Jack Four

by Neal Asher

  ‘The assault is under way. We managed to destroy their railguns with missile strikes but they’re still dug in and heavily armed. The assault force is preparing now, but we’ll send a test ship first to see if we missed any railguns.’

  ‘Then you’ll come and get me?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I may yet leave you there just for the entertainment value.’ She added, ‘And you didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘I didn’t know the droon was there,’ I replied.

  ‘Well now, that could mean you’ve been telling the truth because your other self would not have been so stupid. Then again, your other self would also have been smart enough to lie about it.’

  ‘What about the prador down here?’

  ‘Up in the mountains ahead of you.’

  ‘Where you directed me.’

  ‘Easy enough for you to circumvent them and advisable that you do so. What did you do to annoy Vrasan so much? His response to you was … excessive.’

  ‘Vrasan?’

  ‘A small prador in white armour – the one I conducted my negotiations with. I’m still wondering what to do about him.’ Her voice had gone utterly flat. Good to remember how she sounded when angry.

  ‘You mean, besides preventing his attack on you?’

  ‘Yes, besides that.’

  ‘I got into his sanctum and sliced him up with a laser carbine.’

  ‘Really? He survived? Why didn’t you finish the job?’

  ‘Perhaps because I am not a Polity agent,’ I replied, noting that she clearly didn’t know about the Spatterjay mutation of the king’s children.

  The creatures drew closer. They looked like ruminants, but for the six legs and mouthparts like trumpets. They seemed to be hoovering the ground with these as they advanced, then stopping occasionally to spit out something from an orifice below that trumpet. Glancing aside, I focused on a scattering of balled-up lumps of grit nearby.

  ‘I would say it’s a shame you didn’t kill him, but still, the fact you didn’t now gives me an opportunity to do something more interesting with him.’

  It seemed the approaching creatures were not predators. This of course made sense. How could the monsters here survive if all they had to eat was each other? Still, herd animals could be just as dangerous as any predator. I realized then that in talking to Suzeal and not acting, my only remaining option was to hide and hope the things passed by on the other side of this boulder.

  ‘So what happened between you and him?’ I asked. ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘Prador politics, I think.’ She thought about that then added, ‘The involvement of your erstwhile self was coincidental, though Polity pressure does help drive the issue.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘We’d only traded with Old Family prador until Vrasan made his offer. The money was … a lot. The king supposedly wanted the clones for experimentation. Vrasan even gave us some detail on the new form of Spatterjay virus they were using – all of it looked completely plausible. Then we found the locator beacon in the diamond slate.’

  She seemed chatty and I hadn’t expected such a full answer but, of course, it didn’t matter to her how much I knew. From her perspective she was talking to someone likely to end up dead.

  ‘Locator?’ I wondered. I began to see the shape of what had been happening, but lost it in too many complications. I felt tired as I tried to sort it all out in my head, and the migraine lights began flashing again.

  ‘They won’t attack you, you know,’ she said after I’d fallen silent.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The rock suckers. They stay in the forest overnight then come out in the day to graze on the fungus growing in the grit of the plain. It contains something they need. They usually lose one or two of their number to sleers or the droon when he’s out and about in the day, but their fast breeding accounts for the losses. Completely harmless unless you surprise them, then they’ll kick out your spine.’ She smiled, perhaps at the prospect of this happening to me.

  I stood up, then damned myself for taking any notice of what she’d said. Two of the nearest creatures raised their heads and gazed at me with four blank green eyes each. The rest just carried on hoovering past.

  ‘You said something about a locator?’

  ‘Oh yes, where was I? You see, ECS frowned on our trade across the border into the Kingdom but wasn’t able to do anything about it. They came close with your previous self, but still weren’t able to locate us. They were certainly putting pressure on the king about it, but my guess is he acted out of self-interest. I’d say his main aim wasn’t to shut down the trade, but to find out who the Old Family recipients were. He made it illegal in the Kingdom so, if he can get evidence on which families are involved, he can deal with them without too much objection from the others.’

  ECS, I thought. Earth Central Security comprised the military, police, special forces and spies of the Polity. It seemed I had final confirmation of who my previous self had been.

  ‘As in, put them on trial?’ I suggested wryly.

  She laughed so hard she started coughing.

  ‘You still have your previous self’s sense of humour,’ she finally managed.

  ‘I try, but my situation is lacking in reasons for laughter.’

  She nodded. ‘Quite.’ Her attention seemed to be wandering, but before she cut the link I managed to nail something else bothering me about her explanation.

  ‘I don’t understand why the king needed a locator to find your station.’

  ‘History,’ she replied. ‘A lot of information was lost during this king’s usurpation of the last. The Polity moved the station here during the war before they dumped the creatures down there. It wasn’t called Stratogaster station when they were using it, either.’

  ‘But surely the king has his agents in the Graveyard and there would be those prepared to sell the information?’

  ‘This is true. The king’s interest in this place is a recent thing, else he would have learned its location long ago.’ She paused contemplatively. ‘I’m still not sure why his interest was suddenly sparked now. We’ve been trading for a long time and the Polity has been putting on pressure for a long time. I’m sure there’s something I’m missing.’

  ‘Maybe that pressure peaked?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She looked doubtful, then dropped the subject. ‘Ahead of you in the mountains there are later-stage sleers but your weapon should be enough to deal with them. Stay alert. That being said, a bigger problem seems to be on your trail.’

  I looked round sharply. ‘The hooder?’

  ‘Oh no. It limped back into the jungle to nurse its wounds and now the boundaries are once again established. And not the droon either – it’s back in its hole regrowing a couple of legs.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I’ll give you a clue: he looks marginally like a man but for the nerve-impulse control frame grafted on, and his skin is very blue. Another one of Vrasan’s toys.’

  She started laughing again, then cut the connection.

  7

  Suzeal didn’t care whether I lived or died and no doubt thought the latter more likely. It seemed I was an entertainment – a passing distraction – and maybe, being a walking dead man, someone she could safely talk to. Thereafter I was perhaps a source of useful data from my old self. The fact that I existed proved she’d had some nasty interaction with him, and she had as much as told me he worked for ECS.

  After the last of the rock suckers moved past, I continued towards the tree line, the landscape gaining a few lumps, then a final upslope taking me towards the vegetation. Vines cloaked the ground, sporting low flat leaves and sausage pods that exploded when touched and sprayed me with wet seeds. They looked terran, but no part of me recognized them. Finally I got a closer look at the trees. They were organisms like by-blows of pines and cycads, their trunks and branches heavily scaled and sprouting masses of needles and globular cones. The vines faded away under these, displac
ed by spreads of bracket fungus and patches of what were perhaps yellow dead nettles. I stopped to sit on one of the fungi then got up hurriedly when white insects with doubled thoraxes, much like those of a droon, crawled out of holes in the upper surface. I found a fallen trunk and sat on that instead, watching carefully for a while before relaxing.

  So, presuming Suzeal was telling the truth, the man-thing I’d fought aboard the ship was following me. He had survived being vacuum-dried – probably pulling himself back through that airlock. I presumed that the ‘nerve-impulse control frame’ she’d mentioned grafted to his body was a better or easier option to control him than coring and thralling, considering his advanced viral mutation. But why was he following me? It could just be some perverted instinct or the continuation of the program that had originally set him upon me. I had visions of him grabbing and dragging me all the way back to the ship. It might also be that Vrasan had a linked control unit and was directing him. The prador still had a score to settle with me.

  What the hell could I do about this? Looking back along my course, I saw my footprints clearly visible in the earth and now in the needle mulch. Was he following my tracks? I cut a branch and tried smearing them out, but this only turned over an orange mycelium, probably of the fungus, and made a trail more visible. Instead, I walked all around the area to lay false trails, smeared them out at their terminus, then walked backwards in my previous footsteps. When I felt the issue confused enough, I stepped up onto one of the bracket fungi, then carefully from one to another, taking a course parallel to the tree line at first then gradually turning inwards. I left few marks as the things were as hard as old wood. I just hoped the disturbed insect things would shortly return to their burrows. Thereafter I watched where I walked and took every opportunity to conceal my trail: walking along a log, and at one point climbing from tree to tree until a branch snapped and dumped me on my backside.

  Soon the vegetation began to change, with the trees becoming squatter, the fungus sparse and displaced by clumps of white flowers around which bee-like things buzzed. The slope grew steeper and finally a spine of rock, with scree on either side, took me up out of the trees. Thereafter I chose to walk on rock wherever I could and no longer concealed my trail elsewhere as I picked up my pace. I’d spent enough time at that; it would either work or it wouldn’t.

  I continued up into the mountains keeping the sun ahead, estimating the direction I should take when it moved overhead, then following the course of a stream ever upwards. I drank again and topped up my water container, reckoning I was past worrying about what bugs I might be picking up. Fish swam in some of the pools, but I wasn’t yet hungry enough to risk the same thing happening to me as when I had tried the prador food. It grew colder and I turned off the cooling in my suit. The sun shifted down the sky behind and revealed that the stream had taken me off course. Climbing a steep rocky slope out of the valley it had been carving, I then trudged higher and higher via snaking paths made by some three-toed animal. Eventually, high up, a jutting slab gave me a view down the winding curve of the stream to the lower tree line, the plain beyond and the hazy jungle beyond that. There I saw a shape stepping out of the trees, a man shadow cast blackly behind it. Annoyingly he seemed to be walking up the spine of rock I had negotiated earlier, so my previous attempts to hide my trail hadn’t put him off. Closer still, coming up the course of the stream, came something larger and, in appearance at least, nastier.

  Suzeal had mentioned sleers. Now this information, plus the sight of the thing coming up the stream course, propelled something I already knew into my consciousness. Sleers had an interesting life cycle with many stages. At the beginning they were mostly cave hunters, possessed of a feeding head with grinding mandibles and extensible antlers, ten legs attached in pairs on independently rotating body segments, and though quite capable of killing a man, they never grew larger than a metre in length. After a few years, they encysted in the ground and there transformed to the second stage. The front segment would fold up and meld into the feeding head, the two legs attached turning into carapace saws for dealing with larger prey outside the sand caves – prey they could see with a triad of compound eyes. They also grew an ovipositor drill which they used to inject paralytic. These were a form of adult that split itself for mating: each half moving on four legs. The rear section would go off to mate with the rear sections of other sleers, while the feeding or hunting end continued about its business – the two sections still communicating by low-frequency bioradio. Once reconnected after mating, the whole creature would then lay eggs in a cave or burrow in which to dump paralysed prey, their nymphs hatching out and feeding on this preserved food.

  I now realized the thing that had tried to get to me in the brambles had been such an adult. It seemed likely that had it not eaten me on the spot, I would have served as such preserved food for its young. I shuddered at the thought of that. Then, thinking about all the monsters here, I wondered at my secondhand knowledge of them and what that might tell me about my previous self’s fascination with alien killers. Perhaps to him they were just something he needed to be aware of when conducting his missions on strange planets.

  The second-stagers grew to about two metres in length, which was about the size of the one I’d encountered. But their weird life cycle did not end there. After many years the things encysted again and transformed into the third stage. These laid eggs in a similar manner, but out of them hatched second-stage sleers. The biological imperative for this remained vague to me. These creatures inevitably grew bigger – up to four metres long. Their carapace was dark grey, rather than bearing the usual sand-coloured camouflage of their younger brethren, perhaps for night hunting. Another pair of legs would ride up beside their head to form pincer arms like inwardly turned pickaxes, complementing their carapace saws which, of course, were much bigger too. The things would run on six legs. Other transformations and stages ensued and apparently the question remained open about how many there actually were. I didn’t need to know about those, at least not yet. The thing coming up the course of the stream was a third-stage sleer. All that remained to me was to try not to panic and figure out what the hell I could do about it.

  I watched for a while longer, vague ideas about my response surfacing in my mind. Both the sleer and the man-thing were on my trail. Both were moving at a fast walking pace and were about a mile apart. I closed my eyes and mined further knowledge about sleers. They weren’t particularly intelligent, though, apparently, they did get brighter the older they got. They were tough – their carapaces as hard as a prador’s, and they were fast, but energy weapons were effective against them. The people living on the world of Cull, where they were to be found, could kill them with primitive guns, but also drove them with fire. Like any animal, they didn’t like fire. Okay. My plan was beginning to take shape.

  Suzeal had told me my carbine could handle a sleer, but I didn’t want to handle it, I wanted to drive it. Also, though my carbine was a powerful weapon, I had no faith in it against a Spatterjay-virus-mutated human. I’d seen what he was capable of surviving and, it seemed evident, I would not be able to stay ahead of him perpetually. Eventually he’d catch up because I felt certain he didn’t suffer the unadjusted human need for sleep. However, he wasn’t armed so would have as much trouble against a creature with a carapace as he had with the prador. Well, at least enough trouble to slow him down. Factor in the carbine too … I abruptly picked up my things and began heading back along my route up here. I calculated it would be about twenty minutes before I came face to face with the sleer.

  I kept time with a clock in the control screen of my suit and, after fifteen minutes, found a rock to crouch behind, putting out my pulse gun and all the spare energy canisters on its surface. Even as I put down the last of these, the monstrous thing came into sight below me. It looked even bigger now and a lot more formidable. I watched it pause and snap its pickaxe pincers at the air, black antlers shooting out from holes in its head like the fronds
of a tubeworm, then it came on.

  I took careful aim at a rock ahead of it and fired, the beam screeing through the air, barely visible only where it reflected off water vapour and incinerated floating dust. It splashed on the rock, which exploded satisfactorily, throwing smoking splinters in every direction. The sleer halted and shifted sideways with a weird rotation of body segments. I fired again hitting another rock in front of it, then another and another. It snapped at the smoking fragments, then I saw a wisp of smoke from its head and it backed up rapidly. A shard had landed in one of its three compound eyes. Another shot set a low tangle of herbage smoking and burning, and yet another in the stream next to it blasted boiling water over it. In one revolving segment motion, it turned and headed fast back the way it had come. I picked up energy canisters and inserted them in various pockets, the pulse gun going into my belt. My hands were shaking as I set out after it.

  Now, loping from rock to rock, I began to see a flaw in my plan. I had no guarantee the sleer would attack my other pursuer, or that he might attack it. Maybe he’d just jump out of its path and the thing would keep going and I would end up facing him alone. I hesitated, but then forced myself on. I was committed now.

  A few hundred yards down, the creature slowed, then abruptly spun round, antlers fully extended and pincers snapping. It had sensed me. It began to move towards me, but I fired again putting a smoking crater right in front of it and kept moving towards it. The thing surged over the crater so I fired again and again with less accuracy. It dodged about in sprays of rock splinters and clouds of steam, but then one of my shots hit a forelimb, the thing bursting open and spewing oily fire from the cracks. The sleer emitted a shrill hiss, hesitated, then reluctantly turned and headed away from me again. I waited a while, letting it get further ahead so my presence didn’t become so much of a temptation again, then followed just as it was about to move out of sight. When it slowed I put another shot into the stream behind it. The thing accelerated but as I drew closer, I saw that it wasn’t the shot that now drove it.