Cowl

11

Engineer Goron:

It was some staffer of Maxell’s who had the idea of using cerebral programming on the next torbearer we managed to intercept. Sir Alex seemed the best option as he had been combat trained from birth. Our team had eighteen hours to work on him before his next shift and all seemed to go well: the programming took and there was even time to provide him with physical augmentation and a Pedagogue weapons’ instruction download. Apparently, though he accepted our weapons, he utterly refused to shed his armour. But even with his armour and his weapons and his new abilities, he must have failed. The team, remaining at the location where they had intercepted Sir Alex while they recharged their mantisals via a portable fusion/displacement generator, were attacked by the beast only minutes after his concurrent arrival beyond the Nodus. So we can only suppose that Cowl killed the man, but was angry enough to retaliate directly.

Pedagogue was an unseen presence directly downloading information into his mind and, with the true brutality of a surgeon, wrenching into shape those structures in his mind that could utilize it. But this, this he didn’t understand:

The trip was due to take another five hours. Tack knew there were three ramscoop fusion engines, set on outriders protruding from the main cylindrical body of the ship, belching white blades of flame. Mercury resembled a cindered sphere to his left, but with a sprawl of bright-silver installations spread in a maze across its sooty flank and cigar-shaped stations orbiting it. Tack was apparently standing before one of the triangular screens that ringed the bridge sphere—earlier in its life, the only place possible for humans to survive here. Now the ship was lethally radioactive. How such a vessel managed to operate in these conditions Tack was only momentarily bewildered to consider, but then, almost off-handedly, he dowsed the extent and capabilities of Heliothane materials and field technology.

Ahead, the sun loomed large—like a hole cut through space into some hellish furnace—and against it was silhouetted the tap itself. The thing was stupendous, like some vast tanker crossing an ocean of fire.

‘Why…?’ He didn’t really voice the question—it was just there.

Would you prefer…

Instantly Tack found himself submersed in some viscous clear fluid, and in a world of pain. He couldn’t scream as the fluid was in his mouth and lungs and, as he began to struggle, he discerned optic cables snaking away from the back of his head. Looking down, he saw himself flayed, red muscle revealed, tubes and wires connected down the length of him, metal cuffs enclosing his joints, the cowled head of some surgical robot excavating into the side of his chest. Then the horrific vision was gone and he was back on the sun ship, gasping and clutching at his chest, shivering. But the pain faded and the memory of pain swiftly blurred.

‘When we have rebuilt you, you will be more sufficient to your task.’

The disembodied words meant the same in every one of the many different languages now available to him, for Pedagogue was speaking to him in every language that he now knew. He thought of Heliothane weapons, realized he knew how to strip and rebuild a multi-purpose carbine, and how to program molecular catalysers. And these were just the tip of the berg of knowledge expanding in his mind.

‘I have questions…’

‘And I have answers,’ Pedagogue told him flatly.

Tack reached out, touched the screen, actually felt its warmth. ‘Cowl must overcome the temporal inertia of four billion years to succeed.’ He tilted his head. ‘I see, one billion.’ Now he knew the Nodus Cowl had travelled a few centuries behind was situated just before the Precambrian explosion—when complex life really began to take hold. ‘That inertia—to overcome it Cowl must do something… cataclysmic. And even if he succeeds he’ll just push himself and his new history down to the bottom of the probability slope.’

‘Cataclysmic… Nodus. What maintains the relative position of the alternates on the slope? Why does father killing confine you in the new time-line you have created by that act, down the probability slope, rather than make that line the main one?’

‘Cause and effect. The paradox shoves you down the slope.’

‘Correct. But that paradox can only come into being because you are contradicting what came before. You are acting counter to temporal momentum. Before the Nodus there is virtually zero momentum and therefore zero to contradict.’

Tack saw it then. He conceived the image of time as a sheet tossed over a table, against the surface of which already rested a long rod, the uppermost point on the sheet, where it was lifted along the length of the rod, being the main line. The rod was also tilted up from the edge of the table, so that the slope of sheet, down from it on either side, grew longer the further in from the edge of the table you went. The edge of the table was the Nodus itself, and the rod protruding from the edge was held in a hand that could, given sufficient pressure, swing the rod, thus altering the position of the high point in the sheet and the slopes on either side. That hand belonged to Cowl. Tack swallowed dryly, seeing that he had no choice but to believe what he was being told: if someone’s hand is hovering over the detonator switch of an atomic bomb, you do not hesitate to shoot them should you have the opportunity; you do not ask what their intentions are.

‘There’s more I need to know.’

‘Yes…’

In his mind he now sensed a wave of information, poised just at the edge of perception and ready to break over him. Before him the triangular screens turned black for a second, then came back on to show an entirely different display. He stepped forward, for a moment was submerged in viscous fluid again, and briefly glimpsed his raised arm, skin growing back across it like white slime, the material of his tor grown to the size of his palm. Pain was a brief suffusion, then he was standing on a walkway beside the glass of an aquarium wall behind which something shifted. A nightmare turned towards him.

Well, look at the pretty horses now.

From the start the place had seemed idyllic: warm balmy sunshine, wild plums scattered below the trees fringing the forest—fed upon by small lemurs who maybe preferred the slightly decayed fruit for its intoxicant effect—amid lush green grass scattered with giant daisies and enough dry wood with which to make a fire for the coming night. But before she had a chance to set about gathering some, a herd of miniature horses galloped into view—scattering the lemurs in panic. Polly knelt in the shadow of a tree to eat the plums she had collected while she watched the cute creatures’ antics. Then it had appeared, and now she crouched behind the same tree, the taser in her left hand and the automatic in her right.

You’re way back now. Bastards like that died out about forty million years back.

The monster hurtled in on the pastoral scene with a scream like a klaxon. Swinging and clashing its parrot beak, it eviscerated one of the little horses, then took the head off another, and stamped its talon down on a third, while the rest of the herd fled. It began eating the pinioned animal, tearing it in half and tilting back its head to gobble down the quivering hindquarters. In moments it finished the first horse, then it strode across to another, pecking up a decollated head on the way. Before feasting on its third victim, it paused and shat out a spray of white excrement.

I think it’s getting full now.

So it appeared, for the monstrous bird, after eating the head and forelegs of the third horse, was pecking at the rest in what now seemed a desultory manner. After a moment it gave up completely, scraped at the ground like a chicken, before letting out that klaxon squawk again and moving away.

And that was only a small one.

Polly was aghast, for the horrible creature had stood higher than herself and its killer beak was the size of a bucket.

It’s called Gastornis, Nandru explained.

Seeing the bird was now some hundred metres away, Polly began to move out from under cover.

Wouldn’t it be better to stay in the trees?

Ignoring this advice, she glanced all around to make sure there were no other unpleasant surprises in the offing, then ran over to where the bird had been feeding.

Are you insane?

Stooping, Polly grabbed a bloody chunk of the last little horse and ran for cover again.

‘Waste not want not, as my mother always used to say,’ she sang, running still deeper into the forest.

Later, with her stomach full of roast horse, she gazed out from her camp and noticed how her fire’s glow reflected on eyes out there. After throwing a bone out towards them, she could hear things squabbling in the darkness over it. But at least they sounded small.

The nightmare bore the shape of a man, but a tall, long-limbed man in whom the ranginess of the Heliothane had been taken to its extreme. It had no face—its head was a slightly beaked, utterly featureless ovoid, of the same shiny beetle-black appearance as the majority of its naked body. However, as if this was not strange enough, the black carapace revealed a network of hyaline veins and ribs, so that, when the light caught the network, it looked as if something horribly skeletal stood there.

‘A woman used a semi-AI prognostic program to predict the future development of human DNA, and on the basis of that started recombination experiments on her children. In her terms, her first experiment was a failure, though the offspring survived. Cowl was not a failure, so there is much speculation as to what those terms of hers were.’

Tack flinched as Cowl started to walk towards him, but the dark being was then frozen mid-stride as Pedagogue continued lecturing.

‘We don’t know what external pressures were input, because DNA has no purpose in itself other than its own survival and procreation, so intelligence or physical strength are only increased should they have a direct bearing on that. Should the survival of human DNA entail you needing to lose your big brains and filter food out of the soil, you would all become worms. It can only be supposed that her program posited a future where the highest levels of intelligence, ruthlessness, speed and strength were required. Cowl killed his own mother while in her womb, thereafter escaping by internal caesarean much like a chick escaping from the egg with its beak spur.’

‘But he became one of the Heliothane,’ Tack stated. The information was now just there, in his mind. He saw how Cowl’s survival had initially depended on the Heliothane, how he had deliberately become a very valuable member of that society. It was not so difficult—ruthlessness and intelligence being much admired. The misjudgment had killed many. One of them a top scientist called Astolere—Saphothere’s sister.

‘I see,’ said Tack woodenly.

And see he did. He saw Callisto, a moon of Jupiter, exploding, with the blast contained in some unseen barrier and the moon just winking out of existence. Four hundred million Heliothane gone in less time than it took to draw breath.

‘Cowl, having made his alliance with the Umbrathane, and passing on much of his research, caused a temporal anomaly on Callisto, where his research facility was based, putting a picosecond future version of that moon in exactly the same place as the original. The physical composite of the two moons, forced to exist however briefly in the same place, went in a fusion explosion, the energy generated thereby powering his flight, and that of the Umbrathane fleet, into the past.’

‘And I am supposed to kill this… creature?’

‘Yes, that is your task.’

Back aboard the virtual ship, Tack was bathed in incandescence. The screens now revealed a side view of the sun tap. It was a leviathan wood planer shaving the fiery surface of the sun, raft-like at its two extremes but humped in the middle. The view was filtered—it would have incinerated him otherwise. Then, suddenly, he was gazing upon the vast cliff that was just one side of the tap. This close it seemed to extend to infinity in every direction, beyond planetary scale—immensity impossible to encompass. He blinked and drew his attention away from it, studying his closer surroundings. The inside of the ship had become a furnace: plastics were beginning to smoke, coatings were peeling from metal surfaces, spots of red heat were appearing on bare metal, and smoke-hazed air being drawn away through vents. And so the unreal world Pedagogue had created came to an end. When the ship’s fields collapsed, actinic light obliterated everything and Tack began to wake.

She was running out of air, and now the force of her will was pushing the scale in some other way. She found herself being dragged sideways back into that dimension of black sea underlining a grey void, but drawing along with her part of the previous place. From the scale itself barely visible lines of light sprang out and turned back in on themselves, all looping at precisely the same distance out from it, so she appeared to rest at the centre of a huge, luminous dandelion clock. Then this spheroid took on a glassy quality, the light draining out of it and its surface splitting and coalescing into veins and ribs, as of water poured onto something greasy. Encaged in this cocoon she fell, gulping at nothing in the darkness, consciousness fading. But still she had some will left and attempted to force her way back into her own reality. Around her the black sea rose up, and gravity grabbed her and slammed her down on a floor of hyaline bones. She gasped in frigid air, grateful for each painful breath. Rolling upright, she found herself still encaged in the sphere, hovering now over frigid ground, a dark grey sky above, strange frozen trees to her right and a snowy plain to her left. Terrified that she would be snatched away from breathable air again, she scrabbled for a gap in the cage wall, but even as she found it and fell through, the cage itself began to fold away into that other place.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Polly managed, recovering her breath after landing on her back on the unforgiving ground.

Well, as about the nearest thing to an expert in temporal travel we have here, I have to say I haven’t a clue.

Polly looked around, then hugged her arms close around her body. ‘I thought it was your expert opinion that it was supposed to be warmer before that last ice age.’

Sorry, but there were more than one of them. You got a few in the Pleistocene age, but I thought you were beyond them, then some in the Carboniferous… Let’s just hope you’ve not gone that far yet. This is probably just some sort of hiccup: a bad winter, maybe a bad millennium. You’ve been covering millions of years, remember.

Polly tried not to think too much about that. Absentmindedly she opened her coat and removed from her hip bag a remaining lump of eohippus meat, and methodically devoured it.

‘Any idea at all what period this is?’ she asked.

None whatsoever. The thing that manifested around you might have altered the circumstances, and your previous time-jumps have been too out of kilter for me to easily work out a curve. I would guess you’re getting pretty near to dinosaur country, though.

Polly grunted an acknowledgement and continued eating as she stared about her. ‘Perhaps I’m just in the Arctic here—you said my position in space seems to be changing as well.’

I don’t think there was an Arctic, as we know it. I’m not sure, but I think that, in the region of time we should be entering, even the poles weren’t frozen over.

Polly nodded and started walking towards some nearby trees, since there she might find some shelter from the cold, and might even be able to get a fire going. At the forest edge she found it heavy going, as the snow had drifted thickly against boulders and fallen trunks. Eventually she reached a clearing and scanned the surrounding vegetation.

Looks like bamboo over there. That’s odd.

Polly immediately spotted what Nandru was referring to: the segmented trees spearing up like telegraph poles. Below these she discovered mounds of dry tendrils—light as balsa and only the thickness of her finger, segmented like the trunks they had dropped from. These fragments ignited easily and they burnt with a smell of pine. Polly was quickly able to build up a big fire, since it was apparent that every tree here was dead and their wood freeze-dried. It rapidly made the transition from campfire to bonfire: flames roaring up from the plentiful fuel. Polly sat on a nearby stump to soak up the heat. Scraping up handfuls of melting snow, she quenched her thirst. Then she noticed a strange regularity to the stump, and abruptly stood and stepped away. The fire’s heat continued to melt the snow and reveal what lay underneath it.

It was soon revealed as the head and forelimbs of some huge creature. The beaked head was covered by a large bony shield adorned with three lethal-looking horns.

Triceratops. Polly had seen enough films to recognize it.

‘I bet dinosaur meat tastes like chicken,’ she said, trying find some levity to quell the panic growing inside her.

Sixty-five million years.

Polly was appalled; she almost instinctively reached out to shift, and again found that glassy cage materializing around her. The shift this time was brief and the grey was suddenly displaced by a subliminal glimpse of burning jungle, furnace red, choking smoke and hot ash below a cyanosis sky. Intense heat washed over her, flames clawing in through the glassy structure around her, before she shifted again just to stay alive. Again jungle: cycads and tree ferns and horsetails, huge, strangely shaped trees which were mostly trunk and bole, with a minimal head of greenery. As the cage disappeared, smoke dissipated around her—having been transported through with her. She collapsed on her knees, coughing desperately.

It brought the atmosphere of that last place along with it. It’s almost as if the scale has conceded to your needs, so it can get on with its own journey without you fighting to control it.

That was not Polly’s most exigent concern at that moment.

You know, I think you just witnessed the dinosaur extinction.

Polly knew that. Her concern was that she was on the side of it she would rather not be.

Panicked by her discovery of the frozen triceratops, the girl shifted back beyond the vorpal sensor, and Silleck did not know if she survived the meteorite impact and firestorm that had preceded that killing winter and placed a full point at the end of the dinosaur aeons—that mercy killing of the diseased and dying populations of the great beasts. This, as Silleck knew, ended another of those long-drawn-out evolutionary wars between the large animals of Earth and their constant viral killers. Only humans had survived such a conflict, just.

Silleck now drew herself back down the aeons to where Sauros settled into the soft ground of the Jurassic. The city’s bones were still creaking, and the inner sphere had not yet turned to bring the floors level, but already Engineer Goron had abandoned his station to head for his customary place at the viewing windows. But the interface technicians remained where they were: Sauros, though slowly building up its energy reserves after such a journey, was still vulnerable to attack.

Silleck scanned the nearby slope, where the city was multiplied to infinity in all its incarnations, as if sitting between two facing mirrors. She scanned up and down time as far as she could without using sensors dropped in other ages, but there seemed no danger. Then she pushed her awareness downtime to a vorpal sensor often visited by her fellow technicians, to a brief period at the end of the Triassic and somewhat downslope, which had been named by them ‘the boneyard’.

Here there was some wrinkle in time that many torbearers missed. But it was a trap for many others, which killed their momentum should they fall into it. Thus they were caught for many days and without nutrition became the food for their own parasitic tors. Many of them were starving and half-dead when they arrived, and found no succour in this barren place. Silleck gazed down at the hot dry landscape, where human bones had been cleaned by grave beetles and small vulpine pterosaurs. She chose one scattering of bones and tracked it slowly back in time, seeing it reform, become fleshed and reinflate with moisture, and the brief instant when the tor reappeared enclosing the arm it had later torn away and disappeared with.

The man, who wore a turban and sarong, had walked for many days following a half-seen figure, before just giving up and sitting down to die. The figure, Silleck discovered, was an Australian aborigine, who survived and prospered in this arid hell, before being again taken away by his tor. There were other scatterings of bones, and other desiccated corpses. But it was all too grim, and the interface technician took herself back to one of the furthest sensors resting in the Permian epoch, where she knew another torbearer had been observed, but even as her awareness arrived in this sensor she began to pick up the waves of disturbance travelling uptime and upslope, through interspace, and knew that something was coming.

Gazing across the waves to where the plesiosaurs were mating — rolling in the sea, their great flukes arcing up fountains of water, their long necks slamming against the surface, and then rising and intertwining—Tack found he had acquired a deep and secure certainty about so many things. Foremost was the conviction that Cowl had to die, there was no question of that, and any of the wretched Umbrathane who got in his way should be eliminated as well. Raising his gaze to the dome enclosing the aquapark, and to the hard starlight beyond, he felt impatient to be on his way. At the sound of someone stepping onto the viewing deck behind him, he turned whip fast.

‘Be calm, Traveller Tack,’ said Maxell.

She much resembled the woman who had slammed him against a corridor wall in Sauros. Her skin had that same amber translucence, though her eyes were blue and her hair a straight waterfall of white. But unlike the other, she would not be slamming him into any walls. For, since being taken offline from Pedagogue and coming out of the regrowth tank, Tack had quickly discovered that he was now the physical equal of many of the Heliothane, and superior to very many more. His musculature had been boosted, his martial skills greatly enhanced, and the body of knowledge now available to him was huge. However, he realized that many of these people still viewed him with hidden disdain, for to attain such new heights had required his body to be stripped down and totally rebuilt, with everything from bones being increased in density to cerebral grafts. He even possessed implants, which were anathema to them. Their pragmatic view was that if any man was not strong or clever enough to survive using his natural gifts, then he died—plain and simple.

‘What type of plesiosaur are they?’ Maxell asked him, nodding at the sporting creatures.

‘Elasmosaurus,’ Tack said quickly, giving them their twenty-second-century name despite her having asked in the language of the Heliothane, and despite his having access to over three hundred other languages.

Maxell frowned at this. ‘Still keeping to your old habits, I see,’ she said, now switching to the same language. ‘It appears we could not root everything out of you.’

Tack held up his left arm, displaying the tor, which had now attained full growth. ‘Does that really matter? I know what I have to do now, and you know that you can do no more to improve me. This thing on my arm started to reject once you tried genetic recombination. And no one else can wear it.’

He had been told that they had first tried to remove the parasitic scale from him in order to place it on someone else, but had failed. He also knew that, had they succeeded, he would have been dispensed with like so much garbage, and there remained in him a core of resentment over that. What puzzled him was why this knowledge had not been kept from him.

‘We already know why it started to reject. Cowl is using them to sample the future, so recombination would have defeated the tor’s initial purpose. It read your genetic code the moment it attached.’

She came up to stand right beside him and pointed down at the sea, where a huge shark was cruising past, doubtless attracted by the thrashing of the plesiosaurs. There was no guard rail along the edge of the platform, but that did not surprise Tack from a people who walked bare-faced through vacuum. The Heliothane did not coddle themselves with their technology. The lack of a rail was just another sign of their life view—if you’re stupid enough to fall in, you deserve to get eaten.

‘There will be sharks in that era, but no elasmosaurus—they were most prevalent in the late Cretaceous.’ She turned to look at him. ‘I sense you have been impatient, and wonder why we delay. The simple answer is that Engineer Goron’s shift back into the Jurassic has not been without some difficulties. Even now the tunnel has not restabilized, though we predict conditions will be ready for your transit through it in eighty hours.’

Holding up his tor-covered arm again, Tack asked, ‘Do I use this thing to take me from Sauros onwards?’ An implant kept the tor in abeyance, but he could still feel the thing’s temporal field webbing the inside of his body.

‘No, because your supplies will be limited by what you can carry, and though you can obtain food during much of your journey, there is still a large stretch of it where food would not be easily available. Saphothere will take you, by mantisal, as far back as he can.’

Tack was glad to hear that—if there was ever such a thing here, he considered the man his friend. Saphothere no longer showed disdain for Tack, rather respect. But then those entitled ‘Traveller’ were not so insular in their thinking as the rest of the Heliothane.

‘After that I go on by myself- and tear Cowl’s throat out,’ said Tack viciously.

‘Oh yes, certainly that.’ Maxell smiled.

Tacitus peered down through the spray at the rowers and damned himself for the sudden sympathy he felt for them: they were the spoils of war, slaves and the property of Rome, not citizens. Anyway, should they be freed from their chains their ending now would be no different from everyone else on this galley if it went down. In this sea they would all drown. He looked up to where the weird lights still played about the mast and reefed sail, asked a blessing from Mithras then made his way forward.

His sodden cloak flapping in the gale, he gripped the safety ropes tightly as he edged along the gantry above the rowers. It was then, in the howling night, that lightning struck the mast and leapt down to the prow with a sound like mountains breaking. Tacitus went down on his knees, thinking this must be the end of him. Behind he could hear some of his men shouting prayers at the storm. Looking ahead again, he kept blinking to try and clear his vision, for surely he had seen something looming there out of the night, but then he saw only smouldering wood and sylphs of flame. He continued forging ahead until on the foredeck he found wreckage and the bodies of two of his men, their armour smoking and their skin blackened. This was a cursed voyage, he knew that now. Then his gaze fell upon the strange object cleaving to the wooden rail like a burr.

It was a vambrace, he knew it at once. It was a gift from Mithras for some battle yet to come. He reached out to grab it and yelled as its thorned surface cut into his hand. A big wave hit the side of the galley and, swamped in water, the galley slaves screamed and struggled. Falling down, Tacitus held onto the object, and it pulled from the rail. Without hesitation he thrust his arm into it. Agony, and a deep gnawing pleasure that was almost sexual. Blood poured from his arm and the vambrace closed about it and bonded to him. In only minutes it was firmly in place and his blood washed away by the sea and the rain. He held his arm up in a fist salute to his men at the stern of the ship. Then the jealous god Neptune sent one of his monsters against the ship.

The giant serpent rose up out of the sea, the great loop of its body curving up into hazy night, then its eyeless head and awful vertical maw turned and slammed down on the edge of the galley. Tacitus was again knocked off his feet. Struggling up and stumbling to an inner guard rope, he looked down and saw that the monster had taken out the side of the ship and was now feasting on the slaves. The inner parts of its mouth revolving like some engine, it drew them in, screaming, by their chains. There was no question that the ship would go down, so perhaps this was the battle he was being called to. He drew his gladius and leapt down into the chaos. Knocking aside those begging him in pidgin Latin to release them, and grabbing at him in desperation, he made his way to the horror that was chewing on the ship. He raised his weapon and drove it into a wall of flesh. Once, twice, but seemingly to no effect. Then a tentacle snapped out of darkness beside him and knocked him past a revolving hell of teeth and out into the storm. He struck a scaled flank that lacerated his legs as he fell past it, and then he was down into the sea, still clutching his gladius. He could not swim and he prepared himself for death, relaxed for it. And something took him away from the storm, into some nether hell, then out into bright sunlight.

Tacitus fell face first onto a soft surface, coughed and gasped as he fought for breath, then hauled himself upright and turned, ready to attack the figures that loomed over him. Then, in the presence of gods, he went down on his knees, his blood leaking into briny sand.

‘So this is the torbearer,’ said the tall golden woman in her strange white clothing. Tacitus did not understand the words then, but the time would come when he did.

The man, who had to be Apollo, said bitterly, ‘The galley went down—that was always a matter of historical record. The beast didn’t cause any paradox it couldn’t sustain by eating everyone on board.’

The man now reached down, grabbed Tacitus by the shoulder, and with infinite ease, hauled him to his feet. In the Roman’s native Latin he said, ‘You will help us to better understand that thing on your arm, before it takes you on your way again.’

‘Thank you, Lord… for saving me,’ Tacitus replied, bowing his head.

‘You may yet wish it otherwise,’ the woman told him.

Tacitus did wish it otherwise when these beautiful violent people learnt all they could from him with their strange questions and stranger engines. And when they then paralysed him and probed him and tried to take the god’s vambrace from his arm. Evidently failing in this endeavour, they freed him, handed back his sword, and told him to enjoy his journey to hell. It was a journey he could never have imagined—the time he spent with them being a comparatively harmless interlude—and throughout it he came to understand what the woman really meant.