Читать онлайн «Shadow of the Scorpion»

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.

1

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.