Shadow of the Scorpion

surged forwards to loom over him.

'I do not have much time,' it stated.

Cormac just gaped.

'You need to know.'

'Amistad!' came a bellow from some public-address system. Now more shadows drew across and Cormac looked up to see some huge vehicle hovering above. It looked like a floating barge, but with all sharp corners and flat surfaces, all a dull greyish green he recognised as military ceramal armour.

'Amistad! Move away from the boy!' A woman in ECS uniform had approached, her hands on her hips.

The drone turned slightly to peer at her, then quickly swung back to Cormac. 'Your father—' The drone seemed highly agitated, and Cormac was reminded of his mother's archaeologist friends who visited; men and women who were not accustomed to talking to children. 'Your father is gone.'

'He's dead?' Cormac asked.

Further agitation from the drone. Its feet were beating a tattoo against the ground, its antennae quivering and it kept extending and snipping its claws at the air as if it could find the words there. It never got the chance.

There came a thrumming from above, a deep sonorous note, and it seemed as if something invisible but incredibly heavy and substantial slammed down from the vessel above. The drone was crushed flat on its belly, its legs spread out about it and its claws immobilized. An invisible wall of air hit Cormac in the face and shoved him straight back against the wall of the building behind. He tried to fight his way free, but the air seemed to have coagulated around him, turned into a cloying sheet.

'Is my dad dead?' he asked, but knew at once that his words reached no further than his lips.

Then came a blast, excavating a great crater in the road underneath the drone. Somehow, this gave it enough freedom to move and it dropped down into the hollow then bounced out sideways. Beams of a deep red radiation stabbed through the dusty air from those weapons resting across the gravcars, but the drone avoided them all, moving almost too fast to follow. Coiled into a ring it rolled and sprang open, landed on the face of the building opposite and leapt again, crashed against the side of the ship above and bounced off again. The bright light of a fusion drive ignited in atmosphere lit the street, and the drone hurtled away.

The ship above also accelerated away, the invisible force pinning Cormac against the wall immediately relinquishing its grip, so he slumped to the pavement, and some of the people in the street leapt into their gravcars and they too sped away. His ears ringing, Cormac gazed down at the pavement, then after a moment noticed a pair of enviroboots nearby. He looked up at the woman who had addressed the drone and she reached down and helped him to his feet.

'You mother will be here shortly,' she said.

'My dad is dead,' he replied.

She gazed up at the sky in the direction of the departing vessel and gravcars. 'So that's what it's about,' she said. 'You can never be sure with them, and it's best not to take any chances.' She peered down at him. 'They can be so dangerous.'

He tried to learn more, but everything he asked was referred to his mother, who soon arrived looking worried and angry and quickly led him to her gravcar.

'It said that Dad is dead,' he told her.

'And that's all?' she enquired, handing him a bottle of fruit juice.

'It didn't get time to say much,' he replied, uncapping the bottle. He took a long drink, for he was very thirsty. 'I think they used a hard-field to try and capture it.'

'It should not be here, and it should not interfere in things it is not equipped to understand,' Hannah told him, watching him carefully.

He suddenly felt incredibly tired, and leant back in the seat.

Hannah continued, 'It knows about fighting and killing, but like them all is emotionally stunted.' She seemed to be speaking to him down a long, dark tunnel. 'How can one like Amistad explain the truth when even I, your mother, can think of no way?'

Everything faded to black.

* * *

Feeling utter betrayal, Cormac opened his eyes.

'She drugged me,' he said, just a second prior to an invisible dagger stabbing in through his forehead. He glanced at the side table and reached out to pick up the roll of patches, his biceps still stiff under the length of shellwear enwrapping it. He took one patch only this time, since he felt that using two last time might have contributed to his nausea, and stuck it on the side of his neck. Now familiar with this process he then took up a sick bag, and tried to order the detach sequence in his aug for the optic connection. It was a struggle, but this time he managed it. After a moment he reached up and pulled the fibre optic strands free, then glanced aside as the machine wound them in.

'I am not aware of what these mem-loads contain,' said Sadist. 'I would require your permission to load them myself.'

Cormac wasn't sure how to react to the AI's evident curiosity, however, he really wanted to talk to someone about all this. Gazing about the room he half expected to find someone standing by his bed, then felt a sick sinking sensation in his stomach. The only one who might possibly have been there was Crean, but she had confined herself to her cabin ever since they boarded. Sadist, having now scanned much of the area around the blast, had reported finding only a heat-distorted ceramal blade belonging to Spencer, the surprisingly intact brass buckle from Gorman's belt, and Travis' legs. All three of Cormac's companions had been vaporized. Crean had survived only because a chainglass wall had peeled up and slammed into her, acting like a sail on the blast front and carrying her two miles from its hypocentre. Total unlikely luck, coincidence.

'I give you my permission to load them.' He paused. 'But for the last one—you can load that only when I do.'

'Thank you,' said the ship AI, then, 'Done.'

Cormac was only momentarily surprised; of course an AI could encompass those memories in a moment, it was a reminder of the difference between himself and the intelligences that ran the Polity, between himself and the likes of Crean too.

'I note that each chapter also has attachments and you have only been loading the chapters themselves,' Sadist added.

'Attachments?'

'They are incompatible with your mind, apparently.' Sadist paused. 'They are cleaning-up exercises. It seems apparent to me that your mother at first did not think your initial encounter with the drone, out in Montana, of any significance, though she did think your more traumatic encounter with it outside your school should be edited out at once. After seeing Dax's problem with not fully editing his mind, she then decided to remove that earlier encounter from your mind as well.'

'Cleaning-up exercises?' Cormac asked, though he had some intimation of what the ship AI was talking about.

'All those times you thought deeply about that encounter with the drone out in Montana, all those times you talked about it to others. Other less formative occasions were not removed, but the human mind tends to self-edit those memories that do not match up with the life's narrative.'

Now that was a statement that would require some thought, and he wondered just how much that lay between his ears truly reflected reality even had it not been deliberately tampered with. But his head was aching, he again felt nauseous, and what had once been shock at the loss of his friends was turning to a deep sadness. Was it grief? he wondered. He did not know if it was, for «grief» was such a vague term. Did it require howling tears from him, irrational behaviour? He didn't know. But certainly he did know the feeling of betrayal.

'As you saw, she drugged me,' he said.

'It seems extreme to have done so, just as it seems extreme to edit the mind of a child to prevent him knowing about the death of his father, but it was not so uncommon,' said Sadist. 'During the war, when pain was a frequent companion of many, many took the easy route of excising it from their minds.'

Cormac sat upright, tightly clutching the sick bag. This time there seemed to be no visual effects, and despite