Jack Four Read online

  With a crump and a hiss the prador’s armour separated around its equator. The top half, along with the visual turret, rose up on chromed rods, then it detached from the forward ones and hinged over on the back ones. Further cracks separated the armour on its legs and claws. I spied the diseased-looking organics within, pink and speckled black. Something from below then shoved the creature up and out of its armour, and, as it caught one edge with a triclaw to vault over, I saw that in no way did this thing resemble its artificial outer covering. It was one of the Guard – an older, heavily mutated king’s child and maybe one of those that had been aboard his original ship when he came from Spatterjay. Even as I thought this, I realized only a select few Polity citizens knew about that. It led me to speculate on something else. Had Suzeal taken my source DNA from someone called Jack, whom she’d killed? And this Jack, who I’ll call Jack Zero, had he worked for Earth Central Security? Quite possibly he’d been one of the legendary Polity agents. It was a nice fantasy.

  The prador looked like a giant copepod with its segmented back, but one with overly long limbs and a distinct, fleshy look. Once out of its armour, it collapsed for a moment as if its limbs struggled to support it. I noted its resemblance to the king but only until, with a sucking sound, its head detached from its body and extended on a neck of pink corded muscle. After a time, it finally heaved itself up and perambulated shakily over to the equipment racks and began selecting various tools with which it then returned to its armour. It set to work, rapidly disassembling and reassembling things, making adjustments. I moved closer to the grating to get a better look, then dodged back when its head snapped round. I lay there, keeping as still as possible. It probably couldn’t see me because I was black with filth. It returned to its work, doubtless dismissing anything it had heard or otherwise sensed as a ship louse which, I certainly knew now, occupied these vent pipes in their thousands.

  After a while I began to understand the creature’s objective. It had grown and needed to make its armour fit better by expanding parts and sections, adjusting internal supports and pads inside and ratchetting out sliding plates to make the legs longer. Perhaps its discomfort had been the reason for its irritation when I first saw it. I moved back out of sight. At some point, this thing would leave its accommodation and I’d be able to access that pool. I folded my arms, rested back and a second later fell asleep.

  Pain again.

  Without even opening my eyes I raised my metal rod and brought it down hard beside my leg. Crunch clang. I opened my eyes wide and felt a surge of panic. The action had been automatic, performed throughout numerous sleeps, but I’d forgotten I was resting right next to a prador’s living quarters. I flipped the expiring louse away and kept still, listening. From the living quarters I could hear the clattering of prador speech, the bubbling and hissing. I then heard human speech too and had no idea why. I crawled back to the grating and peered through cautiously.

  The prador sat on its saddle control facing away from me, manipulating pit controls with its foreclaws. It’d put on its armour. The speech came from the array of screens in front of it. Each showed different things: other prador, scenes out in space, prador glyphs scrolling diagonally, while one or two displayed either Polity broadcasts or recordings. Did it understand and interact with everything there? No, my knowledge told me, not all, but it could look at different things with its variety of eyes. I started to move back out of sight, but noticed further movement in the vent tube. I turned, ready to scoot off another ship louse, then froze.

  Wider than my leg, the thing’s centipede body occupied at least ten feet of the tube, and its goat-like eyes surrounded a hollow mouth. I could see movement deep inside that cavity and abruptly shuffled back past the vent grating as it extruded a long yellow tongue ending in hinged pincers. It grabbed the louse I’d killed and sucked it up, regarded me for a second and then surged forwards fast. I raised my club ready to hit the thing but it just crawled over my leg and kept going. I sat there, shaking.

  After a time, I moved back to the grating. The prador spent ages with its screens and pit controls and it brought to mind social media addicts of a different age. I killed another louse, as quietly as possible, and this time ate what I could of it, throwing its remains far down the tube in the direction the centipede thing had gone. Eventually the prador heaved itself off its saddle control, went over to its racks and began attaching equipment to its armour. Once fully loaded, it opened the door with a stab of a claw into the pit control beside it and departed. Off to work or to a prador party? I had no idea. I waited a little while longer, just in case it had forgotten something, then decided the doors opened slowly enough to give me time to get back into the ventilation system before it could do anything about me.

  The bolts came out easily and I shifted the grating to one side, ready to be grabbed and pulled back when I needed to exit. I went over to the pool and stuck my face in it for a drink, only to spit it straight out. The stuff was brine. Working the various spigots required a bar jammed into small pit controls behind them and each emitted strangely coloured and smelly fluids. The prador equivalent of bubble bath? But none of them produced fresh water. I debated drinking from them, until I spotted another tap with a dependent hose above the trumpet-shaped wall toilet. This at last rewarded me with a stream of cold fresh water – the best thing I had tasted … in my whole life.

  I filled myself to bursting then checked the equipment racks for a container. A row of plastic tubes, each about six inches across and two feet long, contained eel-like creatures in fluid, with large caps on the end suitable for prador claws. Some delicacy, perhaps? At the end of the row I found a couple of empties and saw that a button at the end of each cap collapsed a seal around the insert – they were watertight. I filled the tubes with water and capped them, then put them in the air vent, adding one with its eel-like contents too. It would maybe taste better than ship lice, though it could poison me – I decided to take the risk. Now for the pool.

  I jumped in and, fearing the prador’s return, quickly sluiced off the black filth. Immediately feeling better, I decided to take a risk. Testing spigots provided soapy fluid full of grit – but of course, why wouldn’t a technological species use a substance to break down the surface tension of water for washing, and why wouldn’t they use grit for scouring? I stripped off the overalls and washed them and myself properly, pausing in my ablutions to feel the stubble growing on my previously bald head and wondering what colour it would be. I eventually got out and dressed, and began to inspect the equipment shelves further.

  Many of the items were just too unwieldy. A Gatling cannon rested on one of them, with reels of ammunition beside it, but I could hardly lift up the cluster of barrels. A mass of hand tools lay there, every one made of heavy metal, then opening a toolbox revealed a smaller and more delicate variety that prador must employ with their underhands. Screwdrivers and wrenches were handy, but I hit the jackpot with a small atomic shear. A slide button pushed out an end cap and, between it and the body of the device, extended a shimmering wire. I tried it against the edge of the shelf and with a whine it sliced off a lump of composite. Everything useful I piled into the vent tube, keeping the shear in my pocket. Next I needed something in which to transport my haul. I returned to the Gatling cannon and from behind it pulled out a sheet of material much like canvas. It even had a string running through eyelets, and pulling this tight turned it into a sack. Enough. I pissed in the prador’s pool, drank my fill again from the freshwater spigot, then returned to the ventilation system. I had what I needed to survive – now to find my way out to a ship.

  3

  Darkness followed, then far ahead I saw a light flashing like an arc welder and heard something thrashing about in the tunnel. A vent into the corridor running from the prador’s quarters provided enough illumination for me to see the centipede thing lying there. It wasn’t moving; smoke, along with the smell of burned fish, filled the tube. I only paused in going past the creature to not
e its head had been charcoaled. My choice of transit was now becoming increasingly dangerous.

  The robot, when I saw it, blocked the tube like a waiting spider. I stopped crawling and began to back up, but the thing shot forwards, its numerous arms running treads against the walls. A flash came as I shoved my sack behind me, then hot pain down my side from armpit to hip. I smashed my bar into its sensor head, also knocking aside a groping claw. The flash came again and this time I saw the laser stabbing through the smoke issuing from me. I struck it wildly, knocking down legs, and the thing dropped, its laser burning into the bottom of the tube. Finally I broke enough of its legs to stop it targeting me any longer.

  I had never known such pain. In the illumination from a nearby vent, I inspected a long burn down my side. The laser had seared away the plasmesh but left the strengthening wires of my overalls intact. Those wires had to be a highly conductive alloy. Had I been naked, the laser would probably have burned deep inside me and killed me. But it’d still seared a foot-long black line in my skin, and red plasma now leaked from the cracks. I had to get away from here. I’d managed to defeat this robot because it was designed only to hunt down creatures like the centipede behind me, but almost certainly it linked into some system and would broadcast a fault code. I grabbed my sack and climbed over the thing. But when I reached the next vent I hesitated, then dumped my sack and crawled back, taking hold of the robot and pulling it to the vent to inspect it.

  Six legs extended from a central body which contained a power supply, a primitive mind perhaps not much different from that of its prey, a radar sensor head and below that its swivel-mounted laser. My pain had now increased and I just wanted to crawl off somewhere and rest, but it also seemed to focus my mind. I could not miss the opportunity here. Laying out my tools, I set to work, though it turned out I hardly needed them. The power supply detached easily from the robot’s body, spring clips freeing it. I pulled it out, found the leads that supplied power to its limbs and detached them all, at both ends, then put them in my sack. I sliced the laser from its mount and examined its connections further. Power ran straight from the supply to it, while optics ran to its guide motor and into its brain. I needed to replace that with a trigger, but couldn’t do that here. I put the laser and power supply in my sack, then stripped out anything else useful and took that too. Perhaps more from the limbs? No, I could hear a prador coming down the corridor so moved on as quickly and quietly as I could.

  I don’t know how long I pushed on for, maybe hours in the dark and through areas of varying grav. At one point I just stopped and cried with pain, then had it increase when a ship louse found my wound attractive. I moved on towards a thrumming sound and entered an area where the tube widened out, but then came up against a cage behind which a huge fan turned. Light penetrated from a large chamber packed with machinery beyond the fan, amidst which I could see tool-laden prador working. Too tired and uncomfortable to do anything about my haul, I rested and uncapped the container holding the eel thing. The tough and rubbery flesh tasted wonderful. I ate half of it and immediately afterwards weariness hit me like a club. I jammed the sack against the wound in my side to try and keep the ship lice away, then fell into a sleep as deep as death.

  Waking, it seemed, would always be a painful process for me. My side hurt, not because of lice chewing on it, but the burn. My guts then cramped up agonizingly. I felt the desperate need to shit and managed to hold off until my overalls were down. Diarrhoea squirted but gave me no relief and I puked, bringing up chewed flesh and watery bile. This went on and on for hours and I grew sure I was going to die. That no lice paid me a visit seemed small recompense. In my fevered state, I realized that, long being resident aboard prador ships, the creatures probably kept well clear of moving parts such as the fan I lay beside. After a time, I began shaking – one moment the breeze from the fan felt too cold, another moment it prevented my skin from catching fire. Sticky pools spread around me. I hallucinated, seeing a future in which all that would be left would be an empty skin surrounded by this miasma. I tried to quell a terrible thirst, and threw up again immediately. It just went on and on. Time passed, as it does.

  Eventually I fell into another exhausted sleep. I woke shivering still and moved away from the stinking mess I’d left, towing my belongings with me. A stream of diarrhoea and vomit had run along the tube for as far as I could see. Terribly thirsty again, I opened a water tube, but was then too scared to drink from it and just sat there feeling beaten from head to foot. As I put the water tube back, I saw the one containing the remains of the eel thing and said out loud, my voice rough, ‘Maybe stick to eating the lice.’ This gave me a fit of the giggles, until I cried again.

  Later, something thunked in my skull, flooding it with a hard lucidity. I took out the water tube and drank from it this time, retching a little but managing to keep it down. It made me feel a lot better. I inspected my now raw and hideous burn, but could do nothing about that, so just cleaned myself with a little more water as best I could, then put my overalls back on. I next killed a louse and ate what I could of it. Weak and shaky, I moved on, entering a side tunnel and taking a turn which brought me back to another fan. Here I laid out my tools and all the parts from the robot.

  Carving away metal with the shear turned the support bracket of the laser into a handle. I dismantled the radar and accessed the robot’s mind, puzzling over it all for some time, until I saw the schematics of it in my skull. I discarded the mind, radar and much else, and discovered that detaching all the optics and pulling out a small processor fired up the laser continuously. In the end I worked out the best way to operate it: the power supply went into my pocket, while the power cord was extended with a couple of those stripped from the robot’s motor. A simple relay, tied to the handle with a strip of material from my overalls, acted as a trigger. The laser went into my other pocket. As I finished, I understood perfectly that my other self – Jack Zero from whom I had been cloned and whose knowledge continued to surface in my skull – must have been adept at this sort of thing.

  I continued heading as best I could in one direction, still hoping to reach the hull of the ship. But the changes in grav confused me, and I realized that if any of the vent tubes had a slight curve, I probably wouldn’t detect it. In a tube with high air flow, thinking it might be a main one, I followed the air blast. This tube went on for miles, until I saw light ahead and eventually reached its source. A ring ran around the end of the vent tube where it opened out into a spacious area, and there was a row of baffles directing the air blast through the gratings below. The light was issuing up through those gratings. As I drew close to the ring, a laser snapped at me from one of four inset eyes and burned a hole through my overall sleeve into my forearm. I backed up quickly, then checked where the proximity detector operated by extending one of the water tubes in front of me. The laser covered a space of about a yard in front of the ring. It must have been put there to keep ship lice out and now I really wanted to see what lay ahead.

  My original club served a useful purpose here. I emptied the sack and wrapped it around my hands and arms, gripped the length of alloy, then moved forwards and bashed one of the eyes. Luckily the laser only hit the alloy, raising a red glow on it. The eye fizzled and emitted a dispersed light as I went for the next one. After destroying all three, I refilled the sack and crawled through. Initially, the view down in front of the baffles only revealed a wall hung with pipes and protruding pit controls, but when I climbed over the baffles, I peered down at something familiar.

  The grated ceiling hung over a laboratory, and I recognized the prador immediately below me. Abandoning my sack under one of the baffles, I moved stealthily in pursuit of this small prador in dirty white armour and was soon looking into a part of the laboratory I’d seen before. Feed tubes, optics and shielded cables were strewn over the grating where I crouched, while below, my fellow clones floated in cylindrical tanks. One of the mechanisms evenly scattered on the underside of the grating was
set into motion and it lowered its spiderbot claw to haul a clone out of her tank, removing all the feed and breather pipes, and depositing her on the floor.

  ‘Follow me,’ said the prador in Anglic.

  She stumped along after him, seemingly unaware of the dripping wounds all over her body which, I noted, were not bleeding as much as they should have been. I watched in frustration as he took her into a smaller room. I had my laser, after all. Shouldn’t I make some daring rescue attempt? But the laser would have no effect on that armour, and even if it did, what then? What could I do with her or the others even if I managed to get them out of there and into the vents? Would they even follow my instructions? No, they would probably sit in a vent pipe mindlessly while lice chewed them down to the bone. I had to be practical – helping the clones was completely beyond my abilities and would just get me killed. It was a sour and bitter concession and the impossibilities aggravated me keenly.

  ‘Remove your garment and lie down,’ the prador instructed and, when she lay down on the low slab, he closed clamps over her wrists and ankles.

  What happened next confused me utterly. He clambered over her, so his body now blocked my view of most of hers, though I could still see her head. Horrible crunching and sizzling sounds ensued and, shaking her head from side to side, she opened and closed her mouth like a fish. He had positioned himself so he could employ his underhands and whatever tools he was using. I gripped the bars of the ceiling grating for fear I might do something stupid and closed my eyes. Really, I could do nothing, so why did I feel so helpless and ashamed? I had to remember no real mind existed inside that woman’s head, but it felt like cowardly self-justification.