‘Be calm, Traveller Tack,’ said Maxell.

She much resembled the woman who had slammed him against a corridor wall in Sauros. Her skin had that same amber translucence, though her eyes were blue and her hair a straight waterfall of white. But unlike the other, she would not be slamming him into any walls. For, since being taken offline from Pedagogue and coming out of the regrowth tank, Tack had quickly discovered that he was now the physical equal of many of the Heliothane, and superior to very many more. His musculature had been boosted, his martial skills greatly enhanced, and the body of knowledge now available to him was huge. However, he realized that many of these people still viewed him with hidden disdain, for to attain such new heights had required his body to be stripped down and totally rebuilt, with everything from bones being increased in density to cerebral grafts. He even possessed implants, which were anathema to them. Their pragmatic view was that if any man was not strong or clever enough to survive using his natural gifts, then he died—plain and simple.

‘What type of plesiosaur are they?’ Maxell asked him, nodding at the sporting creatures.

‘Elasmosaurus,’ Tack said quickly, giving them their twenty-second-century name despite her having asked in the language of the Heliothane, and despite his having access to over three hundred other languages.

Maxell frowned at this. ‘Still keeping to your old habits, I see,’ she said, now switching to the same language. ‘It appears we could not root everything out of you.’

Tack held up his left arm, displaying the tor, which had now attained full growth. ‘Does that really matter? I know what I have to do now, and you know that you can do no more to improve me. This thing on my arm started to reject once you tried genetic recombination. And no one else can wear it.’

He had been told that they had first tried to remove the parasitic scale from him in order to place it on someone else, but had failed. He also knew that, had they succeeded, he would have been dispensed with like so much garbage, and there remained in him a core of resentment over that. What puzzled him was why this knowledge had not been kept from him.

‘We already know why it started to reject. Cowl is using them to sample the future, so recombination would have defeated the tor’s initial purpose. It read your genetic code the moment it attached.’

She came up to stand right beside him and pointed down at the sea, where a huge shark was cruising past, doubtless attracted by the thrashing of the plesiosaurs. There was no guard rail along the edge of the platform, but that did not surprise Tack from a people who walked bare-faced through vacuum. The Heliothane did not coddle themselves with their technology. The lack of a rail was just another sign of their life view—if you’re stupid enough to fall in, you deserve to get eaten.

‘There will be sharks in that era, but no elasmosaurus—they were most prevalent in the late Cretaceous.’ She turned to look at him. ‘I sense you have been impatient, and wonder why we delay. The simple answer is that Engineer Goron’s shift back into the Jurassic has not been without some difficulties. Even now the tunnel has not restabilized, though we predict conditions will be ready for your transit through it in eighty hours.’

Holding up his tor-covered arm again, Tack asked, ‘Do I use this thing to take me from Sauros onwards?’ An implant kept the tor in abeyance, but he could still feel the thing’s temporal field webbing the inside of his body.

‘No, because your supplies will be limited by what you can carry, and though you can obtain food during much of your journey, there is still a large stretch of it where food would not be easily available. Saphothere will take you, by mantisal, as far back as he can.’

Tack was glad to hear that—if there was ever such a thing here, he considered the man his friend. Saphothere no longer showed disdain for Tack, rather respect. But then those entitled ‘Traveller’ were not so insular in their thinking as the rest of the Heliothane.

‘After that I go on by myself- and tear Cowl’s throat out,’ said Tack viciously.

‘Oh yes, certainly that.’ Maxell smiled.

Tacitus peered down through the spray at the rowers and damned himself for the sudden sympathy he felt for them: they were the spoils of war, slaves and the property of Rome, not citizens. Anyway, should they be freed from their chains their ending now would be no different from everyone else on this galley if it went down. In this sea they would all drown. He looked up to where the weird lights still played about the mast and reefed sail, asked a blessing from Mithras then made his way forward.

His sodden cloak flapping in the gale, he gripped the safety ropes tightly as he edged along the gantry above the rowers. It was then, in the howling night, that lightning struck the mast and leapt down to the prow with a sound like mountains breaking. Tacitus went down on his knees, thinking this must be the end of him. Behind he could hear some of his men shouting prayers at the storm. Looking ahead again, he kept blinking to try and clear his vision, for surely he had seen something looming there out of the night, but then he saw only smouldering wood and sylphs of flame. He continued forging ahead until on the foredeck he found wreckage and the bodies of two of his men, their armour smoking and their skin blackened. This was a cursed voyage, he knew that now. Then his gaze fell upon the strange object cleaving to the wooden rail like a burr.

It was a vambrace, he knew it at once. It was a gift from Mithras for some battle yet to come. He reached out to grab it and yelled as its thorned surface cut into his hand. A big wave hit the side of the galley and, swamped in water, the galley slaves screamed and struggled. Falling down, Tacitus held onto the object, and it pulled from the rail. Without hesitation he thrust his arm into it. Agony, and a deep gnawing pleasure that was almost sexual. Blood poured from his arm and the vambrace closed about it and bonded to him. In only minutes it was firmly in place and his blood washed away by the sea and the rain. He held his arm up in a fist salute to his men at the stern of the ship. Then the jealous god Neptune sent one of his monsters against the ship.

The giant serpent rose up out of the sea, the great loop of its body curving up into hazy night, then its eyeless head and awful vertical maw turned and slammed down on the edge of the galley. Tacitus was again knocked off his feet. Struggling up and stumbling to an inner guard rope, he looked down and saw that the monster had taken out the side of the ship and was now feasting on the slaves. The inner parts of its mouth revolving like some engine, it drew them in, screaming, by their chains. There was no question that the ship would go down, so perhaps this was the battle he was being called to. He drew his gladius and leapt down into the chaos. Knocking aside those begging him in pidgin Latin to release them, and grabbing at him in desperation, he made his way to the horror that was chewing on the ship. He raised his weapon and drove it into a wall of flesh. Once, twice, but seemingly to no effect. Then a tentacle snapped out of darkness beside him and knocked him past a revolving hell of teeth and out into the storm. He struck a scaled flank that lacerated his legs as he fell past it, and then he was down into the sea, still clutching his gladius. He could not swim and he prepared himself for death, relaxed for it. And something took him away from the storm, into some nether hell, then out into bright sunlight.

Tacitus fell face first onto a soft surface, coughed and gasped as he fought for breath, then hauled himself upright and turned, ready to attack the figures that loomed over him. Then, in the presence of gods, he went down on his knees, his blood leaking into briny sand.