Cowl

by Neal Asher

  ‘You took too long,’ Coptic said. ‘Put down the water container.’

  Tack held onto it firmly, knowing this was all that might stop Coptic attacking him. But Coptic stepped forwards and backhanded him, the blow lifting Tack off the ground so hard he felt sure his neck had snapped. He thumped down backwards on the sand in a daze, and coming to he saw that somehow Coptic had rescued the container from spilling its contents.

  ‘I think you have disobeyed me.’ He adjusted the controls on his weapon. ‘Now, tell me why I should not cut off your limbs, leaving only the arm we require.’

  ‘I’ll die of shock,’ Tack managed, crawling backwards.

  ‘No, we can keep you alive in that condition, and you’ll not be a burden to us safely strapped inside the mantisal. Once at Pig City your arm can be removed to be preserved in a nutrient tank, and the rest discarded.’

  Tack looked wildly about himself, to try and find some way out of this. Then he saw it. He pointed up the beach. ‘There, you can see the tracks it left.’

  Coptic glanced up the beach with a look of bored irritation, then he abruptly did a double take. ‘Remain exactly where you are,’ he said, walking up to inspect the trail left by the andrewsarchus. After a moment he returned. ‘Get up.’ Tack obeyed. ‘Pick up the water container and proceed.’

  Walking ahead of him, Tack was thoroughly aware that though multiple amputation might not be imminent, there could still be further punishments for disobedience.

  Shortly they regained the encampment, where they found Meelan crouching by a fire over which a large fish was spitted. After a brief exchange between her and Coptic, she stood and stepped forwards, glancing up and down the beach. Then she took out an instrument similar to the one Traveller had been using. Tack set the water container down by the fire, and when Meelan returned to her previous position, he presumed andrewsarchus was no danger to them at present.

  After Meelan and Coptic had eaten their fill of the roasted fish, Tack was allowed the remains. Such was the sheer size of the thing that he found plenty of flesh left on the bones, and inside the armoured head, which he managed to crack open with a stone. While Tack snacked on parboiled brains, Coptic unrolled his sleeping bag and lay on top of it, while Meelan prowled, keeping half an eye on Tack, but mostly her attention was focused on the instrument she held. Coptic was asleep in an instant, snoring gently. Feeling revived by a full stomach, Tack stood and walked down to the shore, strolling up and down a section of beach that did not take him out of Meelan’s view.

  As well as the debris left by the feeding andrewsarchus, the remains of the shark and the piles of seaweed, he saw other things that apprised him of how very far from home he was. Here were green mussel shells like the split horns of cattle, scallop shells the size of dinner plates, and a multitude of spiral shells decorated with Mandelbrot patterns in primary colours. He found a shark’s tooth that covered the entire palm of his hand, and pocketed it in case it might provide a handy substitute for the knife Meelan had taken from him—though he doubted he had the proficiency to use it against her.

  ‘There are bivalves buried in the shallows. They will serve as bait.’

  Tack whipped round to see Meelan standing right behind him. Observing her closely now, he noticed that the dressing over the stump of her arm looked inflated and oddly distorted. Seeing the direction of his gaze she merely glared at him, then tossed him the fishing rod Coptic had been using earlier. Catching it, he inspected it more closely. The rod itself was telescopic, and the short length of line extending from its tip was as fine as a hair and terminated in a barbed hook, which was intrinsic to it rather than attached separately. Halfway along the line were a slidable bubble float and two weights. The reel itself was a cube with curved edges and no winding arm, only a small console on one side.

  ‘You will now catch more fish for us to eat before we depart.’ She turned away.

  Tack was damned if he was going to ask her how to operate the console, so began pressing at random. After a while he found the button for extending the rod—in an eye blink—to its full three-metre length. He next found the button to release line from the reel—sliding frictionlessly from the far end of the rod into a tangle on the ground—then the button to wind it in again. Contenting himself with using only these three controls, for there were many others, plus a small screen displaying pictographic script, he laid the rod down and went to dig up some bait. Quite soon he found himself fishing on a prehistoric shore, hauling in an armour-headed fish with broad scales as bright as mercury. And for that brief time he realized he had never before enjoyed himself so much—not once in his entire life. But it ended all too soon, when Meelan announced that he had caught enough.

  After Coptic had slept for a straight six hours into twilight, Meelan woke him up and took her turn on the sleeping bag. Without a word Coptic cooked and ate one of the three fish Tack had caught, then sat down in the lotus position to keep watch over the instrument Meelan had used earlier. Tack, weariness catching up with him, and on receiving no contrary instructions, curled up on a mound of pine needles in the bowl of a tree, and fell asleep. It seemed only an instant before Coptic was kicking him awake. But already it was dawn and, checking his watch, Tack discovered he had been oblivious to the world for a full eight hours.

  ‘Pack up the supplies. We’re moving on,’ ordered Coptic.

  Looking around, Tack saw Meelan down on the beach gazing out to sea. Gathering their equipment, he followed Coptic down to join her. Both of them, he saw, were well rested now, for their eyes glowed like embers. He did not see how they summoned it, but instantly the mantisal folded out of the air ahead of them, cold mist pouring off it to dissipate above the warm sand. Tack followed the two of them aboard and took up his accustomed position. Again they shifted.

  ONE HAS TO WONDER if it matters at all to that thing on your arm whether you arrive at your eventual destination alive or dead. It seems parasitic—so perhaps it will continue feeding on your corpse as it drags it back through time.

  Polly’s head was aching abominably, her mouth felt terracotta dry, and her body felt battered. Her hands and face were stung all over, not as a result of time travel but of landing in a patch of nettles. Still gasping on welcome air, she rolled over and sat upright, then wished she had not been so hasty as her vision darkened and a wave of nausea washed through her. After a moment this was supplanted by that familiar gnawing hunger. Glancing down at her hand clenched white around the neck of the food bag, she eased her grip and delved inside it, retrieving a large pork pie, but it was frozen as solid as granite.

  You have to wonder if you have an eventual destination, or if there is any purpose at all to your journey. Maybe you’re just a piece of temporal flotsam?

  ‘Nandru, I don’t suppose you could tell me where to find your OFF button?’

  Touchy. I was only trying to make conversation.

  After staring at the inedible pie for a moment longer, Polly cursed, returned it to the sack, then sat upright. She was sitting in a patch of vegetation at the edge of woodland, and it all looked little different from the countryside of Henry VIII’s time. Getting unsteadily to her feet, she gazed around.

  The nettles grew in a band along the edge of forest, separating it from grassy heath scattered with patches of teasel and thistle and dotted with wild flowers. This open heath extended some hundreds of metres to a wall of parsleys, displaying glimpses of reeds and more forest beyond. Nowhere visible was there any sign she recognized as from the hand of man.

  ‘How far back have we gone now?’ she wondered aloud.

  Oh, speaking to me again are you?

  ‘Yes, I’m speaking to you,’ she snarled.

  That’s good, for after a few more of these jumps back through time, I’ll be the only one left you can speak to.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Polly carefully trod a path through the nettles, as she made her way out into the open.

  Well, your time-jumps are getting longer and longer, a
nd remember human history isn’t that long, relatively speaking.

  ‘Go on,’ Polly snapped, acutely aware of how little history she knew.

  OK, like it was once explained to me at school: if you compared the whole sweep of Earth’s history to one day, then human history occupies about the last two minutes of that.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Polly suddenly felt very cold.

  I’m serious. Earth is four billion years old, and modern humans have only been around for about one thousandth part of that. Dinosaurs, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, existed for about a hundred and sixty million years, yet died out some sixty million years before we appeared.

  Even as he said it, Polly recalled with painful clarity the small facts she herself had picked up almost by osmosis while watching films and taking part in interactives. She recited, ‘And before the dinosaurs, hundreds of millions of years of life on land and in sea, and before that only in the sea, then even more time without life at all.’

  You’re now getting it. Seems your brain is waking up.

  ‘Yeah, seems like it.’

  Polly trudged towards the reeds where she assumed she would find a river, as that seemed as good a destination as any. Upon reaching the high parsleys, she reached out to brush them aside.

  Stop right there.

  ‘What?’

  Those plants are hemlock, so don’t get their juice on your skin—they’re poisonous.

  Polly veered around the stand of hemlock and headed for a gap through to the reeds. Soon she found herself alongside a fast-flowing river, its bottom sandy and pebbled, underneath a slow ballet of strands of waterweed. Soon she found a shallow part, the water’s surface broken by a pebbled prominence, where she crossed and began to walk upstream. Eventually she found a fallen log to sit on. Her hunger had become a constant gnawing in her gut, so she took out her tobacco and made a roll-up, in the hope that it might still the pangs. Staring down into the debris caught where the fallen tree’s branches penetrated the river bottom, she froze suddenly and found her hunger the last thing on her mind.

  ‘I think I know what time we’ve arrived in,’ she whispered.

  And how do you … ? Oh.

  ‘You see him, too?’

  Trapped amid debris, with water flowing over it like a transparent skin, lay a rotting human corpse. White bone and grinning teeth showed through where much of his face had slewed away, white fingerbones dotted the river bed, the remaining flesh was washed almost colourless. But the leather helmet, breastplate and one leather sandal remained. Tatters of cloth flowed about his hips. His eye sockets were empty.

  Your leaps through time are indeed getting longer.

  ‘He’s a Roman soldier, isn’t he?’

  A legionary, yes, so this time you’ve shot back over a thousand years. The Romans were here from about 100BC until around AD400.

  Polly continued puffing silently on her cigarette. When the scale moved her backwards next, who could know when she would end up? How could she make any plans for her own future when she kept regressing further into the past? She stood and continued upstream.

  ‘I don’t know what to do. What am I supposed to do?’

  All you’ve ever done, really: survive.

  THE ERA OF THE andrewsarchus was like balmy spring compared to this period. It seemed as if someone had just opened a furnace door, and Tack did not relish the prospect of stepping from the mantisal when they landed. Coptic, who was currently controlling the bioconstruct, remained where he was, as the mantisal slid on through the air, ten metres above the ground. Meelan began whispering urgently to Coptic and gestured to the structure encaging them. Coptic spat a reply, nodding ahead. Tack assumed this exchange was something to do with how the mantisal’s glassy struts were becoming clouded, as if filling up with smoke, though he had no idea what this might signify.

  Gazing downwards, Tack observed dense scrubland broken only by striated rock formations and red earthen tracks. Looking ahead, he saw that this arid landscape extended as far as distant misted mountains crouching above the flat shimmer of heat haze. Immediately below them, creatures resembling a cross between camel and deer went crashing into concealing scrub. Others, like deer with elephantine snouts, spread honking along well-trodden trails. A lone beast like a rhinoceros, but with twin club-shaped horns on its snout, looked up, then stamped its feet, before lowering its head and charging away. Then, slowly becoming visible through the haze, appeared a sight that did not belong in this distant age at all.

  Behind a high steel palisade rose a conglomeration of cylindrical structures like a chemical plant, but painted in various shades of burnt sienna, green and yellow, so as to blend into the landscape. To one side of this complex lay the gutted ruins of huge craft. These possessed stubby glide wings and bloated nacelles, now gradually decaying into the plain. Spaceships perhaps, but Tack wasn’t to know, nor could he safely ask.

  ‘Pig City,’ muttered Meelan, her attention focused on the newer structures rather than on the once-streamlined vehicles.

  Tack noted a hint of contempt in her voice. She now turned her attention to her arm stump. He watched her pull away the strangely distorted dressing, as if it was a dried-out scab, and drop it out between the lower struts of the mantisal. An embryonic limb was revealed. She grinned at Tack triumphantly, and he quickly switched his attention elsewhere.

  To clear the palisade, Coptic took the mantisal higher. Now the clouding throughout the construct’s cagelike body was resolving into black veins, and its flight was becoming erratic. Tack suspected some problem. He returned his attention to their destination, where he observed, mounted on a tower set in the fence, some sort of gun tracking their progress.

  ‘Why is it called Pig City?’ he risked asking, and received an irritated glare from Coptic.

  Meelan was more forthcoming. She gestured to a herd of animals gathered outside the palisade. Though these battle-scarred monsters bore some resemblance to wild boar, their mouths were crocodilian and crammed with broken teeth, and they themselves were the size of a rhinoceros. ‘Enteledonts. I’m told the Umbrathane here regularly give them little treats and provide them with water, and in exchange can rest assured that no one is likely to approach on foot—which is why we aren’t.’

  Two of the fearsome monsters were between them tearing apart a bloody mess of bones and flesh, and Tack assumed this must be one of those treats. When he glimpsed a boot nearby with some of its owner still inside, he swallowed dryly.

  Coptic brought their transport in over the wall and down.

  ‘Out,’ he ordered, withdrawing his hands from the mantisal’s eyes, which now were black at their core.

  As Tack dropped to the ground, he observed four people walking over towards them. Two men and two women. They were Umbrathane he knew because he had been told, but otherwise he would never have been able to distinguish them as a different kind from Traveller. One of the women he recognized at once as Iveronica—the woman in the rock. Following Tack out of the mantisal, Coptic snared him by the collar and marched him forward. Behind them came a familiar rush of chill air as the mantisal began to disappear. Tack glanced back and watched it folding away slowly and unevenly, its structure beginning to evaporate. Coptic jerked him towards the approaching four. A harsh, staccato conversation ensued, Meelan sounding by far the most vocal. Listening intently, Tack recognized the name ‘Saphothere’, and frequent use of the word ‘fistik’ while Meelan gestured at her newly growing arm, but otherwise their exchange was lost on him. Glancing to one side, he spotted a grinning woman standing by the palisade tossing from a small tin what looked like sweets out to the enteledonts. The beasts fought amongst themselves as they gobbled them up, thick drool hanging from their jaws like glass rods. Tack now had no doubt where he would end up once he was no longer of any use to these people. At that moment he felt Coptic grab up his arm, to show Iveronica Tack’s nascent tor.

  ‘The heliothant you with that want?’ Iveronica said. Before he could b
egin to formulate a reply another staccato exchange ensued between them. Tack’s attention was drawn back, by the roaring grunts and a crashing, to the woman at the palisade. As she rattled her tin against the bars, the creatures beyond it were going wild, chewing on the metal, trying to force their way through, even biting at each other. Abruptly Coptic shoved Tack down to his knees and stepped back. The woman who had just asked the question stepped forward and walked all around him.

  ‘Are you a Heliothane agent?’ she demanded.

  She unhooked something from her belt and held it up. After studying it, she turned to Coptic and spat some command at him. The big man jerked Tack back to his feet and began probing his scalp with iron-hard fingers. They finally located the base of Tack’s skull, where Traveller had inserted an interface plug in order to reprogram him. A finger drove in, and Tack groaned as something was levered from the cavity. Coptic tossed his pink and gelatinous discovery on the ground, and Meelan drew her weapon and fired once, turning the object into a puff of black smoke.

  Be ready, came Traveller’s voice over Tack’s comlink.

  Tack felt a surge of adrenalin. He reached into his pocket with his one free hand and closed it around the shark’s tooth. Iveronica was now barking instructions to her fellows, who obediently moved away. Pausing to gaze contemptuously at Tack, she then gestured to one of the cylindrical buildings behind her.

  Then it hit.

  There came a vivid flickering as of numerous flashbulbs going off in sequence. The woman clanging at the palisade dropped her tin and stumbled backwards. Bright lines travelled across the fence’s surface like flame on ignited fuse paper, so it was eaten away and fell to dust. With the root of the tooth braced against his palm, Tack turned and drove it up hard, slicing into Coptic’s neck and up under his chin. Next twin explosions took out a couple of towers. A huge gun barrel entangled with debris dropped away and crashed to the ground. Staggering wildly, Coptic scrabbled with bloody fingers at the tooth embedded in his neck. A woman screaming briefly, an enteledont shaking its tormentor like a red rag. More of the creatures piling in behind. Meelan, yelling as she points her weapon at Tack. Shots dogging his steps as he runs. Another explosion nearby, and out of it a ragged figure cartwheeling through the air, then a red man-shape, peeled from head to foot, bellowing as it drags itself along the ground. Over the rampaging enteledonts a mantisal hurtles in, and it slams to a halt right above Tack, instantly shrouding him in cold mist. Tack reaching up and grabbing, hauling himself inside as the construct ascends.