Neal Asher - Cowl

‘We must save her,’ Tacitus groaned, as Tack came back into the room.

Tack observed that plumbing and wiring now linked the Roman to several surrounding machines. He raised an eyebrow.

‘All I need is an affixed and internally linked carapace, then I’ll be able to move…’ the soldier croaked.

Tack turned to Polly, who shrugged, then reached out a finger to touch the device now attached to the Roman’s neck. With a sigh Tacitus closed his eyes and slumped unconscious.

‘What did he mean by “carapace”?’ Tack asked.

Polly pointed at his surgical boot. ‘It supports both internally and externally while accelerated repair takes place, but it can only be used for minor injuries. Tacitus could have one placed on his chest, but only if he was prepared to move around very slowly and I do not think that was his intention.’

‘So Cowl has Aconite,’ said Tack.

‘Yes.’

‘What do we do?’

‘We have to get her back. We need her.’

Tack absorbed the thought. They did not know how the mechanisms of the house operated and so could not survive here. But he did not think they stood much chance up against more Umbrathane and the last thing he wanted to do was face Cowl again.

‘We have to get her out of there,’ Polly affirmed, staring at him.

Tack swallowed dryly. ‘OK,’ he said.

The mantisal clipped wavetops, the vapour of its ablation giving it the appearance of hot glassware just cast out of the furnace. It rolled across the sea’s surface and broke apart, the three Heliothane ejecting as if thrown from a car wreck, but controlling their descent at the last and each entering the sea in a perfectly orchestrated flat dive. Pieces of the mantisal skittered across the water and settled, floating, on the surface, as the final glowing ember extinguished in them. One of the three Heliothane resurfaced, cast a package out before him and watched as it unfolded into an inflatable raft. By the time it was fully expanded, the other two had surfaced and all three scrambled aboard.

‘Nothing yet,’ said Meelan, collapsing on her back and spitting out sea water as she studied her detector.

Saphothere started up the small engine mounted inside the back of the inflatable and got them moving. Coptic folded up a scope on the hand-held missile launcher he clutched, and watched the skies.

As soon as the raft was moving, Saphothere asked, ‘Where are we?’

‘About ten kilometres from the citadel itself and about an hour from the Nodus,’ Meelan replied.

‘Look,’ said Saphothere, nodding ahead. The three of them gazed at the torbeast distortion wavering in the sky like a heat haze. Below it they could just about discern the spiky peaks of the citadel. Saphothere went on, ‘We probably won’t get any missiles heading this way. No doubt the attack on Sauros is in progress, and I’d guess Cowl won’t spare attention to such minor matters as a tor falling through his trap and going into the sea. Probably thinks another torbearer just drowned—if he noticed at all. Then, when we get closure at Sauros, Cowl will be in a world of shit—no short-jumping inside his citadel and no way to dodge the bullets.’

‘Shame we can’t send some missiles from here,’ opined Coptic.

‘They would be detected,’ Saphothere replied, ‘especially if they were likely to be in any way effective.’

‘Like atomics, you mean,’ said Meelan acidly.

‘Yeah, like atomics. Cowl probably detected those two I handed to Tack when he was within a kilometre of his destination—and no doubt had a double displacement fixed on them all the time.’

‘Poor idiot,’ said Meelan. ‘At least Tack would have died believing that his assassination attempt was to prevent Cowl destroying human history.’

‘In a roundabout way he was, actually,’ said Saphothere. ‘And, anyway, many Heliothane have died believing the same—so he was not unique.’

‘Umbrathane believe that’s Cowl’s intention, too, and they die just the same.’

‘Yeah,’ said Saphothere.

‘Saphothere,’ Coptic interrupted, ‘we’ve got company.’

The three of them turned their attention to the sky and the object becoming visible there: distant still, but growing closer.

‘Another reason for him not sending a missile against us,’ Meelan observed.

‘That’s it, then,’ said Saphothere. ‘Let’s go and kill the bastard before he can do anything about it.’

‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ said Meelan.

The sky was growing dark and the effect was something like silt boiling up from the bottom of a deep pool. Wave after wave threw dark bands of shadow across the landscape. Polly looked up, feeling her mouth grow dry. This simply did not happen here — after a downpour like last night’s, the sky usually remained clear for many weeks, and Polly had yet to witness any true extremity of weather. But this had an immensity: the bands of cloud spreading out from that central boiling point seemed almost solid. And that there was no sound as yet made it all the more threatening.

‘What now?’ asked Tack, as he too stepped outside Aconite’s house.

‘The Nodus,’ said Polly. ‘We knew it was close.’

Makes a kind of insane sense for it to arrive now. Makes you wonder if the Heliothane haven’t unified everything yet. Perhaps there’s still much they don’t know.

‘Does this mean Cowl has failed—or is he about to succeed?’ Tack asked.

Polly turned and stared at him. ‘Succeed at what?’

Still gazing at the sky, Tack said, ‘At shoving human history down the probability slope and creating his own time-line at the top of the slope.’

‘You still believe that?’ Tack returned his attention to her, as she went on. ‘That’s just the great Heliothane lie told to justify continuing their extermination of Umbrathane. Admittedly their attempts to get to Cowl are in themselves justified because of the many Heliothane lives he has taken. But that doesn’t make it any less of a lie.’

‘What?’

He looked confused, and Polly realized she was pulling another bulwark of belief from underneath him, but it had to be done.

‘Cowl is working to prevent the omission paradox,’ she explained.

‘And I thought I was confused,’ said Tack, rediscovering the sense of humour for which Saphothere had once beaten him.

Polly went on, ‘Cowl escaped Heliothane persecution, and he gave the Umbrathane an escape route too. The energy he carried in the big jump took him back before the Nodus and do you know what he found?’

‘Tell me.’

‘He found life without DNA. He found life that bore no relation to anything he knew, with minimal probability that it would develop into the life we know in the few centuries he had before the Nodus arrived.’

‘And that means?’

‘You have to be as utterly arrogant as Cowl to believe that you are the source of such a critical omission paradox.’

‘You said that before and I still don’t get it.’

‘Cowl believes he is the source of the Nodus—that if he doesn’t start DNA-based life in this ocean, there will be no life as we know it later. That by omission he will destroy the time-line and become a unique, unreferenced being, perpetually trapped in his own alternate.’

‘So he’s a good guy?’

‘If a good guy is also one who’s regard for any life but his own is nil—and who would, given the opportunity, wipe out the entire Heliothane Dominion.’

‘But surely he could do that by doing what the Heliothane claimed he was doing?’

‘No. He only has geothermal taps here. The energy levels he would need require a sun tap at the very least. That’s just another Heliothane lie.’