Tack felt his mouth go dry and suddenly, despite the hot coffee, he felt cold. With a hand that trembled only a little he placed his cup on the ground, took up his heat sheet and draped it around his shoulders.
‘And this is the coldest it will be for us,’ Traveller added. ‘From now on things start getting hotter—in more than the literal sense, too.’
Tack waited for the punchline.
Traveller gestured about them. ‘This is about as restful as it gets. Between us and Sauros lie about eighty million years of appetite.’ Traveller stood up and gestured meaningfully to the backpack. Tack finished his coffee and folded the cup, inserting it into a compartment inside the coffee pot. This and the heat sheets went into the pack, which Tack then shouldered. As they emerged from the trees, Tack noticed dry grass showing through where the snow had melted away. Far to his right he saw a huge elephantine shape standing still as a rock before it turned back into the trees.
‘Mammoth,’ he breathed.
‘Mastodon, actually,’ Traveller corrected him. ‘Mammoths customarily move around in family groups.’ He paused and studied the spot where the creature had disappeared. ‘Though there are the rogue males, of course.’ With that he set off, quickly following their own tracks in the snow, back to where they had disembarked from the mantisal. Tack hurried along behind, scanning all about himself for something significant, since he felt sure this was a time—if not place—that he would never see again. But all he saw here was snowy grassland and forest, and earlier that one enigmatic shape, before the mantisal folded out of thin air before them, and they climbed aboard.
The nightmare darkness receded into memory and it seemed she had been in this forest for an age, with nothing to accompany her but the sounds of birds and the wind in the trees. But now she heard bells tinkling, the murmur of conversation and an occasional burst of laughter. Somewhere nearby there were people, and in Polly’s mind that meant the possibility of food, for she was racked with a hunger that had already compelled her to chew and swallow a handful of acorns before vomiting up the whole bitter mess. Drawing hard on her second hunger-quelling cigarette, she then discarded it and moved on eagerly. Pushing through the bracken below towering trees, she soon lost any sense of where the sound was coming from and began flailing forward in a panic, then stumbled down a slope onto her knees. Before her, like an epiphany in the damp leaf-litter, grew a single yellowish-white toadstool. She reached out for it.
What the hell do you think you are doing?
‘I’m hungry,’ Polly replied, her mouth still full of nauseating bitterness.
Well, that would certainly cure any future hunger. Muse has it listed as Amanita virosa or the Destroying Angel. I thought it was a death cap, but that’s only a small disagreement of memory and acquired memory. Either way the results would eventually be the same.
‘You don’t really know that,’ said Polly, reluctant to deny herself this potential snack.
Muse 184 has a hundred terabytes of reference, remember. I’m living in its damned RAM, so I’m not taking up any space. Do you know what that means?
‘No… no I don’t.’
Put it this way, it knows more than any single human is ever likely to know on any subject you could think of. And being as its purpose is military, it particularly has everything in here you’d want to know about poisons and other causes of death. You want me to detail what will happen to you if you eat that thing?
‘No, I don’t need that.’ Polly stood up and moved off, irritably kicking the toadstool to snowy fragments across the leaf litter as she went.
It’s that damned scale on your arm. By my clock you ate four tins of pilchards and half a loaf of bread only six hours ago on that boat. It must be sucking you dry somehow. They knew it was parasitic… alive in its limited way.
‘Why do you call it a scale?’
Where it came from, my little slot machine. You saw the…creature that killed me? Well that thing on your arm is a scale from its back—if back it had.
‘You said something about all this, but nothing made sense then.’
What’s to tell? We raided a suicide bombers’ school in Kazakhstan, and that creature hit at the same time. Fucking chaos. It chewed four of them down, and shed that thing on your arm in the process. It was just one of many arranged like scales on its surfaces, though whatever the creature is, we never saw enough of it to… just call it a monster, something vast from another place.
‘What other place?’
I haven’t got a clue.
Polly looked around her. There, the bells again… somewhere over that way.
‘What happened then?’ she asked.
One of the Binpots wanted to put it on his arm. Leibnitz put a clip into him before he got a chance, then the monster hit Leibnitz and Smith. I bagged the scale and ran with it—I knew it was important — and Patak and the others covered me. The monster took him when we got back to HQ. Next thing the last of us were in a U-gov facility with the big brains talking temporal anomalies. I was interrogated under VR with drugs I’d never heard of, then was sat out in a compound with the rest as bait for the… monster. Wired up like lab rats, we were. I knew it wanted me, see, from the moment I killed that guy who had been about to put the scale on himself, like you did. It attacked — chaos again. I was able to escape, grabbing the scale and some other tech as I went. The scale tried to get me to put it on, but it left me alone when I wrapped the fucking thing in plastique…
Polly found herself standing at the edge of a rough track. Distantly she could again hear the tinkling of bells, and that muted conversation and laughter.
‘But what is it? What’s it for?’
Christ knows. But I heard enough then to know that somehow time travel was involved, and that the monster it came from hunts through time, taking victims that are somehow irrelevant to the future. You know, if that thing hadn’t attacked when it did, we would have still been around in an area that was subsequently carpet-bombed. I’ve thought about this a lot. I think it was coming to take dead men before they died.
Thinking about that made Polly’s head ache. She turned onto the track and headed towards the human sounds. Shortly a covered wagon rounded a corner, pulled into view by a big white shire horse. The vehicle was hung with the bells she had heard, and painted with the words ‘The Amazing Berthold’ and its woodwork was intricately carved. Polly paused in its path as it approached, the driver and his elderly companion peering at her suspiciously, then she moved to one side of the track. As the wagon drew alongside her, she observed a young dark-haired man holding the reins, his clothes straight out of some historical interactive, and his broad flat hat sporting a couple of pheasant feathers. He pulled on the reins to halt the horse, then reached down to haul up the wooden brake.
At last it was ending, and the world was returning in coloured flashes like a strange species of lightning. Gradually revealed through the mantisal’s glassy spars was a landscape seemingly little different from the one they had recently departed. They rematerialized above grassland a few hundred metres away from the edge of dense forest. Then Tack began to note the subtle but disturbing differences. Here the cloud-dotted sky was a deeper blue, the green of sprouting grass was hazing up through the trampled sea of older stalks, and everywhere were scattered yellow, red and lavender flowers. The distant trees were also tinged with the green and yellow of new growth, and there were birds racketing up into the air. A balmy breeze, carrying with it the smells of hot spring, dispersed the cold from the skeletal cage of the mantisal.