by Neal Asher
‘Wait here,’ said the guard, pointing down at the floor with one claw.
It headed over to the others, whom I studied. They were mostly wearing white armour which matched their aseptic surroundings. But many of them had decorated this with even, multicoloured patterns, and some had almost outrageously colourful armour. This indicated the psychological changes on the part of the Guard, since normal prador tended to wear bland utility armour whose only concession to colour was when they activated outer meta-material camouflage. The Guard showed an artistic bent which was highly unusual for the species. Even as I thought this, I understood the information had its uses to Earth Central – the AI ruler of the Polity. Such knowledge was used by it and its subordinate AIs to penetrate the Kingdom and drive change with subtle forms of psychological warfare.
I began sweating again and this had nothing to do with the scans I’d received. My expanding knowledge now scared me and my nascent sense of self was becoming confused within it. I was a clone, but who was I? The information settling in my mind possessed a quality I could only describe as personal experience.
The prador clattered and bubbled for a while and I tried to listen. In a panicky surge, I realized I understood prador speech, but they were using a version of it I didn’t know. I extrapolated, presuming some kind of slang used by the Guard. My panic increased as I began to comprehend some morphemes and knew that, given long enough, I would get what they were saying. But the speaking stopped and the blue-armoured prador returned, gesturing to the dropshafts. Compelled by our slave units, we followed it over to them. It waved us ahead at the mouth of one shaft and without hesitation we stepped in. The irised gravity field took hold and accelerated us upwards. I peered down, seeing my fellows tumbling behind, with our guard close after them, then found I couldn’t move my head. The field tightened around us and I realized, from how fast the walls of the shaft shot by, that our acceleration had increased. After a moment, I couldn’t breathe. It was the nature of the fields in such shafts that, below a certain level, acceleration couldn’t be felt, but we had gone beyond that. The field protected us from acceleration damage, but in so doing might yet kill us.
The shaft diverted twice and I felt the changes of trajectory as a wrench throughout my entire body. Then we slowed and the pressure finally eased. I took a breath, just before the shaft ejected us into a short corridor. We went in too fast and as my feet hit the floor, I flung myself into a roll. The others were not so lucky and crashed in messily. Coming upright, I dodged aside as the guard came in hard behind, feet skidding across the floor and peeling up metal, slamming into the crowded mass of the others. I saw a Jill ripped open and smeared across the floor under one of its feet, leaving a line of guts, with the sound of bones snapping too. Numb horror arose in me, but alongside this was a cold analysis: there was definitely a problem here, otherwise the prador would not have risked destroying the product they had paid for.
The guard skittered aside and turned to look at the mess. Instructions arrived to bring us to our feet and move back into ranks. The Jack next to me was bleeding from a head wound, while one behind kept trying to stand on broken legs. The guard moved over to the injured Jill as she shivered against the floor. It reached down and casually snipped off her head, the thing thudding across the floor in a spray of blood. It then moved to us and I felt a surge of fear as it loomed directly over me. But it plucked out the Jack behind with the broken legs and discarded him to one side in two pieces. I tried to quell my horror but couldn’t stop myself shaking. The creature then backed up and peered closely at me. I felt surges of data in my slaver unit, that buzzing sensation, and a sense of alien inquiry. Then it stopped.
‘Move fast,’ the prador instructed, suddenly racing off.
The corridor terminated at a round chamber where a ridged ramp rose up and curved round. It took me a moment to recognize the prador version of stairs. Why no grav here? Why the necessity to climb?
‘Move!’ said the prador.
I realized I’d been hesitating while the others swept past me.
We followed it up the ramp, the wide uneven steps difficult for the others but not me. After perhaps half a mile, we arrived in another corridor, where the prador gestured us ahead until our group came to some large doors. These ground open, revealing a wide room filled with upright glass cylinders. Many of them were empty, but I was shaken to see that others contained naked humans floating in amniote, with life-support devices attached. A second prador stepped into view and my fellow clones moved forwards, each positioning themselves beside an empty cylinder. I watched as a complex grab, like a Polity spiderbot, reached down and hoisted one of them up, attached a face mask and inserted various tubes, then dropped her into the tube. It began to fill with amniote as other grabs came down too. Panic seized me, and I still hadn’t moved to take a position beside one of the tubes. I had to run now or I would never get out of this place. Even as I turned, a huge armoured claw closed about my neck.
‘You will come,’ said the guard.
It now clattered prador speech at the other prador, who was clad in dirty white armour and was as small as what my errant mind classified as a second-child. This one headed over and peered at me closely. A further exchange followed, during which I picked up the morphemes for ‘anomalous’, ‘unprogrammed’ and something that I thought, by context, must be ‘behaviour’.
I couldn’t move and didn’t dare struggle. The claw had closed just enough to hold me but not choke me, and I’d already seen how easily this creature discarded clones.
Further morphemes became clear: ‘experiment’, ‘danger below’ and ‘escaped’. I was pretty sure these didn’t relate to any threat from me but could be connected to there being a problem, as I’d suspected earlier. The two then turned to me and, after another brief exchange I didn’t understand, I heard, ‘our father’ and ‘the king’.
Abruptly the guard tossed me out into the corridor. I kicked out against the wall then came down on my feet. I was about to run when the slave unit took firm hold and waves of data washed through my mind, as the doors closed on my fellows.
‘Why do you have a mind?’ the guard asked.
I considered playing dumb but realized this wouldn’t be my best option. If this creature believed I was dumb then I would probably end up in one of those cylinders.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, my voice catching because this was the first time, in my life, I had used my vocal cords.
The guard waved a claw towards the stairs. ‘Go.’
I began climbing again, having no ability to do otherwise with the slave unit vibrating against my neck.
‘Do you have a name?’ the guard asked.
‘Jack Four.’
‘You have memories,’ it stated.
‘I don’t know where they come from,’ I replied.
The prador fell silent behind me until we reached a level floor. Here corridors led off while the stairs continued over to one side. My unit slammed me to a halt and the guard moved past me, clattering in prador speech. This time I understood perfectly.
‘The escaped experiment has moved higher up?’ it asked, then after a pause, ‘I will guard the junction. Our father will not be pleased.’
It moved ahead, then faced me. ‘Keep going. The king waits.’ It waved a claw towards the stairs and turned back to look down the corridor and held its station, claws pointing forwards and the power supply on its back whining. I wanted to pose a few questions but knew I would get no answers. The unit compelled me on, and I began to climb again.
I was alone now but the grip of the slave unit felt tighter than ever. I could do nothing, when all I wanted was to run, to find some way out of this nightmare, as well as answers to the puzzle that was me. What felt like a burn in my guts started building, a need to pay back those who had delivered me and my fellows into this.
The stairs, after numerous switchbacks, finally terminated at a diagonally divided prador door. The thing was closed and I noted scra
tches and damage on it. Up closer, I saw the kind of marks that might have been made by human fingernails but for the fact that they were gouged into hard metal. From down below came the sudden roar of what sounded like a gas torch igniting, then a loud crash and a chittering. It didn’t take much for me to realize the prador there had just used its weapon, and I was grateful when the door in front of me abruptly ground open. I moved into a painfully white corridor, unusually rectangular rather than oval. But as the door began to close again behind me, it started making a grinding sound and with a huge effort I looked back to see the door control showering sparks. My slave unit then delivered a simple concise instruction: Run.
2
I ran, dodging through corridors and frequently changing direction. In darkened rooms I glimpsed more chain-glass tubes containing organic monstrosities, a normal prador partially dismembered on a huge polished table, and a great mass of old-style spherical Polity incubators linked in series. In one place there were amniotic tanks containing vaguely human forms, horribly distorted. Then I heard another crash, and the sounds of skittering movement. I changed direction and ran into a circular chamber, nearly colliding with a prador female. I knew at once that, all instinct and aggression, she would try to kill me. The slave unit slid to a different setting with a more generalized instruction to give leeway for action: Survive.
She crouched before me but immediately rose up and hissed, extra-long mandibles extending. I dived to one side, rolled and came upright again, then moved to go past her, just as something slammed into her and sent her skidding backwards.
The figure was that of a vaguely human man, but huge. His head jutted forwards on a long neck and resembled a baboon’s, with the lower part extended into predatory jaws and hardware buried in his skull. The female grabbed him with her mandibles and slammed him down on the floor, but then didn’t seem to know what to do. As she shifted her grip, he grabbed a mandible with his ridiculously long, clawed fingers. They struggled against each other, the female abruptly rolling, until he suddenly broke free and tore off the mandible. He then drove his other hand right down into her mouth, grabbing and pulling till he ripped out something fat and glistening. The female emitted a high keening and skittered away. She hesitated for just a second before turning and disappearing into a nearby corridor. He stood there, gasping and shuddering, and finally abandoned the mandible. Big tears in his torso weren’t bleeding, but just leaked a clear jelly-like fluid.
Then I understood.
Putting together all I knew about this place with all I’d seen, I came to the conclusion that here must be the escaped experiment the prador had seemed so concerned about. And it was pissed off. I just stared, human biology holding me frozen to the spot while my rational mind told me to run. The man shuddered and swung his predator’s head around until he located me, making noises that sounded suspiciously like an attempt at speech, but which transformed into a snarl. Pulling back his lips from sharp canines, and exposing a long black tongue, he stalked towards me.
I realized that I was probably about to die and stared at the weirdly mutated man as he came closer. Running was no longer an option – I had seen how fast this individual could move.
‘Who are you?’ I asked suddenly.
This gave him pause, and he tilted his head. Only then did something else about this erstwhile human impinge: he was blue. From head to foot he was a deep royal blue with just a few patches of diseased-looking skin, white and pink with a speckling of black. Most of that skin had a fibrous appearance. My mind, or whatever supplied it, provided the answer. Here was a human deeply infected with the Spatterjay virus – the same virus that had mutated the king and his Guard, his children. For him to have changed so drastically, the man must have been deprived of the nutrition needed to hinder the virus, or been subjected to constant stress. Very few hoopers – the name given to those living on the world of Spatterjay where the virus came from – got this bad. Though I knew some had undergone monstrous mutations like this.
‘Are you conscious?’ I asked.
The man responded again, shaking his head, then snarled again. It didn’t matter what he had been: right now he was a dangerous creature prone to attacking anyone or anything. So it was with hoopers who’d been heavily mutated by the Spatterjay virus.
He abruptly crouched and seemed about to leap, but the gas-torch roar exploded into life and two streams of flame struck him. With a horrible squealing, he tumbled through the air, fibrous skin peeling up from his body and burning. Yet he still hit the ground on his feet and accelerated straight into the flame. Looking to the source, I saw the blue-armoured prador, the flame issuing from the nozzles on its claws. Run now? I thought, but instead I backed up towards the wall and watched.
The man dodged to one side and leapt, coming down onto the prador’s back and there tore away tubes and cables, shutting down the twinned flamethrower. This action, along with what he’d done to the door mechanism and his attempt at speech, bespoke intelligence. Whoever the prador had been experimenting on was not a clone like my fellows, nor was he a human blank – one of the hooper humans enslaved by coring and thralling. Again I felt a rush of panic about the activity in my mind, as the explanatory ideas and harrowing images surrounding this arose clearly. The virus infected humans and made them unreasonably tough and rugged. In the past, during the war long ago, some piratical humans had ‘cored’ these infected humans, removing the brain and spinal cord from each and replacing them with a thrall – a device on which my slave unit was based. The thrall effectively turned them into humanoid robots. Those villains had then sold this product on to the prador.
The man next dropped down in front of the prador and grabbed one claw, but though he’d prevailed against the unarmoured female, this one wore a motorized suit. It picked him up with its other claw and flung him away. He hit a nearby wall upside down, then peeled off and fell, yet again coming down on his feet and leaping back towards the prador. Landing on top of the thing, he wrapped his legs around its visual turret and gripped its armoured eye stalks as if intent on steering the thing. Unbelievably he tore one away, then used it as a club to smash the creature’s visor. As the visor cracked, the prador shrieked and shot across the room, tipping itself at the last moment to slam him against the wall. It backed up as he fell, then snatched him up and sent him skidding across the floor. Starting to advance on him again, it abruptly halted and backed up. I wasn’t sure why.
The man stood, moving more slowly now. Burned lengths of stringy flesh and skin hung in tatters, but even as I watched they were writhing back into place on him, turning pale and pink as they healed.
‘What the fucking hell are you?’ I wondered aloud.
He snarled at me again, almost casually, and continued to move towards the prador, but halted too, head swinging to peer to one side. Something was there. I looked over as a nightmare head appeared ten feet up from a nearby corridor. Great mandibles clattered then shimmered along their inner edges as shearfields activated. A large complex foot came down heavily on the floor and the giant, louse-like form stepped out.
I recognized the king of the prador at once.
His body was scattered with scars and technological additions. His foreclaws were long, like a langoustine’s, and oddly he possessed none of the weapons prador usually sported. The man-thing surged towards him and leapt, but the king moved horribly fast, snatching him from the air with one claw and slamming him to the floor. There was a whine of overloaded shearfields, followed by a crack. The man rolled clear of a claw which had been broken open, a great chunk of fibrous flesh hanging from his hip, black ribs exposed and a length of blue intestine trailing. The other claw struck him in the chest, sending him arcing across the chamber, with the king surging after him. As the man-thing rose yet again, the king grabbed him up in his mandibles and shook him like a dog killing a rabbit before crunching him down onto the floor. He stamped heavily on the man’s back and ripped up one arm, nearly detaching it, but it clung on with a
strew of fibres. He then stabbed down with the undamaged claw and closed it round his saurian neck just below the head. Again I heard the whine of shearfields struggling to cut through. The head mostly came away but still remained attached by fibres. And the man kept fighting, even as the king bowed down with his mandibles and tore at him.
Finally it was over: the Spatterjay-virus-mutated man lay spread across a ten-foot area in a disjointed mess, yet was still connected and moving weakly. Just then, further armoured prador from below streamed into the room, towing a grav-sled. They crowded to one side and, at some unheard order, surged forwards to begin snatching up the still-moving and fibrously connected pieces, loading them onto the sled. I noted they arranged the body parts in their position before dismemberment and couldn’t think why. The king, meanwhile, turned my way and walked over, looming above me.
‘You come with me,’ he said, his Anglic slurred as if by the pleasure of the kill.
* * *
I followed even though I hadn’t been compelled by the slave unit. With prador everywhere, running now seemed likely to result only in my dismemberment too. The king led me through the way he had entered, bringing us out to a curved gallery beside a panoramic window that looked out into vacuum. Out there other prador ships called reavers milled around, like hunting barracuda.
‘Who was he?’ I asked, suddenly brave.
The king closed up his damaged claw with a crackling sound. I could see the broken carapace there but none of the usual green prador blood. The fact that I knew their blood was usually green was just another piece of the information constantly surfacing in my mind. Fibrous flesh had bulged through the cracks and now appeared to be hardening. Suddenly he spun about and closed a long claw around me, then hoisted me up from the floor, bringing me in towards his nightmare head and studying me with blood-red eyes.