Cowl

2

Astolere:

It was a move of desperation to attempt a ground assault on the Callisto facility, and one for which the Umbrathane have paid dearly. But we have yet to learn the full extent of the payment we might make in using this infant technology. My brother Saphothere’s venture into the past, using one of the bioconstructs, we knew would have unforeseen consequences in itself. That he took with him an atomic weapon to place at the point of the assault force’s arrival, we knew could only make things worse. Eight thousand of those ground troops died in the conflagration—and as for the rest of us? We now all have memories of two parallel events, while living in the future of only one. And we all now know that such manipulation of events, so close to us on the timeline, has pushed us down off the main line, and that we are one step closer to oblivion.

Tack was inherently immoral. He had been grown for immorality and trained for it. He knew the rules, all of them, and he knew how to break them with a thoroughness that was frightening. The rule he knew how to break most efficiently was ‘Thou shalt not kill’ or any legalese derivation of such.

Tack did not have a mother or father in the usual sense. He had been cloned from a particularly efficient CIA killer, and vat-grown two hundred years after that same killer had paid a visit to a crematorium furnace without the benefit of being dead. The burned killer’s genetic tissue had been taken from him years before as part of one of the top-secret loony projects of that time. Tack’s accelerated upbringing had consisted of, during daytime, an enforced training that had killed off many of his classmates — all surprisingly similar in appearance to himself—and at nights being hooked up to a semi-AI computer via the surgically installed interface plug in the base of his skull. At the age of ten he was physically an adult, mentally an adult, but mentally something else as well. His intensive knowledge of both Eastern martial arts and modern weaponry blended into a coherent whole that made him the supreme killer. His understanding of the world at large came not from personal experience but via uploading. In him his makers and masters had achieved their goal: they had both soldier and secret agent, and did not have to worry about whether or not he would obey orders, for he was programmable.

Glancing back now at the little whore, he wondered what Nandru Jurgens hoped to achieve with her, for it was evident to Tack that she was as dispensable to the Task Force soldier as she was to Tack himself. Some time soon the sale would have to be made and in any such transaction there was always a point where one party must, however briefly, be prepared to trust the other party. And it was in such brief intervals that Tack operated most efficiently. He expected some kind of threat and some kind of double-cross, but was confident of his own and his comrades’ ability to circumvent this; confident that by the end of this day he would be in possession of both the item itself and the money, and that Jurgens and this little whore would be dead.

‘Where to?’ he asked.

‘Head for the Anglia Reforest and put down by the old thermal generating tower,’ Polly replied.

As the driver changed course, Tack faced forward again and briefly scanned the console on the side of his seeker gun. Since first pointing it at the whore it had, by laser and ultrasound scanning, recorded her recognition pattern and now it literally contained bullets with her name on them, though they were not the ones he had it presently set to use. Right now the gun was programmed to track the one whom Tack considered the greater danger: Nandru Jurgens himself. Tack would probably not need to use the gun on her anyway, since he intended to keep her close, and for close work he preferred the seven inches of kris flick knife in his pocket.

Soon they were heading out beyond the residential areas and passing over the old wall that had held back the sea before the U-gov-sponsored land-reclamation project—one that, like all such projects, had spiralled out of control costwise and was now on the brink of failure. Below lay the plain of the Anglia Reforest, seeded with nettle elms, binding grass, and endless brambles, thistles and stinging nettles. The Green contention that the place would become overrun with GM rape and maize had been fallacious—man’s small tinkerings with code were yet to prove effective enough to counter billions of years of evolution.

Tack pointed to the tower rising like a giant iron tulip out of a copse of small oaks. ‘The clearing. Down by those ruins,’ he told the driver.

The man nodded and brought the Macrojet spiralling down towards a clearing that had probably in the past been a farmyard.

Tack turned to Polly. ‘You will now take us to the item. Understand that I will kill you if there are any problems. There will be no problems?’

‘Look, I don’t wanna be here. Nandru roped me into this without asking me,’ Polly replied, her hand flicking up to the Muse at her throat.

Only the presence of that device caused Tack any qualms, for even he did not have sufficient clearance to know its capabilities. It was recently developed military tech and, as such, an imponderable in this situation. However, he judged it to be tech whose purpose was merely informational, not some form of weaponry, its presence being only required by Jurgens as a secure comlink.

The Macrojet landed, blasting about it, like confetti, old crab carapaces whose owners had probably been washed inland during the over-flooding of the incompetently built sea wall that lay some miles to the east. Immediately the two either side of Polly piled out of the vehicle and ran to investigate the surrounding buildings and tangled vegetation, pulling guns from concealed holsters as they went. Tack glanced at Polly and gestured her with his thumb to the open door, before himself climbing out. He did not rush for cover—he had every confidence that the other two had the area covered sufficiently. The driver remained in the car.

‘Where to now?’ he asked Polly.

She held a finger up to the earring that he reckoned had to be an inducer. Tack understood the technology because he too wore a device that used electrostatic induction to vibrate the bones of his inner ear—in his case to relay instructions from his Director of Operations in Brussels. After a moment she pointed to a nearby ruin—all tumbled breeze blocks and heaped mud. When Tack made no move to head in that direction, she frowned and led the way.

Walking behind, Tack scanned his surroundings. The sunlight was bright, so he flicked up his polarized nictitating membranes, once again mirroring his eyes.

No one in the immediate area, Glock told him over comlink.

Traffic control hasn’t got anything within five kilometres, said Airan.

There is the tower, though, added Provish, the driver.

‘Stay alert and keep all detectors on,’ said Tack, getting a querying look from Polly. ‘This guy took out two in Prague with a door mine.’

As they reached the ruin, the whore froze and lost all interest in her surroundings. Looking past her, Tack saw that the item was there, resting on a large fragment of polystyrene, and it was on this that her attention was now riveted. Tack knew about this reaction, but had never felt it himself, perhaps because of his programming. He then noted the explosive charge fixed to the side of the item, and began to guess what Jurgens’s game was.

It calls to you… it calls to you all the time.

The nettles were dead and dry in the cavity walls, and the grass was brown and crunched underfoot. Glancing at her stolid and lethal companion, Polly stepped sideways into the shade cast by the low oaks. She was thirsty, and scared, not only because of her present situation but of the reaction she had immediately felt. For a moment she thought the thing was some chitinous object washed in by the over-flood, like the pink and white crab carapaces all around. It looked like a mutated crustacean from the sea, and some weird things had been turning up in seas greenhouse-cooked and radioactive. However, white plastique was jammed around its thorny outgrowths, and the miniscreen of a matt-black detonator connected to this explosive displayed a revolving spiral of red lights.

There it is, Nandru told her, and she was bemused by the avidity in his tone.

‘What do I do now?’ she asked out loud.

The heavy was staring at her but offered no reply.

Tell him the detonator is net-linked and programmable. I know he’s monitored and in constant com. His DO can run a diagnostic probe from wherever he is and that won’t cause a detonation. He’ll find a hard link from the numbered account.

Polly relayed Nandru’s words, while still staring at the object. It was seemingly all thorned glass and silver; a perilous thing to slip onto her forearm—as she desperately wanted to do. Groping in her hip bag for a smoke, she spotted Tack immediately pointing his seeker gun at her.

Interdiction initiated. Seeking…

Ignoring the dead voice of Muse 184, she slowed her movements but did not stop them, as she was aching for that smoke. With shaking hands she opened her tobacco pouch and rolled a cigarette. Lighting up, she turned directly towards Tack, deliberately away from the temptation of the strange object, and blew smoke towards him provocatively. His air was somewhat distracted, he was obviously listening to his comlink, but the barrel of his weapon never wavered from her face.

‘The hard link has been found and the diagnostic probe is in,’ said Tack. ‘What is the purpose of this?’

After listening to Nandru, Polly replied, ‘He tells me you’ll find that, when the specified sum is transferred to the numbered account, the detonator will shut down.’

‘And we are to believe this?’ asked Tack, his tone conveying respect at the neatness of the set-up.

‘He also tells me that at some point there has to be trust.’

Tack was silent again, for long-drawn-out moments. Polly could feel sweat trickling under her blouse. She did not convey what Nandru told her next.

As I thought, the fuckers are trying to break the hard link. No way in, dickheads… They’ll have to do it—they’re too desperate for the damned thing.

‘It is agreed,’ said Tack after a moment. ‘The transference of funds will be made. Inform Mr Jurgens that if the detonator does not shut down then, or if there are any other… mishaps, I will personally hunt him down and feed him into a trash compactor.’

I can hear you, fucker. And your hunting days are over.

Polly eyed the spiralling lights on the detonator’s screen and stepped back into the hot sunlight, preparing to bolt. Suddenly the lights went out and, realizing she just was not far enough away, Polly closed her eyes and cringed inwardly.

‘Transaction complete,’ said Tack.

Polly opened her eyes to see him stepping in towards the object and its clinging explosive, his weapon again concealed while he pulled on surgical gloves. He stooped, pulled off the detonator and cast it to one side. He then stripped away the plastique, balled it, and tossed it in another direction.

You know, Polly, if it hadn’t been for you, Marjae might still be alive. You can tell your friend there that I acquired him and his companions when they were walking over. The deal’s done and now it’s payback time.

The detonation came from behind and Polly turned in time to see the underside of the Macrojet as it turned in a conflagration. Two other hits swatted it along the ground as if it was fashioned of balsa and papier mâché, blowing it to pieces. Glancing back, she saw Tack raising his seeker gun and she ran for the trees.

Interdiction find.

The mosquito whining of seeker bullets was suddenly all around her—their winged shapes whipping through the air like June beetles. Coming out of brambles some way ahead of her, with leaves stuck to his long coat, she saw one of Tack’s companions levelling his gun at her. Then he doubled over, and the dull thud of a muffled detonation spread his insides across the dry grass.

Not target. Interdiction pause.

Behind her she could hear the killer, Tack, pursuing. She turned to her left as there came the low coughing of a nearby gun.

Interdiction find.

A seeker round whined past her and hit a sapling just ahead, blowing it in half. Another round whined overhead, made a strange whuckering sound, then spiralled into the earth directly in front of her and exploded. She leapt the smoking hole and just kept on running. The shots were missing her and she just did not understand why.

Provish was right. In the fucking tower! In the t—

That was Airan, the remains of whom Tack passed only a minute later. The seeker round had taken off his head, which was especially unlucky for him because he, like Tack, had taken the precaution of wearing a moly-Kevlar undershirt.

Firing again at the girl dodging between the trees, Tack watched in amazement when the round—programmed to hunt her down—veered left and slammed into the remains of an old brick wall. With no time to check his weapon, Tack thumbed off its programming facility, took careful aim, and held his finger down on the trigger. Retaining their casings the rounds now went where he aimed. Trees flared and burning bark showered down, as the girl jumped a drainage ditch. Too many trees and she was moving fast. Tack sprinted after her, only to hear a familiar whining behind him. The round fired from the tower slammed into his back, knocking him face-down next to the ditch. He struggled upright and another round exploded on his chest knocking him backwards into the ditch. Briefly he caught a glimpse of the girl turning and sprinting back towards the ruins, then he blacked out.

Well, there went the super-killers and you are still in one piece, little Polly.

Gasping, Polly stumbled into the ruin and flopped down in some shade with her back against the breeze-block wall.

‘You fucking bastard, you nearly got me killed!’

Only a little bit and, anyway, you’ll get paid because now I have their money and their precious objet d’art.

Polly stared across at the thing he referred to and once again felt a powerful urge to just go over and pick it up—to slip it onto her forearm like a piece of baroque jewellery. What the hell was it? It looked organic rather than made, was a tube seemingly rolled from a holly leaf the length of a person’s forearm, that leaf itself fashioned of white and silver metal. As she contemplated it, she found herself standing, inexorably drawn to it. Somehow, it had the same attraction for her as a roll of drug patches. She could feel the yearning, the addiction…

I’ll be with you in a moment. Just you wait there for me.

Polly squatted by the object, reached out and touched it. Inside her something snapped shut and she knew exactly what she had to do.

Polly, keep away from that! I said, fucking keep away from that!

It was heavy. She had to take it up with both hands, and as she did her hands bled. The pain was ecstasy. She slid it over her right forearm. Skin peeled and flesh parted like earth before the plough. She screamed as blood jetted from slit arteries, and she fell to her knees.

Don’t! Don’t! It comes when you touch it directly!

Very quickly she ceased to bleed. She stared at the thing. It was bonding to her flesh. She could feel it bonding to the bones beneath. Looking up, she saw Nandru running towards her, his weapon braced across his chest.

‘What the hell have you done?’ he shouted.

The air distorted, and something harsh inside her dragged her upright. She could feel something washing through her like citrine fire. The drugs and the dullness they induced were going. Elements of her mind blossomed and opened out. True wakefulness hurt as no physical pain possibly could, and she understood why so many humans spent most of their lives fleeing it.

‘Oh Jesus.’

In the distortion Nandru turned to face a flaw in reality. The flaw opened out to expose two vast rollers of living tissue turning against each other. Polly realized they were land and sky composed of living flesh. Out of this, looming into the day, came a living door, throated with teeth and shadows, and lipped with razor bone—the horrifying terminus of some huge trainlike tentacle that stretched back into that landscape of flesh.

There came a roaring sound, a high-pitched keening, then the stench of carrion.

No! No! I don’t want to…

It closed on him, drawing him in

Casualty link established. Uploading…

Nandru was gone, eaten alive. She watched him go, torn apart and ground away.

Then the flaw snapped shut thunderously, and all distortion fled. Polly saw everything clearly now and did not for one instant believe she had been hallucinating. Just as she wasn’t hallucinating the killer, Tack, who was walking out of the trees towards her.

He was gaining on her. That first burst of adrenalin had taken her some way but she was quickly tiring. The thing on her arm had made her thoughts oh so clear, but it had not repaired a body damaged by years of drug abuse. Glancing back, she saw him raising and lowering his seeker gun as she dodged amid the trees. He was aiming at her legs, and in his other hand she saw the ugly glitter of a knife. Her shoulder clipping a tree, and with brambles tangled round her feet, she sprawled and knew terror. The killer was so close. Then he was standing over her, a look of cold satisfaction on his face, his mirrored eyes reflecting the surrounding green.

‘Get up,’ he said.

Polly looked into the mouth of the gun, then at the knife. As she stood he holstered the gun and she knew only panic at what he intended to do. She turned to flee as he stepped in with the knife held low for a disembowelling cut. He grabbed her arm, then grunted in pained surprise and released her. Glancing back while stumbling away, she saw he was walking after her now, knowing he had her. Polly had to escape. The flaw — that distortion. She felt herself reaching out with something within her that was linked to the thing on her forearm. Twisting that something, she fled in the only direction available to her and fell into waves of darkness below featureless grey. Screaming only blew what air remained from her lungs, and in her next breath she took in nothing. Then came a slow wrench as if she had just penetrated some meniscus. Suddenly she was face-down in cold and dark; salt water filled her mouth. Pushing down, her hands sank into slime. She jerked herself up, breathed and shook her head to clear her eyes, and found herself lying in a foot of sea water under the same trees as before. Only now the trees were without leaves and the air was cold. Heaving herself to her knees, she observed crabs scuttling away through the water nearby.

‘What is this?’ The killer was still with her, standing up to his calves in the water and looking around disbelievingly.

Then he focused on Polly once more. He stepped forwards, grabbed her by the arm that was not enclosed in the object, and hauled her fully to her feet. She tried to knee him in the testicles, but he turned his hip into the blow, and in a flash had the point of his knife poised just over Muse 184.

He tilted his head and said, ‘Tack here. Mission status?’

Polly watched his expression shift from puzzlement to outright disbelief.

‘What do you mean “doubled signal return”? Where’s my DO?’

Almost irrelevantly, Polly noticed that his clothing was torn and burnt away over his chest, exposing the body armour he wore. This then was how he had survived the seeker rounds Nandru had fired from the tower.

Bastard that… The voice whispered in her skull, its phrasing human but its tone machine-like. Perhaps all this clarity of thought was an illusion and she had recently taken some bad lysergic. But she must discount that possibility and react only to circumstances as she saw them. Right now she was a hair’s breadth from being killed. Certainly this man would think nothing of cutting her throat, then sawing off her arm to take the object wrapped around it back to his masters.

His face pale with shock, Tack now dragged her towards dry ground, where earth was mounded against one of the ruin’s walls. He pushed her away from him down onto the patch.

‘Stay there and don’t move. You try to run and I’ll carve you,’ he said, then put away his knife and rolled up one bloody sleeve.

Polly stared at him, then shifted again.

Ignore all irrelevant distractions. Focus on the target. What was irrelevant? When his hand had closed on her arm, it had closed on the item that she had somehow put on, and which now seemed to be fused to her flesh. The pain he had felt was more than it should have been. Now he stared down in momentary confusion at his hand. His palm had been sliced open and there was a fragment like a thorn of coral embedded in his wrist, blood oozing out around it. She had been getting away. No distraction. He had felt the first shift and how he had been caught at the edge of it and drawn in, somehow, by this lump of material embedded in his wrist. Seeing the leafless trees and drowned landscape, he had for a moment considered the possibility of a memory lapse: one of those blank spots associated with reprogramming. However, his subsequent garbled communication with Operations had confirmed what was real. No one there had heard of his Director of Operations, and no one had heard of Tack either. And by their response to him he just knew they had been sending a kill squad to deal with an anomalous agent—himself.

The girl had done something; moved them. This second time it happened validated his crazy idea about just what she had done. He gazed around and saw that they now stood upon a plain of drying mud, deep with cracks and scattered with growths of sea sage and plantains. There being no trees here, this time, he could see the distant sea wall straddled by a huge slab-facing machine. Nearby the ruins were not clearly defined, mounded as they were with mud and yet to be weathered out of the ground. To his right the thermal generating tower stood tall and pristine, and from it a macadam road led back through the old inner sea wall towards the industrial complexes outside Maldon. People were working in and around the tower, and from it a high-mounted crane was lowering a dismounted generator to a low-loader.

Tack glanced down from this bewildering view and saw he was up to his ankles in the mud. With some difficulty he pulled his feet free. The dry mud was in his shoes, in his socks. The girl was sprawled in the mud and looking as bewildered as he felt, and now Tack realized he must keep her alive. He enjoyed books and the interactives as much as normal people, so he knew about the concepts of time travel, and how leading quantum physicists had stated that it might be possible.

He looked up again to scan their surroundings. The first shift had taken them back to the time of one of the over-floods: two to ten years. This second shift had brought them back to the time just after the new sea wall had been built and the land area enclosed by it reclaimed. Tack had seen documentaries about the furore the project had caused, reclaiming land considered by all insurers as unsafe because of the chances of over-flood—a prediction subsequently proved to be true—and therefore a place deemed by all developers unsuitable for any sort of building. The project had cost millions, and millions more as it had rendered useless many of the thermal towers, which required sea water to operate. And this had all occurred half a century before Tack himself had been a twinkle in his creator’s test tube.

‘It would be inadvisable to go further,’ Tack warned the girl.

She looked at him with her eyes wide, panicky. With slow deliberation Tack squatted down before her, making himself appear less threatening. He wondered if she had any idea what she was doing. He inspected his own injured limb and noted that, even though his hand was still bleeding, the wound in his wrist had sealed around the thorn. Distraction. Trying to exude calm, he rolled down his sleeve and looked at the girl.

‘You go any further back and this place will be under ten metres of sea,’ he told her.

She glanced around then pushed herself upright. Her clothing pulled up dry mud with it; was packed with the stuff. She pulled her blouse out of her pelmet and flat pieces of mud fell out, contoured on one side to her body, as if she had been lying in it as it dried. Tack felt no confusion about this. Land levels change through time, she had travelled, the dry mud had been displaced by her body. It all made perfect sense to him. What did not make sense was why the trees and other parts of the landscape had not been dragged along too. Why her clothes, him, his clothes?

‘How have you done this, girl?’ he asked, expecting no coherent answer—she still looked bewildered, probably not yet grasping what was happening. Certainly all this had been caused by the object on her arm, about which he knew only his DO’s instructions: Come back with it, Tack, or don’t come back at all…

‘My name is Polly.’

Tack considered for a moment. It was always best not to use the name of a potential hit, not to consider them as anything more than disposable. He considered what he should do now: a swift head shot would prevent her doing anything more, and he could next cut the object from her arm. But what then? He had no idea how to operate the thing, and suspected that she was only doing so at an instinctive level.

‘You have not answered my question,’ he said.

‘You’re going to kill me. Why should I?’

Tack nodded and stood up, stepping closer to offer her his hand. ‘You must take us back… you must take us forward again.’

‘Why the hell should I!?’

She rolled and came to her feet, backing away from him. Observing her expression, he was surprised at the sudden intelligence he saw there and realized he had little chance of gaining her trust. There was only one option: he must retrieve the object and learn how to use it himself. Stepping forward, he drew his seeker gun from its chest holster. Momentarily the controls snagged on his damaged clothing. He saw her take a deep breath and close her eyes.

‘No!’

He fired, realizing as he did so that, in snagging the gun, he had switched it back to seeker mode. The bullet shot out, dropping its casing even as it left the barrel, opening its ceramic wings to swerve itself away to one side of her. Swearing, he slapped it back to manual. Then one moment he was sighting on her forehead, and the next moment his lungs were filled with brine.

Water pressure closed over him like a vice and he did not know which way was up. He struggled and he kicked and fought. Breaking the surface, he spewed water and fought for every coughing breath. She was over there, steadily swimming away from him. He knew he needed to stay close, but it was all he could do to stay on the surface and breathe. The sea was rough, rain hammering down, and lightning stalked the horizon. She shifted again, leaving a hollow in the water that closed with a sucking rush. Gone.

With a dogged determination to survive, Tack shed his coat and shoes and swam for the barely visible sea wall—the original that had been well inland after the reclamation. Years of physical training, both when linked to a computer and in the field, enabled him to get to his objective through the cold rough sea, when many others might not have made it. After fighting his way through a mat of bladderwrack, he wearily pulled himself up onto the slabbed face of the wall and coughed dregs of burning salt from his raw lungs. His hand ached and he felt feverish. When he reached to pull the thorn from his wrist he saw that it had spread out into a small hard plate the size of a drawing pin, and was now covered with smaller hairlike thorns, which bloodied his fingers when he tried to pull the thing out. It came part of the way up like a scab, but when he released it to get a better hold, it drew back against his flesh. When he tried again with the tip of his knife, he found he could not move it at all. The thing had now bound itself to the bones of his wrist. He clambered to the top of the wall and looked around, shivering in his soaked clothes.

He knew now that he had to be at least a hundred and fifty years back, in the time before the ascendency of U-gov. His DO was not yet alive, and both his programming and his training had no way to incorporate this. He tried to concentrate on essentials: right now he wanted to be warm and dry. He was also hungry and thirsty. His base programming allowed for that—for him to deal with these needs.

As her sodden knee boots wrapped themselves to her legs like sheet lead, Polly fought to peel them off without swallowing any more sea water. Free of them at last, and now fighting to swim to a shoreline etched by the orange light of the setting sun, she felt horribly weary, but understanding came at last from the killer’s recent words: You take us any further back and this place will be under ten metres of sea. She had travelled back in time, just like in the movies or the interactives, but in none of those had the heroine been immediately drowned after transit—she always arrived at some hugely interesting point in history where she could influence important events of recorded history.

Closer to the shore and she saw wooden frameworks supporting vicious tubular nests of barbed wire. Up on stilts behind this defence was a wooden cabin and below it a sandbag bunker, from which protruded the recognizable twin barrels of a gun.

Second World War, at a guess. Not many aircraft attacking during the First.

‘What?’ she managed, swallowing water. ‘What?’

That’s an anti-aircraft gun. The onomatopoeic ack-ack, I should think.

She really just did not have the breath at present to carry on a conversation with Muse, and she did not have the energy to wonder why the device attached below her throat was talking to her in such a conversational manner in Nandru’s voice. Struggling on, she could feel her reserves of energy depleting, and was beginning to notice that if anything the shore was now getting further away. But perhaps this was an illusion caused by the descending twilight. The sun was gone now and the shore was silhouetted against a sky of bright red and dull iron. Behind she heard the low thunder of engines and glanced back to see a squadron of bombers only just distinct through encroaching darkness.

Now those are Heinkels with a Messerschmitt escort, it would seem. That confirms it.

‘Nandru… Nandru, is that you?’ she managed.

She ceased swimming, to tread water, and realized to her horror that she was being dragged out to sea. The planes were closer now and suddenly she was blinded by a strobing of light. The sound impacted a second after, as guns all along the coast opened up and powerful searchlights probed the sky from somewhere further inland. Ahead, when the gunfire paused long enough for her eyes to clear, she saw more planes appearing high against the blood-red western sky.

Spitfires probably… now that’s something I knew before… No, apparently I’m wrong: they’re more likely to be Hurricanes.

‘Nandru… what happened?’

You know, my memory has never been so clear—it’s eidetic in fact — but every second… and those seconds are long in here… I find it harder and harder to distinguish between what’s my memory and Muse’s reference library.

‘You… died,’ said Polly, beginning to swim again.

And so I did, but it seems my Muse uploaded a copy of me to your Muse. I didn’t know they could do that. There’s the facility for transferring recordings in the event of the bearer’s death, just so that vital battlefield intelligence won’t be lost, but apparently you’ve copped the lot… well, as far as I know.

The red tinge in the sky was almost gone, lost in the fall of night and blasted away by cordite light as the guns hammered the air. Glancing up, Polly saw the fighter planes attacking and the flickering of gunfire like the distant glow of ignited cigarettes. Then suddenly she was pinned in the actinic glare of a new sun, and a grey wall loomed over her. Waves slapped her from side to side.

‘Frank, it’s a woman. What should I do?’ someone shouted.

‘Throw her the ring, you berk, and haul her in!’ replied an older voice.

Trailing rope, a life-ring splashed in the sea beside her and, with a surge of gratitude to the unseen rescuers, she grabbed hold of it.

You’ll probably be shot as a spy.

Her current gratitude did not extend to this particular incarnation of Nandru.

Systems, keyed to the Dopplered light intensity of the red dwarf it was approaching, began operating inside the probe. It flipped over and extruded long struts from around the monopoles of its AG motors, spreading them out into space. Linking struts split from the main ones and joined to others, forming a structure like a spider’s web, but one that was ten kilometres across. Between these struts a silvery meniscus spread, which, like the rest of the probe, healed itself when it struck interstellar particles. It had only been a matter of luck that so far nothing larger than a hydrogen atom had got in the way—at such speed anything bigger might have obliterated the probe.

Against the tide of photons, this light sail slowed the probe, but minimally. It further decelerated when the AG motors came back online—powered by the sail, which was also photovoltaic. As the probe drew closer to the red dwarf, light pressure on the sail increased, as did the supply of power to the AG motors. But it was ten years from the probe’s deployment of its light sail, before it fell into orbit of Proxima Centauri, and another two years before it found a dead, cold world orbiting that old sun, and went into orbit about that.

Far above grey mountain chains and methane fogs, the probe folded away its sail, like someone putting away an umbrella after coming in from a blustery day. It then spent a year scanning and mapping the surface of the planet. Finally satisfied, it ejected a two-metre sphere of plumbeous metal which, on independent AG, descended to the surface. Landing on a plain of black rock, this miniprobe hinged down claw arms from where they rested up against its surface like the sepals of a flower, and from the ends of these, explosive bolts thumped down into the surface. From its underside a drilling head extruded and began to turn, a haze of dust all about it as it bored down. At a predetermined depth the probe tested a rock sample, using thorium dating, then began to scan more closely the detritus from the drilling. The layer it had been searching for was penetrated a metre away from where predicted, but geological activity accounted for that. Compressed in the rock, the layer was only a few microns thick, but there was plenty enough material in that layer for the probe’s intensive analysis.

The results, immediately transmitted, took four point three years to get back to Earth: a confirmation that was a happy revelation to some, a source of dread to others.