10.

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

But it was old news.

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

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

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

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

"Anything new?" asked Osiah.

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

"You can check for yourself," Cormac replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He's dead," he said.

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

"The rod up my arse?" Cormac enquired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gorman and Crean were awaiting him, both of them dressed casually. Gorman wore baggy black trousers and a brightly coloured Indian shirt, while Crean wore a tight little green top that exposed both an expanse of cleavage and her flat stomach, white combat trousers and karate slippers. Certainly she possessed assets that might distract anyone seeing her from being suspicious of who or what she was, and her chameleonware should be able to fool most scanners, however, her emulation wasn't perfect—Cormac had yet to see a Golem he did not recognise as a Golem, and guessed there were many others like him.

The training area was merely a cylindrical room with a hard floor and numerous lockers about the circumference, doubtless packed with training equipment. Cormac surveyed it all as he walked out and stopped before the other two. Smiling, Crean stepped up close to him and, despite her being a Golem, when she reached up and began running a finger around one nipple jutting against the fabric of her shirt, he could not help but be distracted. The next thing he knew her other hand had closed around his testicles and squeezed, hard, just prior to her forehead slamming into his nose, then she kicked his feet out from underneath him and stepped away.

"Now," she said, while Gorman looked on, grinning, his arms crossed, "you are going to learn how to fight dirty."

The analgaesic patches had taken the sting out of his grazes and bruises, the repair to his front teeth was invisible and the ache in his foot subsided once the bone and cell welding had settled. He had learned a lot over the last four days. Certainly there were the specifics like which brands of drink came in breakable bottles and therefore could be broken on the edge of a table and shoved in an opponents face, but generally it was an attitude. Everything was a weapon from spittle to drinking straws and always it was better to take the initiative: if it looked like a situation was about to turn violent, better for it to be you that turned that situation violent. He had learned something else too: knowing the difference between Golem emulation of humanity and humanity itself was not quite so cut and dried as he had liked to believe. Crean sweated, she smelt of woman, and grappling with her it was sometimes difficult for him to keep his mind on fighting techniques.

Cormac took a long, slow breath. He needed a shower, but first he turned on the room screen and gazed at the world the Sadist had now fallen into orbit about. Apparently Polity operatives, scattered throughout the Graveyard, had been told to keep watch for the light-cargo hauler Carl had departed on, and it had been seen landing here. Cormac was about to apply to the ship's server for details about this world when there came a tap at his door.

"Come in," he said, without looking round.

"How's the foot?"

Cormac looked round to see Crean standing there still dressed in the skin-tight, low-cut top and similarly clinging leggings she had been wearing earlier, while taking him through the finer points of kick-boxing with your hands tied behind your back. He had broken his foot on her hip.

"All stuck back together again, though still aching a little," he replied. "I'd ask you how your hip was, if it weren't for the fact that your bones don't break and you don't bruise."

"Now," she held up a finger, "you're only half right. Look." She took hold of the top of her leggings and pulled them down to show her hip, incidentally exposing this side of her pubis and neatly waxed traditional Brazilian-style pubic hair... or was it waxed? Cormac didn't know whether synthetic Golem hair grew. It seemed crazy to him that they would want growing hair, but then it seemed odd that they emulated flawed humanity. After a moment he focused on what she was supposed to be showing him: a growing bruise on her hip.

"Does it hurt?" he asked, a catch in his voice. He could not help but notice that her nipples, invisible when she entered his room, where now very definitely visible. Did she consciously control that, or was her emulation program an unconscious thing? How deliberate was any of what she was now doing? It then occurred to him that men often asked themselves that last question about flesh-and-blood women.

She looked up. "Yes, it hurts."

"But it doesn't have to."

"And that is different to you in what way?"

It was true. Cormac did not even have to put up with his foot aching, and many troopers he knew now possessed pain-management systems installed in their bodies. In fact, it was possible for him to manage pain through his aug, but he had yet to study those functions. He nodded acquiescence, and felt a surge of disappointment when she pulled the waist of her leggings back up into position. She walked over and stood with her arms akimbo, gazing up into his face.

"You've got a little bit of a problem with Golem, haven't you?" she suggested.

"No problem, as such..."

"But we're machines?"

"Yes..."

"And you're not?"

"Well..."

"I was programmed by an AI that could run a human mind inside itself as a sub-programme," she said. "The way my mind operates is not any less human than yours just because its physical substance is a form of memory crystal. Honestly, Cormac, if you had not been told, you would never have known I was Golem."

He could have argued that point, but right then he didn't want to: his own particular male programming was responding to her despite the fact that she wasn't human. He felt some reservations—a seedy part of his mind telling him that sex with her would be more like VR porn than the real thing, but then, VR porn had felt just as good...

"Here." She reached up and pulled down her top to expose those all too perfect breasts, reached out, took hold of his hands, then pulled them up to her breasts. He squeezed gently, rubbed the nipples with his thumbs and she made a perfectly plausible little grunting sound. "Human enough for you?" she enquired.

They were warm and taut and certainly there was a part of his anatomy telling him there was no difference at all. She pushed closer to him, her expression coquettish as she undid his jeans and pulled them and his underwear down about his hips, then abruptly she slid down, took hold of his cock, ran her tongue around the end for a moment, then took it into her mouth, which felt sufficiently wet and warm.

"Is this part of my training?" he asked breathlessly.

She pulled away for a moment. "My programming AI told me not to speak with my mouth full." Then she abruptly stood, walked past him to the bed, where she stripped off her top and then her leggings, holding herself bent over for a moment and tugging at one buttock before clambering onto the bed and rolling onto her back. She reached down and with slow leisure began playing with herself, watching him enquiringly as he hurriedly stripped off his clothes and rushed over to join her.

Throughout the ensuing hours they both acquired a few more bruises.

The Sadist had only left U-space for a moment when the ship's AI informed Cormac, "I've got a message for you! It's from your mother!"

Cormac, who at that point had been lying on his bed studying pictures of their new surroundings on his viewing screen and wishing Crean would come and join him, abruptly sat up and paid attention. He had half expected there to be no reply.

"What format is it?"

"I've got a video transmission along with another large file that looks like mem-code," Sadist informed him.

He sat up even straighter then. Mem-code was how memories were stored, its format dependent on the human brain it had been extracted from or destined for. Did this ship have the kind of equipment he would require? It was certainly possible now to implant such code—to allow people to live the memories—but it usually had to be done under very controlled circumstances. There were also augs out there that could do it, the Sensic range, which were not recommended, but which had not been made illegal since the AI view was that if you were stupid enough to use one then that was your look-out. Many people did use them. Many people were addicted to experiencing other people's memories. There was also an illegal trade in memories extracted from people as they were tortured and murdered, though how some became addicted to that, Cormac had no idea.

"Can you transmit both files to my aug?" he enquired.

"I can transmit the video message to you, but not the mem-code," Sadist replied. "The code file would be too large for the storage in your aug."

"Is there any way I can... load this code?"

"It is possible. The initial file would have to be divided into three at preset chapter marks. I can then load them each to your aug through an adapter, though after each you will need to take a rest."

"Why?"

"If these are, as I suspect, memories that have been edited from your mind, when you re-experience them the contradictions will give you an extreme headache," Sadist explained. "They will not mesh with your mind—you'll experience them as actuality, but afterwards will certainly have trouble integrating them."

"I see."

"It will also be necessary for you to seek permission from Agent Spencer and your unit commander, since the process may affect your performance."

"Perhaps the video first?"

"To your augmentation or on your screen?"

"Send a copy to my aug, but also play it on the screen for me."

The screen blinked on to show a frozen picture of his mother, Hannah. After a moment she jerked into motion, raising a hand to rub her forehead as if she had a headache. Then she looked up.

"Cormac," she said, then paused for a long moment. "I'm still not used to calling you that and wonder if, after being in ECS now for a while, you have retained the habit of insisting people call you by your surname. Doubtless you have, since I rather suspect the habit was more firmly established in your mind by the editing process."

Again a long pause.

"Yes, I did have your mind edited. It was perhaps a foolish thing to do, but I wasn't thinking straight back then anyhow. And once it was done there was no way of putting those memories back. Even now, it is not really possible to put them back, especially when a lengthy period of time has passed. This is because everything you are now is a structure built upon what went before, and by altering the shape of a building's foundations you risk toppling it."

She smiled tiredly, and Cormac wished this was a direct link so he could point out how dependent a building was on its foundations and how, if you screwed with them in the first place, the same building might not be stable anyway. But he rather suspected she knew that.

"I took you into the editing suite shortly after Dax departed to Cheyne III, when you were eight years old. I had received the news about your father... we had both received the news about your father, and at that time, the way I was, it was difficult enough for me to handle my own grief. On his second session in the suite even Dax had those memories deleted because he did not want to deal with them then. As for you, it just seemed easier to relieve you of that pain. There is nothing advantageous about suffering—"

Cormac, having picked up the remote control, paused the video at that point and thought long and hard about what she had just said. At the end of the war he had understood that his father would not be coming home. This fact had penetrated his growing mind by some form of osmosis during the three years between his eighth and eleventh birthdays. Would it have been better if he had known at the time that his father had been killed? He thought yes. Here he utterly disagreed with his mother's assessment. Life, if you really wanted to live it, could be sometimes wonderful and sometimes hard, and he felt you couldn't fully appreciate the good stuff without experiencing the bad. He also felt that to get on in life, you also needed to acquire a few emotional calluses. She had been selfish and overprotective, but then, throughout history that had always seemed a parental prerogative. He started the recording running again.

"—experiencing pain only hardens you, desensitizes you, was how I thought about it all back then. I now understand that I was just being selfish, like a parent giving an unruly child drugs to calm him down. Pain, whether physical or mental, always serves the purpose of teaching the recipient to avoid it, but more important than that, it can teach said recipient to empathise with the pain of others. We need pain to be human."

Abruptly his mother shot up in his estimation of her, and though he resented what she had done, he could only forgive her.

"Along with this message I have attached a memcording of the memories that were excised from your mind. It comprises three incidents. However, it was impossible to include all the small alterations that were made to your memories or the natural tendency of the mind to fit things into a logical order." Hannah grimaced, now gazing down at her clenched hands. "I am told this is rather like what happens the moment you wake up from REM sleep. Your mind has been processing masses of unrelated rubbish, yet when you wake these masses are aligned in a coherent order, which we call dreams." Now she looked up. "Experience these memories if you feel you must, but understand they are not the ending. I am not sure if there is an ending—the only way to find that out is from the horse's mouth... or to be more precise: the scorpion's mouth. You need to speak to Amistad."

What the hell?

"I hope you can forgive me, then perhaps I can forgive myself."

The video feed froze.

Cormac sat staring at the screen for a moment, then rewound it and replayed the last bit again, then once more to be sure. No, he had no idea what she was talking about. The memories of when he first found out about his father's death had been edited from his mind. How could death be any more of an ending? And what had that drone got to do with it all? Now, Cormac immediately began reviewing the information he had obtained about that drone, information that had been sitting untouched in his aug since the AI back on Hagren had found it for him.

The drone Amistad was apparently constructed in the infamous factory station Room 101. Certainly the AIs had so named that station because its intended use had been to turn out some of the nastiest cybernetic fighters of the war. A lot of experimental work was done there and it was apparently where the first assassin drones were made. But most of the experimentation involved taking the minds of surviving drones, who in themselves had been quite nasty to have survived, and upgrading them with further traits useful in the fighting, like aggression, amorality and immorality. It might be apocryphal, but there were those who said that before it was destroyed by a Prador kamikaze—essentially a spaceship packed with CTDs and flown into the station by a Prador first-child—Room 101 was turning out the AI equivalent of psychopaths.

After his initiation in Room 101, twenty years before the end of the war, Amistad was sent to the front, where he was involved in numerous vicious conflicts. However, the information Cormac had been given to cover that period was mainly sections of net-retrieved text. After studying them for a while longer he realised they were sections of aug text communications expanded to readability: Sparkind unit 243v23 with drone support sent to Horia Caves. Minimal resistance encountered and now area B is secured. Enemy casualties: one first-child and fifteen second-children. Nix relevant intelligence. Nix relevant tech for Reverse Engineering.

A further check of hyperlinks in the text gave him the names of those in the Sparkind unit, also revealing that "drone support" had been Amistad alone. There were numerous entries like this, which only confirmed what he already knew: Amistad was a war drone. Then Cormac had a moment of inspiration, and using the integral search engine in the aug, searched for his father's name. Just two entries appeared:

...I sent Sparkind units 243v20 through 243v28 to the Olston Peninsular sect. 104, with atmosphere gunship (Vlad and Rickshaw) support. They cleared sect. Enemy casualties: 3 first-children, 4000 second-children (est.). Own: 8 humans, 3 Golem (2 minds retrieved). After Prador counterattack: Lost: gunship Vlad with all personnel. Lost: all Sparkind units. Survivors: gunship Rickshaw, drone Amistad, SUC David Cormac. I tell you, it was a fucking nightmare...

... Specialists SUC Cormac & drone Amistad report Prador snatch squads working in the area. The attack in the Hessick desert will give time for runcible evacuation of 10% population of Patience. South Hessick impossible. Advise clearance...

The Olston Peninsular, Cormac remembered, was one of those places Dax had been stationed. But was his memory of that conversation overheard between his mother and Dax true? It seemed that after the disaster there, Amistad and his father had been recruited to some specialist unit. He wondered what "Prador snatch squads" were, and immediately started a search. Nothing came up in his aug, but it offered him the option to link to "local server." He approved this and immediately got the bad news:

Prador snatch squads were those especially introduced by the Prador to capture humans alive for transportation back to the Second Kingdom, where they were used for entertainment or food. During the later years of the war, these same squads captured humans who were then transported to the planet Spatterjay where they were infected with the local viral fibres, which impart great physical toughness and durability. The purpose of so infecting these captives was to make them strong enough to physically survive Prador coring: a process whereby the brain and part of the spinal column is removed to be replaced by thrall technology.

Clear enough, he felt, and one of those horrifically grotesque things the Prador did that he still could not quite believe. Now, studying the rest of the entry he called up data about the Hessick Campaign, which was the last Polity action his father had been involved in, the one he had died in. Though the final battle for planetary dominion had taken place on the ground in a region called Hessick County, which terminated in the Olston Peninsular, the deciding factor had been out in space. The Polity, it seemed, had expected to lose, but were fighting a delaying action so as to evacuate as much of the population as possible. However, after six months into the fight, which had seen over a million humans dead (mostly civilian casualties) and an estimated two hundred thousand Prador, the tide turned with the assassination of two of the three Prador adults in charge on the ground. The remaining adult quickly retreated, heading for its dreadnought, which was hunting down Polity ships much further out in this Solar System, and while that adult was in transit from the planet to its distant ship, a new Polity dreadnought arrived and destroyed its shuttle, killing it. Further new Polity dreadnoughts arrived and began to get the upper hand. On the ground, the now headless armies of Prador, gradually fell into disarray, but it still took a further month for them to be defeated.

That was the summation of it all, but there was a lot more available to Cormac if he wanted it. He chose another search, this time for "South Hessick Clearance" and received an unexpected response: Access Restricted.

"Sadist," Cormac enquired, "why is access restricted to 'South Hessick Clearance'?"

There was a long pause before the AI replied. "It is restricted because it is restricted. If I tell you why, then I will be revealing what is restricted, won't I?"

Cormac contained his annoyance. It seemed he had gone as far as he could for the moment. His next option must be accessing his edited-out memories. He opened a familiar channel direct to Gorman's aug.

"Gorman," he said, "I need your permission—"

"You have fifteen hours," Gorman interrupted. "If Sadist estimates that you can recover within that time, then you can load one chapter of your excised memories. If there's any doubt of your performance coming up to scratch, then no chance."

The channel closed.