Neal Asher - Cowl

‘So what the fuck is going on?’

‘That,’ said Polly, pointing at the sky.

Gathering in a wheel above them, thick black clouds turned and rolled, expressing spokes of lightning. A low, growling storm was reaching them now. And behind these strange cloud formations a shape was resolving.

‘A ship?’ Tack wondered.

‘Maybe. Or some living being in itself. Or even a seed pod.’

A flattened sphere now filled a quarter of the sky, the lower edge of it lost beyond the horizon. Segmented like an orange, it was translucent, and higher cloud layers showed through it as through a distorting lens. Other clouds broke over it, like the waves of a sea splashing over a boulder. As they watched, it tilted and came fully into view. In consonance with the tilting, the ground began to vibrate. Then came immense flashes of lightning, cracks in the heavens revealing another reality, and the gunshot crashing of thunder.

‘What’s happening?’ Tack yelled.

‘Seeding,’ said Polly, leaning close. ‘As the Heliothane knew, because their first interstellar probe sent back evidence of it elsewhere after Cowl had gone. I don’t know how Aconite found out, which is why we have to get to her—she must have some access to the future that is her own.’

‘But why didn’t she tell him?’

‘Because as long as he struggled to solve his omission paradox, he would not turn his full fury on the Heliothane. She has spent her life blunting the edge of Cowl’s rage.’

Nandru took that moment to add, I’m so glad you explained all that, Polly. There was me thinking it was all a bit complicated.

‘Nandru,’ said Polly out loud, glancing apologetically at Tack. ‘It gets even simpler now. As we move into the Nodus, the chances of the Heliothane reaching Cowl increase dramatically. And when that happens we’ll need to be on the other side of the planet, at least, if we want to survive. We need Aconite and we need her as soon as possible.’

I can help you, but it means I must leave you, and I won’t be able to come back this time, as I must be both the program and the memory.

‘What the fuck are you on about?’

Don’t be so unfriendly.

‘I’m sorry, but things just got a lot more urgent.’

Well, goodbye, Polly.

‘Wait! What are you—?’

Polly felt him go, just as he did when he transferred his awareness to Wasp.

‘What the hell?’ said Polly, then shook her head in irritation. Reaching up, she brushed her fingers through her hair then brought her hand down for inspection. There were gritty white crystals on her palm. She blinked and looked up. It was snowing, only this was no snow that she recognized.

‘We have to get to Aconite—she’s the only one who can help. She has to have a way out of here.’

Just then there came a loud clattering and droning from inside the house, and they whirled round as something shot out of the door to loom over them.

‘And hello!’ bellowed Nandru-Wasp.

The tension in the New London Abutment Control Centre was palpable. Maxell watched the screens and wondered just how much longer she could wait in the hope of totally completing this herculean task. So much had been invested and so much would be lost, whether they succeed or failed, so justification of the latter was not something she wanted to contemplate. Then the tension notched up a level.

‘We have closure!’ shouted an interface technician.

Maxell was frozen for half a second. They had time—they still had time.

‘Do you have a mass reading?’ she asked.

‘Not yet… still calculating… I’m putting it up on a subscreen,’ the technician replied.

Maxell felt her mouth go dry as she saw the figure. The subscreen opened in a band across the bottom of the screen and filled with digits. Abruptly it contracted, the number being rounded off and displayed with an exponent, because it was simply too big to fit on the screen.

‘That cannot be taken out of existence,’ moaned Carloon.

‘Nevertheless,’ said Maxell, ‘we will try.’ To the interface tech she said, ‘Send the signal.’

‘Sent,’ replied the tech.

Now it was a matter of waiting. The tachyon signal would arrive at the moment of transmission, but the transit of the microwave beam was nominally six minutes. They were now utterly committed and history would judge them—if any history there was to be.

‘How long before the beast reaches our abutments?’ she asked.

Carloon replied, ‘It was looking like about ten minutes, but now it’s accelerating.’

‘How the hell can it know?’ an interface technician asked.

Carloon now brought the most distant sensor back into phase, displaying the far section of the wormhole empty of torbeast. This brought them no comfort—the end of it with the most mouths was coming at them like an accelerating juggernaut.

‘Any of you know how to pray?’ Maxell asked. Then to the negatives she said, ‘Well, now might be a good time to learn.’

Cowl:

I am the pinnacle of the Darwinian evolution of the human species, even though my superiority has been achieved by genetic manipulation. I was made to survive in an extrapolation of the most hostile of human environments, by the most ruthless means. As such I am all that Umbra and Heliothane dogma would have humans come to be. But when a being is measured by its ability to survive ruthless selection processes, isn’t its superiority equated with its ability to destroy and murder? Doesn’t such a measure discount all creativity, and so much else? The ability to survive and to dominate is not all. I am a dead end, but I am also human, and know that what I was made to be is not enough. I am what I am.

He had never done this to her before and foolishly she had believed he never would. Aconite was appalled at the ruthless power of her brother’s mind. His linking tendrils were fully developed and he knew how to use them to best effect. Her own had been stunted and virtually unusable since birth, so she’d had an autosurgeon remove them and cover the evidence with cosmetic surgery. With anguine deadliness his tendrils speared through her eardrum and into her skull, dividing and ever dividing down into synaptic plugs, connecting to the various portions of her brain. Cowl had never mind-fucked her before, but now he was.

Immediately she was dropped into the world of memory—but with her brother present as a hostile spectre. He stood behind her as she looked with some amazement at the ersatz assassin, and wondered why Tack was still alive and if she should allow him to continue to be. A jump, and Cowl listened to his explanation, her brother knowing that she already knew the truth: Tack had been sent here to reveal a weakness in the defences of Sauros, which was the jaws of a trap. But Cowl wanted the root of it:

The four stood on a viewing balcony overlooking the Tertiary park, where six-metre tall paraceratheriums were browsing. Though these creatures possessed skin like that of elephants and a llama-like appearance, they were, like all the prehistoric fauna of the New London parks, distinct animals in themselves. Watching them tearing down palm fronds to get at the ripening dates, Aconite felt that, of all Heliothane projects, this was the most worthy, and even to be able to recover Earth’s genetic heritage was a gift indeed. It was a shame that, on the whole, time travel was used for more bellicose purposes.

‘How did you manage to get here?’ asked Engineer Goron.

Aconite held up her arm to display the enclosing tor. ‘My brother has yet to completely hard-wire the programming. I simply inverted it, and I will return it to normal to take me back.’