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Authors: Neal Asher

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BOOK: Cowl
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Already other drinkers in the bar were finding their reasons to be elsewhere. The couple at the next table gulped their drinks and quickly grabbed their shopping. The blond man sat down opposite Polly. He blinked the mirroring from his eyes to expose calm grey. With an almost apologetic smile he reached inside his jacket and removed a short, ugly, seeker gun. Pointing it at her he flipped up the frame sight and clicked a button on the side of the weapon, before putting it down on the table. Polly observed the flashing LED, and she had played in enough interactives to know the gun had acquired her.
Interdiction online. Tech-com unavailable
, Muse informed her, leaving her none the wiser.
Ah, I see our friends have arrived
, said Nandru.
See?
thought Polly.
‘Where did you get that Muse?' said the heavy sitting opposite, at last.
Polly glanced around. All the other outside tables were now unoccupied. The waitress stepped out, then quickly ducked back inside when she saw her new customers. There were still people inside the bar, standing well back from the window and observing the scene. No help there. The only possible rescue in a situation like this would be to have a few hundred thousand to slip to a eurocrat, and even then …
‘It was given to me by a Task Force soldier called Nandru Jurgens,' she said.
The man nodded slowly then said, ‘And you're linked to him now, I take it?'
Polly nodded.
‘Ask him how much,' said the man.
Polly tilted her head as she listened to what Nandru told her. Her mouth went dry and it took her a moment to get enough spit to repeat his message, ‘Fifty million wired direct to Usbank account PX two hundred and three, two hundred and seven, forty. He also wants to know your name.'
The man now tilted his head for a moment, and Polly had no doubt that he was listening to voices inside it much like her own, for there was a small grey pill of an ear stud in his left lobe, and she doubted it was there for decoration.
‘My name is Tack,' he said eventually. ‘He must understand that the transfer cannot be authorized until I have possession of the item.'
‘I'm to take you to it,' said Polly.
Tack showed no change of expression and Polly thought:
I'm going to die.
‘I find that unlikely,' said Tack. ‘What is to stop us taking the item once we have it in sight?'
‘He says you'll see when you see.'
Tack picked up his gun, rose, and gestured with it to the Macrojet. Polly tried to seem casual by finishing off her beer, but it was warm now and she had difficulty in swallowing. She stood up and moved ahead of the blond man towards the car. Climbing inside, she found herself trapped between walls of identical muscle. The one called Tack sat in the front passenger seat, while the driver wound up the turbines to a howl and took the car into the sky. Polly doubted the traffic police would be hitting on this vehicle. Questions of legality with people like these remained that: questions only.
 
THE PROBE, CARLOON THOUGHT, resembled a barbed arrowhead he had once seen in a museum, but one from an immense arrow. Mounted on the launch platform that hung geostationary above equatorial Africa, it now stood separate from the gantries and maintenance pylons, supported only by the fuelling towers that were pumping in the deuterium oxide used in its initial fusion burn, and personnel were leaving the platform in stratocars and supply ships. Suited against vacuum, Carloon floated high above the platform on a line attached to a control tower on the first giant displacement ring. He wanted to see this as directly as possible and there was nothing more to do inside the tower now. The launch would either be successful or not. The ‘not' case was the reason his personnel were leaving the platform. He looked up to where he could just see the second ring a thousand kilometres out from Earth.
‘If we could use time travel, we could get the probe back before it went,' Maxell observed laconically over com.
Carloon glanced across to the second figure floating a few metres away from him. That she had come to see this showed the importance of the project to the Heliothane Dominion.
‘But we can't,' was all he replied.
‘Explain to me the reason for that,' Maxell instructed.
Carloon sighed. He himself was only just beginning to understand the possibilities and limitations inherent in the new science. Phasing matter and matter displacement he did understand, but such things as temporal inertia, short-circuit paradoxes, and the vorpal energy generated by life, were a little
beyond him. ‘As I understand it, time travel is easiest on Earth and becomes increasingly difficult the further you get from that centre of … vorpal generation. We can use it within a limited sphere, which encompasses most of the solar system surrounding Earth; beyond that the energy levels required climb exponentially.'
‘But you are using an offshoot of that technology here?'
‘Yes. We're using spatial displacement to shift the probe back to its launch point as it accelerates on its antigravity engines, while feeding it the energy to accelerate—which we couldn't do if it was heading out of the solar system. If we complete twenty successful displacements, the probe will be travelling at ninety-three per cent light speed when we finally let it go. We could have used temporal displacement between the rings as well, but that would only have reduced the mission time by less than one-hundredth, and would have used over four-fifths of the Earthgrid energy output.'
‘That mission time being?'
Carloon repressed his irritation: Maxell knew all this. Rather than reply, he observed, ‘The probe is launching.'
They both turned their attention to the geostationary platform, where the fuelling towers were rolling back under a haze of heavy-water vapour. Then the fug was lit by the bright burn of fusion engines igniting and the probe began to rise towards them on two spears of white flame. Behind it, on the platform, structures glowed and flared in the back-blast. This was a one-off launch. Carloon found his body tensing and his mouth going dry as the probe accelerated rapidly. In a minute it was close, then it passed through the displacement ring, travelling at five thousand kph, in eerie silence. He watched it rise high, accelerating for the next ring. When it was almost invisible, the fusion flames flicked out.
After taking a drink from the pipe by his mouth, he said, ‘It now accelerates on AG only.'
‘How long until the first displacement?' Maxell asked.
‘Minutes, but we won't see much.'
‘And how long before it arrives at its destination?'
‘Sixteen years before it reaches Proxima Centauri. But before we get any results …' Carloon shrugged.
Minutes later the probe reached the second displacement ring a thousand kilometres out. Space distorted in that ring and the probe just disappeared. Instantaneously it reappeared inside the first ring and continued to accelerate—its
AG motors working against the gravity of Earth. Again and again it ran that course, energy being fed into it by microwave transmitters in the displacement rings themselves, enough energy to power a solar civilization for years. Finally that civilization let it go. The probe headed out into darkness, to confirm or deny a theory about the existence of life on Earth.
Astolere:
It was a move of desperation to attempt a ground assault on the Callisto facility, and one for which the Umbrathane have paid dearly. But we have yet to learn the full extent of the payment we might make in using this infant technology. My brother Saphothere's venture into the past, using one of the bioconstructs, we knew would have unforeseen consequences in itself. That he took with him an atomic weapon to place at the point of the assault force's arrival, we knew could only make things worse. Eight thousand of those ground troops died in the conflagration—and as for the rest of us? We now all have memories of two parallel events, while living in the future of only one. And we all now know that such manipulation of events, so close to us on the time-line, has pushed us down off the main line, and that we are one step closer to oblivion.
 
T
ACK WAS INHERENTLY IMMORAL. He had been grown for immorality and trained for it. He knew the rules, all of them, and he knew how to break them with a thoroughness that was frightening. The rule he knew how to break most efficiently was ‘Thou shalt not kill' or any legalese derivation of such.
Tack did not have a mother or father in the usual sense. He had been cloned from a particularly efficient CIA killer, and vat-grown two hundred years after that same killer had paid a visit to a crematorium furnace without the benefit of being dead. The burned killer's genetic tissue had been taken from him years before as part of one of the top-secret loony projects of that time. Tack's accelerated upbringing had consisted of, during daytime, an enforced training that had killed off many of his classmates—all surprisingly similar in appearance to himself—and at nights being hooked up to a semi-AI computer via the
surgically installed interface plug in the base of his skull. At the age of ten he was physically an adult, mentally an adult, but mentally something else as well. His intensive knowledge of both Eastern martial arts and modern weaponry blended into a coherent whole that made him the supreme killer. His understanding of the world at large came not from personal experience but via uploading. In him his makers and masters had achieved their goal: they had both soldier and secret agent, and did not have to worry about whether or not he would obey orders, for he was
programmable
.
Glancing back now at the little whore, he wondered what Nandru Jurgens hoped to achieve with her, for it was evident to Tack that she was as dispensable to the Task Force soldier as she was to Tack himself. Some time soon the sale would have to be made and in any such transaction there was always a point where one party must, however briefly, be prepared to trust the other party. And it was in such brief intervals that Tack operated most efficiently. He expected some kind of threat and some kind of double-cross, but was confident of his own and his comrades' ability to circumvent this; confident that by the end of this day he would be in possession of both the item itself and the money, and that Jurgens and this little whore would be dead.
‘Where to?' he asked.
‘Head for the Anglia Reforest and put down by the old thermal generating tower,' Polly replied.
As the driver changed course, Tack faced forward again and briefly scanned the console on the side of his seeker gun. Since first pointing it at the whore it had, by laser and ultrasound scanning, recorded her recognition pattern and now it literally contained bullets with her name on them, though they were not the ones he had it presently set to use. Right now the gun was programmed to track the one whom Tack considered the greater danger: Nandru Jurgens himself. Tack would probably not need to use the gun on her anyway, since he intended to keep her close, and for close work he preferred the seven inches of kris flick knife in his pocket.
Soon they were heading out beyond the residential areas and passing over the old wall that had held back the sea before the U-gov-sponsored land-reclamation project—one that, like all such projects, had spiralled out of control costwise and was now on the brink of failure. Below lay the plain of the Anglia Reforest, seeded with nettle elms, binding grass, and endless brambles, thistles and stinging nettles. The Green contention that the place would become overrun with GM rape and maize had been fallacious—man's small tinkerings
with code were yet to prove effective enough to counter billions of years of evolution.
Tack pointed to the tower rising like a giant iron tulip out of a copse of small oaks. ‘The clearing. Down by those ruins,' he told the driver.
The man nodded and brought the Macrojet spiralling down towards a clearing that had probably in the past been a farmyard.
Tack turned to Polly. ‘You will now take us to the item. Understand that I will kill you if there are any problems. There will be no problems?'
‘Look, I don't wanna be here. Nandru roped me into this without asking me,' Polly replied, her hand flicking up to the Muse at her throat.
Only the presence of that device caused Tack any qualms, for even he did not have sufficient clearance to know its capabilities. It was recently developed military tech and, as such, an imponderable in this situation. However, he judged it to be tech whose purpose was merely informational, not some form of weaponry, its presence being only required by Jurgens as a secure comlink.
The Macrojet landed, blasting about it, like confetti, old crab carapaces whose owners had probably been washed inland during the over-flooding of the incompetently built sea wall that lay some miles to the east. Immediately the two either side of Polly piled out of the vehicle and ran to investigate the surrounding buildings and tangled vegetation, pulling guns from concealed holsters as they went. Tack glanced at Polly and gestured her with his thumb to the open door, before himself climbing out. He did not rush for cover—he had every confidence that the other two had the area covered sufficiently. The driver remained in the car.
‘Where to now?' he asked Polly.
She held a finger up to the earring that he reckoned had to be an inducer. Tack understood the technology because he too wore a device that used electrostatic induction to vibrate the bones of his inner ear—in his case to relay instructions from his Director of Operations in Brussels. After a moment she pointed to a nearby ruin—all tumbled breeze blocks and heaped mud. When Tack made no move to head in that direction, she frowned and led the way.
Walking behind, Tack scanned his surroundings. The sunlight was bright, so he flicked up his polarized nictitating membranes, once again mirroring his eyes.
No one in the immediate area
, Glock told him over comlink.
Traffic control hasn't got anything within five kilometres
, said Airan.
There is the tower, though
, added Provish, the driver.
‘Stay alert and keep all detectors on,' said Tack, getting a querying look from Polly. ‘This guy took out two in Prague with a door mine.'
As they reached the ruin, the whore froze and lost all interest in her surroundings. Looking past her, Tack saw that the item was there, resting on a large fragment of polystyrene, and it was on this that her attention was now riveted. Tack knew about this reaction, but had never felt it himself, perhaps because of his programming. He then noted the explosive charge fixed to the side of the item, and began to guess what Jurgens's game was.
 
IT CALLS TO YOU … it calls to you all the time.
The nettles were dead and dry in the cavity walls, and the grass was brown and crunched underfoot. Glancing at her stolid and lethal companion, Polly stepped sideways into the shade cast by the low oaks. She was thirsty, and scared, not only because of her present situation but of the reaction she had immediately felt. For a moment she thought the thing was some chitinous object washed in by the over-flood, like the pink and white crab carapaces all around. It looked like a mutated crustacean from the sea, and some weird things had been turning up in seas greenhouse-cooked and radioactive. However, white plastique was jammed around its thorny outgrowths, and the miniscreen of a matt-black detonator connected to this explosive displayed a revolving spiral of red lights.
There it is
, Nandru told her, and she was bemused by the avidity in his tone.
‘What do I do now?' she asked out loud.
The heavy was staring at her but offered no reply.
Tell him the detonator is net-linked and programmable. I know he's monitored and in constant com. His DO can run a diagnostic probe from wherever he is and that won't cause a detonation. He'll find a hard link from the numbered account.
Polly relayed Nandru's words, while still staring at the object. It was seemingly all thorned glass and silver; a perilous thing to slip onto her forearm—as she desperately wanted to do. Groping in her hip bag for a smoke, she spotted Tack immediately pointing his seeker gun at her.
Interdiction initiated. Seeking …
Ignoring the dead voice of Muse 184, she slowed her movements but did not stop them, as she was aching for that smoke. With shaking hands she opened her tobacco pouch and rolled a cigarette. Lighting up, she turned directly towards Tack, deliberately away from the temptation of the strange object, and blew smoke towards him provocatively. His air was somewhat
distracted, he was obviously listening to his comlink, but the barrel of his weapon never wavered from her face.
‘The hard link has been found and the diagnostic probe is in,' said Tack. ‘What is the purpose of this?'
After listening to Nandru, Polly replied, ‘He tells me you'll find that, when the specified sum is transferred to the numbered account, the detonator will shut down.'
‘And we are to believe this?' asked Tack, his tone conveying respect at the neatness of the set-up.
‘He also tells me that at some point there has to be trust.'
Tack was silent again, for long-drawn-out moments. Polly could feel sweat trickling under her blouse. She did not convey what Nandru told her next.
As I thought, the fuckers are trying to break the hard link. No way in, dick-heads … They'll have to do it—they're too desperate for the damned thing.
‘It is agreed,' said Tack after a moment. ‘The transference of funds will be made. Inform Mr Jurgens that if the detonator does not shut down then, or if there are any other … mishaps, I will personally hunt him down and feed him into a trash compactor.'
I can hear you, fucker. And your hunting days are over.
Polly eyed the spiralling lights on the detonator's screen and stepped back into the hot sunlight, preparing to bolt. Suddenly the lights went out and, realizing she just was not far enough away, Polly closed her eyes and cringed inwardly.
‘Transaction complete,' said Tack.
Polly opened her eyes to see him stepping in towards the object and its clinging explosive, his weapon again concealed while he pulled on surgical gloves. He stooped, pulled off the detonator and cast it to one side. He then stripped away the plastique, balled it, and tossed it in another direction.
You know, Polly, if it hadn't been for you, Marjae might still be alive. You can tell your friend there that I acquired him and his companions when they were walking over. The deal's done and now it's payback time.
The detonation came from behind and Polly turned in time to see the underside of the Macrojet as it turned in a conflagration. Two other hits swatted it along the ground as if it was fashioned of balsa and papier mâché, blowing it to pieces. Glancing back, she saw Tack raising his seeker gun and she ran for the trees.
Interdiction find.
The mosquito whining of seeker bullets was suddenly all around her—their winged shapes whipping through the air like June beetles. Coming out of
brambles some way ahead of her, with leaves stuck to his long coat, she saw one of Tack's companions levelling his gun at her. Then he doubled over, and the dull thud of a muffled detonation spread his insides across the dry grass.
Not target. Interdiction pause
.
Behind her she could hear the killer, Tack, pursuing. She turned to her left as there came the low coughing of a nearby gun.
Interdiction find
.
A seeker round whined past her and hit a sapling just ahead, blowing it in half. Another round whined overhead, made a strange whuckering sound, then spiralled into the earth directly in front of her and exploded. She leapt the smoking hole and just kept on running. The shots were missing her and she just did not understand why.
 
PROVISH WAS RIGHT. IN the fucking tower! In the t—
That was Airan, the remains of whom Tack passed only a minute later. The seeker round had taken off his head, which was especially unlucky for him because he, like Tack, had taken the precaution of wearing a moly-Kevlar undershirt.
Firing again at the girl dodging between the trees, Tack watched in amazement when the round—programmed to hunt her down—veered left and slammed into the remains of an old brick wall. With no time to check his weapon, Tack thumbed off its programming facility, took careful aim, and held his finger down on the trigger. Retaining their casings the rounds now went where he aimed. Trees flared and burning bark showered down, as the girl jumped a drainage ditch. Too many trees and she was moving fast. Tack sprinted after her, only to hear a familiar whining behind him. The round fired from the tower slammed into his back, knocking him face-down next to the ditch. He struggled upright and another round exploded on his chest knocking him backwards into the ditch. Briefly he caught a glimpse of the girl turning and sprinting back towards the ruins, then he blacked out.
BOOK: Cowl
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