‘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.’
‘To provide necessary nutrition for the tor. And because my brother just does not care.’
‘Why do you collect them here?’ Polly asked, realizing with a lurch that Aconite’s interest in Cowl’s samples might not be as altruistic as she had first thought. Did Aconite really want to save lives, or just to collect tors?
‘One day the torbeast will sink into oblivion, so its temporal link to these will be severed. Then, on that day, wars will be confined to their era.’ Aconite gestured to the tors. ‘Those I recruit will make certain of that, for I will use them to police the ages.’
She dreams of peace, the rule of law, and right good justice. I bet every age has its idiots like her.
Polly did not consider Nandru’s bile worth a response.
The seabed was littered with bones, and above it drifted the occasional negative-buoyancy corpse. Tack noted that most of the bones were from arms, so from that knew that many torbearers had not made it all the way back here intact, yet amid this decay he saw few tors and wondered why. The sheer numbers horrified even him. Recent reports of the megadeath this monster had caused had not brought home to him Cowl’s utterly callous ruthlessness so much as did these sad thousands. Trudging through the skeletal remnants, weighed down by his weaponry, he finally reached a supporting leg of the citadel where it entered the seabed, and observed thick cables running down it into the detritus, then away along the bottom into misted depths. By scanning, he established the leg to be solid basalt. He fired his climbing harpoon upwards. Snaking out a thin line of braided carbon filament, it struck high, bonding with a dull chemical flash. Not bothering to hook the launcher to his harness, for the water was supporting most of his weight, he started its winder and it hauled him up.
Twenty metres from the bottom, and five from the surface, the basalt ended, the rest of the support being fashioned of metal. After scanning, he found it to be aluminium alloy, hollow, and filled with sea water. Tack pressed a catalyser against it and set the device for limited dispersement. He knew it was unlikely that this place had been built without anti-catalytic defences, so adjusting it to an unlimited setting would not dissolve everything made of this same alloy above him, but would only alert Cowl to his presence. Swinging aside on the line, he watched as the thing glowed, then a reaction spread out from it, as of pure magnesium dunked in water. The catalyser dropped away, grey and frangible, and broke up while the reaction continued. The sea grew cloudy with oxides, and pure hydrogen bubbled to the surface. When the hole was a metre wide the reaction abruptly ceased. Tack swung into the cavity and crouched on its lower rim, from where he sent a signal to detach the harpoon, which he rewound into its launcher. Leaning into the hollow of the leg, he fired directly upwards, watched the bonding glow above and hauled himself up again.
Soon he was out of the water and suspended below a domed ceiling. Scanning the metal above, he was momentarily surprised not to detect a sensor net. But then the theory still applied that Cowl had prepared himself for a mass attack rather than a lone assassin. The second catalyser got him through this ceiling into a floor space strewn with ducts, vorpal optics, and the dust and detritus that had fallen through the gridwork floor above. Here he took out one of the tactical nukes and set it for a one-hour delay, then jammed it under a duct, before going up to check the floor above him. He did not have to use another catalyser for access this time as the entire gridwork consisted of movable panels. Climbing through into a wide triangular corridor, he drew both his carbine and his handgun—the carbine set on microwave pulse—and advanced, glancing sideways into rooms that contained generators and silos, tangles of piping, and control consoles and other tech. From his psychological profile, he knew that Cowl would control all this complex from a central point—the nectary of the flower. Now Tack must find that point and the easiest way to do that was to get someone to tell him. Luck was with him, but not with the two Umbrathane he discovered working on a torpedo-shaped motor located under the floor panels.