Jack Four

by Neal Asher

  ‘Ankhor, get the autos packed and on the move right now. Molotor, one mile spread and proxies to our rear. They’ll be after us in a big way soon.’ The two were both thickset men, probably boosted. They had their long hair tied back in pony tails, beards tightened with metal rings and, over the usual attire I had seen on the mercenaries above, wore chameleon-cloth sleeveless jackets, presently set to a mottled red. Molotor stepped over and passed a similar jacket to me. It was white when I put it on, then changed to match the colour of the rest as I did it up. Only now, glancing at Marcus, did I see that he already wore one.

  ‘Colour changes on random – we don’t want them matching us.’ I presumed this referred to the jackets and I guessed it a good idea to be able to distinguish friend from foe. Though some of the foes of these people were easily identifiable by their black and white uniforms or armour, others were mercenaries yet to be, or disinclined to be, inducted into the SGZ.

  I couldn’t count how many troops surrounded us because we weren’t in some open space but a maze of corridors, shafts and rooms. We moved off, a group of four soldiers in the lead, then Marcus, me and the woman next. Others came in behind, with mosquito autoguns walking delicately behind them, barrels facing backwards.

  ‘Who are you people?’ I asked.

  The woman grinned at me without humour. ‘The revolution.’ She waved me on.

  ‘Your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Salander, but you can call me Commander. No talking now.’

  More corridors and dropshafts ensued, then we came to the floor of a vast factory, where giant matter printers squatted like pondering giants over mile-long conveyors. Only now, as we travelled through it, did I think about the scale of the Stratogaster station and its population. Suzeal had told me that a hundred thousand now occupied it, but even that number seemed very small in a thing fifty miles across. As I didn’t know the exact figure, I estimated its depth at ten miles, which meant a total volume of nearly twenty thousand cubic miles. The population wouldn’t be evenly distributed throughout it either – people tended to cluster together – leaving lots of empty volume. More than enough for a revolution to hide in. But how much of the station was unoccupied? Perhaps a lot of it didn’t have air and power? I noted a great deal of dilapidation as we passed, but at no point did we move through areas without at least some lights and other signs of power usage. Fusion plants would be scattered throughout, some of which could be as small as a coffee mug. Super- and ultra-capacitors, laminar batteries, ninety-nine per cent solar panels outside, gravity and torsion generators since the station spun over a gravity well – all linked with superconducting cables. Plenty of power available, evidently. That left atmosphere, a question soon answered when we trooped along a suspended walkway wrapped around a giant bioreactor atmosphere plant.

  ‘Mask up,’ Salander instructed, as we came to a huge door but went through a human-sized airlock inset in the thing. A breather from the collar of my uniform went into my mouth, supplying air stored in its layers. Marcus lowered Bronodec to the floor and strapped a breather mask on his head, checking its security over his mouth before picking him up again. We stepped through into a familiar landscape: flute grasses stretching for miles, but with multiple electric suns in the sky.

  ‘The siluroyne?’ I queried.

  ‘Not here,’ she replied, and now seemed more chatty. ‘This was where he kept his hooders and mud snakes. None of the latter here now – bacterial infection. The former were all transported down to the planet – the Polity didn’t want them breaking loose during an attack.’

  Paths had been trodden down through the grasses and we headed across at a steady trot. I struggled to get going, with my body one big ache, but then, as I pushed on, something happened. A weird fizzing passed throughout my frame with an accompanying hot flush, and shortly all my pain disappeared. Maybe the nanosuite had begun its work. Bronodec had said it would take a couple of days but the extra activity could have accelerated it.

  ‘We planted crops in the old droon pen in the early days, but Suzeal poisoned them,’ said Salander. ‘We now keep hydroponics scattered throughout.’

  ‘Surely that’s not enough?’ I asked.

  Not enough for a civilized existence at least, I thought.

  ‘We have our factory units. There’s more than enough equipment here from the old days and we trade. She tried to stop that too but the blockade started to affect her own business. So we’ve been in a kind of truce for decades … until now.’

  ‘And what’s changed now?’ I asked.

  ‘Prador, the space dock out of commission, and him.’ She pointed, but I wasn’t sure whether at Marcus or Bronodec. ‘Also Suzeal’s steady attrition of us. She hasn’t conducted an outright attack over those decades but her people come on hunting expeditions. If our people aren’t killed, they’re taken back to be put under the thrall. We kill lots of them, but more always come to replace them.’

  After crossing the flute grasses, we entered further corridors, old boulevards, massive pedestrian and grav-car ways, and we used working dropshafts. These finally brought us, I assumed by the armaments everywhere, to the base of the revolution. Here apartment towers stretched between floor and ceiling of a large space. Grav was low. Crop areas covered the floor and were also up on what was the ceiling from my perspective. As I studied the sides of the buildings more closely, I saw grav-plates had been utilized and crops were there too.

  Most of the troops and autoguns scattered to head off to their own destinations. Just Salander, Ankhor, Molotor, Marcus and his burden and I entered the cabin of a glass tube lift which took us up. In the interior of the building, we marched along corridors with peaked ceilings and a lot of old decoration.

  ‘You know where to take him,’ Salander said to Marcus.

  He nodded and walked on. I moved to follow him but Molotor’s meaty hand came down on my shoulder and Salander turned to open a door to one side. ‘You and I need to have a talk.’

  Molotor propelled me firmly after her into an ornately decorated room. There were even bookshelves containing paper books, though I felt they must just be part of the decor. The two men disarmed me and pushed me down into a deeply upholstered chair below a crystal chandelier, while Salander took a seat in the chair behind a wide wooden desk.

  ‘One of his apartments.’ She gestured around her. ‘He had a taste for the lurid.’

  ‘You’re talking about Stratogaster?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he still alive?’

  ‘Somewhere in the Polity, last I heard.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I want you to tell me your story, right from the beginning, not missing out any detail,’ she stated, caging her hands before her, elbows on the desk. I felt keenly aware of the two big men standing behind me and half expected this to turn into an interrogation, but then Molotor walked over to one side and grabbed a couple of composite chairs and took them back to the door. He and Ankhor sat on either side of it, arms like hams crossed.

  ‘I presume you’ve heard some of it from Marcus?’ I asked.

  She just stared at me.

  ‘Or perhaps he’s still not talking much. I don’t know how the virus affected his brain.’

  ‘Marcus,’ she repeated. After a long pause she added, ‘It’s surprising he has any brain left at all. This is something I must ask him about when he does start talking more, rather than making his suggestions.’

  Her hesitation confirmed something for me. She’d been stumped by the name Marcus until I elaborated. As I’d suspected down on the planet, this wasn’t his real name. I considered asking her about that but, since she’d run with the fiction, I decided to leave it for now.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘It starts, obviously, with when I first woke up …’ I told her it all. At one point Molotor came over with a tall glass of some fruit drink, and later on Salander pointed me to a door over to one side when I needed the toilet. I eyed the shower longingly as I used the toil
et, then returned to her to relate the rest.

  Her curiosity climbed in the latter stages of my story and she leaned forwards. ‘So Suzeal told you she wants to switch over to selling hooders to the prador? Do you think it’s a certainty?’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘Elaborate.’

  ‘She wanted me to be a new version of the Jack she knew before. I think she just said it to move away from the subject of coring and thralling. I don’t see her abandoning any enterprise until it ceases to be profitable.’

  She nodded. ‘You’re correct. Her cloning facility is still running and she has eight hundred prisoners locked down, all infected with the Spatterjay virus. Even if the king does manage to close down her trade with the Kingdom, which I doubt, she’s still expanding her trade across the Graveyard.’

  ‘Trade across the Graveyard?’ I asked, not sure what she meant.

  ‘Do you think it is only prador who like to have human slaves?’ felt a bit sick. ‘And I suppose Bronodec’s thralls make the process easier and more attractive to some.’

  She nodded. ‘She already has people coming here with prisoners of their own: enemies usually, though sometimes family, very often people to be thralled for prostitution. Suzeal makes plenty of money off that.’ She shrugged. ‘She even sells to rebel prador in the Graveyard – they’re much more inclined to use human blanks than those that remained in the Kingdom.’

  I continued my story but suspected Salander of only half listening. However, her interest came back when I related what Suzeal had said about her negotiations with the prador.

  ‘She thought they might be delaying, that they have another agenda?’

  ‘Yes. Seemed like it.’

  ‘They probably have. Prador are not inclined to just roll over when circumstances change. And you can bet the king knows she has no intention of stopping her coring and thralling trade with the Kingdom. It’ll continue, even if only through intermediaries in the Graveyard.’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps your Marcus is right.’ Before I could ask about that, she continued, ‘Tell me again about Vrasan’s intentions with the hooders he thralled.’

  ‘I told you it all, but not my own speculations on the matter,’ I replied. Until then I’d just related events as they’d occurred.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think their mission here was in two parts. They wanted to shut down Suzeal, certainly, but their prime objective was to use Stratogaster. They wanted it as their base here to gain access to the hooders.’

  ‘So you don’t think their method of attack was all about preserving information about the Old Families she traded with?’

  ‘That’s part of it …’ A new thought occurred to me. ‘But they could have brought heavier weapons to break up the station, grabbed survivors for interrogation and surviving memory storage for forensic analysis, if that were their intent.’

  ‘Seems more their style,’ she agreed. ‘Tell me the rest.’

  I did so and it was a brief tale thereafter. She stood up as I finished. ‘She does like feeding people to that siluroyne.’ She gazed at me steadily. ‘That was her idea in the first place. It wasn’t left here during the war, but is one of a very small number she took from the surface. That was after numerous failed attempts to capture a hooder, which tells you something about her idea of selling those creatures to the prador. Come on.’

  At the door, Molotor handed back my weapons. I nodded my thanks and we trooped up the corridor.

  ‘So what are your plans now?’ asked Salander.

  Until then my only plan had been to remain alive. I took a long time before replying as I thought things through. Suzeal’s business here had to end and I’d do anything I could to facilitate that. This, after all, had been my original objective. And, as I replayed the scene in my mind of Hunstan’s death, with her, Frey and Brack watching, I wanted payback.

  ‘I think it depends on what your plans are,’ I said.

  ‘To kick the scum off this station, shut down Suzeal’s trade and feed her to her siluroyne,’ she replied.

  I considered the brief feelings I’d experienced for Suzeal, how my motivations became confused and how I’d thought that killing her might not be necessary. I recognized them as stemming wholly from the part of my brain I could call the mating ape. However much she’d opened up to me in our encounter too, she’d since confirmed her heartless brutality.

  ‘Seems like a good plan to me,’ I replied.

  They’d put Bronodec in a small cabin with guards outside the door and he was awake when we entered, standing in the middle of the floor with his back to us. When he turned, I saw that Marcus had returned his visor. But of Marcus there was no sign.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Salander, gesturing towards the bed.

  Bronodec made a good attempt at a grin then went over to the bed and sat down. Salander grabbed a chair and sat astride it facing him. It seemed I’d been consigned to the position of Ankhor and Molotor, the lurking heavies. I noted Molotor walk off to one side, fingers against a small circular aug or coms unit behind his ear.

  ‘You know your situation,’ said Salander. ‘Your chances of rescue or escape are close to zero. If it looks even remotely as if Suzeal might get you back, I’ll kill you myself.’

  ‘She may try hostage exchange – I am valuable to her,’ said Bronodec.

  ‘Too valuable to her and too much of a danger to us.’

  He nodded as if expecting this. ‘Then why am I still alive?’

  ‘Because of your thralls.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’

  ‘Do you really? Okay. Here’s how it is: Suzeal has tens of thousands of my people under her control. You are going to help me release them or you’re going to die.’

  Bronodec wrinkled his brow, which looked odd with him having no eyes. ‘A difficult proposition because it is difficult to break the linkage between thrall and host. Most nerve linkages are physical while those that are not, such as the radio, red laser and ultrasound links to nanites and separate system-ware incursions, are tightly controlled by the coding.’

  ‘You must have a back door into the code,’ she said.

  He winced. ‘I tried to make one and it was there in the earlier versions, but Suzeal is paranoid and when she paid an expert to review my work, I closed it. Despite the fact that much of the code was my own design, the holes were a little too obvious.’

  Salander glanced round at us, puzzled. It seemed she’d never encountered Bronodec before and had yet to understand him. I did, however. He occupied the world of intellect and stood distant from human emotion. His work was everything. He hadn’t tried to keep silent or lie or bargain because he really did understand his straits and, perhaps unlike the kind of people Salander surrounded herself with, knew nothing of loyalty, camaraderie and human interaction.

  ‘But of course,’ I interjected. ‘This presented you with the interesting problem of how to maintain access to your thralls.’ I shrugged. ‘Not because you wanted some kind of safety net or some tool you could use to your own advantage, but simply because it was an interesting problem.’

  Bronodec smiled at me. ‘You understand.’

  I glanced at Salander and she waved me to continue.

  ‘Of course I do – the work is important and problems must be solved. Order must be imposed over matter and information. So what did you do?’

  The door opened now and Marcus stepped in. Bronodec gazed at him – no fear, just curiosity – then returned his attention to me. ‘With the back door into the code closed, I looked at the EMR methods of access. Unfortunately, because my coding is tight it will respond to any interference there – it makes adjustments at any attempt to gain access, then finally, once things get outside set parameters, it knocks out the subject. I thought a virus might work, feeding back through the red nanolaser to expand those parameters, but the variance caused a loop that killed the subject.’

  Salander grunted then looked away from the man to me and nodded for me to continue again.
Evidently Bronodec had experimented. I wondered how many people he’d killed to satisfy his need to solve this ‘problem’.

  ‘So what was the answer?’ I asked, sure he’d found one.

  ‘Their nanosuites,’ he said, obviously delighted by the memory. ‘The addition of a reprogramming nanite has their nanosuites attacking the physical connections. It is quick and breaks the protocol which ensures unconsciousness, while launching a viral attack on the thrall itself. The whole system collapses in just three minutes.’

  Salander swung back to look at him. ‘And what happens to the subjects?’

  ‘My sample size was not sufficient to be sure, but based on that, six per cent die, forty-three per cent suffer debilitating pain for a minute before being free of the thrall, the rest experience no discomfort at all.’ He paused contemplatively. ‘It’ll be difficult to get to a hundred per cent problem-free disconnection because the thralls adapt to the varying types of nervous system.’

  ‘Six per cent,’ Salander repeated.

  He swung to her and demonstrated that he wasn’t a complete robot. ‘I think those presently under the thrall would be prepared to take the risk.’

  ‘What would you need to make this nanite?’ she asked.

  ‘Structor tanks, nanoscope, LZD124 nanofactory … I could give you a list,’ he said helpfully.

  ‘How long would it take?’

  ‘About a week to get set up, then a further week till first product. Thereafter it would be two days to produce enough for dispersal.’

  Salander turned and looked round at the rest of us, her expression flat. ‘Suzeal will never give us that time.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Molotor, fingers at his aug again. ‘Large numbers of SGZ and mercenaries are heading our way right now. I’m told about twenty thousand. The traps will slow them but they’ll still get here.’

  She closed her eyes, breathed through her nose for a moment, then with a flash of anger turned back to Bronodec. Before she could say anything, Marcus moved forwards, quickly past her. He grabbed the front of Bronodec’s toga and hauled him to his feet, then up until he hung a foot above the floor.