Cowl

Cowl By Neal Asher

1

Engineer Goron:

From what I have learnt from the two survivors, we have to find another way to attack Cowl. The first of the group took with them a fusion and displacement generator to punch through into interspace to provide an energy tap. This was so subsequent travellers could arrive accurately at the same location — the inaccuracy of time travel increasing proportionally to the temporal distance from a suitable energy source. In this they succeeded. But being able to transport only a few personnel and small amounts of equipment on each trip, it still took them too long to establish a base. The preterhuman detected the tap and sent his pet — now grown into something titanic. It killed them on Earth and in interspace as they fled. Ate them alive.

A storm was opening white-hot cracks in the basalt sky and soon the rain would be etching all exposed metal. Polly knew she should get undercover, as such acidic downpours made all but synthetic clothing degrade to the strength of wet blotting paper, caused hair to fall out and laid rashes across a person’s scalp. After grinding out her cigarette, she pulled her rain film from its cigar-sized cartridge and suddenly felt a loneliness the vodka had failed to dispel. It was at times like this that she most missed Marjae: they would have headed back to the flat to split a block of Moroccan, drink coffee and jaw away the evening before setting out for the night trade.

When Polly had lost her virginity at the age of eleven, her mother, a Christian Scientist, spent the next year trying to beat the sin out of her. At the age of twelve Polly spent several months stealing all the money she could without arousing suspicion, packed her rucksack with portable valuables and left her mother lying on the repro lino with an antique stainless-steel vegetable knife in her groin and the instruction to pray for stitches. As far as she was concerned she’d never really had a mother and the only person she valued any more than herself had been Marjae. But now there was only shadow.

With her rain film belling out around her and her hood up, Polly headed back through streets already turning slick with a cloudy drizzle. Every now and again a gust of wind wafted the smell of sulphur dioxide from where the acid in the falling rain reacted with discarded Coke cans or other garbage. In a few minutes she reached the door to her tenement, fumbled her keycard into its slot, then shouldered the door open. In the cold light cast by everlasting bulbs she climbed the stairs with her hand ready on the small taser in her handbag. She’d been rolled in here before and she wasn’t going to let it happen again. Reaching the plastic door to her flat, she checked behind her before using the card again and entering.

‘Lights,’ she said, quickly closing the door behind her. The lights flickered on just in time to reveal the man in Task Force fatigues as he stepped up close to her and slammed her back against the door.

‘Nandru!’ She was more surprised than scared, but that soon changed.

‘You touch it, you know, and it calls to you… calls to you all the time,’ he hissed, his breath rank, his eyes not tracking properly.

‘Nandru… what is it?’

His hair was filthy and there was a week’s stubble on his chin. He looked out of it—on something.

‘But they are U-gov—straight out of Brussels,’ he said. ‘Vat grown, I’d bet.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Polly said.

‘You know what it means to be hunted?’ he snarled.

She shook her head.

He gestured with the gun as if for emphasis, but when he did so, Polly flinched. This wasn’t his usual UN-issue stunner, nor was it hardware commonly found on the streets. Polly recognized the weapon as a favourite in the latest smash-em-up VR interactives: it was a MOG 5, a weapon that fired depleted uranium bullets, seeker rounds, and mini high-yield grenades capable of turning a house to pebble-sized rubble—if the interactives, the ints, were to be believed.

‘Do you know?’ he yelled.

Polly stared at his bloodshot eyes and ravaged face, then lowered her gaze to the cluster of barrels he was waving under her chin. She carefully reached out and pushed him away, then, unhooking her handbag, stepped past him to the sofa, where she sat down. She found her lighter and cigarettes, lit up and blew a plume of smoke.

‘Why don’t you tell me?’ she said, slurring only a little despite the vodka she’d been downing all evening.

He gestured with the miniature Gatling barrels towards the window—streaked now with neon-lit rain, the colours changing every second as the bar sign across the street went through its sequence. Walking over to the pane, he stood silhouetted against it for a moment.

‘It’s all shit,’ he said. ‘If it’s hunting you, you’re nothing—you don’t mean anything to the future. You’re just a taste, a scrap of protein, and there’s nothing you can do—nothing. Christ, we’re just fucking morsels to it, and it can have us any time it likes. It’s going to have me. It knows it. I know it. Just a game to it.’

Still by the window, he leant his shoulder against the frame, the gun resting in the crook of his right arm. With his left hand he reached out and smeared the condensation on the glass — it was hot in her flat—and he sighed, suddenly looking very tired. This had to be about Marjae.

Because of their trade, she and Polly had received the World Health download for free. Polly had watched it during an evening taken off to allow the prescribed drugs she was taking to clear up her latest recurrence of herpes—contracted before Marjae had finished training her in the hygiene discipline of their trade. The most recent and rugged HIV caused New AIDS, the download had informed her. This particular bug could survive outside the human body for as long as an hour and could be passed on with the same ease as hepatitis A. Public toilets came under stringent health restrictions and in some levels of society it was already fashionable to wear masks outside the home. On the street there was a rumour that the virus was able to survive in the proboscis of a mosquito and that this information had been suppressed. It wasn’t a new rumour. Marjae was found to be HIV positive during her monthly test a year after they’d laughed at that download—presented by a supercilious doctor program—and they’d been certain that they were not stupid enough to end up infected. She died from one of the pneumonias a year after that. PS 24 probably, as that was the one rife at the time. It was Marjae, Polly remembered, who had observed, ‘The man said it’s like the wars, y’know? We’re getting wise enough to number ‘em.’

Marjae: lying skeletal on a bed in the confinement hospital. One last little chat while she lay with the euthanizer in her lap, a finger poised over the button. Polly’s replies muffled by the surgical mask she wore.

‘It ain’t easy any more. It’ll kill you. Get out. Get out while you can.’

Her finger rattled on the button until a little red light came on, and the killing drugs shot through the pipes to her catheter. Ten minutes later she was asleep, ten minutes after that she was dead and, Polly realized as she left the hospital, in another half-hour Marjae would be in the incinerator. Those hospitals had a high turnover and U-gov efficiency targets to meet.

When Marjae euthanized, Nandru had been out with Task Force, cauterizing the latest haemorrhage of fanaticism spreading from oil wells run dry. He must blame her for his sister’s death. Polly decided she needed something a little stronger to get her through whatever was coming. From the back of her cigarette packet she pulled her last H-patch, stripped off the backing and pressed it into the crook of her arm.

‘Look… I’m sorry about Marjae,’ she said.

He turned from the window and stared at her in confused bewilderment, then his expression sharpened when he saw what she was doing.