Shadow of the Scoprion.
An Agent Cormac Novel.
Neal Asher.
For Caroline, as always.
My thanks to Jason Williams and Jeremy La.s.sen for giving me this opportunity, to Bob Eggleton for the artwork and Marty Halpern for the copyediting, and to anyone else at Night Shade Books who made this possible.
Sitting on an outcrop, Ian Cormac stared at the words and the figures displayed on his palm-top, but could not equate them to anything he knew. A world had been bombed into oblivion and the death toll was a figure that could be read, but out of which it was impossible to extract any real sense and, though the battle lines had not shifted substantially for twelve years and such a cataclysmic event was unusual, it was not a story that could hold for long the attention of a young boy.
Ian"s attention wandered, and he gazed back down at the rock nibblers swarming over the ma.s.sive fossil like beetles over a decaying corpse. Slowly, cutting away and removing the intervening stone with small diamond saws and ceramal manipulators, they were revealing the intact remains of-he cleared the current text from his palm-top screen and returned to an earlier page-an Ed-mon-to-saurus. To one side his mother Hannah sat with her legs crossed, monitoring the excavation on a lap-top open where the name implied. She was clad in a pair of Dad"s Sparkind combat trousers, enviroboots and a sky-blue sleeveless top, her fair hair tied back from her smudged face. She was very old-he counted it out in his head-nearly six times his own age, but she looked like an elf-girl since the new treatments cleared the last of the old anti-geris from her system. While he watched she made some adjustments on the lap-top"s touch-screen, then transferred her attention to the line of nibblers entering a large crate set to one side. In there, he knew, they were depositing the slivers of stone they had removed, all wrapped in plasmel and all numbered so their position in relation to the skeleton could be recalled. On the side of the crate were stencilled the letters FGP.
"Why do you want to keep the stone?" he asked.
With some exasperation Hannah glanced up at him. "Because, Ian, its structure can tell us much about the process of decay and fossilization. In some instances it is possible to track the process back through time and then partially reconstruct the past."
He listened carefully to the reply, then glanced down at the text the speech converter had placed across his screen. It was nice to see that he understood every individual word, though putting them all together he was not entirely sure he grasped her entire meaning and suspected she had, out of impatience, not given him a full answer. It was all something to do with fossilized genes, though of course it was impossible for genes to survive a process millions of years long. She"d once said something about molecular memory, pattern transfer, crystallization... He still couldn"t quite grasp the intricacies of his mother"s work, but was glad to know that many a lot older than him couldn"t either. His mind wandered away from the subject.
Some dinosaurs had possessed feathers-he knew that. The idea was an old one which his mother said "had been discussed, discarded, and gone in and out of fashion." Cormac preferred them without feathers since such plumage made even the biggest ones look like silly birds rather than monsters. Anyway, he felt she hadn"t really answered the real drive of his question. He knew that the artificial intelligence running the Fossil Gene Project was more interested in the patterns that could be traced within the bones and the occasional rare piece of petrified flesh... or feather. It struck him, at the precocious age of eight, that collecting all the stone like this was a waste of resources. There was a war on, and a war effort, and it seemed odd to him that his mother had been allowed to continue her work when Prador dreadnoughts could arrive in the Solar System at any time and convert it into a radioactive graveyard.
Ian raised his attention from his mother, focused briefly on the gravcar they"d flown here in, then gazed out across the rugged landscape of h.e.l.l Creek. People had been digging up dinosaur bones here for centuries, and finding an intact skeleton like this one was really something. He grudgingly supposed that not everything should stop for the war. Returning his attention to his palm-top he began flicking through the news services he had chosen, to pick up the latest about a conflict that had started thirty-seven years before he was born. Though the Prador bombardment of one world was the main story, he searched elsewhere to find news from another particular sector of the Polity and learned that after the Hessick Campaign the Prador had suffered heavy losses at a world called Patience, and he felt a glow of pride. That was where his father was fighting. Moving on, he then as usual returned to reading about the exploits of General Jebel U-cap Krong. What a name! Jebel Up-close-and-personal Krong; a guy who, during the early years of the war, had liked to take out Prador by sticking gecko mines to their sh.e.l.ls.
"Why did you call me Ian?" he abruptly asked, peering down at his mother.
She glanced up, still with a hint of exasperation in her expression. "You"re named after your grandfather."
Boring.
Ian checked the meaning of the name on his palm-top and discovered his name to merely be a Scottish version of the name John, which meant "beloved of G.o.d" or some such archaic nonsense. He decided then to check on his family name. There was a lot of stuff about kings and ravens, which sounded really good until he came across the literal translation of Cormac as "son of defilement." He wasn"t entirely sure what that meant, and with those kings and ravens at the forefront of his mind, didn"t bother to pursue it.
"I"d rather be called just Cormac," he said.
As soon as he had started attending school people began referring to him just as Cormac and even then he had decided he preferred his second name to his first.
His mother focused on him again. "You and Dax are both "Cormac," Ian-it"s what is called a surname."
True enough, but she had chosen to retain her own surname of Lagrange and had pa.s.sed it on to her other son Alex.
"It"s what they call me at school," he insisted.
"What you might be called at school is not necessarily the best choice..."
"I want to be called Cormac."
This seemed to amuse her no end.
"Why certainly, young Cormac."
He winced. He didn"t really want that prefix. He also understood that she was humouring him, expecting him to forget about this name change. But he didn"t want to. Suddenly it seemed to take on a great importance to him; seemed to define him more than the bland name "Ian." Returning his attention to his screen he researched it further, and even remained firm about his decision upon finding out what "defilement" meant.
After a little while his mother said, "That"s enough for now, I think," and folding her lap-top she stood up. "Another month and we should be able to move the bones."
Cormac grimaced. When he was old enough, he certainly would not become an archaeologist and would not spend his time digging up bones. Maybe he would join the medical wing of ECS like Dax, or maybe the Sparkind like his father, or maybe he would be able to join Krong"s force, the Avalonians. Then after a moment he reconsidered, understanding the immaturity of his choices. Only little boys wanted to be soldiers.
"Come on, little warrior, let"s go get ourselves some lunch!"
Cormac closed up his palm-top, then leapt from the rock. He was going to walk but it was so easy to run down the slope. In a moment he was charging towards her, something bubbling up inside his 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 circ.u.mstances," 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 sungla.s.ses.
"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 s.p.a.ce 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."
d.a.m.n, 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 landma.s.s. 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 s.p.a.ce 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."
"f.u.c.k," said Carl, picking up his pulse-rifle again and perhaps wishing for an enemy to shoot, but though the Polity was still clearing up the mess, the war had been over for ten years.
"Okay," said Olkennon. "Now you"re acquainted with some of the facts, it"s time for us to get moving. Get your gear together: Earth-range envirosuits, impact armour, small arms and usual supplies. The heavy stuff is already down there."
"s.h.i.t," said Carl, "are there Prador down there too?"
"Apparently there are a few," Olkennon replied as she headed for the storage area to the cabin"s rear, "but they are not the real problem."
Beyond the door to the cabin Cormac shared with the other three, the tubeway network of the ship was zero gravity. Grav-plates had been provided only in cabins and training areas-all set to the pull of Hagren so the troops aboard could become accustomed to it. Cormac"s pack was heavy over those plates and now out in the tubeways possessed a ridiculous amount of inertia and a seeming mind of its own, but he managed to keep with the others despite the tubeways filling with troops heading for the lander bays. Finally, in their a.s.signed bay, Cormac studied his surroundings. All seemed chaos with troops and equipment shifting through webworks of guide ropes to a row of heavy lifter wings parked one behind the other like iron chevrons. The three followed Olkennon along one guide rope to their a.s.signed craft and joined a queue of awaiting troops winding between floating ma.s.ses of equipment. When his turn came, Cormac gratefully scrambled aboard, pushed his pack into the s.p.a.ce provided behind the seat in front of his, strapped it in place, then pulled himself into a position over his seat to get out of people"s way. There were hundreds aboard this craft, mostly four-person units of regulars like his own, but also plenty of "specialists" and units of Sparkind-the latter distinctive by their faded envirosuits and rank patches, but mostly by the smooth, unhurried way they moved in zero-gee.
"Get yourselves strapped in," Olkennon instructed-the same instruction other unit leaders were also giving.
Before he pulled himself down in his seat Cormac noticed a man and a woman taking the seats nearest the end of the spine aisle where it led into the c.o.c.kpit. They did not wear uniforms, just comfortable clothing that included a mismatched combination of fatigues, denim, enviroboots and chameleoncloth capes. Peering at the equipment strapped before their seats he saw two stretched multipurpose sniper rifles. Maybe these two were just specialists, but the way they had been talking to the lifter"s pilot and the deference with which he seemed to respond to them made Cormac suspect they were ECS agents.
Killers, he thought.
"Is there something about the instruction "Get strapped in" that confuses you, Cormac?" Olkennon enquired.
He hurriedly pulled himself down and drew the straps across his body. Once secure, he glanced at Carl who was sitting right next to him. "Be nice to know what we"re dropping into."
Carl grimaced. "Cormac, we"re little more than trainees. It"ll be guard duty and urban policing. Anything heavy goes down and the Sparkind will be on it like a Zunniboot on a bug. We get to experience a new environment, do some scutwork and earn a few points towards our final a.s.sessment."
Carl evidently wanted a fight, and knew it would be some years before those in charge would let him anywhere near one. Cormac wondered what it was that he himself wanted. He"d joined ECS because he felt a responsibility towards the society that had raised him, but also because it seemed like a good way to travel to places usually off the map. So many other careers would have resulted in him being planet-bound and travelling only when he could afford to, and then to the usual tourist traps. What was the old joke? Join the army, see interesting new places, meet interesting new people, and kill them. He hoped that wouldn"t be necessary, but he was prepared to do his duty.
Am I naive? he wondered, then shrugged. Of course he was, compared to some of the people here who, despite their appearance, were in some cases five times his age.
The lifter shunted forwards in the queue, and viewing screens along the bulkheads before them powered up. Cormac considered the wing shape of the lifter. The vessel was capable of AG descent but had been built in such a shape to enable glide re-entry and landing should anything go wrong with the grav-motors. Only ECS still built these things, the landing craft constructed by other Polity organizations coming in all shapes and sizes. He supposed that those other craft were less likely to go wrong, since there was less chance that anyone would be shooting at them.
Finally he felt the lifter stabilize on maglev fields, then abruptly surge forwards. The screens ahead of him showed the bay walls receding before the lifter fell into flecked blackness. Internal lights dimmed automatically as the craft tugged sideways and brought the planet into view. This seemed to be the signal for everyone to settle and prepare for the hour-long flight to the landing field. Seat lights came on here and there; palm-tops, lap-tops and even the occasional paper book were opened; some pa.s.sengers sat back with their eyes closed, seeking entertainment or instruction from the augmentations affixed like iron kidney beans behind their ears and surgically linked directly into their brains. Cormac opened the top of his pack and took out his own palm-top, quickly calling up the sites that had provided him with information about the planet below. Glancing aside he noticed that Carl had what might be described as the breach section of a pulse-rifle on his lap, plugged via an optic cable into a palm-top. Yallow, sitting next to him, was leaning back, eyes closed and fingers tapping against her chair arm. Perhaps she was listening to music through her aug, or watching a musical, or even taking part in one. Olkennon was reading a paper book-The Art of War by Sun Tzu. She could have uploaded a recording of the book straight to her crystal mind, so Cormac guessed this was all for show.
Hagren had been an idyllic place to live. Its cities had been very open-plan, but most of the planetary wealth was generated by concerns growing GM crops used in the manufacture of esoteric drugs and biotech construction units, or raising vat-grown meat and other comestibles. These concerns were scattered like farms and ranches over the four main interlinked continents. The spirit here had been a pioneering independent one and this consequently resulted in a lot of problems when ECS ordered the evacuation. It had gone slowly-only two million shifted offworld by the time the Prador arrived. At first Cormac couldn"t understand what had gone wrong, then studying news items of the time he realised someone had been sowing some quite strange memes. The Polity, apparently, was not to be trusted and the Prador were not as bad as portrayed, they were in fact being used as an excuse for the evacuation so that ECS could get a firmer grip on this world. Cormac sat back. It all started to make sense to him now-the requirement for so many troops here.
"Separatists," he said.
"Outstanding," said Olkennon, without looking up from her book.
From orbit the impact site was teardrop shaped with a wrinkled area just beyond the blunt end, and beyond that a curiously even and radial pattern spreading to the coastal cities. It seemed a geographic oddity, a curious formation until you were there, and saw what it meant.
The heavy lifter deposited them on a flat expanse of plasticrete that extended into misty distance out of which autogun towers loomed. Other lifters were coming down, smaller transports like flying train-carriages were picking up troops and supplies, gravcars and floating platforms zipped here and there. A ma.s.sive snake of troops clad in body armour was winding its way into the mists. But they were not to join it.
Holding her fingers to her ear as if listening to something, when in reality the radio signal was directly entering her artificial brain, Olkennon said, "There"ll be a transport along for us shortly. Fifty of us are on special a.s.signment out in the sticks."
The air was breathable but left an acidic taste in the mouth and it smelt of burning hair. Cormac breathed through his mouth and took frequent sips from the water spigot of his envirosuit to wash the taste from his palate. Peering intently through the mist, he tried to discern his surroundings. Over in one direction he was sure he could see trees and in another direction he was sure lay the sea, either that or the expanse of plasticrete extended to the horizon.