Jack Four Read online

  I unstrapped to the sound of things collapsing, booming, and settling with deep ominous creaks. Gravity had returned at an angle to the floor and I knew it wasn’t from any floor plates. It seemed to have more substance, though that could have been because it was half above terran standard, as the readout on the world of Trallion had told me. I’d been used to a quarter above – that being the grav prador preferred. It emphasized all my aches and pains and seemed to be trying to drag my organs out of my body. I slid to the door and peered down a hundred feet into the tangled infrastructure of the ship, before hauling myself up into the corridor. This too had become a slope and I manually set gecko function on my boots to get up it. Beyond the tilted screen, the area behind the engines was gone. The water tanks were now close enough to touch, buried amidst tangled beams, pipes and warped sheets of bubble-metal. There was no sign of the prador. They were certainly buried in that mess but, in their armour, probably unhurt, despite the glares of fires I could see.

  The next human corridor, leading to the airlock where I had entered, had snapped off. I peered over the end which swayed in mid-air above a drop of fifty feet down to canted gratings. A skein of optics still connected across the gap to the other part of the corridor. I tugged on it a few times to ensure it wouldn’t break, but wondered if I had the strength to cross. I had to. Body screaming, I pulled myself up, got my legs around it and slowly shuttled to the next section of corridor. Dropping to the floor there, I rested for a second, then opened my hood and visor to throw up. What came out had blood in it, which didn’t bode well. I noticed a smell of burning and all sorts of other complex odours. There was nothing I could identify because, though I possessed the knowledge of another human being, very little of it seemed to include what things smelled of. Then, belatedly, the flashing migraine lights returned. I smelled something like burning vegetation, but not quite the same, then complex odorants, perfumes and esters – the constituents of life but with a twist that made them, of course, alien.

  The airlock, surprisingly undamaged, let me out onto the hull. I felt suddenly buoyant and light-headed and realized the air must have high oxygen content. A great plain of metal sloped down towards fires which were worming through a black tangle, streaked with purple and green and shots of eye-aching red. Here the front of the ship had mounded up plant growth and earth. All around hung a fog of smoke and steam, through which embers and other bits tumbled. I headed across this slope, finally reaching the edge. A breeze now picked up as if the world around me had decided to assert itself once again. The smoke cleared, revealing purple and green jungle, fading to red umber in the distance, where mountains humped up like giant hippos wading through the foliage. The sky was yellow while the sun, dropping down behind those mountains, glared orange. I walked along the edge of the ship. Fires burned below but not as many as to the fore. I hoped for a ladder but it seemed this vessel had never been made for planetary landing. However, the ship had snapped nearly in two and the break offered a way down.

  Beam tangles and skeins of optics took me part of the way to the ground, a slope of hardened crash foam crunched underfoot for a few hundred yards, then an edge of hull offered a path just a foot wide. Finally I came to a point where I could use the ship no more, but directly opposite me thick branches of dark wood jutted out and were scattered with globular blue objects. I stared at them because they made no sense. Focusing on my second-hand knowledge of biology, I then recognized a banyan of a world called Circe. Why was this tree here on this alien world? I jumped, landing on a thick limb, and dropped along it as pain shot down my side. A long crawl brought me to the crown of the tree, then I climbed down using the crevices of its interwoven trunk. And finally I stood on the earth of this alien world.

  6

  Remembering that Suzeal had advised me to move away from the ship as soon as it crashed, I did so, even though her general amusement at my situation hadn’t indicated concern for my safety. My enviroboots immediately sank into the soft earth of the planet and I only thought to turn off their gecko function after they’d quickly caked with organic debris. To my right, fire silhouetted banyan trunks and every now and again smoke set me coughing, and that hurt. I closed up the hood and visor and small suit fans cleared it, then began to bring the internal temperature down. This would last for some time since the power supply ran through the fabric, constantly topped up by movement, temperature gradients and light.

  After an hour of this I paused to rest, then wondered again if I was doing the right thing. Suzeal had told me to get away from the ship because it would attract unwanted attention but back there I could find food and water. Was I just playing into the hands of someone I couldn’t trust to have my best interests in mind? Then I remembered something. From a low branch I plucked one of the blue globes, which were in fact leaves, not fruits, opened my visor and bit into it. The things had all the wrong sugars in them and provided little nutrition, but they did provide fluid. I ate a number of them then began to move on. Rounding the banyan trunk from which the branch hung, I halted abruptly at the sight before me.

  Just for a second I thought I had somehow walked a circular course and come back to the ship’s hull, but this hull was moving, and it had legs. A great mass, like a living monorail train, slid past. The portion moving past me looked like the spine of a giant, fashioned from heliotrope, being mainly green but red where each of the ‘vertebrae’ connected. Heavy insect legs protruded with flat feet terminating in hooks. This was a creature similar to the centipede things in the prador ventilation systems, but writ huge. My mind provided recognition and detail, and a moment later it provided fear. I ducked out of sight behind the tree trunk and tried to disappear inside it. The creature crashing through the jungle just yards from me was a Masadan hooder. I had no doubt of that, even though the colour was wrong. Towards its fore, it had a spoon-shaped head cupped to the ground in which its main eyes and incredibly complicated feeding apparatus resided, though the thing had sensors all down its body. Its main prey animal possessed black fats that released poison into its flesh upon its death, so the hooder dismembered the prey while it was still alive, preserving its life till it ate the last morsel. It also tended to use the same feeding technique on anything else it caught and, given the opportunity, that could be a human being. Death would be a protracted, agonizing affair.

  I unshouldered my carbine and gazed at the useless thing as I realized I knew a lot more about hooders than most people. They were not naturally evolved creatures or, at least, in their present form they weren’t. Masada had been the home world of the Atheter – one of the three ancient alien races the Polity had identified, whose deliberately devolved descendants – gabbleducks – lived on that world too. Hooders had been biomech war machines the Atheter had made – themselves devolved naturally over a couple of million years. These incredibly tough creatures were impervious to most energy weapons and projectiles. Obviously, their ruggedness extended to environmental changes, since Masada was a world devoid of oxygen. Perhaps the atmosphere here accounted for their colour change? Irrelevant really. I now understood exactly what ‘hostile environmental factors’ meant, and why no colony had been established down here. I also understood Suzeal’s little internal chuckle. She had no expectation I’d be able to survive either inside or outside the ship.

  I looked up at the banyan, then turned to peer deeper into the jungle. Another tree stood nearby with plenty of side branches, and it reared much taller than others around it. I waited until the sounds of nearby movement drew away, then headed over, keeping a sharp eye on my surroundings.

  The tree’s side branches stuck out perfectly level, as if trimmed by an expert in bonsai. I reached for the lowest branch at head height with trepidation, then tensed and hauled myself up. My body screeched at me and I felt something pop in my chest. Once up on the branch, I moved in and leaned against the trunk, fighting the urge to cough and scared of what might detect it. A brief and quiet clearing of my throat only made the urge to cough e
ven stronger. I clamped down on it, closed my visor and climbed as though ascending a ladder, so close and evenly spaced were the branches. As I got higher I could hear crashes and bangs and a sound like giant rasps being dragged over tin. Nearer the top, the branches were thinner and now their foliage lay close by. I paused and recognized the leaves of a genfactored tea oak grown on many worlds. Perhaps it was left over from a previous colony on this world.

  Soon I had sight of the ship and realized I hadn’t got far from it – perhaps half a mile at most. For a second I thought tree branches lay over it, until I saw them moving, and one tearing up a chunk of hull metal, then flowing inside. Hooders were crawling all over the ship, while the bangs and crashes I could hear issued from inside. Then I also heard the fast machine sound of a Gatling cannon firing and, in a storm of metal splinters, one of the creatures peeled off the hull and tumbled down into the jungle. A particle beam stabbed in, hitting another in the middle and it reared up like a snake prodded with a stick. The prador, five that I could see, rose up through a pall of smoke, their grav-rafts rising alongside them loaded with their supplies. They’d obviously decided their smaller weapons weren’t enough, and missile streaks cut in from them, raising multiple explosions on the hull. The blasts knocked all the hooders back down into the jungle, but I only saw one of them substantially damaged – two missiles hitting it in the same place and cutting it in half. The prador moved in around a clear section of hull and continued firing down into the jungle. One of them swept onto the hull with a grav-raft slaved behind it. The creature was small, and its flight appeared erratic. I pulled closer to the trunk. It seemed my would-be nemesis had made enough of a recovery to be reinserted in his dirty white armour.

  Shortly after the raft settled, a hatch swung open in the hull and figures scrambled out. Human figures. I wished I had binoculars because I felt sure their skin had a bluish hue. Hadn’t I actually killed the clones? In perfect recall I saw the bodies tumbling through vacuum and knew I had destroyed the force given the task of the initial assault on Stratogaster. But it seemed that hadn’t included all of them. The figures clambered onto the raft. Perhaps White-Armour didn’t want to abandon his work. With all aboard, the raft rose into the air just as the first of the hooders came up over the edge through a storm of fire. The prador rose too. I had seen enough and needed to get away from here just as fast as I could. But as I began to descend, the tree above me disappeared in an explosion of splinters under Gatling fire.

  I fell from my branch and landed stomach down on one below it and hung on there, groaning in pain, as part of the jungle down to my right also fragmented. Looking up, I could see the prador in dirty white armour heading unevenly towards me, but fast. Adrenalin surged now, and the pain disappeared. I scrambled down to another branch as a white streak cut across my vision. The missile struck below, the blast wave lifting me up as the tree tottered and then started to go over. It crashed down in a tangle of branches and vines, one of its branches pinning my leg to the ground. However, my view of the approaching prador remained unimpaired. It drew close enough that surely it couldn’t miss, until a hooder suddenly rose up out of the jungle, its cowl striking the prador like a racket and sending it tumbling. Another emerged, and then another, trying to reach the prador, but the Guard I had seen in its sanctum swept in and snared it, fired up thrusters and pulled it away. I started to scrabble at the earth underneath my leg, but further missiles rained down, blowing the jungle all around me to shreds and hurling one of the hooders up into the air. I buried my head under my arms until it ended.

  I was alive, unbelievably alive. I reckoned the white-armoured prador had emptied out its missile supply in my direction while its fellow dragged it away. Perhaps that fellow had thought his behaviour irrational and perhaps, in the circumstances, it was. All around me jungle lay smoking and boughs splintered. A couple of fires had started and began sweeping across with choking smoke. I started to cough, but found it easy to stop when something big shifted through the smoke nearby. Having finally freed my leg, I looked back at the ship, now visible from ground level, and began to move away from it, crawling at first, then standing and walking. Pure dumb luck stayed with me.

  * * *

  Utterly focused on my surroundings, I was ready to dive into hiding at the slightest sign of movement. I walked beyond the smoke, the sounds of the hooders’ steady destruction of the ship receding behind me. The banyan trees became smaller and then an even band of tea oaks displaced them. I suspected them to be the remains of a planted grove. As I walked, my suit started buzzing at me intermittently from inside the helmet, but I assumed this was from some damage it had received and ignored it. When it eventually stopped, I found myself on a downslope, the plant life around me changing to something damper and greener including cycads, ferns and giant rhubarbs interspersed with oily patches of bubble grass. I noted how nothing around me was unknown to my earlier self, even though I hadn’t read all the detail on this world. Had it been terraformed and planted with flora found all across the Polity?

  As I speculated on all this, my diving-for-cover strategy was tested by movement up in the branches of a tree I was approaching. I threw myself to one side and crawled behind a cycad, peeking out after a moment. The oddly shaped tree had a trunk like a pear, and branches decorated with blue foliage spread like those of a baobab. From these hung brown snake-like objects which I’d been sure I’d seen moving. Then I recognized them: Spatterjay leeches.

  ‘Oh great,’ I muttered.

  The tree was the pear trunk of that world. Some symbiosis meant that when any creature wandered beneath it, the tree shook its branches to drop leeches on it. I wasn’t sure of the biology behind that. So, it seemed I not only had hooders to contend with but Spatterjay leeches, which could grow big enough, on land, to take a large chunk out of me, even leave me in two halves. I then reassessed. The big leeches weren’t exactly speedy. Most likely, with so many hooders about, the leeches only grew until they wouldn’t be ignored as prey. I stood, circumvented the tree, and kept a wary eye out for any more of its kind. But with my envirosuit closed I felt safe enough from the creatures, even if they were in other trees, for I doubted their mouthparts could penetrate the tough material.

  The slope grew steeper and the vegetation changed further. Now tall grasses and reeds speared up between rocks cloaked in mosses and lichens. Still the life forms remained familiar to me, or rather, to my earlier self. Then a sound filtered through that I first equated to spigots in a prador sanctum but soon turned out to be a stream running between rocks. I went down to the edge and peered into the water at small diamond-shaped rays. I half expected to see leeches attached to them since on Spatterjay the leeches had filled just about every ecological niche, but they were clean. I sat there in silence for a moment, until the damned buzzing started again. I lowered my visor and collapsed the hood back into the neck ring, which dulled the sound, and squatted by the flowing water. It was much cooler here than up by the ship. Did I dare to drink? Despite the banyan ‘leaves’ I’d eaten earlier, I was incredibly thirsty. I decided to test my luck further, cupped some water in my hands and drank. It was wonderful. I took my pack off and got the water container out, rinsed it, filled it and drank my fill from that before filling it again and capping it. All this liquid around me then had its effect on my bladder, which I emptied, noting the blood in my urine – just one more thing to add to the list of potentially fatal hazards.

  Trudging along the course of the stream, I began to feel horribly weary. The sun stood high above but that made no difference. I’d never in my life thus far been governed by day and night. A flat boulder overhanging a small beach made of miniature snail shells seemed a good spot. I closed up my hood and visor for extra protection, curled up there with my head on my pack, and sleep came down on me like the darkness of a hooder’s spoon-shaped head.

  I woke panicked by the buzzing in my suit again, not knowing where I was or remembering much at all. The sun lay out of sight, but
darkness had yet to fall. I quickly collapsed the hood and opened the visor to kill the intrusive sound. Food and water first, then I stripped out of my envirosuit and cleaned it in the stream, scouring away old blood and dirt with handfuls of the miniature snail shells. With the suit cleaned and laid out to dry, I took a further risk and entered the water to wash myself. Plenty of bruises showed on my limbs now, and my torso from neck to waist was just one large bruise. The crusty scab over the laser burn grew soggy and peeled away to reveal clean scar tissue, however, and I considered that one small victory. My ribs still ached abominably but, despite my earlier coughing, I’d produced no blood so hadn’t punctured my lung. And that was a victory too. Other aches and pains were also evident, but then I had been vigorously active on a world with gravity higher than I was accustomed to.

  Once I’d dressed again, I headed out. The sun, as far as I could judge, lay behind me whereas when I had set out from the ship it lay ahead, so I assumed I was going in the right direction: away from the ship. Where that would take me I had no concern beyond it being away from the hooders. How long, I wondered, before the local hooders lost interest in that vehicle and spread out again, or had they already done so? Keeping a wary eye on my surroundings, I climbed the slope on the other side of the stream into a patch of stunted banyan. Then I found myself amongst briars, regularly punctuated by shoots like asparagus standing taller than me, and large patches of giant rhubarb with leaves ten feet across. As I walked on, all of these grew increasingly sparse, displaced by purple and red grasses. Then I came upon the skeleton.