No one gave me a second glance. I blended in perfectly with the press pack that avidly followed Denison’s every word, lusting for new scandal.
“Twelve men and three women dead,” continued Denison, in his thunderous voice that had once seemed so appealing to me. “All the victims were citizens of irreproachable character. This heinous killer—” I shot him with a dart from my camera and Denison blinked.
“This heine, hen, evil, uh, killer,” he continued, and stopped, and stared into space.
Ten seconds later he went into spasm and died of a heart attack on the podium.
The whole crowed of journos were hushed with horror and regret for, well at a guess I’d say, for all of .00001 seconds. Then they became vultures with cameras taking photos of the death throes of their much-mocked but undeniably charismatic Police Commissioner.
An autopsy later confirmed that Denison’s bloodstream was a suppurating pool of toxins. He’d been shot with a darted capsule filled with cyanide, and a cocktail of other goodies I had carefully prepared.
Felix Denison and Hamilton Brandish, let me remind you, or rather tell you for the first time, had been friends. Good friends. And they had shared everything.
From that moment on the street cops were authorised to shoot to kill anyone they suspected of being the Heartstealer.
But who could they shoot? My identity, as I say, changed daily. I left no forensic clues. I was a rabid fox in their fucking chicken coop but there was nothing they could do about it.
And there was no pattern or indeed rhyme nor reason to the murders – or so the news reports said. All the victims were upstanding members of the community! Hence, these were just random killings by a motivelessly malignant psycho – that was the consensus view.
But after a while – after many deaths – a pattern started to emerge.
Because as well as the heart imagery, designed to mock and goad all those of my intended victims who were bonded by certain obscure rituals, I was leaving hidden clues. Clues that could only be read by those who knew how.5 These clues took the form of numbers painted in blood near the scene of each crime; which when multiplied by the numbers in the victim’s date of birth (excluding the year) related to the word of that number in my favourite novel, Dawn Never Comes by Archie Simpson II; and the first letters of each of these words spelled out my mocking message.
To crack the code, you had to know there was a code, and you had to know that I was the killer. And you also had to know what my favourite book is, and which edition I prefer to read it in. And no one, of course, could possibly know all that!
Except, that is, for one man: Daxox.
The message? It was pretty puerile, I’m afraid. It said:
THISISTHEREVENGEOFARTEMISFUCKYOUYOUMOTHERFUCKERSBETRAYEROFALLTHATSGOOD
Seventy characters in all, which meant I was planning to kill seventy of the aforesaid motherfuckers, including Daxox himself. And Baron Lowman too – he was the second “R” in MOTHERFUCKERS. But as you’ll see, I never got as far as Daxox. That’s because – sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The “A” in ARTEMIS was a little old lady who ran a boarding house in East Seven Laguid. Her name was Mary. She used to run a kind of boarding house somewhere else in Laguid, in the old days. That was where I had “lodged” for so many years, and back then Mary had been renowned for her strictness.
I broke into Mary’s bedroom and woke her up and confronted her with a litany of her sins. She burst into tears. She was old, really old, too old for rejuve which means over a thousand years old. And a sweet-looking lady. I took pity on the poor old dame, and decided to spare her; but she spoiled it by shooting me in the back as I started to climb out the window.
The bullet went through my body armour and lodged in my heart. I stopped breathing. I thought for a moment I was going to have a stroke. So I turned and shot Mary in the head before she could fire a second projectile bullet and then, what the hell, I took out her heart and stuck it in her mouth. Old does not mean innocent. She was one mean bitch.
Then I stripped off my body armour and injected myself with adrenalin to restart my heart. And later on I rejuved the entry wound and glued the skin together. I left the bullet inside me. I have quite a few bullets inside my body, in fact. My cells and organs seem to grow quite happily around them.
The “M” of MOTHERFUCKERS was Baron Lowman’s bodyguard, Charlie. Charlie had been a brute. I picked him up in a nightclub and let him paw me a little in the flying taxi on the way back to his place. Then when we got into his apartment, I killed him with my bare hands. It was a fair fight, though I guess it might have been even fairer if he hadn’t drunk three bottles of rum and swallowed six sky-pills first. When I took his heart out, I swear it smelled of booze.
The “F” in FUCK was—I don’t need to go on, do I? It was a bloodbath. I’m not proud of it. But I had to do it. And every one of those people, especially the ones in FUCK and MOTHERFUCKER, deserved to die, and deserved to know why they were dying.
Okay, now let me tell you about Daxox.
He was the first man I ever loved. Yeah, go on, laugh.
This is how I met him:
After I left Rebus – the library, my father, my whole way of life – I ended up on a planet called Gullyfoyle. Nice planet, apart from the fact it had rain like pus. (It didn’t drip down your body, it crawled down…) After a series of unfortunate incidents, I got a job in a bar; and before long I was dying of boredom. I was only eighteen, you see. And I wanted excitement. Adventure. Romance! Instead, I was serving over-priced drinks to drunk tourists and getting propositioned ten times a night by ghastly wankers of all three sexes.
Fuck this, I thought.
And then a party of aristos arrived. From one of the fake-medieval planets, Illyria or Arcadia, or maybe Tolkien. I can’t actually remember which. Never mind, it doesn’t matter. Or maybe it was—No, fuck, move on Artemis. Let’s say it was Illyria.
“Illyria” was one of the settler planets granted some degree of autonomy by the Corporation. The Illyrians provided weapons and soldiers for the Cheo’s endless wars, and, in return, they were left pretty much alone. No doppelgängers, no oppression, no ritual massacres.
The Illyrians lived in castles, rode horses, kept prisoners in dungeons, all that shit. Role-playing on a planetary scale. They even genetically engineered dragons and unicorns. And to sustain this dream-existence, they built fabricators the size of planets and put them in orbit around their pretty green planet, and created energy sails so vast they darkened their own sun. As a result, though they were clearly mad, they were also rich. Very rich.
So, as I say, I was serving cocktails to these lordly bastards in their jerkins and hoses and billowing gowns, and then I saw it; the jewel; and my heart soared.
The body wearing the aforesaid jewel was possessed by a dark-haired marbled-skinned and astonishingly beautiful Illyrian (?) woman. When I first saw her, in that pricey Gullyfoyle bar, she was wearing an ornately brocaded and hooped dress with a décolletage that would shock all of polite society, if such a thing existed any more. This wench’s skin, I further noticed, was so pale that even a faint blush made her face go as crimson as the warning lights on a pursuing cop car. Her eyes however were blank and staring.
And then, as her partner ordered yet another round of elaborate cocktails with names like Supernova and Black Hole of Hell, I saw, around her neck, a gold choker with a white ruby boss, with the aforementioned jewel inset. And I wanted it, so badly. I was possessed with lust. Or maybe it was just greed. But I’d never seen such a—
Anyway, cutting to the heist: It was a shaloyiss – a kind of pearl with the lustre of a diamond.6 It had a radiance that made my emotions hum. And after consulting my Rebus chip, I knew this to be an antique gem that had been carved by hand, not by lasers, dating all the way back to the days of the Lentarr jewel traders.
That night I came into her room where she – the marble-skinned dead-eyed bitch – slept.
What’s that – why do I call her “bitch”?
Look, guys, I’m not slagging off this Illyrian broad for no reason! Or out of petty jealousy, because she was richer and more privileged and considerably more beautiful than I was or am.
No! That’s not it. The fact is, earlier that evening I’d seen this evil ginch beat a waiter senseless with a metal stave for not bowing to her before serving the hors d’oeuvres. All part of the courtly etiquette of these monstrously wicked anachronists.
Anyway:
I moved, as I always do when I’m stealing stuff, without noise, and without breathing. The jewel was in the safe, as I knew it would be. I knew how to break the combination too. She’d used her own code, but you can turn it back to factory default with a simple cyberspace nudge, if you know how, which I do.
I took the jewel and fled on a colony boat to Cúchulainn, and tried to sell it on the black market there. That wasn’t a great success. After several rebuffs, I finally met a fence in a bar who had a big smile and a charming manner and shark’s teeth (the affectation à la mode at that time). Shark Teeth was delighted at the size of the jewel and offered to transfer a million scudos to my pseudonymous account. But instead of swiftly concluding the deal as he should have done, he chatted and chatted. And eventually I smelled a rat and walked out.
Two goons stopped me before I reached the door. One of them sprayed paralysing gas in my face, the other shot a taser at my body. Then both came at me with electric clubs.
The taser didn’t work, because I was wearing my electrosheath beneath my T-shirt and jeans. The gas caught me full on but I was already holding my breath. The electric clubs both missed, as I ducked like a dervish and came up punching and kicking.
I killed them both and returned into the back room and removed the fence’s eyes. Then I walked back to my hotel.
And when I got back to my room he was there, waiting for me.
Daxox.
“Nice work,” he observed, in the friendliest of tones.
“Thank you.”
“You’ve cost me a fortune tonight.”
“How so?”
“Rejuve. Resurrection. New eyes. It all costs.”
“Serves you right, for hiring such fucking useless bludgers,” I said nastily.
He frowned. He clearly resented my attitude.
“Those were my best men you killed,” he said affably, like a man who was only pretending to be annoyed.
“They weren’t so tough.”
He shrugged, acknowledging my point. He waited patiently, a half-smile on his lips.
I wondered how he’d got in without triggering the security pins I’d inserted in the door and the corridor walls outside my room. I also wondered if there was anyone else – in particular, hordes of gangsters with guns – waiting close at hand. In the bathroom, maybe? Or in the next room? And most of all, I wondered why I wasn’t more afraid.
I’d never met Daxox before. But despite the circumstances, I found there was something oddly comforting about his presence. He was one of those people who puts you at your ease. Even though you know he’s planning to kill and/or eviscerate you.
It’s a knack, I guess.
“We would like to purchase the jewel after all,” Daxox eventually said, almost kindly.
“Transfer the money. When it’s cleared, I’ll come and see you with the jewel.”
“How do I know you won’t cheat me?” His face was a moue of anticipatory disappointment.
“I just might fucking do that.”
He smiled.
“I like your candour.”
“Fuck off. Do we have a deal or not?”
“We have a deal,” said Daxox.
And he was, amazingly, as good as his word. The money was transferred. I delivered the jewel to him. There was no double-cross. I found no tracers on the bank account. No hitguys turned up at my apartment, though I was changing apartments hourly by that time. I was home free.
A week later I walked into Daxox’s club.
A singer was on stage, crooning a ballad. She was good. The music was bluesy, soporific. There were drugs in the air, mood-enhancers, mild aphrodisiacs. I could also smell perfume, thick and flowery. The kind I now associate with strippers and cross-gender artistes, since it was the strippers and the queens and the princes in Daxox’s club who loved to use that shit. Daxox himself was sitting in the corner table, surrounded by augmented guards. I was wearing a frock.
Yeah, get that! I never wore a frock, back then. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking of. It was bright blue. My arms and cleavage were bare, and lightly dusted to make them sparkle. My gun was in my handbag. My knives were strapped to my hips, under the flowing skirt. I’d rehearsed a few bending-over-and-grabbing-at-my-arse knife-drawing manoeuvres, just in case.
I sauntered across, sat down next to him, and took a sip of his bourbon. It was the real McCoy, hand-distilled. It slid down like velvet, if you’ve ever eaten velvet, which I guess you never have, nor indeed, ever should. Fuck! What I mean is, it was good stuff.
That night we stayed up talking till the early hours. We slept together, but not in a sexual way. A week later, we were lovers.
Picture this: shy librarian’s daughter becomes the moll of the most dangerous gangster on Cúchulainn.
And I was shy. Really shy. I was raised by my father, and his mother, and her two brothers. All archivists on Rebus, the planet so dull that no one even makes jokes about it.
My gran Margarita – I’m digressing again – was a powerful personality. She dominated and bullied the entire family, including, but not especially, me. Her two brothers, my Great Uncle Mike and my Great Uncle Dougall, were treated like indentured slaves in a plantation. They were at Margarita’s beck and call. And from the moment I was born, I was welcomed as a new domestic servant in the making. Once I was out of nappies, pretty much, she put me to work. Cooking. Tidying. Sorting. I catalogued all my grandmother’s dresses. I was five when I started that job; nine when I finished. She had a lot of dresses; they brought back for her memories of other times, and other lovers. In that happy period before she married her lacklustre no-account librarian husband Mitchell, aka my grandfather.
I never met him. Gran had exiled Mitchell for insubordination and general bad attitude when little John McIvor, aka my dad, was six years old. Granddad now lived, so my investigations eventually revealed, in a little town called Alexandria, the other side of Rebus. Even his library ticket was revoked, so he wasn’t able to use his Rebus chip to access archival material. Which, for these guys, is a living hell.
Children weren’t illegal on Rebus. they just weren’t that common. So my childhood was spent in the company of dour, grey-faced anally-retentive grown-ups. I had no kid friends when I was a kid. I had only one teenager friend when I was a teenager, and he didn’t stay for long. Then I fled to Gullyfoyle; and eventually went to work in the bar.
And that’s where I learned to be me. I copied what the other women wore – not the lah-di-dahs who came in to the bar, but the sexy funky local women I saw on the street and in clubs. The flamboyant girls who strutted the streets looking for action. I learned to swear as they swore, using seventeenth-and eighteenth-century gutterslang that was now coming back into fashion in this sector of the humanverse. I practised the art of chit-chat and “hanging out.” Because on Rebus, there was none of that. Every conversation had to have a purpose – namely the advancement of knowledge. No one ever, like, just talked.
So on Gullyfoyle, I learned to be different – which meant, of course, the same as the women I most admired. The hard bitches, the ex-mercenaries, the gangsters. I walked like a warrior. I dressed like a slut. I swore like a Soldier. And I made small talk like, well, like an ordinary human being.
But it was all façade. I was pretending to be someone. I was a concocted me.
But in my heart, I was always the shy librarian’s daughter.
A few weeks after we became lovers, Daxox asked me to kill a man, and I d
id.
I guessed that this request was some kind of initiation test. And I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to be seen to be unworthy.
I’ll tell you who the guy was. His name was Donnie Miro. He owed money to a Clannite loan shark. He was a gambler and a sex addict. He also had three children and a loving wife called, no, that name’s gone, I forgot to save to chip, again.7 Maybe accidentally on purpose?
Owing money to gangsters was no stigma back then, of course. It was just the way people lived their lives, and had been doing for decades. The Clan, after all, were the banking system. They were the government. They were the police. And they were the only source of actual income, since the Corporation had a zero salary policy. On the assumption that once they’d slaved most of their working day on Corporation business, the colonists could somehow scrounge or steal enough to actually eat, and pay their bills.
That was the system. The Corporation owned everything, and contributed nothing. But the Clan stole from them, and used the proceeds of crime to run a parallel society.
So being in debt was no big deal. After all, Donnie could easily have paid Daxox back in kind, by working pro bono for the Clan as an actor in porn films, for instance. Or as a drug dealer or mule, or a burglar, or an enforcer, or some other such shit. But no, Donnie was an idealist. He thought the Clan were corrupt and as great an evil as the Corporation themselves. And he said so, shooting his mouth off fearlessly in bars and strip clubs. Donnie thought he was entitled to freedom; even though every single part of him from his arsehole to the hair on his head was owned by the Clan.
And Daxox, of course – did I mention this? – was a Clan quintino when I met him.
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