Jack Four

by Neal Asher

  ‘I will kill him,’ said Marcus. He turned away and headed over to a wall of storage lockers and began inspecting the numbers.

  I just stood there staring at what had been done to the three. Another movement drew my eye to one cylinder. A length of spinal column flicked like a tail. I felt sure nerve tissue had no muscle, so the movement had to be due to the virus and any alterations it had made. I thought about Marcus’s ruggedness and how the virus preserved life. I also remembered Vrasan’s head gaining independent life in his bathing pool and, more recently, the escaped prisoner crawling across the floor with the top of his head sliced off. Vrasan’s brain hadn’t been in that head but in his main body, while the prisoner might have been alive but not necessarily a conscious thinking being. But still … these brains and spinal columns had independent life. Would they retain intelligence? I acted without considering the matter further.

  I flipped the lid off the first cylinder, reached inside and grabbed the brain. There would surely have been a better way to do this using the surgeons, but that would take time and expertise I did not possess. As I lifted the thing out, the spine coiled about my wrist. I pulled it off while reinserting the brain into the skull cavity I presumed it came from. A transparent jelly oozed out all around as I pushed it in, and it seemed to bed itself in there, shrugging and shivering as it did so.

  ‘What the hell?’ Marcus began, standing by an open drawer holding a squat silver cylinder. He inserted the thing into a belt pouch and walked over. He’d found the nanite.

  The length of spinal nerve trunk writhed over the open section of spine like a snake trying to force its way to cover. I pulled out the rod in the first vertebra and pushed a section of it into place, and then the next and the next. The thing kept popping out and I swore. Marcus came over with a gun-like device which trailed a cable and feed tubes to one of the surgeons.

  ‘Hold it closed,’ he said.

  I pinched a top vertebra together and he applied the device. The bone weld wasn’t neat, but it held. He handed me the bone welder and stepped over to one of the other slabs. Once I’d welded all the vertebrae, I took out all the hooks holding the flesh and skin back from them and looked round for a cell welder, but found no need. Skin and muscle meshed even as I watched, blue fibres wriggling in it like thread veins. I closed the skull lid and held it in place until it firmed, then went over to the next one. Once Marcus had finished the same procedure with the one he’d gone to, he came over to help me. After we were done, he drew a large commando knife and began cutting the straps.

  ‘Do you think it’ll work?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’ We headed out of there.

  We negotiated our way through an area of the station where, by its dilapidation, it seemed few people came. As we moved away from the sounds of fighting, he said something I didn’t quite understand, ‘I would not have thought of that.’

  ‘Thought of what?’ I asked.

  ‘Those three, back there.’ He stabbed a thumb behind.

  My turn to shrug. ‘Seemed like we could give them a chance.’

  ‘You’re different.’

  I didn’t ask what he meant by that. Weren’t we all different from each other?

  The atmosphere plant sat in a large open area cut through numerous station floors. The thing measured a couple of hundred feet from pole to pole – a sphere of metal fed by numerous pipes and power lines. Various decals and mechanisms covered its surface. The thing was biotech. It was filled with modified chloro-plasts in a support gel, run through with microtubules for feeding it and carrying away wastes sieved out by meta-material membranes. Optics would supply light throughout the interior to complete the process. At the top of the thing sat a huge extractor fan that drew off the constant bubbling up of oxygen, while linked to it stood a mixer for adding surrounding air – mainly to cut down on fire risk.

  We climbed a ladder up the side of the thing to the steady thrum of the upper fan, then walked along a pipe standing ten feet wide from that and clambered over the mixer. Beyond this, the pipe fed into a huge junction box with smaller pipes running off, into the station to feed the ventilation system. This wasn’t all of it. There would be CO2 scrubbers and crackers throughout, recyclers and filters, plants for producing nitrogen and other gases from compounds, and of course hydroponics and gardens adding their product to the mix. From here came the main breathable air to keep the station topped up, since no doubt a place as old as this leaked like a sieve.

  ‘Here.’ Marcus gestured to an inspection hatch in the top of the pipe.

  I squatted down and tugged at the thing. The clip holding it down simply broke and it hinged up with a rusty creak, shedding corrosion. The air blast from it hit me in the face, redolent of those forests on the planet below. Marcus took out the cylinder of nanites he’d recovered from Bronodec’s lab.

  ‘Primed for atmosphere distribution.’ He showed me the small fan in the end of the thing. ‘Perhaps I won’t kill him after all.’ He placed the cylinder down in the pipe where a switch activated a gecko pad and stuck it in place. Holding his finger against another control set a fan running. Vapour spilled and once he’d extracted his arm I closed the hatch. The thing kept flicking up in the air blast until he put his foot on it and I used a low setting on my weapon to melt part of the edge into the surrounding rim. We were done. The procedure seemed singularly lacking in drama considering what we had gone through to get here.

  ‘What now?’ I asked, standing.

  ‘Now it’s time to talk to the prador,’ he replied.

  Marcus leapt down from the pipe, dropped almost two floors, landed on another narrow pipe and walked out of sight.

  ‘What the fuck do you mean, talk to the prador?’ I shouted. I got no reply. I looked around for a way down but saw only the route he’d taken. I jumped, hurtled down and landed on the pipe. The impact jarred up through my body, and suit assist kicked in belatedly. I fell off but managed to grab it and swing into the next floor. Marcus was still in sight, heading towards a bulkhead door. I ran after him.

  ‘What the fuck do you mean?’ I shouted at his back again.

  He turned towards me and waited until I’d caught up.

  ‘Your suit has a map you haven’t used,’ he said. ‘You can head out to the rim and join the rest of them.’

  He had become noticeably more eloquent now.

  ‘I won’t do that.’

  He nodded, turned to the bulkhead door, spun its wheel and opened it, stepping through into an aged and non-functioning pedway.

  ‘What do you think will happen here now?’ he asked.

  This had been on my mind for a while.

  ‘If Salander cannot win,’ I said slowly, ‘then the best we can hope for is the innocents here escaping the station, just as you said.’

  ‘Correct. Then what happens?’

  ‘The escape pods don’t have U-space drives. They either head down to the planet or out-system with those inside in cryo.’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head.

  ‘No?’

  ‘The prisoners we released will keep Suzeal occupied only for a little while – even supposing they stay and fight and don’t head out to the rim. The same applies for those who are freed from thrall control. Salander will try to get people into the escape pods, but that will take time. I calculate that most of them will still be at the rim when Suzeal attacks. She has thousands under her and most are heavily armed, hardened killers.’

  It was the longest speech I’d ever heard from him.

  ‘So there’s no hope?’

  He continued relentlessly, ‘Most will be killed, though Suzeal will capture some for the coring trade. She may let those in the pods escape. More likely she will kill all those aboard the station and recapture the pods, since it’ll be easier for her to take the people in them as prisoners.’

  ‘And talking to the prador will make this better how?’

  He glanced at me, his expression almost pitying. ‘There is no easy s
olution here. It is possible that some agreement between the Kingdom and the Polity will allow rescue ships in. But, even if that were the case, this would all be over before they got here.’

  ‘All I’m hearing is negatives.’

  ‘If the prador were to attack, they would go in at the hub. Suzeal would have to keep her forces there to counter them. This would give Salander time to get the refugees away.’

  ‘But they cannot get here.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘The railgun …’

  He pointed to his pack, which until then I thought contained only the ammunition and power for his multigun. ‘I have the solution to that. Yield of one kiloton.’

  I didn’t know what to say. It all sounded perfectly logical but the idea of allowing the prador here seemed crazy.

  ‘What of the refugees when the prador get here?’

  ‘They’ll be off the station … mostly.’

  ‘That wouldn’t have kept them safe from Suzeal and will not keep them safe from the prador.’

  ‘I told you, there are no easy answers.’

  I fell silent as we traversed the station. In time I began to recognize our surroundings again and then finally the door back into the empty apartment overlooking the park. The sound of gunfire was still evident, but it had waned.

  ‘We have to be ready,’ said Marcus. ‘This is going to be a hard fight.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘See to your suit and see to yourself.’

  ‘What fight?’

  ‘See to yourself,’ he instructed tersely.

  He shed his pack, cleared a table of debris and put the thing on it. I headed straight over to the apartment’s sanitary unit and luckily found the plumbing still working. I felt utterly dehydrated. With that tended to, I stepped out and went over to look down into the park. Bodies scattered the ground, and medics moved about with grav-gurneys as fighting had ceased there. I noted many bodies were of prisoners. They weren’t moving, yet they didn’t appear highly damaged, which was odd. Weapons flashes and occasional explosions lit up the far end. I returned inside, reluctant to find out my condition. Then, angry with myself, I put up my visor and turned on the HUD.

  Suit diagnostics first. The program highlighted numerous holes and burn craters and I set to work on them with my supply of patches. I used all of them up wherever reachable – a standard procedure since the front always took the most damage, unless you were inclined to retreat.

  ‘I’ve run out of patches,’ I said.

  ‘Here.’ Marcus waved me over.

  Out of the mess of items from the pack, he picked up a box of patches and repaired the damage on the back of the suit. He next picked up a cylinder with FA 5.1 stencilled on the side. I knew the letters meant ‘Field Autodoc’.

  ‘You’ll have to take it off,’ he said.

  The readout in my visor listed my damage. Besides the earlier injuries, I had a bullet in one leg, fragments of metal in my guts, shin splints and damaged knees, broken ribs and a broken arm. I looked at the arm concerned and opened and closed my hand. I’d felt nothing at all but now I could feel something shifting inside, or perhaps that was just psychosomatic. Further readouts showed how the suit had kept me mobile. It’d pumped in exotic cocktails of drugs, printed open wounds closed and isolated the bullet and metal fragments. It had also injected drain tubes here and there and made some serious alterations to my nanosuite’s functions. The bone breaks were being held together by internal wrap-around splints of linked nanites. Using the wrist console, I ordered the suit to break its link with the nanosuite, extract the tubes and curtail the drugs. I shut down suit assist and ordered detachment at every joint, and immediately collapsed on the floor.

  Lying there, weak limbed, I began to remove the thing in sections, exposing bloody underclothes, smears of analgesic paste and seeping punctures. Large areas of bruising were evident but difficult to distinguish from the staining of antiseptic and antiviral solutions. I got one arm section off as I lay flat on my back, leaving the broken arm till last, then tried to sit up. Harsh grating in my chest and horrible stabbing sensations ensued. Marcus, who until then had been observing me dispassionately, finally decided to step in and help. Soon he had me stripped of suit and underclothes and lowered me carefully back to the floor. The effect of the drugs still in my system had begun to fade. I felt as if I’d been run through a rolling mill.

  ‘Just lie still,’ he said, uncapping the cylinder.

  He tipped it and the field autodoc slid out, like a folded-up nymph only rendered in chrome, bone-white plastic and grey composite. As it dropped to the floor, it unfolded, landing with a clatter on its gleaming feet. The thing resembled a scorpion, with far too many legs and other manipulators. It immediately scuttled over to me and, in a fog of aseptic spray, climbed onto my chest. It felt very heavy; technology packed it near to the point of ultimate ‘dense tech’. It hummed while it sat there, and I felt the hot flush of active scanning traverse me from head to feet. When it moved again down to my leg, I couldn’t help but feel a flush of horror, with it looking so similar one of the lice aboard the King’s Ship.

  My leg numbed where the bullet had gone in. I tilted my head in time to see the thing slice me open, spray a coagulant, then delve inside. After a moment it lifted out the bloody nub of a bullet and discarded it, reached in again and threw aside fragments, then, with the hiss of a cell welder, sealed up the wound. It came up to my torso again and I suppressed the urge to knock the thing away. As that numbed, I decided not to look, but could feel the slicing of its scalpels, the tugging of its manipulators and hear the metal fragments hitting the floor. After these sounds stopped I made the mistake of tilting my head and looking down again. It had skin and muscle folded back in two large flaps and was concentrated on my ribs, shoving breaks together and welding them, laying in composite splints where necessary.

  ‘Imagine how this would be in pre-Quiet War times,’ said Marcus. He sat on the floor working on my suit with a small deposition welder. Yeah, before the AIs took over running human civilization, before nanosuites and autodocs, in the time when a body mostly relied on its own resources for healing.

  I lay back and closed my eyes. ‘I really don’t want to use my imagination right now.’

  The autodoc traversed my body further, dealing with my injuries in order of importance. Finally it sat on my chest again and gave me another scan. It clambered off and scuttled across the floor to its cylinder beside Marcus, folding up as it inserted itself inside. At the last, it reached out with two manipulators to grab the lid and popped it back into place. I felt no urge to move, but Marcus walked over and held a hand down to me. I grasped it and he hauled me up. I ached, felt sore and my thirst had returned along with a ravenous hunger, but that was all. It seemed somehow wrong for injuries to be repaired so easily, yet I didn’t understand why I felt that way. It perhaps extended from some understanding of those ancient times Marcus had mentioned.

  ‘Put your suit back on,’ he said, turning away to head back to his table.

  I instead found a plastic bowl on the floor and went to fill it, more than once. As I stepped out of the booth he said, ‘Here,’ and tossed me something. I caught one of the food blocks we’d used down on the planet and munched it down. He unwrapped one too and began eating.

  ‘I forget your needs,’ he said.

  ‘And your own,’ I replied.

  16

  Once I’d finished eating, I squatted over the suit, noting the thing had self-cleaned inside. I put it all on again and ordered the joints to reattach, which they did with a series of clicks, foam cushions expanding inside to tighten it around me. A system check revealed that Marcus had repaired the helmet as I went over to pick up my gun.

  ‘You said there would be a fight,’ I said.

  He nodded contemplatively.

  ‘Suzeal’s paranoia has meant she’s set up a net of jammers and blockers around the outside of this station,’ he said. ‘So getting a si
gnal out will be difficult. To speak to the prador, we’ll need to break into Suzeal’s coms centre. It’ll be guarded, of course, doubly so since it’s just above her apartment.’

  He’d refilled his pack and now slung it on his back, then picked up his multigun to reattach its feeds and support arm.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Numerous soldiers occupied the park, clustered closer together around the dropshafts that led up to where Suzeal lived. Others were working in the park, including the thralled who were collecting up bodies and the debris of battle.

  ‘The nanite didn’t work,’ said Marcus.

  I considered that for a moment then said, ‘Bronodec gave us no time frame on its penetration. We also don’t know how it’ll distribute through the ventilation, and whether it’s even got to this part yet.’

  He nodded agreement.

  I eyed the number of soldiers we would have to get through to access those dropshafts. I had no doubt that we wouldn’t be able simply to walk up and use them without being checked.

  ‘There has to be another way,’ I said, looking up.

  ‘All access from elsewhere in the station is blocked by armoured doors. Triple-layered ceramal with impact foam between, so’ – he held up his multigun – ‘even this won’t make a dent.’

  ‘Have you got a grav-harness in your pack?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look.’ I pointed from where we crouched in the banyan.

  ‘Balconies,’ he stated.

  ‘Seems she hasn’t covered that access.’

  He stared at them for a long moment, then stood and headed back the way we’d come. Turning my visor to mirror, I followed him out of the banyan. We left the park between two shops and took a dropshaft up, stepping out into the deserted section above them. Thereafter, for no apparent reason, stairs took us the rest of the way up. At the highest point, this volume of the station was once again inhabited, but most of those we saw were thralled. We finally reached the top floor, found an apartment with its door missing and, by the rubbish strewn about the floor, obviously unoccupied. Marcus stepped out onto a balcony and pointed up.