Neal Asher - Cowl

Saphothere briefly relished the moment, then went to pick up his second carbine from behind the fallen transformer. Touching the transformer’s surface, he found it only warm, and seated himself there with his carbines resting beside him. He took out a hip flask containing the last of his stash of nineteenth-century whisky, and sipped at it. Then he waited for the Umbrathane to come.

The wormhole collapsed from both Sauros and New London. It took one and two-thirds years, it took all time and none. Like a hair singed at both ends by lighter flames, it contracted—huge forces closing it down to non-existence. Inside this contracting tube the torbeast raged against impenetrable surfaces—utterly confined in a self-referencing universe—without alternates on which to feed, without even time—and, in that infinite moment, the vast forces of this collapsing universe closed down on the beast’s leviathan mass. But the Heliothane plan to crush this monstrosity out of existence failed, in the end, as mass and force found balance.

To human perception, motionless in interspace, rested a perfect black sphere nearly a kilometre in diameter.

Inside this the torbeast howled.

Forever.

Sauros was a radioactive ruin and the surrounding area uninhabitable. Only three mantisals had survived the battle, sitting nearby, a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase. One of them was dying, much of its complex internal workings wrecked by the EM pulse from a tactical nuke directed against the torbeast. Six survivors were chosen to take the remaining two uptime, and with luck return to New London. Their journey would be long and dangerous as, without the energy feed from the wormhole, their jumps would be short and they and their mantisals would require long intervening rests. It would take them over twenty time-jumps. However, they were envied by the other survivors, which was why Goron had made their selection utterly random and why he and Palleque had discounted themselves from it. Those who remained then had to move to safety.

The march through the mountains to find a cleaner environment had cost the lives of eight survivors, but the Engineer felt certain they would have died anyway, so severe were their injuries. No lives were lost to the local fauna, with Silleck and the other interface technicians keeping an eye on the immediate future. There had, in fact, been only the one attack from a small pack of carnosaurs, most of which had ended up suffering the same fate they had intended for their human prey. The creatures had tasted of chicken.

As he fed a large worm onto his hook, Goron gazed across at the city of tents now occupying the river valley they had selected. He was glad to see that it was slowly transforming into something more permanent, which he hoped meant that most of the survivors had now accepted their fate—to live and die here—though some things he had recently overheard made him doubt that.

Palleque had managed to rig a catalyser to fuse sand dug from the river bottom, and by using wooden moulds was producing building blocks and slabs. He was even managing to produce sheets of rough glass, and claimed he would soon be able to do better. His industriousness had helped greatly to eliminate the distrust many heliothants felt for him. Others were prospecting for ores which could be catalysed into pure metals. Still others hunted, while some were clearing the level ground lower down for the planting of crops, once seed suitable for that purpose was gathered.

‘Power generation within a month,’ promised Palleque, not taking his gaze off the float he had cast out into the deep pool they were sitting by.

‘You’re optimistic,’ Goron replied.

‘As soon as we obtain the required rare metals, I’ll be able to use the catalyser to produce photovoltaic cells—probably in sufficient number to tile the roofs of the houses we build.’

‘I thought you meant real power,’ said Goron.

Palleque turned to him. ‘About a year still before we can build generators and they’ll only be driven by steam, wind or water.’

‘So by then we should have a nice viable mini-civilization going here.’

‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic’

‘I am enthusiastic about that, but not about some of the other things I’ve been hearing—about our building a base for vorpal technology and eventually managing to go home.’

‘People need hope.’

‘Hope I don’t mind, but when that moves into the region of blind faith I start to get a little edgy. You know as well as I that, at the present rate of progress, it would probably take us a century to build the technological base for any useful form of time travel, by which time the building of such a base would have forced us so far down the probability slope we’d never possess the required power sources to travel anyway.’

‘There are other reasons for hope,’ said Silleck, who had just climbed up onto the same slab of rock.

‘And they would be?’ asked Goron, turning to regard her. He was worried about this woman, as he was about all the other interface technicians like her. All of them were turning quite strange, with their constant four-dimensional view of the world.

‘To learn that,’ said Silleck, ‘I suggest the both of you get off this slab quickly before you get crushed to death.’

Goron peered past her and saw how the other interface technicians were gathering some distance back, and that other heliothants were filtering down from the tent city to join them. Both Palleque and he hit the winders on their rods, then quickly followed the technician from the slab. When Silleck suggested something, it was best to do it quickly because you knew she was looking at the consequences of you not doing so.

‘What’s happening, Silleck?’ Goron asked.

‘We are finding we can feel and see things… deeper, further… and we have sensed this coming for some time. At first we couldn’t be sure, as there’s a lot of echoes and aftershocks disturbing interspace. But now we are sure—this is solid.’

Goron felt this explanation turbid at best, but turned his attention to the vacated rock slab, on which all the technicians were now concentrating. Silleck suddenly grinned and some of her fellows laughed out loud. That was the thing about the lot of them—you could never tell a joke in their presence, as they would always know the punchline before you said it. A minute after, a line of light speared down into the centre of the slab’s surface, and out of it folded a great domed house, its walls and roof cracked and flaking away to expose its vorpal superstructure. First, out of an arched entrance, emerged a large insectile robot that Goron instantly recognized, so he figured who was going to step out next. This second figure was closely guarded by a Roman soldier, who fingered the pommel of his gladius as he eyed the spectators.

‘I’ve found you at last, Engineer,’ said Aconite.

‘So you have,’ Goron replied.

Aconite looked around. ‘I have the means to transport those who want to go, back to New London. But I also have an alternative proposal.’

‘I’m listening,’ said Engineer Goron.

While Polly gazed up at the aircars in the far distance over Maldon Island, Tack studied their surroundings.

The nettles were dead and dry in the cavity walls and the grass was brown and crunched underfoot. There had been a temporary over-flood, and crab carapaces were scattered like confetti on the grass. A U-gov clean-up team had been here to remove the corpses, and the carcass of the Ford Macrojet that Nandru had destroyed. The only evidence now of what had happened was the scorched vegetation and some shattered trees. Closing his eyes, Tack sensed the temporal web inside himself, located their position in time, and their position on the probability slope.