After a moment he stood up, and found that his legs supported him without problem. He was slightly out of balance as he pulled on the undergarments and fatigues, but a supporting hand from Olkennon was enough. Once finished dressing he gazed around at the other familiar furnishings of this room and wondered, with his chosen profession, about the regularity of his visits to places like this.

"How many died?" he finally asked—one of the many questions nagging at him since the moment he woke up.

"Your questions will be answered during the debriefing," Olkennon replied. "Follow me." She headed towards the door.

Cormac peered down at his feet, twisted one of them against the floor to test its grip and, finding it sufficient, followed Olkennon out of the medical centre and along one of the township streets. As they walked he found himself scanning about him, half expecting to see a big steel scorpion crouching in the shadows nearby. Maybe he had imagined it; war drones tended to be quite similar in their choice of nightmarish body-shapes so perhaps it had just been a similar drone. After all, he had lost consciousness shortly after the CTD blast, and hadn't been entirely lucid and clear-headed just prior to it, since he'd been through rather a lot.

Now they reached another composite dome which, as far as Cormac knew, was used for storage. Olkennon led him inside, lights automatically switching on for them. Cormac gazed round at the stacked crates, racks filled with ordinance and crash-foam-wrapped items. To one side stood a column of disc-shaped antigravity tanks, stacked one upon the other like inverted plates. Assembled mosquito autoguns squatted in lines in one rack, occasionally shifting and twitching as if trying to get more comfortable in slumber. She took him into the shadows between racks loaded with engine components and what looked like bundles of pulse-gun barrels, then finally through an internal security door into an area packed with specialized equipment, where Agent Spencer sat behind a table spread with the component parts of various hand weapons.

"Pull up a chair," said Spencer, gesturing to where some folded camp chairs were resting against the wheel of a low-slung ATV. Olkennon grabbed up two chairs, handing one to Cormac, and they sat themselves before Spencer's table. Cormac was glad Olkennon had positioned herself next to him, for this indicated she was taking the position of advocate rather than interrogator.

"Are you paying attention?" asked Spencer.

Cormac only realised the question wasn't directed at him when a crab drone resting on some packing cases behind her unfolded gleaming legs and said, "I am always paying attention."

"So, Cormac," said Spencer, without looking up from the pulse-gun power supply she was inspecting, "in your own words, and in as much detail as you can supply, tell us what happened from the moment trooper Yallow was murdered."

That hit him in the stomach and immediately seemed to highlight his memories, or maybe the potent cocktail of analgaesics and antishock drugs washing about inside him was beginning to wear off.

"She's dead," he said.

Spencer looked up and nodded once.

"What about the CTD blast?" Cormac asked. "How many were killed?"

"None at all."

"What?"

"We'd already spread the rumour that another battalion was moving into the woods because we suspected that would be where a CTD would be deployed and we knew the Separatists would want to wait on a larger target. At that point we were preparing the battalion there to pull out. And they pulled out fast once we got the warning you posted on your personal net-space."

Cormac sat back, feeling some of the tightness in his chest slacken.

"Now, from the moment Yallow was murdered…"

Cormac told them the story, in detail. There were no interruptions until he reached the point where he escaped.

"So let me get this right," said Spencer. "You deliberately sacrificed one hand to enable yourself to get free, and thereupon managed to wipe out seven Separatists?"

"The forensic examination of his wounds seems to confirm his story," Olkennon observed. "As does the examination of the bodies recovered at the Separatist base." She turned and gazed at Cormac for a moment. "It would appear that this soldier is a walking abattoir."

Cormac absorbed that, understanding in an instant that they must have pieced together the sequence of events in Dramewood before this debriefing. However, he felt they really didn't understand what he had faced and why he acted as he did. "My choices were to either do nothing and be tortured, eventually to death, or to try and fight back. I was lucky, I was prepared to die and my opponents were not."

Spencer, who had long ago abandoned her inspection of the components before her, placed her elbows on the table, interlaced her fingers and rested her chin on them. "Then having been prepared to die and managing to survive, you went after Carl. If you could continue your story?"

Cormac did so, including in detail the mistakes he felt he made at the end.

"You made no mistakes," said Spencer. "Your time was limited both by your injuries and by the detonation time of the CTD so you needed to expose yourself to draw them out. Carl was wrong about that. If you had held back and spent your time trying to stalk them, you could have lost them, faced reinforcements or been forced into an encounter when your injuries further impaired your efficiency."

It was a distinctly cold analysis.

"What about Carl?" he asked.

"What about him?" Spencer leant back, holding her hands out in appeal. "The Carl whose records we have grew up on Callisto and there joined ECS, but it now seems the Carl here was not the Carl there." She turned towards the crab drone. "Anything?"

The drone replied, "I have made enquiries: childhood genetic and medical records match with recent scans and samplings taken while he was in the medical unit here. The Callisto AI has now despatched agents to bring in his parents for questioning, for genetically it seems they are not his parents."

"The records have been altered?" Spencer suggested.

"The records have been altered," the drone confirmed. Cormac realised it must be telefactored from the local AI to have made such fast enquiries.

"So he has escaped," said Cormac, which was the real question he had been asking.

"Unless he was caught in the blast," said Spencer, "it would seem so."

Cormac paused for a moment, wondering how he was going to broach the next subject. "A drone rescued me."

"Your actions in the Separatist base resulted in their chameleonware crashing, but it seemed quite possible to us that they did that themselves to lure more ECS personnel within the blast radius of the CTD, so we left it. The explosion from your ATV was picked up by satellite shortly after our friend here," she stabbed a thumb back at the crab drone, "picked up your warning on your site. We then moved anything that could fly fast enough into the area. Lucky the drone found you and grabbed you when it did."

This was frustrating. How could he say to them that the drone looked just like one that had haunted his childhood? They'd probably send him back to the medical unit for brain scans.

"I can't say that I'd seen many war drones here," he said.

Spencer studied him for a short while, then shrugged. "There aren't many."

"Where's it from… has it been here for a while?" Cormac grimaced. "Drone or otherwise I'd like to thank it for getting me out of there."

"Hagren?" Spencer enquired, her use of the planet's name indicating that the AI using the crab drone behind her was the main planetary runcible AI.

"Amistad is a free drone and merely answered the call I put out for assistance. He is now no longer connected to the planetary net and is not responding to calls. I have no idea where he is."