‘The heliothant you with that want?’ Iveronica said. Before he could begin to formulate a reply another staccato exchange ensued between them. Tack’s attention was drawn back, by the roaring grunts and a crashing, to the woman at the palisade. As she rattled her tin against the bars, the creatures beyond it were going wild, chewing on the metal, trying to force their way through, even biting at each other. Abruptly Coptic shoved Tack down to his knees and stepped back. The woman who had just asked the question stepped forward and walked all around him.

‘Are you a Heliothane agent?’ she demanded.

She unhooked something from her belt and held it up. After studying it, she turned to Coptic and spat some command at him. The big man jerked Tack back to his feet and began probing his scalp with iron-hard fingers. They finally located the base of Tack’s skull, where Traveller had inserted an interface plug in order to reprogram him. A finger drove in, and Tack groaned as something was levered from the cavity. Coptic tossed his pink and gelatinous discovery on the ground, and Meelan drew her weapon and fired once, turning the object into a puff of black smoke.

Be ready, came Traveller’s voice over Tack’s comlink.

Tack felt a surge of adrenalin. He reached into his pocket with his one free hand and closed it around the shark’s tooth. Iveronica was now barking instructions to her fellows, who obediently moved away. Pausing to gaze contemptuously at Tack, she then gestured to one of the cylindrical buildings behind her.

Then it hit.

There came a vivid flickering as of numerous flashbulbs going off in sequence. The woman clanging at the palisade dropped her tin and stumbled backwards. Bright lines travelled across the fence’s surface like flame on ignited fuse paper, so it was eaten away and fell to dust. With the root of the tooth braced against his palm, Tack turned and drove it up hard, slicing into Coptic’s neck and up under his chin. Next twin explosions took out a couple of towers. A huge gun barrel entangled with debris dropped away and crashed to the ground. Staggering wildly, Coptic scrabbled with bloody fingers at the tooth embedded in his neck. A woman screaming briefly, an enteledont shaking its tormentor like a red rag. More of the creatures piling in behind. Meelan, yelling as she points her weapon at Tack. Shots dogging his steps as he runs. Another explosion nearby, and out of it a ragged figure cartwheeling through the air, then a red man-shape, peeled from head to foot, bellowing as it drags itself along the ground. Over the rampaging enteledonts a mantisal hurtles in, and it slams to a halt right above Tack, instantly shrouding him in cold mist. Tack reaching up and grabbing, hauling himself inside as the construct ascends.

‘Push that out,’ said Traveller, nodding to pumpkin-sized mirrored sphere attached loosely to one of the struts. Tack pulled it free and slipped it out through a gap in the structure. Glancing down he saw other mantisals appearing all round, and people running to board them. Then they were up and away from Pig City, hurtling out over the scrubland.

‘Don’t look back. It will blind you,’ warned Traveller.

Tack turned away just in time from the burst of harsh white light, which refracted through the body of the mantisal and threw midnight shadows beyond rocks and trees on the landscape below. Momentarily he glimpsed the familiar shape of a nuclear explosion, before the mantisal folded them into between space.

But even then it was not over. Against the surrounding blackness he saw a spreading cloud of escaping mantisals.

‘Don’t look,’ Traveller warned again.

Fire bled through and painted red light across colourless space. Immediately after, they flew on through the vorpal and human wreckage evaporating in a place unable to sustain it.

‘I saw you get the one called Coptic,’ said Traveller.

Tack merely nodded, too stunned still to speak.

‘My given name is Saphothere,’ Traveller conceded.

8

Engineer Goron:

The energy dam still functions, but with the orbit of Io perturbed I don’t know how long this will last. We assumed there was to be another attack when the Umbrathane fleet displaced into orbit around Callisto, and in response missiles were launched from Station Seventeen. They didn’t impact, for the fleet shifted inside the temporal barrier englobing the moon. What readings we were able to take showed us that the entire moon was a few degrees out of phase. Attempts at tachyon communications failed. Luckily Seventeen did not orbit Callisto, since, like the rest of the stations that were there then, it would now be drifting erratically in the Jovian system — the phase change having negated the moon’s gravity-well before the final apocalyptic event. It seems stupid to ask how we could not have predicted this when we have access to time-travel technology. But who would have thought only a month ago we would have needed to look to the immediate future? It is certain that the entire population are all dead. It was only the Umbrathane fleet and the research facility that shifted.

As they thawed, the apples became pulpy, but Polly still managed to eat four of them. Then she gnawed her way through to the frozen core of her pie as she walked some miles along the watercourse. Finally stopping to rest with her back against an oak tree, she slept until what was, in her estimation, midday. When she woke her mind seemed a lot clearer.

‘I don’t want to just survive. I want a life as well,’ she abruptly stated.

Nandru’s reply was some time in coming, as if he too had been dozing.

You are alive.

‘I want to understand, to experience. So I should view this… journey as an opportunity. There is so much I can learn.’

All you ever wanted to experience before was as many highs as possible with the fewest hangovers.

Polly unbuttoned her coat to check the contents of her hip bag. It still contained some heroin patches and pearlies.

‘No, I’ve changed,’ she insisted.

She ignored the patches, taking out only her tobacco to roll herself another cigarette. It occurred to her that she only had enough for a few more days. Not having experienced withdrawal from the other drugs she had used before placing the scale on her arm, she might avoid tobacco withdrawal as well. She had no intention of getting hooked again on patches though, so considered throwing them away. However, they would serve as analgesics should she be injured—which was now looking increasingly likely.

So your plan is?

‘To learn, to experience. I need to see things in this time before I get dragged back again.’ She assessed the food bag. ‘I have enough supplies here for a few more days, but what after that? I’m hardly equipped for this kind of life.’

You’ve done pretty well so far. You’ve acquired rather more suitable clothing than that you started out with—as well as a gun and a knife—and, of course, you’ve still got your taser.

Reminded of this last item, she removed it from her hip bag and studied it. It was not yet recharged, so she moved back to the open area by the river and rested the taser on a log, where its solar cells would benefit from direct sunlight.

Yours seems an admirable aim, but surely, in a such a barbaric age as this, you’d do better to keep your head down and wait for the next time-jump.

‘But then I’d continue doing nothing—just existing.’

Then, when your taser is fully recharged, we must go and look for whatever passes for civilization here.

When later she came upon it, the military encampment was undoubtedly the work of man, but whether civilized or barbaric was still to be seen. Polly had entered an area at the forest’s edge where some trees had been felled, coming in sight of a tented city surrounded by an abatis and earthen banks. Outside these, soldiers stood in neat ranks facing funeral pyres—Roman legionaries burning their dead. Seeing heads already turning in her direction, and word being passed along, she sat herself on a stump and started chewing on another pie. Shortly after, a small group of heavily armed legionaries was approaching her, their cloaked commander riding along behind. She noticed how cleanshaven and neat these people were, how polished was their steeped-leather armour, how their short swords gleamed. She also noticed how frequently their attention shifted to the forest behind her.