Cowl (23 page)

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Authors: Neal Asher

BOOK: Cowl
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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.
Two Heliothane on Station Seventeen:
‘The Engineer wouldn'
t let me see the recording from the internal security system—all we managed to get out before some sort of temporal barrier shut off all communication with the facility.'
‘Brother, I want to know.'
‘Goron'
s been otherwise occupied, trying to push his project, so I managed to break into the system …
'
‘What happened?
'
‘Cowl's creature killed Astolere.
'
‘
That can't be … the amniotic tank was supposed to vent onto the surface of Callisto, where the beast would have died
.'
‘That didn't happen.'
‘Then the creature must be destroyed
.'
‘There'
s more than that
.'
‘Show me.'
 
‘What is that?'
‘Some kind of feeding mouth that can be extruded from the main body. It wasn't there before
.'
‘That glass should have been able to withstand any force the creature could exert.'
‘Yeah, does that include displacing parts of its molecular structure through time so that those parts aren't even in the same location?'
‘Scan shows this?'
‘Damned right it does.'
‘Cowl does not try to help her
.'
‘No, he just allows it to consume our sister. She was the brightest and best of us all, and though she was there to supervise the shutdown, she was perhaps, excepting the failed preterhuman, Cowl's greatest advocate.'
‘Then Cowl must die.'
 
E
NGINEER GORON GAZED FONDLY upon the Jurassic, where giants were demolishing a forest to fill their titanic ever-hungry stomachs. Even with the damping fields of Sauros operating, it was possible to feel the vibration of their gargantuan progress—what palaeontologists of Tack's time gave the overblown term ‘dino-perturbation'. This herd of camarosaurs, though impressive, was nothing to what he yet had a good chance of seeing, for he had arranged for Sauros to come out in this specific locale: where brachiosaurs roamed. He could also have aimed to bring them out twenty million years later, in the time of the seismosaurs, but conditions had been optimum for this time and place, and he doubted he would have got that one past Vetross. Goron also hoped that when Tack returned there would be a chance for the twenty-second-century primitive to view these creatures along with him, as Tack, stupid in ways Goron could not even conceive, seemed to possess an appreciative awe of these giants that Goron's fellows did not.
‘What is it, Vetross?' He'd spied her edging towards him. ‘More calculations for me to check? More energy measures for me to approve? I appointed you as my second for a good reason, you know.'
‘It's coming,' Vetross replied.
Goron turned towards her and read the fear in her expression. This moment had been inevitable as soon as they had begun the push. Cowl would not countenance them getting close, without attacking. And attacking meant only one thing.
‘On
our
time?'
‘Ten hours. It's pushing up the slope towards our Carboniferous, otherwise it would not retain the energy to bring enough of itself to bear. We've got travellers located back every fifty million years. Canolus slowed it with a neutron warhead quarter-slope relative to our Silurian, but while he recovered ground, it got him in transit.'
‘Canolus always tended to be premature. What about Thote?'
‘Mid-Devonian. Took out a small percentage of its mass with a displacement sphere. Damaged his mantisal, however, and now we can't locate him.'
Suddenly Goron felt very tired, but that was unsurprising considering he
had been working non-stop for three centuries. ‘Get every weapon you can online, and send all non-essential personnel back through the tunnel. I want field walls projected out to one kilometre in every direction and displacement generators, set for proximity activation, scattered randomly in between. And if there's anything I haven't thought of, I want you to think of it.'
‘
Every
direction?' asked Vetross.
‘Damned right. The rock underneath us won't stop it—it would just need to go out of phase either physically or temporally.'
Vetross watched him hesitantly.
‘Have I missed anything?'
‘I don't think so.'
‘Then why are you still here?'
‘Because you are needed now, Engineer Goron. People are frightened.'
Goron turned back to the window and, resting his hands on his tool belt, sighed and stared at a view that he knew would soon be incinerated.
‘Impressive preparations, but it is all a matter of potential energy.' The voice was utterly factual.
Goron turned. ‘Like I needed you to tell me—' His words died in his mouth. Vetross was staring to one side, terrified, and Goron quickly understood her feelings.
Cowl was poised like an axle-spring stood on end, looming taller even than Vetross. Here was a nightmare they had lived with all their lives: a preterhuman of darkness and glass, utterly ruthless, utterly committed to his own ends. There was no question that death would result from this encounter. Cowl now opened the cowl over his face to reveal the nightmare underneath.
‘Go!'
Vetross shoved at Goron, simultaneously pulling a weapon from her coat. Goron pushed off from the wall, diving and rolling, taking his own devices from his belt. He glanced behind him, tossing an interface generator back. He did not question Vetross's sacrifice, for both he and she had instantly calculated that for just one of them to survive this encounter, one of them must die, while the other must be extremely lucky. He dropped another generator, saw fire smear along one wall, and Vetross's weapon spiralling away. Cowl's hand was on her chest, sharp fingers penetrating between her ribs, then he slammed her round gunshot-fast into a window, cracking armoured glass and leaving a corona of her blood on it. Cowl was almost on Goron's first interface generator when it fired up, slinging a wall of energy up before the dark intruder, but
Cowl somehow pushed through it. The second generator went as Goron initiated a coded transmission while he ran. He threw a handful of seeker mines behind—bouncing down the corridor like ball-bearings. Another window smashed, then Cowl came rushing along the outside of the building like a spider. Goron turned into one of the access corridors. Smash again, and Cowl was now only a second behind him. Goron tore off a service-hatch cover and threw it in a flat trajectory at Cowl's neck, then dived through the hatch, scattering more mines. Explosions, and the cover hurled back, slicing through his calf muscle. That sharp hand groped in after him just as the displacement field, which he had already set, initiated. The service chamber blinked out, and Goron rolled out into the control room of Sauros—ten seconds before he left the service chamber.
‘Change the defence frequencies right now!' he bellowed coming to his feet and heading for the control pillar. His order was instantly obeyed. Then he operated virtual controls, calling up the immediate scene into the viewing gallery, saw himself turning, then a sudden distortion.
‘Anomalous warp—that's impossible!' someone said.
Five seconds later the distortion dissipated and Vetross was still dead. Cowl was gone.
‘That's impossible,' someone repeated.
Goron stared down at the pool of blood he was standing in, and didn't have the will to get angry about such a ridiculous statement. Anything was possible—it was just a matter of energy, which Cowl evidently possessed.
 
IT WAS VAST, AN animal so huge that its neck disappeared into the mist above the jungle every time it raised its head to crunch the vegetation it had torn from the low cycads. Leaf fragments rained down through the mist as it chewed, and they were the size of a car door. Its excrement would have totally buried Cheng-yi, and it could flatten him with one of its elephantine feet and not even notice. In his delirium he looked in awe on it feeding and wondered just how many tons of vegetation it could consume in a day. When it farted like a thunderstorm, he could not suppress mad laughter. His amusement soon ceased when the long neck looped downwards and it inspected him with piggy eyes.
Cheng-yi quickly backed away. But the dinosaur took a step towards him, knocking over trees as high as a house. He looked down at the musket he had stolen, and which had served him well enough when the world had still been
sane, then he turned and ran. Dodging into a dense stand of cycads, he crouched in shadow, sweat trickling down from his queue and also soaking through his filthy clothing.
The monster shortly returned to its feeding, but the Chinaman's nightmare was only beginning. He was no longer staring at the dinosaur. He was gaping in horror at the huge scorpion sharing his cover. Black and yellow, it was as wide as a spade, and he watched in panic as it scuttled round to face him, its vicious tail hooking up over its head. He backed away, and moved further into the undergrowth. But now, aware that the horrors here were not all reptilian, he began to notice other enormous insects: a bright blue dragonfly resting on the trunk of a giant horsetail, its armoured head the size of his fist and body the size of his arm, wings like sheets of fractured glass; a centipede the length of a python, and the colour of old blood, winding itself out from a hole in a rotten trunk; beetles big as rugby balls burrowing into leviathan turds; and some horrible clacking kin of the mosquito that kept trying to land on him, their probosces like hypodermics.
‘Go away!' he shouted, and the jungle suddenly grew silent around him. It was in this quiet that his instinct for survival overrode nascent madness, and he remembered that the musket he carried was not loaded—emptied as it had been into the face of some grizzled forest monster, when the monsters had been still covered with hair. After thumping a rotting log with the butt of his musket, to make sure nothing was living in it, he sat down and, with sweaty shaking hands, reloaded the weapon. Then, feeling calmer, he moved on.
Seeing brighter light up ahead, Cheng-yi began trotting in the hope of getting out of the arboreal darkness. What he came upon was a band of devastation cut through the jungle. Tree trunks lay scattered everywhere on the ground, denuded of their vegetation. Peering to his right, he observed three more brontosaurs looming in the distance, bellowing to each other as they continued their forest clearance project. They rose up on their hind limbs to reach high foliage, their forelimbs resting against a tree until it just gave up and keeled over. Behind these giants a herd of lesser dinosaurs grazed on the remaining detritus of their passage, and behind them again, much closer to Cheng-yi, were carnosaurs—no higher than his waist—relishing the bonanza of insects exposed.
Cheng-yi knew at once that he must not let these smaller creatures see him. He stepped back into shade and kept moving. Soon he was no longer plagued by the mosquitoes, and the racket of deforestation grew distant. He stopped
and, after checking it out for more leviathan insects, again sat on a fallen trunk. Resting his gun conveniently beside him, he took off his jacket to try and find some relief from the cloying heat. Closing his eyes he listened to the sound of a breeze sighing through the foliage, and found himself so weary he did not want to open his eyes again, did not want to move. Then a loud buzzing intruded. He flicked open his eyes just in time to anticipate an insect like a winged grey chilli pepper coming to land on his arm. He slapped it to the ground and, from under the trunk, a chicken-sized carnosaur darted out and snapped it up, then stood crunching it, while observing him with hawk eyes. Carefully, the Chinaman reached for his musket.
 
THE CLOTHING WAS THE essence of sheer functionality, but Tack had never felt so comfortable before. The jacket sealed to the waistband of the fatigues, just as they sealed to the lightweight boots. All the pockets possessed the same impervious seal along their flaps, and there were many pockets. The outer fabric was waterproof, gloves were packed in special pockets at the sleeves, and a hood could be folded up from the back of the collar to meet a film visor extruded from the front, all sealable too. Powered by boot-heel storage batteries, which were kept charged by the outer, photovoltaic, fabric of the suit, miniature pumps set in the sleeves, the rounded collar and the boots circulated air to regulate internal temperature. In addition, the garment's insulation of foamed shock-composite served as body armour. The suit gave further protection against heat weapons by means of a superconducting mesh embedded in the composite. Tack felt invulnerable, especially when he glanced lovingly at the pack now secured by him in the body of the mantisal. The lethal toys it contained were too numerous to mention.

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