Cowl dumped him on the gridwork floor, then seemed to lose interest in him for the moment—walking over to a vorpal control and pressing his hand into its oblate shimmering surface. Tack peered down at his chest and watched blood trickling out. No artery had been severed so a welcome death would not come that way. Perhaps he could press a finger in, locate such an artery… but the thought dispersed like mist almost as soon as it arose. Instead he scanned his surroundings.
There were closed doors all around, but he doubted he could ever manage to reach them, let alone open one. Nearby the floor sloped down to some sort of disposal tunnel cut down into darkness. He stared at this, confused by the conflicting impulses within him. The possibility of escape arose, but dispersed again. Then Cowl was back, standing over him, in one hand holding two objects: the tactical nukes.
‘They thought to kill me with you?’
The voice was sibilant and seemed to issue from the air around the dark being. Then Cowl came forward in a movement so fast it deceived the eye, closed a hand around Tack’s throat and jerked him upright. Tack groaned in an agony of grating bones and bruised organs. Glancing down, he saw the two nukes bouncing across the floor, their casings breaking open. Looking up again, he watched Cowl’s face before him, glistening black, and utterly smooth until a dividing line appeared in it. Then the cowl split, and hinged open at either side, to reveal the nightmare underneath.
The black eyes were lidless, and a double set of mandibles opened before a mouth containing rows of spadelike teeth. Between mouth and eyes, other organs spilled hair-thin tentacles, small grasping spatulae, and sliding scales of chitin briefly revealing red cavities and other soft, unidentifiable things that quivered eagerly.
Tack tried to pull away, but he might as well have been fighting a moving iron statue. The horror pulled him closer, turned his head aside, and came down on the side of his face. He felt the mandibles sawing into his neck and cheek. With a sharp popping and grinding, something forced its way into his ear, adding a new hurt to the ever-growing waves of pain surging through his body. He screamed and tried again to struggle, but some hard probe hit a nerve, rolling out such incandescent agony that his arms and legs were paralysed. Tack screamed repeatedly until something ripped into the back of his neck and connected to his interface plug, switching off that ability in him. Then the horror only increased as Tack felt his mind being taken apart, and each part of it thoroughly scrutinized.
Memory after memory rose up for Cowl’s inspection. Tack relived the moment of first awareness: a child with the mind of a killer and a hard-wired loyalty. Mission after mission was replayed: the killings, the frame-ups, the interrogations and beatings, but to Cowl they seemed worth only a brief scan. All events concerning the tor were scrutinized thoroughly, however, and Tack sensed Cowl’s acid amusement over all that had occurred just before Tack’s first shift back in time. As this forensic study continued, Tack felt Cowl begin delving through his U-gov programming, and the subsequent Heliothane programming: ripping great holes through them, dumping large portions of them as irrelevant, studying some sections and breaking them down into their smallest elements.
Traveller had initially beaten him into insensibility, this and subsequent events Cowl watched very closely. Flashes of black humour invaded Tack’s consciousness as some of the lies he had been fed were revealed. Tack began to see how he had been cunningly primed for this mission right from the beginning. How blackly painted were the Umbrathane and Cowl, and how saintly the Heliothane in their mission to save the world. A flare of anger shot through to Tack when the destruction of Pig City was observed. And then Saphothere’s subsequent history lecture was turned on its head as Tack absorbed Cowl’s viewpoint: the Heliothane pushing for dominance over the independent Umbrathane polities; Cowl being forced to use his immense abilities in the service of the Heliothane, under threat of being destroyed because of his genetic variance, even though that rendered him physically and mentally superior to all Heliothane themselves; Cowl then giving the Umbrathane an escape route; and his own escape to beyond the Nodus. But Tack did not understand the dark being’s hollow laughter in reaction to the Heliothane assertion mat he was trying to eliminate human history.
Later, in Sauros, Cowl replayed every conversation, every image; gathering useful data for attack, for a means to crush. In New London the same, where Tack felt the last of Pedagogue’s programming of him being pulled out by its roots and studied intensively. One conversation between Tack and Saphothere particularly held Cowl’s interest:
‘… Tap and wormhole are inextricably linked and neither, once created, can be turned off. There is, in fact, no physical means of turning off the sun tap as the antigravity fields that sustain its position also focus the beam—as I mentioned—but if you did, the wormhole would collapse catastrophically and Sauros would be obliterated by the feedback. Also, if the wormhole was independently collapsed, the energy surge would vaporize New London. The project was therefore a total commitment.’
Cowl then spent an age with the image of Maxell before angrily dropping it.
Back in Sauros Cowl observed the torbeast invade from the other side.
Throughout all this the progressively ravaged elements of Tack’s mind dropped back into some mental abyss, devoid of motive beyond those any human is naturally born with, and devoid of programming. There they reconnected—first with the imperatives of survival, then with the untainted yearning for true freedom.
Subliminally Tack felt a loop generated as Cowl found something important in a conversation and viewed it again and again.
Palleque: ‘Three hours earlier and Cowl would have really fucked us over. The torbeast won’t be getting through now we’re up to power again.’
Saphothere: ‘The push?’
Palleque: ‘Yeah. Like riding the top of a fountain and everything gets scrambled. The constant energy feed can’t be switched, so the capacitors have to be drained to the limit before we can shut off and stabilize. Took us an hour this time before we could even get the defence fields back up.’
Then Cowl’s vicious amusement at Saphothere’s reply: ‘I don’t think I need to hear any more of this.’
Tack’s foot suddenly hit the floor, and pain howled up from his broken ankle, but he was too physically drained even to scream. He tumbled over on his side, the taste of blood in his mouth, as Cowl turned away, his face closing. On some unconscious level Tack realized the being now had what it wanted, as it left Tack’s mind to fall like snow through darkness.
Escape was now an instinctive goal for Tack, where previously his programming had not allowed it. He pushed himself up onto one elbow, the inside of his head feeling sand-blasted and nothing making any sense. With blurred vision he observed that Cowl was back at his vorpal control, the air above which shimmered and split on a nightmarish living landscape. Operating on a wholly animal level, Tack dragged himself backwards, reached the slope in the floor and stared down at the tunnel. Pushing himself over the edge, he immediately slid down its frictionless surface, grunting with pain as his shoulder hit the rim of the tunnel and he plummeted into it. A brief descent through darkness opened into bright yellow light, and the golden glitter of the sea below. As Tack fell, he bounced on a ledge and groped for purchase, but found none and went over, finally hitting the sea flat on. The sharp pain in his chest he recognized as a rib penetrating his lung. Sinking, he had no breath to hold, so breathed sea water instead. His only coherent thought as he drowned was triumphant: