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Authors: Neal Asher

BOOK: Cowl
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With a dogged determination to survive, Tack shed his coat and shoes and swam for the barely visible sea wall—the original that had been well inland after the reclamation. Years of physical training, both when linked to a computer and in the field, enabled him to get to his objective through the cold rough sea, when many others might not have made it. After fighting his way through a mat of bladderwrack, he wearily pulled himself up onto the slabbed face of the wall and coughed dregs of burning salt from his raw lungs. His hand ached and he felt feverish. When he reached to pull the thorn from his wrist he saw that it had spread out into a small hard plate the size of a drawing pin, and was now covered with smaller hairlike thorns, which bloodied his fingers when he tried to pull the thing out. It came part of the way up like a scab, but when he released it to get a better hold, it drew back against his flesh. When he tried again with the tip of his knife, he found he could not move it at all. The thing had now bound itself to the bones of his wrist. He clambered to the top of the wall and looked around, shivering in his soaked clothes.
He knew now that he had to be at least a hundred and fifty years back, in the time before the ascendency of U-gov. His DO was not yet alive, and both his programming and his training had no way to incorporate this. He tried to concentrate on essentials: right now he wanted to be warm and dry. He was also hungry and thirsty. His base programming allowed for that—for him to deal with these needs.
 
AS HER SODDEN KNEE boots wrapped themselves to her legs like sheet lead, Polly fought to peel them off without swallowing any more sea water. Free of them at last, and now fighting to swim to a shoreline etched by the orange light of the setting sun, she felt horribly weary, but understanding came at last from
the killer's recent words:
You take us any further back and this place will be under ten metres of sea
. She had travelled back in time, just like in the movies or the interactives, but in none of those had the heroine been immediately drowned after transit—she always arrived at some hugely interesting point in history where she could influence important events of
recorded
history.
Closer to the shore she saw wooden frameworks supporting vicious tubular nests of barbed wire. Up on stilts behind this defence was a wooden cabin and below it a sandbag bunker, from which protruded the recognizable twin barrels of a gun.
Second World War, at a guess. Not many aircraft attacking during the First
.
‘What?' she managed, swallowing water. ‘What?'
That's an anti-aircraft gun. The onomatopoeic ack-ack, I should think.
She really just did not have the breath at present to carry on a conversation with Muse, and she did not have the energy to wonder why the device attached below her throat was talking to her in such a conversational manner in
Nandru's
voice. Struggling on, she could feel her reserves of energy depleting, and was beginning to notice that if anything the shore was now getting further away. But perhaps this was an illusion caused by the descending twilight. The sun was gone now and the shore was silhouetted against a sky of bright red and dull iron. Behind she heard the low thunder of engines and glanced back to see a squadron of bombers only just distinct through encroaching darkness.
Now those are Heinkels with a Messerschmitt escort, it would seem. That confirms it.
‘Nandru … Nandru, is that you?' she managed.
She ceased swimming, to tread water, and realized to her horror that she was being dragged out to sea. The planes were closer now and suddenly she was blinded by a strobing of light. The sound impacted a second after, as guns all along the coast opened up and powerful searchlights probed the sky from somewhere further inland. Ahead, when the gunfire paused long enough for her eyes to clear, she saw more planes appearing high against the blood-red western sky.
Spitfires probably … now that's something I knew before … No, apparently I'm wrong: they're more likely to be Hurricanes.
‘Nandru … what happened?'
You know, my memory has never been so clear—it's eidetic in fact—but every second … and those seconds are long in here … I find it harder and harder to distinguish between what's my memory and Muse's reference library
.
‘You … died,' said Polly, beginning to swim again.
And so I did, but it seems my Muse uploaded a copy of me to your Muse. I didn't know they could do that. There's the facility for transferring recordings in the event of the bearer's death, just so that vital battlefield intelligence won't be lost, but apparently you've copped the lot … well, as far as I know
.
The red tinge in the sky was almost gone, lost in the fall of night and blasted away by cordite light as the guns hammered the air. Glancing up, Polly saw the fighter planes attacking and the flickering of gunfire like the distant glow of ignited cigarettes. Then suddenly she was pinned in the actinic glare of a new sun, and a grey wall loomed over her. Waves slapped her from side to side.
‘Frank, it's a woman. What should I do?' someone shouted.
‘Throw her the ring, you berk, and haul her in!' replied an older voice.
Trailing rope, a life-ring splashed in the sea beside her and, with a surge of gratitude to the unseen rescuers, she grabbed hold of it.
You'll probably be shot as a spy
.
Her current gratitude did not extend to this particular incarnation of Nandru.
 
SYSTEMS, KEYED TO THE Dopplered light intensity of the red dwarf it was approaching, began operating inside the probe. It flipped over and extruded long struts from around the monopoles of its AG motors, spreading them out into space. Linking struts split from the main ones and joined to others, forming a structure like a spider's web, but one that was ten kilometres across. Between these struts a silvery meniscus spread, which, like the rest of the probe, healed itself when it struck interstellar particles. It had only been a matter of luck that so far nothing larger than a hydrogen atom had got in the way—at such speed anything bigger might have obliterated the probe.
Against the tide of photons, this light sail slowed the probe, but minimally. It further decelerated when the AG motors came back online—powered by the sail, which was also photovoltaic. As the probe drew closer to the red dwarf, light pressure on the sail increased, as did the supply of power to the AG motors. But it was ten years from the probe's deployment of its light sail, before it fell into orbit of Proxima Centauri, and another two years before it found a dead, cold world orbiting that old sun, and went into orbit about that.
Far above grey mountain chains and methane fogs, the probe folded away its sail, like someone putting away an umbrella after coming in from a blustery day. It then spent a year scanning and mapping the surface of the planet. Finally satisfied, it ejected a two-metre sphere of plumbeous metal which, on independent AG, descended to the surface. Landing on a plain of black rock, this
miniprobe hinged down claw arms from where they rested up against its surface like the sepals of a flower, and from the ends of these, explosive bolts thumped down into the surface. From its underside a drilling head extruded and began to turn, a haze of dust all about it as it bored down. At a predetermined depth the probe tested a rock sample, using thorium dating, then began to scan more closely the detritus from the drilling. The layer it had been searching for was penetrated a metre away from where predicted, but geological activity accounted for that. Compressed in the rock, the layer was only a few microns thick, but there was plenty enough material in that layer for the probe's intensive analysis.
The results, immediately transmitted, took four point three years to get back to Earth: a confirmation that was a happy revelation to some, a source of dread to others.
Astolere:
The two leaders of the remaining seven thousand troops, now pinned down by my brother's forces, but in a position from which it would cost Saphothere greatly to expel them, have surprisingly surrendered—it has ever been my previous experience that Umbrathane always fight to the death. While they go to parley with Saphothere on Station Seventeen, I can only wonder at the extent of the plan. The Umbrathane were attacking because of our development of what is being called vorpal technology (a word from an ancient rhyme I have yet to find the time to track down), so must have understood what they were facing. The failed attempt by the Umbrathane fleet to knock out the energy dam between Io and Jupiter confirms this: they knew the energy requirement for time travel to be immense, and had the fleet's attack succeeded, then Saphothere would have been unable to plant the atomic. Still, I do not think that we can afford many dangerous ventures such as my brother's, and I wonder at the consequences of what both we and the preterhuman, Cowl, are creating.
 
T
ACK TRIED TO HOLD it at bay by concentrating on his immediate circumstances but, like the black wall of depression, an utter lack of purpose loomed in around him. U-gov did not exist in this earlier time, nor did the girl, nor the item she had bound to her arm, and this rendered his mission not only impossible but irrelevant. Slowly, inexorably, emergency programming was coming online, compelling him to return to the Agency for debriefing—only there was nowhere for him to return to. As he stumbled across a ploughed field in the pouring rain, he fought impulses he could not satisfy. He felt almost drunk or drugged, and could not control surges of emotion that one
moment had him in fits of giggles and in another moment had him railing at the downpour.
Ahead of him and to the right, Tack caught glimpses of artificial light through a thick hedgerow. Mud was clodded on his bare feet and between his toes, and spattered up his legs. It was also smeared up his front and on his face from when he had tripped over and thumped the ground like a child in a tantrum. Eventually reaching a gate in a thorn hedge, he stooped to pull up a handful of soaking grass to clean his feet, and found his eyes swimming with tears and his chest tightening with a surge of self-pity. Swearing at himself then, he stood up and vaulted the gate. On the other side was an asphalt lane and a little way along it the glow from the windows of a house. Scraping his karate-hardened feet against the macadam surface as he went, he … paused as a wave of something flowed up to him through the night, through and past. He drew his knife, clicked it open, and glared around. But disquiet remained as there now seemed an abnormality to his surroundings—strangely indefinable. Advancing on the house, he found himself sliding into total-combat mode like an animal on the defensive. Soon he was stepping past a gleaming Ford Capri, which in his own time would have been seen only in a museum. At the door he hammered on wood with muddy knuckles, the knife concealed behind his back.
In a gust of scented warmth a woman in a towelling bathrobe opened the door and looked at him in surprise.
‘Hello, how can I help you?' she asked.
Another age—so much trust.
‘What is your name?'
‘I beg your pardon?'
‘What is your name?'
‘Jill … Jill Carlton. Why do you want to know?'
Her married name obviously. She wore a wedding ring. Not any name he recognized from U-gov or from the Agency, so it was unlikely she was an ancestor to any of his masters. He might have had qualms if that were the case. He reached out and slashed her throat. Choking red onto white towelling, she staggered back and fell, her flailing arm pulling a telephone and a basket of dried flowers down on top of herself.
‘Jill?'
Drawing his seeker gun, Tack stepped over her into the hallway, then to the right into the kitchen, where a man was just rising from the table, a newspaper open to the half-completed crossword. The husband caught a glimpse of his
wife thrashing bloodily in the hall behind Tack, and for a moment could not comprehend what he was seeing.
‘Oh my God,' he managed, before a brief thwack from the gun and the whine of a round, flung him back against a kitchen worktop, with a hole in his cheek. Then the round exploded inside him, blowing all his teeth, and half his head across the granite-effect kitchen surface. He was dead even before the blood stopped pumping from his wife's open throat.
Tack holstered the gun and pocketed his knife before looking around. Remembering how time-travel stories traditionally went, he moved to the newspaper and looked for the date: 1997. He was even further back than he had thought. He then moved to the sink and washed his hands, coldly observing his own reflection in the darkened window above it.
‘The energy required to short-jump here is immense, but I was allowed this alternate so I might see you—know you.'
His gun immediately back in hand, Tack turned so fast that his twisting foot ripped up carpet tiles. He turned again, this way and that, still unable to locate the source of that calm androgynous voice.
‘I do know you now, Tack, and I have no qualms, none at all. The new Tack will be different. You end here.'
A hand, bone-white, emerged out of the empty air over the kitchen sink. The hand clasped a gun that looked laughably small and ineffectual. There came a click, an infinitely bright light, and a brief indescribable agony. Tack burnt away. This Tack.
 
AHEAD OF HIM AND to the right, Tack caught glimpses of artificial light through a thick hedgerow. Mud was clodded on his bare feet and between his toes, and spattered up his legs. It was also smeared up his front and on his face from when he had tripped over and thumped the ground like a child in a tantrum. Eventually reaching a gate in a thorn hedge, he stooped to pull up a handful of soaking grass to clean his feet, and found his eyes swimming with tears and his chest tightening with a surge of self-pity. Swearing at himself then, he stood up and vaulted the gate. On the other side was an asphalt lane and a little way along it the glow from the windows of a house. Scraping his karate-hardened feet against the macadam surface as he went, he … paused as a wave of something flowed up to him through the night, through and past. He drew his knife, clicked it open, and glared around. But disquiet remained as there now seemed an abnormality to his surroundings—strangely indefinable.
A figure, tall and rangy, clad in a long coat, baggy trousers and pointed shoes, stepped out of the shadows to his right. The hands and face of this figure were bone-white, and its pale hair was tied back in a ponytail. The expression on its face held anger and contempt. Tack had only time for one breath before a fist like a bag of marbles slammed into his stomach. He went over, his knife clattering on the asphalt. He couldn't get his breath back. He had never been hit so hard in his life.
‘That is for what you were going to do,' said a horribly calm androgynous voice. ‘And this, and what is to come, is for all those things you have already done.'
A foot—moving too fast for Tack to even think about blocking—slammed his testicles up into his groin. Throughout the systematic beating that followed, he heard a woman's voice asking what was going on out there and a man's voice telling the woman, Jill, to get back inside and that he would go and find out. And all the time Tack could not understand why he kept thinking:
This is wrong; it does not happen this way
.
Those thoughts carried him into unconsciousness.
 
THE TWO SOLDIERS DEFERRED to the boat's captain, even though he wore no uniform that Polly could see. But then he was clad in a long waterproof coat and woollen hat and a uniform might be concealed underneath.
‘You all right, luv?' asked the young ginger-haired soldier who had pulled her out of the sea, his concern not preventing him goggling at her. Drunk with fatigue, Polly glanced down at herself and saw that her soaked blouse was now utterly transparent, her nipples protruding as a result of the cold water, and that her skirt had ridden up to her waist, revealing knickers that had also been rendered transparent.
‘I'm cold,' she said.
The youth blushed and glanced at his companion, who had now moved closer to get a good look. Polly observed that this youth carried a machine gun, whereas the first had a rifle strapped across his back.
A Sten gun and a Lee Enfield rifle—that's definitely from Muse as I wouldn't be able to identify a ‘bolt-action .303 rifle' if one bit me on the arse.
Ignoring Nandru's commentary, Polly pulled her skirt back down and folded her arms across her all-too-noticeable breasts. She felt foolish doing this, considering her daily occupation, but suspected these two would not possess cash euros or chip cards. She was also experiencing a horrible cringing
shame at what that occupation had been. This, she now realized, had been just one of the many reactions she had deadened with the drugs and alcohol. The two young soldiers were both now staring with puzzlement at her folded arms. Glancing down she realized what might have attracted their attention: the strange object had lost its spikes and sharp edges and was now completely moulded around her right forearm, from her wrist to just a few centimetres below her elbow. Lowering her arms, however, immediately gave them something else to concentrate on.
Leaning out of the wheelhouse, the captain called to them. ‘Are you two just going to stand there ogling the young lady, or is one of you going to offer her a coat?'
Both youths moved into action. The one with the Sten gun said, ‘Come on, let's get you below … You can have my greatcoat.'
The ginger-haired youth reached out to grip her biceps, then hesitated and turned the movement into a gesture for her to move ahead of him. On unsteady legs she preceded him to the hatch, and down splintered wooden steps into a hold heated by a small stove and thick with cigarette smoke. Without speaking, ginger hair moved past her to take a heavy army coat down from a wall hook. The machine-gun holder, following them, took up a piece of blanket from one of the cases that they had been using as seats down here, and passed it to her. Still shivering, Polly dried her arms and legs and tried to blot the rest of the moisture from her clothing, thoroughly aware of the silence of the two soldiers and how they could not keep their eyes off her. When she accepted the greatcoat, shrugged it on and moved closer to the stove, the spell broke.
‘They spotted you from one of the pillboxes. How did you end up in the sea?' asked ginger hair.
‘Toby, get that bloody kettle on!' came a yell from above, giving her time to try and think of a plausible answer. Toby, the ginger-haired one, moved over to where one crate being used as a small table was cluttered with cups, tea-making stuff, and two overflowing ashtrays. Taking up a large teapot, he emptied its remaining contents into a nearby bucket, which by the smell of it also served a less sanitary purpose. He then spooned in loose tea. The other soldier unhooked his Sten gun and sat down on one of the lower steps, propping the weapon against his knee. He took a pack of Woodbines from the top pocket of his army shirt, knocked out a cigarette and lit up.
Not too bright: an oil stove and cigarettes down here. You'd think they'd be
a bit more careful considering the load they're carrying. But then I suppose you get blasé about that sort of thing after a while.
Polly desperately wanted to ask what Nandru was on about. She studied the crates stacked everywhere and saw stamped on them ‘Corned Beer', and in one case ‘Pilchards'. Over to one side were stacked hessian sacks, which she guessed contained potatoes.
Over to your left
.
Polly glanced in that direction, wondering if Nandru was much closer to her thoughts than she would like, and observed a stack of metal cases roped down to hooks and partially concealed by a tarpaulin. On one of these she could see, stamped in white letters, the label ‘3.7 inch AA', which meant nothing to her.
That looks like a shitload of ammunition
.
‘Well, what happened to you then?' asked the one with the Sten gun, shaking out his match then grinding it underfoot.
I've been thinking about this and there's no easy story. Say you had a row with your boyfriend or something, and he tipped you out of his boat.
‘What's your name?' Polly asked the youth.
‘Dave,' he replied, hoisting his Sten gun into a more comfortable position. ‘This is Toby, and the captain up there is Frank. What about you?'
‘Polly.'
Dave continued staring at her, evidently still waiting for an answer to his previous question.
Polly said, ‘Nandru … my boyfriend … he died and I was going to join him.'
The kettle Toby had just filled from a jerrycan clanged down on the castiron surface of the stove. He was staring at her with his mouth open, not knowing what to say.
‘Gurkha?' Dave asked. Polly thought it safe to affirm this.
‘He died fighting then, I take it?'

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