1.

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 massive 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 Hell 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 shells.

"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 God" 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 passed 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 circumstances," 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 sunglasses.

"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 space 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."

Damn, 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 landmass. 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 space 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."

"Fuck," 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."

"Shit," 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 assigned 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 assigned craft and joined a queue of awaiting troops winding between floating masses of equipment. When his turn came, Cormac gratefully scrambled aboard, pushed his pack into the space 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 cockpit. 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 assessment."

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 naïve? 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 passengers 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 massive 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 assignment 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.

Some of the troops who had come down with them peeled off in disciplined groups to join the departing column. Some Sparkind moved off with them, while others were picked up by a small open-topped transport. The two Cormac guessed were ECS agents, opened a crate that had been deposited, amongst many, from the lifter's belly hold. Eventually they dragged out a grav-scooter, unfolded it and prepared it for use, then mounted one behind the other and shot off into the sky. Cormac wondered who they were off to assassinate.

Finally two train-carriage transports landed for them and they boarded. Their journey took an hour, and gazing down through one window Cormac saw that they were approaching the impact site they had spied earlier. After the transports departed leaving fifty of them on the peak of a spoil hill, Cormac gazed around. Through slowly clearing mist he could see the edge of that radial pattern and now knew it consisted of skarch trees, millions of acres of them, all flattened and pointing in the direction of the blast wave. The spoil hill they stood upon had been thrown up by the impact, and was one of a whole range of them. Below this range, the scalloped inner slope of the crater delved down to something massive, brassy coloured, and still smoking.

"I have given your unit leaders the positions for each unit and the area to be covered by each," said someone.

Cormac turned to see some grizzled veteran standing balanced on a couple of packs. He glanced at Carl who rolled his eyes—it had been a dictum in the regulars that so long as your commander never felt the urge to make speeches, your chances of survival were higher. However, more closely studying the one addressing them, he realised that individual was Golem. In reality, he realised, all the new human recruits here were being nurse-maided.

"I cannot over-stress the importance of what we are doing here. There are those who would like to gain access to what lies below us, and having gained access might obtain weapons whose destructive power we have seen the effect of in orbit and on the surface of this world. Now I'm not going to ramble on—I'm not one for speeches. Your unit leaders will take you to your areas of responsibility." The Golem grinned and stepped down.

"What did I tell you?" said Carl. "Guard duty."

"Yeah, but we're guarding something pretty important," said Yallow.

They'd been given a screen display aboard the troop transport—almost a documentary. It had taken a swarm of Polity attack ships and drones to drive the Prador dreadnought down into atmosphere. The linear accelerator that had finally done for its engines had been sited down the length of a deep mineshaft in the ground. That mineshaft had become a crater itself shortly afterwards. The dreadnought, suddenly gaining the aerodynamics of a million-ton brick, had dropped, attempted AG planing, then ploughed into the ground below where Cormac stood.

"Comunits on," said Olkennon. "Let's go."

"This is to give us an authentic taste of soldiering," commented Carl, as he gazed out through his monocular into the darkness.

Cormac squelched his feet in the mud in the bottom of their foxhole and surmised, from his reading, that an authentic experience should include leaky boots. Carl's cynicism could be wearing at times. He raised his own monocular and peered from his side of the foxhole. The infrared image he saw showed him leggy things with bodies about the size of a human head crawling about on the slopes below. They'd been given no warnings about anything dangerous... then again, maybe that was part of the learning process, maybe they had been supposed to find this out for themselves.

"Are you seeing these beasties?" he asked.

"Scavengers," Carl replied. "Called cludder beetles. They'll eat anything organic."

"I thought the inland ecology was Terran."

"Imports—the eggs probably came in on the bottom of someone's boot."

That accounted for Carl knowing about these things, for to Cormac's knowledge he certainly hadn't done any research on this place.

They kept watching into the long hours of the night. The stars here had a reddish tint and there were no recognisable constellations. About three hours into their watch a group of four asteroids tumbled up over the horizon, flashing reflected sunlight then falling into shadow as their course took them overhead. When he began to feel weary, Cormac took out a packet of stimulant patches and pressed one against his wrist. In moments his bleariness cleared and he abruptly realised one of the cludders was only a few yards downslope from him. He pointed his monocular at it and brought it into focus.

"Fancy a swap round?" he suggested to Carl.

"I'm fine where I am," his companion replied.

The cludder looked horribly like a human skull without eye-sockets and with eight arthropod legs sprouting from where its jawbone should have been. He could hear it making sucking slobbering sounds as it drew a skarch twig into some unseen mouth.

"About these cludders—" Cormac began.

A flashing, like someone striking an arc with a welding rod, lit up their surrounding, and this was immediately followed by the stuttering of pulse-rifles, then the clatter of some automatic projectile weapon. Cormac turned and located the source as lying behind a mound to his right, possibly down in the crater itself. His comunit earplug chirped, and obviously addressing both himself and Carl, Olkennon said, "Have you had a nice sleep there, boys?"

Since Carl outranked Cormac by a couple of points, it was his prerogative to reply. "We have not been asleep, Commander."

"Then perhaps your monoculars have malfunctioned or maybe even your eyes?"

When Olkennon got sarcastic, this usually meant someone had seriously fucked up.

"If you could explain, Commander," said Carl primly.

"Well, it seems a commando unit of six rebels just tried to get into the Prador dreadnought. Luckily they were running a small gravsled—probably to haul away a small warhead on—and one of our satellites picked that up on a gravity map. I'm looking at that map now and previous recordings. They came in right past you."

"Were they caught?" asked Carl.

After a long delay, Olkennon replied, "Hold your positions and stay alert. Four of them were taken down but the other two are heading back your way. If they arrive before I get there, try for leg shots or try to pin them down, but don't hesitate to kill if necessary. Out."

"How the hell did we miss them?" wondered Carl, bringing his monocular back up to his eyes.

"Some sort of chameleonware?" said Cormac, doing the same.

He scanned the nearby slopes then concentrated in the direction of the crater. As far as he understood it the only portable camouflage available for a soldier was chameleoncloth fatigues—the same cloth the outer layer of his envirosuit was made from and which turned it to the colour of the mud he was lying in. But such cloth did not conceal one from someone looking through a monocular set to infrared, which was why they had dug in—that, and the possibility of gunfire.

"Maybe they slipped past while you were studying cludder beetles," Carl suggested.

Cormac immediately felt a flush of guilt. He'd only been distracted by the creatures for a moment—nowhere near enough time for someone to get past him. Then he felt anger. Carl's accusation seemed not only unjust but spiteful. Had Carl himself fallen asleep or not been following the required scanning patterns? Was he now trying to find a way to shift the blame onto Cormac? The anger existed in him for a short time, accelerating his heartbeat as he searched for a sufficiently cutting reply. Then it seemed to hit a cut-off, and he abruptly reassessed his situation.

"Maybe they did," he said without heat.

Aren't we on the same side? he thought. Carl might want to step on people's hands in a scramble up the promotional ladder, but no matter. Cormac had joined to do a job, and do it well. He abruptly felt an utter coldness towards his companion, a detachment. It was as if the man had suddenly become a malfunctioning item of machinery he must account for in his calculations. He would watch Carl.

Following his search-grid training, Cormac continued to scan the slopes on his side of the foxhole. Carl was doing the same. A belligerent silence fell between them.

"I'm half a mile from you and will be there soon," Olkennon informed them through their comunits.

Carl, as if in response to this, abruptly stood, bringing his rifle to his shoulder while flicking up its infrared sight screen. Cormac spun, monocular still to his eyes. The rifle thrummed, spitting an actinic broken beam into the darkness. It fired again, then again.

"Got 'em," said Carl.

Olkennon had specified leg shots, or keeping the two escapees pinned down, probably because someone in ECS wanted to interrogate these people. What had Cormac seen? Two people struggling towards them, one supporting the other, obviously wounded. The light from the pulse-rifle tended to blank infrared viewing for brief periods; still, Carl's shots had all torn into upper bodies and heads.

"I fucked up, okay? I fucked up." Carl turned and gazed out the wide window of the troop transport. Other soldiers aboard gazed across enquiringly and Cormac felt this best a conversation to have at some other time.

"But that's not like you," Yallow insisted.

"End of conversation," said Carl, without looking round.

At that point Olkennon rejoined them after speaking with some grizzled sergeant seated towards the front of the transport. She gazed at them for a moment then sat, and it was difficult to tell whether she could read the unpleasant atmosphere. Cormac wondered if Golem could sense such things... probably, though by picking up pheromones and reading the tensions in facial expressions. They probably used some sort of formula.

"The barracks adjoin a temporary township by the coast adjacent to the old city," she said without any ado. "You are located in Theta bubble. Cormac, your room is 21c, Yallow, 21b and Carl, 21a. Get yourselves settled in then use the local facilities—I doubt we'll have any reassignment until after the enquiry."

Carl grimaced and turned to gaze out of the window again.

"We get our own rooms?" asked Yallow.

"Certainly," said Olkennon. "There's no shortage of living space and no limitations were put on the size of the township."

Without any hint of a change in her expression of mild interest, Yallow looked across at Cormac. It had been over a month now since they'd had their own rooms and certain activities had been neglected. He felt a pleasurable anticipation seat itself in his groin.

Within a few minutes the troop transport descended and landed on an area of grated plasticrete over mud. A short walk away bonded-earth domes stood clustered as if the earth had bubbled. The domes were a uniform grey-brown, scattered with green and the occasional flashes of red, which only as the four of them were walking over did Cormac identify as some adapted form of geranium gaining a root-hold in the bonded earth. There were numerous windows inset in the lower floors of the domes, though fewer windows in the upper levels since they were mainly used for storage. Some of the domes had large hatches open in those upper areas and extending below them landing platforms for military AG cargo drays.

They departed the landing area onto a path of the same grated plasticrete leading across churned mud sprouting skarch shoots like blue asparagus.

"Not difficult to find our dome," said Yallow, pointing. The main entrance to each dome had one letter of the Greek alphabet incised above. And even as they approached these buildings, Cormac picked out the letter theta.

"You go on now," said Olkennon, waving a hand at them and turning onto a path heading off around this collection of buildings. "I'll contact you when we have our next assignment."

As Olkennon departed, Yallow returned her attention to the barracks and the surrounding area. "Doesn't look a whole lot of fun."

"I'm sure you'll think of something," Carl sneered.

Cormac gazed at him steadily, but Carl did not meet his eyes, merely accelerated his pace to pull ahead of the other two. That just wasn't like Carl—it seemed utterly out of character, worryingly so.

Carl entered the building foyer well ahead of them, and by the time they arrived at their rooms he had dumped his stuff and was on his way out again.

"There's bars in the township," he told them as he hurried past. "I'm going for a drink." Then he paused and looked back. "I'm sorry to be such a pain, but it seems I might be looking at the end of my military career." He moved on, and Cormac could not help but think that his explanation seemed so stilted, so wrong.

"Let's get ourselves settled then," said Yallow, watching Carl depart. She turned to the door to her room and opened it using the simple mechanical handle.

Cormac opened his own door and entered to look around: simple bunk; combined shower, sink and toilet cubicle—the sink folding up into the wall and the toilet seat telescoping from the floor; net access on a narrow desk, more of a shelf really; and a window giving a view of the bonded-earth curve of the neighbouring dome, on which, fortunately, some of those red geraniums had taken root. Entering, he dumped his pack and his pulse-rifle on the bed, then immediately proceeded to strip off his envirosuit. Beside the shower he noted a small sonic cleaner box and, after stripping the suit of its detachable hardware, shoved the suit inside and set the device running. He then stepped into the shower and luxuriated in needles of hot water, washing himself thoroughly with a combined abrasive sponge and soap stick. It had been many days since he had been able to do anything more than wash himself from a small bowl. After shutting off the water a warm air blast ensued, complimented by a towel from a dispenser actually within the booth, and once dry, he inserted the towel back into its dispenser for cleaning, then stepped out.

His skin feeling almost like it was glowing, he walked over to his bed and opened his pack, taking out fresh underwear and uniform shirt and trousers. These he laid out neatly on the bed, and before dressing proceeded to pack away everything else in the cupboards. Shortly after having completed this chore, while he was checking round to see if there was anything he missed, there came a sharp rap at his door. He stepped over, opened it a crack, and saw Yallow standing there all but naked, holding one of the small towels about her hips where it didn't stretch far enough.

"Well let me in," she demanded.

He opened the door and she stepped in, still holding the towel in place. Even as he closed the door his cock felt like it was a steel rod. He gazed at her. Her chameleon-effect skin now looked little different from the skin of any normal woman, apart from a slight scaled effect which, though visible, he knew could not be felt. The skin wasn't adapting to her surroundings at the moment, for she possessed conscious control over it. He focused on her breasts, which weren't large since that would have interfered with her chosen profession. She was athletic, as muscular as a man but very definitely not a man. Abruptly tossing away the towel she then reached down and closed her hand about his penis. He looked down, her mons was bald, since pubic hair could be a problem when trying to stay clean out in the field. He realised, only after the fact, that he'd made a grunting sound as her hand closed.

"Oh dear," she said. "I don't think you're going to last very long, and I'm going to need your undivided attention for a good hour."

Sometimes Yallow could be hard work. He knew that she possessed enough control to hold off her orgasm, and that she liked to do so because the longer she held off, the bigger the multiple explosions at the end.

Releasing his penis she strode over to the bed, swept his clothing aside—an act that offended his sense of neatness—then climbed on her hands and knees. Looking back over her shoulder at him she said, "Time to get you into a state when that will last," then parted her knees and stuck her arse out at him.

She was right, he didn't last long the first time. Over the ensuing twenty minutes she dictated to him his every lick, bite and caress as his youthful hyperfit body returned him to the state she required. Next came a marathon that had sweat running into his eyes, and when she came, her hands clenching in the bedding to stop herself tearing the skin off his back, she lost control of her chameleon skin, and blushed with bursts of red, blue and yellow, like a slow firework display.

"There'll be no enquiry," said Cormac, as he and Yallow strolled from the barracks along the short curved track to the adjoining military township. Somehow he felt the need to return focus to things military, despite the fact that his legs felt wobbly and he really wanted a beer.

"Carl is in the top percentile for marksmanship," Yallow observed, gazing at him with an amused quirk to her mouth.

Cormac took a slow breath of the cool evening air, which for a change right then tasted clean. The urge for a beer being utterly understood, he also felt utterly relaxed, and understood the reason for that too. He felt the need to pause for a moment—not to hurry on to the next thing. Halting, he gazed at the nearby skarch trees. These were young examples of the plant that had managed to get a root-hold on many worlds. He walked over and rested a hand against a fibrous surface and peered at little green beetles gathered like metal beads in a crotch where one of the thick leaves sprouted from the stalk, or trunk.

The young trees stood a mere ten feet high with trunks the thickness of a man's leg. They were a tough terraforming hybrid of the kind sowed on worlds to rapidly create biomass for the production of topsoil, and therefore grew fast in even the most extreme conditions, rapidly increasing in height and bulk. As he recollected, the plants were a splicing of maize, bamboo and aloe vera. It occurred to him then that this was the first time he had seen them up close, though he had seen distant examples on the spoil hills about the Prador ship and pieces of them rotting underfoot in those same hills. This was what it was all about: actually being here, seeing and experiencing—not gazing at a picture on a screen.

He turned back to Yallow, who had halted too and was watching him.

"It is understood," he said, "that in his first firefight a soldier may not perform to standard. They thought he got a bit overexcited and just blasted away."

"Young soldiers do tend to get overexcited and blast away," she said, grinning.

He half frowned, half grinned and waved a dismissive hand at her.

She shrugged and continued, "Well, he won't be blasting away at anyone back there now."

Too true: the cases arrived on the morning after the shooting, and they spent most of the day unpacking and assembling their contents. Carl, whose speciality seemed likely to be weapons tech, had been in charge whenever Olkennon was not around. Assembled, the mosquito autoguns walked on four gleaming spidery legs, fat bodies loaded with ammunition and a mini-toc power supply, tubular snout for firing rail-gun projectiles at a rate capable of turning a man into slurry in a second. With them now guarding the perimeter around the Prador ship there would be no more mistakes. The guns had been programmed to go for leg shots, though whether there would be anything left of the legs after the shooting was debatable.

Yallow gave the skarch grove a long suspicious look, then began striding along the track again, and Cormac followed, guessing she was thinking about how many enemies such growth could conceal.

"Where's he gone, anyway?" Yallow asked, jerking her chin towards the military township.

"As you may have noted he's not very talkative lately, so he didn't tell me," Cormac replied. "Who wants to talk about their screw-ups? Maybe we should give him some space."

Yallow glanced at him. "He has spoken some to me, though it always strikes me as a bit false. He probably doesn't talk so much to you because you're a hard act to follow sometimes. When was the last time you screwed up?"

Cormac was surprised. He had always admired both Carl and Yallow and thought them likely to be better soldiers than he was. He shrugged; of course he screwed up, didn't he?

"Let's go get that drink," Yallow added, after an embarrassed pause.

The township was also comprised of bonded-soil domes with plasticrete gratings over the mud lying between them. The place swarmed with soldiers, and those locals who had come from the partially ruined city nearby to sell their wares. A number of eateries had been established, along with a number of bars that were already gaining a reputation as not the best places to visit and be sure to retain your teeth. ECS command could have clamped down on that, but felt that allowing the troops to blow off steam was one of the better alternatives to prescribed drugs and cerebral treatments. It was also true that there were many veterans here too, who preferred this old-fashioned approach. They took the view that busted heads and broken bones could be repaired, but that naïvety could kill.

The first dome with a lit façade that they came to was called Krong's. Cormac gazed at the sign and smiled to himself, remembering his childhood fascination with that character. Apparently Jebel U-cap Krong had survived the war and now ran a salmon farm on some backwoods world, though Cormac was not entirely sure he believed the story.

He and Yallow entered the smoky atmosphere and looked around. The place was starting to fill up, but there were still some tables available so Yallow snagged one and sat down, gesturing Cormac to the bar. He walked over and pushed through the crush there, ordered two beers, then scanned around while the barman, a brushed aluminium spider with limbs terminating in three-fingered hands, poured his drinks.

Carl?

Carl was ensconced with a few of the locals around a small table in one of the dimmer parts of the bar. They were drinking and talking, but did not show the animation evident at the tables surrounding them. Their discussion appeared serious, whispered and vehement. With his drinks finally before him, Cormac took them up, returned to Yallow and told her what he had seen.

"Works fast," she commented. "I don't think I've even spoken to a native yet."

"They don't look happy. Should we go over there?"

"Nah, if they start slapping him about it'll be character-building for him."

Yallow's attitude to violence had ever been thus, but then few people would ever be tough enough to slap her about. In training he'd seen her flip a Golem instructor—something only one in a hundred recruits was capable of doing. Then, thinking of her earlier comment, Cormac remembered the first time he'd managed to get the upper hand against the same instructor. Maybe he took his own achievements too lightly. He frowned, took a drink of his beer, and decided then to keep a wary eye on any inclination to arrogance growing in him; then he drank more, keeping pace with Yallow.

They took it in turns to go to the bar for each round and he was feeling a pleasant buzz when he saw one of the locals standing and pointing a threatening finger at Carl. Carl stood too, glanced about warily, then leaned forwards to say something. The man backhanded him and Carl took it, blank-faced, then turned and headed away. Cormac tracked him across to the door, watched him depart, then observed some altercation back at the table. The man who had slapped Carl abruptly turned and hurried for the door, and that he was checking the positioning of something underneath his coat did not escape Cormac's notice.

"I think we'd better finish up and take a walk," said Yallow, obviously having watched events too.

They downed their beers and stood, quickly heading for the door and, once outside, scanned the floodlit brightness and the deep shadows between buildings. No sign of the local, but Carl was a little way up the street strolling as if he hadn't a care in the world, which struck Cormac as quite odd.

"You follow him," said Yallow. "I'll go the back way."

She would be better there—sneaking about in darkness was her preferred pastime.

Cormac kept Carl in sight along the curving street, watched him take a left heading for the barracks. The route there was dark, so Cormac picked up his pace, but upon reaching the turn could see no sign of Carl. Abruptly someone seemed to appear out of nowhere to balletically kick Cormac's feet out from under him, step beyond him and drop into a crouch.

"Carl—"

Carl was aiming a nasty, squat little pulse-gun at Cormac's head.

"Ah fuck," said Carl, then abruptly came upright and scanned about himself. Out of the darkness came the flash-crack of a projectile weapon, the sound of a fleshy impact, and Carl was flung back.

"Thanks for that, boy," said a figure stepping out of a nearby alley.

Cormac froze for a moment, then began to move towards the interloper.

"You want some, soldier?" the man enquired, swinging the stubby barrel of a weapon towards him. Carl was coughing blood—not dead yet. Maybe all it would take was another shot—

Something slammed against the man's back, and he oofed and staggered. Glimpsing a rock thudding to the ground, Cormac moved in close and crescent-kicked the gun from the man's hand. As the weapon clattered to the gridwork, he moved in close for a heel-of-the-hand strike, and just managed to duck the swipe of a blade. The guy was fast—used to this sort of encounter—and Cormac realised, by the way his opponent was poised, that a crescent-kick would not work again.

"Come on, Yallow!" shouted Cormac.

"Oh I'm here," said Yallow, from just behind the man.

There came a thump then, and the man lifted off his feet and sprawled. Cormac thought Yallow had hit him, but looking round saw Carl lowering his gun—certainly not military issue, and certainly not something he should have been carrying here. Carl dropped the gun to the grating, then passed out.

"We need to get him to the infirmary," said Cormac.

"I've already called a medivac team." Yallow tapped her aug.

Cormac stooped beside the attacker, checked for a pulse and found none. He then found the charred hole right over the man's heart, next turning him over to gaze at the fist-sized cavity in his back and realising a low-energy pulse shot had been used. A higher energy pulse would have cut a perfect hole right through, but this kind, however, was more damaging at close quarters and more likely to ensure a kill. He stood and moved over to Carl.

Yallow had wadded up her jacket and pressed it against Carl's sucking chest wound. Cormac stooped to take up the gun Carl had dropped, then studied it. The weapon had to be adjusted internally for low-power shots—something Carl was quite capable of doing—but his doing so demonstrated that he had felt the need for the weapon to perform in that way. Carl was into something, that was sure.

Soon, flashing lights lit the night above them and an AG ambulance settled on the ground near them. Three medics piled out followed by two self-governing floating stretchers. The medics dismissed Cormac and Yallow and set to work, and soon Carl and his opponent were on the stretchers and on their way towards the ambulance. Inevitably, before Cormac and Yallow could depart, another grav vehicle descended—the logo of the ECS military police gleaming on its doors. Cormac was tempted to slip Carl's weapon inside his jacket, but decided at the last moment not to. Maybe unit loyalty should be encouraged, but only so far. Two military policemen stepped out of the vehicle, then one of them paused, holding up his hand to the other while listening to his comunit. After a moment they both returned to their vehicle and it rose back into the sky again.

"Odd," commented Yallow.

As the ambulance finally ascended, another vehicle descended from the sky. This was a rough-looking gravcar without anything to distinguish it from a civilian vehicle. A lean woman stepped out and Cormac recognised her instantly. She had long blonde hair tied back with a leather thong, and was clad in a worn grey envirosuit and long leather coat. She was one of the couple he had tentatively identified aboard the heavy lifter wing as ECS agents.

"Well, you have been busy," she said, gazing up at the departing ambulance, then down at the dark stains on the gratings. She now looked steadily at Yallow. "I've viewed your recording." She tapped the discrete aug behind her ear. "But now I want detail from the both of you." Looking at Cormac her eyes focused on the weapon he was holding.

"Carl's," he said, and tossed it to her.

With supreme ease she snatched it out of the air, inspected it briefly, then removed its gas canister before inserting the gun inside her leather coat.

"Let's go somewhere more convivial for a chat."