Cowl by Neal Asher

hold of him and dragged him down against the hard bones of the mantisal. Tack stared at the colour, and took it in like a man starved. That was it about the between place: no colour at all. For a moment longer, though, everything seemed unreal,
and Tack noticed Traveller warily scanning their surroundings. Then the man shifted one hand inside a mantis eye and they completely arrived.
    â€˜Out. Out now,’ said Traveller, withdrawing both his hands from the two spheres.
    Tack grabbed up the pack and pulled himself towards the gap through which he had entered the mantisal. He fell and, bracing himself for impact, was grateful to drop into a snowdrift. As he pulled himself out of this, brushing it from his ruined coat, Traveller dropped into a squat on some grassy ground nearby, which was only lightly dusted with snow, then stood upright. Tack glanced up at the mantisal and, seeing it dropping back into that ineffable dimension, quickly averted his gaze. When he turned back it was gone and all that remained was the sky, punctuated by the occasional bird silhouette. He took up the backpack, slung it on and turned to Traveller.
    The strange man’s face was lined with fatigue, and Tack noticed that his eyes were now brownish-gold in colour, as if dulled by the extent of his weariness.
    â€˜Over there,’ Traveller said, pointing to a distant line of dense forest, and they began trudging in that direction. After a moment he went on, ‘You’re not curious about where, or rather when , we have come?’
    Tack stared at him dumbly.
    â€˜Ah,’ said Traveller. ‘You may speak.’
    â€˜I am curious,’ admitted Tack, now free to speak again.
    â€˜Welcome to the early Pleistocene,’ said Traveller, gesturing about himself with both hands. ‘Neanderthal man is dominant at present, but humans like yourself are appearing, and it will only be another hundred thousand years before their ascendence. The belief, in your time, was that your people drove the Neanderthals to extinction. The truth is that a disease crossed a species boundary, contracted from the animals they hunted as food, and killed most of them off. Many of those who survived mated with your own kind and their DNA still exists even in my time.’
    How very interesting , thought Tack, knowing that to voice such a thought would probably result in him getting a beating. He looked around and instantly realized that he was in no place that he knew, for in his lifetime he had never seen a landscape completely untouched by the works of man. Perhaps there had been such places in those portions of the Antarctic still not inhabited in his own era, but someone like himself did not get to travel there—his business usually involving very close contact with other human life, however briefly, not the shunning of it.

    Traveller paused for a second to kick at a pile of dung before moving on. ‘Mammoth, probably. I brought us down in an interglacial period, so they’ve moved up while the ice sheet retreated. Some big animals around in this time—we definitely don’t want to run into any of the predators.’
    Tack noted the massive footprints in the snow, and suddenly it felt as if a huge emotional backlog had caught up with him. That the girl had dragged him back in time he had figured with stolid logic—which was understandable since U-gov programmed its killers for dispassion. Now he experienced a surge of emotion that flipped his stomach over and made the world grow vast around him. Mammoth , he remembered from his early schooling. Smilodons … As they walked, he turned away from Traveller to scrub tears from his eyes. Then, his voice catching, he brought the subject back to their immediate circumstances, ‘Is that mantisal thing alive?’
    Without looking round, Traveller said, ‘It is alive in the only way that matters.’
    â€˜I don’t understand …’
    â€˜Vorpal energy,’