‘Stop or I shoot!’
Immediately Polly panicked. Always, in films and interactives, people could run while others were shooting at them and survive. This was reality—the reality of a heavy slug slamming into her back, snapping her spine before smashing through her. She stopped and turned slowly, her hands in the air. In that moment it seemed to her that she had tried all she could, but got nowhere. She allowed some internal grip to relax and that freed the tension which networked her body from the alien object on her arm.
As the heavy stood with revolver aimed, and growing confusion on his face. Polly could see the vastness accumulating behind him—a black rolling sea and endless grey sky.
‘Come back!’ the man shouted, and his revolver boomed, its sound oddly distorted and echoey, the bullet an ablating red streak over fading air. Then he was gone, the whole world was gone, and Polly was falling endlessly through dark and cold. She screamed, but the sound, along with her breath, was sucked away.
5
Astolere:
It is quite probable that the Umbrathane fleet remains somewhere in the Jovian system. Even I know that the energy requirement to displace them out of it would have been detected. Their fleet is a large imponderable, and Heliothane forces remain on alert. Saphothere’s negotiations with the two Umbrathane leaders have gone surprisingly well. It seems that the particular faction comprising the ground assault force is always used in such risky missions because it is one whose beliefs are not so harsh as those of the Umbrathane majority. Apparently those leaders are prepared to accept imprisonment on Ganymede rather than face obliteration. Meanwhile I must return to the facility and supervise the temporary shutdown of Cowl’s research program. I have to say that this is something about which I feel trepidation, especially when I tell the preterhuman himself that the torbeast (his name for it, and mountainous it is—other staff at the facility have jokily named it ‘Jabberwock’, though I’ve yet to understand the humour) must be vented out on the surface of Callisto.
Through the foliage above him Tack could see that the sky was a cloudless pale blue. A new day, in this unfamiliar time, had begun. Moving his arm up out of the covering fold of his heat sheet, he checked the time and saw that he had slept a further two hours since his second spell of watch ended. Traveller was moving about the campsite, but Tack did not want to turn over yet to see what the man was doing. He wanted to keep still for a little longer and get a chance to contemplate what he had thus far learnt.
Traveller wanted the tor that was growing on Tack’s arm as, somehow, this device would enable his kind to get to a creature called Cowl, who was trying to destroy the entirety of human history. There were so many holes in that explanation, and so many questions to ask, Tack could not even think of where to begin. The simple fact of time travel being a reality raised an insuperable wall of questions. However, lying there, Tack realized there was one question he had yet to ask: to where, or rather when, was Traveller taking him?
When Tack smelt coffee brewing and the mouth-watering aroma of roasting meat, he finally flipped back his sheet and sat up. He saw Traveller squatting by the fire and poking at it with a stick. A coffee pot rested on the hot embers, with skewered next to it the gutted body of a small animal.
Traveller gestured at the carcass with his stick. ‘Wild pig. I’m surprised the racket didn’t wake you.’
Tack looked at him queryingly.
‘Something got its mother back in there.’ He gestured with his thumb into the deeper forest. ‘This one was hiding in bushes nearby.’
‘Why didn’t you bring the mother?’
‘Not much left of her. Cave lion, I think. Best not to remove what was left of its kill in case it comes back for more of it.’
As Tack absorbed this, he noticed that Traveller’s eyes had returned to that weird orange colour and that he seemed to possess more energy this morning than on the night before. Transferring his attention to the roasting flesh, he discovered in himself a touch of squeamishness, as the only meat he had ever eaten had come out of numerous layers of plastic—disassociated from its true source. He stood up then and moved away from the fire to urinate behind a tree. When he returned he found his squeamishness disappearing under the onslaught of growing hunger. Soon he found himself stuffing greasy roast pork into his mouth.
‘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.