Cowl

21

Cowl:

I am the pinnacle of the Darwinian evolution of the human species, even though my superiority has been achieved by genetic manipulation. I was made to survive in an extrapolation of the most hostile of human environments, by the most ruthless means. As such I am all that Umbra and Heliothane dogma would have humans come to be. But when a being is measured by its ability to survive ruthless selection processes, isn’t its superiority equated with its ability to destroy and murder? Doesn’t such a measure discount all creativity, and so much else? The ability to survive and to dominate is not all. I am a dead end, but I am also human, and know that what I was made to be is not enough. I am what I am.

He had never done this to her before and foolishly she had believed he never would. Aconite was appalled at the ruthless power of her brother’s mind. His linking tendrils were fully developed and he knew how to use them to best effect. Her own had been stunted and virtually unusable since birth, so she’d had an autosurgeon remove them and cover the evidence with cosmetic surgery. With anguine deadliness his tendrils speared through her eardrum and into her skull, dividing and ever dividing down into synaptic plugs, connecting to the various portions of her brain. Cowl had never mind-fucked her before, but now he was.

Immediately she was dropped into the world of memory—but with her brother present as a hostile spectre. He stood behind her as she looked with some amazement at the ersatz assassin, and wondered why Tack was still alive and if she should allow him to continue to be. A jump, and Cowl listened to his explanation, her brother knowing that she already knew the truth: Tack had been sent here to reveal a weakness in the defences of Sauros, which was the jaws of a trap. But Cowl wanted the root of it:

The four stood on a viewing balcony overlooking the Tertiary park, where six-metre tall paraceratheriums were browsing. Though these creatures possessed skin like that of elephants and a llama-like appearance, they were, like all the prehistoric fauna of the New London parks, distinct animals in themselves. Watching them tearing down palm fronds to get at the ripening dates, Aconite felt that, of all Heliothane projects, this was the most worthy, and even to be able to recover Earth’s genetic heritage was a gift indeed. It was a shame that, on the whole, time travel was used for more bellicose purposes.

‘How did you manage to get here?’ asked Engineer Goron.

Aconite held up her arm to display the enclosing tor. ‘My brother has yet to completely hard-wire the programming. I simply inverted it, and I will return it to normal to take me back.’

Maxell turned to Goron. ‘Goron, don’t make the mistake of seeing Aconite forever in her brother’s shadow. Her abilities are at least equal to his, even if her intentions are not.’

Cowl hissed at this, his breath liquid against Aconite’s cheek.

‘Did you think I couldn’t plumb your technology? Did you really believe I was the poisonous failure our mother named me?’ asked Aconite.

The tendrils tightened in her head, shooting agony around her skull and down her spine. She knew he wanted her to resist, but she let him have it all:

‘So what is it you have to say?’ asked Goron, eyeing Aconite with suspicion.

‘My brother is not trying to destroy you by altering the time-line — in doing that he might well destroy himself. He has discovered he is the cause of the Nodus. Human history begins with a circular paradox. He has found no DNA-based life before that point, so it can only be caused by him. Now he applies all his energies to stop himself causing the omission paradox that could destroy the entire time-line, and thus his own ancestry.’

The laughter came from the fourth member of this group.

‘Such arrogance,’ said Palleque, shaking his head.

Maxell gave him a look. ‘Something of which we are all guilty. Please continue, Aconite.’

After a moment of puzzlement Aconite went on, ‘My brother is not the greatest danger to you, not in himself.’

‘The torbeast,’ said Palleque. He wasn’t laughing now.

Aconite nodded, ‘Already it is immense and reaches uptime to feed. Cowl cannot entirely prevent it doing this, and already the anomalies it is creating are forcing its uptime substance further down the slope generated from the Nodus.’

‘Then that will be the end of the problem,’ said Palleque.

Aconite stared at him. ‘No. My brother needs the torbeast to drop active tors, so he can sample the future and thus find out how to avoid the omission paradox—to find out if his experiments with the protoseas are having any effect — so he feeds energy to it from his geothermal taps to sustain its position on the slope.’

‘It also serves another purpose for him,’ said Palleque through gritting teeth.

Aconite turned to stare at him. ‘Then you know that, while it serves his purposes, it also feeds.’

Grimacing, Palleque turned away from her.

‘I do not yet see how his pet is the greater problem,’ said Goron.

‘As it feeds, it grows,’ said Aconite. ‘Its structure is more complex than anything else that has ever lived. It can grow organic time machines on itself… do I need to draw you a diagram?’

‘Oh,’ said Goron.

‘What does she mean?’ asked Palleque, turning back.

Maxell offered an explanation. ‘It generates its own vorpal field, and once it reaches sufficient mass that field will be strong enough to enable the beast to shift itself anywhere on the probability slope.’

‘And to feed,’ Aconite added.

‘And what precisely are we talking about here?’ Palleque asked.

‘An eater of worlds—all life, every shift-generated time-line, nothing but torbeast left.’

From her brother, Aconite felt confirmation of this, and understood in an instant that his sending of the beast against the Heliothane served two purposes: to kill his enemy and also to weaken his dangerous pet. The time frame jumped:

‘It is the only way to take it out, completely out,’ said Goron.

This time Aconite and the Engineer walked out together across the floor of one of New London’s construction bays, towards the skeleton of a giant sphere—only this time the shadow of Cowl walked beside them.

‘This was created to extend Heliothane Dominion throughout time. As a base from which to kill every last umbrathant, and finally from which to finish your brother. But perhaps now it can serve a more honourable purpose. I would wish it so.’

‘The bait seems… small.’

‘The largest fish can be hooked with the smallest fly.’

‘Will the Heliothane, as a whole, countenance the loss?’

‘Of this?’ Goron asked, gesturing to the nascent Sauros.

‘Of it all. You’ve spent two centuries on this project, and used up half the wealth of the Dominion. And just to lose it all to destroy a threat most of its citizens have never seen and many could not even comprehend?’

‘It has to be done.’

Cowl’s anger was like hot wires burning inside her skull. He was going to kill her with this and, if he did not, he would kill her later.

The tor called to everyone in the Antarctic research facility, but only Aconite intended to respond to that call. Palleque glared at the thing, but then he had more reason to hate its source than anyone else.

‘Here, I have a present,’ he said, turning to her and holding out a small glass cylinder containing white crystals. ‘We found it on Mars, in strata a billion years old, and after that on every other solid planet in the solar system, in rock of the same age.’

‘What is it?’

‘You wondered why I laughed when you said Cowl was the cause of the Nodus.’ He gestured at the cylinder she now held. ‘There were hundreds of theories on the source of that, until our interstellar probe discovered the same substance on a dead world orbiting the red dwarf, Proxima Centauri.’

‘You still haven’t told me what it is.’

‘Crystalline DNA in a protein matrix. As soon as it hits liquid water, it becomes active. In about a million years you’ve got metazoan life—and the rest is history, as they say. In the end, only one theory fits the facts.’

‘Seeding.’

Cowl released his hold and Aconite dropped to her knees, blood running from her ear and glistening over the abrasions around her throat. She glared up at her brother and tested the thick ceramal cuffs that bound her wrists and ankles.

‘How many more do you think I’d let you kill?’ she spat.

Cowl tilted his head, but said nothing. Abruptly he spun round and headed for his vorpal controls. After a moment he uttered a shriek of rage.

In the sky, the spectral display of the torbeast juddered and bled away as, unnoticed, a raft drew into the citadel’s shadow. With the energy feed severed at Sauros, a backlash rippled downtime from the city, taking no time at all, and for ever. Cowl withdrew his sharp fingers from the vorpal ovoid, and stepped back, turning his head to see lightning flashing between temporal capacitors and transformers. The sea boiled as safety trips attempted to divert the surge into the water. It was like trying to hold together a broken dam with Sellotape. Under the sea flare after flare ignited then died to dull red, stepping out in tens then hundreds then thousands towards the horizon, as geothermal generators vaporized and melted surrounding rock. Shortly after, explosions, as from depth charges, followed the same course. Inside the citadel darkness was lit up by machinery fires, then dispelled when auxiliary generators cut in. Emergency lights came on all over the structure, and Umbrathane ventured from their places of safety.

Clinging to the ledge, in the shadow of the out-flowering walls of the citadel above, Tack gazed at the other occupants and saw how they had accumulated. The torbearer in armour had been the first, his weight dropping him directly down from the chute mouth and, with whatever strength had remained to him, he had driven his dagger into a crevice where the ledge joined the pillar. There he must have died, for Aconite had not rescued him, and over time the rust from his armour had stuck him to the ledge. After him had come others: someone wearing a long robe had fallen, the material of which had snagged on one of the knight’s greaves; arm bones had accumulated around these two, and other skeletons had become stuck to the ledge with the adipocere of decay. Occasional ornaments gleamed and weapons rusted. Tack noted a burnt-out Heliothane carbine resting against a ribcage enclosed in parchment skin, the weapon’s black metal and plastic partially melted and turned grey with salt, and wondered about the story behind that. Then, keeping his foot firm against the adhesive mine, he raised the harpoon launcher he had taken from Aconite’s armoury and fired upwards.

With the usual chemical flash, the head of the harpoon bonded to the upper lip of the chute, and after detaching the adhesive mine Tack set the winder spinning to haul him up into the chute’s mouth. Here he stuck the mine to the floor of the chute to give himself a foothold, before detaching the harpoon and winding it all the way back into its launcher. He then gazed up into darkness.

Having little clear memory of his own descent down this pipe, Tack had consulted Nandru and was told it ran in a hundred-metre arc down from Cowl’s spherical control centre. Easy enough to climb, but not yet—he waited.

The sky was still dark with the presence of that thing and the storm it had induced. Beyond the sheltering loom of the citadel, Tack observed the dusty snowstorm of the crystalline substance hazing the surface of the sea and somehow making the waves sluggish. Within a few minutes he spotted Nandru-Wasp hurtling towards him from the direction of Aconite’s home, the robot clutching Polly underneath it like a stolen grub. Finally Tack turned and fired up into darkness, observing the glow of chemical bonding twenty metres above him. Winding the line in taut, he detached the mine and hooked it onto the shoulder strap of the weapons harness he had also acquired. There were three of these devices which, on their contact surfaces, possessed a layer of microscopic hairs much like those found on a gecko’s foot. Unfortunately, unlike the lizard’s foot, the mines were not made for repeated use and after a time would lose their adhesive quality. Hence three of them were needed for this climb. Tack had no intention of using them to blow up anything.

Nandru-Wasp flew into the shadow of the citadel, then descended to hover by the mouth of the chute. Polly, clasped firmly underneath the robot by its four spiky legs, brushed white powder from her face and eyes, before reaching out a hand to Tack. Standing with his boot on the chute’s rim, Tack used the winder’s friction control to allow himself enough slack to lean out and grasp her forearm.

‘Do you have her?’ Nandru asked. ‘I don’t want to be premature in letting her go.’

‘I have her,’ Tack replied tightly.

Nandru-Wasp released his hold, then shot up into the air with the sudden lightening in weight. Polly leapt inwards, her feet coming down on the chute’s lip, and her other hand clutching at Tack’s weapons harness.

‘OK?’ he asked.

‘OK,’ she replied.

Tack started the winder hauling them up the slope. Because of the risks he would rather have done this alone, but he just did not have the will to push Polly away. The thought of being separated from her aroused in him a feeling he had not often experienced but easily recognized. But this was a fear of a different kind.

Reaching the attachment point of the harpoon, Tack located two of the adhesive mines to serve as footholds for both himself and Polly. Then he heard a scrabbling and droning noise in the chute’s throat as Nandru-Wasp tried to find purchase there. He observed the robot finally gain a foothold, then with its four spiked legs begin to advance up the pipe. It covered four metres before, with a screeching of metal being peeled up by its foot spikes, it slid back down. This had been no part of any plan.

‘Stay there, Nandru—the noise you’re making might carry above,’ he whispered urgently.

Nandru managed to drive his spikes into the metal and hold his position. Tack detached the harpoon and fired it further up the slope again.

Cowl returned from studying his vorpal controls, utterly unreadable. Aconite glanced across to where Makali stood, then scanned around the chamber to where the woman’s pet killers were positioned. Having lost the source of his power to manipulate time inside this sphere, Cowl’s paranoia was showing. Aconite then glanced over at the chute down which Cowl had been tossing human remains for the best part of a century. With the manacles around her wrists and ankles she stood no chance of reaching that escape route, but she was sure she had heard something…

Aconite now turned her attention fully on her brother. ‘It has been a stupid and destructive conflict—Umbrathane and Heliothane killing each other over centuries in the solar system and now throughout time,’ she said, pushing herself back so she rested on her knees. ‘I don’t know which side could be judged the more guilty, as now most of them have been born to this conflict and know no different. But I do know who is guilty of most killing—and that’s you, Brother dear.’

‘Our war has been defensive!’ Makali objected, stepping forward.

‘Yes,’ Aconite hissed. ‘I’ve witnessed some of your defensive moves. I saw exactly how you defended yourself by beating a prehuman to death. What threat to you was Ygrol?’

Cowl halted before Aconite and crossed his arms. His voice then issued, as it always seemed to, from the very air around him, ‘Where are the other two?’

‘What do you think you’ll obtain from them? A way of retrieving your creature? A way of instantly rebuilding your power sources? Face it, Brother, your run is over and now it’s time to take yourself to the only place that will remain safe for you.’

‘Where are they?’ Cowl snarled.

‘What? Would you like Makali to do a bit more defending for you? Haven’t you caused enough death already? In making you, our mother thought to create a human nonpareil. Instead she only made a killer of humans. I know you, Brother.’

Cowl’s arms unfolded and dropped to his sides. It was coming now, Aconite felt—now he would kill her. Then suddenly the lights went out and the glow of a catalyser ignited high up in one side of the sphere. On the opposing side a hole blew in through it, hurling an umbrathant off the adjacent walkway, his clothing on fire. Then two more catalysers ignited, their fuse-paper glow spreading out from a central point, incandescent dust billowing in from the burning edges. Momentarily, a glimpse of a big man diving through, a stuttering of fire, and two Umbrathane, struggling to don their masks, were slammed backwards through glowing debris. Another explosion and one of the heavy tubular transformers danced out of its support framework and began to topple. Cowl moved fast, half in a dive, towards his vorpal controls, and Aconite felt sinking dread. Then in a single bright flare a fast-acting catalyser opened a hole in the floor, and high in the sphere the bonding glow of a climbing harpoon was briefly visible. Then, rising up out of the floor on the harpoon’s wire, came Meelan and Saphothere, back to back, each of them brandishing two carbines and spraying the interior of the sphere with fire. Aconite stared in horror at the holes growing in the sphere, and realized that snowing in was not the outfall of catalysis, but a white powder she recognized. And she knew what her brother intended.

‘Stop him!’ Aconite bellowed. ‘He’ll take us all down!’ Several shots slammed into Cowl’s leg, dropping him before he reached his controls. Saphothere and Meelan detached five metres above the floor, then dropped and rolled for cover as return fire tracked their progress. Saphothere dived behind the fallen transformer, spraying fire behind him without even looking, his shots spinning one of Makali’s killers in a wheel of breaking flesh, then a shield generator he had dropped activated behind him a microsecond later to absorb other returned fire. Meelan paused to take out an umbrathant who was now targeting Saphothere, and didn’t see the source of the projectile that smacked into the back of her neck, blowing most of it away and dropping her bonelessly to the floor.

‘Meelan!’ came the anguished shout from Coptic.

Yet another explosion separated a walkway from the dissolving wall and it swung out, Coptic standing on the end of it, shooting at the Umbrathane with both a carbine and his missile launcher. Returned sniping cut away one of his legs, and he shattered the source of that on the floor below. Other shots slammed into his torso, but he absorbed them and kept on firing. Umbrathane died one after another, explosions tearing them away from walkways or blowing them in tatters from whatever concealment they had found. He kept up this barrage until both weapons were empty; then the two remaining Umbrathane came out of cover and concentrated a fusillade on him. Eventually he went down, then toppled from the walkway as it jerked to a halt at the end of its arc.

Aconite kept her head down and dragged herself towards the slope leading down to the disposal chute, but a hand grabbed the back of her jacket and hauled her upright, a prosthetic arm looping around her neck and the snout of a carbine now pressing against her cheek. Holding this human shield, Makali gazed over to where Saphothere had concealed himself.

‘Saphothere, you’re finished now!’ she shouted.

Looking round, she saw her two comrades aiming their weapons down at the fallen transformer.

Aconite directed her attention to her brother, and saw the bullet holes through his carapace and that he was up by his vorpal controls, trailing his shattered leg. In one hand he held a small remote key, which he now pointed towards Aconite and activated. Then he discarded the key and plunged his hand into a glistening sphere.

‘No!’ Makali exclaimed, her attention swinging towards Cowl.

Aconite felt the magnetic lock snicking open. She looked up into the fall of white powder, then, as the manacles dropped away, drove her elbow back hard into Makali, and as the umbrathant bowed over, snatched away her weapon and sent it skittering across the floor. Now someone fired up from the chute, and one of the two Umbrathane went down on his knees, smoke pouring from his front. Saphothere stood up and tracked the second one in his flight across a walkway, blowing away pieces of him—so he never made it to cover. Aconite turned and drove her knee up into Makali’s face, flinging her upright, her face a ruin. She turned back to her brother.

From the surrounding air his voice issued in a hissing whisper, as shields activated between him and Saphothere. ‘Go.’

She could see his hand in the vorpal spheroid, manipulating, moving. Aconite turned to where Tack stood beside the chute with his back against the wall, his weapon directed towards Cowl, and Polly on the other side of the chute, her handgun pointed at Makali. Almost casually, using the back of her larger hand, Aconite struck Makali, sending her sprawling, then stepped down towards the slope. She slid down and caught the edge, her bigger hand closing vicelike on the lip.

‘We have to get out of here, fast,’ she said. ‘How did you get here?’

‘Wasp-Nandru,’ Polly replied.

‘Carries the weight of two, at a push,’ muttered Aconite.

Tack observed the current scene: Makali crawling brokenly along the floor; Cowl at his vorpal controls, operating shield generators set in the floor; Saphothere walking around outside the shields as they were flung up, then moving closer as their generators burnt out. Their number had to be finite and Tack knew that Saphothere was a tenacious killer.

‘You two first,’ said Tack, nodding back at the chute.

Aconite did not give Polly time to protest: she reached out, grabbed the girl’s ankle and tugged her yelling towards her, then sent her down the chute.

‘We’ve got twenty minutes at most, then this place is gone,’ said Aconite. ‘I’ll send the dead soldier back for you.’ She dived into the chute after Polly.

‘Saphothere!’ Tack yelled. ‘There’s no time!’

The man who had hunted and killed Umbrathane most of his life and who, Tack realized, must have dreamed of this moment for much of that period, did not even look round.

‘Damn,’ said Tack, firing his harpoon into the floor at his feet, then himself dropping down the chute, a friction setting on the winder controlling his descent. When he reached the opening above the sea, it was just in time to see Nandru-Wasp carrying a heavy load to the shore, sometimes skimming the surface of the water, then rising up again.

Twenty minutes before what?

Tack supposed Cowl had placed some kind of destructive device inside the citadel, probably atomic, probably powerful enough to vaporize the citadel right down to the bedrock — lunatics always provided that kind of an out. Tack was now standing balanced on two adhesive mines with his harpoon wound back into its launcher, wondering if the wasp-robot would return for him—when Makali slid down the chute and slammed into him.

One mine gave way, spinning off out into the air, but this was enough to absorb Makali’s momentum, so that when they both fell it was down to the ledge below rather than out past it. Scrabbling to gain traction, they sent stray bones spilling down into the sea. Tack dropped his harpoon launcher and tried to bring his carbine to bear, but Makali successfully knocked it aside and stabbed her fingers at his eyes. He ducked, sliding out a leg to drive his boot into her shin. She toppled, but forwards onto him, driving her forehead into his nose. He then hook-punched her in the gut, but she drove down with her prosthetic arms, demonstrating their mechanical strength. He felt his carbine ripped away from him, and through tear-filled eyes saw that his launcher had fallen to lodge itself next to a half-crushed skull. Makali now tried to turn the carbine on him, but her feet slid out from under her, her shoulder thumping against the pillar as she fell towards Tack, shots punching a line of holes through rusting armour beside him. Tack rolled, grabbing up the launcher and firing it in one move. This close, the harpoon punched straight through her, bonding with a flash to the pillar behind. Still she tried to bring the carbine to bear on him. Tack hit fast wind, and let go of the launcher, which wound itself up to her torso, its flat snout crushing into the open wound the harpoon had already made. She shrieked as she was dragged back against the wall, yet managed to fire the carbine again. Tack rolled off the ledge with her shots scoring the air above him. He had no time to turn his fall into a dive—as sharp metallic legs closed around him in mid air.

Running along the shore, Polly looked back up, but, unable to see either Nandru-Wasp or the citadel through the dustfall, she hurried to catch up with Aconite. The dust now fell so thickly it formed conglomerated flakes. Polly glanced over at the water, at the slow roll of the waves humping up the beach, and in the confusion of the moment it took her a second to understand that there was something strange about these waves: they seemed too sluggish and produced little foam; they had the appearance not of sea water waves but of ripples in a thickening soup. Along the strand there now accumulated a mound of gelatinous fragments.

‘What is that?’ She pointed, as she came up beside Aconite, who did not seem in good shape.

‘Hydroscopic,’ Aconite said, pausing to press one hand against her blood-leaking ear.

The meaning of the word flowed easily to Polly from the Muse 184 reference, access to it, she had soon discovered, now so much easier without Nandru in the way. She stooped, picked up a handful of the dust, raised her mask, and spat into the gritty substance. The dust quickly absorbed her saliva; single grains expanding into gelatinous blobs a hundred times their original size.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘The basis of Metazoan life—of us, too, eventually,’ Aconite replied, as she set out again.

Soon they reached the estuary and ran along the bank of the river to where the water was shallowest. There they waded across through a thixotropic flow of jelly till they reached the other shore, knocking away blobs of the gelatinous substance clinging to their clothing. As they laboured up the hill, Nandru-Wasp thrummed overhead, bearing its new load.

‘What… what is Cowl going to do?’ Polly gasped.

Aconite did not have the breath to reply. She turned to Polly, then stumbled down on one knee. After Polly helped her up, they struggled on. Then a figure loomed out of the dust storm. Tack didn’t hesitate: he grabbed Aconite and slung her over his shoulder, then turned and ran up towards the house. Polly was struggling to catch up and, reaching the door behind them, she looked back and caught a brief view of the citadel, a glow igniting underneath it—and spreading.

Once inside, Tack put Aconite down on her feet and she staggered over to lean against a table.

‘Shut the door,’ she rasped.

Polly did as instructed, stripping her mask off as she returned. Tack and Aconite removed their masks too.

Aconite turned to Nandru-Wasp, who was squatting amid the detritus of her home. ‘Can you find the generator start-up code?’

‘I should think so,’ Nandru replied.

‘Then start the fucking generators!’

After a pause, a low humming vibration permeated the house.

‘Now turn on the vorpal feed.’

The tone of the hum changed, its pitch climbing in degrees until it escalated beyond human hearing. Polly felt again something of what she had experienced when she had shifted—a reminder of the last horrible stages of her journey into this past, a hint of the tor webwork in her flesh and bones and in the very air around her.

‘That’s the best we can do,’ said Aconite, moving to a sofa and slumping down, to rest her head back and close her eyes.

‘What’s your brother doing?’ Tack asked

With eyes still closed, Aconite said, ‘My brother wanted to start again with a clean slate when he tried to avoid the omission paradox. He wiped out all pre-Nodus life on Earth by distributing a network of molecular catalysing engines across the ocean bottom. They do not destroy themselves like the weapons version, so that network still exists.’

‘Why does that affect us? I don’t understand,’ Polly asked, sure she could now see glowing lines showing through the outer walls of the house.

Aconite’s eyes snapped open. ‘Where can my brother go now? Outside the Nodus the Heliothane will hunt him down. They’ll never give up, no matter how inaccurate their vorpal jumping may be—he’s too dangerous. The only place for him is to get beyond reach down the slope. So he has started those engines and the reaction will kill all nascent life existing in every drop of water on Earth—which would have had no temporal effect before this time. It won’t end that nascent life because the dust will blow from land to sea. But enough of it will be wiped out for long enough, to shove him down to the bottom of the probability slope, where it starts here in the Nodus.’

‘But then what, for him… for Saphothere?’ Tack asked.

‘Maybe there his alternate will slide into oblivion, maybe a new and distinct time-line will develop and create its own slopes. The strength of the paradox he is creating would have dragged us down with him, but here, with the vorpal skeleton of this house carrying a huge temporal charge, we may yet hold.’

‘He’s shooting his father,’ observed Tack.

‘Precisely,’ Aconite replied. She waved towards the window, from which Cowl’s citadel was visible. Polly moved over to it and Tack came up behind her. Through waves of falling dust they saw the citadel shimmering, the glow in the sea underneath it blooming and spreading to the horizon, and felt the tension drawing the air taut, as a whole world tried to fold away. The house now began to quake and Tack wrapped an arm around Polly’s waist. Then suddenly light speared down through the citadel and began turning it into ineffable interspace. The house lurched in response to the turning, then juddered as if hit with a missile; fragments of wall material clattering down. Another violent wrench threw Polly and Tack to the floor, and sent things crashing down throughout the interior of the house.

Then stillness.

Tack helped Polly stand and they moved to the window. Cowl’s citadel was gone, the glowing in the sea was gone. The dust storm was now settling.

A billion years in the future, in one possible future, a tachyon signal instantly caused thousands of displacement generators to switch on, where they had been placed on the ceramic shielding of thousands of giant antigravity motors. A second was all that was required, as in that second everything moved: sun, solar system, galaxy… Displaced spheres of tightly packed ceramo-composite components, sheered-off pure metal coils and optics, and silicon-controlling matrices appeared outside the motors, where their temperature rose some thousands of degrees. Metals burnt in bright primary colours, silicon melted, components shattered and the spheres flew apart. Down ducts wide enough to swallow Earth’s moon, walls of fire travelled from these gaseous explosions. From outside, the sun tap blinked with a million stars as flame vented into the chromosphere and joined that fire.

With its antigravity motors no longer focusing and transmitting the candent energies below, the vast device now suffered the true brunt of its proximity to this fusion inferno. The ceramic materials of its construction were created to take huge temperatures, but not this. The underneath of the tap began to melt and ablate. For long minutes, like a drop of water dripped onto a hot plate, it skated on the vapour of its own destruction. It now glowed with an intensity as impossible for a human eye to view directly as were its surroundings. Then it distorted, structural plates the size of continents buckling and springing free. Now firestorms raged out through the gaps as further unprotected components, planetary in scale, felt the savage bite of the solar furnace. Then, as if the fiery elementals had tired of toying with this example of human hubris, gravity closed its fist and dragged the sun tap down into harsher flame. The only sign it left was a smear of cooler red on the sun’s surface, and that lasted minutes only. And by then the back end of the microwave beam the sun tap had been transmitting reached New London and that vast source of power was cut off.

In the Abutment Chamber of New London, Heliothane soldiers watched in horror from behind the heat shields of their attack rafts as the fore of the torbeast fountained from the interface and treed out over them and came down: thousands of open mouths eager to rend and feed. Then light died as the power that kept apart the mono-singularities in the abutments shut down. It took less than a second for the three huge devices to slam together at a central point, severing this fraction of the monster that had shown itself, and incinerating much of it in the subsequent heat flash. The tree fell, writhing and burning, yet containing life still, and the Heliothane rafts attacked, cutting apart necks and smashing mouths, killing any of it that still moved.

The last shield generator burnt out, so nothing remained between Saphothere and Cowl. The Heliothane killer casually pointed his weapon at Cowl’s torso and half expected to feel a lack of satisfaction in this moment, but he could not feel better about what he was going to do.

‘You saw and felt the shift,’ Cowl told him. ‘We are now so far down the probability slope you will never again travel in time unless I can do something.’

Saphothere shrugged. He had seen interspace through the gaps in this control sphere and of course he had felt the shift. He was not sure what Cowl had done, but it seemed unlikely he was lying or that it could be undone. Saphothere was fatalistic about such things and, in his heart, had never expected to return from this last mission. He glanced across at the corpse of Meelan and then to the shattered remains of Coptic.

‘And how should I respond to that?’ he asked.

‘You can survive here. There will be Umbrathane still alive in this citadel. We can build something.’

Yeah, thought Saphothere—now he knew Cowl was lying.

‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘I was always better at destroying things.’

With improbable speed for one so injured, Cowl leapt towards him. Saphothere triggered his carbine, hitting the black shape in mid air and stepping aside as it flailed past him, smoking and with pieces of its carapace splintering away. Cowl hit the ground then writhed round, coming up into a crouch. Hissing, he opened his face. Saphothere concentrated his next shots into that and killed him there.

Saphothere briefly relished the moment, then went to pick up his second carbine from behind the fallen transformer. Touching the transformer’s surface, he found it only warm, and seated himself there with his carbines resting beside him. He took out a hip flask containing the last of his stash of nineteenth-century whisky, and sipped at it. Then he waited for the Umbrathane to come.

The wormhole collapsed from both Sauros and New London. It took one and two-thirds years, it took all time and none. Like a hair singed at both ends by lighter flames, it contracted—huge forces closing it down to non-existence. Inside this contracting tube the torbeast raged against impenetrable surfaces—utterly confined in a self-referencing universe—without alternates on which to feed, without even time—and, in that infinite moment, the vast forces of this collapsing universe closed down on the beast’s leviathan mass. But the Heliothane plan to crush this monstrosity out of existence failed, in the end, as mass and force found balance.

To human perception, motionless in interspace, rested a perfect black sphere nearly a kilometre in diameter.

Inside this the torbeast howled.

Forever.