‘It has to be done.’
Cowl’s anger was like hot wires burning inside her skull. He was going to kill her with this and, if he did not, he would kill her later.
The tor called to everyone in the Antarctic research facility, but only Aconite intended to respond to that call. Palleque glared at the thing, but then he had more reason to hate its source than anyone else.
‘Here, I have a present,’ he said, turning to her and holding out a small glass cylinder containing white crystals. ‘We found it on Mars, in strata a billion years old, and after that on every other solid planet in the solar system, in rock of the same age.’
‘What is it?’
‘You wondered why I laughed when you said Cowl was the cause of the Nodus.’ He gestured at the cylinder she now held. ‘There were hundreds of theories on the source of that, until our interstellar probe discovered the same substance on a dead world orbiting the red dwarf, Proxima Centauri.’
‘You still haven’t told me what it is.’
‘Crystalline DNA in a protein matrix. As soon as it hits liquid water, it becomes active. In about a million years you’ve got metazoan life—and the rest is history, as they say. In the end, only one theory fits the facts.’
‘Seeding.’
Cowl released his hold and Aconite dropped to her knees, blood running from her ear and glistening over the abrasions around her throat. She glared up at her brother and tested the thick ceramal cuffs that bound her wrists and ankles.
‘How many more do you think I’d let you kill?’ she spat.
Cowl tilted his head, but said nothing. Abruptly he spun round and headed for his vorpal controls. After a moment he uttered a shriek of rage.
In the sky, the spectral display of the torbeast juddered and bled away as, unnoticed, a raft drew into the citadel’s shadow. With the energy feed severed at Sauros, a backlash rippled downtime from the city, taking no time at all, and for ever. Cowl withdrew his sharp fingers from the vorpal ovoid, and stepped back, turning his head to see lightning flashing between temporal capacitors and transformers. The sea boiled as safety trips attempted to divert the surge into the water. It was like trying to hold together a broken dam with Sellotape. Under the sea flare after flare ignited then died to dull red, stepping out in tens then hundreds then thousands towards the horizon, as geothermal generators vaporized and melted surrounding rock. Shortly after, explosions, as from depth charges, followed the same course. Inside the citadel darkness was lit up by machinery fires, then dispelled when auxiliary generators cut in. Emergency lights came on all over the structure, and Umbrathane ventured from their places of safety.
Clinging to the ledge, in the shadow of the out-flowering walls of the citadel above, Tack gazed at the other occupants and saw how they had accumulated. The torbearer in armour had been the first, his weight dropping him directly down from the chute mouth and, with whatever strength had remained to him, he had driven his dagger into a crevice where the ledge joined the pillar. There he must have died, for Aconite had not rescued him, and over time the rust from his armour had stuck him to the ledge. After him had come others: someone wearing a long robe had fallen, the material of which had snagged on one of the knight’s greaves; arm bones had accumulated around these two, and other skeletons had become stuck to the ledge with the adipocere of decay. Occasional ornaments gleamed and weapons rusted. Tack noted a burnt-out Heliothane carbine resting against a ribcage enclosed in parchment skin, the weapon’s black metal and plastic partially melted and turned grey with salt, and wondered about the story behind that. Then, keeping his foot firm against the adhesive mine, he raised the harpoon launcher he had taken from Aconite’s armoury and fired upwards.
With the usual chemical flash, the head of the harpoon bonded to the upper lip of the chute, and after detaching the adhesive mine Tack set the winder spinning to haul him up into the chute’s mouth. Here he stuck the mine to the floor of the chute to give himself a foothold, before detaching the harpoon and winding it all the way back into its launcher. He then gazed up into darkness.
Having little clear memory of his own descent down this pipe, Tack had consulted Nandru and was told it ran in a hundred-metre arc down from Cowl’s spherical control centre. Easy enough to climb, but not yet—he waited.
The sky was still dark with the presence of that thing and the storm it had induced. Beyond the sheltering loom of the citadel, Tack observed the dusty snowstorm of the crystalline substance hazing the surface of the sea and somehow making the waves sluggish. Within a few minutes he spotted Nandru-Wasp hurtling towards him from the direction of Aconite’s home, the robot clutching Polly underneath it like a stolen grub. Finally Tack turned and fired up into darkness, observing the glow of chemical bonding twenty metres above him. Winding the line in taut, he detached the mine and hooked it onto the shoulder strap of the weapons harness he had also acquired. There were three of these devices which, on their contact surfaces, possessed a layer of microscopic hairs much like those found on a gecko’s foot. Unfortunately, unlike the lizard’s foot, the mines were not made for repeated use and after a time would lose their adhesive quality. Hence three of them were needed for this climb. Tack had no intention of using them to blow up anything.
Nandru-Wasp flew into the shadow of the citadel, then descended to hover by the mouth of the chute. Polly, clasped firmly underneath the robot by its four spiky legs, brushed white powder from her face and eyes, before reaching out a hand to Tack. Standing with his boot on the chute’s rim, Tack used the winder’s friction control to allow himself enough slack to lean out and grasp her forearm.
‘Do you have her?’ Nandru asked. ‘I don’t want to be premature in letting her go.’
‘I have her,’ Tack replied tightly.
Nandru-Wasp released his hold, then shot up into the air with the sudden lightening in weight. Polly leapt inwards, her feet coming down on the chute’s lip, and her other hand clutching at Tack’s weapons harness.
‘OK?’ he asked.
‘OK,’ she replied.
Tack started the winder hauling them up the slope. Because of the risks he would rather have done this alone, but he just did not have the will to push Polly away. The thought of being separated from her aroused in him a feeling he had not often experienced but easily recognized. But this was a fear of a different kind.
Reaching the attachment point of the harpoon, Tack located two of the adhesive mines to serve as footholds for both himself and Polly. Then he heard a scrabbling and droning noise in the chute’s throat as Nandru-Wasp tried to find purchase there. He observed the robot finally gain a foothold, then with its four spiked legs begin to advance up the pipe. It covered four metres before, with a screeching of metal being peeled up by its foot spikes, it slid back down. This had been no part of any plan.
‘Stay there, Nandru—the noise you’re making might carry above,’ he whispered urgently.
Nandru managed to drive his spikes into the metal and hold his position. Tack detached the harpoon and fired it further up the slope again.
Cowl returned from studying his vorpal controls, utterly unreadable. Aconite glanced across to where Makali stood, then scanned around the chamber to where the woman’s pet killers were positioned. Having lost the source of his power to manipulate time inside this sphere, Cowl’s paranoia was showing. Aconite then glanced over at the chute down which Cowl had been tossing human remains for the best part of a century. With the manacles around her wrists and ankles she stood no chance of reaching that escape route, but she was sure she had heard something…