Neal Asher - Jack Four

JACK FOUR

By Neal Asher

Agent Cormac series

Gridlinked The Line of Polity

Brass Man Polity Agent Line War

Spatterjay trilogy

The Skinner

The Voyage of the Sable Keech

Orbus

Standalone Polity novels

Prador Moon Hilldiggers

Shadow of the Scorpion

The Technician Jack Four

The Owner series

The Departure Zero Point Jupiter War

Transformation trilogy

Dark Intelligence War Factory

Infinity Engine

Rise of the Jain trilogy

The Soldier The Warship The Human

Cowl

Novellas

The Parasite Mindgames: Fools Mate

Short-story collections

Runcible Tales The Engineer

The Gabble

Copyright 2021 by Neal Asher.

First published in the United Kingdom by Tor, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing LLC, 221 River Street, 9th Floor, Hoboken, NJ 07030.

Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.

Visit our website at www.start-publihsing.com.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN: 978-1-59780-660-2

Printed in the United States of America

In this time of Covid-19, bitter elections and general political throat-tearing, its difficult to step outside my cynicism to find anyone to dedicate this book to, so instead Ill dedicate it to the island of Crete for my garden in the calm of Papagiannades where I grow chillies, for the mountains that provide me with energy even after trudging through them for miles, for the Libyan Sea where, while out in my kayak, I can find a quiet mind.

Thank you, Crete.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to those who have helped bring this novel to your e-reader, smartphone, computer screen and to that old-fashioned mass of wood pulp called a book. At Macmillan these include Bella Pagan (editor), Georgia Summers (assistant editor), Samantha Fletcher (desk editor), Neil Lang (jacket designer) and Eleanor Bailey (marketing); also freelancers Jessica Cuthbert-Smith (copy-editor), Robert Clark (proofreader), Steve Stone (jacket illustrator) and Jamie-Lee Nardone (publicity); and others whose names I simply dont know.

Though at times they irk me with their demands to see more from this character or that in my previous books, further thanks are due to the fans I chat with on social media. I may not end up doing what they want, but they do spark some things off. Its pleasing to know that they get joy from the same things as me, but then, I was a fan myself before I tentatively pushed down a key on my fathers old manual typewriter!

Glossary

Atheter (The): A highly advanced space-faring race who during their time encountered the civilization-destroying Jain technology. Eventually, to escape this technology, they committed a form of racial suicide by sacrificing their civilization and intelligence. Their animal descendants still exist on the planet Masada. They are gabbleducks creatures that speak nonsense and whose behaviour is always strange.

Augmented: To be augmented is to have taken advantage of one or more of the many available cybernetic devices, mechanical additions and, distinctly, cerebral augmentations. In the last case we have, of course, the ubiquitous aug and such backformations as auged, auging-in and the execrable all auged up. But it does not stop there: the word aug has now become confused with auger and augur which is understandable considering the way an aug connects and the information that then becomes available. So now you can auger information from the AI net, and a prediction made by an aug prognostic subprogram can be called an augury.

From Quince Guide compiled by humans

First- and second-children: Male prador, chemically maintained in adolescence, enslaved by pheromones emitted by their fathers and acting as crew on their ships or as soldiers. Prador adults also use their surgically removed ganglions (brains) as navigational computers in their ships and to control war machines.

Hardfield: A flat force field capable of stopping missiles and energy beams. The impact or heat energy is transformed and dissipated by its projector. Overload of that projector usually results in its catastrophic breakdown, at which point it is ejected from the vessel containing it. Hardfields of any other format were supposed to be impossible; however, it has now been revealed that they can be made spherical and almost impenetrable

Hooders: The devolved descendants of Atheter biomech war machines. Creatures that look like giant centipedes, they retain some of their war machine past in that they are rugged, tough, vicious and very difficult to kill with conventional weapons.

Hooper: A human from the oceanic world of Spatterjay who has been infected with the Spatterjay virus. Commonly passed on through a leech bite, this virus makes its host inhumanly strong, dangerous and long-lived.

Jain technology: A technology spanning all scientific disciplines, created by one of the dead races the Jain. Its apparent sum purpose is to spread through civilizations and annihilate them.

King of the prador: The king who ruled the prador when they attacked the Polity was usurped by another prador who had been infected with the Spatterjay virus. The new king, and his family, have been highly mutated by this, resulting in extreme body changes and increased intelligence.

Nanosuite: A suite of nanomachines most human beings have inside them. These self-propagating machines act as a secondary immune system, repairing and adjusting the body. Each suite can be altered to suit the individual and his or her circumstances.

Polity: A human/AI dominion extending across many star systems, occupying a spherical space spanning the thickness of the galaxy and centred on Earth. It is ruled over by the AIs who took control of human affairs in what has been called, because of its very low casualty rate, the Quiet War. The top AI is called Earth Central (EC) and resides in a building on the shore of Lake Geneva, while planetary AIs, lower down in the hierarchy, rule over other worlds. The Polity is a highly technical civilization but its weakness was its reliance on travel by runcible instantaneous matter transmission gates.

Prador: A highly xenophobic race of giant crablike aliens ruled by a king and his family. Hostility is implicit in their biology and, upon encountering the Polity, they immediately attacked it. They originally had an advantage in the prador/human war in that they did not use runcibles (such devices needed the intelligence of AIs to control them and the prador are also hostile to any form of artificial intelligence) and as a result had developed their spaceship technology, and the metallurgy involved, beyond that of the Polity. They attacked with near-indestructible ships, but in the end the humans and AIs adapted, their war factories out-manufactured the prador and they began to win. They did not complete the victory, however, because the old king was usurped and the new king made an uneasy peace with the Polity.

Quantum crystals: Can be used to store masses of data in a distributed fashion throughout any system, including the human body. This form of storage is being experimented with by the Polity and can take the place of a memplant a device used to record a human mind.

Reaver: