Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  orbitbooks.net

  orbitshortfiction.com

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  Extras

  Copyright Page

  To Bess

  Preface

  I was fourteen years old when I first read Artemis McIvor’s account of her life and times. It was a wild and rambling tale and it seized my imagination. These are quieter times, and we look back in awe at the great history of our civilisation, in all its absurdity, barbarity, and cruelty.

  The book I read was somewhat erratically edited, and in publishing this new corporeal edition1 we considered very carefully whether to delete some of the interpolations from this unnamed and now forgotten scribe before eventually deciding to retain them. However, readers should be aware that large sections of McIvor’s manuscript were excised by this editor for reasons which in the eyes of posterity appear spurious; and all these deleted sections have now been lost. And, apparently, McIvor herself showed no interest in revising her manuscript, even when the charges against her were dropped.

  So this is the story of Artemis. She was not a revolutionary, or an idealist; she was merely a survivor. But we salute her spirit.

  Henry Exon, publisher-in-chief of

  Heritage of Humanity Books.

  Publisher’s Note

  The events described in this volume predate the planetary carnage wreaked by the entity known to history as the Hive-Mind. In consequence, several of the planets named by Dr McIvor no longer exist.

  The following text is unamended from the original highly amended first edition, published by Way Out of Orbit Books.

  Edited Highlights1 from the Thought Diary and Beaconspace Blog of Dr2 Artemis McIvor3

  BOOK 1

  REVENGE4

  Chapter 1

  Prison Break

  “Fuck you,” I said, then walked into the kitchen. Picked up the mug of scalding hot water. And threw it over my own face.

  It hurt. A lot.

  I could feel my skin melting.

  I began to scream.

  Let me back up a little. Who was I saying “Fuck you” to? Why throw boiling water over my own face? And why was I screaming like a bratty little girl? (I can, I assure you, take a lot more pain than that without whining about it.)

  To know all that, you’d have to know why I was in the high-security wing of the Giger Penitentiary on the arid wilderness that is Giger’s Moon, in the midst of the greatest prison riot of all time.

  It’s a long story. I’ll tell it when I’m ready. For the moment just stay with the basic facts. Boiling water, melting face, girly screaming from me. And then Teresa Shalco running after me, shouting “Bitch!” and “Whore!” and other such expletives, before punching me viciously and knocking me to the ground.

  I wept and huddled, playing the helpless victim. And Shalco screamed a great number of mostly unfounded insults at me, whilst savagely kicking my prone body. It took three DR dubbers to pull her off.

  It was all going according to plan.

  Giger’s Moon – I’m digressing now, bear with me – is a boon to lovers, if you happen to live on the planet of Giger.

  The Moon is a third of the size of the planet it orbits. And thus appears to Gigerians as a glorious silvery orb that fills half their night-time sky. Its surface is scarred with cliffs and craters that cast dark shadows which, to the imaginatively minded, resemble the faces of mythical beasts. There are ruined cities up there too, and eerie ziggurats made of solid metal which have no discernible function, like desk ornaments the size of skyscrapers. All products of the mysterious alien civilisation that once dwelled there.

  And – I love this bit!– Giger’s Moon is believed by most Gigerians to have an aphrodisiac effect that is in inverse proportion to its size.

  In other words, when there’s a full moon, the hearts of lovers will beat just a little faster.

  When there’s a half moon, lust starts to really stir.

  And when the moon is a thin crescent– oh boy!!!– shameless and indiscriminate carnality ensues.

  Which I guess is why they call it the Horny Moon.

  No one knows how Giger’s Moon became a barren wilderness. Or why its original three-legged five-headed inhabitants fled. Or where those strange denizens of Giger’s Moon went to. Or indeed (okay, I admit I’m the only one who wonders this) whether they wore hats on any or all of their five heads.

  Nowadays, the Brightside of Giger’s Moon is a vast Industrial Zone. And the Darkside of Giger’s Moon is where they house the Penitentiary. It is the second largest prison in the Solar Neighbourhood, after Pohl Pen. It houses recidivists and sociopaths and stone cold killers. As well as all those generals and soldiers and Corporation lawyers who were so astonishingly evil they couldn’t get pardoned in the round of judicial amnesties that followed the Last Battle.

  Security here is formidably tight. No one has ever escaped from the Giger’s Moon Penitentiary.

  Until now.

  “Keep your head still,” said the doppelgänger robot, and I kept my head still.

  The DR sprayed my scalded face with healant, and it stung like fuck. I could feel the skin becoming stiff, and I knew that in about forty-eight hours my burned flesh would start to regenerate.

  “My eyes!” I whined, “I’m fucking blind!” I wasn’t, in fact, but the dubber operating the DR was too dumb to know that. His silver-skinned robot-puppet shone its torch in my eye and my pupils didn’t dilate; and the idiot at the controls thought that proved something.

  “Shackle her,” said the DR, and the two other DR-dubbers put magnetised shackles on my arms, pinning them behind my back. Then they did the same with a bar-shackle around my ankles. Then they fastened an explosive collar around my neck and strapped me to a trolley. They were taking no chances.

  Teresa Shalco, meanwhile, had fucked off. Even though she was the aggressor and I the victim, no one attempted to arrest her. Because she was the capobastone, and hence the Boss of this entire fucking prison, and was hence pretty much untouchable.

  The lead DR wheeled me on my trolley down the Spoke. Past the R & R rooms. And past the F Spoke cells and through twelve sets of force fields, until we reached the Outer Hub where the prison hospital was located.

  “What have we got here?” said Cassady briskly – that’s Cassady Penfold, hospital trusty, five-foot nine, ruby-haired and, oh, my lover – as I was wheeled into the receiving area. I groaned and raised my head and looked straight at her. Cassady, bless her, didn’t flinch at the sight of my melted face.

  “Gang violence,” said the DR. “Burns on face, torso injuries, big mouth.”

  “Can we use cosmetic rejuve to restore the skin texture?” said Cassady, in her usual gentle half-murmuring tones.

  The DR was silent a moment, as the dubber at the other end of the virtual link considered this question. Although in truth there wasn’t much to think about. Waste high-quality cosmetic rejuve on a recidivist? “No,” said the DR.

  Then the DR picked my stretcher up with one hand with effortless strength and dropped me on to a bed. I groaned, trying to sound as if I was in agony and filled with abject despair at having forever lost my lovely looks.

  The agony part was real enough.

  “Anyone else to come?” asked Cassady.

  “Nope,” said the DR, and then the light went out of its eyes and it was motionless.

  Now there were only two of us with functioning minds in the reception area. Me and Cassady.

  The hospital reception was a large oval room with a mirrored ceiling (don’t ask me why, but it made looking upwards a dizzying experience) and a hexagonal purple and green virtual array hovering at its heart. It also had the standard SNG pale-pastel walls of the kind that always made me want to blaze away with a proj
ectile gun full of primary-coloured paints. And there were of course, carefully embedded in the walls, micro-cameras that covered every single area in the room. But it was a fair bet no one in the surveillance centre was looking at us. Not now. Not with all the shit that was going down.

  “The riot’s started?” asked Cassady.

  I consulted my retinal display. “You bet your arse,” I confirmed.

  There are, so I am assured, not that I give a damn about such things, many cool things about me.1

  Such as for instance, my hair. Which is long and lustrous and, these days, vividly yellow-blond.

  And the fact I have a scary stare that can terrify the toughest of tough guys, even though I am slight and girlish-looking.

  And the many augments which my paranoid mother built into my DNA, which give me all kinds of amazing super-powers.

  And my personality, which has been described by friends as “acerbic” and “sarcastic.”2

  And my philosophy of life, which many feel is “immoral” and “vile,” but is based on a principle of savouring every moment to the full regardless of consequences.

  But the coolest thing about me by far, in my view, is the fact that I am the daughter of an archivist.3

  Yeah, I do mean it. That really is cool.

  For you see my father, from an early age, taught me all about databases. Their architecture, their hidden byways, their lock-outs and encryptions, their base codes, their security protocols. Almost all databases you see are built on the ruins of their predecessors. So most systems can be decrypted if you understand the archaeology of that database.

  It helps, too, if you have a Rebus chip, as I do – it’s a small addition to the standard brain chip implant, which allows me to directly access databases from any quantum computer brain in shortband range.4

  This is why I spent a year on Giger. Staring up, every night, at the Moon. (Which is how, by the way, I learned at first hand, and – oh boy! – often, about the Horny Moon phenomenon.)

  Dekon is the name of the QRC on Giger’s Moon. It’s linked of course to Ariel, which is the name of Giger’s own planetary computer. (Or possibly Ariel is a clone of Dekon?)5 I spent the aforementioned year finding a way to explore the dusty corridors of Dekon’s mind. And when I succeeded, I set up a permanent data-pathway into my implant.

  Now at any moment, night and day, I can conjure up a living map of the entire prison. I can see which Spokes are locked down, which force barriers are on Red Setting, and where the DRs are patrolling.

  And this was what (lying on a trolley in the hospital reception area, flanked on all sides by pastel-coloured walls, face burned off, next to my red-haired lover Cassady) I could now see. A prison in crisis. Inmates rioting and attacking DRs and smashing “hidden” cameras (’cause everyone knows where those fuckers are). And then DRs being unleashed en masse from the Spoke Storage Bays to contain the riot. General chaos in the A, B, C, D, E and F Spokes, and the Outer Hub. In short, a prison riot.

  This of course was why the doppelgänger robot in the hospital reception area had been switched off. The human operator was needed elsewhere.

  Meanwhile, as I was witnessing the riot in my mind’s eye, Cassady was unfastening my shackles and explosive collar with the electronic lock-decoder I had purchased some weeks before. And when I was finally free, she passed me a roll of toilet paper. I grimaced.

  Time for the next stage in my plan.

  I am not, repeat NOT, providing any visual or tactile details about what occurred during this next stage of this escape plan.

  Suffice it to say: I took the toilet roll. And staggered to the john.

  Once there, knowing I was unobserved, I wept hot tears on to my scarred cheeks at the thought of – things that had happened some years before. Bad experiences that were the motive for – but we’ll get to that.

  Then I stopped weeping. Got a grip on myself. Covered the toilet bowl in plastic film. Swallowed six laxatives. And awaited the results.

  And a little while later I had a scrubbed-clean cylindrical package of mouldable organic explosive. Enough to blow up a skyscraper.

  I should add that this wretched thing had been there, concealed in the deepest recesses of my colon, for nearly six months. That is what I call forward planning.

  Let me go back in time a few months, and tell you how I first met Teresa Shalco. That capobastone bitch who beat me up, remember?

  It was my first day in Giger. I’d been through all the scanners. They’d x-rayed and ultrasounded me; and had missed the bomb up my arse, and the bone-claws embedded in my hands. And they’d also DNA’d me to confirm I was who I said I was. Which in fact I wasn’t. DNA archives are so fucking easy to hack! So, officially, I was Danielle Arditti. Psychopath. Serial killer. Assassin.

  Then they dressed me in a purple overall and I stood in the Holo Hall and listened to Prison Governor Robbie Ferguson explaining the rules of the establishment. No drugs. No drink. No sexual molestation. No gang lingo. No murdering other inmates. No fomenting rebellion against the democratically elected government of the Solar Neighbourhood. Oh, and this was the absolute killer; moral rehabilitation classes were compulsory.

  Fuck! I’d rather be beaten and hosed down with cold water.

  After the bullshit briefing, I went to the inmates’ bar and got slaughtered on cheap rum.6 And, when in my cups and dribbly with rage, I vowed to kill the entire fucking Parliament of the SNG. Shalco heard me at the height of my rant and laughed. She told the barman to give me a free drink, grinned at me, and eyed me up.

  “Danielle,” I said, introducing myself ritually, despite my drunkenness: “vangelista7 of our Beloved Family. I respect the authority of the Clan.”

  Shalco held out her right hand. Her middle finger was a stump. I kissed the stump.8

  “Do you fuck girls?” she asked me. I grinned, but shook my head. I didn’t, then.

  “Shame.” She grinned back. She had an infectious grin. “How’s the booze?”

  “It’s, um.” I took another sip of the free booze she’d given me. It was whisky, not rum. Richer and more wonderful whisky than I’d ever drunk before.

  “Four-hundred-year-old malt,” Shalco informed me.

  “They spoil you guys.”

  “I have some contacts.”

  The prison bar was in the gym. Some nutjobs were chinning up and lifting weights around us. And then Shalco introduced me to Bargan Oriel, who was playing solitaire at a table, while drinking a six-hundred-year-old bottle of port.

  Oriel was Shalco’s quintino. He was a thin man, with a vulture’s beak nose, and a piercing stare. (He had two artificial eyes, I later learned.) He’d been quintino of the New Earth Clanning, which was comprised of seven planets in the Alpha 4 sector of the Solar Neighbourhood. His boss, Trajo Marol, had been a legendary monster, responsible for organising massacres on behalf of Gamers on an awe-inspiring scale. Marol was killed resisting arrest, despite having been slipped enough sedatives to put a buffalo to sleep. Now that was a story.

  Anyway! Oriel was a quiet man, who exuded an aura of control freak. He was however very charming to me, offered me some port, and told me a series of very funny stories about his life on New Earth III.

  I disliked him immensely. He had a knack of pitching his voice so low you had to lean in close to hear him. He was impossible to interrupt, because he left such huge pauses you could never be sure he’d finished speaking.

  And he was, like so many of these guys, enveloped in self-love. I mean! If he could have fucked his own arse, he would’ve done.

  Shalco, by contrast, was exceptionally likeable. She was a big woman – tall and broad – with an appealing extrovert personality, who took her power for granted. I’d heard good things about her from the Clan scuttlebutt sites. She was considered to be fair, and generous, and at times merciful. Though she was, of course, a Boss, and it goes without saying that Bosses have to be tough.

  And oh yes, she was tough.

  The DRs broke up the p
arty at nine p.m. and escorted us to our cells. I was in cell 2333x. The x meant it was on the twenty-fourth floor of the cell complex. The hardglass lifts carried us up twenty at a time. A DR ushered each of us into our cell, and closed the door behind. The doors were heavy and metal and slammed loudly when they were shut. That was for effect.

  I was drunk and cheerful. It had been a sociable evening. In the course of it, I’d met a few old friends. Though they didn’t recognise me of course, because I was taller and black-haired (not blonde) and somewhat bigger busted when they knew me. And my eyes then were brown, not blue. And my face, of course, was quite different. My body language was maybe similar, though I’d worked hard at that. And my voice – well. The timbre had changed. And I’d altered the rhythms of my speech, and of course my favoured catchphrases. No more “Yo’ mollyfocker” as a term of endearment. I missed that. It was a phrase that had once defined me.

  The cell was small. A bunk, a toilet, and three hangers for clothes. I had three sets of purple overalls, in case I fancied a change. One pair of black shoes, no laces. There were still bracket marks and screw holes on the hardmetal floor, where the torture bench had been removed and replaced by an actual bed. The ceiling was slightly curved. It was like living inside a tin can. There were no books on the shelf, which by the way was a breach of my human rights.9 And there was no mirror, which was also a breach of my human rights. The walls were not soundproofed, which meant I could hear the prisoners in the neighbouring cells wanking, or talking, or even fighting. This also was a breach of my human rights.

  There is a four-hundred page SNG Act of Parliament10 outlining in some considerable detail all the human rights which even the scummiest and most evil prisoners are deemed to possess. I found it hilarious. Human rights! What the fuck are those?

  At three a.m. the doors of all the cells were opened. And, or so I assumed, the corridor and cell cameras were all switched off. I stayed put. I heard the movement of prisoners outside. The chatter of conversation, the casually muttered asides, the occasional burst of subdued laughter. And after a while I heard, as I had been warned I would hear, the sounds of rape.