Shadow Of The Scorpion Part 14

Something flickered and the missile briefly trailed a luminescent green cloud before, with a thunderclap, turning into a long cloud of fire.

"Laser," commented Travis.

"Now the bet is on as to whether-"

There now came another thunderous crash to their right from the missile's launch site. Peering over there Cormac saw the ground seem to bubble up for a moment then erupt in a localized explosion.

"Rail-gun strike," he said, just to try and feel part of all this.

"Exactly," said Travis, turning to Gorman, "which negates the bet." He grinned crazily. "You thought ECS would use a particle beam."

Gorman shrugged. "Fifty-fifty really, once the launcher was located outside of any populated areas."

"And if it had been fired from the city?" Cormac enquired.

Gorman turned to him. "We had squads decked-out in night gear ready to move in once the power supply in the grid area concerned was cut."

Cormac nodded. They knew all this was going to happen and had been making bets on how it would happen, which all brought home to him that, though he was the fourth man in this Sparkind unit, he was not actually part of it yet.

"Let's go," said Gorman.

They returned to the ATV to continue their journey to the makeshift s.p.a.ceport on this world. As Cormac stepped inside the vehicle after the others, he pulled the stim-patch from his arm and discarded it, reclined his seat and was soon dozing fitfully, only coming fully awake an hour later as they arrived at their destination. Through the screen he saw a ship down on the acres of plasticrete: a lumpen vessel like a giant beetle, battle-scarred and old and with ramps down from which a row of gravtrucks were disembarking before rising into the air to fall into a precisely quadrate formation. The four departed the ATV and began heading towards this vessel.

"I would have liked to have bet on both the firing position of that launcher and the weapon deployed against it from orbit," he commented to Gorman.

"Would you have won?" Gorman asked.

"Yes," said Cormac. "They would have wanted to be close to the city to fire the missile but not actually in the city where they could be located and apprehended. If they'd known we had anything up there capable of taking them out, they would not have fired at all. And a rail-gun strike was used because though it would kill whoever was near the launcher, it would leave evidence for investigation, whereas a particle beam strike would have incinerated everything... also the beam strike might well have started a fire in all that dead skarch wood, which would have required further resources to extinguish."

"Good job we didn't include you," said Gorman.

"Why didn't you include me?"

"There was no certainty you would be coming offworld with us until just ten minutes before we left-it seemed that the AIs were having some debate about that."

"Why am I coming with you?"

"Two reasons," Gorman replied. "The first concerns our mission to capture Sheen. I've seen the a.n.a.lysis of everything that happened in there. You killed Pramer-without much hesitation it would seem."

"And the second reason."

"I'll leave Agent Spencer to tell you about that."

Soon they were aboard the large shuttle and ensconced in one of its cabins with the Polity agent. The explanation was quite simple: "Carl Thrace," Spencer supplied.

The cabin was cramped and seemed as packed with equipment as Spencer's office down in the military encampment. The two Golem stood back against one wall while Gorman snagged the only free chair and Cormac sat on a plasmel crate which, by its label, contained fragmentation grenades. Cormac wondered if Spencer dragged around a collection of stuff like this wherever she went, or if she had merely taken a cabin previously vacated by another of her kind.

When no one else seemed inclined to ask, Cormac enquired, "What about him?"

Spencer was sitting at a cluttered desk gazing at a screen, occasionally pressing b.u.t.tons and manipulating a ball-control she held in her right hand. "After searching through millions of hours of scan data the Hagren AI eventually managed to track his course from when he abandoned you in the Dramewood," she said without looking up. "The ATV delivered him to a rendezvous with an old hydrocar limousine-" Now she did look up. "-driven by Sheen, who took him to a guest house in the old city. The data showed no sign of him leaving the guest house, but Sheen was kind enough to inform us that, as well as having syntheflesh patches for concealing weaponry, Carl has a whole kit for drastically altering his appearance. The AI checked its recordings and tracked everyone who left the hotel-all but one have been tracked down and eliminated from the search." She now turned her screen towards them to show a portly individual with yellowish and slightly scaly skin, and mouth tendrils that wound into a large spadelike beard. He was clad in brown leather and wore leather trilby. "He's calling himself Marcus Spengler now."

"I'm still not quite sure why I'm here," said Cormac.

Spencer eyed him for a moment. "There was some discussion about whether to allow you to continue in the Sparkind. Though you have shown an apt.i.tude for the job, your training is lacking. The powers that be were considering sending you for further training while the rest of your unit-" She flicked a glance at the other three. "-took a vacation."

"d.a.m.n," said Gorman. "What made 'em change their minds?"

The room lurched at that moment and a deep vibration shook the vessel they were aboard. There was no doubt it was now launching.

"My request changed their minds," Spencer replied. "My aim is to bring Carl Thrace down and I prefer to work with those whose methods I'm familiar with." She glanced at Cormac. "I wanted Cormac included for two reasons: having known Carl for two years he might well be able to identify him despite any disguise but, most importantly, Carl Thrace will recognise Cormac."

Bait, thought Cormac.

"I take it Thrace has left Hagren?" suggested Travis.

"After leaving the guest house," Spencer replied, "he headed for the inland commercial s.p.a.ceport and boarded a small but very fast light-cargo hauler."

"Smugglers," said Gorman.

Spencer nodded. "Almost certainly, since that ship's destination seems to be the Graveyard."

Gorman cursed, and well he might.

"Get some rest now," said Spencer. "We dock with the s.a.d.i.s.t in three hours."

"The s.a.d.i.s.t?" Travis enquired.

"AI humour," said Spencer, "go figure." She waved them away.

After Spencer had dismissed them, Cormac received a message in his aug from the ship's AI giving a schematic of the ship itself and the location of a cabin he could use for the brief time he was aboard. Crean and Travis headed off somewhere else in the ship, perhaps to occupy themselves with Golemish things while the soft humans of their unit sought home comforts and sleep. Gorman accompanied Cormac, since his own cabin was nearby. As they walked, Cormac considered everything he knew about the Graveyard. Originally this borderland and buffer zone between Prador and Human s.p.a.ce was called the Badlands, but the name was soon dropped in favour of the more accurate description. Polity AIs did not intervene there or, rather, they did not intervene overtly, beyond sending in the odd warship to drive off any Prador vessels that were getting too close to the Polity for comfort. The place had become home for some nasty types, but the worlds and stations they occupied were few in number compared to the other once-habitable worlds that could now be described as war graves.

"It should be an interesting experience trying to find him there," Cormac opined.

Gorman snorted derisively. "You can bet it'll get dirty and b.l.o.o.d.y within an hour of us making landfall."

Cormac paused by the door to his cabin and Gorman slapped him on the shoulder before continuing on to his own. "Get your head down, boy-you're going to need your rest."

Cormac pressed his hand against the palm-lock and the door slid open. He stepped inside and looked around, feeling a grab almost of nostalgia on seeing that he had been given a four-berth cabin just like the one he, Carl, Yallow and Olkennon had arrived in at Hagren. Obviously this ship, having dropped off its pa.s.sengers, had room to spare. He dumped his pack and his pulse-rifle on an empty bunk, then stepped over to the wall to pull the screen remote from its slot and turn on the room screen. Immediately the screen showed an image of the ground far below and quickly receding.

The old city and the military township were no longer visible, though the Prador ship's crash site showed as a shape like a small eye just inland. Trying a few other views he got the curve of the horizon and the glint of one or two objects in orbit. Magnification brought into focus a coin-shaped satellite and a ship shaped like a ca.n.a.l barge with three U-s.p.a.ce nacelles jutting equidistantly on vanes at its rear. It was an old-style attack ship and he wondered if it was the s.a.d.i.s.t. Logging on to his present ship's server he requested details on all ships in the vicinity and discovered that it was. He peered down at the remote and found a touch control marked "voice" and pressed it.

"Ship," he said, "can you hear me?"

"Of course I can hear you," replied the voice of a grumpy old woman, "and my name is Pearl."

"Nice to... be aboard you, Pearl," Cormac replied. "Can you tell me why it is going to take us three hours to dock with the s.a.d.i.s.t, when it's clearly visible out there?"

"The attack ship is waiting on further targets below and, for our own safety, it's best not to dock when it might open fire at any moment."

"Fair enough."

"Is that all?"

Cormac considered something else he'd been delaying for some time. "I would like to send a message to Earth..."

"And you're telling me this why?"

"I... I've never done this before." He felt a bit stupid, for he knew how to go about sending a simple message, even if it was over a vast distance. The truth was that he wanted to talk to someone about it. However, this AI's att.i.tude did not encourage conversation.

"Simple enough," said the Pearl AI, "you just address it correctly and send it to my server where it'll sit in the queue until I make my next U-s.p.a.ce transmission, which should be in about three minutes. Now is that all?"

"That's it, thank you." Cormac hurriedly thumbed the "voice" control again.

Now he sat on one of the bunks and called up the message in his third eye to review it. First he described his journey from the training camp on Mars to Hagren, then he went on to describe some of what had happened on that world, though his internal censor had been working overtime. As he reviewed it, he wondered if this was the same sort of message his father had sent to Hannah while he had been away fighting the Prador. At the end of the message came the bit of most importance to him: Having been promoted to the Sparkind it has been necessary for me to have an augmentation fitted and, only during this process, did I discover that my mind has been edited. The medical data indicates that this was done to me when I was between the ages of eight and twelve, but since there was so much editing going on during the Prador war, the AIs did not feel it necessary to keep detailed records. I know no more than that memories have been extracted from my mind and remaining memories of the time have been "cut and pasted." What can you tell me about this, Mother? Which of my memories did you feel it necessary for you to destroy?

For some time he had been toying with the wording of this last bit, unsure if he was being too harsh, or not harsh enough. In the end he placed it in a packet file, attached his mother's net address, and sent it. There: it was done now. Cormac rested back on the bunk and tried to catch up on his sleep.

It evaded him.

Cormac gazed at the image on his new p-top. Its screensaver showed scenes from an encounter between one of the big Prador dreadnoughts and the My Mary Rose out in deep s.p.a.ce, where usually the crabs won. It was a slugging match: ma.s.sively powerful weapons being deployed by both ships, shield generators burning out on both of them and poxing them with fires, bigger and bigger weapons getting through defences so the two ships strewed armour and molten metal across a couple million miles of void. Then came the big CTD hit straight in a particle beam hole bored through the Prador vessel's hull. The explosion gutted it, leaving only the heavy-armour hull to tumble glowing through s.p.a.ce like a mollusc from which the soft body had been sc.r.a.ped out.

But it was old news.

New weapons being deployed at the wavering line of defence had been having a positive effect for over a year. The latest ships from the factory stations, their armour as effective as that of the Prador dreadnoughts, were fighting direct one-to-one engagements and winning, and this recording was of the first of those. Now there were many new recordings of similar events and more coming in every day. Cormac consigned this recording to memory, and pulled up another one of a ground conflict in which mosquito autoguns were hammering into a line of Prador second-children. It was a messy but satisfying scene.

Even to Cormac it was noticeable that the holographic three-dee maps of the Polity had begun to display appreciable areas of regained territory. And now stories were appearing about worlds that had been occupied by the Prador and incommunicado since before he was born, and he viewed them with the utterly morbid curiosity of a ten-year-old.

When it was possible for any ECS trooper wearing an aug to easily record thousands upon thousands of hours of sensory data, and transmit that data directly onto the nets once within range of a suitable server, it wasn't so much impossible for the AIs to keep a lid on the news, but a pointless exercise. Better, they thought, for people to know what was really happening than to let the rumour mills fill the void. Censorship, which had been forever placed in the hands of the end-user, was mostly applied by parents to what their children were viewing. However, since access to information was universally easy, it was almost a rite-of-pa.s.sage for most children to find their way around parental blocks. Cormac had long ago looped his mother Hannah's censorship programmes and now watched whatever he desired.

It seemed that on these worlds Prador adults had ensconced themselves like feudal lords amidst their own kind, but the position of humanity had been little better than that of cattle in some previous human age. Cormac observed the drone recordings of huge camps like those seen in human genocides, but noted a lack of bodies, not because few people died there but because those guarding the camps simply ate the corpses. However, he did glimpse one recording broadcast by some ECS ground troops of a ma.s.sive abattoir containing row upon row of gutted human corpses hanging on hooks. He also saw the initial pictures of the release of some captives-these ones were bulky with fat and could hardly carry their own weight, for the Prador had been keeping them like veal calves. It was also the case that many of these captives knew of the Polity only as word-of-mouth story pa.s.sed down to them by their parents, for many of them had known nothing but the camps and Prador rule.

"Anything new?" asked Osiah.

Cormac glanced up from his p-top at his friend. Osiah was working on a missive back home to his extended family-a combination of audio, video and holographic recording with explanatory texts that could be accessed throughout it all. He wanted to be a doc.u.mentary maker and in the year Cormac had known him it seemed not a moment pa.s.sed when he wasn't either recording, or editing those recordings.

"You can check for yourself," Cormac replied.

"But I want you to tell me-don't give me news, give me reactions to news."

Cormac shook his head and closed his p-top. He was bored now and bubbling with energy, which was good, since soon he would be having an hour of zero-gee training, usually followed by a handball match in the same gym.

Zero-gee training, familiarization with station and ship safety protocols, were the main reasons for them coming to the orbital school, but their days were also filled with numerous other lessons covering all aspects of extra-planetary existence. Cormac found that his underwater swimming at Tritonia had put him in good stead for most disciplines. He was good in zero-gee, with s.p.a.cesuits and most of the safety stuff regarding vacuum and pressure changes since a lot of it applied to diving. He was less able when the lessons concerned solar radiation, field technology and the mechanics of s.p.a.ce travel.

"Y'know we're well advanced compared to kids our age a few centuries back," Osiah once told him. "Back then we would still be playing with plastic toys."

Cormac had investigated this and been astounded at how dim the children of past ages had been and soon discovered that his own advantages were due to the AI redesign of education methods. It seemed that his mental development was at about that of the late teens of the heavily politicised education systems of the twenty-first century. d.a.m.n, kids of ten back then didn't even know about simple stuff like vector a.n.a.lysis. Some of them couldn't even read and write their own language, let alone the three or four most of Cormac's contemporaries managed. And none of them were much good at the sciences and, strangely, didn't really like learning them.

There was no sudden announcement that it was all over. During his first two months at orbital school Cormac was too involved in his lessons and zero-gee handball to take much notice of the news. When he again started checking he found that for the past two months the news services had been full of reports of some kind of internecine conflict within the Prador Second Kingdom and of their dreadnoughts pulling off from attacks and heading back home. Then, just a month before his eleventh birthday, Cormac realised that though plenty of Polity victories were detailed, they were usually over Prador first- and second-child ground armies abandoned by their support ships. Then, after his birthday, it seemed that past stories of battles and atrocities were being recycled. Nothing much was going on out there. Upon his return to Earth it was understood that there has been a revolution within the Prador Second Kingdom, that the king had been usurped and many other ruling Prador slaughtered, and that it was now called the Prador Third Kingdom.

"I think the war is over," said his mother one day.

Cormac nodded, for so it seemed. The Prador had withdrawn behind their original border and there were building defensive stations, while on the Polity side similar construction was taking place. There had also been as yet unconfirmed rumours of tense meetings between Polity and Prador amba.s.sadors.

"You understand that your father won't be coming home," Hannah continued.

Cormac nodded again. He was not sure when this had become evident to him, maybe a year or so back, about the time Dax had last visited, but he couldn't remember being told.

"He's dead," he said.

"Yes," Hannah confirmed, though there was something in her expression Cormac found difficult to fathom. He did not pursue it-there seemed no need.

The interior of the s.a.d.i.s.t rather belied its ominous name, and whereas Pearl had been a crotchety AI, s.a.d.i.s.t was chatty and cheerful.

"Welcome aboard!" it boomed from the intercom system the moment they stepped into its thickly carpeted interior.

Cormac immediately received a schematic of the ship's interior and directions to his cabin. "Cheerful AI," he observed.

"Probably enjoys its work," said Gorman. "If its choice of name is any indication."

"I've some stuff arriving in the hold here that I need to check over," said Spencer. She stabbed a finger at Cormac. "We're five days away from the Graveyard, and in that time I want you to lose that rod up your a.r.s.e." She turned and headed off.

"The rod up my a.r.s.e?" Cormac enquired.

"Your military bearing, my son," said Gorman. "It was fine enough on Hagren where your cover included you being a soldier, but if we go undercover in the Graveyard, you'd be spotted in an instant."

"It's all those marching drills," said Crean dryly.

"Yeah, right," said Cormac, never having marched in his life.

Travis patted him on the shoulder. "You need to slouch a bit more, maybe acquire one or two bad habits-seemed to work for Gorman."

The four of them headed off down the corridor thick with carpet gra.s.s. At intervals framed pictures hung on the walls, each displaying what looked like Egyptian papyrus scrolls that were certainly copies. Soon they arrived at a row of doorways-Cormac halted before his.

"We'll meet up in the midship training area in half an hour," said Gorman. "Meanwhile, take a look at this." A message arrived in Cormac's aug.

The luxurious accommodation contained a wide bed, plenty of cupboard s.p.a.ce, an en suite and even his own dispensary port from the ship's synthesizer. He dumped his pack and rifle on the bed and immediately turned back to the dispensary, since he had not eaten in some hours. First he got himself a coffee, which arrived behind the chaingla.s.s hatch in a porcelain cup and saucer; then, checking through the menu, he found that just about anything was available from the ship's synthesizers. He ordered a bacon sandwich on rye bread, which arrived while he sipped his coffee. The sandwich tasted wonderful, though what it contained had never come from a pig.

While on his second sandwich and second coffee, he opened the message Gorman had sent, which was empty, then opened the attached file. Therein lay the main factors that could identify someone as a soldier. Some things he could do nothing about, for he could not unlearn his familiarity with weapons. The rest was about speech patterns, combat techniques, choice of nutrition, neatness-and slouching and bad habits. After skimming through the extensive lists, he headed over to his pack, then opened it and upended it on his bed. From the contents he pulled out his casual clothing of jeans and a sleeveless light-blue shirt and, after stripping off his uniform, donned these, retaining only his enviroboots-nothing in the list about wearing c.r.a.ppy footwear. He then headed for the door, deliberately leaving the mess on his bed and deliberately not putting his cup and plate into the waste port next to the dispenser. Then he slouched down the corridor.