"What about the others?" he asked.

Her head swivelled towards him for a moment. "Dead," she said, her voice perfect, which more than anything seemed to bring home her unhumanity. Humans needed lips and tongues to form their words; she now possessed neither. He took that in, some weasel part of himself trying to find some way around it. He stamped on that inclination, hard. Whatever he thought of Golem, or artificial intelligences, in this situation Crean would not have said the others were dead without being utterly sure. Cormac felt that, had she been human, this would have accounted for her apathy earlier. He felt a moment of confusion: Why should she emulate shock and grief?

"Return with Cormac to the shuttle, and then to me," Sadist instructed.

New coordinates appeared. Cormac turned, until the arrow was pointing directly ahead, and set out. There was no need to run now, and suddenly he felt so exhausted a slow walk seemed almost too much.

13

As Cormac stepped outside the school he scanned around eagerly for a sight of the war drone—the one they had seen in Montana and which now seemed to be here—but there was no sign of it.

"Bye bye, Cormac!"

He glanced round and saw Culu standing with her father.

He waved. "Bye, Culu!"

Her father was a bulky bald-headed man in baggy pyjama-like clothing that disguised the physical cybernetic additions to his torso, but which could not disguise his twinned augs, shiny chrome additions on either side of his head. Cormac's mother, on one of the few occasions she met Cormac outside the school, said Culu's father was a «traditionalist» because he felt the necessity to pick Culu up every day, and it had taken Cormac some time to figure out what she meant. Only stumbling across a historical text about twenty-first-century paedo-hysteria did he understand the old tradition of always picking up one's daughter at the school gates. His mother also said something about minority-group paranoia also being traditionalist—a comment he still did not quite understand.

The only other individual being picked up at the gates by his parents was Meecher, but Cormac suspected that had something to do with Meecher's behaviour today. He watched as Meecher's mother smacked him hard across the back of the head then pointed to their hydrocar. Meecher climbed in and sat down, while his father and mother stood outside discussing him. Cormac watched them until they climbed into the car and headed off. He waited a little longer, dawdled for a while because he did not much enjoy sharing public transport with his fellow pupils, which was apparently a trait that worried the school authorities.

Eventually he began heading down the pavement in the direction many of the other pupils had gone—towards the nearest bus stop. Still scanning his surroundings for some sight of the war drone, he noticed the presence of numerous gravcars parked here and there in the area, most of which seemed to be occupied by one or two individuals. This was odd, since usually such vehicles occupied the roofports of the residences here, or if from outside the area, they parked on public roofports. Then a shadow loomed above and he glanced up expecting to see yet another car coming in to land, only to see a scorpion, black against the bright sky.

The drone descended fast and landed hard in the road flinging flakes of plasticrete and gritty dust. Simultaneously, surrounding gravcars accelerated, blocking the road in either direction, and the occupants began piling out. With a surge of sheer excitement Cormac realised that many of these people wore ECS uniforms and were brandishing weapons, which they rested across the roofs and bonnets of their vehicles. These weren't any kind of weapon he recognised, having long, arm-thick barrels and heavy, wide breach sections covered with cooling fins. The drone spun in place, its sharp-pointed limbs scoring the plasticrete, until it came to face Cormac, then it surged forwards to loom over him.

"I do not have much time," it stated.

Cormac just gaped.

"You need to know."

"Amistad!" came a bellow from some public-address system. Now more shadows drew across and Cormac looked up to see some huge vehicle hovering above. It looked like a floating barge, but with all sharp corners and flat surfaces, all a dull greyish green he recognised as military ceramal armour.

"Amistad! Move away from the boy!" A woman in ECS uniform had approached, her hands on her hips.

The drone turned slightly to peer at her, then quickly swung back to Cormac. "Your father—" The drone seemed highly agitated, and Cormac was reminded of his mother's archaeologist friends who visited; men and women who were not accustomed to talking to children. "Your father is gone."

"He's dead?" Cormac asked.

Further agitation from the drone. Its feet were beating a tattoo against the ground, its antennae quivering and it kept extending and snipping its claws at the air as if it could find the words there. It never got the chance.

There came a thrumming from above, a deep sonorous note, and it seemed as if something invisible but incredibly heavy and substantial slammed down from the vessel above. The drone was crushed flat on its belly, its legs spread out about it and its claws immobilized. An invisible wall of air hit Cormac in the face and shoved him straight back against the wall of the building behind. He tried to fight his way free, but the air seemed to have coagulated around him, turned into a cloying sheet.

"Is my dad dead?" he asked, but knew at once that his words reached no further than his lips.

Then came a blast, excavating a great crater in the road underneath the drone. Somehow, this gave it enough freedom to move and it dropped down into the hollow then bounced out sideways. Beams of a deep red radiation stabbed through the dusty air from those weapons resting across the gravcars, but the drone avoided them all, moving almost too fast to follow. Coiled into a ring it rolled and sprang open, landed on the face of the building opposite and leapt again, crashed against the side of the ship above and bounced off again. The bright light of a fusion drive ignited in atmosphere lit the street, and the drone hurtled away.

The ship above also accelerated away, the invisible force pinning Cormac against the wall immediately relinquishing its grip, so he slumped to the pavement, and some of the people in the street leapt into their gravcars and they too sped away. His ears ringing, Cormac gazed down at the pavement, then after a moment noticed a pair of enviroboots nearby. He looked up at the woman who had addressed the drone and she reached down and helped him to his feet.

"You mother will be here shortly," she said.

"My dad is dead," he replied.

She gazed up at the sky in the direction of the departing vessel and gravcars. "So that's what it's about," she said. "You can never be sure with them, and it's best not to take any chances." She peered down at him. "They can be so dangerous."

He tried to learn more, but everything he asked was referred to his mother, who soon arrived looking worried and angry and quickly led him to her gravcar.

"It said that Dad is dead," he told her.

"And that's all?" she enquired, handing him a bottle of fruit juice.

"It didn't get time to say much," he replied, uncapping the bottle. He took a long drink, for he was very thirsty. "I think they used a hard-field to try and capture it."

"It should not be here, and it should not interfere in things it is not equipped to understand," Hannah told him, watching him carefully.

He suddenly felt incredibly tired, and leant back in the seat.

Hannah continued, "It knows about fighting and killing, but like them all is emotionally stunted." She seemed to be speaking to him down a long, dark tunnel. "How can one like Amistad explain the truth when even I, your mother, can think of no way?"