Cowl

16

Engineer Goron:

The fusion explosion was contained within the temporal barrier, but even so a wash of radiation bled through the phase change. It did not take long to calculate that the bleed-over was not concomitant with the explosion that utterly erased Callisto. Had this been the case, the entire Jovian system would have been irradiated. It is certain that the bulk of the vast energy output from the explosion powered a time-jump no one believed possible. Cowl has taken himself all the way to the Nodus and, as far as we can ascertain, the Umbrathane fleet is scattered throughout the ages between then and now. The spatial shift, predictably, was towards Earth. I have to admit that what the Umbrathane might do does not bother me greatly, as I have little doubt that their ships will be unusably radioactive and so will need to be abandoned. But Cowl… a creature capable of snuffing out four hundred million lives so easily? Even the two Umbrathane prisoners, Coptic and Meelan, agree that something must be done now, probably because their troops also died when Callisto was obliterated.

In the rock pools there were trilobites and white slugs with hinged shells on their backs. Feverish, and aching with hunger, Polly caught both types of creature by hand, and swallowed them still alive and kicking.

Disgusting, Polly, absolutely disgusting.

Nandru was standing right behind her, for she could see his reflection in the water. But when she turned, he evaporated. She gulped down more, stuffing the horrible creatures into her mouth, all briny and stinking while her teeth chomped through their green-packed innards. Eventually she forced herself to her feet.

The sea had begun rushing back across the plain of frozen lava, and not wishing to be caught by the fast-approaching tide, she turned back towards the foothills. She was aiming for a patch of still-warm lava back there, where she had slept much of the previous night, but the tor would not allow her this luxury. Its webwork turned steely inside her and dragged her down like a claw. She shifted yet again through night, in a cage glowing incandescent, to a place barren and hammered by filthy rain. There she managed to drink her fill of bitter water, then was shifted again. In another place, duned with black sand, she staggered towards a horizon, where she hoped to find relief, something. Inside her greatcoat her ribs were now protruding. At her side walked Nandru, a frown puckering his brow.

I think it knows you will find no food here, and thus nothing to nourish it with, so it is feeding on you—using you up, killing you.

‘Help me.’

And how is he supposed to do that, young lady? He’s only a hallucination.

The boat captain, Frank, was standing there, chuffing on his pipe, Knock John naval fort standing tall in the sands behind him. Polly supposed that the droning in her ears must be the sound of bombers flying over.

‘Stop it… make it stop.’

I cannot, and if I could, how would you live here?

That was Nandru, really speaking to her. She stared at the great maunsel fort and realized she was only seeing memory, not reality. When Fleming, the man from military intelligence, eyed her, seeming about to ask a question, she turned away from him. And in doing that she saw her own footprints stretching ahead of her, and realized she had been walking in a wide circle. As if impatient with this impasse, the tor shifted her again. And the nightmare not only continued—it grew worse.

Polly was too exhausted, too utterly depleted to care any more, and knew that the future span of her life encompassed maybe this shift and one more, but no more than that. Her clothes were now as baggy on her body as her skin was on her skeleton. She was like a fleshless waif staggering out of Belsen, whom food would probably not prevent from dying. Around her the glassy cage glowed incandescent, as if she had been trapped within tangled rods of white-hot steel, and she could see little beyond it. The shift back into the real she felt as a violent sideways motion, reminiscent of that preceding her arrival in Thote’s time. Around her the world bled back into existence, in shades of iron and glass, but the cage did not dematerialize. Instead it dropped to a flat metallic surface, deforming on impact as if made of dough, while vapour began to pour from it. Within the vorpal struts the glow faded down to red filaments, as the glass itself began to splinter and crack. Polly weakly nudged at one strut and it snapped like a sugar stick. Just then a figure loomed over her and began tearing open the rest of the cage.

‘Oh God…’

I suspect you have arrived, said Nandru.

Polly did not have the energy to scream as a skeleton wrapped in shadow was revealed through the shattering struts of the cage. Then, after a moment, she realized that this was not what she was really seeing. But still the rangy dark figure terrified her. Even some evil demonic face might have been more acceptable than the featureless ovoid that was his head. The skeletal impression, she now saw, was created by a network of hyaline ribs and veins inlaid into his black carapace.

Cowl, I would guess.

Too weird, far too weird, Polly thought.

Cowl grabbed her, one long hand closing round her thigh, and jerked her up out of the wreckage of the cage. The blood-rush to her head, as she was held suspended, made the world fade in and out of focus for Polly, but she saw that blank face tilt as she was inspected like some interesting bug. Then, with one swipe of his free hand, he tore away her greatcoat, pulling it down and over her head and off her arms. Then he caught her flailing arm, long fingers closing doubly around the tor. Inside her she felt the webwork jerk, then sensed the horror of it withdrawing, pulling back—its elements coiling up like the tentacles of an octopus dropped in boiling water. Then Cowl released his hold on her hip and she dropped, her arm wrenching painfully as she was suspended only by the tor. Cowl now gripped her elbow and pulled the tor closer to his blank face for inspection. It was as if Polly herself was utterly irrelevant—a pendulous piece of rubbish attached to the real centre of his interest. With vision now blurred, she saw him probing at the edge of the tor with one sharp finger, then drive the digit in. Polly howled.

The tor loosened, peeled up and she slid out of it like a mollusc discarded from its shell. Hitting the floor on her boots, consciousness fled her for only a moment, then she found herself lying over on her side, her arms stretched out before her face. The one from which the tor had been removed was now a flayed mess of tendons and exposed muscle.

You have to move, Polly. You have to escape.

Easy enough advice from someone who had probably forgotten what it was to be at the limit of endurance. From where she lay, Polly could see Cowl squatting, with his knees projecting way above his head, running long fingers around the inside of the tor, before abruptly sending it skittering across the floor. Gasping from an agony that just went on and on, Polly became subliminally aware of her surroundings—of curving walls of ribbed metal inlaid with esoteric circuitry, seemingly fashioned of other coloured metals and polished crystal. Above her, yellow light beamed down from a circular skylight; while, opening at intervals around the wall, were doors revealing a gleaming chaos beyond; and beside her, at the bottom of a slope, an intestinal tunnel dropped down into darkness, into which the now discarded tor had fallen. But mostly her attention was fixed on Cowl himself as he stood, with a motion both abrupt and fluid. The man—the creature? — was about to stride away, but then turned and stepped back towards Polly. This was it—he was going to kill her.

However, that was not his intention at all. Almost impatiently he snatched her up by the shin and in one motion, turning to leave, tossed her towards the tunnel’s black mouth—like so much garbage.

Polly yelled as she slid down a frictionless slope, she flailed to grab at one side with her undamaged arm, but her hand slid off metal that had the feel of slime, and she plummeted down into blackness. In the brief, hurtling transit that followed, she coiled up protectively around her damaged arm. Then she shot out into yellow daylight, dropping to hit a ledge, to which she clung briefly, but seeing it occupied by skeletons and decaying corpses, screamed and released her hold. She then struck water, cold and salty, and began to sink. Polly still had some fight left in her — struggling weakly for the surface, her flayed arm burning in the brine—but in her weakness and confusion, she took in a breath, and the numbing water filled her lungs, curtailing her struggles like a body blow.

Polly, I am so sorry…

Drifting in golden depths, Polly now knew her ending. But then a beetle-black hand grabbed her under the chin, and some monstrous being began to haul her back to the surface.

The pseudo-mantisal completed around Tack on the next shift; then on the following one he observed the red filaments expanding in its structure as it pushed to its limits, hurtling for home. Each time-jump he estimated to be in the region of a hundred million years. At each barren destination reached he stuffed himself with food and drink, taking glucose and vitamin supplements to stave off that point when the tor, detecting his blood sugars had dropped below a certain level, would become truly parasitic on him. This, he knew from the study of numerous torbearers encountered by the Heliothane, was the point of dying for many of those not killed by carnivorous fauna earlier in their journeys—their decaying bodies, still dragged back to Cowl, being fed upon by their tors.

Arriving here in a time when no life yet existed on the land, not even smears of blue-green algae, he set up his tent in the shelter of a frozen lava flow sculptured like some vast wormcast and, while sitting in front of it, ate and drank his fill. Thereafter transferring the remainder of his rations to the pack containing his equipment, he walked away from the tent—and immediately came upon a fellow torbearer.

She was sprawled on the ground, and wore the tattered remains of a richly decorated Elizabethan dress. There was a net of pearls holding her once dark—but now bleached-ginger—hair in an elaborate style. It confounded him how she had managed to keep it secured this way throughout what must have happened to her. Then he realized she had likely died much earlier on her journey through time, to be fed upon by her tor as she decayed. This was perhaps why her tor and the arm it had once enveloped were both gone—breaking away from the putrefying remnants of her body. The desiccating wind here had mummified her, and her hollow eye sockets gazed up endlessly into the sky. Tack turned away from the corpse and headed back to his tent.

Spewing brine from her lungs, Polly returned to abrupt and painful consciousness. The troll who had been battering at her chest now turned her unceremoniously into the recovery position and reached out to touch something recently attached to the side of her neck. Polly felt something happening—then recognized a drug hit coursing through her bloodstream.

Coughing up the last of the sea water, she rolled over onto her back and lay gasping below the lemon sky. But no matter how hard she inhaled, she was simply not getting enough air into her lungs. Then her rescuer loomed over her, a grotesque insectile mask covering its face. Polly baulked when a six-fingered hand offered her a similar mask, but she was too weak to resist as it was pressed wetly over her face.

Blessed oxygen surged into Polly’s lungs. Within a moment she was feeling light-headed, but then, with a sound like a liquid kiss from inside the mask, the air mix changed to normal.

With her vision clearing, Polly studied her rescuer. The woman’s skin was a metallic grey, glassy veins inset in its surface just like Cowl’s. A wide and powerful body was contorted by a hunched back, and supported on bowed legs. Her arms were malformed: the left arm, grotesquely muscular, terminated in a three-fingered hand that looked strong enough to crush granite, while her right arm was of normal size, but possessed a hand with two opposable thumbs. This strange creature stooped closer and said something to her she did not understand.

‘It hurts,’ was all Polly could say in reply.

The other woman shook her head, muttering something that sounded foul, then stepped back towards some thing squatting behind her. Polly felt her skin crawling when she got a good look at it. The size of a pony, it rested on four spiderish legs, its jointed neck jutting forward from the thorax, then slanting back to support a wasp-like head the size of a football. The thorax itself was translucent green and packed with circuitry in which lights constantly glinted. The wasp-striped body behind was covered by nacreous wings which the woman lifted up, like the lid of a box, to delve inside. Removing something from the robotic insect’s body, the grotesque woman came and squatted down beside Polly, indicating her injured arm before holding out a cylinder that hinged open in two halves to reveal a moist interior that seethed. Polly instantly made to back away from it.

She’s trying to help you, Polly. That’s some kind of wound dressing, I’ll bet.

Reluctantly heeding Nandru, Polly held out her injured arm and the woman closed the cylinder round it. At first there was alarming movement and pain then, thankfully, her arm abruptly numbed. Grabbing Polly’s upper arm, the woman hauled her to her feet.

‘Abas lo-an fistik trous,’ the woman said, then shook her head. Abruptly she reached over to Polly’s hip bag and neatly opened it with her twin-thumbed hand. Taking out Polly’s taser, she inspected the device for a moment before returning it and sealing the hip bag shut. That reminded Polly the automatic was still in her coat, but she felt no inclination to go back for it.

The troll woman then spoke words in what sounded like Chinese, then Russian. Finally she said, ‘Century human what is?’ before going on to try another language.

When Polly finally figured she had been asked a question, she replied, ‘Twenty-second.’

The woman paused, then said, ‘You are lucky… to be alive. Few attain… this… location, or survive long after their arrival.’

‘Why…?’ Polly asked, not sure exactly what she was asking.

‘Cowl normally kills before discarding. He must have been distracted—either that or he does not care any more.’ Suddenly the woman’s speech was totally lucid.

Polly stared at her rescuer in bewilderment.

‘It is complicated to explain. You will not be able to walk?’ Testing her theory, the woman released her grip—then caught Polly as she began to slump. ‘I see not.’ Abruptly the strange female ducked briefly and, slinging Polly easily over one shoulder, she stepped to the insectile robot and dropped the girl down on her feet beside it, gesturing to the compartment revealed by the hinged-up wings.

‘Not comfortable, but it is either that or on my shoulder.’

Polly nodded and the woman helped her into the cramped compartment, her legs dangling over the rear. Glancing round, she saw the robot’s head turn to inspect her briefly, then tilt slightly, as if in query, before facing forwards again. As the woman moved off, the robot followed her dutifully, the sharp tips of its legs driving deep into the ground in sequence. It moved just like an insect, and utterly silently, with no hydraulic sounds, no hiss of compressed air. Polly had half expected to be thrown from side to side, but the compartment remained precisely level all the time.

The woman led them away from sand and out across a fragmenting lava flow. Orange-brown clouds now scudded across the yellow sky and, to Polly’s right, the sea in which she had so nearly drowned reflected those colours. Wavelets foamed on a reef of jagged stones, and beyond, where the coast curved round, she now saw a huge flower-shaped citadel, from which she had obviously been ejected earlier.

Simulacra of life—excepting Cowl and this one here—and nothing else. Seems you have finally reached your destination.

‘And now what?’ Polly subvocalized.

Has anything really changed? You must just try to stay alive.

‘Maybe that’s not enough any more. Maybe I’d like to do something about that faceless bastard that fucked me over.’

A fatal course of action, I would suggest.

Polly gritted her teeth in growing anger.

With the pseudo-mantisal fighting against ablation with an outpouring of energy, Tack knew this would be the last shift, so he prepared himself. The ultraviolet light baking the Earth would be no hazard for him, since part of his augmentation had been an artificial epidermis resistant to such radiation, but the lack of oxygen was a problem. He donned the hated mask, before closing up his pack and shrugging it onto his back. With his carbine dangling before him on its strap, and the Heliothane U-sound injector clasped in his right hand, he now concentrated on the vorpal view of interspace. Cowl’s tor trap was likely to be automatic, so whether or not Tack was expected, it would try to drag him quickly down into Cowl’s abode and that Tack must not allow. He wanted to reconnoitre, get the feel of his prey’s location, then come at him from some unexpected direction. He no longer felt any great impatience or eagerness for his task, just a stolid determination reinforced by seeing the Elizabethan corpse back there. Above all, Cowl had to die because of the suffering he had already caused and because of what he intended.

The hyperspheres and infinite surfaces, the lines of light and impossible distortion appeared in Tack’s perception and he saw, in 3D representation, the trap swaying towards him like the funnel of a tornado. With rigid will, he grasped control of the webwork inside himself and forced the tor and its generated mantisal aside from the approaching funnel and down into the real. The webwork fought him, like a horse being urged at too high a jump, but Tack’s will was strong because, his physical being having been bolstered by food concentrates, the tor had not managed to weaken him with the lethal parasitism that became usual at this late point of the journey. The pseudo-mantisal evaded the funnel, folded out of interspace and bounced, splintering, onto a dusty plateau. Shattering all about him on its second bounce, it began to ablate as if hit by a molecular catalyser.

As the construct disintegrated, Tack tumbled out of it in a roll. Then he was up and running, the tor so tight around his arm it paralysed his hand. He dodged into a dried-out gulley eaten down through friable rock, then along its course and came up between butts of black volcanic rock. Glancing back he saw a white rocket flame curving out from the horizon, impelling a black polygonal container. The missile hit at his arrival point, and detonated, blowing up a pillar of fire that rolled out clouds of dust.

Tack allowed himself a nasty grin—in his paranoia Cowl had given away the location of his refuge. All Tack had to do now was track back along the missile’s trajectory.

Tack now stripped off his pack and slid down, with his back resting against the black rock, then pulled up his sleeve and studied the tor. It was a boiled-lobster red now, having filled itself with his blood as it sucked in the energy to fling itself to its intended destination. Inside him he could feel the webwork hardening again quickly. He pressed the injector against the tor’s hard surface, feeling a brief vibration, then removed it to see a spill of chalky powder around a cluster of pin-holes, through which the catalytic poison had just been injected. Slowly the tor began to change colour, veins of black spreading across its surface and its rubescence fading to white. Inside him, Tack felt the web was dying—retreating from his extremities. Eventually the tor hung dead on his arm.

Taking up his pack again, Tack strode through the billowing dust clouds from the explosion, and set off in the direction of the missile’s source. After an hour he reached the edge of the plateau and there made his camp—concealed behind a boulder starred with large quartz crystals. Inside his tent, well sealed against the external atmosphere, he paused to eat and drink his fill, before stepping outside, safely masked again, and heading to the plateau’s rim. Before him lay a plain veined with rivers, encroached on from one side by a field of frozen lava. Broken rock was scattered everywhere, the detritus of some ancient cataclysm.

However, down below lay the remains of other less natural structures, which Tack would not have recognized without Pedagogue’s teaching. For here lay the remains of the entire research facility that Cowl had taken back through time, and across space, from Callisto. Witnessing this ruination, Tack recalled the gutted spaceships that lay decaying by Pig City. Clearly they were vessels from the Umbrathane fleet which Cowl had also dragged back through time.

The plain eventually narrowed into a peninsula projecting out into a golden sea, its water reflecting the lemon sky. To one side of this peninsula rested Tack’s true destination—not those ruins below him, for Cowl had built anew in the three centuries since his flight.

Supported above the sea on a forest of pillars, the citadel bore the shape of an open water lily. The structure was as beautiful as it was huge. Though still ten kilometres away from it, he estimated that the tops of its petals, glowing with lights, must pierce cloud. So that was where Cowl lived—and where Tack intended him to die.

The structure squatted on a slab of basalt poised at the top of a slope leading down to the wide but shallow river they were currently crossing. It was dome-shaped, closely arched all around, so that only narrow points of exterior wall between these arches actually reached the ground. Through most of the arches glinted windows, though Polly could just see that one of them opened directly into the interior. Too tired to keep turning her head round to look at it, she gave up and faced back down the way they had come. Realizing that they were now travelling in bright moonlight, Polly tried to remember some of the journey that had brought them here, but she had been fading in and out of consciousness so often that it remained a blur.

‘What’s your name?’ she finally managed to croak to her travelling companion.

‘Before I was born, my mother named me Amanita because I poisoned her in the womb and had to be removed, completing my early growth in an amniotic tank. As soon as I could, I renamed myself Aconite.’

‘Why that?’

‘Because it seemed appropriate.’

Polly found she had run out of the energy to pursue this line of questioning, so bowed her head and lost it for a second. Coming to, she saw that they had now reached the other side of the river and were about to climb the slope towards what seemed likely to be some kind of house.

Aconite is an interesting word.

Nandru, who was walking alongside the robot, gazed across it with a twisted expression at the strange woman.

‘How so?’ Polly asked out loud.

It is an alternative name for the poisonous plant also called wolfsbane or monkshood.

‘And that’s interesting why?’

I see you don’t get it. You must try harder; since you’re now so closely linked into Muse’s reference library, the information is available to you.

‘I still don’t understand…’ Then Polly did get it. ‘I didn’t know what Cowl meant before. I see… cowl is the name for a monk’s hood.’

Abruptly she realized her robot transport had stopped moving. She glanced the other way and saw that Aconite was standing watching her. Turning back revealed that the illusory Nandru had disappeared.

‘I realize now that your words are not entirely the result of delirium.’ The troll woman stepped forward and reached down beside Polly into the back of the robot. Removing a square palm console, Aconite held it in her heavy three-fingered hand while running the nimbler fingers of her other hand over the machine’s display. After a moment she looked up, reached over and pulled aside the filthy collar of Polly’s blouse. She touched first the muse device briefly, before reaching up to flick Polly’s earring.

To Polly she said, ‘Speak to your hidden companion.’

Oh-oh, looks like I’ve been rumbled.

‘That is enough,’ said Aconite before Polly could say anything to Nandru. ‘Now, are you Al?’

Polly tried to overcome her confusion, but her brain was washing around inside her head like dirty water.

Nandru’s voice issued from the palm console. ‘Well, that’s a moot point,’ he said. ‘I guess that’s what I am now, but I wasn’t always like this. You’ve caught me on a bad day.’

‘You are a cerebral download,’ Aconite said, disapproval in her voice. ‘Yes, I see. A military log-tac computer with secure com-link, and the facility set for partial download of tactical information in the event of death. It would seem the level of redundancy was excessive and that you took advantage of that. So dead soldier, what is your name?’

‘Nandru. And I resent being addressed that way, that’s… thanatist.’

With a snort, Aconite switched off the console and dropped it back into the compartment beside Polly. Turning away, she snapped her fingers, and the robot began to follow her again.

I think she likes me.

Mounting the slope, the robot did not tilt in the least. With its back legs stretching down at full extension, its front legs bent double like a spider’s, it maintained Polly perfectly level as it climbed the incline. Soon they reached the basalt slab and, as Polly twisted to look round, they began heading for the arched entrance. Close up, Polly saw that the building was huge.

Then through the entrance and crossing a wide room, with arched windows all around, containing the chaotic glinting of metal and glass—insectile sculptures or esoteric machines, Polly could not tell. A whoomph as the entrance closed behind them, then a breeze stirring up Polly’s hair. The mask coming away from her face with a sucking sound. Also unmasked, Aconite picked her up from the robot’s container and briefly Polly glimpsed golden eyes amid lopsided but not unattractive features. Then bright aseptic light and a soft table underneath her, clothing cut away, something cold against her chest—then a stabbing pain and a sense of movement inside her chest. Abrupt unconsciousness followed.

On waking, after long oblivion, to find some flesh miraculously back on her bones, Nandru told her, He’s her brother.

And only later did she learn that she was the first of Cowl’s samples to survive.

The cold and piercingly bright light of the full moon precluded sleep, as did the itching underneath his dead tor. Sitting in the tent, Tack picked at the edges of the thing as if it was a huge scab, and just like a scab it began to peel away from his flesh, but was frangible and snapped like charcoal. Revealed underneath it was pink scar tissue—forming so fast because of the Heliothane boosting of his body. He continued snapping away pieces of the tor and, bit by bit, broke the thing off. His arm looked grotesque and felt as if it had been burnt, so he quickly applied a wound dressing taken from his pack. His arm ached as well as itched and he realized he had very little chance of sleep now.

Once masked and outside again, Tack collapsed his shelter and stowed it away. Taking up his pack once more, he rounded the boulder and headed off. Cowl’s citadel now glowed both with internal light and reflected moonlight, looking even more beautiful. Tack observed it in awe for a while, wondering why he had expected something ugly. Then he negotiated the steep slope down to the plain.

Within an hour he was back on level ground, then walking fast down a watercourse that wound in the general direction of the peninsula. He chose this route as a precaution against there being motion detectors aimed out across the plain above him. He suspected, though, that Cowl, if he entertained at all the possibility of the Heliothane getting through to him, would expect from them a massive assault, not a lone assassin.

After a further two hours, Tack reached a shallow estuary debouching beside the shoulder of the peninsula. Here he searched around until he found a trench formed by a wide crack in the granite, through which a small rill bubbled. Aiming to follow this as far as it would take him towards his destination, he was pleased when it continued meandering as far as a point adjacent to the citadel. On a nearby slab he again erected his tent, then climbed up the side of the trench to take a look.

Getting out to the citadel presented no problem. The sea would offer Tack more concealment than he had anticipated: since all his equipment was waterproof, by wearing his mask he could approach the place underwater. The problems started once he got inside it as, now gazing at the citadel through his monocular, he could see Umbrathane working on structures running round the outer surfaces of the lily’s petals.

With the exception of those who had established Pig City, the Umbrathane had dispersed into cells as they had fled into the past, so presenting the usual problems of any guerrilla organization. It was not so much the damage they could inflict—their attacks were mosquito bites to the great beast that was the Heliothane Dominion—but the extravagant use of resources needed just to track them down. Saphothere had conjectured that Cowl might be gathering them to him—and this was the case. So, to locate Cowl, Tack must not only avoid the citadel’s security system, but its hostile Umbrathane population as well.

Lowering the monocular, he decided that no matter what plans he made now, they would probably need to change once he entered the citadel. But the logistics programs Pedagogue had loaded him with were protean and his lethal skills at their peak. He must just go in and do what he had been sent to do. Sliding back into the trench, he opened his pack and began to extract those items that would assist him in the task.

First he donned a weapons harness, with all its stick pads and pockets to carry the necessary devices. Sliding the carbine into its back holster, next to the climbing-harpoon launcher, he hooked a further power supply and another two-thousand-round box for it at his right hip. A spare carbine he considered for one long moment, then left aside.

The five molecular catalysers—coins of red metal ten centimetres across, with a virtual console on the front—he pressed against stick pads in a line down one chest strap. Each of these was set to react with a different material, but each was also capable of being reset. Into one trouser pocket he emptied the pack of mini-grenades, and into the other he put the multispectrum scanner. The grenades were all set for a standard three-second delay—the countdown starting the moment they exceeded a one-metre proximity to the transponder in his weapons harness. Ten larger programmable grenades he attached around his belt; they were made of hard fragmentation glass and contained an explosive that made C4 look silly. His handgun, which could take the same explosive ammunition as the carbine, he adjusted for silent running—much like more primitive guns, with a silencer screwed onto the barrel, though this operated by slinging out a sound-suppressor beam in line with the bullet, generated by the same impelling charge.

Then he took from his pack the less standard items. Five field generators he attached to the other chest strap, their power supply operated from a thermal battery that burnt itself out within a few seconds. He hoped he would not need these, as it would probably mean he was on the run. The two tactical nukes—like the one Saphothere had used on Pig City—went into a bag attached to the left-hand side of his belt. These he would use at his discretion. Finally he took out the last item: his seeker gun. It contained twenty rounds, and its system, via recordings, had already acquired Cowl. This he put in his thigh pocket, there being no position provided for it on the harness. He was ready.

As he climbed out of the trench and headed down to the sea, sealing his hood and pulling on his gloves, Tack wondered vaguely why he had not been provided with a long-range missile launcher, or one of those excellent Heliothane scoped assault rifles. But he dismissed that thought as he entered the water. It did not once occur to him to wonder how, once his mission was completed, he would be able to get away from this place and this time. His programming did not allow him that.