Cowl

14

Traveller Thote:

It was a close-run thing with the Roman. Keeping him on life support, we nearly managed to remove his tor and interface it with a mantisal. I subsequently see that it is just a question of using a quantity of the old bearer’s genetic material as a buffer, plus some method of fooling the tor’s propensity for pattern recognition. However, it seems I am not going to get a chance to try out my theory as Maxell has cancelled all energy allocations for this kind of work, and it seems Goron’s project now has prime status. I am now to return to other duties subordinate to the Engineer. I do not mind, for we must choose the best option we can find… to kill our enemies.

Endless seashores. It appeared that the vambrace was intent on bringing him back into the world in the same sort of location each time. The gods were casting him into places to fight battles he did not understand at their whim. He just kept himself honed and focused on survival. He hated his gods.

The jungle was a dense wall of green, spilling into mangroves to the Roman’s left as he faced seaward on the strip of sand on which he had been deposited. To his right weird trees, and other strange plants he could not identify, halted their march towards the sea at the beginning of a rocky promontory. Resting his hand on the pommel of his sheathed gladius, he headed towards that, assuming that wherever rocks were bathed by the sea there would be shellfish, which had served him well enough thus far. As he walked he suddenly felt ebullient, light-headed. The air here had a strange clarity and was as intoxicating as wine.

Reaching the edge of the sandbar, Tacitus scrambled up the rocky face and began to head out onto the promontory itself. After a moment he noted that scattered over the stone were nautiloid shells the size of dinner plates. He laughed and kicked one into the sea. Drew his sword and waved it at the sky.

‘Send them now, curse you!’ he shouted at the gods. ‘Send your monsters and your trials!’

But there was no immediate response and, from past experience, he expected none. Usually the monsters came in the night, sniffing after him as if after spoiled meat.

He moved on towards the end of the promontory, where he squatted and gazed down into the deep water. His head was buzzing almost as if he was getting too much air, and he noted that his breathing was shallow. Observing a nautiloid drifting along in the pellucid depths, with its tentacles outstretched and its shell striped red and white, he wondered if he was beginning to see the kind of visions wounded soldiers saw before dying.

He prodded at the surface of the water with his gladius and something rose up out of those same depths, in an expanding ring around the nautiloid, like an odd piece of jewellery carved from grey rock, ivory and rose quartz. The nautiloid jetted aside in a cloud of ink and the circle kept growing larger. Then Tacitus realized his challenge had been answered.

Recognizing the apparition in that instant as an enormous open mouth, Tacitus flung himself back as a huge fish shot up over the rim of stone in an explosion of foam. Its mouth was filled with jagged teeth, its blunt head armoured. He shoved himself further away, sliding on his backside, the sea boiling behind the great creature as, with its moray tail, it tried to force itself further onto the promontory. Realizing he was getting close to the sea on the other side, he scrambled to his feet, and turned and ran. After thrashing around, trying to get to him, the sea boiling and spindrift tumbling through the air, the giant fish flipped back into the water with a huge splash, then came hammering alongside the promontory, driving a wave before it. Tacitus leapt onto the beach as the wave also reached it, and didn’t stop running until he reached the wall of vegetation. Turning, he watched the fish, half emerged from the water, begin thrashing from side to side to pull itself back into the sea. He spat on the sand—recognizing this sending from Neptune—then turned to peer into the greenery.

The vegetation was so dense that there was no easy path through it. Large, unlikely insects moved about in its shade, clinging to the underside of bedspread-sized leaves, or camouflaged against the trunks of plants like green spears. He did not care to venture in there amongst those horrors, but was hungry again, and certainly didn’t want to be down near the shore collecting shellfish.

‘Curse you,’ he muttered.

Tacitus removed, from the sack he had made from his tattered cloak a jug he had found on one of those past seashores and drank water collected from another age. Looking around, he noted how dank everything seemed inside the jungle, while at the upper edge of the beach extended a drift of bleached wood and other dried-out organic matter, including piles of triple-ribbed carapaces. Warily eyeing the shoreline, he collected some of these and, using a flint spearhead he had taken from some primitive who had been sent against him and tinder he had collected from a place as dry and hot as his native land in summer, he began the laborious process of striking sparks from his sword to ignite a fire. When it was going he piled on a log, from underneath which scuttled large horrible sealice with scorpion forelimbs, then turned back towards the jungle in search of food. Spotting a horrible insect the size of a flattened chicken, he pinned it with his gladius to one of the spear trees, then roasted it over the fire, before devouring its fragrant prawn-flavoured flesh. Later, having partially denuded the nearby jungle of similar creatures, he lay down and slept in bright sunlight, surrounded by the carnage of his meal. And dreamed of vengeance.

After carving the herrerasaur he had roasted with the microwave setting on his carbine, Tack tentatively ate a piece.

‘Chicken,’ he said.

‘Chicken’s grandad about a billon times removed,’ Saphothere replied.

Tack wiped his knife on fallen needles and rejoined the traveller.

‘What happened?’ Saphothere asked without raising his head.

‘From what point?’ Tack asked.

Saphothere now looked up. ‘My memory is completely blank from the moment we embarked until I came to and saw you fighting our dinner there.’

‘The interspace adjacent to Sauros was… rough. The second attack came earlier than Goron or his people supposed, and we went straight into torbeast incursion surfaces, displacement fields and spillover from the occasional tactical being employed. We came out of it here with actual momentum. The mantisal bounced a couple of times and came to rest against this tree. I got you out and the mantisal returned to interspace—on its second try.’

Saphothere nodded, then held up his injured arm enquiringly.

Tack went on, ‘I checked you over thoroughly. Besides vorpal draining you had suffered a broken arm—both bones—and some cracked ribs, and your heart had stopped. I used adrenalin and a discharger to get things going again and made some necessary repairs.’

‘You saved my life,’ observed Saphothere. ‘Yet your programming probably gave you a choice—you could have just gone on and left me.’

‘It seemed the right thing to do.’ Tack sat, staring at the fire and feeling uncomfortable. ‘I need you to take me as far back in time as possible by mantisal, so I can conserve my energies for the fight that follows.’ But his words fell on deaf ears, for when he looked up again, he saw that Saphothere was fast asleep.

Saphothere needed five days of rest before attempting to summon the mantisal again, and it was a relief when it appeared intact. The two surviving herrerasaurs, which had been lurking around the encampment all the time and twice had to be driven off, were left to dispute the ripe remains of their kin, and the bones the two men had stripped of meat. Interspace no longer seemed as dangerous as it had done, but Tack sensed in it a weird difference, like some presence. He gazed out at the grey void overlying midnight—the nearest interpretation his customary senses could put upon the view—and noted the terminus of the wormhole, looking like a distant sliver of silver inserted at what might be called the horizon. But whatever was bothering Tack wasn’t there.

‘Look to the interface,’ suggested Saphothere.

Tack peered at the black surface of the pseudo sea. Then, with that ability to distort perception he had acquired by riding the mantisal, he looked harder. There at first, infinitely deep, he observed a great tree like some vast water plant. Focusing on it was like trying to discern the final edge of a Mandelbrot pattern. Leviathan heads of tissue consisted of feeding mouths and wormish tangles of endless necks, surfaces of skin curved away into nether spaces. Thicker branches were at once serpentine torsos and the interior glimpses of bottomless intestines. Organs layered over and within each other like mountain ranges. And when at last Tack felt he was gaining some focus, some perspective, it all tumbled away and he realized he was seeing only that fraction of it his mind could interpret.

‘It’s quiescent at the moment,’ Saphothere explained. ‘Though “moment” is stretching the word—like us all it exists in its own time, and that time might bear no relation to any other.’

‘The torbeast,’ Tack stated.

‘Yeah,’ said Saphothere.

‘What are you going to do about this creature when Cowl is dead?’ Tack asked.

‘That is a question we have yet to answer,’ Saphothere replied, closing his eyes and truncating the conversation. Some hours later, personal time, the mantisal brought them down on a drizzly mountainside overlooking an endless sea of foliage. Wordlessly, Saphothere activated his tent. It self-erected into a ground-hugging dome a metre high and two metres wide—the entrance to the dome being an elasticated thing like an anus. It closed tightly behind him when he crawled inside.

Tack walked down into Carboniferous forest, armed with his newly acquired knowledge of the flora and fauna, in search of food. When he returned with a metre-long newt slung over one shoulder and a bag of cycad fruits like spherical red pineapples, he found Saphothere was fast asleep in the tent. Tack sat gazing out at the ancient forest and considered all he had now come to understand, yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being lied to.

Perhaps that was just natural paranoia arising because he didn’t understand everything. He could see that, before Pedagogue’s education of him, he would have been suspicious about things that he now understood perfectly. The length of this recent jump was a case in point. To reach this forest they had crossed a hundred and fifty million years whereas, before, half that distance had crucified Saphothere. Now Tack knew that, prior to their first violent meeting in twentieth-century Essex, Saphothere had been hunting down Umbrathane for a long time, and draining himself—and his mantisal—down to the limit continuously. Five days sitting on his butt in the Triassic had been the most rest he’d enjoyed in five years. And stuffing dinosaur meat, roast nuts and some sort of root like Jerusalem artichoke into his face had increased his physical bulk noticeably. Also Saphothere explained that the energy detritus from the torbeast’s attack on Sauros had, once the danger passed, provided a rich feeding ground for the mantisal. But, no, it wasn’t apparent inconsistencies like that. It was the simple idea of himself being the most effective assassin the Heliothane could send against Cowl. Yes, he understood how they could not get through without a tor but, surely, with their technology there had to be another way…

‘Admiring the view?’ Saphothere asked from behind him.

Tack turned and nodded as the traveller left his tent.

Saphothere went on, ‘Fossil fuels, that’s all it becomes. And your profligate society burnt it all up by fuelling uncontained growth without making any serious effort to get out of the container.’

Tack stared at him questioningly.

Saphothere gestured towards the vast forest. ‘You mentioned predestination, though I should think you are now beyond such ideas. But, if you really wanted to find it, there it is spread below you. For millions of years the Earth stored energy in the form of fossil fuels, as if making it ready for intelligent use by a future civilization. With such energy to hand, your people could have powered their civilization into the solar system long before mine. It could be said that this was their destiny. And they wasted it.’

‘What power did you use?’

‘Nuclear fusion, bought at great cost. For your people it could have been easy, for mine it was hard.’

Tack wondered quite what he meant by ‘mine’, for it was the Umbrathane who had taken that step. He turned away and proceeded to gut the big newt, while Saphothere opened one of the red pineapples. The minutiae of day-to-day existence pushed speculation to the edge of his consciousness. After they ate, Saphothere retired again. Tack dozed with his back against a rock, too lazy yet to bother setting up his own tent, even though it was hardly a difficult task. Vaguely he heard Saphothere speak, then later a breath of cold, washing across him, pulled him into full consciousness. He was staring dozily at the endless forest when something pressed against the back of his neck.

‘Not one word, one movement, or I cripple you now.’

She was supposed to be dead—incinerated in an atomic blast—but Meelan now sounded very much alive.

Again the air was growing stale and Polly had to fight a rising terror to look for the other place in which she could control the careering progress of the scale and of the cage that contained her. She did not want to see more because, at the edge of perception, she just knew that a nightmare lurked underneath the midnight sea, watching her. When she did reach out, brief chaos surrounded her and she glimpsed a vast torso curving above, its edges lost in spatial distortion: an endless tangle of necks and mouths like the one that had taken Nandru; and she felt the regard of some feral intelligence.

‘Oh Christ…’

She was groping for a way out, fear freezing her will and shoving her perception back to that of the black sea and grey void. Then something reached out, opening a surface at the end of which the coloured light of the real gleamed, and she fell down the slope into day, the cage smoking and dissipating as she hurtled out over cold desert and dropped down towards a rock field. She clung to the glass cage’s struts, willing them to retain integrity, feeling them grow thin under her touch. But it was enough. She dropped two metres to a boulder, slid down the side of it, and rolled in a scattering of yucca-like stems, snapping them over onto ground coated with the green buttons of other primitive growth.

What did you see? I couldn’t see anything.

‘That thing—I saw the thing that killed you.’

I saw only two surfaces: one black and one grey. That’s all I’ve ever seen.

‘Perhaps you’re lucky,’ said Polly, standing up and brushing green slime from her coat, before looking around.

The mountains rising up to her right were jagged, unrounded by the elements. From somewhere behind them a column of smoke rose into the sky, staining the clouds in shades of sepia, black and crimson. Between them and the rock field lay a gritty plain dappled with green. The few plants were simple: constructed from a child’s drawing by some inept god. In the stony ground there were occasional cracks filled with stagnant water in which miniature rainbow larvae wriggled and swarmed. Again the shift had brought her down near the seashore, for she could hear the hiss of waves beyond the rocks, though she could not yet see the ocean. Negotiating her way between some boulders, she headed in that direction, for despite her recent, near-lethal experience by the sea, it was at least something reassuringly familiar.

The shoreline was cluttered with the shells of sea creatures; water snails as big as human heads, crab things and lobster things, worm things and just plain things. Some of the shells were still occupied, and stank like a trawler’s bilge, but nothing was moving. Polly kicked over a ribbed shell resembling a knight’s shield and squatted down beside it to inspect the decaying creature it contained.

I don’t think there’s anything on the land that can attack you now.

‘What makes you say that?’ Polly asked bitterly.

I think you’re beyond any land animal other than insects… or their ancient relatives.

‘That’s a comfort.’

About to stand up to move on, she yelled with fright. A figure was looming over her.

Dressed in dark clothing like army fatigues, the man was rangy, hard-looking. His skin looked almost bluish-white and his close-cropped hair resembled a layer of chalk. At first she had the crazy notion that he was some sort of inhabitant of this same age, then realized he could be nothing other than a time traveller like herself.

‘Who…?’ was all she could manage.

The man smiled, though it was hardly reassuring. Polly’s hand strayed to her pocket and the comforting weight of the condom-wrapped automatic.

‘My name is Thote—if that is relevant. I’m here to help you.’

‘Now, lie face-down with your legs and arms outstretched.’

Tack considered going for her, but in this situation his new strength meant nothing and his reactions could not be faster than her trigger finger. So he obeyed, stretching out, but turning his head so he could just see Saphothere’s tent. With the barrel of her weapon still pressed against his neck, Meelan tossed a small silver sphere at the tent, which burnt through the fabric like hot iron through tissue paper. The interior was suddenly filled with a phosphorescent blaze, becoming a bright lantern for a few seconds before erupting from the fabric and consuming it. The heat was intense and Tack recognized that she had hurled a molecular catalyser, like the one Saphothere had used on the palisade of Pig City and like those still contained in Tack’s pack. Saphothere was not even given time to scream.

As the fire died down, a filigree of solidifying black smoke fell through the air as from acetylene flame. Tack felt the pressure of the gun barrel lift from his neck.

‘I have placed on your back a small mine, which, should you move abruptly, will detonate and drive into your spine fragments of glass coated with a paralytic. Do not move.’

Tack recognized that both Heliothane and Umbrathane possessed numerous varieties of explosives that could be programmed to detonate under varying circumstances—changes in temperature, humidity, position, whatever—so he did not disbelieve Meelan. His recent education had opened his eyes to just how dangerous her kind were.

Soon after she stepped into view as she went to inspect the ruins of the tent. He watched her running the toe of her boot through the thin layer of ash. Her new arm, he saw, was now nearly the size of the other, there was some sort of brace extending down the forearm and dividing up to spread down each finger. This was clearly to prevent any deformation in the rapid growth of the limb. Unfortunately, such regenerative ability was not one the Heliothane had been able to impart to himself, along with his other augmentations. Tack then realized Meelan might not know about those. Maybe the mine’s detonation was programmed to the slower movements of a twenty-second-century human, not for what he had become. Tack calculated that he had at least one and a half seconds.

With Meelan’s back now towards him, he reached round, closed his hand on cold metal, and threw the object at her, whipfast. The mine blew only centimetres from where he had been lying, but by then he was rolling down the slope towards the forest, paralytic glass fragments thumping the back of his suit. In the flash’s after-images he glimpsed Meelan spinning round and raising her weapon. Thrusting down with the flat of his hand, he changed the course of his roll as a series of explosions cut in a line down the slope towards him. Finally getting his feet underneath him, he sprang up, cartwheeled away on one hand while drawing his weapon with the other, and sent a spray of shots up the slope. A horsetail exploded into fibrous pulp right next to him as he dived headfirst into the cover of greenery. As plants continued to explode around him, he offered up thanks that both Umbrathane and Heliothane were so arrogantly self-assured of their fighting skills that they rarely relied on weapons like his seeker gun.

Deep in the jungle, the continuing explosions now behind him, he was caught unawares when a white hand snaked out from behind a giant club moss to grab his shoulder. He thrust his weapon up towards a white face, and was a microsecond from pulling the trigger before its identity registered.

‘I thought she’d killed you!’ Tack exclaimed.

‘Apparently not,’ Saphothere replied, staring up at the mountainside Tack had just left.

Tack turned to look and saw two mantisals had just appeared. Later, learning that Saphothere had left his tent briefly while Tack dozed, he was grateful that even superhumans like Saphothere needed to take a shit occasionally. The traveller began climbing the tree they were standing beneath. Tack followed him up and soon they obtained a better view of their ravaged campsite.

Their packs had been propped against a rock face behind Saphothere’s incinerated tent. Even as they watched, the group of Umbrathane set their defences, then leaving behind only two, a man and a woman, the other six, including Meelan herself, began scouring the jungle below. Tack handed back the monocular Saphothere had passed him.

‘I recognize a couple more of them from Pig City,’ he observed.

‘Well, there would have been some survivors,’ Saphothere replied.

‘So what do we do now?’ Tack asked.

Saphothere’s face was locked in an angry grimace. Then he looked around. ‘It’s turning dusk. We hit them in full dark. Then you grab a supply pack and your weapons, and just go on from here.’

He scrambled down from the tree and Tack followed, knowing that when the traveller said ‘go on from here’ he meant the moment Tack grabbed those packs he must take his implant offline and allow the tor to take him back in time. From that point he would be on his own, if he survived the coming fight. Dubiously he considered their current collection of weapons. Saphothere had wisely taken a carbine with him into the jungle and had an assortment of proximity mines hooked on his belt, while Tack possessed only his hand weapon. Though containing a hundred-round clip of explosive ammunition, that was not sufficient if you went up against eight heavily armed Umbrathane.

‘What about you?’ Tack asked, as they pushed through undergrowth.

‘I survive—or not. But your mission is vital and you must carry it out.’

‘Why not just summon the mantisal here and we could get supplies elsewhere?’

Saphothere looked at him. ‘We cannot afford the time.’

There it was: another of those pronouncements that just didn’t make sense to Tack. Nevertheless, he nodded as if he understood.

Saphothere explained, ‘When Coptic and Meelan hit us first, I was prepared to accept that as just luck on their part. But her tracking us here and being so well-prepared, I am not inclined to accept as coincidence. They are getting inside help, but most importantly they are somehow securing the energy for accurate time-shifting.’

‘Cowl,’ said Tack.

‘Maybe,’ Saphothere replied. ‘Now, this is what you must do.’

Shortly afterwards Saphothere signalled that they should now proceed in silence, sliding through the foliage, stepping only on sure ground, utterly alert. Even their comlinks were unusable in this situation as they could be detected. But their clothing shielded them from infrared detectors, and the natural motion of the foliage from motion detectors. This was to be dangerous and bloody.

When Saphothere motioned for Tack to now head off separately, he did so. It was only seconds later that the firing started.

‘What is your name?’

Thote’s voice was calm, soothing.

‘Polly.’

‘It is good to meet you, Polly.’

Polly felt herself getting lulled.

Don’t go all slushy for the first dick you ‘ve encountered in a hundred million years, Polly. You can bet your arse he’s not just your tour guide.

Nandru’s words were iced water in her face and reminded her that always, in her past, whenever someone was being nice to her they wanted a piece of her.

‘If you’re here to help me, then start by telling me what the hell is happening to me,’ she suggested succinctly.

The man flinched visibly and got a distant look on his face. After a moment he smiled again and held out his hand to her.

‘Come with me to my camp and I’ll try to explain.’

Polly took his hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. She noticed how his gaze kept straying to the arm on which the scale clung, concealed by her sleeve. Pushing for some clearer reaction she could read, she released his hand, pulled up her sleeve, and held out her forearm before him.

‘Do you know what this thing is?’

‘It is a tor: an organic time machine that is dragging you back to the beginning of time—to the Nodus. You are one of Cowl’s samples.’

Instead of asking the questions that clamoured for attention after such a statement, Polly said one thing only, ‘I don’t want to go-’

The man nodded and slowly began to walk away from her. She could feel a tension in him; that he was holding something back. She had much practice in reading men’s body language. She followed him across the rockscape to a campsite, where supplies were neatly stacked and a pot bubbled on a compact stove. Thote gestured to a blanket spread on the ground and Polly sat down, while he squatted by the bubbling pot and stirred it.

‘You are stretched out like elastic from your own time. There is admittedly a small risk in removing the tor; it is a living parasite and made to cling to and draw its host back in time until removed and read by its maker, Cowl. I too can remove it, though, and once it is removed you will immediately fall back to your own time. I take it you want to return there?’

Now that sounds a little too easy to me. Watch out for this fucker.

‘When I left my own time someone was busy trying to kill me.’

But no, she had dragged the killer along with her… and what did that mean? Would he still be there on her return? Would he have never left? Thote looked at her as if reading her mind.

‘You won’t return at the exact moment you left. You’ll arrive in what would naturally be your own time. You have been travelling for some days now, personal time, so that means you’ll arrive back the same number of days after your departure.’

Easy as sucking eggs. He’s lying to you.

Polly did not want to hear Nandru. It all seemed so perfect. She didn’t want to be chewed on by bad-tempered dinosaurs. She didn’t want to run into this Cowl, whose name alone sounded ominous. But Nandru was right—this whole situation stank.

‘Why do you want to do this?’ she asked the stranger.

‘I’ll do anything to thwart Cowl’s plans.’

Thote ladled what smelt like fish stew into a bowl and handed it to Polly.

‘Here, you’ll find this tastes better than anything you’d find on the shore.’

Polly took the proffered bowl and sniffed it. The food smelt delicious, with chunks of white meat and pieces of fibrous vegetable floating in a thick sauce. She dug in and raised a spoonful to her mouth. It was in her mouth and she was already chewing, when she noticed the avid look on Thote’s face. As a sudden bitterness froze her tongue, she spat the food out and threw the bowl at him, then stood, reeled, staggered back. He stood up also with a calm satisfaction.

He gestured then to a nearby rock crevice, where lay the remains of some other time traveller, the tor still wrapped like a coral on one arm, but gathered round bare bone. Empty eye sockets, bare ribs exposed through decaying clothing, some mummified flesh remaining, blond hair fallen from a bare skull.

‘That will be your future if you keep going. There’s a lot of time still between here and the Nodus, and few can survive the journey.’

Polly tried to shift, tried to suborn that webwork inside, but her will seemed flaccid and confusion was filling her head.

Well, what a surprise—the guy’s not at all nice.

‘You can’t go on, Polly. Even if you do survive the journey, Cowl will kill you.’

‘Like you give a shit,’ said Polly thickly. She concentrated harder, trying to get hold of something, anything inside her. But the drug blurred her perceptions, ate into her concentration. Thote could sense what she was trying to do. His eyes narrowed for a moment, then he relaxed.

‘Too late now, primitive,’ he said. ‘And, to a certain extent, I’m sorry to have to do this to you. But for two years now I’ve been fishing interspace with what’s left of my mantisal from this shit hole.’

Polly tried to hurl a curse at him, but her mouth felt like some dentist had injected half a pint of novocaine and all she managed was to dribble down her chin.

‘What I intend to try has been tried once and failed once.’ He gestured to the skeleton. ‘I think I have it now, though — desperation refines the thought processes. You see, Cowl is sampling genetics, which is why it doesn’t matter to him if you reach him dead or alive. You are just a portable food sack for your tor, as it already has your code locked inside it—and that’s all Cowl needs to find out if he is managing to destroy the future.’ Thote shrugged. ‘All I really need do is graft some of your skin into a vorpal strut, plasticize the tor, and wrap it around that. The field should then be magnified enough to include me—even though I am not the actual sample.’

Polly’s vision was growing black around the edges, but she retained enough to see the shattered remnants of silvery cagework come folding into existence to one side of Thote. He drew an ugly commando knife from his boot, then stepped towards her.

I think we’ve seen and heard about enough now.

The webwork slammed into life with more power than ever. Thote’s scream of rage echoed after her into black and grey, as her own silver cage materialized around her.

Some sort of projector, stabbed into the ground like a garden lantern, shrieked a warning only seconds before an explosion ripped out of the jungle wall. Tack stepped out, triggered a burst of fire towards the one visible umbrathant, then dropped and rolled as horsetails sheared over behind him. A man to Tack’s left was turning his carbine towards the jungle when his legs fragmented below the knee. Saphothere came out so fast he was stepping on the man’s shoulder before the same man had fully collapsed, then went into a roll from which he managed to shoot backwards, taking off the victim’s head, before disappearing into shadow. Tack was back into cover by then, running at full pelt, slamming through foliage, then out and accelerating around the foot of the mountain. More explosions behind him. Someone screaming. Turn and head upslope, legs hammering down hard as spring steel. Foliage breaking behind him. Down, roll, fire. The umbrathant following him was gone—then springing up again from behind a boulder, firing his carbine, the scree slope erupting at the spot from where Tack leapt. Disappeared. Tack firing at the rock face immediately behind the boulder, his rounds set for timed detonation rather than impact. The man standing up to fire again, then screaming as Tack’s rounds detonate about his feet. A second’s hesitation. Enough. One explosive shell spreads the man’s brains up the rock wall. And Tack was moving on again.

All the way upslope now, the battle flashes shielded by the mountain flank. The rock wall runs up the mountain like a spine and curves round above him. Already seen and studied. His weapon back in its holster, Tack heads up it like a spider, sprints across a stony plateau, drops down beside a three-metre waterfall, then descends the course of a stream in bounding strides on slimed rocks, shooting one brief puzzled glance at strange amphibians glowing with blue light in a shallow pool. Then upwards, scrambling a fern-covered slope. Finally gazing down on the encampment.

Saphothere is there, pinned down on a slope, a man and a woman firing towards him but not daring to emerge from cover. No sign of Meelan or the other one. Perhaps dead? Tack fires a single burst and the man fragments, the woman rolling aside with a horrible scream, her bare rib bones exposed. Then Tack is down the slope—the two packs resting just below him—his implant coming offline, and the temporal web inside him hardening like glass. He hits the ground and comes up in time to see a column of distortion howling up into the night, near Saphothere, bulging and breaking open on a nightmare landscape beyond. The beast breaking through! Flesh-light floods the area, in which Tack sees an explosion tossing Saphothere into the air, and Meelan hurtling in from the side, hitting him in a flat dive.

Fucking go! — over com.

Grabbing up the two packs, Tack allows the tor to take him, just as the woman with her ribs exposed hurtles down on him like a hammer. Night folds into another night. Tack glimpses the substance of the torbeast built up behind the incursion, like a forest trying to force its way through a keyhole. Hanging onto Tack’s jacket, the wounded woman turns her gun towards his face. His boot goes in below her ribs, into exposed intestines. Screaming, choking blood filling her mouth, she loses her grip and tumbles away into night.

A feeding mouth uncoils out of midnight and Hoovers her up. Ignores Tack completely.