Neal Asher: Shadow of the Scorpion

Amistad continued, "We are capable of emotion, and more, and when our minds are hurriedly put together under the exigencies of a fight for survival, we are also quite capable of going insane. This is what happened to me, this is why I felt sure I must find David Cormac's kin and tell them what had happened to him. Luckily the Tritonia AI intervened before I loaded that on your shoulders at such an early age. After I left Earth I searched for five years. I joined the police action against Jay Hoop's organization on Spatterjay. We found the camps, released those prisoners who had yet to be cored and thralled and eliminated those who had ceased to be human. We checked what records we could find, discovered how many millions had been processed. I know that millions will never be found, never be known about, but some could be traced and David was one of them."

"What happened to him?"

"Surely you understand?"

"I'm not sure…"

"Your father was taken to Spatterjay where, from the bite of a leech, he was infected with the Spatterjay virus. When the virus had sufficiently changed his body, sufficiently made it tough enough to withstand such abuse without dying, most of his brain was cut away and replaced with Prador thrall technology."

There it was: the plain horrible truth. Cormac felt sick at the thought, but he also felt distanced. This was a father he could be proud of, a man to be admired who had met such a horrible end, but he was also a father Cormac could hardly remember.

"He became the property of a Prador captain called Enoloven, whose demesne lies just inside the Prador Kingdom at the border, the Graveyard. Enoloven was high in the hierarchy of the Second Kingdom, but when the old king was usurped—an event which led to the end of the war—Enoloven was not in good favour with the new king, and had no place in the Third Kingdom. He was attacked and killed, his properties divided amidst the loyal and much sold off. Your father was one item sold to human criminals resident in the Graveyard."

Cormac suddenly got the nasty idea that the human blank he himself had seen in the Graveyard had been his own father. No, that was madness.

"I found your father's new owner—" Amistad snipped a claw at the air, probably in response to some strong memory. " — and his cohorts. They did not survive the meeting."

"My father?"

"Used for display fighting against genetically modified beasts."

"What did you do with him?"

"The only thing that could be done," said the drone. "Look down at where you stand."

Cormac did so, and noted that just ahead of him was a clear rectangular section of stone set into the other burnt and heat-glazed rock.

"I could not bury him complete because what he had become was something that would never die easily. His ashes lie there, underneath that stone."

Staring at his father's grave, Cormac tried to understand what he was feeling. He wanted to feel grief, but only because, surely, that was what should be expected from him. He felt nothing like that. This place was a good and dramatic one. This was completion, an ending to a story and the beginning of another.

"Perhaps you would like me to cut some words into the stone?" the drone suggested.

"I feel no need for them, though perhaps my mother or my brothers…"

"If you will allow."

Amistad loomed up beside Cormac and intense light flickered across the stone ahead, which crackled and smoked. As soon as this ceased, he stepped up and gazed down at the perfectly incised shape of a scorpion cooling from red-heat.

"Yes, I think that's fine," he said, and turned away to keep an appointment with the future.