16

Engineer Goron:

The fusion explosion was contained within the temporal barrier, but even so a wash of radiation bled through the phase change. It did not take long to calculate that the bleed-over was not concomitant with the explosion that utterly erased Callisto. Had this been the case, the entire Jovian system would have been irradiated. It is certain that the bulk of the vast energy output from the explosion powered a time-jump no one believed possible. Cowl has taken himself all the way to the Nodus and, as far as we can ascertain, the Umbrathane fleet is scattered throughout the ages between then and now. The spatial shift, predictably, was towards Earth. I have to admit that what the Umbrathane might do does not bother me greatly, as I have little doubt that their ships will be unusably radioactive and so will need to be abandoned. But Cowl… a creature capable of snuffing out four hundred million lives so easily? Even the two Umbrathane prisoners, Coptic and Meelan, agree that something must be done now, probably because their troops also died when Callisto was obliterated.

In the rock pools there were trilobites and white slugs with hinged shells on their backs. Feverish, and aching with hunger, Polly caught both types of creature by hand, and swallowed them still alive and kicking.

Disgusting, Polly, absolutely disgusting.

Nandru was standing right behind her, for she could see his reflection in the water. But when she turned, he evaporated. She gulped down more, stuffing the horrible creatures into her mouth, all briny and stinking while her teeth chomped through their green-packed innards. Eventually she forced herself to her feet.

The sea had begun rushing back across the plain of frozen lava, and not wishing to be caught by the fast-approaching tide, she turned back towards the foothills. She was aiming for a patch of still-warm lava back there, where she had slept much of the previous night, but the tor would not allow her this luxury. Its webwork turned steely inside her and dragged her down like a claw. She shifted yet again through night, in a cage glowing incandescent, to a place barren and hammered by filthy rain. There she managed to drink her fill of bitter water, then was shifted again. In another place, duned with black sand, she staggered towards a horizon, where she hoped to find relief, something. Inside her greatcoat her ribs were now protruding. At her side walked Nandru, a frown puckering his brow.

I think it knows you will find no food here, and thus nothing to nourish it with, so it is feeding on you—using you up, killing you.

‘Help me.’

And how is he supposed to do that, young lady? He’s only a hallucination.

The boat captain, Frank, was standing there, chuffing on his pipe, Knock John naval fort standing tall in the sands behind him. Polly supposed that the droning in her ears must be the sound of bombers flying over.

‘Stop it… make it stop.’

I cannot, and if I could, how would you live here?

That was Nandru, really speaking to her. She stared at the great maunsel fort and realized she was only seeing memory, not reality. When Fleming, the man from military intelligence, eyed her, seeming about to ask a question, she turned away from him. And in doing that she saw her own footprints stretching ahead of her, and realized she had been walking in a wide circle. As if impatient with this impasse, the tor shifted her again. And the nightmare not only continued—it grew worse.

Polly was too exhausted, too utterly depleted to care any more, and knew that the future span of her life encompassed maybe this shift and one more, but no more than that. Her clothes were now as baggy on her body as her skin was on her skeleton. She was like a fleshless waif staggering out of Belsen, whom food would probably not prevent from dying. Around her the glassy cage glowed incandescent, as if she had been trapped within tangled rods of white-hot steel, and she could see little beyond it. The shift back into the real she felt as a violent sideways motion, reminiscent of that preceding her arrival in Thote’s time. Around her the world bled back into existence, in shades of iron and glass, but the cage did not dematerialize. Instead it dropped to a flat metallic surface, deforming on impact as if made of dough, while vapour began to pour from it. Within the vorpal struts the glow faded down to red filaments, as the glass itself began to splinter and crack. Polly weakly nudged at one strut and it snapped like a sugar stick. Just then a figure loomed over her and began tearing open the rest of the cage.

‘Oh God…’

I suspect you have arrived, said Nandru.

Polly did not have the energy to scream as a skeleton wrapped in shadow was revealed through the shattering struts of the cage. Then, after a moment, she realized that this was not what she was really seeing. But still the rangy dark figure terrified her. Even some evil demonic face might have been more acceptable than the featureless ovoid that was his head. The skeletal impression, she now saw, was created by a network of hyaline ribs and veins inlaid into his black carapace.

Cowl, I would guess.

Too weird, far too weird, Polly thought.

Cowl grabbed her, one long hand closing round her thigh, and jerked her up out of the wreckage of the cage. The blood-rush to her head, as she was held suspended, made the world fade in and out of focus for Polly, but she saw that blank face tilt as she was inspected like some interesting bug. Then, with one swipe of his free hand, he tore away her greatcoat, pulling it down and over her head and off her arms. Then he caught her flailing arm, long fingers closing doubly around the tor. Inside her she felt the webwork jerk, then sensed the horror of it withdrawing, pulling back—its elements coiling up like the tentacles of an octopus dropped in boiling water. Then Cowl released his hold on her hip and she dropped, her arm wrenching painfully as she was suspended only by the tor. Cowl now gripped her elbow and pulled the tor closer to his blank face for inspection. It was as if Polly herself was utterly irrelevant—a pendulous piece of rubbish attached to the real centre of his interest. With vision now blurred, she saw him probing at the edge of the tor with one sharp finger, then drive the digit in. Polly howled.

The tor loosened, peeled up and she slid out of it like a mollusc discarded from its shell. Hitting the floor on her boots, consciousness fled her for only a moment, then she found herself lying over on her side, her arms stretched out before her face. The one from which the tor had been removed was now a flayed mess of tendons and exposed muscle.

You have to move, Polly. You have to escape.

Easy enough advice from someone who had probably forgotten what it was to be at the limit of endurance. From where she lay, Polly could see Cowl squatting, with his knees projecting way above his head, running long fingers around the inside of the tor, before abruptly sending it skittering across the floor. Gasping from an agony that just went on and on, Polly became subliminally aware of her surroundings—of curving walls of ribbed metal inlaid with esoteric circuitry, seemingly fashioned of other coloured metals and polished crystal. Above her, yellow light beamed down from a circular skylight; while, opening at intervals around the wall, were doors revealing a gleaming chaos beyond; and beside her, at the bottom of a slope, an intestinal tunnel dropped down into darkness, into which the now discarded tor had fallen. But mostly her attention was fixed on Cowl himself as he stood, with a motion both abrupt and fluid. The man—the creature? — was about to stride away, but then turned and stepped back towards Polly. This was it—he was going to kill her.