‘How long before the beast reaches our abutments?’ she asked.

Carloon replied, ‘It was looking like about ten minutes, but now it’s accelerating.’

‘How the hell can it know?’ an interface technician asked.

Carloon now brought the most distant sensor back into phase, displaying the far section of the wormhole empty of torbeast. This brought them no comfort—the end of it with the most mouths was coming at them like an accelerating juggernaut.

‘Any of you know how to pray?’ Maxell asked. Then to the negatives she said, ‘Well, now might be a good time to learn.’

21

Cowl:

I am the pinnacle of the Darwinian evolution of the human species, even though my superiority has been achieved by genetic manipulation. I was made to survive in an extrapolation of the most hostile of human environments, by the most ruthless means. As such I am all that Umbra and Heliothane dogma would have humans come to be. But when a being is measured by its ability to survive ruthless selection processes, isn’t its superiority equated with its ability to destroy and murder? Doesn’t such a measure discount all creativity, and so much else? The ability to survive and to dominate is not all. I am a dead end, but I am also human, and know that what I was made to be is not enough. I am what I am.

He had never done this to her before and foolishly she had believed he never would. Aconite was appalled at the ruthless power of her brother’s mind. His linking tendrils were fully developed and he knew how to use them to best effect. Her own had been stunted and virtually unusable since birth, so she’d had an autosurgeon remove them and cover the evidence with cosmetic surgery. With anguine deadliness his tendrils speared through her eardrum and into her skull, dividing and ever dividing down into synaptic plugs, connecting to the various portions of her brain. Cowl had never mind-fucked her before, but now he was.

Immediately she was dropped into the world of memory—but with her brother present as a hostile spectre. He stood behind her as she looked with some amazement at the ersatz assassin, and wondered why Tack was still alive and if she should allow him to continue to be. A jump, and Cowl listened to his explanation, her brother knowing that she already knew the truth: Tack had been sent here to reveal a weakness in the defences of Sauros, which was the jaws of a trap. But Cowl wanted the root of it:

The four stood on a viewing balcony overlooking the Tertiary park, where six-metre tall paraceratheriums were browsing. Though these creatures possessed skin like that of elephants and a llama-like appearance, they were, like all the prehistoric fauna of the New London parks, distinct animals in themselves. Watching them tearing down palm fronds to get at the ripening dates, Aconite felt that, of all Heliothane projects, this was the most worthy, and even to be able to recover Earth’s genetic heritage was a gift indeed. It was a shame that, on the whole, time travel was used for more bellicose purposes.

‘How did you manage to get here?’ asked Engineer Goron.

Aconite held up her arm to display the enclosing tor. ‘My brother has yet to completely hard-wire the programming. I simply inverted it, and I will return it to normal to take me back.’

Maxell turned to Goron. ‘Goron, don’t make the mistake of seeing Aconite forever in her brother’s shadow. Her abilities are at least equal to his, even if her intentions are not.’

Cowl hissed at this, his breath liquid against Aconite’s cheek.

‘Did you think I couldn’t plumb your technology? Did you really believe I was the poisonous failure our mother named me?’ asked Aconite.

The tendrils tightened in her head, shooting agony around her skull and down her spine. She knew he wanted her to resist, but she let him have it all:

‘So what is it you have to say?’ asked Goron, eyeing Aconite with suspicion.

‘My brother is not trying to destroy you by altering the time-line — in doing that he might well destroy himself. He has discovered he is the cause of the Nodus. Human history begins with a circular paradox. He has found no DNA-based life before that point, so it can only be caused by him. Now he applies all his energies to stop himself causing the omission paradox that could destroy the entire time-line, and thus his own ancestry.’

The laughter came from the fourth member of this group.

‘Such arrogance,’ said Palleque, shaking his head.

Maxell gave him a look. ‘Something of which we are all guilty. Please continue, Aconite.’

After a moment of puzzlement Aconite went on, ‘My brother is not the greatest danger to you, not in himself.’

‘The torbeast,’ said Palleque. He wasn’t laughing now.

Aconite nodded, ‘Already it is immense and reaches uptime to feed. Cowl cannot entirely prevent it doing this, and already the anomalies it is creating are forcing its uptime substance further down the slope generated from the Nodus.’

‘Then that will be the end of the problem,’ said Palleque.

Aconite stared at him. ‘No. My brother needs the torbeast to drop active tors, so he can sample the future and thus find out how to avoid the omission paradox—to find out if his experiments with the protoseas are having any effect — so he feeds energy to it from his geothermal taps to sustain its position on the slope.’

‘It also serves another purpose for him,’ said Palleque through gritting teeth.

Aconite turned to stare at him. ‘Then you know that, while it serves his purposes, it also feeds.’

Grimacing, Palleque turned away from her.

‘I do not yet see how his pet is the greater problem,’ said Goron.

‘As it feeds, it grows,’ said Aconite. ‘Its structure is more complex than anything else that has ever lived. It can grow organic time machines on itself… do I need to draw you a diagram?’

‘Oh,’ said Goron.

‘What does she mean?’ asked Palleque, turning back.

Maxell offered an explanation. ‘It generates its own vorpal field, and once it reaches sufficient mass that field will be strong enough to enable the beast to shift itself anywhere on the probability slope.’

‘And to feed,’ Aconite added.

‘And what precisely are we talking about here?’ Palleque asked.

‘An eater of worlds—all life, every shift-generated time-line, nothing but torbeast left.’

From her brother, Aconite felt confirmation of this, and understood in an instant that his sending of the beast against the Heliothane served two purposes: to kill his enemy and also to weaken his dangerous pet. The time frame jumped:

‘It is the only way to take it out, completely out,’ said Goron.

This time Aconite and the Engineer walked out together across the floor of one of New London’s construction bays, towards the skeleton of a giant sphere—only this time the shadow of Cowl walked beside them.

‘This was created to extend Heliothane Dominion throughout time. As a base from which to kill every last umbrathant, and finally from which to finish your brother. But perhaps now it can serve a more honourable purpose. I would wish it so.’

‘The bait seems… small.’

‘The largest fish can be hooked with the smallest fly.’

‘Will the Heliothane, as a whole, countenance the loss?’

‘Of this?’ Goron asked, gesturing to the nascent Sauros.

‘Of it all. You’ve spent two centuries on this project, and used up half the wealth of the Dominion. And just to lose it all to destroy a threat most of its citizens have never seen and many could not even comprehend?’