Shadow of the Scorpion

'Are you alive?' Sadist enquired.

It seemed a stupid question but then, for all the ship AI knew, it was opening a communications channel with a still-functional augmentation attached to a corpse.

'I'm alive,' Cormac replied.

'Are you injured?'

'Got a pulse shot through the arm.'

'I know about that,' said the AI, sounding irritated. 'I wanted to know if you sustained further injuries as a result of the CTD blast.'

On some level he had known that's what the explosion had been, but never really admitted it consciously. Carl had left a nice little booby-trap for anyone who came hunting him, with the final touch of that syntheflesh head winking at the victims.

'They're gone,' he said abruptly, but the words did not seem to make any sense.

'At present I can detect no signals either from Travis and Crean or from the augmentations belonging to Gorman and Agent Spencer,' said Sadist didactically. 'However, it is quite possible that the EM pulse knocked out all their com hardware—you will have to go and look.'

Cormac jerked himself to his feet and headed outside, where he found that the cinders had stopped falling and the dust had cleared enough for him to see about ten feet ahead.

'I am now within scanning range,' Sadist informed him. 'I cannot as yet penetrate the ionization around the site, but I can see you, Cormac. Might I enquire why you are outside the shuttle.'

Cormac just stood gaping into the dust, his brain seemingly running on neutral. Why had he stepped outside, what purpose was served by him walking the twenty-odd miles to the terraforming plant?

'Bit of a glitch,' he said, and returned to the shuttle.

'Are you sure you are uninjured?' Sadist enquired.

'I think it's what might be described as shock.'

'Then take an antishock med,' said the AI.

Standing inside the shuttle, Cormac gazed across at the first aid kit, then abruptly turned and smashed his left fist into the wall. 'Fuckit!… Fuckit! Fuckit!' Then he forced himself into motion, taking the pilot's chair and re- engaging the shuttle's systems. He glanced at the blank subscreen and abruptly reached out to key the controls that expanded the location map to cover it, then jerked the shuttle into the air. He did not want to take antishock meds; it seemed like a betrayal.

Fifty feet up the dust thinned, and a hundred feet up he was above the worst of it in his present location, but ahead a mushroom cloud stood high in the sky. Turning on the ion drive he thrust the joystick forwards, not bothering to check the location map since his destination was clear. Within a few minutes debris were pattering against the shuttle and occasionally there would be a loud clang as something big impacted. Nearing the stem of the cloud he spun the shuttle around and used the ion drive to decelerate, then descended into boiling whiteness. This was no good—he needed a clearer view. Setting the craft to hover he checked the control panel before him for a moment, then damned himself for not thinking clearly.

He aug-linked to the shuttle's system, mentally sorted through the menus available, noting numerous diagnostic warnings from the EM damage to the craft's systems, and eventually found what he wanted. Shortly a radar map of the terrain below began to build on the screen—slowly, because of the ionic interference—but it soon became evident that there was no terraforming plant anymore, just a large crater with occasional chunks of silo and pipework scattered about it. Using the radar image for guidance, which was also updating slowly, he cautiously descended towards the largest mass of wreckage. Again setting the shuttle to hover, he waited until the picture on the subscreen was again complete, selected a clear area to one side of the wreckage and descended cautiously to the ground, using a high-powered radar pulse to give him the distance to measure his altitude. Still the shuttle settled with a crash.

'Can you hear me?' he enquired, via the aug channel to Sadist.

For a moment there was no clear reply, just occasional bursts of static, then abruptly Sadist spoke. 'I can hear you, just.' The AI's voice was clear to Cormac so he guessed it must be using a narrow-beam transmission aimed precisely at his location, while using all sorts of clean-up programs to sort out what Cormac was transmitting. He unstrapped himself and headed for the door, knowing that, though there would be a lot of radiation outside, his envirosuit would protect him from much of it as would his own internal suite of nanites and the anti- mutagenic tweaks to his own immune system. However, he called up the main menu in his aug, then sorted through numerous submenus until he obtained what he required. Once this facility of the aug initiated, a simple dosimeter appeared in his third eye, presently reading in the green. Anyway, even if he received what once would have been considered a lethal dose, the medical facilities aboard Sadist would certainly be able to deal with it—dealing with the effects of radiation was something ECS Medical had become quite expert in during the years of the Prador war.

Stepping outside, he scanned around. Visibility was just over twenty feet and cinders were still dropping from the sky this close to the hypocentre. He wondered what Sadist hoped for him to achieve here, and what he hoped to achieve himself. He knew Golem could move very fast and that maybe, given time, Travis and Crean might have been able to get Gorman and Spencer clear. But they had not been given time. It seemed likely that they had all simply been vaporized.

'It is becoming clearer,' said the ship AI. 'I am sending direction finding to your aug. Key to envirosuit reactive visor.'

He hadn't even thought of that. As an information package arrived from Sadist he searched for the channel to the suit he was wearing, found it and initiated visor projection. Immediately the dosimeter appeared down in the corner of the visor; shortly after that he opened the package from Sadist and ran it too. Now a locator arrow appeared in the lower half of the visor with his present coordinates on some planetary grid, in red numerals, to one side, and coordinates of some other location aligned underneath them in green numerals. The arrow presently pointed to his left, he turned until it was pointing straight ahead, which put the shuttle right in from of him, so he walked round the craft, aligned the arrow again, and headed off. Already the dosimeter had shifted to a pale yellowish green and checking one of its attached functions he realised his time here was limited to an hour and ten minutes.

'So what is it you've found?' he asked.

'A regular energy signature, but beyond that I have no idea.'

Cormac again checked the given coordinates against his own and worked out that he had half a mile to travel. Maybe, out there, either Spencer or one of his unit was lying injured. He broke into a jog, then accelerated, going just as fast as he could over the churned ground through this poor visibility. Within a couple of minutes a hundred-yard length of a huge pipe loomed out of the murk to his right, five yards wide and flattened by its impact with the ground, almost like some massive sea creature washed ashore and decaying. Then lay chunks of twisted building superstructure, deposited on the ground like sections cut out of a steel forest. He had to slow here because, as well as the ground being uneven, the ends of I-beams and jagged edges of metal protruded from it. His own set of coordinates gradually drew closer to the others, then eventually the arrow blinked out.

'Within five yards of your present location,' Sadist informed him.

Cormac halted and scanned around, disappointed, since there was no immediate evidence of any of his companions here. He spotted a short length of aluminium extrusion, tugged it from the earth, then stabbed it down upright where he had been standing; then walking out in a spiral from this, he closely inspected the ground. Now paying greater attention to what lay about his feet, he noted all sorts of items scattered amidst the earth. There were numerous small fragments of greenish brown matter. He stooped and picked one of these up and crumbled it between his fingers, guessing it to be a piece of dried up algae from one of the silos. There were also numerous hard chunks of something and it was only when he picked one of these up and cleaned the soot off that he realised these were spatters of molten metal that had hardened. But still no sign of what he was looking for.

'What was this signal?' he asked again.

After a brief delay, Sadist replied, 'Merely a regular energy signature—possibly from a power supply of some kind.'

Then he saw something he at first took to be a red object on the ground which, only as he drew closer, resolved as a patch of red light cast by an LED. He stooped down to inspect it more closely and saw that the small light was inset in some sort of metal object. He dug underneath it with one hand and levered it up, and as the