Well, what a surprise—the guy’s not at all nice.

‘You can’t go on, Polly. Even if you do survive the journey, Cowl will kill you.’

‘Like you give a shit,’ said Polly thickly. She concentrated harder, trying to get hold of something, anything inside her. But the drug blurred her perceptions, ate into her concentration. Thote could sense what she was trying to do. His eyes narrowed for a moment, then he relaxed.

‘Too late now, primitive,’ he said. ‘And, to a certain extent, I’m sorry to have to do this to you. But for two years now I’ve been fishing interspace with what’s left of my mantisal from this shit hole.’

Polly tried to hurl a curse at him, but her mouth felt like some dentist had injected half a pint of novocaine and all she managed was to dribble down her chin.

‘What I intend to try has been tried once and failed once.’ He gestured to the skeleton. ‘I think I have it now, though — desperation refines the thought processes. You see, Cowl is sampling genetics, which is why it doesn’t matter to him if you reach him dead or alive. You are just a portable food sack for your tor, as it already has your code locked inside it—and that’s all Cowl needs to find out if he is managing to destroy the future.’ Thote shrugged. ‘All I really need do is graft some of your skin into a vorpal strut, plasticize the tor, and wrap it around that. The field should then be magnified enough to include me—even though I am not the actual sample.’

Polly’s vision was growing black around the edges, but she retained enough to see the shattered remnants of silvery cagework come folding into existence to one side of Thote. He drew an ugly commando knife from his boot, then stepped towards her.

I think we’ve seen and heard about enough now.

The webwork slammed into life with more power than ever. Thote’s scream of rage echoed after her into black and grey, as her own silver cage materialized around her.

Some sort of projector, stabbed into the ground like a garden lantern, shrieked a warning only seconds before an explosion ripped out of the jungle wall. Tack stepped out, triggered a burst of fire towards the one visible umbrathant, then dropped and rolled as horsetails sheared over behind him. A man to Tack’s left was turning his carbine towards the jungle when his legs fragmented below the knee. Saphothere came out so fast he was stepping on the man’s shoulder before the same man had fully collapsed, then went into a roll from which he managed to shoot backwards, taking off the victim’s head, before disappearing into shadow. Tack was back into cover by then, running at full pelt, slamming through foliage, then out and accelerating around the foot of the mountain. More explosions behind him. Someone screaming. Turn and head upslope, legs hammering down hard as spring steel. Foliage breaking behind him. Down, roll, fire. The umbrathant following him was gone—then springing up again from behind a boulder, firing his carbine, the scree slope erupting at the spot from where Tack leapt. Disappeared. Tack firing at the rock face immediately behind the boulder, his rounds set for timed detonation rather than impact. The man standing up to fire again, then screaming as Tack’s rounds detonate about his feet. A second’s hesitation. Enough. One explosive shell spreads the man’s brains up the rock wall. And Tack was moving on again.

All the way upslope now, the battle flashes shielded by the mountain flank. The rock wall runs up the mountain like a spine and curves round above him. Already seen and studied. His weapon back in its holster, Tack heads up it like a spider, sprints across a stony plateau, drops down beside a three-metre waterfall, then descends the course of a stream in bounding strides on slimed rocks, shooting one brief puzzled glance at strange amphibians glowing with blue light in a shallow pool. Then upwards, scrambling a fern-covered slope. Finally gazing down on the encampment.

Saphothere is there, pinned down on a slope, a man and a woman firing towards him but not daring to emerge from cover. No sign of Meelan or the other one. Perhaps dead? Tack fires a single burst and the man fragments, the woman rolling aside with a horrible scream, her bare rib bones exposed. Then Tack is down the slope—the two packs resting just below him—his implant coming offline, and the temporal web inside him hardening like glass. He hits the ground and comes up in time to see a column of distortion howling up into the night, near Saphothere, bulging and breaking open on a nightmare landscape beyond. The beast breaking through! Flesh-light floods the area, in which Tack sees an explosion tossing Saphothere into the air, and Meelan hurtling in from the side, hitting him in a flat dive.

Fucking go! — over com.

Grabbing up the two packs, Tack allows the tor to take him, just as the woman with her ribs exposed hurtles down on him like a hammer. Night folds into another night. Tack glimpses the substance of the torbeast built up behind the incursion, like a forest trying to force its way through a keyhole. Hanging onto Tack’s jacket, the wounded woman turns her gun towards his face. His boot goes in below her ribs, into exposed intestines. Screaming, choking blood filling her mouth, she loses her grip and tumbles away into night.

A feeding mouth uncoils out of midnight and Hoovers her up. Ignores Tack completely.

15

Modification Status Report:

My daughter is a failure that nearly killed me while she was still in my womb. Obviously my decision to retain the alleles is the cause of this — those alleles displacing both wholly and partially the alterations I made. As she continues her growth in the amniotic tank, I see that she possesses no exoskeleton, merely a toughening and discoloration of the skin. Her sensory grid is viable, but nowhere near as efficient as planned for. Her interfacing organs have been stunted by the growth of those damned human features: eyes, nose and a normal mouth, and all the concomitant sensory apparatus to support them. She has also lost some of her bilateral symmetry, which I now see is due to the fiddler-crab gene I used to supposedly make alterations to her mouth. Sometimes I damn the lack of logic in genetic evolution, when a gene controlling eye colour might also control something like fingernail growth. My instinct is to flush the tank, but much can be learnt from this growing child and, having learnt, I will try again.

There was no real danger to him in venturing outside Sauros — other than the stringencies of the environment—since Cowl would never bother to expend the energy required just to hit an individual heliothant of Palleque’s minor status, so consequently there were no restrictions on such ventures for him. Had it been Goron out here it would have been an entirely different matter, for the Engineer’s assassination would be an utterly demoralizing blow for the Heliothane, as it had nearly proven. Pausing on a slope made spongy by centuries of ferny growth and decay, Palleque raised his monocular and gazed back at Sauros.

Goron rarely left the city and, even if he did, Cowl might be disinclined to attack, suspecting a trap. The recent attack upon the Engineer inside the city had been unexpected and nearly successful because Cowl had known the shield frequency, enabling the preterhuman to pass through the defences at a particularly vulnerable time. And now some pertinent questions were being asked at all levels of the Heliothane.

Hooking the monocular back onto his belt, Palleque removed a small locator and saw that he did not have far to go. The communicator was on the other side of the mountain, where he had established it in a body of granite. By now it would have grown its shielding of vorpal crystal all through the surrounding rock and would be ready to use. Glancing upslope he saw that the ferns ended where the cold wind had denuded the mountainside of vegetation. On reaching this firmer ground he picked up his pace. The Triassic push was a while away—on Sauros time — so he did not hurry because of that. He hurried because he realized time was running out for himself.