‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked eventually, cleaning his hands in the snow.
Traveller stared at him through the steam rising off his cup — his eyes now demonic. ‘If you look upon time as a road, then in the wrong direction at present. We need you back in New London, where we have the technology to ensure the survival of your nascent tor. But that thing embedded in your wrist attracts the notice of Cowl’s particularly nasty pet and it is, on our time, very active in proximity to your… natal time.’ Traveller paused, his expression pained. ‘I find your language particularly unsuited to any sensible discussion of time travel.’
‘How do you finally intend to get back to this New London?’ Tack asked, realizing he must keep doggedly to just one line of thought at a time, for every answer that Traveller gave him promulgated a whole new set of questions.
‘We have an outpost called Sauros based in the Mesozoic, and between it and New London, a sub-temporal wormhole—a time tunnel.’
Tack sipped his coffee and considered. ‘Mesozoic?’
Traveller grinned over his coffee. ‘Think of dinosaurs,’ he said. ‘But we have some trips yet to make to get there. I was already tired before the one we just made, so I possessed only enough energy for limited symbiosis with the mantisal. That means we only managed about a million years. This next jump should take us back at least fifteen million.’
Tack felt his mouth go dry and suddenly, despite the hot coffee, he felt cold. With a hand that trembled only a little he placed his cup on the ground, took up his heat sheet and draped it around his shoulders.
‘And this is the coldest it will be for us,’ Traveller added. ‘From now on things start getting hotter—in more than the literal sense, too.’
Tack waited for the punchline.
Traveller gestured about them. ‘This is about as restful as it gets. Between us and Sauros lie about eighty million years of appetite.’ Traveller stood up and gestured meaningfully to the backpack. Tack finished his coffee and folded the cup, inserting it into a compartment inside the coffee pot. This and the heat sheets went into the pack, which Tack then shouldered. As they emerged from the trees, Tack noticed dry grass showing through where the snow had melted away. Far to his right he saw a huge elephantine shape standing still as a rock before it turned back into the trees.
‘Mammoth,’ he breathed.
‘Mastodon, actually,’ Traveller corrected him. ‘Mammoths customarily move around in family groups.’ He paused and studied the spot where the creature had disappeared. ‘Though there are the rogue males, of course.’ With that he set off, quickly following their own tracks in the snow, back to where they had disembarked from the mantisal. Tack hurried along behind, scanning all about himself for something significant, since he felt sure this was a time—if not place—that he would never see again. But all he saw here was snowy grassland and forest, and earlier that one enigmatic shape, before the mantisal folded out of thin air before them, and they climbed aboard.
The nightmare darkness receded into memory and it seemed she had been in this forest for an age, with nothing to accompany her but the sounds of birds and the wind in the trees. But now she heard bells tinkling, the murmur of conversation and an occasional burst of laughter. Somewhere nearby there were people, and in Polly’s mind that meant the possibility of food, for she was racked with a hunger that had already compelled her to chew and swallow a handful of acorns before vomiting up the whole bitter mess. Drawing hard on her second hunger-quelling cigarette, she then discarded it and moved on eagerly. Pushing through the bracken below towering trees, she soon lost any sense of where the sound was coming from and began flailing forward in a panic, then stumbled down a slope onto her knees. Before her, like an epiphany in the damp leaf-litter, grew a single yellowish-white toadstool. She reached out for it.
What the hell do you think you are doing?
‘I’m hungry,’ Polly replied, her mouth still full of nauseating bitterness.
Well, that would certainly cure any future hunger. Muse has it listed as Amanita virosa or the Destroying Angel. I thought it was a death cap, but that’s only a small disagreement of memory and acquired memory. Either way the results would eventually be the same.
‘You don’t really know that,’ said Polly, reluctant to deny herself this potential snack.
Muse 184 has a hundred terabytes of reference, remember. I’m living in its damned RAM, so I’m not taking up any space. Do you know what that means?
‘No… no I don’t.’
Put it this way, it knows more than any single human is ever likely to know on any subject you could think of. And being as its purpose is military, it particularly has everything in here you’d want to know about poisons and other causes of death. You want me to detail what will happen to you if you eat that thing?
‘No, I don’t need that.’ Polly stood up and moved off, irritably kicking the toadstool to snowy fragments across the leaf litter as she went.
It’s that damned scale on your arm. By my clock you ate four tins of pilchards and half a loaf of bread only six hours ago on that boat. It must be sucking you dry somehow. They knew it was parasitic… alive in its limited way.
‘Why do you call it a scale?’
Where it came from, my little slot machine. You saw the…creature that killed me? Well that thing on your arm is a scale from its back—if back it had.
‘You said something about all this, but nothing made sense then.’
What’s to tell? We raided a suicide bombers’ school in Kazakhstan, and that creature hit at the same time. Fucking chaos. It chewed four of them down, and shed that thing on your arm in the process. It was just one of many arranged like scales on its surfaces, though whatever the creature is, we never saw enough of it to… just call it a monster, something vast from another place.
‘What other place?’
I haven’t got a clue.
Polly looked around her. There, the bells again… somewhere over that way.
‘What happened then?’ she asked.
One of the Binpots wanted to put it on his arm. Leibnitz put a clip into him before he got a chance, then the monster hit Leibnitz and Smith. I bagged the scale and ran with it—I knew it was important — and Patak and the others covered me. The monster took him when we got back to HQ. Next thing the last of us were in a U-gov facility with the big brains talking temporal anomalies. I was interrogated under VR with drugs I’d never heard of, then was sat out in a compound with the rest as bait for the… monster. Wired up like lab rats, we were. I knew it wanted me, see, from the moment I killed that guy who had been about to put the scale on himself, like you did. It attacked — chaos again. I was able to escape, grabbing the scale and some other tech as I went. The scale tried to get me to put it on, but it left me alone when I wrapped the fucking thing in plastique…
Polly found herself standing at the edge of a rough track. Distantly she could again hear the tinkling of bells, and that muted conversation and laughter.
‘But what is it? What’s it for?’
Christ knows. But I heard enough then to know that somehow time travel was involved, and that the monster it came from hunts through time, taking victims that are somehow irrelevant to the future. You know, if that thing hadn’t attacked when it did, we would have still been around in an area that was subsequently carpet-bombed. I’ve thought about this a lot. I think it was coming to take dead men before they died.