Jack Four

by Neal Asher

  The independent kingdom of Stratogaster was a Graveyard trading hub ruled by the Stratogaster Trimor family. I could have read much more about it but was running out of time. The rumbling within the ship had increased and different sounds were now impinging: the thrum of atmosphere pumps, and deep clonks surely the docking clamps disconnecting. Then other sounds issued from nearby. Back in the corridor leading into this emplacement, I headed over to the bulkhead door that opened into the dropshaft, and peered down. Nothing was visible, but I could hear metal-on-metal movement down there. A second later a blast low down momentarily blinded me. The shockwave blew me back, and chunks of hot metal zinged up the shaft, one of them landing on my envirosuit and burning until I knocked it away. It was time to get rid of the thing anyway.

  I stripped off and backed into the cabinet again, securing the spacesuit around me, its helmet closing and HUD activating. Exterior audio remained available so I immediately heard the movement in the shaft and stepped over. A familiar shape scrambled up towards me. Either the dismembered prador had managed to communicate my attack on him, or the others had simply surmised an enemy was aboard and, of course, had sent the perfect hound to hunt that one down. The man-thing halted his scramble up the shaft rungs and glared at me, then opened his carnivore mouth to show black teeth in what might have been a grin. I slammed the bulkhead door and locked it, took up the matter deposition welder and began to seal around the edge. I was halfway round when he crashed into it, and I finished the job just as he put a dent in the door with one heavy thump. Maybe it would hold him for long enough.

  I grabbed my prepared rucksack, took the carbine too and launched up for the airlock. In a moment I was inside, manually closing its door, as the bulkhead door below bent in at one edge and a clawed hand reached through. As the air drained from the airlock, I only just heard the scrabbling below me before it faded. The man-thing certainly hadn’t ceased its efforts, but no air remained to transmit the sound. Opening the outer door, I hauled myself up and stepped out onto the hull of the ship, gecko function engaging automatically, and breathed a sigh of relief – surely the creature couldn’t follow me out here.

  Now the ship was turning and the whole panorama swept into view. The world of Trallion rose over the metal horizon, swirled green and orange, with continents visible. Something glimmered in my new sky which I assumed to be the Stratogaster station, while the spaceship dock extending from the moonlet lay clearly visible: an immense scaffold of habitations and tunnels scattered with ships of various designs. Also appearing, nosing out from below my perspective, came the old shuttle. It seemed the clones had already been sent without their companion. Everything was happening as expected and now I just had to do my part. I’d agonized over this for some time, but again had to accept that the clones were mindless human blanks – organic robots programmed to kill.

  With the HUD activated, the weapons turret beside me stirred as I moved my head, tracking those crosshairs. I simply faced directly towards the departing shuttle and held the crosshairs on it. The display outlined the vehicle and queried ACQUIRE? I hit the relevant section of the touchpad and the outline started to blink. Now, when I turned my head, the crosshairs shifted across my visor, tracking the shuttle, while the turret stabilized, pointing its load of missiles directly at the thing. FIRE? the HUD asked me, and now I hesitated. Again my reluctance to kill held me back until I remembered other details about Stratogaster – its population in the hundreds of thousands – and fired a missile. Beside me, in utter silence, one of the missiles shot away, ignited its burner and accelerated. It struck the shuttle to the rear, the flash darkening my HUD for a second. When my view cleared, I saw that I’d blown a chunk out of the back of the thing, putting out probably half of its fusion drive, while burning debris strewed away from it. I fired again and, to be sure, a third time.

  The missiles streaked in. The second struck amidships and ricocheted off, exploding nearby, its blast tilting the thing up to my perspective, just right for the third one to hit it again in the middle, the blast cutting right through and out the other side. As the HUD cleared again, I saw burning human shapes amidst the debris. The shuttle tumbled dead through vacuum, before another part of its hull blew away, this time due to explosive bolts. The prador I’d seen take on the clone control units jetted out, shedding fire from its armour and trying to stabilize with thrusters. I acquired it and fired a fourth missile, clearly having overcome my initial reluctance to kill. The missile struck it in the side. Legs exploded away, steam boiling out into vacuum from a hole in its armour.

  The prador had now lost their initial strike force, and those on Stratogaster would be aware of something seriously wrong. But would they realize the real danger? The possibility remained that the prador might manage to explain this event away and still get a force to the station in that war boat, while the other force could launch an assault along a wide front. I targeted Stratogaster itself. Here the risk of killing innocent people dropped me into a world of indecision. It had seemed like a good idea before, when I calculated I could fire on the station and the defences would pick up on the missiles and destroy them before anything happened. Thereafter the station would respond strongly and fire on this ship. I resolved to do it; my previous self, I was sure, would not have hesitated. Still struggling with the idea, I called up details in my HUD of the spacesuit’s thruster system, since I planned on being as far away as possible from the ship when the station fired on it. But I’d hesitated too long, and the man-thing suddenly appeared, crashing into me from the side and trapping me against the weapons turret.

  His fist slammed into my spacesuit and it threw up damage warnings, but nothing critical yet. Vapour poured from his mouth, his skin was writhing and bubbling and eyes bulging. My fist landed with a satisfying motor-driven impact that blew more vapour from his mouth. One of his eyes burst, while the other bulged even more, then began to shrink again as vapour issued in a stream from its side. If I could only get him away from me it would be the end of him, but his grip on my arm felt solid. I hit him again and again. He bowed down, I thought from the damage, but he grabbed a rung in the hull with his free hand and tried to pull me after him. When that didn’t work, he released his hold and struck my other arm with the edge of one clawed hand, attempting to break my hold on the turret. He then gripped the rung again and, following a row of them, started dragging me back to the airlock. Air began jetting from a crack between my gauntlet and sleeve, then sealed as breach sealant mushroomed from it. Subliminally I saw another departure from the ship – the war boat. He continued to drag me, his clawed feet also gripping the rungs, and no matter how hard I struck him I couldn’t break his hold. I tried for my carbine, but just couldn’t reach it. Stupid to have tied it to my pack, but I hadn’t expected to need it out here. Still, there was something I could do. I turned and targeted the war boat, firing four missiles at once. I didn’t see where they struck, though, before he reached the airlock and began to pull me inside.

  Others were now departing the ship: the swarm of armoured prador. The ship surged, fusion drives igniting a sun glare on its horizon and small explosions cut across the hull towards me. A hit slammed me down, with fire exploding all around me, and I was freed from his grip. I glimpsed the man-thing still clinging to the airlock as I tumbled away through vacuum. FATAL BREACH the HUD told me, while my suit spewed breach sealant from numerous cracks. Pain surged and I wondered if my body had received a fatal breach too. His claw still clung onto my arm, his arm sheared off at the elbow. I pulled it off and discarded it, also banishing the scrolling list of warnings and crosshairs to call up SUIT MANV. Thruster jets at the ankles and waist stilled my tumble relative to the ship, but kept blasting to try and match acceleration. Meanwhile prador drew closer to me, so it wouldn’t be long before one of them took another shot. I directed my course back down towards the passing hull. My landing was going to be hard.

  As I descended, an icon blinked up in the corner of my visor. Knowledge not my
own again surfaced: a com laser was on me. I looked at the icon directly and blinked deliberately, activating the connection. Vacuum glared as, at the same moment, the ship blasted with side thrusters to change course. Fortunately, or perhaps not, this turned it towards me and a moment later I bounced along the hull, my suit thrusters driving me back after each bounce. I was surely becoming one large bruise with shattered bones inside my suit.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked a female voice that sounded familiar.

  ‘Jack Four,’ I replied, as I finally fetched up against a communications array pylon jutting from the hull. Catching a breath, I noted oxygen was now down to two per cent, my calculated survival time with the leaks being just twelve minutes. I then noticed an unexpected reaction from whoever had spoken to me: she was laughing.

  ‘Was it you who fired those missiles?’ she eventually asked, once her hilarity had passed.

  ‘I did.’

  I could see a human airlock twenty yards ahead of me, and forced myself into motion. Body screaming, and with boots on spotty gecko function, I began to clump towards it, groaning in pain.

  ‘Are you hurt, Jack Four?’

  ‘Probably,’ I managed tightly.

  ‘Well, I guess I owe you at least this: Get yourself away from that ship,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t. My suit’s breached and I have about twelve minutes.’

  She said something, but interference mashed it. Armoured prador swarmed above, some flaring out at the terminus of stabs of particle-beam fire, others throwing up hardfield defences. The hull jerked down, snapping away from my boots. Light blazed towards the nose and a giant spray of debris and fire reached out at an angle and spread on lines of smoke. A large chunk of the ship’s nose had just disappeared.

  ‘Are you still alive?’ the woman enquired, not sounding particularly concerned. I realized the suit com device would have another function and studied my gauntlet touchpad. After a moment I found the cam activation and used it. Her face appeared up in the top right corner of my visor. Recognition hit me at once, while she studied me for a second, biting her lip in mild amusement. I stared at her face dumbfounded, perhaps too overloaded with adrenalin to find any other reaction, but I also felt my hopes of rescue die.

  ‘It was my intention to destroy that ship.’ She grinned.

  ‘Oh really,’ I replied, first discovering my capacity for sarcasm, then deciding I’d pretend I didn’t know her, this being an advantage I might be able to play.

  ‘It tried to get to the space dock but wouldn’t have survived the particle weapons there. It certainly wouldn’t survive another railgun strike.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I reached the airlock and operated the manual control. The hinged lid blasted over, ejecting the lock’s content of air, and slammed on the hull. I used my suit thrusters to bring me back down to the hull again, feeling as if my shoulder had been dislocated.

  ‘However, it does seem likely that their follow-up strike force will get there – they’re more dispersed so harder to target. I’ve ordered evacuation.’

  Strange but nice of her to keep me updated on the current battle, but I was more concerned about other things. ‘You were going to destroy the ship?’

  She had turned away from me, perhaps studying some instrument panel, and replied distractedly, ‘Oh they recognized the targeting limitations of my railgun and are running in the only direction available to them. They know they stand little chance of taking this station without first disabling the railgun.’

  ‘And I saved you from that,’ I noted.

  She turned back to me. ‘My shot took out their U-drive and they cannot run out-system. I expected them to take a course to hide behind the planet but, if our vector calculations are correct, they’re aiming to land on the surface. Seems a foolish move to me since they must know what’s down there.’ I noted that she hadn’t acknowledged my last comment.

  ‘The planet,’ I repeated, as I inserted myself in the airlock.

  ‘The ship may survive re-entry and landing,’ she informed me. ‘And you may, as well.’

  ‘Well thanks for that.’ Sarcasm had its merits.

  ‘But I’d advise you to get away from the crash site as soon as possible.’

  I caught her expression and saw how all this amused her. The hull began splintering in a line towards me. One of the prador had clearly decided to do something about me.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It will attract unwanted attention. The—’ I cut her off, slamming the airlock hatch just as Gatling slugs punched a line of deep dents across it.

  A leak from the upper door of the airlock, caused by the Gatling slugs, meant it was refusing to charge with air, until I smashed my fist into the control panel. Manually opening the lower door, I managed to push hard enough to hinge it down off its seal against the air pressure. Finally enough air had entered, though still escaping above, for me to push it all the way down and go through. Closing it behind, I looked around with no idea where I was.

  The airlock had given me access to a human-scale corridor that extended for quite a distance. Items fell through the air towards me and I shifted to one wall to bat them aside. Chunks of engineering tumbled past, tools, numerous photoelectric scales the size of a palm and as black as midnight, and a vacuum-dried human skull. Resting briefly, I felt hopeless. I had come so far and made it to the very place I was ultimately aiming for. The woman communicating to me from the Stratogaster station had been Suzeal. Was her full name Suzeal Stratogaster Trimor? My plan for escaping this ship had been to undermine the prador attack plan and, having abandoned the ship, then – with luck – be picked up by the grateful residents of that station. It just wasn’t going to happen now. Even if I did survive out there against the prador soldiers, Suzeal would most likely just laugh while she watched my suit’s air run out. And now I was caught on a ship that seemed likely to crash-land on a hostile world.

  I chose the direction all the stuff was falling from and began to trudge that way. My suit indicated breathable exterior air, though it contained an unhealthy number of toxins. I felt no inclination to take it off since it offered protection, and the gecko boots. I also wasn’t sure I would be able to move about without its motors. I felt raw from head to foot, had a terrible pain in my side below my ribcage, and visions of my undersuit soaked with blood.

  A bulkhead door opened into another corridor running diagonally across this one. It terminated to my right against the wall of a prador corridor. On the left, a door stood open to a room with consoles along one wall, and a single acceleration chair running on rails to get to all of them. Inevitably the chair remained occupied with another human corpse – headless this time. I was about to walk in there when a side surge of ship’s thrusters threw me in headfirst instead. I bounced off the floor, then came up as acceleration slammed me into the wall above the consoles. I pushed away from it and realized it was transparent – a screen – and I could see into a large open area. I hurriedly pushed away and down beside the consoles, peering over them into an engineering section.

  A ceiling braced by webs of scaffold speared across above the screen. Down below, a gantry, almost hidden by pipes and power feeds, ran along behind a row of high-pressure water tanks, beyond which then lay massive injector assemblies. I appeared to be in some sort of control room for the fusion engines. However, the prador down below had set up their own saddle controls and other means of accessing the drive while everything in here was dead. I thought the gantry must have grav until one of them propelled himself from it and rose up, then with the stab of a thruster settled on one of the tanks. Dropping lower, I pulled myself along to the chair, reached up to undo a safety harness, pulled the corpse down with me and towed it along – envirosuits seemed to have been standard dress aboard this ship.

  Past the end of the screen, another bulkhead door stood open. A further short stretch of corridor terminated against the outside wall of another prador addition. I opened the only door here, just as another deceleration threw m
e against the wall beside it. Something crashed to my right. Pulling against the edge of the door, I peered round to see that the screen – one sheet of tough chain-glass – had been knocked into the space behind, with the prador lodged there and scrabbling to pull itself out again. I pushed on into the cabin and left the door open, hoping it hadn’t seen me, and painfully slowly unstrapped the carbine from my back. The scrabbling sounds continued until, a moment later when I peered out again, the prador made it back into the engineering area.

  The headless corpse had now settled against one wall. I searched the cabin, glad to find a new envirosuit rather than having to don grave garments. After a long struggle, I managed to get out of the spacesuit, parts of it falling to pieces even as I removed them. Some spots of blood had soaked into my undergarment here and there but on inspection I saw they were from old wounds probably aggravated by limited areas of decompression. Breach sealant had also stuck to the garment in clumps so I abandoned it and hunted down another. Amazingly I could find no broken bones but I did see plenty of red tender areas that would probably bruise. Finally dressed in the envirosuit, I opened my pack. No water remained in the single container I had left – the fight had popped off the lid, while the food blocks had developed a hard vacuum-dried crust. I wasn’t hungry anyway. Another surge flipped me across the cabin, so I pulled down on the bed and found straps to secure me there. And the manoeuvres continued.

  A steady roar grew and grew, transforming into a vibration and then a violent shuddering. We had entered atmosphere, I was sure of it. Had the railgun shot disabled the grav-engines? It seemed so, as the shuddering threw me again and again against the straps. The noise increased to painful levels and I managed to close up the hood and visor of the suit, which filtered it a little. Great jolts then ensued and a crack snaked along the ceiling of the cabin. The whole room fell with a crash and I saw it had torn away from the corridor outside. Fire wafted across out there, then dispersed into webs, while smoke boiled up from below. Another jolt threw the cabin up, then it crashed down again. I closed my eyes and just hoped to live. And then, finally, it was over.