"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.

11

Cormac and his mother, Hannah, were on their way back from the Fossil Gene Project excavation when she abruptly turned their gravcar, so it tilted over, swinging round in a wide circle, and peered past him towards the ground. He looked in the same direction and saw something down there, perambulating across the green. It looked big, its metal back segmented. As they flew above this object, 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—and was now clearly revealed as a giant iron scorpion.

"What's that?" he asked, supposing it some exotically shaped excavating machine controlled by the AI running the Fossil Gene Project.

With a frown his mother replied, "War drone," then abruptly used grav-braking to halt the gravcar in mid-air above the drone. Cormac tried to stand and peer down at it, 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 tried to behave himself, but just could not keep still in his seat as his mother now brought the car down towards the ground. They landed, kicking up a cloud of dust and a scattering of dead leaves. Hannah shut down the car and peered through the cloud towards the drone's location. Shortly it became visible, approaching like some nightmare monster emerging from a sinister fog.

"You stay here," she said, hauling herself up on the passenger cage and, without opening the door, clambering out.

"Aww," Cormac whined.

She walked round to his side of the car, towards where the drone was approaching, and stabbed a finger at him, "You stay there—these things might be fighting for us but some of them can be damned dangerous," then headed towards the drone.

Thirty feet out from the car the drone and his mother drew face-to-face, and Cormac felt a sudden rush of fear as the mechanical monster rose up above her, exposing its ribbed underside and forward legs. It reached towards the sky with its claws, as if again trying to catch hold of something invisible. She looked small and vulnerable before it, and he thought it was about to fall on her. Then she just gestured with her flat hand, waving it towards the ground, and the drone dropped down again. Cormac had a feeling she had just told it off, but he could not hear what she was saying.

The two stood talking for a short while, Hannah occasionally gesturing or the drone waving a claw in the air, but they were just far enough away for their conversation to be an indistinct noise with no single word clearly audible. Cormac fidgeted in his seat and wondered if he might be able to get away with climbing out and creeping up behind her.

"No!" his mother yelled, and abruptly collapsed to one knee as if her legs could no longer support her. The drone was still speaking, moving and snipping one claw to emphasise each point.

"Mother!"

Cormac scrambled from the gravcar and began moving hesitantly towards her. The drone dipped its nightmare head, antennae waving above Hannah, and said something further. Hannah immediately heaved herself to her feet and whirled round.

"Get back in the car!"

He had never seen her so angry, and he could now see she was crying. He still hesitated.

"I won't tell you again!"

Cormac returned to the car, his stomach tightening and tears behind his eyes. As he climbed in he saw his mother turn once more to the drone, say something brief, then head back to the car. The drone sat utterly motionless for a moment, then abruptly came after her. Upon reaching the car, Hannah turned on it.

"There's nothing else to be said," she told it, almost choking as she spoke.

Cormac, tears abruptly forgotten, stared in fascination at the machine's peridot eyes, its slowly grating mandibles and what looked like missile and beam ports below its mouth.

"The boy should be told," it intoned, its voice sonorous but with a hint of steel.

Hannah walked around the car, grabbed a passenger cage bar and heaved herself in. "That is my decision." She scrubbed away tears on her sleeve, reached out and engaged power, then grasped the joystick, lifting the car from the ground.

The drone surged forwards, its claw coming down with a crash right beside Cormac and closing on the top of the door. The car made a whining sound and tilted as it struggled to rise.

"I think I know more about what is best for my son than you," said Hannah. "As I understand it, with the one-oh-one classification you have, you shouldn't even have been allowed to come here. Release us. Now."

The drone abruptly obeyed, and the car soared into the air.

"What should I be told?" asked Cormac.

Hannah slammed the joystick forwards, but her shaking hand imparted its motion to the vehicle, which swayed from side to side through the air. Abruptly the safeties cut in, a single tongue of plastic folding out of the seat beside Cormac and closing around his waist, then a voice issued from the console.

"Are you experiencing difficulties, Hannah Lagrange?"

"I am," she replied. "Can you take us on automatic back to our house?"

"Done." The car abruptly stabilized, now controlled by some remote AI, but Hannah kept her hand on the joystick.

"What was the drone talking about?" Cormac persisted.

"Be quiet," she said mildly, reaching into her top pocket to take out her sunglasses and place them over her reddened eyes.

The campsite beside the lake soon came into view and Hannah said to the traffic-control AI, "Okay, I can take it from here."

This time, rather than land the gravcar beside their bubble house she took it into the carport, and upon landing sent the instruction for the floor clamp to engage.

"Are we going?" Cormac asked.

"We certainly are," his mother replied.

As they clambered out of the car he peered at the damage the drone had caused to the door, then hurried after his mother when she shouted for him.

Cormac opened his eyes and immediately it felt to him as if someone was driving a dagger straight through his forehead, so for a little while it was difficult for him to even think about the missing memory he had just experienced. His right eye seemed to be filled with a large black blob and zigzag patterns were flashing in the left peripheral vision of his other eye. He groped to his right for the medical table, couldn't find it so turned to look, feeling something dragging across his left shoulder.

There.

He snatched up a strip of three analgaesic patches, peeled one from its backing and slapped it straight on one temple, then after a moment peeled another one and stuck it on his neck.

"Careful of the optics," Sadist warned him.

Only then did he remember the optic feed trailing across his shoulder. It had come as a surprise to him that the aug hinged open to reveal numerous optic plugs, that in fact most of its internal space was taken up with them and the device's computing hardware wasn't much bigger than the tip of his thumb.

"Can you initiate detach?" the ship's AI enquired.

"I don't think so," Cormac managed.

"No problem."

Words blinked fleetingly across his vision but he could identify none of them except "CLOSED," which by some mental quirk went to join the zigzags for a party.

"You may now remove the optics," Sadist informed him.

He reached up, grabbed the bundle of fibre optic threads plugged into his aug, and pulled. They detached easily and when he released them the device standing on that side, which bore only a passing resemblance to a pedestal autodoc, quickly wound them in then retreated across the medbay to its alcove.