and now understood why there had been so few lying on the seabed along with the arm bones. Here he felt the subversive control emanating from these parasitic devices and noted how many of them lay on the floor. He realized that they were regrowing their thorns, and that this process had forced some of them out of the racks. But Aconite, or her body, was not here either, so he closed the door and returned to Polly.