Shadow Of The Scorpion Part 18

"How are you now?" she enquired solicitously.

For a moment he did not want to have this conversation, since he did not want any of the others to overhear, then he d.a.m.ned himself for his stupidity, because Crean was quite capable of talking to him without using her audible-voice generator.

"I am well enough," he said cautiously.

"Don't sweat it," she replied. "n.o.body expects perfection from you at once, and certainly not Spencer. She walked us into a situation which, because she had not completely a.s.sessed it, could have gone a lot worse than it did."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning she didn't know about the hooper, and she should have."

"I see."

Knowing that did make him feel a little better, but not much. Perhaps he was just being too hard on himself? His arm now properly dressed and the drugs in the dressing numbing both that and his nagging headache, he reached out and quickly initiated the shuttle's start-up routine, then gripped the joystick and pulled it up.

"s.a.d.i.s.t, how are you doing?" he asked, as the craft's AG motors lifted it shakily from the ground. He boosted it higher with a couple of spurts from the steering thrusters, and watched the ground rapidly drop away.

"I will be above you in thirty minutes," the s.h.i.+p AI replied.

Cormac was about to ask if s.a.d.i.s.t could send a program to realign the grids in the shuttle's ion drive, since there was no longer any need for the craft to appear to be a Graveyard relic owned by dodgy inhabitants of the area, when he started to pick up military com in his aug.

"Over there," said Gorman.

Crean's view swung across to focus on a gravcar grounded by one of the low buildings. A chameleoncloth tarpaulin had been slung across it, but obviously the wind had picked up one corner and dislodged it. Crean now began scoping out the surrounding area with magnification, focus and in spectrums not available to unaugmented humans. There seemed to be no weapons emplacements within view, but in infrared she detected a heat source within the nearest silo adjacent to where the car was parked.

"Two-by-two cover," said Spencer, breaking into a trot towards the gravcar. "Pulse-rifles down to electro-stun. We want Thrace alive if he's in there."

Crean and Travis reached the grounded gravcar well ahead of Gorman and Spencer. Meanwhile, Cormac urged the shuttle out over the s.p.a.ceport, checked his position on a terrain screen called up in a frame in one corner of the subscreen, then set the shuttle grav-planing towards the terraforming plant.

Now he asked, "s.a.d.i.s.t, can you do anything about the ion drive in this shuttle from up there?"

"I have sent an alignment program," the s.h.i.+p AI replied. "It will take two minutes to take effect."

He could turn on the drive immediately and have the shuttle speeding to his destination, but running such drives dirty never did them much good. They also tended to be noisy, and he guessed that Spencer would not want him creating a racket while she and the others were creeping about down there. He decided to wait.

Crean studied the chalky ground about the gravcar, a visual program clearly outlining footprints for her. There were numerous patterns, so obviously Carl had been tramping about this area for some time, but most of them led to a single door in the nearby building. In a second Crean and Travis were over by the door.

"No b.o.o.by-traps or sensors evident," sent Travis, obviously having used his Golem senses to scan through the wall.

The moment she arrived, Spencer twisted the door handle and she and Gorman entered. Crean and Travis followed them in, pulse rifles up against their shoulders as they scanned the gloomy interior. From Crean's perspective, Cormac observed twisted and collapsed pipework, and big ceramic vats, some cracked or shattered. He observed frames picking out various points within that area and understood she was making threat a.s.sessments. Meanwhile, Gorman and Spencer reached double swing-doors through the further wall, one of the doors hanging by only one hinge. Now they covered the area behind them as Travis and Crean sped over.

"Your ion drive is now at optimum function," s.a.d.i.s.t abruptly informed him.

Had only two minutes pa.s.sed? It seemed like hours. Cormac held off engaging the drive as he gazed at the screen. Crean and Travis went through the doors, Gorman and Spencer coming through behind them to cover the area they now hastily crossed. Here lay a long, low room walled with chaingla.s.s through which ran many transparent pipes; some sort of control area with numerous consoles were attached along those same walls. The area terminated against the curve of a silo, where a hole had recently been cut through. Using her infrared vision, Crean detected heat beyond, inside. Travis dived through the hole ahead of her, while she turned to cover the other two as they approached. Then she dived through, rolled and came upright in the cathedral s.p.a.ce inside.

"No one here," said Travis, out loud, as Gorman and Spencer now entered.

"The heat source?" Spencer snapped.

Travis gestured to a large crate with some fleshy-looking substance seemingly growing over it like a fungus. Crean, focused on this, detecting the heat signature inside the crate. They all walked over to inspect it. Cormac felt both disappointed and glad as he engaged the ion drive to accelerate towards their location. He certainly wanted Carl apprehended, but he wanted to be there when it happened.

"s.h.i.+t!" Spencer exclaimed.

Cormac returned his attention to the screen, and saw that Crean was now gazing down at the face of Marcus Spengler. The stuff strewn over the crate was syntheflesh: Carl's syntheflesh disguise. Then the face spoke.

"Ah, you're here at last," it said. "Say bye bye cruel world."

The face winked.

"Run," said Spencer, and chaotic images ensued-too fast for Cormac to follow.

Then a light ignited on the horizon, and he looked up. A fireball expanded, so bright it seemed to eat into the Earth. He just stared, utterly understanding what had happened, yet still unable to accept it. When he looked back at the screen, it was blank.

The crash of the explosion arrived shortly after its glare, and it sounded as if the world was being smashed in half. The shockwave struck just as Cormac slammed the shuttle into an emergency landing, lifting the vessel off the ground, pointing nose down. It automatically fired stabilizing thrusters and Cormac felt a strange wave run through his body as the grav-motors tried to realign too. Immediately the surrounding air filled with white dust, blotting everything from view. He concentrated on bringing the craft level and landing it properly, but it still came down hard, and as its systems wound down into silence, he listened to the patter of some sort of hail against the hull.

"Gorman?... Crean?... Travis?... Spencer?"

No response over his aug, just static. The electromagnetic pulse from the blast might well have screwed up his aug... might have screwed up their augs...

Feeling numb, he unstrapped himself and headed for the side door of the shuttle, stood before it for a long moment, then went off to search the craft's lockers for some goggles, which he found-they were Gorman's. Opening the door he stepped out, then immediately stepped back inside when falling cinders burned his bare arms. After a further search he found an envirosuit which, with painful slowness, he began to don. When he finally closed it up he just sat exhausted, not quite sure how to proceed. Then came a query for linkage through his aug, and he realised, recognising the source, that the device had lost all its previous settings. He approved the query and a com channel established.

"Are you alive?" s.a.d.i.s.t enquired.

It seemed a stupid question but then, for all the s.h.i.+p 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 b.o.o.by-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 s.a.d.i.s.t 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," s.a.d.i.s.t 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?" s.a.d.i.s.t 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. "f.u.c.kit!... f.u.c.kit! f.u.c.kit!" 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 d.a.m.ned 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 ma.s.s 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 alt.i.tude. Still the shuttle settled with a crash.

"Can you hear me?" he enquired, via the aug channel to s.a.d.i.s.t.

For a moment there was no clear reply, just occasional bursts of static, then abruptly s.a.d.i.s.t 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 s.a.d.i.s.t 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 s.a.d.i.s.t 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.a.d.i.s.t 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 s.a.d.i.s.t 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 ma.s.sive sea creature washed ash.o.r.e 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," s.a.d.i.s.t 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, s.a.d.i.s.t 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 object came free he instantly recognised the breach section of a pulse-rifle. He grabbed it and pulled it free. The barrel was missing as was most of the b.u.t.tstock; the barrel stock, which was in fact the power supply, was still partially attached. He instantly dropped the weapon and stepped back.

"A pulse-rifle," he said.

About the rifle the ground was smoking, and he realised he had just had a close call, for the power supply was discharging into the ground.

"Nothing else?" asked s.a.d.i.s.t.

"Perhaps I should dig?" Cormac wondered.

"No," replied the AI. "There's as much chance of anyone being down below there as anywhere else within a hundred miles. I will however deep scan that area when the ionization has cleared. Move on to the next coordinates."

These coordinates appeared on his visor and he saw that the next location was a mile away. His dosimeter had now edged into a yellow-orange on its way across the spectrum to the red. He was about to set out when there came a crack from the ground, the pulse-rifle jerked, sparks momentarily spreading about it, then these drained away and the LED went out. For a moment he considered it an ominous sign, then felt a tight sadness in his chest, because really the time for omens was past. However, he set out, again running as fast as he could. Abruptly, there came a drumming sound and he felt something pattering against his envirosuit. Halting, he saw great globular drops of black tarlike rain. This struck him as odd, since there was not a great deal of water on this world. Some sort of atmospheric reaction caused by the heat of the blast. No matter, he set out again.

More wreckage, and acres and acres of churned earth. His dosimeter was into the orange when he reached a great mountain of wreckage, which he realised was an entire building, uprooted to its foundations and dumped on its roof. Was the power source in this? He followed the arrow until it disappeared, and found himself still twenty yards from the nearest wall, though amidst a strewn wreckage of chaingla.s.s pipes and large chunks of ceramic he recognised as vats he had seen in the building his unit had entered through.

"Within five yards of your present location," s.a.d.i.s.t again informed him.

Again he approached this as before, this time picking up a length of chaingla.s.s pipe to jab into the ground as the start point of his search, but he did not have far to go. Nearby a sheet of muddy chaingla.s.s jutted up from the earth, and just seen through it, something was moving against the underside. He stepped over, thinking for a moment he was seeing one of the insects of this world, then realised it was a black skeletal hand. He paused for a moment, not sure he wanted to see more, then felt a sudden disgust at this reaction and forced himself forwards. As he stepped round the sheet a head turned towards him, severely blackened and burnt, but with s.h.i.+ny metal showing through where some of the crisped synthetic skin had fallen away.

Cormac grabbed the edge of the sheet and with some difficulty, possessing only one working arm, tried to pull it away. He could not tell if it was Travis or Crean who lay there. The Golem reached up and pressed its hand against the sheet, which began to s.h.i.+ft, and abruptly Cormac was able to pull it clear. The Golem lay with its legs and lower half of its torso buried in the ground. Cormac grabbed the arm, but the Golem failed to clasp its hand around his forearm, and otherwise seemed to be making no further effort to get free. Perhaps its power supply was down, for surely it could pull itself free.

"I see," said s.a.d.i.s.t abruptly. "She is refusing to acknowledge my signal-allow me to speak through your envirosuit."

She?

Cormac wasn't quite sure how to go about that until through his aug he accessed the suit menu and initiated "external speaker" whereupon the s.h.i.+p AI immediately spoke.

"Crean," said s.a.d.i.s.t, "Cormac has now received about half of the allowable dose of radiation searching for you, and now you have been found. However you choose to proceed henceforth, your recent experiences must be recorded-this you cannot avoid." Then, after a pause, "Get up."

Crean lurched to sit upright and it was only then that he realised one of her arms was missing. She turned, her torso revolving further round than a human torso could have, stabbed her only hand deep into the earth and levering from this point, dragged her legs free. She looked grotesque twisted round like this, but abruptly twisted back and then stood. Cormac studied her, seeing that very little of her syntheflesh remained and she looked like a charred mummy. He wondered if, without s.a.d.i.s.t naming her, would he have known this was Crean? Did Golem females possess female ceramal skeletons, would he have known her as female by the shape of her pelvis? Too late now to know for sure for in his mind he had imposed the shape of Crean over this burned wreck.

"What about the others?" he asked.

Her head swivelled towards him for a moment. "Dead," she said, her voice perfect, which more than anything seemed to bring home her unhumanity. Humans needed lips and tongues to form their words; she now possessed neither. He took that in, some weasel part of himself trying to find some way around it. He stamped on that inclination, hard. Whatever he thought of Golem, or artificial intelligences, in this situation Crean would not have said the others were dead without being utterly sure. Cormac felt that, had she been human, this would have accounted for her apathy earlier. He felt a moment of confusion: Why should she emulate shock and grief?

"Return with Cormac to the shuttle, and then to me," s.a.d.i.s.t instructed.

New coordinates appeared. Cormac turned, until the arrow was pointing directly ahead, and set out. There was no need to run now, and suddenly he felt so exhausted a slow walk seemed almost too much.

As Cormac stepped outside the school he scanned around eagerly for a sight of the war drone-the one they had seen in Montana and which now seemed to be here-but there was no sign of it.

"Bye bye, Cormac!"

He glanced round and saw Culu standing with her father.

He waved. "Bye, Culu!"

Her father was a bulky bald-headed man in baggy pyjama-like clothing that disguised the physical cybernetic additions to his torso, but which could not disguise his twinned augs, s.h.i.+ny chrome additions on either side of his head. Cormac's mother, on one of the few occasions she met Cormac outside the school, said Culu's father was a "traditionalist" because he felt the necessity to pick Culu up every day, and it had taken Cormac some time to figure out what she meant. Only stumbling across a historical text about twenty-first-century paedo-hysteria did he understand the old tradition of always picking up one's daughter at the school gates. His mother also said something about minority-group paranoia also being traditionalist-a comment he still did not quite understand.

The only other individual being picked up at the gates by his parents was Meecher, but Cormac suspected that had something to do with Meecher's behaviour today. He watched as Meecher's mother smacked him hard across the back of the head then pointed to their hydrocar. Meecher climbed in and sat down, while his father and mother stood outside discussing him. Cormac watched them until they climbed into the car and headed off. He waited a little longer, dawdled for a while because he did not much enjoy sharing public transport with his fellow pupils, which was apparently a trait that worried the school authorities.

Eventually he began heading down the pavement in the direction many of the other pupils had gone-towards the nearest bus stop. Still scanning his surroundings for some sight of the war drone, he noticed the presence of numerous gravcars parked here and there in the area, most of which seemed to be occupied by one or two individuals. This was odd, since usually such vehicles occupied the roofports of the residences here, or if from outside the area, they parked on public roofports. Then a shadow loomed above and he glanced up expecting to see yet another car coming in to land, only to see a scorpion, black against the bright sky.

The drone descended fast and landed hard in the road flinging flakes of plasticrete and gritty dust. Simultaneously, surrounding gravcars accelerated, blocking the road in either direction, and the occupants began piling out. With a surge of sheer excitement Cormac realised that many of these people wore ECS uniforms and were brandis.h.i.+ng weapons, which they rested across the roofs and bonnets of their vehicles. These weren't any kind of weapon he recognised, having long, arm-thick barrels and heavy, wide breach sections covered with cooling fins. The drone spun in place, its sharp-pointed limbs scoring the plasticrete, until it came to face Cormac, then it surged forwards to loom over him.

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