Cowl

5

Astolere:

It is quite probable that the Umbrathane fleet remains somewhere in the Jovian system. Even I know that the energy requirement to displace them out of it would have been detected. Their fleet is a large imponderable, and Heliothane forces remain on alert. Saphothere’s negotiations with the two Umbrathane leaders have gone surprisingly well. It seems that the particular faction comprising the ground assault force is always used in such risky missions because it is one whose beliefs are not so harsh as those of the Umbrathane majority. Apparently those leaders are prepared to accept imprisonment on Ganymede rather than face obliteration. Meanwhile I must return to the facility and supervise the temporary shutdown of Cowl’s research program. I have to say that this is something about which I feel trepidation, especially when I tell the preterhuman himself that the torbeast (his name for it, and mountainous it is—other staff at the facility have jokily named it ‘Jabberwock’, though I’ve yet to understand the humour) must be vented out on the surface of Callisto.

Through the foliage above him Tack could see that the sky was a cloudless pale blue. A new day, in this unfamiliar time, had begun. Moving his arm up out of the covering fold of his heat sheet, he checked the time and saw that he had slept a further two hours since his second spell of watch ended. Traveller was moving about the campsite, but Tack did not want to turn over yet to see what the man was doing. He wanted to keep still for a little longer and get a chance to contemplate what he had thus far learnt.

Traveller wanted the tor that was growing on Tack’s arm as, somehow, this device would enable his kind to get to a creature called Cowl, who was trying to destroy the entirety of human history. There were so many holes in that explanation, and so many questions to ask, Tack could not even think of where to begin. The simple fact of time travel being a reality raised an insuperable wall of questions. However, lying there, Tack realized there was one question he had yet to ask: to where, or rather when, was Traveller taking him?

When Tack smelt coffee brewing and the mouth-watering aroma of roasting meat, he finally flipped back his sheet and sat up. He saw Traveller squatting by the fire and poking at it with a stick. A coffee pot rested on the hot embers, with skewered next to it the gutted body of a small animal.

Traveller gestured at the carcass with his stick. ‘Wild pig. I’m surprised the racket didn’t wake you.’

Tack looked at him queryingly.

‘Something got its mother back in there.’ He gestured with his thumb into the deeper forest. ‘This one was hiding in bushes nearby.’

‘Why didn’t you bring the mother?’

‘Not much left of her. Cave lion, I think. Best not to remove what was left of its kill in case it comes back for more of it.’

As Tack absorbed this, he noticed that Traveller’s eyes had returned to that weird orange colour and that he seemed to possess more energy this morning than on the night before. Transferring his attention to the roasting flesh, he discovered in himself a touch of squeamishness, as the only meat he had ever eaten had come out of numerous layers of plastic—disassociated from its true source. He stood up then and moved away from the fire to urinate behind a tree. When he returned he found his squeamishness disappearing under the onslaught of growing hunger. Soon he found himself stuffing greasy roast pork into his mouth.

‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked eventually, cleaning his hands in the snow.

Traveller stared at him through the steam rising off his cup — his eyes now demonic. ‘If you look upon time as a road, then in the wrong direction at present. We need you back in New London, where we have the technology to ensure the survival of your nascent tor. But that thing embedded in your wrist attracts the notice of Cowl’s particularly nasty pet and it is, on our time, very active in proximity to your… natal time.’ Traveller paused, his expression pained. ‘I find your language particularly unsuited to any sensible discussion of time travel.’

‘How do you finally intend to get back to this New London?’ Tack asked, realizing he must keep doggedly to just one line of thought at a time, for every answer that Traveller gave him promulgated a whole new set of questions.

‘We have an outpost called Sauros based in the Mesozoic, and between it and New London, a sub-temporal wormhole—a time tunnel.’

Tack sipped his coffee and considered. ‘Mesozoic?’

Traveller grinned over his coffee. ‘Think of dinosaurs,’ he said. ‘But we have some trips yet to make to get there. I was already tired before the one we just made, so I possessed only enough energy for limited symbiosis with the mantisal. That means we only managed about a million years. This next jump should take us back at least fifteen million.’

Tack felt his mouth go dry and suddenly, despite the hot coffee, he felt cold. With a hand that trembled only a little he placed his cup on the ground, took up his heat sheet and draped it around his shoulders.

‘And this is the coldest it will be for us,’ Traveller added. ‘From now on things start getting hotter—in more than the literal sense, too.’

Tack waited for the punchline.

Traveller gestured about them. ‘This is about as restful as it gets. Between us and Sauros lie about eighty million years of appetite.’ Traveller stood up and gestured meaningfully to the backpack. Tack finished his coffee and folded the cup, inserting it into a compartment inside the coffee pot. This and the heat sheets went into the pack, which Tack then shouldered. As they emerged from the trees, Tack noticed dry grass showing through where the snow had melted away. Far to his right he saw a huge elephantine shape standing still as a rock before it turned back into the trees.

‘Mammoth,’ he breathed.

‘Mastodon, actually,’ Traveller corrected him. ‘Mammoths customarily move around in family groups.’ He paused and studied the spot where the creature had disappeared. ‘Though there are the rogue males, of course.’ With that he set off, quickly following their own tracks in the snow, back to where they had disembarked from the mantisal. Tack hurried along behind, scanning all about himself for something significant, since he felt sure this was a time—if not place—that he would never see again. But all he saw here was snowy grassland and forest, and earlier that one enigmatic shape, before the mantisal folded out of thin air before them, and they climbed aboard.

The nightmare darkness receded into memory and it seemed she had been in this forest for an age, with nothing to accompany her but the sounds of birds and the wind in the trees. But now she heard bells tinkling, the murmur of conversation and an occasional burst of laughter. Somewhere nearby there were people, and in Polly’s mind that meant the possibility of food, for she was racked with a hunger that had already compelled her to chew and swallow a handful of acorns before vomiting up the whole bitter mess. Drawing hard on her second hunger-quelling cigarette, she then discarded it and moved on eagerly. Pushing through the bracken below towering trees, she soon lost any sense of where the sound was coming from and began flailing forward in a panic, then stumbled down a slope onto her knees. Before her, like an epiphany in the damp leaf-litter, grew a single yellowish-white toadstool. She reached out for it.

What the hell do you think you are doing?

‘I’m hungry,’ Polly replied, her mouth still full of nauseating bitterness.

Well, that would certainly cure any future hunger. Muse has it listed as Amanita virosa or the Destroying Angel. I thought it was a death cap, but that’s only a small disagreement of memory and acquired memory. Either way the results would eventually be the same.

‘You don’t really know that,’ said Polly, reluctant to deny herself this potential snack.

Muse 184 has a hundred terabytes of reference, remember. I’m living in its damned RAM, so I’m not taking up any space. Do you know what that means?

‘No… no I don’t.’

Put it this way, it knows more than any single human is ever likely to know on any subject you could think of. And being as its purpose is military, it particularly has everything in here you’d want to know about poisons and other causes of death. You want me to detail what will happen to you if you eat that thing?

‘No, I don’t need that.’ Polly stood up and moved off, irritably kicking the toadstool to snowy fragments across the leaf litter as she went.

It’s that damned scale on your arm. By my clock you ate four tins of pilchards and half a loaf of bread only six hours ago on that boat. It must be sucking you dry somehow. They knew it was parasitic… alive in its limited way.

‘Why do you call it a scale?’

Where it came from, my little slot machine. You saw the…creature that killed me? Well that thing on your arm is a scale from its back—if back it had.

‘You said something about all this, but nothing made sense then.’

What’s to tell? We raided a suicide bombers’ school in Kazakhstan, and that creature hit at the same time. Fucking chaos. It chewed four of them down, and shed that thing on your arm in the process. It was just one of many arranged like scales on its surfaces, though whatever the creature is, we never saw enough of it to… just call it a monster, something vast from another place.

‘What other place?’

I haven’t got a clue.

Polly looked around her. There, the bells again… somewhere over that way.

‘What happened then?’ she asked.

One of the Binpots wanted to put it on his arm. Leibnitz put a clip into him before he got a chance, then the monster hit Leibnitz and Smith. I bagged the scale and ran with it—I knew it was important — and Patak and the others covered me. The monster took him when we got back to HQ. Next thing the last of us were in a U-gov facility with the big brains talking temporal anomalies. I was interrogated under VR with drugs I’d never heard of, then was sat out in a compound with the rest as bait for the… monster. Wired up like lab rats, we were. I knew it wanted me, see, from the moment I killed that guy who had been about to put the scale on himself, like you did. It attacked — chaos again. I was able to escape, grabbing the scale and some other tech as I went. The scale tried to get me to put it on, but it left me alone when I wrapped the fucking thing in plastique…

Polly found herself standing at the edge of a rough track. Distantly she could again hear the tinkling of bells, and that muted conversation and laughter.

‘But what is it? What’s it for?’

Christ knows. But I heard enough then to know that somehow time travel was involved, and that the monster it came from hunts through time, taking victims that are somehow irrelevant to the future. You know, if that thing hadn’t attacked when it did, we would have still been around in an area that was subsequently carpet-bombed. I’ve thought about this a lot. I think it was coming to take dead men before they died.

Thinking about that made Polly’s head ache. She turned onto the track and headed towards the human sounds. Shortly a covered wagon rounded a corner, pulled into view by a big white shire horse. The vehicle was hung with the bells she had heard, and painted with the words ‘The Amazing Berthold’ and its woodwork was intricately carved. Polly paused in its path as it approached, the driver and his elderly companion peering at her suspiciously, then she moved to one side of the track. As the wagon drew alongside her, she observed a young dark-haired man holding the reins, his clothes straight out of some historical interactive, and his broad flat hat sporting a couple of pheasant feathers. He pulled on the reins to halt the horse, then reached down to haul up the wooden brake.

At last it was ending, and the world was returning in coloured flashes like a strange species of lightning. Gradually revealed through the mantisal’s glassy spars was a landscape seemingly little different from the one they had recently departed. They rematerialized above grassland a few hundred metres away from the edge of dense forest. Then Tack began to note the subtle but disturbing differences. Here the cloud-dotted sky was a deeper blue, the green of sprouting grass was hazing up through the trampled sea of older stalks, and everywhere were scattered yellow, red and lavender flowers. The distant trees were also tinged with the green and yellow of new growth, and there were birds racketing up into the air. A balmy breeze, carrying with it the smells of hot spring, dispersed the cold from the skeletal cage of the mantisal.

‘Best get to the trees as quickly as we can,’ said Traveller. ‘Out here we’re likely to get stomped.’

Tack saw that the man was tired again and his eyes lifeless. Traveller gestured to a distant elephantine shape coming towards them.

‘Mammoth,’ Tack said.

Traveller snorted. ‘Wrong. They’re ten million years in the future. That thing over there is a deinotherium—a rather larger and more bad-tempered ancestor of the elephant. So let’s move.’

They dropped out of the mantisal and walked away from it. Glancing back, Tack saw the strange thing fold out of existence, leaving a cold mist that swiftly dissipated. Nearby he saw huge skins of excrement covering the ground, some old enough for plants to be pushing up through them, and some new enough to be covered by legions of flies contesting ownership with dung beetles the size of golf balls. Avoiding these, they tramped on towards the trees, keeping a wary eye on the approaching beast.

‘How big is it? I can’t really tell,’ Tack asked.

‘About four metres high at the shoulder. We could bring it down with our weapons, but even this far back in time every drastic action we take creates difficulties for the mantisal.’ Seeing Tack’s puzzled expression Traveller went on, ‘We come from the potential future, and no matter how careful we may be our actions here affect that future.’ He gestured all about them. ‘Our presence here is even now moving this time-line down the probability slope, leaving as the main line all this without our presence. Therefore, in each jump through time we make, the mantisal takes us not only back in time but back up the slope to mainline time. And the more we influence each time we are in, thus affecting our probable future, the more slope it has to carry us back up on the next jump. Luckily, the further back we go, the less we affect our probable future.’

Reflecting on their previous conversations, Tack said, ‘I’d have thought the danger would increase the further back we went.’

His expression showing his customary irritation, Traveller glanced across at him. ‘Which shows just how little you understand. As I said before: kill your father before your conception and you’ll end up right down the slope, where it would take the full energy output of the sun tap for a whole day to propel you back onto the main line. But to achieve the same screw-up here, you’d need heavy weapons—and as far back as, say, the Jurassic, nothing less than a tactical nuke.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No, of course not.’ Traveller said nothing more for a while then, relenting, added, ‘Errors like that do not accumulate through time. There’s an effect called temporal inertia. By travelling back in time and killing your father, you push yourself down the slope because of the paradox you’ve created. Kill your direct ancestor a hundred million years in the past, and you’ll still be born.’

‘But doesn’t that mean… predestination… some controlling intelligence?’

‘Only in the way that a tree is predestined to grow towards the sun, and only in the way that some god might have made that tree. Evolutionary forces are macroscale as well as microscale.’

‘But—’

‘Enough. Just think about what I’ve already told you. It is doubtful you’ll be able to understand it all anyway. You still think linear.’ Just then the deinotherium let out a roar and was suddenly charging towards them, kicking up a cloud of dust.

‘It is probably in must,’ said Traveller. ‘Pick up your pace.’

Tack did so readily, glancing back the way they had come as he broke into a trot. ‘Perhaps that’s pissed it off,’ he commented.

Traveller looked back, too, and his expression changed. The mantisal had returned, hovering just where they had previously abandoned it. Tack now did a double-take—it clearly wasn’t their mantisal, since it contained four individuals who were even now scrambling out of it.

‘Umbrathane,’ Traveller hissed. ‘Run!’

The order was reinforced through Tack’s programming, so without conscious volition he found himself obeying. As he ran he drew his seeker gun, and he wondered if he had received some subliminal instruction to do that as well. A triple flash to his side: Traveller was firing with that weapon of his, then sprinting past Tack to turn and fire again. Suddenly the grass to their right was burning and the air full of smoke. Again the deinotherium roared, and now they could feel the thunder of its progress.

‘Shed the pack!’

Still running, Tack obeyed, regretting the loss of the equipment it contained. But regret was dispelled when Traveller came sprinting past him with the same pack slung from one shoulder, as if its weight was of no consequence. Tack glanced back and saw the four newcomers heading directly towards them. Then the elephantine mass of the enraged animal thundered in between, drawing a veil of dust between them and their pursuers.

‘Move faster!’

From somewhere inside himself, Tack found his last few ergs of energy and accelerated. But no matter how fast he ran, or dodged from side to side, Traveller was in front of him, behind him, to the side, crouching and firing, then up again and sprinting away. Traveller was fast, more so than any human Tack knew of, and the man made Tack feel slow and clumsy, which he had never felt before.

Behind them, the deinotherium’s aggressive roaring changed to a panicked trumpeting, and Tack glimpsed back to see it turning aside, smoke boiling off its hindquarters, as black-clad figures moved quickly past it. Suddenly a tree exploded to Tack’s left, and it was only then that he realized they had finally reached the forest. Loud detonations and flashes continued to move off to his left—the direction Traveller had veered in as they entered the trees. Tack just kept running as hard as he could. In fact he could not stop, and knew that if Traveller did not cancel his last instruction soon, he, Tack, would die of a ruptured heart.

Stop.

The order at last came through Tack’s comlink as he was running, in the agony of lactic overload, down a black tunnel of trees. He immediately sprawled forwards on the ground, his muscles locking with cramps and his lungs feeling torn as he gasped for breath. Distantly he could still hear the trumpeting animal.

Hold your position and, excepting myself, kill anyone who comes to you.

It was some minutes before Tack could even pull himself to his knees. His seeker gun was clasped tightly in a hand as white as tooth enamel, and it took him a severe effort of will to unclench his fingers and drop the weapon. For a while he tried to massage the agonizing cramps from his legs, then taking up his gun again he dragged himself to cover amongst dense ferns beneath a fallen forest giant, partially supported off the ground by its own massive side branches. There he lay still and listened to the deinotherium’s cries of outrage fading away.

After a hiatus, the birds started singing. He found nothing in their song to comfort him as he lay with his jaw still clenched rigid, while he tried to rub the agonizing knots from his legs. Slowly the pain was dispersing, but it would be some minutes before he would be able to get about on them again. As yet no suspicious sound or sign of movement.

Then the birdsong suddenly stopped again, and the most glorious face Tack had ever seen gazed down at him—before a hand like a nest of steel bars grasped the back of his collar and hauled him out of hiding.

The watcher, mind and body in glass, had tracked the course of the tor over brief centuries from this particular vorpal sensor, finally turning it out from interspace to track her progress in the real world. Upon seeing the girl thrashing her way through the woods and talking to herself, it was not difficult to surmise that this was one torbearer who would not survive long. But the omniscient voyeurism was almost addictive, and there had been something odd about those insane monologues… After a brief exchange with the girl, the wagon driver, presumably the Amazing Berthold advertised, jumped nimbly down to the ground and swept off his hat. And the watcher decided to listen in.

‘Dancing before the King at Court, or standing at the bows of some ship travelling to far Lyonesse,’ the man said, perhaps in response to an earlier question from the girl, which the watcher did not feel inclined to track back to.

The man went on, ‘Perhaps standing at a window of the Bloody Tower, awaiting the harsh fate bestowed upon the beautiful and innocent. Maybe far away on—’

‘You are as interminable as a three-onion fart, Berthold,’ said the older man on the wagon, before replacing in his mouth the stick he had been gnawing.

The girl was studying both men intently, obviously starving because of the parasitic drain of her tor, perhaps fascinated by their smallpox-scarred faces, which were inadequately covered by the neatly trimmed beards they wore.

‘But, Mellor, it is my interminable rhetoric that puts the groats and pennies into my pouch and the pheasant pie into your mouth.’

Mellor removed his stick. ‘No, I would venture to suggest it is the juggling and pratfalls which do that and your athletic servicing of either lord or lady.’

Berthold frowned, then returned his attention to the girl. ‘You have the face of an angel, my lady. Tell me, whence do you come, and whither do you go?’

The watcher noted now that Berthold was eyeing, with some puzzlement, her clothing, his attention finally resting on her army boots. It must be the odd clothing that caused him to use the honorific ‘my lady’, for in this age skin unscarred by smallpox was the preserve of milkmaids naturally immunized by an earlier infection of cowpox.

‘I’m a traveller from… the East,’ said the girl.

‘Yes,’ said Berthold, ‘it is said that their garb is most strange and that the women wear trews. Most interesting.’

Ah, the human capacity for self-deception, thought the watcher.

The girl at last found something to add. ‘I am also a hungry traveller.’

Berthold turned to Mellor. ‘How far to go?’

‘Another six miles, by my reckoning, and we were instructed to arrive not before tomorrow morning. Berthold, what is in your mind?’

‘I am thinking that the nobility value novelty most high, and are never averse to the sight of a pretty face.’ Berthold turned to her. ‘Climb up here with us and travel a little way. We shall soon make our camp and I am sure Mellor has some pie to spare. Tomorrow we shall eat like kings in the house of a King, and shall leave it with as much as we can carry.’

The watcher wondered if the girl had any idea what age she was in and how lucky she was not to have ended up dumped behind a tree with her throat cut.

Mellor snorted then spat a gobbet of phlegm over the side of the wagon, but he shuffled aside to allow the girl to sit beside him. Once Berthold, too, was up beside her, squashing her up against Mellor, the watcher felt some sympathy for her, and some amusement at her expression. By her dress she must have come from an age where people were not so unconcerned about body odour or about the things living in their beards.

‘Geddup there, Aragon,’ said Berthold, as he released the brake and snapped the reins across the horse’s rump. The animal looked back at him, let out a snort identical to Mellor’s, then slowly began to trudge up the track. After listening for a while to Berthold’s subsequent ‘three-onion farts’ as he described interminably his adventures as a travelling entertainer, the watcher tracked forwards in time.

Late afternoon inexorably slid towards evening, and before sunset Berthold pulled the wagon over to a clearing below a huge oak tree. While Mellor freed the horse from its harness, the girl and Berthold collected fallen wood from around the tree. When Berthold then struggled to use a tinderbox to get a fire started, the girl took out a propane cigarette lighter, thought for a moment, then hurriedly put it away again.

Very wise, the watcher whispered in her glassy domain. The consequences for the girl might be proximity to more flame than would be healthy.

Soon a good blaze was going and beside it rested enough wood to keep it fed for some time. Only then, in fading light, did Mellor fetch a sack of food from the back of the wagon. The bread looked stale and the hard pies seemed to contain, along with meat, fat and jelly, the occasional bone and unidentifiable organ webbed with rubbery tubes. But for someone who had earlier tried eating acorns, it was doubtless all ambrosia. Though eating plenty themselves, Mellor and Berthold watched the girl’s guzzling with awe.

‘You were hungry,’ commented Berthold.

Pausing to wipe crumbs from her face, the girl said, ‘Yes, I was… and you say there’ll be more tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow I shall entertain the King himself, then our pouches will be filled with silver and our sacks filled with salted venison and pork, pheasant pies and sweet pastries.’

After washing down, with small beer, her latest mouthful, the girl prompted, ‘The King, yes…’

Berthold obliged her, ‘Yes, good old Harry himself—Henry the VIII, under God alone King of this fine green country.’

The girl choked on another mouthful of pie and had to cough it into the fire.

The woman tossed Tack out into the open as if he were an empty coat, then slowly approached as he struggled upright. But, as he brought his gun to bear, she was on him in a second, slapping it out of his hand.

‘Pishalda fistik!’

Under the impetus of Traveller’s last order, he swept his foot out towards her legs, while aiming a straight-fingered blow to her throat. She caught his outstretched hand and twisted it so hard that he must follow it round or feel it break. Pulling his kris flick knife from concealment, he clicked it open and swung it towards her neck. Next thing he knew he was on the ground again, flat on his back and disarmed.

‘Esavelin scrace, neactic centeer vent?’ she said, casually inspecting the flick knife before closing it.

‘Yeah, about four o’clock in the afternoon,’ muttered Tack, hauling himself to his feet and preparing for attack again.

Desist.

Tack paused, grateful for this order from Traveller, aware that he had as much chance of killing this woman as he had of killing Traveller himself. Now, inactive, he had more time to study her. Approaching two metres in height, she moved with the same wiry strength as Traveller. Her face was utterly beautiful but strong, her cropped hair a dyed black that was growing out bright orange, and her eyes the colour of strawberries. She wore loose black fatigues, and a loose shirt underneath what looked like a sleeveless Kevlar jacket. Some sort of gun was holstered across her stomach, and various odd-looking instruments were affixed to her belt. His knife she now placed into a pouch also attached to the same belt.

Tilting her head she studied him with apparent confusion. ‘Century twenty-two primitive. With you want what they?’

Tack could only suppose that somehow Traveller was watching this scene from nearby, and wondered why no shots had been fired. Unexpectedly, Traveller answered that same question as if the link between them ran deeper than just the comlink.

I am five kilometres south of you, and will be with you in fifteen minutes. Try to stay alive and try to delay.

Tack did not know how Traveller could see what was going on, though he guessed at some sophisticated sort of bugging — which should not be so difficult for a race advanced enough to travel in time.

‘Answer me!’ the woman spat.

‘What was the question?’ Tack asked.

The woman paused, as if listening, then, carefully articulating each word, said, ‘What do the Heliothane want with you?’

‘I would tell you if I knew a Heliothane from a hole in the ground.’

By now the woman’s attention was fixed upon his right arm. Abruptly she stepped forward, grasped his forearm and lifted it to inspect the device now enclosing the fragment of tor embedded in his wrist.

‘Fistik!’ she spat, then, dropping his wrist, grabbed his shoulder and turned and shoved him stumbling forward. He got only a couple of metres before running straight into a wall of flesh. The hands that gripped his shoulders were huge and solid enough to compress the flesh off his bones. This man was enormous, dressed much the same as the woman, and by his features probably related to her. While he held Tack immobile, he and the woman exchanged a machine-gun conversation over his head, in their distinctive staccato language, then the man shoved Tack past him and on. Tack glanced back to see them walking behind him, the male with his weapon drawn.

The woman waved him on impatiently. ‘What is the name of heliothant with whom you travel?’

Tack stopped and turned towards them. ‘He didn’t give me his name—said I hadn’t yet earned that privilege. He told me just to call him Traveller.’

The man said, ‘That is believable. Now you will keep moving ahead of us and answer our questions as you proceed. If you delay again, I will burn off your legs and carry you.’

Tack quickly turned and kept on moving. He had no doubt this would be his only warning.

‘Describe this Traveller,’ demanded the woman.

After Tack did so, there ensued another of those staccato conversations. Abruptly the male and female were up on either side of him, catching him each by an arm and running with him. He found himself half running, half floating, and when he stumbled being lifted and carried forwards. In a few minutes the cramps returned to his legs and he began stumbling more frequently, terrified that the man would carry out his earlier threat. Apparently these two had no time to spare even for that. The woman released him and, still running headlong, the man hoisted Tack up and slung him over a shoulder. Then the mysterious pair accelerated away at a stupendous pace. Soon they were out of the trees and onto the grasslands again.

‘Deinth!’ the woman shouted a warning.

Tack saw the huge animal suddenly bearing down on them. This close he saw how it did resemble an elephant, but with a short powerful trunk and shorter tusks protruding from its lower jaw. But it did not need to have recognizable characteristics for Tack to know that its earlier trauma had left it very pissed off indeed. It roared triumphantly as it thundered down on them in its own surrounding dust cloud, shaking its massive head from side to side. Tack expected his captors to veer away from it, but instead they ducked low and were under the red mouth and compost breath, between its forelegs then out through the side between foreleg and rear, then up and running again. Behind them the bellowing creature turned to pursue them, its two-metre legs making it a match even for these two apparent superhumans. The bizarre chase continued ever further out into the grasslands, the deinotherium neither gaining nor giving ground.

‘Fist mantisal-ick scabind!’ panted the the woman.

Tack saw her whirl round and drop into a crouch, drawing a weapon that bore some resemblance to a long-barrelled Colt Peacemaker. It emitted an arc-welder flash, then a dull and actinic explosion blew to gristly fragments most of the creature’s head. It skidded down on its knees, only its trunk and lower jaw still attached by a gory bridge of flesh to the stump of its neck. Its momentum was such that it nearly somersaulted, but such was its huge weight that it flopped back and slumped onto one side. Before Tack could see more, the man came to halt and unshouldered him ungently to the ground.

‘Saphothere,’ hissed the woman, as more weapon fire erupted. Tack managed to raise himself to his knees just as a mantisal appeared above them. The woman was firing out over the grasslands as the white-haired figure of Traveller wove towards them, blasting away. Something else was happening that Tack could not quite fathom: there were sheets and lines slicing through the air, against which the weapon discharges flared impotently. The man guided the mantisal lower, then gestured for Tack to climb inside. As Tack hesitated, he reached out to grasp his arm and, wrenching his shoulder, threw Tack aboard. Then the female was screaming, her right arm burning like wax caught in a gas torch. Once the man was in the mantisal, the strange thing began drifting towards the woman as she loosed a fusillade towards Traveller. Then she too was safely inside and the world just folded away.