Shadow of the Scorpion

chest and coming out of his mouth as a battle cry. As she caught him he pressed his palm-top against her stomach.

'Blam!'

'I take it I've been U-capped,' she observed, swinging him round, then dumping him on his feet.

'He's blown up loads more Prador!' Ian informed her.

She gave him a wry look. 'There's nothing good about killing,' she observed.

'Crab paste!' he exclaimed.

'I think I'm going to have to check what news services you're using, Ian.'

'Cormac,' he reminded her.

She grimaced. 'Yes, Cormac—it slipped my mind.'

He held her hand as they walked down to the gravcar. It was okay to do that here where only the AI who kept watch over all these bones could see them. Shortly they climbed into the car and were airborne.

He considered for a moment what to say, then asked, 'Isn't the Fossil Gene Project a waste of resources?'

'Research of any kind is never a waste even in the most dire circumstances,' she replied, then allowed him a moment to check on his p-top the meaning of 'dire.' 'However, though our funding here has been much reduced because of the war, we are allowed to continue because our research might have some war application.'

'Make dinosaurs to fight the Prador,' he suggested, this idea immediately turning into a lurid fantasy. Imagine Jebel riding a T-rex into battle against the crabs!

'No, I'm talking about the possible uses of some coding sequences in the creation of certain viruses.'

'Oh, biological warfare,' he said, disappointed. 'Aren't they difficult to off that way?'

'They are difficult to 'off' in many ways, excepting Jebel's particular speciality.'

Abruptly she turned the car, so it tilted over, swinging round in a wide circle, and she peered past him towards the ground. He looked in the same direction and saw something down there, perambulating across the green. It appeared big, its metal back segmented. As they flew above it, it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky. A giant iron scorpion.

'What's that?' he asked, supposing it some excavating machine controlled by the AI.

With a frown his mother replied, 'War drone,' then put the gravcar back on course and took them away. Cormac tried to stand and look back, but his mother grabbed his shoulder and pulled him down.

'Behave yourself or I'll put the child safeties back on.'

A war drone!

Ian Cormac behaved himself.

The campsite beside the lake was mostly occupied by those here for the fishing. Their own accommodation was a bubble house of the kind used by many who were conducting a slow exploration of Earth. You bought the house and outfitted it as you wished, but rented the big AG lifter to take you from location to location. While they had been away, more bubble houses had arrived and one other was in the process of departing—the enormous lifter closing its great earwig claws around the compact residence while the service pipes, cables and optics retracted into their posts. As his mother brought the gravcar down, the lifter took that house into the sky, drifting slowly out over the lake on AG. This time, rather than land the gravcar beside the house, she drove it into the carport, and upon landing sent the instruction for the floor clamp to engage.

'Are we going?' he asked.

'We certainly are,' his mother replied.

As they clambered out of the car he peered at some damage on his door and wondered when that had happened, and if he might be blamed, then hurried after his mother when she shouted for him.

Two hours later Cormac was playing with his cybernetic dinosaur when an AG lifter arrived for their home. As he abandoned his toy and walked over to the sloping windows to watch the process, he heard a strange intermittent sound which he tentatively identified as sobbing, but even then he could not be sure, because it was drowned out by the racket of service disengagement and the sounds of the lifter's clamps clonking into place around the house. Soon the house was airborne and, gazing beyond the campsite, he was sure he saw the war drone again, heading in. A hand closed on his shoulder. He looked up at his mother who now wore an old-style pair of sunglasses.

'Why are we going?' he asked.

'I've done enough here for now—the project won't need me for a while,' she replied. Then turning to gaze down at him she added, 'Cormac,' and the name seemed laden with meaning at that moment.

'Where are we going?' he asked.

'Back home.'

Cormac grimaced to himself. 'Back home' usually meant a return to his schooling, and suddenly the idea of sitting around watching his mother dig up fossil bones became attractive.

'Do we have to?'

'I'm very much afraid that we do,' she replied. 'I think we are going to need to be somewhere familiar.'

* * *

As Cormac lay on his bunk with his hands behind his head, fingers interlaced, he felt the ship surface into the real—a horrible twisting sensation throughout his body and a momentary but utterly bewildering distortion of his perception—but like the three recruits he was bunking with, he just pretended it was no bother. They were ECS regulars who had gone through a year of tough intensive training, and a little perceptual displacement shouldn't be a problem.

Carl Thrace, a lean man with cropped blond hair, elf-sculpt ears and slanting dark-blue eyes, put aside his pulse-rifle, which he had been tinkering with yet again, then picked up the room remote and used it to turn on their screen. Revealed against the black of space was a planet utterly swathed in pearly cloud, a debris ring encircling it. Distantly, in that ring, ships could be seen, about which occurred the occasional flashes of either detonations or particle cannons firing.

'I thought Hagren was Earthlike?' said Yallow N'gar—a woman with a boosted musculature, semi- chameleodapt skin and hair in the usual military crop. The skin of her face partially mirroring the colour of her uniform collar and her own hair, she turned to the Golem Olkennon, who wore the not very convincing emulation of a grey-haired matron.

Olkennon focused on Cormac. 'You tell them, since it seems you are the only one who has bothered to do any research on our destination.'

Damn, teacher's pet, thought Cormac. But it was true that the others hadn't seemed inclined to find anything out about this world. Carl's obsession had, in the two years Cormac had known him, always been weapons technology, and he looked set to become a specialist in that area. Yallow just seemed intent on becoming the best groundside fighting grunt possible, hence her skin adaptation. Neither of them seemed to show an interest in anything outside of their narrow focus.

'It was Earthlike,' said Cormac, 'though point seven gravity and with three-quarters of its surface being landmass. There's a native ecology under a hundred-year preservation and study order—'

Carl let out a snort of mirth at that because, ever since the first runcible had gone online, the preservation of ecologies had become something of a joke. Instantaneous travel between worlds also meant the instantaneous transference of all sorts of life forms. Many people fought to preserve and record, down to the molecular/genetic level, alien forms on alien worlds. In some cases they were fighting a losing battle when stronger alien or terran forms were introduced, in other cases those forms they were studying became the invaders elsewhere. It was evolution in action, stellar scale.

Cormac shrugged an acknowledgement and continued, 'An Earthform GM ecology was constructed for formerly bare areas everywhere inland but only a small amount of that survives—most of those areas are now forested with skarch trees.' He sat up. 'I do know that Hagren didn't have a debris ring when we colonized it.' He pointed at the picture. 'That ring consists of the remnants of about five space stations, a couple thousand satellites and a selection of Polity and Prador warships.'

'Ah,' said Yallow. 'And the people, on the surface?'

'Coil-gunned from orbit—I don't know all the details, but only about half the original population of eighty million survived.'