The woman led them away from sand and out across a fragmenting lava flow. Orange-brown clouds now scudded across the yellow sky and, to Polly’s right, the sea in which she had so nearly drowned reflected those colours. Wavelets foamed on a reef of jagged stones, and beyond, where the coast curved round, she now saw a huge flower-shaped citadel, from which she had obviously been ejected earlier.
Simulacra of life—excepting Cowl and this one here—and nothing else. Seems you have finally reached your destination.
‘And now what?’ Polly subvocalized.
Has anything really changed? You must just try to stay alive.
‘Maybe that’s not enough any more. Maybe I’d like to do something about that faceless bastard that fucked me over.’
A fatal course of action, I would suggest.
Polly gritted her teeth in growing anger.
With the pseudo-mantisal fighting against ablation with an outpouring of energy, Tack knew this would be the last shift, so he prepared himself. The ultraviolet light baking the Earth would be no hazard for him, since part of his augmentation had been an artificial epidermis resistant to such radiation, but the lack of oxygen was a problem. He donned the hated mask, before closing up his pack and shrugging it onto his back. With his carbine dangling before him on its strap, and the Heliothane U-sound injector clasped in his right hand, he now concentrated on the vorpal view of interspace. Cowl’s tor trap was likely to be automatic, so whether or not Tack was expected, it would try to drag him quickly down into Cowl’s abode and that Tack must not allow. He wanted to reconnoitre, get the feel of his prey’s location, then come at him from some unexpected direction. He no longer felt any great impatience or eagerness for his task, just a stolid determination reinforced by seeing the Elizabethan corpse back there. Above all, Cowl had to die because of the suffering he had already caused and because of what he intended.
The hyperspheres and infinite surfaces, the lines of light and impossible distortion appeared in Tack’s perception and he saw, in 3D representation, the trap swaying towards him like the funnel of a tornado. With rigid will, he grasped control of the webwork inside himself and forced the tor and its generated mantisal aside from the approaching funnel and down into the real. The webwork fought him, like a horse being urged at too high a jump, but Tack’s will was strong because, his physical being having been bolstered by food concentrates, the tor had not managed to weaken him with the lethal parasitism that became usual at this late point of the journey. The pseudo-mantisal evaded the funnel, folded out of interspace and bounced, splintering, onto a dusty plateau. Shattering all about him on its second bounce, it began to ablate as if hit by a molecular catalyser.
As the construct disintegrated, Tack tumbled out of it in a roll. Then he was up and running, the tor so tight around his arm it paralysed his hand. He dodged into a dried-out gulley eaten down through friable rock, then along its course and came up between butts of black volcanic rock. Glancing back he saw a white rocket flame curving out from the horizon, impelling a black polygonal container. The missile hit at his arrival point, and detonated, blowing up a pillar of fire that rolled out clouds of dust.
Tack allowed himself a nasty grin—in his paranoia Cowl had given away the location of his refuge. All Tack had to do now was track back along the missile’s trajectory.
Tack now stripped off his pack and slid down, with his back resting against the black rock, then pulled up his sleeve and studied the tor. It was a boiled-lobster red now, having filled itself with his blood as it sucked in the energy to fling itself to its intended destination. Inside him he could feel the webwork hardening again quickly. He pressed the injector against the tor’s hard surface, feeling a brief vibration, then removed it to see a spill of chalky powder around a cluster of pin-holes, through which the catalytic poison had just been injected. Slowly the tor began to change colour, veins of black spreading across its surface and its rubescence fading to white. Inside him, Tack felt the web was dying—retreating from his extremities. Eventually the tor hung dead on his arm.
Taking up his pack again, Tack strode through the billowing dust clouds from the explosion, and set off in the direction of the missile’s source. After an hour he reached the edge of the plateau and there made his camp—concealed behind a boulder starred with large quartz crystals. Inside his tent, well sealed against the external atmosphere, he paused to eat and drink his fill, before stepping outside, safely masked again, and heading to the plateau’s rim. Before him lay a plain veined with rivers, encroached on from one side by a field of frozen lava. Broken rock was scattered everywhere, the detritus of some ancient cataclysm.
However, down below lay the remains of other less natural structures, which Tack would not have recognized without Pedagogue’s teaching. For here lay the remains of the entire research facility that Cowl had taken back through time, and across space, from Callisto. Witnessing this ruination, Tack recalled the gutted spaceships that lay decaying by Pig City. Clearly they were vessels from the Umbrathane fleet which Cowl had also dragged back through time.
The plain eventually narrowed into a peninsula projecting out into a golden sea, its water reflecting the lemon sky. To one side of this peninsula rested Tack’s true destination—not those ruins below him, for Cowl had built anew in the three centuries since his flight.
Supported above the sea on a forest of pillars, the citadel bore the shape of an open water lily. The structure was as beautiful as it was huge. Though still ten kilometres away from it, he estimated that the tops of its petals, glowing with lights, must pierce cloud. So that was where Cowl lived—and where Tack intended him to die.
The structure squatted on a slab of basalt poised at the top of a slope leading down to the wide but shallow river they were currently crossing. It was dome-shaped, closely arched all around, so that only narrow points of exterior wall between these arches actually reached the ground. Through most of the arches glinted windows, though Polly could just see that one of them opened directly into the interior. Too tired to keep turning her head round to look at it, she gave up and faced back down the way they had come. Realizing that they were now travelling in bright moonlight, Polly tried to remember some of the journey that had brought them here, but she had been fading in and out of consciousness so often that it remained a blur.
‘What’s your name?’ she finally managed to croak to her travelling companion.
‘Before I was born, my mother named me Amanita because I poisoned her in the womb and had to be removed, completing my early growth in an amniotic tank. As soon as I could, I renamed myself Aconite.’
‘Why that?’
‘Because it seemed appropriate.’
Polly found she had run out of the energy to pursue this line of questioning, so bowed her head and lost it for a second. Coming to, she saw that they had now reached the other side of the river and were about to climb the slope towards what seemed likely to be some kind of house.
Aconite is an interesting word.
Nandru, who was walking alongside the robot, gazed across it with a twisted expression at the strange woman.
‘How so?’ Polly asked out loud.
It is an alternative name for the poisonous plant also called wolfsbane or monkshood.
‘And that’s interesting why?’
I see you don’t get it. You must try harder; since you’re now so closely linked into Muse’s reference library, the information is available to you.