Neal Asher: Shadow of the Scorpion

For Caroline, as always

My thanks to Jason Williams and Jeremy Lassen for giving me this opportunity, to Bob Eggleton for the artwork and Marty Halpern for the copyediting, and to anyone else at Night Shade Books who made this possible.

Sitting on an outcrop, Ian Cormac stared at the words and the figures displayed on his palm-top, but could not equate them to anything he knew. A world had been bombed into oblivion and the death toll was a figure that could be read, but out of which it was impossible to extract any real sense and, though the battle lines had not shifted substantially for twelve years and such a cataclysmic event was unusual, it was not a story that could hold for long the attention of a young boy.

Ian's attention wandered, and he gazed back down at the rock nibblers swarming over the 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!"