Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  Later I learned that Daxox had been a medal-winning ballroom dancing when he was in his twenties. But no young woman these days likes to be outclassed on the dance floor. Clumsy plays much better. So, the wily fox, he played clumsy.

  After we’d been together a month, an assassin broke through his cordon sanitaire and put a projectile bullet in his shoulder. Daxox’s bodyguard dragged the would-be killer away, vowing to kill him. And I nursed Daxox for weeks after that. It was during the period when he was convalescing – while I was walking through the streets, looking up at the moons – that I realised I loved him.

  I changed his dressings daily – I hated to let the autodoc near him. I reassured him that it was normal for some people to hate him. Just because an assassin had tried to kill him, didn’t mean he wasn’t a nice person! I was his nurse, and his lover, and his confidante.

  That was one of the happiest periods of my life, those weeks when Daxox was recovering from his bullet wound. He seemed so vulnerable. I vowed to stay close to him in future, to protect him. I’m a natural warrior, you see, I can’t help wanting to protect people.

  A few years later though, when I was in captivity, I spotted Daxox’s shooter. He was a piccioto working for Baron Lowman. He hadn’t in fact been killed by the bodyguards. The entire shooting had been a put-up job. Daxox’s way of luring me into bed, by making me feel sorry for him.

  I loved Daxox with all my heart. But he had played me, like a fish on a hook. Reeling me in, then reeling me out. And in the end I sucked the hook into my mouth and threw myself on to the bastard’s fucking boat.

  Okay, that’s it. No more fucking fishing metaphors!

  The point being – Daxox betrayed me, in so many ways. My hate for him was so intense it haunted my every thought.

  And now he was going to die.

  This is how it went down:

  Fraser had done a deal with the newly elected Cúchulainn government, using trumped up evidence that Daxox was in league with the five rebel Clan leaders.1 A joint task force had been created, made up of local Laguid Arrest Cops and SNG Special Forces. But they didn’t use real warriors, they had doppelgänger robot bodies, of the humaniform variety. Some of the doppelgängers were posing as customers at the club, some as strippers. It was, trust me, a remarkable sight. I saw it all on the Gold Control cameras, and through the eyes of the doppelgängers launching the raid.

  My doppelgänger robot was not a stripper, I’m glad to say. I was one of the ones with guns, who smashed down the walls and came in shooting.

  Look, I know what you’re thinking! It still doesn’t make any sense, does it? Me and Daxox. I mean, what was I thinking of?

  Well for starters, I was young at the time, okay? I didn’t know any different. I just didn’t, I really didn’t, know any better. And besides – besides—

  Fuck! So hard to put it in words! So let me try and explain, with two images from my past.

  First, picture this: me on my first day in Laguid. Capital city of Cúchulainn. Wide-eyed and stupid, with a stolen necklace burning a hole in my pocket. Looking around at the ugliest place in the humanverse. The skies were black, and the cities were crammed to bursting with pyramidical fabricator plants that loomed above the houses and the streets. Smoke billowed out into the air, turning blue daytime skies into carbonised night. When it rained, some days it rained ash. And I loved that. I loved it!

  What a naïve young fool I was.

  And now, picture this: me and Daxox, in his club where the evil and the deviants dwell, drinking all night long. Pouring booze down our throats till we could barely speak. Then when morning came we’d stagger out of the club and watch the dawn peep through the ghastly black pall of smoke. And we would totter there on the pavement, savouring the getting-pissed-in-reverse dizzying sensation, as the rejuve cleared our systems of alcohol.

  And then, shuddering into sobriety, we’d watch the early morning commuters clinging to the underside of the conveyor belts, hitching a free and fast ride to work. And we’d laugh and savour the horror of it all.

  So ugly it was beautiful; that was Cúchulainn.

  And that was Daxox too.

  Daxox was always testing me. That should have been a clue to – no matter. He tested me, and I never failed him.

  For example, after we had been together a couple of months, he asked me if I was prudish. I said – fuck, no! Anything but!

  Yeah, you can imagine what followed. And, to be honest, I lapped it up. All the dressing up, partner-swapping, orgies – what could be more fun?

  After a while, however, it was obvious I was finding it all more arousing than HE was. Daxox was a homebody at heart. He liked to curl up in bed with one woman at a time. He loved to be talked to as he went to sleep. So the kinky sex and the ménages à trois et quatre et quelquefois cinq came to an end.

  And I guessed then that it had all been a test. But hell, I didn’t care. I was young! I was still finding out about stuff. And I love sex; I mean, there’s nothing more enjoyable than getting naked with—

  Hey, what am I, a tour guide? The point is. He tested me.

  One night in a bar he pointed out an obese guy talking to some girls. “Deal with him,” said Daxox.

  So I waited for the fat oaf outside the club and filled his body with bullets. He didn’t die. He came at me with a knife. I had to beat the fucker to death with my bare hands. Turned out he had a robot torso, only the head was human. So I cut his head off his shoulders and took it to Daxox, who laughed and said, “That’s my girl.”

  I never did learn what the guy did wrong. I never asked. That was the test. Not the killing (for Daxox knew I could kill). The not asking. I passed.

  Another time, there was a problem in one of the food fabricator plants, Delta Amigo 4. Some of the workers were covertly gathering, and speeches about workers’ rights were being made. There were rumours of a union being formed.

  So I spent a month undercover, working side by side with these guys. Herding cows and sheep. Tending vines and food plants. Watching the meat being butchered by robot knives. And of course watching over the protein farms. Eventually, I found the ringleaders – they were old guys, grandfathers and grandmothers, with large families. They wanted a better life for their children and their children’s children; and they were planning a mass mutiny against the Clan tyrannisation of their lives.

  So I found them guilty of pilfering, and threw them in the fabricator vat.

  That was a test. I liked those guys. They all carried photographs of their grandkids and told stories of the good old days. Which weren’t that different from the current days, but were more fondly remembered. But the test was: do not flinch.

  I did not flinch.2

  Oh, and did I mention aliens? That was the other big Daxox test; the alien safari.

  The planet was full of aliens you see. It was a shock to me, when I first discovered that. Because Rebus was a terraformed world, and the only animals I ever saw were dogs and cats, which were kept as pets. Gullyfoyle was also terraformed, and all the animals were Earth animals. Except for the dragons and the manticores, but those were genetically engineered creations, not indigenous aliens.

  But Cúchulainn was blessed with an Earth-type atmosphere, and a mild climate. So the original settlers had no need to terraform, thereby killing all the native flora and fauna. They simply colonised, and allowed the least nasty of the native life forms to survive.

  It meant the planet was a remarkably exotic genuine alien habitat; and so one of Daxox’s best earners was organising safaris for Earth Gamers. That’s where the alien safari test came in.

  There were a dozen Earthians on the expedition that I led, inhabiting Mark 5 Doppelgänger Robot bodies. Smaller than the military model, with more design features. Glaring red eyes. Arms that turn into cannons. Gyroscopic auto-hover. Full speech capacity to replicate the Earthian rider’s vocals.

  I wore my war suit. Soft silver armour. Bandolier. Rifle-cannon on a backstrap. Gunbelt with double barr
el multi-use Wesson pistols. My long black hair was in a ponytail. I was pretty fucking hot, and I knew it. And that’s why Daxox wanted me on this trip. I could see the DRs’ eyes glittering red as they stared at me. Wondering if raping the guide was in their contract of engagement. (It wasn’t.)

  “My name,” I said, “is Artemis McIvor, and I am your guide.”

  They introduced themselves. I already had them on chip, so any time I looked at a robot body I saw the human’s name in my visual array. They were – no, I can’t remember their names now, and I later wiped the chip files. They were all ignorant fucks, that’s all you need to know. No small talk. They’d never done anything with their lives apart from tend their estates and play Games. Some of the Earthians, the well connected, don’t even do their twelve hours a week minimum conscript duty. Not unless it’s the Cambrian Festival or some such shit.

  “What are we hunting?” said one of the DR-Earthians whose names I’ve now forgotten. Let’s call him Dumb Fucker 1.

  “Well,” I said, “there’s savannah big game. Like the Sabre-Mastodon, the Eagle-Mantis, and the Aurelian Orc. And there’s snakes, or rather giant serpents. And of course there are the sentients, the Caipora. Or we could go into the swamps and shoot some Nargans and Jengus.”

  “The Caipora,” said Dumb Fucker 2, “how dangerous are they?”

  “They have bow and arrow technology,” I informed him.

  The Dumb Fuckers all laughed.

  “With exploding arrows. Their range is pretty good too. A direct hit, and your chassis is gone, even with your force field up.”

  “Impossible. A force field can—”

  “Trust me, I’ve seen it. These creatures use gunpowder technology; it seems primitive, but it’s not. Your fields are designed to kill the momentum of a bullet, so it can’t penetrate your armour. But these are musket shells that are designed to explode whenever they slow down or stop. The blast’ll rip you open like a tin can.”

  “If that happens, I’ll want my money back,” said Dumb Fucker 4.

  “Of course,” I said soothingly. “I’ll give you the paperwork. All you have to do is sue the Corporation.”

  And so we set off, into the wilderness.

  There wasn’t a lot of wilderness, I have to admit. Since half the planet was made up of factory.

  And the skies – well, skies cover the whole world. So the black smog followed us even as we flew away from the cities and towards the dense forests and sheer mountain ranges of the North-Eastern Territories of Cúchulainn. We were in a Firefox 4 with a glass hull. The views below were spectacular. Lakes and glaciers and other stuff like that.

  The Dumb Fuckers kept up a constant hail of banter and chatter, comparing their relative experiences as Alien Monster Killers. Between them, they’d killed an awful lot of aliens, many of them sentient. But it was usually on planets that were due to be terraformed, with only Scientists and Soldiers living there. There was something cool, they felt, about killing aliens on a planet that had been settled by ordinary humans.

  I felt like a rube. I’d never killed an alien. I assumed it would be fun.

  And hey, it was!

  We landed the Firefox and went native. I had a jetpack on my warsuit. My head was bare and I let my hair fly loose in the wind as we flew close to the ground towards our first batch of prey. A herd of Mapinguari were grazing in a blue field. They were three legged and purple furred and each was the size of a city flybus. Giants, in other words! I had no idea this planet was so fertile, to sustain beasts the size of this.

  “On my count,” I said, and the DR/Gamers started firing randomly. The first fusillade of bullets all missed. They tore up the purple grass, and the herd scattered. But the Gamers recovered. Their robot bodies flew fast towards the stampeding Mapinguari and they fired again and the first of the Mapinguari began to explode, in a mess of blue blood and entrails.

  Two of the Gamers landed and the Mapinguari herd turned and rushed at them. They were trampled underfoot. The howls of rage of the Mapinguaris filled the air. But when they backed away the DRs were still intact and carrying swords. The Mapinguaris roared, and scraped the grass with their hooves, then charged. And swords flashed. Flesh was ripped and torn. And the Mapinguari died in a bloody frenzy.

  One DR got himself impaled on a Mapinguari horn, and I killed the beast with a mercy shot to the abdomen (where the brain was located). Then I cut the creature’s horn off as a souvenir. By now the robots’ silver bodies were caked in mud and shit and blood. And their red eyes sparkled with glee.

  “Incoming,” I said, and the Eagle-Mantises swooped down, their thin bodies spraying poison over their prey. And the robots’ armour hissed as the acid etched their metal. I was getting tense now because my warsuit armour was vulnerable to sustained acid attack. So I joined the fray and began shooting the Eagle-Mantises from the sky.

  “Hey, save some for us,” said Dumb Fucker 6.

  And so the day continued. An orgy of carnage and bloodshed. The native animals bred fast. Which was just as well, because we slew hundreds of them that day. The joy of slaughter was upon me.

  “We want,” said Dumb Fucker 7, “to find a Caipora next.”

  I’d already located the nearest nest of course. And, naturally, I had no problems with killing sentients. So we sped off to find the species once described (in an encyclopaedia I had consulted, the Hooperman book) as “a sophisticated tool-using civilisation with a strongly developed sense of morality and intense herd-loyalty and possessed of an instinct for familial love.”3

  Somewhere along the way however I got separated from my herd of blood-crazed battle-mad Earthian Gamers. And that’s when I found the Caipora in hiding.

  I swooped low and burned the grass with a plasma blast and the Caipora was revealed. A three-legged creature with a richly black hide and eyes on stalks. I landed, and stumbled slightly and recovered my footing. A casual 360 degree scan-round reassured me there were no other Caiporas in the vicinity lurking to ambush. And I felt a surge of excitement at seeing the beast; it seemed unreal in its alienness, yet I was close enough to smell its aroma and to see the veins in its bulging eyes. It reminded me of – I don’t know what. A creature I once read about in a book on Rebus. The Gruffalo; yes, that was it. Fictional, not mythological; and this creature reminded me—

  The Caipora hissed and howled, and slashed its claws in the air, in an attempt to intimidate me. But it was unarmed, lacking in artificial body armour, and my research told me it could not spit venom, or fire electricity, or hurl poison darts. It was strong though, and its claws could apparently rip through body armour given enough time and an unconscious prey. So I had no intention of allowing it close enough to wrestle me.

  I raised my rifle to deliver the coup de grâce, a simple head shot that would end the encounter instantly; but then I realised I could understand it. The patterns of howls and hisses were words, in English.

  “Spare me,” said the hissing Caipora.

  I laughed. “Fuck no,” I said, brutally.

  “Fuck?”

  “Fuck.”

  “What is fuck?” hissed the Caipora.

  “It’s a—” I raised my Wesson. I wasn’t going to discuss the use of expletives with a sentient stalk-eyed monster.

  “Kill me not.”

  “Do not kill me,” I said.

  I know! But I couldn’t help myself.

  “What say you?” the creature asked me querulously.

  “Your syntax is shit. ‘Do not kill me’ is what you should be saying.”

  “Do not kill me,” hissed and howled the Caipora, in a tone so forlorn it broke through my barriers of indifference and actually made me feel something.

  “I’m a hunter,” I pointed out, floundering somewhat by this point.

  “I just got married/love-connected/hitched,” said the Caipora, using multiple options to convey its meaning. “Don’t break my poor husband’s heart.”

  I sighed.

  Yeah, I admit it. In t
he space of just a couple of minutes, I’d become fond of that black-furred three-legged fucking thing.

  The Caipora told me of her life. She and her kind lived in the hills these days, breeding prolifically in the knowledge that most of their young would be hunted and killed. The Caipora were smart but had only basic technology – catapults and bows and arrows and gunpowder, but not rockets or nuclear weapons. But to give them credit, they had a theory of the universe that was halfway credible. And they were herbivores who forged alliances with other creatures, including most of the native predators. As a result, they may have been the only truly popular species in the history of all life. For no creature hunted them or ate them or even competed with them. And they hunted no other creature, but instead did their best to help others survive in their ecological niche.

  Then we came along.

  I led the Caipora into a side gully and concealed it under vegetation. Then I caught up with the hunters and led them in the wrong direction. It was, even so, a rich day’s hunting. By the time we returned, the flier was crammed with heads and tusks and claws. Useless mementoes, since it would take decades for these to arrive back in the Earth system. But the hunters liked to have photographs of themselves taken amongst their trophies. It was some kind of bonding thing.

  Then I returned to Laguid and was greeted by Daxox. He was in a warm, expansive mood. He told me a long story about the lunch he’d enjoyed, and quizzed me excitedly about my adventures with the aliens. We shared mockery of Earth Gamers – those cowardly wankers!

  “How would you rate Dumb Fucker 4?” he asked me. “On the dumbological spectrum?”

  “Even dumber than Dumb Fucker 5,” I explained. And we roared with laughter at that gag, for a good while.

  Then, after we’d shared a glass or six of champagne, he gave me two wonderful presents. A jewelled necklace, with blue stones to match my eyes, and pearls that echoed the swell of my breasts, and a black-carbon chain that perfectly echoed my night-black hair. And the other gift was a beautiful black leather jacket. I put the jacket on and marvelled at the softness of the leather. It fit me like a second skin.