Cowl (6 page)

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Authors: Neal Asher

BOOK: Cowl
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‘Yes,' said Polly. ‘I think he did.'
Oh, very funny. Now they'll ask you where and when I was killed, and we don't even know the damned date.
‘Where'd he cop it then,' asked Dave.
‘He was killed at … in the desert. They said he died doing his duty.'
Dave stared at her for a moment. ‘He was with Monty?'
Polly numbly nodded her head.
Ah fuck, yes. Tell them I caught it at El Alamein.
‘Yes, at El Alamein,' she added.
‘Yeah, well that Rommel was a tricky sod, but the bastards are on their last gasp now,' said Dave. He gestured at the ceiling with his cigarette, and they all paused to listen to the distant gunfire. ‘Probably trying to hit Marconi again. That's one they haven't given up on,' he finished.
Polly did not know what to say to this. She had heard the name Marconi once but could not remember in connection with what. Dave observed her for a moment, then took out his cigarette packet and held it out to her. Polly stepped over to him and took one, then stooped low to light it from the match he struck and cupped for her. Drawing on it, she found it tasted of nothing but burning paper and gave her no satisfaction at all.
‘You were going to kill yourself?' asked Toby, then got a warning look from Dave and flushed with embarrassment.
‘I was,' said Polly, ‘but now I wonder if that might just be giving in to the fuckers.'
Silence immediately followed and, glancing at the two youths, she realized they were shocked by her swearing. She moved to one of the crates and sat down. Drawing on her cigarette again, she got a bit more of a hit this time, and immediately sensed movement from the thing on her arm. She took another drag, ignoring it.
‘Where are you going?' she asked.
‘If I told you that I'd have to shoot you,' said Dave, in mock reproach.
‘OK,' said Polly. Glancing over at Toby, now pouring boiling water into the teapot, she tried to remember the last time she had drunk any tea. Her mother used to make it and, ever since, the stuff had left a bad taste in her mouth.
‘No big secret,' admitted Dave. ‘Cock-up on the supply front from Herne Bay to Knock John. So we're running some stuff down from Goldhangar to keep ‘em going for a week or so. We all know something big is coming up.'
‘Knock John?' Polly repeated, before she could stop herself.
Toby said, ‘I always wanted to go out to them. I've never seen them.'
‘Not many people have,' added Dave. Then, to Polly, ‘Knock John naval fort is where we're heading. It's one of the Maunsell sea forts.'
Polly nodded as if she knew what he was talking about, and hoped Nandru would be able to fill her in. While she waited for his input, she sipped from the tin mug Toby handed her, and the memories became more painful than ever before.
 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED UNGENTLY AND Tack found he could not move. Staring up at dusty beams, he at first thought the assailant had broken his neck. But it wasn't the beating that had paralysed him. The familiar sensation of imperatives dissolving in his skull told him that he was
connected
, as did the raw pain at the back of his neck where his interface plug was located. It was apparent someone had done some home surgery, on this dusty floor he lay upon, to access the plug and connect him up. He was being reprogrammed, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Movement to his left, but he could not turn his head to look. Someone said something in a language he did not recognize, then went on with, ‘Ah, you took your time, but then I suppose that's to be expected. You AD humans are soft and riddled with imprecise genes.'
The face of the white-skinned man loomed above, his expression contemptuous.
‘You knew the fundamental laws of evolution and you ignored them. You bred strong diseases and weak humans, poisoned with a shitload of inherited idiot programming. You, Tack, have been doubly programmed. And your second program is about to be replaced.'
The stranger liked to talk, that was evident. Tack listened as best he could, through the white noise in his brain, as imperatives were changed and new instructions melded into place.
‘Normally we would have nothing to do with your type, but this opportunity to grow a viable tor we cannot miss.'
The man's face hovered above Tack again for a moment, then went away. Tack was left with an impression of alienness, but one not easy for him to define.
‘The tor is the device you were sent to retrieve, in a future that does not exist as of here and now. The piece broken off in your wrist, given the right nutrients and conditions, can be encouraged to grow into an entire new tor. And that would be one of which Cowl has no knowledge. Perhaps through you we can get to him at last.'
‘Cowl?' Tack managed, his voice grating dry in his throat.
‘Ah, Cowl.' A hiss now came into the man's tone. ‘Cowl is a step too far for a social species. He is the ultimate individual and, though I hate to admit it, the ultimate application of Darwin's laws. He kills every threat to him and would destroy humanity to save himself. Your existence is threatened, just as much as mine.'
Tack just didn't get it—it was all too much. But he did recognize someone far beyond him in the arts of violence, and he wondered about his captor's programming.
‘You may sit up now.'
Tack did as instructed and found himself on the floor of a barn, in a space walled around with straw bales like huge bricks. Sunlight stabbed through holes in the shiplap wall and illuminated motes of dust in the air. Nearby was an old grey tractor steadily being iced with bird droppings. Tack looked first at his captor, then at the cable snaking from the back of his own neck to a strange-looking portable console propped on some rusting farm implement. The console appeared to have been fashioned from glass, in a suitable shape, then again melted and allowed to distort and sag before cooling. Turning aside, he noticed a ploughshare only inches from his right hand, but he found he could not act on his initial intention, which was to pick up the lump of iron and cleave that white face with it.
‘Pick up the console and stand.'
Tack did precisely as instructed. His programming had changed and he resented it. He suddenly resented all such control: he wanted to be himself. Was this urge part of his new programming?
‘You may detach the cable now.'
Tack obeyed, his fingers pulling the bloody optical plug free from the back of his neck. White-face took cable and console from him and placed them in a backpack. Returning, he reached around and pressed something against the wound in the back of Tack's neck. Tack could feel the object moving as it occupied the cavity and sealed it shut. The other man then pointed to the backpack.
‘Pick that up and put it on.'
Tack did as instructed.
‘Questions?'
There had never been questions when dealing with his DO. Tack asked anyhow.
‘What do I call you?'
‘You call me Traveller. It is a title in
our time
, and you do not have my permission to use my given name.'
Tack absorbed
our time
and wondered just when this man was from.
‘What do you want of me? I didn't understand you before.'
‘It's not really you we want, just what is embedded in your wrist.'
Traveller pointed at Tack's arm. Tack raised it and now saw that his wrist
was enclosed in a transparent band filled with esoteric electronics and some sort of gelatinous fluid. Only just could he see the thing embedded in his wrist through all this—it lay at the centre of an array of golden connections almost like an integrated circuit.
‘What's a tor?' he finally asked.
‘Tors are complex organic time machines: portable and biased towards the past they are sent from. Our machines, unfortunately, must push from the future into that past, against all Cowl's traps and juggled alternates, and up the probability slope he's shoving us down.'
‘I still don't understand.'
‘Of course you don't. You think linear. What you must be is the ultimate existentialist: only what you perceive is real. If you travel into the past and kill your father before you were conceived, all that happens is you cause an alternate to sprout from that point in time. That act, though, would shove you far down the probability slope, and you would be unlikely to be able to travel ever again. You would become trapped in the alternate you created.'
‘Probability slope?' Tack felt as if he was trudging through treacle.
‘The parallels are in the form of a wave and the main line sits at the apex of this wave. The other parallels fall down from this apex in descending order of probability. The further down that probability slope you are, the more energy you require to time travel. Both our lines, from our perspective, are coming off the apex. Mine is further down than yours.'
Tack discovered humour. ‘Thank you for clearing that up for me,' he said.
Traveller hit him and he spun and went down, overbalanced by the pack, blood spurting from his nose into the dirt. Traveller stooped over him, and yanked his head up by the hair. Tack found his hand on the butt of his seeker gun, but he was unable to draw it.
‘When we're done with you,' Traveller hissed, ‘I may yet kill you.' He grabbed Tack's arm and held it up so that Tack could again see clearly the band around his wrist. ‘Understand that this is all that's keeping you alive at present, simply because the nutrients it is currently drawing from your body are keeping it alive.' Traveller then hauled Tack to his feet one-handed, with the ease of a man picking up a rag doll, and shoved him towards the double doors of the barn. ‘Now, get moving.'
The double doors opened onto a yard of compacted road scrapings, along the opposite side of which stood a Dutch barn sheltering a combine harvester, a tractor and the tractor's various implements. Wiping blood from his face,
Tack noticed a plough with its numerous shares polished bright by recent use, and wanted to throw Traveller at this tangle of iron and hear his bones break.
‘Turn to the right,' said Traveller, and Tack could do nothing but obey his new master. Glancing back, he saw a farmhouse and wondered if it was the same one from which he had heard voices the night before when he had received his beating. Ahead lay a track leading out between fields of newly turned earth, glistening like brown scales in the morning sun. It was cold, his breath steamed in the air, and he noticed frost sugaring the nettles and elder that grew in the shade of the outbuildings.
‘Where are we going?' he asked, hoping this would not be a punishable question.
Traveller glanced at him. ‘Out to the sea wall along from where you came in. We got you located as soon as the torbearer broke away from you, but we didn't act on that for many years. We had the tor located in your original time, but the beast was there guarding it, as it always does, until it was taken up.'
Beast?
Tack did not ask that question. He pursued his original query. ‘Why are we going there?'
‘There we use the mantisal that brought me here. It is presently sitting out of phase underneath the slope,' replied Traveller, impatience in his voice.
‘Mantisal?'
‘Enough. I haven't the inclination now and you haven't the intelligence.'
Tack realized the limit on how far he could push, so clamped his mouth shut as he tramped along beside Traveller. Evidently he was being dragged into a situation it would take him some effort to understand, but that there was a chance for him to understand it fully was an indulgence U-gov had never allowed him.
They followed the track out between the fields and round to the left, where it finished against a gate and a thick blackthorn hedge. Beyond the gate was a field that had been left fallow long enough for brambles to take hold. After climbing over the gate they worked their way around the edge of the field to where a path had been beaten by frequent use through the vegetation. The far side of this field was bordered by a barbed-wire fence with a stile at one end. Climbing this, they then crossed a grass area as wide as a motorway, and finally mounted the sea wall.
The sea did not come right up to the wall itself here, as between there lay an area of mudflats overgrown with sea sage and whitish grass, cut through with
channels clogged with glossy mud and encroached by the marching growth of samphire. Traveller pointed out a wreck half sunk in the flats, its portals like blind eyes, and the mud all around stained with rust. Negotiating a course out to this, across tough grass on which crab carapaces seemed to be impaled, and avoiding the channels that might easily suck them down, they came at last to the edge of a muddy hollow containing the mass of black wood and corroding metal. Traveller stood there for a while with his eyes closed and his head tilted back, a salt breeze whipping loose strands of hair around his face.

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