Jack Four Read online

‘You fucking damage the product and Suzeal will have your balls for earrings,’ said Frey.

  ‘This ain’t damage,’ said Brack, as I ran through his previous words again. Suzeal, I thought. I will find out who you are.

  Brack pulled the Jill off to one side and through a doorway I hadn’t seen before. As I put on my slippers and stood upright I watched carefully out of the corner of my eye, seeing the door close, and noting that my companions weren’t even glancing that way.

  After a short time I heard muffled sounds from behind the door, but didn’t know if they were of pain or pleasure or from whom. This didn’t last long and ended with a guttural shouting from Brack. The flickering lights in my mind imparted the knowledge that he had been swearing in a form of Anglic slang that had taken hold in parts of the Graveyard, a borderland of space between the Kingdom of the alien prador and the human Polity. Implicit with this came more information about the two realms, of a war between them that had ended in an uneasy truce. Images of horrifying warfare flicked through my mind. They were second-hand, I understood, but how could they be there if I was a newly created clone?

  ‘Put your clothes on and get back into the ranks,’ said Brack, leading the Jill back out again.

  She obeyed and as she walked over I could see blood coming down her legs. I felt a brief sick lurch of something inside I only recognized later as anger.

  ‘When you’ve quite finished down there,’ came a woman’s voice over an intercom. ‘We’re going in now, so get them fed – I don’t want any of them collapsing before we make the exchange.’ Then after a pause, ‘And Brack, you forget your position in the SGZ. If there are any problems with that Jill Eleven you lose half of your cut.’

  Brack and Frey stood perfectly still, then Frey headed over to one of the walls and opened a hatch there. ‘Jack Four, come here and distribute these.’

  ‘The bitch was watching,’ said Brack.

  ‘And probably still is, and listening,’ said Frey, adding bitterly, ‘no talk of demotion for you, though. But one day you’ll push too far, Brack.’

  I felt a surge of panic. I wasn’t at the end of the row nearest Frey, so why had he called me? The instructions for the physical actions arrived in my mind. The slaver units possessed sufficient computing to translate verbal orders into actions, yet again I hadn’t needed them. I stepped out of my line and walked over to the cupboard. From there I took out blocks of a dark brown substance and drinks bottles and handed them to each of my fellows individually. This wasn’t the most efficient way, because I could have handed them to those nearest me, for them to pass along. But I followed the instructions to the letter. Jill Eleven, I noticed, was standing awkwardly and blood now pooled around her ankle.

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ said Frey.

  ‘Sure,’ Brack replied, seeming a bit subdued now. He turned to the wall directly opposite us, then reached up to the grey metal slug of an aug behind his right ear. Touching the thing was unnecessary since the cerebral augmentation didn’t need physical operation. Knowledge about the schematic for it unfolded in my mind: it had nanofibres which penetrated his brain, neural meshes, neurochem and optics and light-operated switches in their millions, as well as its laminar crystal computing, bionic power supply and bone anchors. Next came further detail on layered coding languages: whole edifices of data. I wanted to throw up again and bit down on it. The wall ahead of us flickered, almost in tune with the jags across my vision, and I realized it had been painted with nanobond screen paint. I tried to encompass the detail on it and only belatedly heard the ‘Eat your food and drink your drinks’ from Frey.

  I took a bite from the block, tasting all the vitamins and proteins and thought it rather like pork and apple, while the cold drink tasted of blackberries. I still didn’t know how I could possibly make such comparisons. Memory analogues, much like those from an aug, were loading to my mind, but their source remained a mystery.

  The wall now lit up as a screen, giving me a full view of vacuum scattered with stars. An immense vessel sat out there which I recognized at once – knowledge already acquired. The column-like thing measured fifty miles from top to bottom with a large off-centre disc at the top. At the bottom, which was then out of our sight range, I knew there were two massive ion drives like giant, cored olives. This was the King’s Ship – home to the ruler of the Prador Kingdom. And this must be where the vessel we were aboard was heading.

  The great ship loomed and, from what was visible, it seemed we were approaching the base of a giant tower. As we drew closer and closer I discerned the spines of great docks and our vessel soon turned towards one of them. The thing looked small at first, but as perspective altered I saw it was miles long and hundreds of yards wide. We came up beside its golden curved wall and it extruded a smaller moving dock which, with its array of clamps at the end, bore a horrible resemblance to a giant rag worm – a comparative my mind dredged up from what had already loaded. The thing snaked out and landed with a thump, just below our point of view. Our vessel halted and vapour puffed out in vacuum as the dock made its connection.

  ‘Big ugly fucker, isn’t it?’ said Brack.

  I just managed to stop myself replying to him. With my mind moving faster, it was hard to keep my self-control rigid, but I had to banish my confusion. I needed to accept the knowledge pouring into and establishing itself in my mind and not keep puzzling about the source. For now, it was about survival. I was alive, feeling more so every minute, and wanted to stay that way. I was clearly a clone being delivered by some very nasty types to some even nastier ones: the prador. I had to escape somehow and … well, I was angry. I realized it had been rising up inside me slowly, gathering pace then taking a leap forwards when Brack raped Jill Eleven. However, the slaver unit on the side of my neck meant I could do nothing but obey those keyed into it as my overseers. The best thing would be to escape before I was transferred aboard that monstrous ship, but that seemed impossible. I’d therefore have to bide my time and seize any opportunities once I was on there.

  ‘Okay, take them through,’ Suzeal commanded.

  Brack walked up to the screen wall and palmed it, hitting a door control. A wide door opened, giving the illusion of us walking straight into the body of the King’s Ship.

  ‘In threes, follow me,’ he said and stepped through.

  The instruction for physical movement arrived in my skull via the slaver unit. Falling in behind the first three, I stuffed the rest of the food in my mouth and drained the bottle, while around me the others simply dropped theirs. I thought it a risk worth taking. Brack led us through a short corridor which, judging by the structure of the walls, sloped down in relation to the rest of the ship. But it wasn’t noticeable since the corridor had grav-plates in the floor. This then opened into a discshaped room where others of Brack and Frey’s kind waited, all heavily armed. I noted Polity-issue pulse rifles, one large hermaphrodite lugging a particle cannon, while on either side were shielded Gatling cannons with figures in control seats behind the shields. These pointed towards the wide door at the end. The detailed knowledge I had of these weapons concerned me, as did my tendency to assess what might happen here should they be used. I noted too that those who wore armour or envirosuits with the same decals and decoration as Brack and Frey seemed to take precedence over others in more standard attire.

  A woman stepped forwards. She wore a heavy, armoured exoskeleton in gold and black with those decals and other ornamentation. So this was the voice in command over them? She stood over seven feet tall and had a strong jaw, with long ginger hair in a plait swept down over one shoulder. She moved out to inspect us as we came to a halt.

  ‘They’re all good?’ she asked.

  ‘Stats seem optimal,’ said Frey. ‘Just some … things.’

  ‘What?’ she shot at him.

  ‘Well … Jill Eleven had a bleed but it’s stopped now. It hasn’t weakened her too much. Jill Seventeen seems to be loaded with recessives, but no problem for our purposes.’
<
br />   ‘The Jacks?’

  ‘Just something odd about Jack Four. Getting some weird feedback through the slave unit. Probably just an IQ anomaly.’

  She walked down the line of us on one side, then back up the other, turning to face me. I continued looking straight ahead, but every feature of her face impressed itself in my mind. She gave an odd smile and moved on.

  ‘Right, here’s how it goes. We take them through to where a guide sphere is due to collect them. Our diamond slate should be waiting in exchange.’

  Diamond slate was currency, though ‘guide sphere’ I only understood from context.

  ‘And if it’s not and they shaft us?’ asked Brack.

  She gazed at him steadily.

  ‘Then we’re dead,’ she said simply. ‘But you should have some faith in the trajectory of what we are doing.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Brack, obviously not a believer.

  She frowned, glanced at the others in the room, then said, ‘Let’s do this.’

  The circular lock ahead lay twenty feet across. It now irised open to reveal a diagonally divided oval behind – a prador door. With a crack, that division parted and I felt the rush of air against my face as the pressures equalized. Suzeal’s people crouched behind the deck-mounted Gatling cannons and heavy armoured shields floating on grav-motors, with all their weapons pointed towards that opening door. As its two sections rumbled and revolved back, it soon revealed the tube leading back into the main dock was empty. After a moment Suzeal stepped out of cover.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said succinctly.

  ‘No guide sphere and no diamond slate,’ said Frey noncommittally.

  Suzeal sighed and then said, ‘Okay, four of you with me. It could all simply be a matter of translation. I was told that they would be waiting for us in the dock. That might not necessarily mean here in this docking tube.’ She turned to us. ‘You, follow.’

  Suzeal, Brack, Frey and two others launched into the docking tube, which had zero gravity, and we followed. I copied Suzeal and the others by slamming my hands against the dock walls and propelling myself along, but then damned myself for doing so. My fellows struggled with it until instructions arrived via their slaver units, and Suzeal looked back at me speculatively. Soon we moved into the huge main docking tunnel where artificial gravity brought us crashing down to the floor. Landing perfectly upright, Suzeal again swore.

  ‘They’re fucking pulling us in,’ said Brack.

  ‘Stow it, Brack,’ she snarled. ‘Understand that they don’t need to pull us in – if they want to fuck us then we are royally fucked already.’

  He grinned and turned away. I sensed there might be more to the relationship between the two of them than was first apparent. This keyed in with Frey’s resentment at the man not being ‘demoted’.

  A sweaty jog brought us up to the doors into the main ship and here sat two crates on top of a grav-sled. A stony sphere about the size of my head lay beside the sled.

  ‘There, you see,’ said Suzeal. She stepped over to the sphere. ‘You have the coding for the slave units?’ Meanwhile Brack and Frey had popped open one of the crates. Inside, I could see the gleaming slabs of diamond slate – a natural gemstone valued all across occupied space.

  ‘I have the coding,’ the sphere confirmed, voice flat and, well, stony.

  Brack and Frey checked the other crate, then Frey took up a control from the sled and lifted it from the floor. The thing was ready to follow him.

  ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ he said.

  ‘One moment.’ Suzeal held up a hand and then walked over to us. ‘I can’t tell you what will happen to you all here and, really, most of you wouldn’t understand if I could.’ She then walked over to me, pushing the one ahead of me out of the way. She faced me directly. ‘Except you, of course. You might understand.’ I said nothing, just kept my face blank. She continued, ‘Are you in there, Jack? Is the real Jack in there?’ She then hit me, throwing me against the Jack behind and we both went down. I had the overpowering urge to retaliate but knew that might be the death of me. Instead I focused on the positional data from my slave unit, stood up and moved back into my place, even though she stood in the way. I kept pushing against her as if mindlessly trying to return in line. She blocked me for a while longer, then snorted in disgust and stepped out of the way. I reassumed my position.

  ‘Come on, Suzeal – let’s blow this place,’ said Brack.

  ‘Okay.’ She walked past me, and all the others went too, the sled obediently following Frey. I listened to them drawing away and wondered if I could now make some sort of escape – maybe run off and hide somewhere aboard this giant ship, then find my way onto another craft docked to it and leave.

  ‘Follow,’ said the voice of the sphere, and I could do nothing but obey.

  The prador-scale tunnel was oval in section and consisted of yard-wide hexagonal panels set in an alloy grid. The panels looked like granite but I knew they were actually polystyrene-light airform stone. On the floor nearby, I noted a creature and felt some confusion at the sight of the thing. Jags appeared in my vision again and I then recognized it as a ship louse – quite a standard life form in a prador vessel. But this one was a cyborg, its head a complex sensor array, while the alternate segments of its body were chromed metal. It scuttled away noisily and disappeared through the gaps in a barred hole near the floor. I felt a gust of air as we passed this and understood it to be an air vent. I looked back, now feeling that I didn’t need to be so careful about my movements, and noted the large bolts holding the grating in place. They were made for prador claws and I wondered if I’d have the strength to undo them.

  At length an order arrived in my mind to halt and I did so along with the others. A weird tingling started on my scalp and, as I reached up to scrub at it, it began to transit down my body. I stood still, realizing we were being scanned. The sensation reached my feet and then cut out. I was about to move on again when a pillar rose out of the floor ahead of us and it became clear we had only experienced a basic scan and now the real thing was coming. The hooded head on top of the pillar dipped and the air hazed between us and it. My feet grew hot and then the heat travelled all the way up my body. By the time it had departed the top of my head, sweat was trickling into my eyes. I wiped it away, noting that the others did not have the sense to do the same. The sphere then started rolling again, circumventing the pillar sinking back into the floor.

  We trudged on through the bowels of the King’s Ship, stopping for a further scan. I felt grubby and sticky, and my skin had reddened as if with sun burn. I really hoped that two scans were enough to satisfy prador paranoia. I had become aware, with the jagged lights now muted and sliding to my peripheral vision, that I probably didn’t have the usual immunity-boosting nanosuite which humans had within their bodies, and my risk of genetic damage and cancers had now climbed through the roof. A corridor, like the partially flattened gut of a tapeworm, curved round and, with a degree of irritation, I started pushing my mind, seeking further data about my surroundings. This distracted me from a growing feeling I finally understood as I came face to face with my first prador: we had been sold to monsters.

  The thing rounded the bend up ahead of us and hurtled down the corridor at great speed. It was small for its kind but almost certainly one of the king’s family, one of the Guard. I wanted to dodge to one side to let it past, but the slave unit instruction merely halted us all in place. It turned and skidded to a stop too. Comparatives arose in my mind. The thing seemed like the by-blow of a giant fiddler crab and a wolf spider. Its body had the shape of a vertically flattened pear – the narrower top section being its visual turret, pushed to the fore of its main body, with two stalked eyes sticking up above an array of red eyes behind a visor. It had six legs, two claws and underslung manipulators I could just about see. All of these were clad in blue metallic armour that perfectly matched its form, even its grinding mandibles. But something about this assessment nagged at me and the ligh
ts flashed again. Further updates revealed that the inner form of members of the Guard did not necessarily match the outer appearance of their armour. These creatures were mutated.

  Behind its head turret it carried a heavy pack which gurgled as it moved – seemingly some tank of liquid attached to a large power supply. From this, tubes and power cables fed down to objects attached to the underside of its claws. These looked like guns (though that might have been more my expectation of prador), but protruded glassy tubes. I reassessed: perhaps some kind of spray-cleaning device? I also recognized my feeling of vulnerability.

  ‘You are to follow me now,’ said the prador in perfect Anglic. It directed its stalked eyes towards the guide sphere and, as if being admonished, the thing abruptly shot away.

  The prador turned to head in the same direction as the ball, its words propelling us after it too. For a moment there I’d thought I might be free of my unit’s influence, but it seemed this prador could also control us. As we moved into a jog to keep up with the creature, I wondered what had happened. Its arrival had been hurried and something had changed. Again reviewing what I knew about the King’s Ship and pushing my mind for more, I felt knowledge surfacing.

  Weapons development occupied the lower areas, but nothing that might damage the ship itself. It was mostly small arms made there – carried by individual prador. Higher up, biotech weapons laboratories were rumoured to be operating. However, none of these, no matter what might go wrong, required an apparently armed prador to take over accompanying us. Above this my knowledge grew vague until nearing the top. Up there the king experimented with his own children and himself in an effort to learn more about something called the Spatterjay virus and its effects upon him and his family. It also seemed likely that the king’s breeding programme exclusively occupied the whole floor below his sanctum – being almost completely infertile himself, he was physically incapable of mating with prador females without killing them.

  The mass of data opening in my mind brought on a headache. Yet again, I wondered where all this was coming from because, this time, I realized that the average Polity citizen would not have had access to this stuff. I next considered scenarios that required us having a personal guard, the most likely being that something, high up, had escaped. The prador led us all the way along the corridor to a chamber surrounded with access points to a series of dropshafts. Here other heavily armed prador were arrayed, facing the shafts.