Jack Four

by Neal Asher

  ‘Suzeal was to provide all but mindless clones,’ he said. ‘What are you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I managed. ‘Data is entering my mind all the time.’

  ‘I should dispose of you.’

  ‘I am no danger.’

  ‘You do not know that.’

  He was right. I had no idea what I was or what purpose I might serve. I stayed silent in agreement. The king emitted a disconcertingly human sigh and released me. I landed in a crouch as he turned away and settled down on the floor. He almost seemed jaded and bored – I had interested him for only a moment.

  ‘Suzeal,’ I said abruptly. ‘Who is she?’

  He swung back to look at me, then obviously decided to engage. ‘Her organization is semi-religious, military, its people inducted from mercenary humans in the Graveyard. They have been difficult to locate.’

  I didn’t know what to make of that and could think of no reply. But I frantically searched for something to say – some way to keep him engaged, for his boredom might mean the end of me.

  A hint of movement over to one side drew my eye as robots scuttled out. These things, each a foot long, resembled rhinoceros beetles forged out of magnesium alloy and white porcelain. I recognized the Polity tech.

  ‘Multi-purpose,’ I stated, nodding to them, ‘combining the function of autodocs and maintenance bots.’

  He shifted round to study me again as the bots streamed up over his long louse-like body and set to work, cutting into carapace and tough flesh to remove nodules and areas that simply did not look right, spraying in collagen foam and layering on pieces of artificial carapace, rerouting optics and fluid tubes, as well as tending to various other devices connected to his body.

  ‘Who was the man who attacked you?’ I asked again quickly.

  The king paused once more, considering, then with what looked like a bored shrug, began, ‘As I understand it, he was a human involved with Suzeal’s trade in human beings. A trade which is now illegal under our agreements with the Polity, but it continues. He had fallen out of favour with her and been sold to an Old Family father-captain to be prepared for coring and thralling.’

  Sweating again, I felt a now-familiar panic at what was arising in my mind. I realized I needed it because while I kept the king interested, I stayed alive. A limited objective, but there it was.

  I knew that ‘Old Family’ meant a normal prador descended from the line of the previous king. There was something wrong about that and I strained for information until something clicked and I ‘remembered’ – if that’s the correct term. It had been believed that all those descendants were exterminated by the new regime.

  ‘Interesting to know they’re still around,’ I said. When the king made no reply I groped around for something to keep the exchange going. ‘And what happened to the father-captain?’

  ‘He, and his children, are in cells two floors below.’ The king swung his head away from me to inspect the work of the bots on his body. ‘They will be useful in further investigations of prador biology.’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘you captured a human and ran experiments on him? I don’t know the source of the knowledge in my mind, but I’m pretty sure there was something about that in Polity agreements.’

  The king swung his nightmare head back and gazed at me with that array of glaring red eyes. ‘Because of course the Polity never experiments with any prador that fall into its hands …’

  My conscious mind lacked information on this, even though I tried to force it to the surface. I saw a brief image of a prador in heavy restraints in some laboratory, its carapace hinged over like a lid while human technicians delved inside. It was whistling and clattering its mandibles. Confused, I realized that the image arose not from reality but a wargame virtuality.

  The king turned away again as robots scuttled down to his mandibles and began making repairs there. ‘It has come to my attention that the mutation the Spatterjay virus causes is highly influenced by the nature and mind of the one who’s infected. In some cases the mutation can cause extreme changes and ultimately produce a very dangerous creature. The pirate, Jay Hoop, was one such individual. Our experiments have produced another.’

  ‘Jay Hoop,’ I repeated, struggling to find something, my head aching.

  ‘Probably in the DNA,’ said the king.

  ‘The virus DNA? What?’ I was confused.

  ‘No, the DNA Suzeal used to create you.’ The king pondered on this, not looking at me. ‘DNA itself can be a good storage medium for data besides that used to grow your body, but I suspect otherwise. The Polity AIs have been experimenting with distributed quantum crystal memplants.’ Now he did swing back towards me. ‘Curiously, one of your fellow clones which my children have already examined had neither, nor did she possess the kind of knowledge you evidently do.’

  One of the armoured prador from earlier moved into view and crouched, waiting. Suddenly my sense of danger increased.

  ‘You are saying I have the memories of someone?’ I was desperate to keep this going.

  ‘I would say that you are the original sample while they were multiplied from what created you, so without the quantum crystals. It will be necessary to examine you.’

  There it was. I was damned sure I would not survive any examination here.

  ‘You will go with my child here.’ The king gestured towards the prador.

  The slave unit turned me and set me marching. The prador stood and moved ahead, and I could do nothing but follow.

  ‘It is impossible for you to disobey instructions from the slave unit while it remains on your neck,’ said the king as I departed. ‘But, of course, you do not have to obey instructions it does not give.’

  I didn’t know then and I do not know now why the king said that. Perhaps he was just bored and wanted to see what I would do. Perhaps he liked throwing a spanner in the works of his ship and testing his own children. Or perhaps he saw in me a reflection of his own need to survive.

  Whatever his reasons, he had shown me the way.

  The prador led me out of the king’s quarters. I noted its stalked eyes facing back towards me while it navigated with its forward eyes. I trudged along obediently, down the stairs and to the junction I had seen earlier. The wall was still smoking. Here numerous corridors speared off into the ship and the next stop further down would be where my fellows had gone. I had no doubt the small prador in dirty white armour would conduct its examination of me there too. But the king had hinted to me how I might escape. His unexpected last words had made abundantly clear that I only had to obey direct instructions from the slave unit while it was on my neck. But this didn’t mean I could do nothing else. As soon as the prador’s stalked eyes started checking the surrounding corridors and no longer focused on me, I reached up, dug my fingers in around the unit and tore it away. Then I ran.

  I had reached fifty yards down one corridor when a bubbling shriek issued from behind me. I saw a corner and turned, just as a weapon filled the corridor with flying metal. My neck hurt badly. I assumed some of the fibres the slaver unit injected were larger than nanoscopic and I had ripped them out. But I just kept going, feeling blood running down and glimpsing it spattering on my shoulder. I took another turn and another, then beside me saw a row of smaller tunnels and ran into the third one along. Luckily it was too small for my erstwhile escort. I took two more turnings, until slowing to a walk just as something loomed into view ahead.

  A small second-child prador appeared sans artificial armour. Its narrow carapace terminated in a tail, its legs were unusually long and it only had one claw, a triclaw. For a second I was tempted to turn round and run again, but then reasoned that the King’s Ship would have its complement of human blanks and the thing might well disregard me. As it drew closer, I moved to the side of the tunnel and stood perfectly still. It watched me with one stalked eye. Here was one of the king’s children, a second-child, mutated by the Spatterjay virus, in the process of growing up and yet to attain either the size
or status required for it to have its own suit of artificial armour. As it moved on past, ignoring me, I started to breathe more easily.

  I carried on, scanning along the wall of the tunnel. I’d been lucky so far, but this couldn’t last in the main prador corridors. Finally reaching a barred vent, the same as the ones I’d noticed earlier, I tried to turn one of the bolts securing it. The thing wouldn’t budge. An epiphany came when I pushed and it sank a little way before springing out again. Prador engineering and their physiology. I had been assuming it was a threaded bolt but such fixings weren’t so easy for a race whose main manipulators were claws; they did the more delicate stuff by touch with their underslung manipulators. I pushed the bolt down, turned to release it, and it sprang out a few inches. I went round them all and soon each one was hanging out. Then I spotted the second-child running back towards me, eerily silent but intent.

  I heaved the grating out, expecting it to be heavy but discovering otherwise, turned with it as the second-child arrived, and hit the creature’s reaching claw as hard as I could. The prador squealed and rattled deformed mandibles, its body slamming me to one side and turning. I pushed forwards and hit it again, this time catching it across its visual turret, its claw snipping just inches from my face. I didn’t let up. I just kept on hitting the thing until it retreated. I drove it back a few yards, tossed the grating at it and then dived through the hole in the wall. The air vent was a yard across and I scrambled along it fast, just avoiding the claw that came questing after me. The pull of grav slid to one side, screwing my perception of ‘down’ and making me nauseous. Further along, the second-child had begun unbolting another grating and it hissed and clattered at me as I went past. A turning offered itself, taking me away from the corridor I’d been in. It felt almost as if I was climbing a steep slope, as the grav from the corridor fell behind me. It also grew steadily darker, since the only light issued from the vents.

  I continued to crawl along these vent tubes for ages, and I lost myself in there. Establishing some sense of direction was nearly impossible. Besides the dark, the tubes were not grav-plated but influenced by whatever areas they served, so I crawled up apparent slopes then down into areas where grav waned to nothing. One downslope seemed to grow steeper and I turned off before I ended up falling through what turned into a ‘down’ shaft.

  Finally I found a spacious area at a junction with grav below me, light coming from a vent in the floor, and settled down with my back against the wall. I couldn’t spend all my time just running: I needed a plan. I visualized the ship, with my position in the top tilted disc, while all the vessels clung below it on the column extending ‘down’ towards the engines, or on jutting spine docks. They were quite far beneath – I reckoned about ten miles. I remembered the tube that had turned into a down shaft, the image just repeating in my mind with nothing coherent attached, when sleep fell on me like a black wall.

  Pain in my leg.

  I woke with a start and kicked away a ship louse trying to chew through the tough fabric of my overalls. This one was no cyborg and after a moment it came back. Thumping my fist on its head end made it squeal but only seemed to make it more determined to chew on me. I hit it again, then again. Rage rose up inside and I found myself hammering at the thing.

  ‘Die, you fucking bastard!’ I bellowed. ‘Fucking die!’

  It did eventually, and I started to calm down. I stared at the thing, the migraine lights flashing as I thought about biology. The creatures, just like the prador, were alien and possessed a genome with some very different bases to Earth, but they did produce protein and other digestible parts. The trick was to avoid the internal organs and stick to the muscles. I picked it up, pulled off a leg and cracked it open with my teeth, then sucked and chewed out the glutinous amber flesh. It tasted foul but I felt better afterwards. Okay, food supply secured. I also needed water, which I could search for as I headed downwards. I didn’t allow myself to think too hard about what lay ahead; or how little chance I had of stealing a spaceship, let alone getting it away from the King’s Ship and out of the Prador Kingdom.

  ‘How do you eat an elephant?’ asked Drasden Pike.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied tiredly.

  ‘Why, one bite at a time!’ he declared delightedly.

  A thrumming echoed in my head as the jagged lights came back. I stared at the remains of the ship louse, trying to reclaim more, but only knowledge and experience surfaced without any other flashes of memory. The king had claimed I could have quantum crystals inside me – that they formed a memplant. Such devices stored the mind of a human being, yet, thus far, all I’d experienced was the knowledge one might acquire from an educational upload. That brief fragment of memory had felt utterly alien and it had simply not been me. I pushed myself up and crawled into a tunnel. The first thing I needed to do was determine my position within the ship. One bite at a time.

  Through the grating I saw a small room packed with containers. A series of rails ran along the ceiling, and a claw hung from a motorized unit that could traverse them. While I watched, the unit whined into motion and shifted along, casting shadows from dim round light panels. It took a turn and lowered the claw to one of the cylindrical containers, picking this up and shifting it to the side of the room, then inserted it into a hatch. I reached through the grating and undid the bolts. My arms ached by the time I had got the last of the stubborn things out and I just caught the grating before it fell into the room, turning it to pull it in through the hole, and rested it beside me in the tube. The stubborn fixings were a good sign – with luck it meant no prador had been in here recently with an oil can. Sticking my head through to get a better look around, I didn’t see a door to this automated supply chamber. I assessed further and, being reassured that I’d be able to stack up some of the containers to gain access back into the vent again, I dropped inside.

  Immediately stepping over to a container, I tried to figure out how to open it. It seemed to be made of compressed fibre and I struggled with it. In the end I dug at the thing with my fingernails to make a hole, easily tearing it open after that. A heavy object rested inside, surrounded by aerogel packing. I pulled the thing out and just for a second wildly hoped for a weapon. Stripping off a thin layer of plastic revealed a thick rod about a yard long with a ring of blocky mechanisms about its centre. I hefted it. Well, it would serve as a club. Moving back out of the way as the grab claw above shifted again, I sat between containers and examined my find more closely.

  I waited for something to surface in my mind as I examined the object, but nothing occurred. Discarding the thing in disgust, I opened more containers but found the contents the same. So, a club it must be.

  I stacked up some cylinders to get back into the vent tube and crawled on, dragging my makeshift weapon with me. Eventually I entered a tube that apparently sloped down, becoming steeper as I traversed it. Luck stayed with me, though, with the rod turning out to be just the right length to wedge wall to wall, aiding my descent as the tube steadily transformed into a down shaft. I edged down for some time into pitch dark, passing two side tubes I found by feel, until tiredness and the presence of light attracted me into the third. I slept in there and, as had become usual, my breakfast woke me by trying to gnaw on some part of my body. I learned to sleep lightly, sitting upright in any area with conventional grav, because lying down had lost me a chunk out of my ear. I also learned to sleep with my arms folded, keeping my bare hands away from the floor. After hollowing out another ship louse, I descended again to reach a vent junction at the bottom of the shaft. Then I halted to think hard about what I was doing.

  When Suzeal and her crew had approached the King’s Ship, it’d stood like a tower to my perspective. In essence it was very much like a tower in its construction, with the king’s living area right at the top. Grav-plates did not have the reach of planetary gravity because, to my limited knowledge on that subject, they simply did not operate in the same way – theirs was some principle involving the ampl
ification of molecular binding forces. However, it made sense to place them facing in the same direction because their influence did reach far enough for them to interfere with each other. So ‘down’ would be down to my original perspective … probably. Different construction might have been used beneath where the king lived. I really needed to locate myself. I decided to head in one direction, as best I could, in the hope of reaching the ship’s hull and finding one of the numerous magnifier ports there – those ports were another stray piece of information which had surfaced in my mind. I set off, aware I still needed to find water too – the moisture from my disgusting diet wasn’t going to be enough.

  The prador ran in my direction and bounced off the wall right beside the air vent grating I was peering through, and for a second I thought my presence was the cause. Surely it could not see me in the shadows, so had it smelled me? No, a prador’s sense of smell wasn’t much better than that of a human. They had evolved in water and their equivalent of smell worked best in that medium. And, like humans, their evolution towards intelligence had sacrificed much of that. The thing moved back over to the other side of the room, rattled its feet against the floor and bashed its claw against the wall. Some kind of fit, or had something irritated it? Being careful to stay back in the shadows, I inspected its accommodation.

  Deep shelves ran along every wall, loaded with equipment. A trumpet-shaped device protruding from one wall was its toilet, while over to another side stood an array of hexagonal screens. A saddle sat in front of them and there were pit controls in the floor for the creature’s main claws, as well as others on its surface for its underhands. I found all of this interesting but focused mainly on the pool and the array of spigots protruding around its rim. It had never occurred to me that these creatures might like to bathe but, considering their nature, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I licked my lips and settled down to wait.