"— experiencing pain only hardens you, desensitizes you, was how I thought about it all back then. I now understand that I was just being selfish, like a parent giving an unruly child drugs to calm him down. Pain, whether physical or mental, always serves the purpose of teaching the recipient to avoid it, but more important than that, it can teach said recipient to empathise with the pain of others. We need pain to be human."

Abruptly his mother shot up in his estimation of her, and though he resented what she had done, he could only forgive her.

"Along with this message I have attached a memcording of the memories that were excised from your mind. It comprises three incidents. However, it was impossible to include all the small alterations that were made to your memories or the natural tendency of the mind to fit things into a logical order." Hannah grimaced, now gazing down at her clenched hands. "I am told this is rather like what happens the moment you wake up from REM sleep. Your mind has been processing masses of unrelated rubbish, yet when you wake these masses are aligned in a coherent order, which we call dreams." Now she looked up. "Experience these memories if you feel you must, but understand they are not the ending. I am not sure if there is an ending—the only way to find that out is from the horse's mouth… or to be more precise: the scorpion's mouth. You need to speak to Amistad."

What the hell?

"I hope you can forgive me, then perhaps I can forgive myself."

The video feed froze.

Cormac sat staring at the screen for a moment, then rewound it and replayed the last bit again, then once more to be sure. No, he had no idea what she was talking about. The memories of when he first found out about his father's death had been edited from his mind. How could death be any more of an ending? And what had that drone got to do with it all? Now, Cormac immediately began reviewing the information he had obtained about that drone, information that had been sitting untouched in his aug since the AI back on Hagren had found it for him.

The drone Amistad was apparently constructed in the infamous factory station Room 101. Certainly the AIs had so named that station because its intended use had been to turn out some of the nastiest cybernetic fighters of the war. A lot of experimental work was done there and it was apparently where the first assassin drones were made. But most of the experimentation involved taking the minds of surviving drones, who in themselves had been quite nasty to have survived, and upgrading them with further traits useful in the fighting, like aggression, amorality and immorality. It might be apocryphal, but there were those who said that before it was destroyed by a Prador kamikaze—essentially a spaceship packed with CTDs and flown into the station by a Prador first-child—Room 101 was turning out the AI equivalent of psychopaths.

After his initiation in Room 101, twenty years before the end of the war, Amistad was sent to the front, where he was involved in numerous vicious conflicts. However, the information Cormac had been given to cover that period was mainly sections of net-retrieved text. After studying them for a while longer he realised they were sections of aug text communications expanded to readability: Sparkind unit 243v23 with drone support sent to Horia Caves. Minimal resistance encountered and now area B is secured. Enemy casualties: one first-child and fifteen second-children. Nix relevant intelligence. Nix relevant tech for Reverse Engineering.

A further check of hyperlinks in the text gave him the names of those in the Sparkind unit, also revealing that "drone support" had been Amistad alone. There were numerous entries like this, which only confirmed what he already knew: Amistad was a war drone. Then Cormac had a moment of inspiration, and using the integral search engine in the aug, searched for his father's name. Just two entries appeared:

…I sent Sparkind units 243v20 through 243v28 to the Olston Peninsular sect. 104, with atmosphere gunship (Vlad and Rickshaw) support. They cleared sect. Enemy casualties: 3 first-children, 4000 second-children (est.). Own: 8 humans, 3 Golem (2 minds retrieved). After Prador counterattack: Lost: gunship Vlad with all personnel. Lost: all Sparkind units. Survivors: gunship Rickshaw, drone Amistad, SUC David Cormac. I tell you, it was a fucking nightmare…

… Specialists SUC Cormac & drone Amistad report Prador snatch squads working in the area. The attack in the Hessick desert will give time for runcible evacuation of 10 % population of Patience. South Hessick impossible. Advise clearance…

The Olston Peninsular, Cormac remembered, was one of those places Dax had been stationed. But was his memory of that conversation overheard between his mother and Dax true? It seemed that after the disaster there, Amistad and his father had been recruited to some specialist unit. He wondered what "Prador snatch squads" were, and immediately started a search. Nothing came up in his aug, but it offered him the option to link to "local server." He approved this and immediately got the bad news:

Prador snatch squads were those especially introduced by the Prador to capture humans alive for transportation back to the Second Kingdom, where they were used for entertainment or food. During the later years of the war, these same squads captured humans who were then transported to the planet Spatterjay where they were infected with the local viral fibres, which impart great physical toughness and durability. The purpose of so infecting these captives was to make them strong enough to physically survive Prador coring: a process whereby the brain and part of the spinal column is removed to be replaced by thrall technology.

Clear enough, he felt, and one of those horrifically grotesque things the Prador did that he still could not quite believe. Now, studying the rest of the entry he called up data about the Hessick Campaign, which was the last Polity action his father had been involved in, the one he had died in. Though the final battle for planetary dominion had taken place on the ground in a region called Hessick County, which terminated in the Olston Peninsular, the deciding factor had been out in space. The Polity, it seemed, had expected to lose, but were fighting a delaying action so as to evacuate as much of the population as possible. However, after six months into the fight, which had seen over a million humans dead (mostly civilian casualties) and an estimated two hundred thousand Prador, the tide turned with the assassination of two of the three Prador adults in charge on the ground. The remaining adult quickly retreated, heading for its dreadnought, which was hunting down Polity ships much further out in this Solar System, and while that adult was in transit from the planet to its distant ship, a new Polity dreadnought arrived and destroyed its shuttle, killing it. Further new Polity dreadnoughts arrived and began to get the upper hand. On the ground, the now headless armies of Prador, gradually fell into disarray, but it still took a further month for them to be defeated.

That was the summation of it all, but there was a lot more available to Cormac if he wanted it. He chose another search, this time for "South Hessick Clearance" and received an unexpected response: Access Restricted.

"Sadist," Cormac enquired, "why is access restricted to 'South Hessick Clearance'?"

There was a long pause before the AI replied. "It is restricted because it is restricted. If I tell you why, then I will be revealing what is restricted, won't I?"

Cormac contained his annoyance. It seemed he had gone as far as he could for the moment. His next option must be accessing his edited-out memories. He opened a familiar channel direct to Gorman's aug.