Cowl

15

Modification Status Report:

My daughter is a failure that nearly killed me while she was still in my womb. Obviously my decision to retain the alleles is the cause of this — those alleles displacing both wholly and partially the alterations I made. As she continues her growth in the amniotic tank, I see that she possesses no exoskeleton, merely a toughening and discoloration of the skin. Her sensory grid is viable, but nowhere near as efficient as planned for. Her interfacing organs have been stunted by the growth of those damned human features: eyes, nose and a normal mouth, and all the concomitant sensory apparatus to support them. She has also lost some of her bilateral symmetry, which I now see is due to the fiddler-crab gene I used to supposedly make alterations to her mouth. Sometimes I damn the lack of logic in genetic evolution, when a gene controlling eye colour might also control something like fingernail growth. My instinct is to flush the tank, but much can be learnt from this growing child and, having learnt, I will try again.

There was no real danger to him in venturing outside Sauros — other than the stringencies of the environment—since Cowl would never bother to expend the energy required just to hit an individual heliothant of Palleque’s minor status, so consequently there were no restrictions on such ventures for him. Had it been Goron out here it would have been an entirely different matter, for the Engineer’s assassination would be an utterly demoralizing blow for the Heliothane, as it had nearly proven. Pausing on a slope made spongy by centuries of ferny growth and decay, Palleque raised his monocular and gazed back at Sauros.

Goron rarely left the city and, even if he did, Cowl might be disinclined to attack, suspecting a trap. The recent attack upon the Engineer inside the city had been unexpected and nearly successful because Cowl had known the shield frequency, enabling the preterhuman to pass through the defences at a particularly vulnerable time. And now some pertinent questions were being asked at all levels of the Heliothane.

Hooking the monocular back onto his belt, Palleque removed a small locator and saw that he did not have far to go. The communicator was on the other side of the mountain, where he had established it in a body of granite. By now it would have grown its shielding of vorpal crystal all through the surrounding rock and would be ready to use. Glancing upslope he saw that the ferns ended where the cold wind had denuded the mountainside of vegetation. On reaching this firmer ground he picked up his pace. The Triassic push was a while away—on Sauros time — so he did not hurry because of that. He hurried because he realized time was running out for himself.

At the mountain’s peak he paused to look back at Sauros again, and considered how arrogant were so many assumptions about that place. Gazing down the rear slope, he observed a swathe of devastation cut through the vegetation by a herd of sauropods, and the ensuing activity which that elicited from the attendant carnosaurs. But that would represent no problem—he now recognized his surroundings and no longer needed the locator. The communicator lay only a hundred metres below him and, by taking the slope in long bounds, he shortly reached it.

Like the wing of a downed aircraft, the granite outcrop speared up from the spread of cycads crowding this west face of the mountain. Arriving there, he pocketed his locator and reached out to press his hand against the grey rock face. Immediately the stone took on a translucence and a vorpal manifold rose to the surface to meet and bind with his hand. In the darkness behind it, a beetle-black non-face turned towards him.

‘The attack was unsuccessful,’ said Cowl.

Palleque nodded. ‘Goron had made preparations of which no one but he was aware.’

‘He used a displacement generator.’

‘I’ve since learnt he had them placed at intervals inside Sauros, when it was first built in New London. I now have their positions mapped.’ Palleque took his palm computer from his belt and pressed its interface patch against the necessary position in the manifold, squirting the information across. As he took it away again, he scanned about himself, suspicion wrinkling his brow.

Cowl bowed his head towards something, then raising it up said, ‘For this to be of any use to me I will need to know a future, Sauros-time shield frequency.’

Palleque grinned. ‘Now here’s the good news. You won’t even need that. When Sauros—’

The energy discharge hit the rock like a thunderclap. Shrieking, Palleque staggered back, his hand pulling free of the manifold, but leaving most of its incinerated skin behind. Down on his knees he groped for his weapon with his free hand, while Cowl looked on.

Stepping out from the surrounding cycads came Goron and four other Heliothane.

‘You treacherous fucking snake!’ spat Goron.

Palleque pulled his weapon free, but another shot slammed into his bicep and spun him round, the weapon bouncing from his grasp.

Goron turned to the fading image of Cowl. ‘By all means, please, come and visit us. If you don’t, we’ll be coming for you.’

From Cowl there issued a hissing snarl. Goron raised his weapon and fired it straight into the manifold. The communicator fused on solid rock, all translucence behind it disappearing. Goron turned to his companions and directed two of them towards Palleque. ‘I don’t want him to die or suffer any unnecessary pain now.’ He glanced at the rock. ‘That will come later.’

She was coming out of it. Her legs felt cold and numb where they lay in the water, but at last she was able to move her arms a little and, driving her elbows into a scree of rock flakes and broken rainbow shell, she was able to drag herself clear of the cold brine and roll over onto her back. Then, still gasping, she gazed up at an anaemic blue sky smeared with washes of white cloud. Her body felt cored with lead, and as feeling returned to her extremities they felt bloated. But that core was diminishing with her every breath. Eventually she managed to heave herself up onto her knees and survey her surroundings.

The rock pool her legs had been soaking in was bright with anemones, odd shellfish, red algal growth and green weed like discarded tissue paper. She shuddered to see that it also was full of movement: trilobites sculled about in its depths like great flattened woodlice. This pool was just one amid many others left by the retreating tide, in a band of rock lying between the slope of the beach she was now kneeling on and the sand flats stretching out beyond to the distant spume of the sea. Nothing else was visible to her yet.

‘How did you do that?’ she managed, when she could get enough spit into her mouth.

I might as easily ask you the same question.

‘No but… you never said…’

Muse is linked deeply into you and it is linking deeper all the time. Perhaps two time-shifts back I became aware that its monitoring systems were connecting up with your… tor. The last time you shifted I saw… felt how you did it, and knew that I could do it too.

Suddenly Polly felt invaded by the presence of Nandru—something she had never felt before while all she could hear was his voice. Even when attending the calls of nature she had not felt his scrutiny, as he seemed to retreat to some place of his own on such occasions, as if only making his presence felt when she required it. But then she decided she was being histrionic. Nandru had just rescued her from having the tor cut away from her—along with a chunk of flesh sufficient for Thote’s purpose — so he had probably saved her life.

‘Thank you,’ she said, at last heaving herself to her feet and getting a wider view of her surroundings.

Polly was now seeing what she would have called desert, or perhaps tundra, for only these landscapes did she associate with such an absence of life. However, the temperature here was that of a balmy spring day, and the air felt neither freeze-dried nor baked dry of moisture. Under these conditions, the landscape — strewn with boulders, drifts of powdered and flaking stone, blackened with falls of volcanic ash and divided by a sparkling river—should technically be burgeoning with life. The only evidence of such was the occasional smear of green to leaven a monochrome vista. Walking woodenly, Polly headed for the river.

There was nothing alive in the sparkling torrent. Stooping down, Polly scooped up water in the container, and drank. The liquid was cold and tasted of soda. She hadn’t drunk anything so sweet in… a long time. She then refilled the container, pocketed it, and headed back for the seashore, wondering when she would die of shellfish poisoning.

With his breath held, and his understanding of the tor’s operation complete, Tack willed it to materialize its pseudo-mantisal. But that failed when a lack of breath forced him to will it back into the real. He folded out of interspace in midair, the straps of each pack grasped firmly in each hand, and plummeted into reedlike growth and lukewarm water. Then, treading over a mat of rhizomes and stirring up black silt, he waded towards an island made of either mud or rock, which he had glimpsed as he fell. An hour later, exhausted, and with hunger engendered by the parasite on his arm eating into his guts, he reached the mudflat abutting a contorted hook of stone. Crawling up across the muddy slope, still dragging his packs behind him, he finally reached the remains of a lava flow and rested gratefully.

Saphothere must already be dead, or rather would be dead some indeterminate time in Tack’s current mainline future. It didn’t help to contemplate that too deeply as, without expending amounts of energy not available to the Heliothane this far back, time travel was not accurate enough to correct such errors—to save Saphothere’s life. Now only the mission remained.

After a moment Tack stood up. Some distance ahead a gigantic tree reared out of the green battle between horsetails and ferns in a wayward promontory of forest hemmed in by the endless sea of sword-shaped emerald reeds. Gazing at this scene, Tack felt disquiet: that tree was not the right shape, the horsetails were tentacles beating at the ferns in seasonal slow motion, and the ferns themselves grew chaotically from their rhizome trunks. This seemed brute growth without complexity, a war rather than an environment, as if balance of coexistence had yet to be found. And the reeds were like dumb spectators to it all.

Just one glimpse was enough to tell him that he had arrived in the Devonian age. Here he knew that there might be a few tetrapods about, but that those ferns were loaded with cyanide, there was no fruit of any kind, and that all available tubers would have the consistency of saturated balsa and be as nourishing. He moved over to the other side of the lava flow, where it plunged down into deep water, and washed the mud from his suit. Returning above, he opened his supply pack, took out his concentrated rations and, seated on the stone, staring down the mudflat, began methodically to fill himself. He was very hungry. His tor was hungry.

As Tack understood it, a mantisal consumed a similar amount of nutrition from its temporary host as did a tor, and the length of its time-jump was also commensurate. But while the mantisal also needed to charge itself like a huge capacitor, the tor did not. It was a fact the Heliothane did not like to admit, that the tor was as far in advance of the mantisal as the hydrogen-powered aircar was in advance of the Model-T Ford. Without recharging, the mantisal jumped inaccurately—the error could be as much as a hundred million years. The tor always jumped accurately and greater control could be exerted at the point of exit. The only problem with the tors was being programmed to jump only in one direction in time: back towards Cowl. No heliothant had yet managed to change that programming.

While he continued eating, Tack noticed movement in the shallow trench his progress had left in the mud. Creatures similar to mudskippers were flopping and bubbling out of the water, gobbling up something he had disturbed to the surface of the mud. Which one of those might it be, he wondered. Could it be the one over there the size of a mature salmon, or the one with the purplish warty skin and eyes like tomatoes? Or was it this little one with whitish skin, sunken eyes, and large flippers that propelled it across the mud at such speed? Which one was his grandad a billion times removed? At that point the white one got too close to the warty one, and the ugly fellow snatched it up and chomped it down, so Tack assumed the warty one was the more likely candidate. This was life on land in the first days—beginning as it meant to continue.

Contemplatively Tack bit off a lump of protein concentrate and threw the remains out to the creatures. They slopped themselves away from it at first, then after a short time circled back in and began fighting over it. Eventually the warty one scuttled off with the prize in its thick lips. Replete himself, and then some, Tack set up his tent, crawled inside it, wrapped himself in the heat sheet and was instantly asleep.

With her regenerating arm locked around his neck and the snout of her weapon jammed up underneath his chin, Saphothere felt he was no longer in a position to resist Meelan. Thus sprawled on the ground, the both of them observed the incursion folding itself back into a fuzzy line in the air, as it closed then disappeared.

‘Right, get up. Put your hands on your head,’ Meelan hissed. ‘One wrong move and you know what will happen.’

She drew away from him, keeping her weapon aimed at his back, and stood waiting while he assumed the position. His carbine lay on the ground only a metre to the side of him, but even as he glanced at it two Umbrathane women stepped out from different parts of the jungle and began jogging up the slope. As they converged on the campsite both of them studied Saphothere with evident hostility.

‘Iveronica,’ Meelan acknowledged the woman Saphothere recognized as the leader of the Pig City Umbrathane.

Stepping forward Iveronica said, ‘I saw Coolis go, but what about the rest?’

The other woman, who could have been Meelan’s double, but for the fact that her lower jaw had been replaced by a metallic prosthesis, hissed, ‘Golan was dragged through with the tor-bearer. Olanda is on his way.’

Saphothere grinned at the jawless woman. ‘What did you say? That wasn’t very clear.’

Meelan belted him across the back of the head, knocking him down on all fours.

‘Soudan, we need him.’ Iveronica restrained the jawless woman, whose carbine was now trained on Saphothere’s midriff. ‘Put it up.’

‘What do we need him for?’ Soudan lowered her weapon. ‘Cowl has given us our way to him and soon all Heliothane will be extinct.’ She gestured to where the incursion had appeared earlier, and where eight thorny objects were scattered on the ground.

‘Information,’ said Iveronica. ‘Cowl won’t be pleased that we didn’t capture the torbearer.’ She glanced aside. ‘Here’s Olanda now. That’s all of us?’

‘Yes, all,’ conceded Soudan. ‘That fucking primitive got Oroida and burnt Golan before she jumped him. I doubt she survived the drag-through—she was a real mess.’

‘He was augmented,’ said Iveronica, her face expressionless as she gazed at Meelan. ‘That’s why he first escaped. Golan and Oroida knew this. They made an error.’

Soudan was glaring at Saphothere, and did not seem to register her companion’s words. She was probing her prosthetic jaw as if she felt it might fall away.

‘Obviously not as genetically advanced as your fellows,’ said Saphothere. ‘How long ago in your time has it been since I just missed hitting that sack of shit between your ears?’

With a snarl Soudan swung her weapon back up. But then a shot hit Soudan squarely between the eyes, spraying Iveronica with pieces of her bone and brain. Saphothere rolled smoothly, snatching up his carbine and firing at the Umbrathane leader as she shook the bloody mess from her eyes. Meelan turned, just as smoothly, and put a cluster of shots into Olanda’s chest, flinging the man back in an explosion of gore. Fire cut up into the sky as Iveronica went down, one leg blown away at the knee. She tried to bring her weapon to bear, but further shots from Saphothere smashed away her weapon and her right arm.

Saphothere stood and glanced round at Meelan. ‘That could have gone better.’

‘How so?’ asked Meelan tightly, as she holstered her weapon and strode over to stare down at Iveronica. ‘I don’t see any of them getting up again.’

The Umbrathane leader, Iveronica, looked up at the two of them.

‘Why?’ she managed, as she bled into the dirt.

‘Seven thousand of our people were on Callisto,’ spat Meelan. ‘When you sat in your nice comfortable ships and leapt back through time with Cowl, what of them?’

‘Losses… were inevitable,’ said Iveronica.

‘You could have picked them up. Callisto was under your control once Cowl erected the phase barrier. You didn’t bother because my kind of Umbrathane has always been cannon fodder for your kind. My people were reduced to less than atoms.’

‘Many have died in our cause.’ Iveronica managed to push herself up onto her remaining elbow. The bleeding from her shattered arm had ceased as her body already began to repair itself. ‘And you have betrayed them all.’

‘Do you need to hear any more?’ Saphothere asked Meelan.

Meelan turned and stared at him for a moment, then abruptly stooped, her right hand closing around the supine woman’s throat and her left hand catching her flailing left arm. With a raised eyebrow Saphothere looked on while Meelan slowly choked Iveronica to death. When it was over, he said, ‘You know, putting that mine on Tack was a bit risky.’

‘Not really.’ Meelan stood, still staring down at the dead woman. ‘No paralytic on the glass, and I set it to detonate far enough away from him to cause no damage as long as he was wearing that suit.’

‘I meant when he threw the damned mine at you,’ said Saphothere, shouldering his carbine and turning away.

After a moment Meelan followed him and they walked down the slope to where the incursion had manifested. Reaching the bottom, Saphothere turned over with the toe of his boot one of the many active scales discarded by the torbeast—one of the tors Cowl had made it leave behind for his Umbrathane allies.

‘Well, friend Tack was a little more dangerous than we supposed,’ said Meelan finally. ‘I think Coptic could attest to that. Anyway, who are you to talk about taking risks?’ She held up her hand and shifted it in its brace, inspecting it closely. ‘Maxell is not best pleased with us, you know.’

‘Of course I know. She made that plain when I finally brought Tack to New London. Apparently she didn’t think I should have risked losing him for the sake of finding and destroying Pig City.’

Meelan turned to look at him. ‘She perhaps sees the bigger picture.’ She gestured back at Iveronica. ‘Like she did.’

‘Perhaps,’ Saphothere conceded. ‘But even Maxell would have to agree that the results have been… gratifying.’ He again nudged one of the tors with the toe of his boot. ‘Iveronica would have stayed in her stronghold and never have gone to Cowl until no other option was available. With Pig City gone, and her energy sources destroyed, she and those who survived with her became just as much refugees as any other Umbrathane, and like them, needed tors to escape nasty Heliothane killers like myself.’

Meelan snorted. ‘Yes, everything has worked very nicely. But why this?’ She was still inspecting her hand.

‘Veracity.’

Closing her hand into a fist, Meelan abruptly spun round and drove it into Saphothere’s torso. He accepted the blow without retaliating, dropping down on one knee and clutching his gut.

‘Veracity,’ she spat.

Regaining his breath, Saphothere said, ‘Iveronica would have wondered about why only you and Coptic survived, and perhaps have been less inclined to give you the energy feed leading to Pig City. Being badly injured, your continued hatred of Heliothane would be believed and they would understand how you had neglected to scan Tack.’

‘And why atomics?’

Saphothere stood. ‘I had to destroy those generators and there was no time to set up catalysers or conventional explosives. I knew there would be survivors and you would be amongst them—your mantisal, though damaged, was within easy reach. I also knew that with the generators destroyed it wouldn’t be possible for Iveronica to get more than a few mantisals here—I did not want hundreds of umbrathants turning up. And I knew you would be amongst the riders. It could only work this way.’

‘Survivors,’ said Meelan, staring at him bleakly. ‘I got out about a second ahead of the blast, with an enteledont trying to chew my head, and just rode out the bleed-over of that blast into interspace.’

‘Comes with the territory.’

‘I sometimes wonder precisely what your priorities are, Saphothere.’

‘You know my priorities, Meelan. And you knew the dangers when you signed up with me,’ Saphothere replied. ‘Also I hope you fully understand how things are most likely to go from now on.’

‘Yes, I understand,’ Meelan hissed.

The glassy skeleton around her was veined with red, like glowing wires centred in cloudy black, and the air inside it stale yet again. To Polly it seemed like an engine pushed to its limits—a malfunctioning hydrocar driven to the point where the components of its engine were growing red hot. Every now and again it vibrated, as if something was going out of balance prior to some final smash. When this was becoming unbearable, she found she did not need to use much force of will to push herself out of this hell. Just looking into the grey and black, and contemplating summoning up that place of hyperspheres and endless surfaces, was enough to push her out into the real again.

No sea was visible, or audible, this time. She glimpsed twilit sky through boiling black smoke, a river of fire snaking down from the boiling caldera of a volcano, while a cataclysmic roar filled her ears. The stink of sulphur was strong and acrid. She sneezed as something salty and stinging went up her nose, then tasted grit and ashes in her mouth, stumbled away over whorled stone, the heat from which she could already feel through her boots, and that same stone shook and jerked under her like a dying beast. A boulder the size of a family car hammered down to her right, deforming around its glowing core rather than breaking, as it bounced once, smashing the larval crust beneath it to release gouts of yellow vapour, then crumping down a second time, much of its bulk penetrating down into a gas-formed cavern.

This is not a good place.

Eyes on her footing and her hand cupped over her mouth and nose, Polly began to run. Other lumps of hot rock came hammering down. She glimpsed something the size of a railway carriage drop down behind a rucked-up outcrop, raising a cloud of the black ash that lay in drifts and sooty lakes all about. Hot flecks settled in her hair, burning into her scalp.

Shift, for chrissake, shift!

But she couldn’t. There seemed nothing left—no strength, no will.

The ground shuddered underneath her, and Polly glanced back as an eruption concealed everything behind her in a boiling cloud of red and grey, hurtling towards her with ridiculous speed, seeming to eat up the landscape as it came. From somewhere there was enough—the tor perhaps realizing that, in the face of this, it would not itself survive to take back even a fragment of her arm. She shifted, glimpsed grey and black which seemed only an extension of the vulcanism, the cage not even forming around her. She came out yelling in a roll across the surface of a lake of cold cinders, sunlight above, and only a hint of sulphur in the air.

Again the pseudo-mantisal had been unable to form, but this time not due to any lack of will on his own part, nor lack of nutrition from his tor. Something had grabbed him from interspace and pulled him down, and he rolled out of it, releasing his packs and drawing his carbine from its holster—now positioned on his back. Rough shingle and broken shell gave way underneath him as, coming up onto his feet, he swung, sighting his weapon around him. No one nearby. Focusing on the rock field at the head of the beach, he advanced, weapon still ready, and checked the most likely places of concealment. Still nothing. Which meant that whatever had pulled him from interspace might not be nearby—nor whoever had used it. But certainly they would be coming along. His programming impetus was pushing him to shift again, but not very strongly. He fought it—rebelling on an almost unconscious level—and won. Slinging the two packs over one shoulder, while retaining his carbine in his right hand, he returned to the rock field and found cover, where he waited while tucking into his concentrated food supplies and gulping his bottled water. Leaden fatigue was eating into him as some hours later the man came limping down the beach, leaning on a strut of vorpal glass.

Tack identified him as Heliothane or Umbra, but very old — something he had yet to see in either of their kind. The man paused by the trail Tack had left and looked up the beach to the rock field. Stepping out of cover, the butt of his carbine propped against his hip, Tack waited.

The figure waved an arm and struggled up the beach. Tack observed how the old man’s decrepitude had seemingly increased of a sudden, and his own wariness increased. Even so, this man looked very ill. The clothing hung baggily on his thin frame and the skin of his pallid face was as near to the skull as was possible without him being dead.

‘That’s far enough,’ said Tack, when the oldster was ten paces from him.

The man leant on his cane of glass and wheezed dramatically. ‘At last,’ he said and took a step forwards.

Tack gestured with the gun and shook his head. The man took another step nearer.

‘One more step and I kill you,’ said Tack and he meant it.

The man halted and held up a hand. ‘My apologies, Traveller. It has been so long since I saw one of my own kind I can hardly believe you are real.’

‘How long?’ Tack asked.

‘Fifty years, or thereabouts—I lose track.’

‘Who are you?’

‘The name’s Thote. Poor Thote, stranded here; a casualty in a war that never ends or begins. Forgotten by those who sent me into battle.’

Tack thought the guy was laying it on a bit thick.

‘And you are?’ Thote asked.

Tack wondered to which of the two warring factions this old man belonged, and if that made any difference to any danger he might represent. Confident that, should he need to, he could take him down, he replied, ‘My name is Tack, twenty-second-century human, sent to assassinate Cowl.’ He watched for the other’s reaction.

‘Then we are allies,’ said Thote, suddenly standing more upright. ‘And I know about you, Tack. You are Traveller Saphothere’s protégé and perhaps our best hope. Join me at my camp for some food—since I have no doubt you are hungry. Tell me your tales, then be on your way.’

Tack returned his carbine to its holster and took up his two packs. This provoked no reaction from the old man, so Tack guessed he would make his move, if any was intended, at some later point.

‘Lead on,’ he said.

Thote turned and began to trudge back up the beach.

‘How is it you are here?’ Tack asked, as they walked.

‘The torbeast reared up from its lair, in its dead-end alternate, to attack Sauros and I was sent out as a spotter, and to delay it if I could. I used a displacement sphere and took out five per cent of its mass, dropping that into the Earth’s core. But it hit my mantisal when I was in interspace, damaging it and knocking me down in this place.’

‘You managed to pull me down here as well,’ Tack observed.

‘I did that.’ Thote glanced back at him. ‘My mantisal, though badly damaged, remains out of phase here. It can generate enough of a field to funnel travellers down into this time.’

‘Resourceful.’

‘Yes… I can do that, but I cannot leave here, or find sufficient nutrition to keep me alive for my full span.’

Tack did feel sympathy, but knew there was little he could do. Should he try to drag the man along with him at this stage in his journey, Thote would end up with the pseudo-mantisal materializing in his body, killing him instantly. Soon Thote turned inland from the beach and led the way to his encampment in the rock field. He had built himself a small stone hut, which was roofed with large empty carapaces. Before the entrance was the remains of a fire scattered round with fish bones. To one side lay a basket woven from some of the tougher growths that grew in the area, which contained dried stems for the makings of future fires. In front of the hut, Thote eased himself down into a bucket chair, obviously carved from a boulder over a long period of time.

‘I’ll prepare some food shortly,’ said the old man.

Seating himself nearby, Tack said, ‘No need—here.’ He opened his supply pack, took out one of the rations containers and tossed it over, noting the hand that caught it moved as fast as a snake.

‘There’s water over there.’ Thote gestured to where one of the collapsible water containers used by other travellers rested against a rock.

‘No need, I’ve drunk enough,’ said Tack, now increasingly suspicious of anything this man might offer him.

Thote opened his rations and began to eat, fast, one thin bony hand pecking up the food like an albino chicken. Then abruptly he stopped eating, his face turning grey. He jerked out of his seat, grabbed up his glass staff and stumbled forward, retching. Too rich for him, assumed Tack, after fifty years on the meagre diet provided by this environment. Tack stepped forwards, and, only as the staff lashed out towards him did he spot the red line glowing inside it like a lightbulb filament. The staff merely brushed his chest as he pulled away, but the discharge of energy from it slammed into him like a spade, flinging him backwards through the air. Hitting the ground heavily, he fought against the paralysing shock, pulling his handgun just as Thote bore down on him with the butt of the staff. Thote halted as Tack levelled the gun at him.

‘Um… Umbra… thane?’ Tack managed, pushing himself up onto one elbow.

‘Everything I told you is true,’ said the man, his voice less quavering now.

‘Well… tell me what you were trying to do?’

‘Just take your supplies.’

Tack realized that fifty years alone here had also impaired the man’s ability to lie convincingly.

‘No, that’s not it.’ Tack hauled himself up onto his knees. Thote’s gaze flicked to Tack’s left forearm and quickly away. ‘It’s my tor you were after. But surely you know you couldn’t use it — it’s genetically keyed to just me.’

Thote’s expression wrinkled with contempt. ‘Is that what they told you, primitive? Is that their explanation to you for sending you alone on your pathetic mission?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Tack growled.

‘Like the girl who passed through here fifty years ago, you’re just a piece of temporal detritus. In your case primed and filled with poison, then sent on its way.’

Here was another one of those arrogant Heliothane, like others in Sauros and New London, who obviously thought Tack a waste of time and energy. With a kind of weariness he noted the old heliothant turning himself slightly sideways to present a smaller target. Any moment now he would try for Tack’s gun.

‘What girl?’ Tack asked, trying to forestall the inevitable attack.

‘She called herself Polly. Just another of Cowl’s uptime samplings.’

Polly.

Almost from the instant Traveller Saphothere had captured him, Tack had forgotten the girl who had been the reason for him ending up on this insane journey. He felt a sudden loneliness—a craving to be with someone from a more familiar era. Almost distractedly he watched Thote tensing to make his strike.

‘Don’t try it,’ Tack warned. ‘Tell me about this Polly. What did you do with her?’

‘Drugging her was simple,’ said Thote. ‘I put just a bit in the food I gave her, since I needed to keep her alive.’

‘Why alive?’

‘Because at the moment of a torbearer’s death, the tor itself begins to feed directly on the substance of its host’s body and thereafter shifts unremittingly back to Cowl.’

‘What happened?’

Thote looked momentarily puzzled. ‘She should not have been able to. The drug acts on the cerebrum first before paralysing the nervous system.’

‘She escaped?’

‘She…’ Thote fell forwards, his legs sagging, then abruptly he twisted round, the staff leaving his hand in a glittering wheel towards Tack’s head. Like a spring uncoiling, he then hurled himself forwards in a flat dive. It was well done, and had not time and bad diet left the man so weakened, he might have been a formidable adversary. But he was not quite fast enough. Tack ducked under the flying staff, sidestepped quickly and brought his gun butt down on the back of Thote’s neck. He stepped away as the man hit the ground, rolled and came up in a crouch.

‘No,’ warned Tack, but he wasn’t getting through. Thote had that look in his eye: he didn’t care. This was his last chance. Tack pulled the trigger as the man came at him again. Five rounds hit Thote square in the chest and flung him back. He collapsed in the cold ashes of his own fire, coughing blood from his shattered chest, then just tipped over into a foetal curl. Tack walked over to check his pulse; it was best to be sure. Confirming Thote was dead, Tack turned and picked up his packs, then went into the man’s hut to find somewhere to sleep.