Shadow of the Scorpion

subsuming memory space, deleting information and rewriting the aug's base programming. It felt like the device was burning into the side of his head and that somehow the synaptic connections actually inside his head were worming deeper. He hit the ground, his shoulder in agony, scrambled and threw himself behind another display case and something, something in this room connected. Standing, he felt a presence, just like he had felt with Sadist, but it spoke no words and he sensed at once that it was incapable of doing so. It wanted something, at a computer code level and almost at an instinctive level. When he peered through the display case at the autogun beyond it, that other presence seemed to be sitting at his shoulder, and he felt a species of fierce joy thrum through his connection with it.

The thing in this room had found what it wanted: a target.

Carl now stepped into view, his gun pointed casually at Cormac's head. The autogun was also moving into position and in a matter of seconds he would be in its range of fire too. Carl grinned, enjoying the moment. Doubtless he would have some last words for Cormac, some last sneer. Training with the Sparkind, Cormac had learned one thing that stayed with him always: never grandstand, never hesitate, if you have an opportunity to kill an enemy do it at once, for that opportunity might pass.

A high whine penetrated, and Carl looked up, puzzled, the words yet to leave his mouth. The whine turned to a shriek and a nearby display case exploded into white powder, its chain molecules disintegrating. A glittering wheel skimmed from the falling cloud, straight towards the autogun. It hit with a sound like a high-speed grinding wheel going through a tin can, and the autogun's body clattered to the floor, separated from its legs.

'What the—?' Carl began, as Cormac again turned to him.

Target.

The glittering wheel turned at right angles and shot towards Carl. It came up from the floor, across him and beyond. He stood there, his expression still puzzled, then a red line appeared at a slant across his face from chin to temple. He staggered, and the upper part of his head above that line simply fell away, then he slumped to the floor, blood pumping into a spreading pool from the exposed face of his brain.

After a long pause, Cormac walked over and gazed down at him. That chunk of his skull had been chopped cleanly away like a lump of Chinese radish. Looking up, Cormac studied the thing that had done the deed, the thing hanging in mid-air and revolving slowly. Now he discerned that it possessed a small grey star-shaped body from which extended blades of some treated form of chainglass—it had to be a special glass to have gone through its case like that. He walked over to the destroyed display case and picked up the plaque lying in the chainglass dust: Shuriken throwing star with Tenkian micromind, micro-tok powered and grav- capable.

In the dust also lay a holster with a small inset programming console. The strap, he realised, fitted perfectly around one wrist. He picked it up and put it on, then held up his arm. The throwing star flicked gore from its blades, retracted them and hummed down to the holster like a falcon returning to its master's arm. As he watched the shuriken slot itself home, Cormac felt the holster grow warm. There was much, he realised, that he must learn about this weapon. He suspected this was the beginning of a long association.

'My father did not die here,' Cormac repeated.

The drone sighed again, and again pulled itself down closer to the ground. This time it did not look so threatening, so much like a giant vicious arthropod, but weary, which was odd really, considering it ran on a fusion reactor.

'After we killed the second Prador adult, it was a hard fight getting out of there,' Amistad told him. 'David was captured, along with others, and taken offworld by one of the last Prador snatch squads to escape from here.'

'Snatch squad.' Cormac felt stupid. Was he just going to stand here repeating everything the drone was telling him?

'There was no time or resources to be spared to try and find those who were taken. I wanted to find him, but I could not be spared, and there were Prador to kill.'

A lengthy pause ensued and Cormac gazed out across lands that had once seen such vicious conflict and horror. His father was taken by a snatch squad. He knew precisely what that meant, intellectually, but just did not want to accept it on any other level.

'You would think that a machine mind is incapable of emotion,' the drone said.

Cormac had thought so, but the Golem Crean had disabused him of that notion.

Amistad continued, 'We are capable of emotion, and more, and when our minds are hurriedly put together under the exigencies of a fight for survival, we are also quite capable of going insane. This is what happened to me, this is why I felt sure I must find David Cormac's kin and tell them what had happened to him. Luckily the Tritonia AI intervened before I loaded that on your shoulders at such an early age. After I left Earth I searched for five years. I joined the police action against Jay Hoop's organization on Spatterjay. We found the camps, released those prisoners who had yet to be cored and thralled and eliminated those who had ceased to be human. We checked what records we could find, discovered how many millions had been processed. I know that millions will never be found, never be known about, but some could be traced and David was one of them.'

'What happened to him?'

'Surely you understand?'

'I'm not sure…'

'Your father was taken to Spatterjay where, from the bite of a leech, he was infected with the Spatterjay virus. When the virus had sufficiently changed his body, sufficiently made it tough enough to withstand such abuse without dying, most of his brain was cut away and replaced with Prador thrall technology.'

There it was: the plain horrible truth. Cormac felt sick at the thought, but he also felt distanced. This was a father he could be proud of, a man to be admired who had met such a horrible end, but he was also a father Cormac could hardly remember.

'He became the property of a Prador captain called Enoloven, whose demesne lies just inside the Prador Kingdom at the border, the Graveyard. Enoloven was high in the hierarchy of the Second Kingdom, but when the old king was usurped—an event which led to the end of the war—Enoloven was not in good favour with the new king, and had no place in the Third Kingdom. He was attacked and killed, his properties divided amidst the loyal and much sold off. Your father was one item sold to human criminals resident in the Graveyard.'

Cormac suddenly got the nasty idea that the human blank he himself had seen in the Graveyard had been his own father. No, that was madness.

'I found your father's new owner—' Amistad snipped a claw at the air, probably in response to some strong memory. ' — and his cohorts. They did not survive the meeting.'

'My father?'

'Used for display fighting against genetically modified beasts.'

'What did you do with him?'

'The only thing that could be done,' said the drone. 'Look down at where you stand.'

Cormac did so, and noted that just ahead of him was a clear rectangular section of stone set into the other burnt and heat-glazed rock.

'I could not bury him complete because what he had become was something that would never die easily. His ashes lie there, underneath that stone.'

Staring at his father's grave, Cormac tried to understand what he was feeling. He wanted to feel grief, but only because, surely, that was what should be expected from him. He felt nothing like that. This place was a good and dramatic one. This was completion, an ending to a story and the beginning of another.

'Perhaps you would like me to cut some words into the stone?' the drone suggested.

'I feel no need for them, though perhaps my mother or my brothers…'

'If you will allow.'

Amistad loomed up beside Cormac and intense light flickered across the stone ahead, which crackled and smoked. As soon as this ceased, he stepped up and gazed down at the perfectly incised shape of a scorpion cooling from red-heat.

'Yes, I think that's fine,' he said, and turned away to keep an appointment with the future.