Cowl

17

Engineer Goron:

We know that many thousands of torbearers have been dragged back through time towards the Nodus, but how many survived the journey we have no idea. It is also a matter for conjecture whether any who did survive the journey then survived their encounter with Cowl. His utter disregard for human life makes this seem unlikely. I have to admit to feeling some guilt at our contribution of Tack to that likely offhand slaughter, though with what is at stake it was wholly justified. But it makes me question our own regard for human survival, evolutionary imperatives and all that these entail. Is not Cowl the summit of our own aspirations? And does not our attitude to him prove the falsity of our world view?

The robot did not have a name, so Polly christened it Wasp and altered its programming so that it recognized when it was being addressed. Originally Aconite had designed it for one simple purpose: to check if those of Cowl’s samples who caught on the ledge were still alive. For Wasp’s wings not only served as a lid for its rear compartment; it could fly. Polly did suggest that it might be worth building an aquatic robot to retrieve those falling into the sea, but Aconite demurred. The woman liked to swim and had no wish to dispense with her reason for doing so. Consequently Polly learnt to swim as well, soon being able to cover the hundred metres out from the beach as fast as Aconite herself. But thus far neither she nor Aconite had managed to retrieve any survivors, so the accumulation of bones and slowly decaying corpses below the citadel continued to grow. Polly spent six months with Aconite before things changed.

Wasp tells me she’s got a live one.

Immediately Polly rolled from her bed and stood up. Stepping naked into her shower cubicle, she switched it from water spray to UV-block, and closed her eyes while the moving shower head coated her skin with a substance that prevented her getting flayed by the ultraviolet outside. The block being quickly absorbed, she stepped out of the shower, pulled on the skin-tight garment that served as both clothing and wetsuit, slipped on her boots, whose loose upper material immediately tightened around her ankles, then took up her mask and headed outside. Aconite was trudging up the slope, with Wasp, heavily laden, following as usual.

‘At last,’ said Polly as she walked down to the troll woman, aware that the average had now become a live one for every two thousand dead, and that every death seemed to bruise something inside Aconite. Polly had come to realize that from childhood on it had always been Aconite’s purpose to clear up Cowl’s messes, to leaven his ruthless violence, and try to protect him from his own destructive impulses. She it was who had found for him a pre-eminent position amongst the Heliothane; and she it was who had come with him into the past, to continue performing her childhood duties.

‘I had to knock him unconscious,’ Aconite explained, holding up a sharp and perfectly maintained short sword in her heavier hand.

Studying the muscular man with his short-cropped grey hair, Polly recognized the leather armour he wore. She had seen similar armour on a corpse jammed under a deadfall in a stream in Claudian England. Tacitus Publius Severus, was the second rescuee.

After the Roman, who, they soon learnt, had encountered a Heliothane intercept squad at the beginning of his journey came three more almost in a rush. One was a feral boy without a name and without even a language, whom Polly dragged from the sea, and whom Aconite identified as from the dark age of the neurovirus. Aconite cured him of his affliction and surgically implanted a cerebral augmentation to compensate for his partially destroyed brain; while Polly, being one to give names, called him Lostboy. Wasp, for the first time, brought in a man who had managed to cling to the ledge over the sea, and understandably he screamed all the way, beating at the robot with the rusting musket he still grasped. Identifying this little Chinaman, they made the mistake, because of the musket, of thinking him from an age earlier than from which he had actually come. He had been a thief during China’s Cultural Revolution. They learnt from him how his robber band had been ambushed and slaughtered, by the People’s Army, and how the torbeast had come to feast on the dead before leaving him his tor. The musket he had stolen from a Prussian soldier in a different age, and in yet another one claimed to have shot a dragon with it. The Neanderthal, Ygrol, smashed Wasp’s sensor cluster with a bone club, fell twenty metres into the sea, swam ashore, then shouting all the way charged Tacitus and Lostboy, whose watch this was. With the flat of his gladius, Tacitus knocked the man out, dumped him on Wasp, then had to guide the robot back like a dog, when its sensor cluster finally burnt out.

‘Why are they always men?’ Polly asked, puzzled.

Because you are an exception, Polly. That you survived is a near miracle: men are built stronger, and most ages of Earth are hostile to women. Only in that distant future from which Cowl and Aconite came are women the physical equals of men. Look at those four. You have a boy who was feral; a Roman soldier who served most of his life in one of the toughest armies that ever existed; a Chinese thief and, unless I miss my bet, sometime murderer; and a Neanderthal who beats his next meal to death with the remains of his previous one.

Dangerous people: Polly had realized that as each of them had arrived. But after receiving educative downloads from Aconite’s Pedagogue, they soon learnt how dependent they were on the heliothant, and kept themselves in line.

‘Why me?’ Polly asked—a question she had not asked in some time.

Survivors from concentration camps asked the same: how come I was caught so late? Why did that soldier’s gun jam? Why was I chosen to load the furnaces? How was it they missed me under the mounded dead? Luck and statistics, Polly. Luck and statistics.

Polly knew all about statistics. Aconite had showed her only a few days after her arrival. Silently gesturing Polly to follow, the heliothant woman had led her down a spiral stair to the basement of her house.

‘They are all dormant,’ explained Aconite. ‘Their programs run and erased the moment Cowl removed the recorded genetic information.’

Around every wall of the chamber ran racks stacked with the smooth carapaces of tors. There were thousands of the devices.

Polly fought for a suitable response. ‘If… if all he wants is a genetic sample… why bring the whole person? He could take just one hair, a piece of skin.’

‘To provide necessary nutrition for the tor. And because my brother just does not care.’

‘Why do you collect them here?’ Polly asked, realizing with a lurch that Aconite’s interest in Cowl’s samples might not be as altruistic as she had first thought. Did Aconite really want to save lives, or just to collect tors?

‘One day the torbeast will sink into oblivion, so its temporal link to these will be severed. Then, on that day, wars will be confined to their era.’ Aconite gestured to the tors. ‘Those I recruit will make certain of that, for I will use them to police the ages.’

She dreams of peace, the rule of law, and right good justice. I bet every age has its idiots like her.

Polly did not consider Nandru’s bile worth a response.

The seabed was littered with bones, and above it drifted the occasional negative-buoyancy corpse. Tack noted that most of the bones were from arms, so from that knew that many torbearers had not made it all the way back here intact, yet amid this decay he saw few tors and wondered why. The sheer numbers horrified even him. Recent reports of the megadeath this monster had caused had not brought home to him Cowl’s utterly callous ruthlessness so much as did these sad thousands. Trudging through the skeletal remnants, weighed down by his weaponry, he finally reached a supporting leg of the citadel where it entered the seabed, and observed thick cables running down it into the detritus, then away along the bottom into misted depths. By scanning, he established the leg to be solid basalt. He fired his climbing harpoon upwards. Snaking out a thin line of braided carbon filament, it struck high, bonding with a dull chemical flash. Not bothering to hook the launcher to his harness, for the water was supporting most of his weight, he started its winder and it hauled him up.

Twenty metres from the bottom, and five from the surface, the basalt ended, the rest of the support being fashioned of metal. After scanning, he found it to be aluminium alloy, hollow, and filled with sea water. Tack pressed a catalyser against it and set the device for limited dispersement. He knew it was unlikely that this place had been built without anti-catalytic defences, so adjusting it to an unlimited setting would not dissolve everything made of this same alloy above him, but would only alert Cowl to his presence. Swinging aside on the line, he watched as the thing glowed, then a reaction spread out from it, as of pure magnesium dunked in water. The catalyser dropped away, grey and frangible, and broke up while the reaction continued. The sea grew cloudy with oxides, and pure hydrogen bubbled to the surface. When the hole was a metre wide the reaction abruptly ceased. Tack swung into the cavity and crouched on its lower rim, from where he sent a signal to detach the harpoon, which he rewound into its launcher. Leaning into the hollow of the leg, he fired directly upwards, watched the bonding glow above and hauled himself up again.

Soon he was out of the water and suspended below a domed ceiling. Scanning the metal above, he was momentarily surprised not to detect a sensor net. But then the theory still applied that Cowl had prepared himself for a mass attack rather than a lone assassin. The second catalyser got him through this ceiling into a floor space strewn with ducts, vorpal optics, and the dust and detritus that had fallen through the gridwork floor above. Here he took out one of the tactical nukes and set it for a one-hour delay, then jammed it under a duct, before going up to check the floor above him. He did not have to use another catalyser for access this time as the entire gridwork consisted of movable panels. Climbing through into a wide triangular corridor, he drew both his carbine and his handgun—the carbine set on microwave pulse—and advanced, glancing sideways into rooms that contained generators and silos, tangles of piping, and control consoles and other tech. From his psychological profile, he knew that Cowl would control all this complex from a central point—the nectary of the flower. Now Tack must find that point and the easiest way to do that was to get someone to tell him. Luck was with him, but not with the two Umbrathane he discovered working on a torpedo-shaped motor located under the floor panels.

The female was passing tools down to the male as Tack, moving cautiously, spied them around a bend in the corridor. He pulled back and observed them covertly for a second while he decided what to do. After a minute, carefully aiming his carbine, he waited until the male stuck his head above the floor plates, then fired once. The man’s head split with a crack and a flare of greasy flame, steam and brains blasting up into the woman’s face. As the man then collapsed back into the floor spaces, the woman forward-rolled, and came up groping for something on her belt. Tack’s next two shots exploded first her biceps then her knee, and she went down with a yell. In an instant he was standing over her, holstering his carbine as she groped for the laser cutter on her belt. With his handgun he blew apart the elbow of her undamaged arm, snatched away the cutter, then jammed one of his ration packs into her mouth as a gag. Crushing down on her chest with one knee, he pressed the silencer into her eye and paused to scan up and down the corridor. No sign of action. After a moment he dragged the wounded female into one of the side rooms and, behind the insulated cowling of a generator, subjected her to interrogation techniques that owed as much to his prior U-gov training as his subsequent education by the Heliothane. When he had finished, he dumped what was left of her under the floor with her dead companion, kicking their tools in after them and sliding the grating back into place. Then he set off to find the central control sphere, about which she had told him as much as she could possibly bring to mind.

The whole place was packed with service floors and ducts, and it seemed that much rebuilding was in progress. The next man Tack came upon was supervising two spider-like robots welding plates over a long gap in the pipe running down one side of a corridor. This was the main corridor leading to Tack’s destination, and by trying to circumvent him Tack knew he could get lost in this warren. With handgun levelled, he approached.

The man did not even look round, but said, ‘It is going to take two hours—no less, no more.’

Tack shot him through the back of the head, then picked him up and shoved him into the gap remaining in the pipe. The robots proceeded to plate over the corpse regardless. But such luck could not continue.

Another male umbrathant, driving a small vehicle towing a trailer stacked with struts made of vorpal glass, came around a bend, suddenly catching Tack with no place to hide. Tack hit him with a fusillade of pulses, throwing the man backwards out of his seat. The vehicle swerved into the wall, then skidded along to crash into a pillar, the trailer shedding its load in a racket of clanging glass. Tack spotted no one ahead, but behind him three Umbrathane came rushing out of a side tunnel.

Then it really started.

Tack tossed a handful of mini-grenades behind him as he ran. Spots glowed on the wall of the turning ahead, and he felt the superconducting mesh of his suit absorb rapid heating. He dropped, rolled aside in the stink of burning plastic, fired back. The first of them came over the grenades as they blew, flinging him up into the air along with some floor panels. Tack next pulled one of the larger grenades, already set for proximity detonation, pressed it against the wall low down, and ran around the corner. Now, because he might not find another chance, he yanked up a floor panel and dropped the second tactical below — its setting again for one hour. Ahead of him, more Umbrathane. He fired at them with both carbine and handgun, seeing one turned into a jerking bloody rag while the other rolled away for cover. Into a side corridor, running as the big grenade went off, blowing a wall of fire towards his back. Then he found himself where he wanted to be: out on a platform, with the inner face of the citadel curving in below him towards the central sphere, which was supported between four cylindrical pillars, each nearly as wide as it, with tangles of broad pipes spreading out like a web from its underside.

Tack dropped onto the curving slope below him and slid down it. A figure appeared to his left on another platform. Tack flung himself sideways as shattered metal erupted in a line along the slope, flung himself forwards, then side-rolled again. Again that eruption. Then he reached one of the pipes and swung himself round it. More Umbrathane emerging on platforms. As they dropped down after him, he slapped a catalyser against the incline, set for full dispersement, and had the satisfaction of seeing them unable to stop their descent as the fire-rimmed hole spread up towards them. But no time to gloat: he hit the pillar with another catalyser, stepped behind a pipe for cover, firing at any movement he could see, while the device did its work.

Shots were coming now from all directions, slamming into the pipe and hammering the metal floor behind him, metal splinters whickering and hissing past him. He was now pinned down, but only briefly. Tossing down a field generator, he dived for the growing gap in the pillar just as the generator flung up its electrostatic wall. He dropped inside it, caught at a briefly glimpsed rail, and hauled himself up an access stair before the fusillade followed him inside. Hearing movement below, he dropped the last of his mini-grenades then set another proximity device against the wall to take out any pursuers. He continued climbing fast, entering a corridor that accessed the sphere. Here on the wall he set another grenade, this one for proximity with timed delay. Then into the sphere, where huge machines loomed in darkness, walkways spiralling around its interior wall, others reaching in towards the machines.

A dark figure was standing perfectly still on the floor below.

Cowl.

Tack felt a sudden stab of some unfamiliar emotion, which it took him a moment to identify as fear. He opened up with both weapons, turning the entire vicinity of the motionless figure into a chaos of explosions and smoking metal. But the figure just stood there, striations of rainbow light running all around it. Then a large, sharp-fingered black hand reached over Tack’s shoulder and snatched away his carbine.

Tack dived to one side, came up firing his handgun. Cowl?

But then his attacker was gone and Tack was firing only into the falling wreckage of the carbine. Glancing over, he saw that the dark figure was still standing below. Doppelganger, was his first thought, then it hit him like lead: time travel. Why hadn’t they prepared him for this? But there was no time now for questions.

Movement underneath the walkway, a beetle head coming up beside him. He fired at it and it disappeared. He slapped down a grenade as he leapt away in the opposite direction. But Cowl was suddenly coming over the rail ahead of him before the grenade exploded behind Tack. Shooting again, the new arrival going up the wall and along it above him, fast. While tracking it with fire, he glimpsed the one on the floor below him disappearing. Then a hand hard as iron slammed into his back, driving him over the rail.

Tack knew then that he was dead. Cowl had supreme control in this place—possessing enough energy here to short-jump and avoid a short-circuit paradox. Tack spun around and fired as he fell, noticed the amber warning light on his gun but kept on firing until it flicked to red as it emptied.

Over a rail further below, a hand reached out and caught him, pulled him in and flung him down on the walkway floor. Cowl walking towards him. Tack flung a shield generator out as he back-flipped to his feet and turned to flee. He drew his seeker gun and emptied its magazine, firing ahead. A second Cowl came over the rail ahead, while the other one was somehow walking round the shields behind Tack. Seeker bullets were homing in like a swarm of bees on the second figure. There followed a blurring motion of hands, and bullets were thwacking to the walkway, where they detonated. But one, just one, missile exploded on black carapace.

This ended the game.

One black hand closed around Tack’s throat from behind, and he was slammed up against the wall while, with such viciousness it broke bones and tore skin, the other one ripped away his harness, suit and all his weapons. Then Cowl flung him naked onto the grated floor. Sharp fingers then descended, piercing Tack’s chest before closing, as Cowl picked him up like a cluster of empty milk bottles. Tack tried to fight back until Cowl swung his head against a wall and knocked all resistance out of him. As his consciousness waxed and waned, Tack thought it about time for him to die—but death was not a mercy Cowl intended to allow him.

The Umbrathane came and searched the house while Aconite stood with her unequal arms folded, silently watching them. When the search was completed with concision and efficiency, the leader emerged to stand before Aconite. Makali was a sour woman and Polly supposed this was because both her arms were obviously prosthetic, which meant she did not possess the regenerative gene and was thus an inferior type of umbrathant. In Polly’s own time she would have been regarded as an exotic beauty, with her perfect white skin, black hair and lavender eyes; and also as a prize athlete with her future-human speed and strength. But in Umbrathane terms even Aconite was genetically her superior.

‘You are inviolable,’ said the woman in the Heliothane language.

‘That is my brother’s conceit,’ replied Aconite.

To Polly, Nandru said, Those explosions. Something shook them up last night, but it certainly wasn’t an outright Heliothane attack, else we’d be sitting on a radioactive wasteland now.

From where she was sitting, with her knees pulled up against her chest, Polly subvocalized, ‘‘Probably a little internecine conflict. The Umbrathane always want to sort out which of them can piss the highest.’

The woman waved her stumpy carbine at Polly and her four companions, who sat in a tight group. ‘But these are not.’

Aconite slowly shook her head. ‘What happened?’

‘An assassin: a twenty-second-century human coming in by tor.’ The woman turned and stared hard at Polly for a moment. ‘But a human with Heliothane augmentations. We can only suppose some tor fragment was regenerated, as all the active tors are accounted for.’

‘What about future tors?’ Aconite asked mildly.

This really seemed to annoy the woman. Her face flushed and she looked ready to strike Aconite, but controlled the impulse.

‘You know that’s impossible. Concurrent future probability came under temporal interdiction the moment Cowl made the big jump. There is not enough energy in the universe.’

Do you understand any of this?

‘You have to think shallow so as not to tie yourself in knots. I’m just not yet able to think in circles, but it’s like Aconite said: the rule of entelechy must be applied always.’

Entelechy shmelecky. It just doesn’t make fucking sense.

‘We’re here, aren’t we?’

‘Was it Cowl’s idea for you to come and search my house?’ Aconite asked Makali.

At this the woman showed discomfort. ‘He would never object to such precautions.’

‘So it wasn’t his idea…’ Aconite now stared at her for a moment before going on. ‘My brother, not being the soul of patience or trust, has an automatic system set to obliterate any tor and its bearer who fall outside the trap. I saw the missile fired by that system two days ago. That usually means the tor has malfunctioned, or someone else has got through who should not have. I also saw the recent explosions inside the citadel. Obviously some assassin arrived and went in directly to carry out his task. So… why are you searching my house?’

‘You will not always be inviolable. One day Cowl will tire of your interference, and that will be a day I enjoy.’ The woman turned away abruptly, her companions falling in behind her as she marched back down to the river, where a hover-sled awaited.

Aconite gestured to the four rescuees seated with Polly, indicating that they could go about their tasks. Polly she called over.

‘Go with Tacitus and watch the citadel. If anything is ejected, I have no doubt that it will be very dead, and possibly not even intact, but I want as much as possible of the corpse brought here.’

‘What do you expect to find?’ Polly had often brought back corpses for Aconite’s forensic inspection, for Cowl’s sister was looking for the same things as he was, though for different reasons.

‘Makali perhaps revealed more than Cowl would like when she talked of regenerated tor fragments and Heliothane augmentations. This is a great opportunity for me to assess the extent of concurrent Heliothane technology, and perhaps to learn what might ensue in the coming years.’

‘The Nodus?’ said Polly. The start of that pivotal time was approaching, and though Cowl’s huge geothermal taps were providing him with massive energy, they would not provide even one per cent of the amount required to jump him back behind the Nodus again. As Polly understood it, Cowl had used the torbeast to generate the vorpal energies required to push him behind the Nodus the first time, and that process had also required the energy from the fusion obliteration of Callisto, a moon of Jupiter.

‘Quite, the Nodus.’

‘What do you expect?’ Polly asked.

‘The city you saw during your journey. As we discussed before, it is no doubt the terminus of a wormhole and as such will be used as an energy source for the Heliothane, and a base from which to launch their attack against my brother. It is now a critical time. Thus far he has failed to discover the source of the omission paradox, and failed to affect the future in any way. At the Nodus this may change, and that is also the time the Heliothane will consider him the greatest danger to them. They will devote every resource they can to stopping him.’

Thote had told Polly that Cowl was trying to destroy the future, thus promulgating the theory that Cowl wanted a timeline occupied only by his own kind. Aconite claimed not to know if this was what the Heliothane truly believed, or if it was a lie to excuse their aggression. The real reason for Cowl’s actions, Polly had since learnt from Aconite, was somewhat more complicated. She studied the Heliothane woman closely, realizing that something was being left unsaid—that Aconite knew more than she was letting on.

‘I see,’ Polly replied, then went to fetch Tacitus. As she walked away, she was also aware of how Aconite always made reference to ‘the Heliothane’ as if she herself was not a member of that race. And still, after all this time, Polly did not know in which camp Aconite’s loyalties lay.

His adrenalin high fading, Tack began to realize just how badly injured he was and began to feel the pain. His right shoulder was dislocated; certainly some of his ribs were broken, since he could feel them shifting as Cowl carried him like a sack of shopping to the floor below, each of the preterhuman’s sharp fingers penetrating through Tack’s intercostal muscle. His left ankle had snapped as his boots were torn away, and his skull fractured when Cowl had slammed him against the wall. But unconsciousness did not result, since that was a luxury denied him by his Heliothane programming. Unconsciousness served no purpose, for they wanted him functional to the last moment of life. They had not seen fit to remove his ability to feel pain, however, as that did serve a purpose.

When they reached the lower floor, Tack saw several armed umbrathants departing in response to a silent instruction from Cowl. It occurred to him then that the Heliothane, as well as not providing him with suitable weapons to take a distance shot at this monster, had not provided him with any way of taking his own life in the event of capture. He knew what was coming now, something invariably enacted in all situations of this nature: he would be interrogated mercilessly.

Cowl dumped him on the gridwork floor, then seemed to lose interest in him for the moment—walking over to a vorpal control and pressing his hand into its oblate shimmering surface. Tack peered down at his chest and watched blood trickling out. No artery had been severed so a welcome death would not come that way. Perhaps he could press a finger in, locate such an artery… but the thought dispersed like mist almost as soon as it arose. Instead he scanned his surroundings.

There were closed doors all around, but he doubted he could ever manage to reach them, let alone open one. Nearby the floor sloped down to some sort of disposal tunnel cut down into darkness. He stared at this, confused by the conflicting impulses within him. The possibility of escape arose, but dispersed again. Then Cowl was back, standing over him, in one hand holding two objects: the tactical nukes.

‘They thought to kill me with you?’

The voice was sibilant and seemed to issue from the air around the dark being. Then Cowl came forward in a movement so fast it deceived the eye, closed a hand around Tack’s throat and jerked him upright. Tack groaned in an agony of grating bones and bruised organs. Glancing down, he saw the two nukes bouncing across the floor, their casings breaking open. Looking up again, he watched Cowl’s face before him, glistening black, and utterly smooth until a dividing line appeared in it. Then the cowl split, and hinged open at either side, to reveal the nightmare underneath.

The black eyes were lidless, and a double set of mandibles opened before a mouth containing rows of spadelike teeth. Between mouth and eyes, other organs spilled hair-thin tentacles, small grasping spatulae, and sliding scales of chitin briefly revealing red cavities and other soft, unidentifiable things that quivered eagerly.

Tack tried to pull away, but he might as well have been fighting a moving iron statue. The horror pulled him closer, turned his head aside, and came down on the side of his face. He felt the mandibles sawing into his neck and cheek. With a sharp popping and grinding, something forced its way into his ear, adding a new hurt to the ever-growing waves of pain surging through his body. He screamed and tried again to struggle, but some hard probe hit a nerve, rolling out such incandescent agony that his arms and legs were paralysed. Tack screamed repeatedly until something ripped into the back of his neck and connected to his interface plug, switching off that ability in him. Then the horror only increased as Tack felt his mind being taken apart, and each part of it thoroughly scrutinized.

Memory after memory rose up for Cowl’s inspection. Tack relived the moment of first awareness: a child with the mind of a killer and a hard-wired loyalty. Mission after mission was replayed: the killings, the frame-ups, the interrogations and beatings, but to Cowl they seemed worth only a brief scan. All events concerning the tor were scrutinized thoroughly, however, and Tack sensed Cowl’s acid amusement over all that had occurred just before Tack’s first shift back in time. As this forensic study continued, Tack felt Cowl begin delving through his U-gov programming, and the subsequent Heliothane programming: ripping great holes through them, dumping large portions of them as irrelevant, studying some sections and breaking them down into their smallest elements.

Traveller had initially beaten him into insensibility, this and subsequent events Cowl watched very closely. Flashes of black humour invaded Tack’s consciousness as some of the lies he had been fed were revealed. Tack began to see how he had been cunningly primed for this mission right from the beginning. How blackly painted were the Umbrathane and Cowl, and how saintly the Heliothane in their mission to save the world. A flare of anger shot through to Tack when the destruction of Pig City was observed. And then Saphothere’s subsequent history lecture was turned on its head as Tack absorbed Cowl’s viewpoint: the Heliothane pushing for dominance over the independent Umbrathane polities; Cowl being forced to use his immense abilities in the service of the Heliothane, under threat of being destroyed because of his genetic variance, even though that rendered him physically and mentally superior to all Heliothane themselves; Cowl then giving the Umbrathane an escape route; and his own escape to beyond the Nodus. But Tack did not understand the dark being’s hollow laughter in reaction to the Heliothane assertion mat he was trying to eliminate human history.

Later, in Sauros, Cowl replayed every conversation, every image; gathering useful data for attack, for a means to crush. In New London the same, where Tack felt the last of Pedagogue’s programming of him being pulled out by its roots and studied intensively. One conversation between Tack and Saphothere particularly held Cowl’s interest:

‘… Tap and wormhole are inextricably linked and neither, once created, can be turned off. There is, in fact, no physical means of turning off the sun tap as the antigravity fields that sustain its position also focus the beam—as I mentioned—but if you did, the wormhole would collapse catastrophically and Sauros would be obliterated by the feedback. Also, if the wormhole was independently collapsed, the energy surge would vaporize New London. The project was therefore a total commitment.’

Cowl then spent an age with the image of Maxell before angrily dropping it.

Back in Sauros Cowl observed the torbeast invade from the other side.

Throughout all this the progressively ravaged elements of Tack’s mind dropped back into some mental abyss, devoid of motive beyond those any human is naturally born with, and devoid of programming. There they reconnected—first with the imperatives of survival, then with the untainted yearning for true freedom.

Subliminally Tack felt a loop generated as Cowl found something important in a conversation and viewed it again and again.

Palleque: ‘Three hours earlier and Cowl would have really fucked us over. The torbeast won’t be getting through now we’re up to power again.’

Saphothere: ‘The push?’

Palleque: ‘Yeah. Like riding the top of a fountain and everything gets scrambled. The constant energy feed can’t be switched, so the capacitors have to be drained to the limit before we can shut off and stabilize. Took us an hour this time before we could even get the defence fields back up.’

Then Cowl’s vicious amusement at Saphothere’s reply: ‘I don’t think I need to hear any more of this.’

Tack’s foot suddenly hit the floor, and pain howled up from his broken ankle, but he was too physically drained even to scream. He tumbled over on his side, the taste of blood in his mouth, as Cowl turned away, his face closing. On some unconscious level Tack realized the being now had what it wanted, as it left Tack’s mind to fall like snow through darkness.

Escape was now an instinctive goal for Tack, where previously his programming had not allowed it. He pushed himself up onto one elbow, the inside of his head feeling sand-blasted and nothing making any sense. With blurred vision he observed that Cowl was back at his vorpal control, the air above which shimmered and split on a nightmarish living landscape. Operating on a wholly animal level, Tack dragged himself backwards, reached the slope in the floor and stared down at the tunnel. Pushing himself over the edge, he immediately slid down its frictionless surface, grunting with pain as his shoulder hit the rim of the tunnel and he plummeted into it. A brief descent through darkness opened into bright yellow light, and the golden glitter of the sea below. As Tack fell, he bounced on a ledge and groped for purchase, but found none and went over, finally hitting the sea flat on. The sharp pain in his chest he recognized as a rib penetrating his lung. Sinking, he had no breath to hold, so breathed sea water instead. His only coherent thought as he drowned was triumphant:

I have escaped.

Engineer Goron stared at the ‘CELL SECURITY SHUTDOWN’ signal in one of his control spheres, until it disappeared, then he removed his hands from the control pillar and gazed around the control room of Sauros, noting how his staff had been depleted. The loss of Vetross, irretrievably murdered by Cowl, had been unexpected, even though Goron had expected casualties. Two of the direct-link technicians had been pulled dead from their vorpal connectware after the subsequent torbeast attack. And now Palleque, formerly his most trusted aide, was in a cell awaiting an interrogation that Goron was apparently putting off. At least Silleck was still with him and the personnel replacements seemed competent enough. He returned his attention to the control pillar.

The energy levels were already up to eighty per cent of requirement, and he calculated that they would be ready to shift Sauros very soon. All the field frequencies which Palleque had access to had been subsequently changed, and all weapons systems had since been moved to a separate circuit, so as not to be dependent on the power tap on the wormhole itself.

‘How long?’ he asked Silleck.

‘One hour and fourteen minutes. Are we going for an extension this time?’ asked the woman, who was enclosed in vorpal tech.

‘Yes: one third of a light year.’

‘Good. We were pushing it last time.’

Goron turned his attention to the man now sitting at Palleque’s console. ‘Theldon, is everything stable?’

‘It is, Engineer,’ the man replied without looking round.

‘And everyone is now aware of the location of their nearest displacement generator?’

At this, Theldon looked round. ‘We are… you are expecting trouble?’

‘That last torbeast attack was a little too close to our vulnerable time. I think we managed to stop Palleque from passing on that we do have a vulnerable time, but it is best to be cautious.’

‘That’s all right for all of you,’ grumbled Silleck. ‘You don’t have to detach vorpal interface nodes before hitting the generator. Anything goes wrong and I doubt I’ll get the time.’

Goron winced. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, putting as much confidence in his voice as he could. ‘Now, keep an eye on things for the moment. I have something I need to do, but I shouldn’t be away long.’

He turned away from his control column and headed for the lift platform, aware that his fellows were watching him curiously. Dropping down from the control room, he felt like a traitor.

Via moving walkways and ramps he quickly reached one of the supply centres that dotted Sauros, observing as he went the city’s various citizens about their various tasks. He had a bitter taste in his mouth because what he had set in motion so long ago was now coming to fruition. Reality now bore a hard edge.

The supply-centre door opened when he palmed the lock, without requiring further confirmation of identity. Inside he walked along the racks of replacement items needed for the many different systems the city contained, until he came to a rack of empty containers—empty all bar one. This, too, opened when he palmed it, and inside rested a single device. It was heavy, the shape of a transformer with rounded edges, and it fitted his palm. He took it out, weighing it in his hand, then slipped it into his belt pouch before exiting the supply centre.

Further transit of walkways and ramps finally brought him to a residential section of the city. The door he sought was different from all those which opened automatically as soon as their residents approached, being heavily armoured and its frame recently welded into place. Reaching it, he again pressed his hand against the lock and to his satisfaction received no reaction. He took out a small key and inserted it into the manual lock beside the security lock. One turn and the door whoomphed off its seals. He dragged it open, stepped inside, and quickly closed it behind him, before turning to the apartment’s only resident.

‘I noticed the security system go offline,’ said Palleque, banging a fist against the mesh that covered the single window out of which he was gazing. Just an hour earlier the charge the mesh was carrying would have thrown him across the room. ‘I wondered if you expected me to try and escape.’ Palleque still did not look round. ‘Had I tried, I doubt I’d have survived long out there. It would seem a lot of my fellow Heliothane dislike me and they wonder why you are delaying the interrogation.’

‘Ostensibly I am too busy with organizing our push into the Triassic. Anyone not satisfied with that explanation would put my delay down to a certain squeamishness.’

Palleque turned at last. ‘The push… it is imminent?’

‘One hour, even less now.’

Palleque let out a tense breath. ‘Then it will soon be over.’

‘Not for you.’ Goron removed the device from his belt pouch, and put it down on the single table before Palleque’s couch.

‘Displacement generator. What location?’

‘The same as all others now,’ Goron replied.

‘That is risky and may give the game away.’

‘A risk I am prepared to take.’

‘But am I? The torbeast swept up my sister as if she was nothing, and I am prepared to die to exact vengeance.’

Goron stared at him directly. ‘Yes, I know your commitment.’ His gaze strayed down to Palleque’s arm, then his hand.

Palleque glanced at the dressing, then held up his hand covered in a surgical mitten. ‘For veracity, as always, it had to be done. I’ll heal soon enough as I have the rejuvenation gene, though I never expected to have the chance to do so. Let’s hope you didn’t underdo things by not killing me outright.’

‘We are now not long away from that point when all such subterfuge will be irrelevant. I have no doubt that already Cowl has extracted the required information from the torbearer. Now all that remains is for us to perform our duty at this end.’

Palleque came over and picked up the displacement generator. ‘I’m surprised you had any of these to spare.’

‘I made sure there was one,’ replied Goron. He waved a hand around Palleque’s erstwhile apartment—now his cell. ‘You deserve better than to die here.’ He turned to go.

‘Goron,’ said Palleque, halting the Engineer’s departure. ‘Good luck.’

‘Let us hope that is something we don’t need too much of,’ Goron replied as he left the cell.