13

Engineer Goron:

The project is vast: to tap energies directly from the sun and use those energies to bore a hole back through time so that every age will become accessible, using a drill bit that will be a large fortified structure. And Maxell has agreed because this is the only way we will ever get to Cowl, or to those Umbrathane who escaped along with the preterhuman. Trying to establish bases piecemeal just does not work, as the torbeast hits them before they can be adequately defended. The only true way to establish any downtime base is to travel inside it as it moves back, as if in some vast armoured car. We will, in time, locate the preterhuman and make him pay for the dead of Callisto, but still I cannot help but feel that such a grand design is demeaned by pursuing such comparatively petty ends—so am I then guilty of hubris? We transferred our wars and exterminations from the surface of the Earth, and continued them in the solar system; how hateful it is that now we even carry them back through time as well. But, though I bemoan this, I will still go armed into that valley. Damnation! Am I a sentimental fool in that I just want to witness dinosaurs?

‘It’s gone,’ said Silleck.

Returning to his control pillar, Goron could feel the sweat sticking his shirt to his back, and in some deeper part of himself noted that he was trembling.

Have you really fucked up, Cowl—have you underestimated us?

It seemed unlikely that Cowl would make any mistakes and that a kill could be made now, but Goron had to try, for that possibility and for Vetross.

‘Is there enough energy available for short-jumping inside Sauros?’

Palleque glanced round. ‘Vetross?’

‘If we can,’ Goron replied. ‘But there’s an opportunity here that cannot be missed… so we have to try.’ He turned to Silleck and awaited her reply.

‘We’ll have capacitance up to a high enough level for someone to short-jump within ten minutes, just so long as that someone is not you. You were too close and the risk is too great of a short-circuit paradox getting out of control.’

Goron gazed at Palleque, who winced as if in pain and turned back to his consoles.

‘Who’ve we got available? What travellers?’ the Engineer asked generally.

‘Traveller Aron is rested, and here, and possesses the same facility as Saphothere for this sort of thing,’ said Palleque, his back still turned.

‘Send him to the location and meanwhile patch this through to his palm computer,’ the Engineer ordered, now calling up the recording he had been readying and watching it play out in one of the vorpal spheres. He saw an image of himself standing at one of the viewing windows, with Vetross at his shoulder, as behind them the incursion developed—a nacreous pillar splitting the air. Out of this pillar, like some demon sliding into the world, stepped Cowl—and Goron watched Vetross die. The recording now tracked Goron’s escape—then Cowl stepping away through a second incursion. The same recording repeated, and he watched Vetross die again and again.

‘Are you getting this, Aron?’ he asked.

‘Getting it,’ the voice of the Traveller confirmed. ‘How long will I have?’

‘Silleck?’ Goron asked.

‘The potential energy levels available to Cowl are huge, but what he will do with them we don’t know. I estimate Aron will have a minute at most.’

‘Impressive preparations, but it is all a matter of potential energy.’

Cowl’s words, but what did the being mean by them? Cowl must have known what Goron would try.

‘What weapons do you have, Aron?’

‘A launcher—the missile containing a displacement generator set for the Earth’s core. I’ll hit the incursion as he appears and with luck fry the fucker.’

‘Are you at the D-generator for yourself now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then be ready. Silleck will send you back the moment we have the capacity.’

Long minutes dragged by. Goron felt the sweat drying on his back and his wounded leg was now beginning to ache. He glanced down at the blood he had tracked across the floor. If they now succeeded, Sauros would be tipped some way down the slope, and all in the city would possess memories of two sets of events. But Vetross would be alive. He knew that if the blood disappeared it would mean a short-circuit paradox had developed, and the resulting cascade would drag them irretrievably down the slope. He was thoroughly aware of the dangers.

‘I’m sending him now,’ Silleck said at last.

The scene replayed, interfaced with the now. In the shimmer of displacement, Traveller Aron appeared to one side of Goron and Vetross. But something was wrong, as his appearance elicited no reaction from the other two. Aron raised his launcher to his shoulder, and it spat a missile towards Cowl as the being stepped from the incursion. The missile struck the edge of Aron’s still-operating displacement field, flinging out a spherical boundary. Aron lowered his launcher and faded—displaced back to his point of departure. The scene had been changed not at all: Cowl killed Vetross and pursued Goron, then was gone.

‘What happened?’ the Engineer asked, his mouth dry.

‘The potential energy,’ Silleck replied. ‘Cowl fed it into Aron’s displacement sphere to keep it out of phase. The same would happen to any other we could send, had we the time or energy to spare.’

As Goron allowed that Vetross was irretrievably dead, and that this chance at Cowl was past, Silleck went on to tell him, ‘The torbeast is returning.’

Goron realized that this second attack, just like the first, was not with any hope of the beast destroying Sauros, but to drain available energy and prevent them repeating their attempt to change this particular fragment of the city’s past. He knew that by the time the new attack was over, and by the time they were up to capacitance again, that event would be too far down the slope to retrieve. They had failed, but then Cowl too had failed in what must have been the dark being’s original purpose: to kill Goron.

Food was plentiful so long as you were not squeamish, but there was nowhere Polly felt she could safely sleep. This was not so much because of the predatory dinosaurs but more because of predatory insects. Already there was a lump half the size of a tennis ball on her arm, just above the scale, where something like a giant ant had crawled up it while she was dozing against a rock. Screaming curses as she stamped the arthropod into yellow slurry had brought her no satisfaction—only larger predators to investigate.

Run was Nandru’s considered advice when she became aware of birdlike eyes observing her at the level of her own, and a long beaky mouth opening to expose translucent razor teeth and a black forked tongue. She ran, dodging between fallen trees, then dropped and rolled through the hollow under a toppled log, delaying her immediate pursuer when it jammed itself under, trying to follow her. But behind it others of its long-legged kind closed in with frightening speed. The first of those leapt onto the log and tried to smash its way through a wall of twigs and branches. Polly drew her automatic, took careful aim and pulled the trigger. The explosion sent bark flying from the log, and the creature on top of it fell back. But it was immediately replaced by another, and Polly was pulling on an unresponsive trigger. In her pocket her taser contained only one last charge, so she turned and, following some primeval instinct, jumped up into the first climbable tree. She began to haul herself up, couldn’t—something snagged her coat. Glancing down, she saw one of the carnosaurs gripping the hem in its teeth. As it worried and tugged, the material ripped and a great strip of the fabric tore away, and the release in resistance propelled her up into the tree.