Jack Four

by Neal Asher

  The prador now began clattering and bubbling in his language, some of which I understood, much of which I recognized as a scientific vocabulary. ‘The virus had established’ in the ‘test subject’ apparently. Finally he backed off to reveal he had split open her arms and legs down to the bone, as well as opened up her torso from neck to groin. She should have been pouring with blood but only clear fluids leaked out as she writhed, exposing fibrous growths with a bluish tint within. The Spatterjay virus was growing there and my knowledge told me it had developed unreasonably fast. Even as I watched, her wounds were starting to close.

  ‘Test subject optimal,’ said the prador in his own language.

  He reached over and with one claw began roughly pinching the wounds closed, holding them this way for a moment each time. When he took his claw away, they had all but sealed. Her writhing diminished and he undid the clamps, flipping her over onto her face, then secured them again. Next he introduced a new clamp that closed rams on either side of her head just ahead of the ears, and in one quick movement tore off the slaver unit on the back of her neck. With a whine, the slab tilted and he pulled over what looked like a Polity pedestal-mounted autosurgeon, which then ran its program. I could see little of what it did, just heard the buzz of a saw, and the whickering of chain-glass scalpels. The autosurgeon then rose and shifted to one side, exposing its work. The thing had taken off the back of her skull, opened out her neck vertebrae, and extracted the contents. With a soggy thunk, the surgeon deposited them on a platen that swung aside. There lay her brain, along with a tail of spinal cord. She was now as good as dead.

  I gazed in horror as the surgeon stretched gleaming limbs to a nearby rack and removed an item I had never seen before but recognized at once. Silvery spider legs surrounded a squat cylinder from which also extended its own segmented tail. I glimpsed the surgeon inserting this into the skull cavity, the tail sitting comfortably in the row of open vertebrae. Then came the sound of bone and cell welders, and it blocked my view for a while. When it next moved away, it had closed the vertebrae, while movement down the spine revealed gleaming microfibres spreading to make connections. The cylinder part sat centrally in her skull, while its legs pressed against the interior to hold it in place. Here the surgeon paused, because the prador wanted to make a closer inspection. He chuntered to himself, but my mind was too numb to translate. As the surgeon returned to its work, he reached out and picked up the brain with the attached piece of spinal cord and inserted it into his armoured mandibles and thence into his mouth. No chewing required for something so soft, I assumed. It seemed the ultimate insult.

  This woman’s skull no longer contained a human mind. I had just seen someone cored and thralled and turned into a human blank.

  My numbness remained as the surgeon sealed up the Jill’s skull and withdrew, following which the prador undid all the clamps. I watched him head over to another rack, take out a hexagonal device and insert the spike on its underside into a socket on the upper section of his armour, beside his turret. He shuddered, banging one claw against the floor, while I noted the hole had been one in a row, with another row present on the other side of his turret too. The woman raised her head, clumsily got her arms underneath her and rolled off the slab to fall on the floor. She lay there jerking her limbs randomly then, finally, it seemed the prador accustomed himself to the control unit he had just installed, and she stood up. She moved back and sat on the slab with her hands on her knees. The prador then moved away, seeming to lose interest.

  Feeling cold and stunned, I followed him back into the other part of the laboratory. There he moved over to an array of pit controls and inserted a claw to twist and manipulate. Movement in the tanks caught my eye as snakish forms entered them all. They attached to the bodies inside, which began to thrash in agony. Spatterjay leeches – the usual vector of transmission for the virus. These clones too, when ready, would be cored and thralled, becoming simply organic extensions of the controlling prador’s mind. Again I reminded myself that any efforts I made on their behalf would be futile and I’d probably end up the same way as them. I had to look to my own survival and nothing else. But I still sat there in a daze, until the anger boiled up in me once more.

  Undoubtedly prador were vicious creatures, but humans had provided these test subjects. I reviewed the faces and names of the suppliers: Suzeal, Brack and Frey. My purpose started to become clearer to me. I not only wanted revenge, I needed to get out of this place and … stop them. This aim hardened in my thoughts, though I realized bitterly it was also driven by my guilt at not being able to do anything here.

  Returning for my sack, I headed across the grated ceiling to the far side, over partitioned parts of the laboratory in which more tanks contained gross distortions of humanity and others that had once been prador. Airflow now feathered from below. It came in the way I had come, was directed down by the baffles, sweeping around the laboratory then up again. Shortly it blew from behind me too, sucked through a filter system which looked like a wall of intricately tangled wires. A mote of dust struck this as I watched and flared like a mosquito hitting the grid of an electric zapper, so I kept well away and walked along parallel to it. I assumed this system was to destroy dangerous biologicals, which didn’t bode well for my health should I remain here for any time. Then, as I walked along beside the filter wall, something below riveted my attention, and I peered through.

  Another Polity autosurgeon was standing over to one side of a slab on which the man-thing had been reassembled. Numerous staples marked where the body pieces had been joined together again, while massive clamps secured his arms, legs and torso. I’d assumed his remains were scheduled for disposal, but it seemed that merely being torn apart by the king of the prador hadn’t been enough to kill him. The legendary hooper humans were famed for their ruggedness because they could survive the most appalling injuries, but this seemed beyond ridiculous. As I gazed at him shifting on the slab, constantly testing his bonds, he opened his eyes and grew still. He had spotted me.

  The horror of everything I’d witnessed redoubled. In his gaze I saw intelligence, and an understanding the others lacked, as well as rage – plenty of that. Though not one of the clones, his physical transformation showed what might become of them.

  Seeing this earlier experiment, I thought more closely about events here. From the information I had, I knew that the prador had cored and thralled virus-infected humans throughout the war with the Polity, so the technique had been long established.

  But this procedure being conducted here, in a laboratory, had to be something new. The virus had established quickly in the clones, so I suspected a much faster-growing, mutated form of it. Could they have tried it on this man first, without coring him, to study the effects? Perhaps he’d not been cored subsequently because this faster-growing virus hampered the process at a later stage. I didn’t know. I turned away and headed back to the baffles, climbed over and destroyed the vermin lasers on another ring and then returned to the ventilation system. Always on the move, searching for the skin of the ship, sleeping, and eating the lice that woke me every time. Forcing myself to forget what that human might be enduring.

  * * *

  When I finally found the first window I’d come across in my long wanderings, it revealed the good news that I’d managed to travel down into the stalk of the King’s Ship. The air vent opened into a wide corridor with oval ports slightly above head height. Rough walls like stacked slate were easy to climb up so I could peer through. I gazed first on starlit space with a stab of agoraphobia, then at the underside of the upper disc of the ship, and down towards some docks, just visible, with clinging ships. Darting back into the vent, I had the grating back in place by the time a party of noisy prador came past, loaded with tools and towing grav-sleds stacked with machinery. I headed in the same direction, the vent tube tracking the corridor, hoping for some shaft going down close to the hull, because I didn’t want to get lost again.

  I caught up with t
he prador just a little while later and stopped to observe them working. Here the corridor was smooth but for a huge hole in the wall. I could see into this, into the layers and cavities of the ship’s outer armour, as complex as skin. It revealed superconducting meshes, impact foams and laminated metamaterials, but also a cavity between layers which was braced by shock absorbers like hair cells. One of the prador climbed into the hole to install something in a pipe which, judging by the air blast as the creature uncapped it, extended to vacuum. The prador quickly shoved in a sliding bung, then a long complicated mechanism went in after it which might have been a weapon or a detector. The prador and its fellows connected this up to the power and optic system running through the armour. Once they’d finished and left, I made a decision: there lay my route down.

  Preparations now needed to be made. I found a route away from the corridor and traversed this until reaching a junction. Here I spilled out the remains of the eel thing, then shifted back and waited. As ever, the ship lice came. I killed the first and ate it, and intended to catch a good load of them to keep as a food supply. I could put them in the now empty container … but the idea abruptly panicked me. Whatever had poisoned me might still be in the container, and I didn’t know how long it would be before the meat from a ship louse spoiled. I changed my plans, caught and killed four more of the creatures and ate what I could of them too. That would have to be enough. I then returned to the vent tube beside the corridor.

  Here I took out the laser again and began tinkering with it. After a while I found the adjustment I wanted: a simple ring to turn and a slider to push down to the bottom. Now when I triggered the thing it produced a defused white light rather than a deep purple beam. I had a torch. Next I used the shear to make two pairs of slices in my sack – the intervening material between each pair of cuts serving as straps. Shrugging on this backpack, I went through the vent grating.

  The gap between armour layers stood four feet wide, braced across at intervals by the shock absorbers. I pointed my torch down and didn’t see an end to the space. Lines marked the edges of huge alloy construction slabs forming its outer wall, and each rectangle, as far as I could see, extended lengthwise down the pillar of the ship. The edges of these would have to be my guide once alterations in grav lost me my present perspective. I climbed in and, using the shock absorbers as climbing aids, descended.

  Gravity changed as I worked my way nominally ‘down’ through this gap yet, when I flashed my torch at the slab lines, I found this was no longer affecting my sense of direction. Food supply turned out not to be a problem, since the lice occupied this space too. This also confirmed that it lay open to the ship’s air supply. Such gaps in Polity ships were often filled with inert gas, but that was unlikely to be used aboard a prador vessel – being armoured and tough enough to survive in vacuum for an appreciable time, the prador considered seals and atmosphere security the province of weak creatures like humans.

  I stopped to sleep in areas where grav pulled me against the inner wall, always scribing an arrow into the other wall to tell me what direction I had been going. The lice here were particularly aggressive, and the reason for this I soon found out to be clusters of eggs clinging to the bases of shock absorbers. Close inspection with the laser torch revealed translucent globules with small lice inside. At one point I observed a youngster hatching with the mother in attendance, one of the cybernetic lice I’d noticed on first boarding the ship. It had stuck itself to the wall with a glassy exudate and its young crawled all over it. Mother love? The cybernetic remains of one I later found beside a hatched-out batch of eggs provided the answer. As with some terran spiders and insects, the mother obviously became her young’s food source. This struck me as a predictable nastiness in this place, then further knowledge of their biology surfaced in my mind. They had three sexes, so I wasn’t sure if the one serving itself up like this could be called ‘mother’.

  After a time which I could only measure by my number of sleeps, which was three, the scenery changed. I came down on a wide pipe, sure to be an airlock leading outside, then further pipes loomed out of the dark. One of them, for no immediately apparent reason, possessed numerous windows of a crystalline yellow substance. I could see enough inside to confirm my conjecture: it was another massive tunnel, probably leading to one of the huge docks. Ships were near, but how the hell would I get to one? Well, I needed to eat the elephant. First I had to get out of the hull armour.

  I began to explore, now not concerning myself with sense of direction, and eventually glimpsed a distant glow. As I moved towards it, I saw movement that resolved into prador at work in another hole made in the armour from the inside. I took a position on one of the docking pipes and watched for hours. Eventually, when it seemed the activity had ceased, I went over. Here they had opened a hole much larger than the one above, perhaps for a new dock or airlock. I risked going right up to the workings to peer into the huge corridor lying beyond. Spotting one of the ubiquitous vents, I adjusted the laser back to its kill setting, despite the certainty it wouldn’t touch a prador in armour, and took out the shear. Soon standing in the corridor, I looked along it to see prador perambulating towards me. It was too late to hide now so I crossed, used the shear on the grating bolts and dived into the vent. A flash of blue fire ignited behind me and, crawling up the tube, I glanced back to see a glowing hole in the wall. If I had chosen to turn left rather than right I’d be dead now. I scuttled on, took the first turning away from the corridor and found a place to rest and consider my next moves.

  I explored, noting an increase in the louse population and assumed that, being mutualistic life forms, the higher prador population in this part of the ship had attracted them. More of their predators were evident too, but they ignored me. When, as seemed inevitable, one of the vermin-killing robots surged towards me, I hit it with the laser and the thing slumped in smoking ruin. Even though I was aware the things had been designed to kill just vermin, and had no armouring, I felt unreasonably happy with this victory.

  Vent tubes once again became my world. With my sack turned into a backpack, I could move a lot more quickly and damned my stupidity for not doing it before. The lightness of the pack was another reason I could travel faster, since I had run out of water some while ago. I eventually came to a vent overlooking a huge internal space, where a crew of five prador were moving stacks of supplies and feed umbilicals around a ship. Small for a prador vessel, the thing measured about a mile long, with fusion engines to the rear, blisters for faster-than-light U-space engines and a rounded-off nose. It looked a bit like a gravestone and this suddenly triggered a familiarity for me. This was no prador vessel but an old Polity wartime supply ship, obviously adapted for the prador. At the far end I noted castellated doors and became excited as I realized these, and the ship, could be my means of escape from this place. Then something else drew my attention.

  Nine figures walked into the area in two rows of four with a familiar form in the lead. The man-thing wore a frame like a primitive exoskeleton that ended at his knees and elbows. It ran in segments up his spine to cup the back of his skull, while here and there over his body other hardware disappeared into healing slits. He showed no signs of wanting to attack anyone. The eight clones were as obedient and docile as ever but, seeing what had happened to one of them, I assumed they had all been cored and thralled and were under the thorough control of the prador in the dirty white armour walking behind. I wondered what had been done with the others. Had they been treated the same? Had they died during their procedures or failed in some other way? Or were they all still writhing in their tanks back in the laboratory? As they proceeded up the ramp into the ship, their serendipitous arrival seemed to confirm that I had to get aboard too. I hurried along, looking for a way down.

  A brief stop in another smaller prador accommodation provided more water and a chance to clean myself. The place seemed Spartan and hadn’t been used in a while. With no belongings evident, I deduced it must be temporary accomm
odation for visiting crews. From there I found my way to a vent at ground level. I watched, soon realizing I could not simply walk aboard, and turned my attention to the nearest pallet of supplies. It lay just ten feet from the vent and I had to take the risk. The grating came away easily and I rested it back in place without tightening the bolts, so I could dart back in if one of the prador here spotted me. Then I ran over to hide behind the stack. Made of compressed fibre like those I had seen in the supply room, the boxes had actual lids which peeled off molecular seals. Three of them sat in a row before me, and a larger box kept me concealed while I opened one. Inside rested a series of cylinders filled with chunks of meat under an oily fluid. The box had room for me, but not with these inside.

  One after another, I transported the heavy cylinders back to the vent and rolled them inside. Even though it was apparently prador food in them, my stomach grumbled, and I feared being heard. But I made each journey to the vent only when the loading crew were moving the next load of supplies up the ramp. As soon as I’d made enough room, I slung in my backpack and climbed in after it, pulling the lid closed above.

  It took only a little time before the fears kicked in. What if they loaded this cargo into a hold without atmosphere? Maybe they’d empty the boxes of their contents for storage? I tried to persuade myself that if I was really a clone of a Polity agent, I should be braver than this, but my mind meanly reminded me that I apparently only possessed the genome and knowledge of whoever had been my source. I’d all but persuaded myself to return to the ventilation system, where I could survive and watch and wait for a better opportunity. But even as I thought this, I heard prador nearby and then the maglev pallet rose and set into motion.

  Too late now.

  I felt it when the pallet went up the ramp. Other sounds impinged from within the ship: the crackle of a cutting laser and the drone and susurration of a matter printer, prador crashing about, their clattering and bubbling language. The pallet turned, turned again, then dropped with a crash to the floor. My small hide shuddered then jerked sideways, rose up and came down. A moment later, a crump from above sounded as another box went on top of mine.