‘So this is the torbearer,’ said the tall golden woman in her strange white clothing. Tacitus did not understand the words then, but the time would come when he did.

The man, who had to be Apollo, said bitterly, ‘The galley went down—that was always a matter of historical record. The beast didn’t cause any paradox it couldn’t sustain by eating everyone on board.’

The man now reached down, grabbed Tacitus by the shoulder, and with infinite ease, hauled him to his feet. In the Roman’s native Latin he said, ‘You will help us to better understand that thing on your arm, before it takes you on your way again.’

‘Thank you, Lord… for saving me,’ Tacitus replied, bowing his head.

‘You may yet wish it otherwise,’ the woman told him.

Tacitus did wish it otherwise when these beautiful violent people learnt all they could from him with their strange questions and stranger engines. And when they then paralysed him and probed him and tried to take the god’s vambrace from his arm. Evidently failing in this endeavour, they freed him, handed back his sword, and told him to enjoy his journey to hell. It was a journey he could never have imagined—the time he spent with them being a comparatively harmless interlude—and throughout it he came to understand what the woman really meant.

12

Two Heliothane on Station Seventeen:

‘The Engineer wouldn’t let me see the recording from the internal security system—all we managed to get out before some sort of temporal barrier shut off all communication with the facility.’

‘Brother, I want to know.’

‘Goron’s been otherwise occupied, trying to push his project, so I managed to break into the system…’

‘What happened?’

‘Cowl’s creature killed Astolere.’

‘That can’t be… the amniotic tank was supposed to vent onto the surface of Callisto, where the beast would have died.’

‘That didn’t happen.’

‘Then the creature must be destroyed.’

‘There’s more than that.’

‘Show me.’

‘What is that?’

‘Some kind of feeding mouth that can be extruded from the main body. It wasn’t there before.’

‘That glass should have been able to withstand any force the creature could exert.’

‘Yeah, does that include displacing parts of its molecular structure through time so that those parts aren’t even in the same location?’

‘Scan shows this?’

‘Damned right it does.’

‘Cowl does not try to help her.’

‘No, he just allows it to consume our sister. She was the brightest and best of us all, and though she was there to supervise the shutdown, she was perhaps, excepting the failed preterhuman, Cowl’s greatest advocate.’

‘Then Cowl must die.’

Engineer Goron gazed fondly upon the Jurassic, where giants were demolishing a forest to fill their titanic ever-hungry stomachs. Even with the damping fields of Sauros operating, it was possible to feel the vibration of their gargantuan progress—what palaeontologists of Tack’s time gave the overblown term ‘dino-perturbation’. This herd of camarosaurs, though impressive, was nothing to what he yet had a good chance of seeing, for he had arranged for Sauros to come out in this specific locale: where brachiosaurs roamed. He could also have aimed to bring them out twenty million years later, in the time of the seismosaurs, but conditions had been optimum for this time and place, and he doubted he would have got that one past Vetross. Goron also hoped that when Tack returned there would be a chance for the twenty-second-century primitive to view these creatures along with him, as Tack, stupid in ways Goron could not even conceive, seemed to possess an appreciative awe of these giants that Goron’s fellows did not.

‘What is it, Vetross?’ He’d spied her edging towards him. ‘More calculations for me to check? More energy measures for me to approve? I appointed you as my second for a good reason, you know.’

‘It’s coming,’ Vetross replied.

Goron turned towards her and read the fear in her expression. This moment had been inevitable as soon as they had begun the push. Cowl would not countenance them getting close, without attacking. And attacking meant only one thing.

‘On our time?’

‘Ten hours. It’s pushing up the slope towards our Carboniferous, otherwise it would not retain the energy to bring enough of itself to bear. We’ve got travellers located back every fifty million years. Canolus slowed it with a neutron warhead quarter-slope relative to our Silurian, but while he recovered ground, it got him in transit.’

‘Canolus always tended to be premature. What about Thote?’

‘Mid-Devonian. Took out a small percentage of its mass with a displacement sphere. Damaged his mantisal, however, and now we can’t locate him.’

Suddenly Goron felt very tired, but that was unsurprising considering he had been working non-stop for three centuries. ‘Get every weapon you can online, and send all non-essential personnel back through the tunnel. I want field walls projected out to one kilometre in every direction and displacement generators, set for proximity activation, scattered randomly in between. And if there’s anything I haven’t thought of, I want you to think of it.’

‘Every direction?’ asked Vetross.

‘Damned right. The rock underneath us won’t stop it—it would just need to go out of phase either physically or temporally.’

Vetross watched him hesitantly.

‘Have I missed anything?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then why are you still here?’

‘Because you are needed now, Engineer Goron. People are frightened.’

Goron turned back to the window and, resting his hands on his tool belt, sighed and stared at a view that he knew would soon be incinerated.

‘Impressive preparations, but it is all a matter of potential energy.’ The voice was utterly factual.

Goron turned. ‘Like I needed you to tell me—’ His words died in his mouth. Vetross was staring to one side, terrified, and Goron quickly understood her feelings.

Cowl was poised like an axle-spring stood on end, looming taller even than Vetross. Here was a nightmare they had lived with all their lives: a preterhuman of darkness and glass, utterly ruthless, utterly committed to his own ends. There was no question that death would result from this encounter. Cowl now opened the cowl over his face to reveal the nightmare underneath.

‘Go!’

Vetross shoved at Goron, simultaneously pulling a weapon from her coat. Goron pushed off from the wall, diving and rolling, taking his own devices from his belt. He glanced behind him, tossing an interface generator back. He did not question Vetross’s sacrifice, for both he and she had instantly calculated that for just one of them to survive this encounter, one of them must die, while the other must be extremely lucky. He dropped another generator, saw fire smear along one wall, and Vetross’s weapon spiralling away. Cowl’s hand was on her chest, sharp fingers penetrating between her ribs, then he slammed her round gunshot-fast into a window, cracking armoured glass and leaving a corona of her blood on it. Cowl was almost on Goron’s first interface generator when it fired up, slinging a wall of energy up before the dark intruder, but Cowl somehow pushed through it. The second generator went as Goron initiated a coded transmission while he ran. He threw a handful of seeker mines behind—bouncing down the corridor like ball-bearings. Another window smashed, then Cowl came rushing along the outside of the building like a spider. Goron turned into one of the access corridors. Smash again, and Cowl was now only a second behind him. Goron tore off a service-hatch cover and threw it in a flat trajectory at Cowl’s neck, then dived through the hatch, scattering more mines. Explosions, and the cover hurled back, slicing through his calf muscle. That sharp hand groped in after him just as the displacement field, which he had already set, initiated. The service chamber blinked out, and Goron rolled out into the control room of Sauros—ten seconds before he left the service chamber.