Cowl (42 page)

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Authors: Neal Asher

BOOK: Cowl
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‘Cowl believes he is the source of the Nodus—that if he doesn't start DNA-BASED life in this ocean, there will be no life as we know it later. That by omission he will destroy the time-line and become a unique, unreferenced being, perpetually trapped in his own alternate.'
‘So he's a good guy?'
‘If a good guy is also one who's regard for any life but his own is nil—and who would, given the opportunity, wipe out the entire Heliothane Dominion.'
‘But surely he could do that by doing what the Heliothane claimed he was doing?'
‘No. He only has geothermal taps here. The energy levels he would need require a sun tap at the very least. That's just another Heliothane lie.'
‘So what the fuck is going on?'
‘That,' said Polly, pointing at the sky.
Gathering in a wheel above them, thick black clouds turned and rolled, expressing spokes of lightning. A low, growling storm was reaching them now. And behind these strange cloud formations a shape was resolving.
‘A ship?' Tack wondered.
‘Maybe. Or some living being in itself. Or even a seed pod.'
A flattened sphere now filled a quarter of the sky, the lower edge of it lost beyond the horizon. Segmented like an orange, it was translucent, and higher cloud layers showed through it as through a distorting lens. Other clouds broke over it, like the waves of a sea splashing over a boulder. As they watched, it tilted and came fully into view. In consonance with the tilting, the ground began to vibrate. Then came immense flashes of lightning, cracks in the heavens revealing another reality, and the gunshot crashing of thunder.
‘What's happening?' Tack yelled.
‘Seeding,' said Polly, leaning close. ‘As the Heliothane knew, because their first interstellar probe sent back evidence of it elsewhere after Cowl had gone. I don't know how Aconite found out, which is why we have to get to her—she must have some access to the future that is her own.'
‘But why didn't she tell him?'
‘Because as long as he struggled to solve his omission paradox, he would not turn his full fury on the Heliothane. She has spent her life blunting the edge of Cowl's rage.'
Nandru took that moment to add,
I'm so glad you explained all that, Polly. There was me thinking it was all a bit complicated.
‘Nandru,' said Polly out loud, glancing apologetically at Tack. ‘It gets even simpler now. As we move into the Nodus, the chances of the Heliothane reaching Cowl increase dramatically. And when that happens we'll need to be on the other side of the planet, at least, if we want to survive. We need Aconite and we need her as soon as possible.'
I can help you, but it means I must leave you, and I won't be able to come back this time, as I must be both the program and the memory.
‘What the fuck are you on about?'
Don't be so unfriendly.
‘I'm sorry, but things just got a lot more urgent.'
Well, goodbye, Polly.
‘Wait! What are you—?'
Polly felt him go, just as he did when he transferred his awareness to Wasp.
‘What the hell?' said Polly, then shook her head in irritation. Reaching up, she brushed her fingers through her hair then brought her hand down for inspection. There were gritty white crystals on her palm. She blinked and looked up. It was snowing, only this was no snow that she recognized.
‘We have to get to Aconite—she's the only one who can help. She has to have a way out of here.'
Just then there came a loud clattering and droning from inside the house, and they whirled round as something shot out of the door to loom over them.
‘And hello!' bellowed Nandru-Wasp.
 
THE TENSION IN THE New London Abutment Control Centre was palpable. Maxell watched the screens and wondered just how much longer she could wait in the hope of totally completing this herculean task. So much had been invested and so much would be lost, whether they succeed or failed, so justification of the
latter was not something she wanted to contemplate. Then the tension notched up a level.
‘We have closure!' shouted an interface technician.
Maxell was frozen for half a second. They had time—they still had time.
‘Do you have a mass reading?' she asked.
‘Not yet … still calculating … I'm putting it up on a subscreen,' the technician replied.
Maxell felt her mouth go dry as she saw the figure. The subscreen opened in a band across the bottom of the screen and filled with digits. Abruptly it contracted, the number being rounded off and displayed with an exponent, because it was simply too big to fit on the screen.
‘That
cannot be taken out of existence,' moaned Carloon.
‘Nevertheless,' said Maxell, ‘we will try.' To the interface tech she said, ‘Send the signal.'
‘Sent,' replied the tech.
Now it was a matter of waiting. The tachyon signal would arrive at the moment of transmission, but the transit of the microwave beam was nominally six minutes. They were now utterly committed and history would judge them—if any history there was to be.
‘How long before the beast reaches our abutments?' she asked.
Carloon replied, ‘It was looking like about ten minutes, but now it's accelerating.'
‘How the hell can it know?' an interface technician asked.
Carloon now brought the most distant sensor back into phase, displaying the far section of the wormhole empty of torbeast. This brought them no comfort—the end of it with the most mouths was coming at them like an accelerating juggernaut.
‘Any of you know how to pray?' Maxell asked. Then to the negatives she said, ‘Well, now might be a good time to learn.'
Cowl:
I am the pinnacle of the Darwinian evolution of the human species, even though my superiority has been achieved by genetic manipulation. I was made to survive in an extrapolation of the most hostile of human environments, by the most ruthless means. As such I am all that Umbra and Heliothane dogma would have humans come to be. But when a being is measured by its ability to survive ruthless selection processes, isn't its superiority equated with its ability to destroy and murder? Doesn't such a measure discount all creativity, and so much else? The ability to survive and to dominate is not all. I am a dead end, but I am also human, and know that what was made to be is not enough. I am what I am.
 
H
E HAD NEVER DONE this to her before and foolishly she had believed he never would. Aconite was appalled at the ruthless power of her brother's mind. His linking tendrils were fully developed and he knew how to use them to best effect. Her own had been stunted and virtually unusable since birth, so she'd had an autosurgeon remove them and cover the evidence with cosmetic surgery. With anguine deadliness his tendrils speared through her eardrum and into her skull, dividing and ever dividing down into synaptic plugs, connecting to the various portions of her brain. Cowl had never mind-fucked her before, but now he was.
Immediately she was dropped into the world of memory—but with her brother present as a hostile spectre. He stood behind her as she looked with some amazement at the ersatz assassin, and wondered why Tack was still alive and if she should allow him to continue to be. A jump, and Cowl listened to his explanation, her brother knowing that she already knew the truth: Tack had
been sent here to reveal a weakness in the defences of Sauros, which was the jaws of a trap. But Cowl wanted the root of it:
The four stood on a viewing balcony overlooking the Tertiary park, where six-metre tall paraceratheriums were browsing. Though these creatures possessed skin like that of elephants and a llama-like appearance, they were, like all the prehistoric fauna of the New London parks, distinct animals in themselves. Watching them tearing down palm fronds to get at the ripening dates, Aconite felt that, of all Heliothane projects, this was the most worthy, and even to be able to recover Earth's genetic heritage was a gift indeed. It was a shame that, on the whole, time travel was used for more bellicose purposes.
‘How did you manage to get here?' asked Engineer Goron.
Aconite held up her arm to display the enclosing tor. ‘My brother has yet to completely hard-wire the programming. I simply inverted it, and I will return it to normal to take me back.'
Maxell turned to Goron. ‘Goron, don't make the mistake of seeing Aconite forever in her brother's shadow. Her abilities are at least equal to his, even if her intentions are not.'
Cowl hissed at this, his breath liquid against Aconite's cheek.
‘Did you think I couldn't plumb your technology? Did you really believe I was the poisonous failure our mother named me?' asked Aconite.
The tendrils tightened in her head, shooting agony around her skull and down her spine. She knew he wanted her to resist, but she let him have it all:
‘So what is it you have to say?' asked Goron, eyeing Aconite with suspicion.
‘My brother is not trying to destroy you by altering the time-line-in doing that he might well destroy himself. He has discovered he is the cause of the Nodus. Human history begins with a circular paradox. He has found no DNA-based life before that point, so it can only be caused by him. Now he applies all his energies to stop himself causing the omission paradox that could destroy the entire time-line, and thus his own ancestry.'
The laughter came from the fourth member of this group.
‘Such arrogance,' said Palleque, shaking his head.
Maxell gave him a look. ‘Something of which we are all guilty. Please continue, Aconite.'
After a moment of puzzlement Aconite went on, ‘My brother is not the greatest danger to you, not in himself.'
‘The torbeast,' said Palleque. He wasn't laughing now.
Aconite nodded, ‘Already it is immense and reaches uptime to feed. Cowl
cannot entirely prevent it doing this, and already the anomalies it is creating are forcing its uptime substance further down the slope generated from the Nodus.'
‘Then that will be the end of the problem,' said Palleque.
Aconite stared at him. ‘No. My brother needs the torbeast to drop active tors, so he can sample the future and thus find out how to avoid the omission paradox—to find out if his experiments with the protoseas are having any effect—so he feeds energy to it from his geothermal taps to sustain its position on the slope.'
‘It also serves another purpose for him,' said Palleque through gritting teeth.
Aconite turned to stare at him. ‘Then you know that, while it serves his purposes, it also feeds.'
Grimacing, Palleque turned away from her.
‘I do not yet see how his pet is the greater problem,' said Goron.
‘As it feeds, it grows,' said Aconite. ‘Its structure is more complex than anything else that has ever lived. It can grow organic time machines on itself … do I need to draw you a diagram?'
‘Oh,' said Goron.
‘What does she mean?' asked Palleque, turning back.
Maxell offered an explanation. ‘It generates its own vorpal field, and once it reaches sufficient mass that field will be strong enough to enable the beast to shift itself anywhere on the probability slope.'
‘And to feed,' Aconite added.
‘And what precisely are we talking about here?' Palleque asked.
‘An eater of worlds—all life, every shift-generated time-line, nothing but torbeast left.'
From her brother, Aconite felt confirmation of this, and understood in an instant that his sending of the beast against the Heliothane served two purposes: to kill his enemy and also to weaken his dangerous pet. The time frame jumped:
‘It is the only way to take it out, completely out,' said Goron.
This time Aconite and the Engineer walked out together across the floor of one of New London's construction bays, towards the skeleton of a giant sphere—only this time the shadow of Cowl walked beside them.
‘This was created to extend Heliothane Dominion throughout time. As a base from which to kill every last umbrathant, and finally from which to finish your brother. But perhaps now it can serve a more honourable purpose. I would wish it so.'
‘The bait seems … small.'
‘The largest fish can be hooked with the smallest fly.'
‘Will the Heliothane, as a whole, countenance the loss?'
‘Of this?' Goron asked, gesturing to the nascent Sauros.
‘Of it all. You've spent two centuries on this project, and used up half the wealth of the Dominion. And just to lose it all to destroy a threat most of its citizens have never seen and many could not even comprehend?'
‘It has to be done.'
Cowl's anger was like hot wires burning inside her skull. He was going to kill her with this and, if he did not, he would kill her later.
The tor called to everyone in the Antarctic research facility, but only Aconite intended to respond to that call. Palleque glared at the thing, but then he had more reason to hate its source than anyone else.
‘Here, I have a present,' he said, turning to her and holding out a small glass cylinder containing white crystals. ‘We found it on Mars, in strata a billion years old, and after that on every other solid planet in the solar system, in rock of the same age.'
‘What is it?'
‘You wondered why I laughed when you said Cowl was the cause of the Nodus.' He gestured at the cylinder she now held. ‘There were hundreds of theories on the source of that, until our interstellar probe discovered the same substance on a dead world orbiting the red dwarf, Proxima Centauri.'
‘You still haven't told me what it is.'
‘Crystalline DNA in a protein matrix. As soon as it hits liquid water, it becomes active. In about a million years you've got metazoan life—and the rest is history, as they say. In the end, only one theory fits the facts.'
‘Seeding.'
Cowl released his hold and Aconite dropped to her knees, blood running from her ear and glistening over the abrasions around her throat. She glared up at her brother and tested the thick ceramal cuffs that bound her wrists and ankles.
‘How many more do you think I'd let you kill?' she spat.
Cowl tilted his head, but said nothing. Abruptly he spun round and headed for his vorpal controls. After a moment he uttered a shriek of rage.
 
IN THE SKI, THE spectral display of the torbeast juddered and bled away as, unnoticed, a raft drew into the citadel's shadow. With the energy feed severed at Sauros, a backlash rippled downtime from the city, taking no time at all, and for ever. Cowl withdrew his sharp fingers from the vorpal ovoid, and stepped back,
turning his head to see lightning flashing between temporal capacitors and transformers. The sea boiled as safety trips attempted to divert the surge into the water. It was like trying to hold together a broken dam with Sellotape. Under the sea flare after flare ignited then died to dull red, stepping out in tens then hundreds then thousands towards the horizon, as geothermal generators vaporized and melted surrounding rock. Shortly after, explosions, as from depth charges, followed the same course. Inside the citadel darkness was lit up by machinery fires, then dispelled when auxiliary generators cut in. Emergency lights came on all over the structure, and Umbrathane ventured from their places of safety.
 
CLINGING TO THE LEDGE, in the shadow of the out-flowering walls of the citadel above, Tack gazed at the other occupants and saw how they had accumulated. The torbearer in armour had been the first, his weight dropping him directly down from the chute mouth and, with whatever strength had remained to him, he had driven his dagger into a crevice where the ledge joined the pillar. There he must have died, for Aconite had not rescued him, and over time the rust from his armour had stuck him to the ledge. After him had come others: someone wearing a long robe had fallen, the material of which had snagged on one of the knight's greaves; arm bones had accumulated around these two, and other skeletons had become stuck to the ledge with the adipocere of decay. Occasional ornaments gleamed and weapons rusted. Tack noted a burnt-out Heliothane carbine resting against a ribcage enclosed in parchment skin, the weapon's black metal and plastic partially melted and turned grey with salt, and wondered about the story behind that. Then, keeping his foot firm against the adhesive mine, he raised the harpoon launcher he had taken from Aconite's armoury and fired upwards.
With the usual chemical flash, the head of the harpoon bonded to the upper lip of the chute, and after detaching the adhesive mine Tack set the winder spinning to haul him up into the chute's mouth. Here he stuck the mine to the floor of the chute to give himself a foothold, before detaching the harpoon and winding it all the way back into its launcher. He then gazed up into darkness.
Having little clear memory of his own descent down this pipe, Tack had consulted Nandru and was told it ran in a hundred-metre arc down from Cowl's spherical control centre. Easy enough to climb, but not yet—he waited.
The sky was still dark with the presence of that
thing
and the storm it had induced. Beyond the sheltering loom of the citadel, Tack observed the dusty snowstorm of the crystalline substance hazing the surface of the sea and
somehow making the waves sluggish. Within a few minutes he spotted Nandru-Wasp hurtling towards him from the direction of Aconite's home, the robot clutching Polly underneath it like a stolen grub. Finally Tack turned and fired up into darkness, observing the glow of chemical bonding twenty metres above him. Winding the line in taut, he detached the mine and hooked it onto the shoulder strap of the weapons harness he had also acquired. There were three of these devices which, on their contact surfaces, possessed a layer of microscopic hairs much like those found on a gecko's foot. Unfortunately, unlike the lizard's foot, the mines were not made for repeated use and after a time would lose their adhesive quality. Hence three of them were needed for this climb. Tack had no intention of using them to blow up anything.
Nandru-Wasp flew into the shadow of the citadel, then descended to hover by the mouth of the chute. Polly, clasped firmly underneath the robot by its four spiky legs, brushed white powder from her face and eyes, before reaching out a hand to Tack. Standing with his boot on the chute's rim, Tack used the winder's friction control to allow himself enough slack to lean out and grasp her forearm.

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