Then he took from his pack the less standard items. Five field generators he attached to the other chest strap, their power supply operated from a thermal battery that burnt itself out within a few seconds. He hoped he would not need these, as it would probably mean he was on the run. The two tactical nukes—like the one Saphothere had used on Pig City—went into a bag attached to the left-hand side of his belt. These he would use at his discretion. Finally he took out the last item: his seeker gun. It contained twenty rounds, and its system, via recordings, had already acquired Cowl. This he put in his thigh pocket, there being no position provided for it on the harness. He was ready.

As he climbed out of the trench and headed down to the sea, sealing his hood and pulling on his gloves, Tack wondered vaguely why he had not been provided with a long-range missile launcher, or one of those excellent Heliothane scoped assault rifles. But he dismissed that thought as he entered the water. It did not once occur to him to wonder how, once his mission was completed, he would be able to get away from this place and this time. His programming did not allow him that.

17

Engineer Goron:

We know that many thousands of torbearers have been dragged back through time towards the Nodus, but how many survived the journey we have no idea. It is also a matter for conjecture whether any who did survive the journey then survived their encounter with Cowl. His utter disregard for human life makes this seem unlikely. I have to admit to feeling some guilt at our contribution of Tack to that likely offhand slaughter, though with what is at stake it was wholly justified. But it makes me question our own regard for human survival, evolutionary imperatives and all that these entail. Is not Cowl the summit of our own aspirations? And does not our attitude to him prove the falsity of our world view?

The robot did not have a name, so Polly christened it Wasp and altered its programming so that it recognized when it was being addressed. Originally Aconite had designed it for one simple purpose: to check if those of Cowl’s samples who caught on the ledge were still alive. For Wasp’s wings not only served as a lid for its rear compartment; it could fly. Polly did suggest that it might be worth building an aquatic robot to retrieve those falling into the sea, but Aconite demurred. The woman liked to swim and had no wish to dispense with her reason for doing so. Consequently Polly learnt to swim as well, soon being able to cover the hundred metres out from the beach as fast as Aconite herself. But thus far neither she nor Aconite had managed to retrieve any survivors, so the accumulation of bones and slowly decaying corpses below the citadel continued to grow. Polly spent six months with Aconite before things changed.

Wasp tells me she’s got a live one.

Immediately Polly rolled from her bed and stood up. Stepping naked into her shower cubicle, she switched it from water spray to UV-block, and closed her eyes while the moving shower head coated her skin with a substance that prevented her getting flayed by the ultraviolet outside. The block being quickly absorbed, she stepped out of the shower, pulled on the skin-tight garment that served as both clothing and wetsuit, slipped on her boots, whose loose upper material immediately tightened around her ankles, then took up her mask and headed outside. Aconite was trudging up the slope, with Wasp, heavily laden, following as usual.

‘At last,’ said Polly as she walked down to the troll woman, aware that the average had now become a live one for every two thousand dead, and that every death seemed to bruise something inside Aconite. Polly had come to realize that from childhood on it had always been Aconite’s purpose to clear up Cowl’s messes, to leaven his ruthless violence, and try to protect him from his own destructive impulses. She it was who had found for him a pre-eminent position amongst the Heliothane; and she it was who had come with him into the past, to continue performing her childhood duties.

‘I had to knock him unconscious,’ Aconite explained, holding up a sharp and perfectly maintained short sword in her heavier hand.

Studying the muscular man with his short-cropped grey hair, Polly recognized the leather armour he wore. She had seen similar armour on a corpse jammed under a deadfall in a stream in Claudian England. Tacitus Publius Severus, was the second rescuee.

After the Roman, who, they soon learnt, had encountered a Heliothane intercept squad at the beginning of his journey came three more almost in a rush. One was a feral boy without a name and without even a language, whom Polly dragged from the sea, and whom Aconite identified as from the dark age of the neurovirus. Aconite cured him of his affliction and surgically implanted a cerebral augmentation to compensate for his partially destroyed brain; while Polly, being one to give names, called him Lostboy. Wasp, for the first time, brought in a man who had managed to cling to the ledge over the sea, and understandably he screamed all the way, beating at the robot with the rusting musket he still grasped. Identifying this little Chinaman, they made the mistake, because of the musket, of thinking him from an age earlier than from which he had actually come. He had been a thief during China’s Cultural Revolution. They learnt from him how his robber band had been ambushed and slaughtered, by the People’s Army, and how the torbeast had come to feast on the dead before leaving him his tor. The musket he had stolen from a Prussian soldier in a different age, and in yet another one claimed to have shot a dragon with it. The Neanderthal, Ygrol, smashed Wasp’s sensor cluster with a bone club, fell twenty metres into the sea, swam ashore, then shouting all the way charged Tacitus and Lostboy, whose watch this was. With the flat of his gladius, Tacitus knocked the man out, dumped him on Wasp, then had to guide the robot back like a dog, when its sensor cluster finally burnt out.

‘Why are they always men?’ Polly asked, puzzled.

Because you are an exception, Polly. That you survived is a near miracle: men are built stronger, and most ages of Earth are hostile to women. Only in that distant future from which Cowl and Aconite came are women the physical equals of men. Look at those four. You have a boy who was feral; a Roman soldier who served most of his life in one of the toughest armies that ever existed; a Chinese thief and, unless I miss my bet, sometime murderer; and a Neanderthal who beats his next meal to death with the remains of his previous one.

Dangerous people: Polly had realized that as each of them had arrived. But after receiving educative downloads from Aconite’s Pedagogue, they soon learnt how dependent they were on the heliothant, and kept themselves in line.

‘Why me?’ Polly asked—a question she had not asked in some time.

Survivors from concentration camps asked the same: how come I was caught so late? Why did that soldier’s gun jam? Why was I chosen to load the furnaces? How was it they missed me under the mounded dead? Luck and statistics, Polly. Luck and statistics.

Polly knew all about statistics. Aconite had showed her only a few days after her arrival. Silently gesturing Polly to follow, the heliothant woman had led her down a spiral stair to the basement of her house.

‘They are all dormant,’ explained Aconite. ‘Their programs run and erased the moment Cowl removed the recorded genetic information.’

Around every wall of the chamber ran racks stacked with the smooth carapaces of tors. There were thousands of the devices.

Polly fought for a suitable response. ‘If… if all he wants is a genetic sample… why bring the whole person? He could take just one hair, a piece of skin.’