Artemis

by Philip Palmer

I was, incidentally, just to get it out in the open, at this point in my life’s story having a wildly passionate sexual relationship with Billy.

  Remember Billy? He was the old-timer who met me when I came out of the brainthrashing machine back in Giger. He had given me some vital TLC. Then he’d warned me they were sending a doppelgänger to kill me. After that – well, we became friends of sorts. But not close. Then I left Giger, as you know. And now he was working for Fraser too, on the same suicide squad deal, and one thing led to—

  I mean! Can you fucking believe it? Me, and an old baldy ginch like Billy?

  We kept it secret at first. But before long, the entire battalion knew. After that night when – no, you don’t need to know about what happened that night. It was – no!

  Let me tell you about Billy.

  Billy used to be a Space Marine.

  And that’s it. That’s all you need to know. He was one of those guys.

  Tough, for sure.

  Ruthless, without doubt.

  Fit as fuck, despite the bald head and wrinkles. That’s just superficial ageing. Billy in fact has the body of a warrior; as I know, ahem, only too well.

  He is also calm. Amazingly calm. Reassuringly calm. And resourceful. And alert. He sees everything, without effort, like a lion lazily glancing across the savannah.

  He isn’t introspective. He doesn’t write poetry. He has no moral qualms, or philosophical queries about life. Just give him a gun and body armour and he’d go and frag an entire planet full of alien fuckers, and be back for tea. No nightmares. No pangs of guilt. He is an awkward, cussed, angry, brawling, sentimental when drunk, cheerfully practical when sober, no-nonsense old-timer.

  My first day on the Rock,1 I’d spotted a few familiar faces from Giger Pen on the same “suicide squad” deal, and Billy’s was among them. This wasn’t good news for me, because as you’ll recall, I’d double-crossed all the prisoners including Billy when I staged my celebrated escape. It was a fair bet that some of the guys would be sore. It was a matter of time, in other words, before someone tried to kill me.

  It happened on Day Two of my stay on the Rock. I’d barely recovered my strength after what had happened on Cúchulainn with Jimmi and the blood transfusion. So I was aiming to keep my head down, stay out of trouble.

  And then I had a heart attack.

  I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t even notice Macintosh walking up to me. Who’s Macintosh? Some just fucking nobody. But he happened to have been at Giger, and, well, there you go.

  Macintosh had a taser and he shot me in the back with it, at full voltage. Thousands of volts of electricity pulsed through me. And my heart stopped.

  Then I turned and hit him with a knife-hand strike to the throat. It should have been fatal. But Macintosh just grinned. The taser had sapped my strength; it was as if I’d tickled his tummy. There were three other ex-cons from Giger Pen with him, all with knives. I fell to the ground, desperately trying to restart my heart. Then I glimpsed a fourth person – Billy. Another person I’d fucked off at Giger!

  When I regained consciousness, Billy had me over his shoulder and was carrying me back to my cell. I deduced he’d creamed the opposition and saved my life, and I tried to say thank you but he refused to listen to my little speech. “Don’t be a stranger,” he said as he left.

  The next day Macintosh had been ghosted out of the programme. Fraser took a dim view of internecine warfare. We were there to kill the enemy, not each other.

  Anyway, that’s how Billy came back into my life.

  The rest was just – well. I knew I owed him. He seemed to like me. I was feeling pretty lonely. Sex seemed like a good idea.

  It wasn’t like we were in love.

  It spooked me though. Billy had helped me twice now. He’d been, magically, the right person in the right place at the right time. Coincidence? Or destiny?

  I do believe in destiny by the way. It’s my primary superstition. I don’t use totems, but I believe I have a hidden purpose. And my god is Ganesh. Billy, however, worshipped the Santieran Orisha known as Changó. Who happens to be the god of thunder and lightning. And I’d been electrocuted with an energy pulse from a Mark 4 taser. Random coincidence, or destiny?

  Well, I know what I think, okay?

  Billy and I weren’t in the same cohort but I caught his eye in the canteen the day after my heart attack. And I nodded once. To show that I was willing to let him approach me. So he ambled over.

  “How’re you doing?” he asked.

  “Heart’s healing,” I replied.

  “Steak’s good.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Join me?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  And so we had lunch together.

  The dining hall on the Rock was multi-level, and self-service. No robots, no serving trays, you had to actually queue. The food was good, compared to Giger Pen. Mediocre compared to the haute cuisine I’d known on Cúchulainn. Meat – Thorak steak from Weisman or Pohlian bandersnatch, at a guess – potatoes, and a green vegetable I’d never seen before. The guy next to me called it a quok; the “qu” prefix gave away that it was a genetically created New Form, rather than edible alien life.

  The Rock, by the way, really was a rock. An asteroid with navigational jets and biodomes. It was in effect a mobile planet that could be towed at half-light speed from world to world, picking up new recruits along the way.

  Fraser had scooped me up on Cúchulainn with an army of other losers, wankers, wasters and drifters – six thousand of us in all, I estimated – and we were now in transit to the nearby planet of Garcia.

  It had been a shock, I have to admit, to discover I was just one among so very many. ’Cause when Fraser first pitched this deal to me, I sort assumed that I was special.

  You know – one of the élite team. Hand-picked. Each with a special skill, and a unique mannerism or catch-phrase. The six toughest meanest mollyfockers in the galaxy!

  Or maybe even twelve. A dozen daring mavericks! The twelve meanest mollyfockers in the galaxy!

  I hadn’t appreciated that, in this deal, I was pretty much cannon fodder. So when I walked through the doors to the Muster Hall and saw the mob within – thousands of mean mollyfockers, and those were just the new guys – well, my self-esteem took something of a nose dive.

  But, you know, you get over these things.

  Anyway, long story shorter: Billy and I got our food and sat down to eat.

  “You like ketchup?”

  “You bet.”

  “Me too.”

  He passed the ketchup. I drenched my steak in it. I passed him the ketchup back. He drenched his steak too.

  And it was good. A bonding moment. A mutual both-liking-lots-of-ketchup moment.

  Hey, these things matter!

  And so there we were. Bonding. Sitting side by side in a canteen of about fifty thousand other mean mollyfockers. Billy was smoking a cigarette, the first I’d seen in a hundred years. And it was real nicotine too. His fingers were yellow. His teeth were crooked. He was old.

  “Food good?” he asked.

  “I’ve had better.”

  “Me too.”

  “And worse.”

  “You betcha.”

  Billy, as you may have gathered, wasn’t given much to small talk.

  However, over the months that followed, he told me a few of his amazing true-life stories.

  For instance:

  Billy had had Space Marine friends who’d been on the expedition into the world of the Bugs. There, they had of course all died.

  But before they died, he told me, they’d called up their old Marine friends on the MI imagelink. All the guys and the girls and the herms they had trained with and served with, over a period of years. And they’d said a mass “Hello,” and they’d explained the situation, and told some jokes and funny stories, as they waited for their inevitable doom.

  Then when the moment came, they said a final goodbye.

  By this time
millions of Space Marines had clustered online, watching the imagelink messages on their retinal arrays. And then the doomed Marines hung up. And the Bugs came and ate them alive. But those soldiers died in the very best of ways: fearlessly, and in the company of their fellow Marines.

  That made it a good death, Billy told me. And he was, he added, proud to have had those guys as friends.

  It was a brief story, and Billy told it poignantly, but matter-of-factly. Death held no terror for him. He’d been maimed, dismembered, mutilated and patched up a hundred times and regarded it as no big deal. Billy wore his body like it was a battered old raincoat with stains that he couldn’t be bothered to clean off.

  I loved that story. I can’t explain why.

  Billy was also a shy man. And he had almost no social skills. For instance:

  “Fuck?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure.”

  That was our first date.

  On the plus side he had, from the neck down, a body like a Greek god. And he was tender too.

  On the minus side, he had an astonishing amount of body hair. It even came out of his ears! Having sex with Billy with like firkytoodling a gorilla, it really was. Though I’m guessing there of course.

  I discovered that I really liked him.

  This is how it came about. The first time we fucked, I mean.

  We were the last table left in the bar. It was malt whisky and stories time. I told my stories, which were wild and extravagant and largely untrue. The other guys around the table told their tales, again with huge hyperbole and plenty of hushed pauses for effect.

  And then Billy, with calm understatement, talked about some of the wars in which he’d fought. He’d fought in a lot of wars. He’d been in the attack squad in the first Heebie-Jeebie Skirmish. He’d helped annihilate the Zoltan, a species no one remembers now, but they were even crueller and more homicidal than the human race. He’d led the doomed assault on the flame beasts, averted at the last moment when the Cheo finally came to his senses. He’d quelled mutinies on countless planets.

  Oh, and he’d even led an army of Lopers to victory against a colony ship of Eagles, on Enceladus. That was a great story. Lopers leaping, Eagles soaring, no weapons, just claws and talons. Till Billy fired up his armoured spacesuit (which was more like a tank with arms) and massacred the Eagles as they flew.

  But he didn’t describe the battles, not in any detail anyway. It was all about the people. His comrades and superiors and enemies. He conjured them up in brief word-portraits. Their foibles. Their stupidities. Their favourite sayings. He had no concept of the epic yarn. All he knew was the tiny anecdote.

  He told one tale about a Space Marine comrade called Darius, who carried a lucky charm into every battle. On the day he died, Darius forgot his lucky charm.

  Billy showed us the charm – it was a Celtic Cross. A pagan icon, with cross bars of the same length. Darius had given the charm to Billy, on the eve of their big battle. Darius claimed he’d had a premonition of disaster and didn’t want the magic icon to go to waste. Billy had thought his friend was nutso, but didn’t argue. You never argue with a warrior, on the eve of a battle. It can lead to unpleasantness of the extremest variety.

  Then, next day, the day of the battle, their transport ship was attacked by enemy missiles which rent their force field and smashed great holes in the hull. All the crew were suited up, but Darius had died when his spacesuit sprang a leak and he explosively decompressed. Billy always attributed Darius’s death to the absence of his lucky charm. That’s why you carried those mamajammers, was Billy’s view.

  Then, years later, he learned that Darius had sent a suicide message in a broadcast he made to his sister, which was scheduled to be transmitted the week after his death. And in the message, he admitted that he had put the holes in the spacesuit himself.

  “Why would he do that?” Billy wondered to us.

  “I don’t know, why?” That was me.

  Billy thought about it. “Darius thought too much,” he eventually concluded. “You have to do bad stuff and move on. Darius thought about it.”

  Billy still had the lucky charm. He showed it to me. I thought it looked cheap, and was anxious that if he wore it, its imbued Celtic deity might get into conflict with Billy’s own Cuban voodoo god. You have to worry about that shit, it matters.

  But I could see that the cross had great sentimental value for him. He slipped it back around his neck.

  We drank the bottle dry and then the two of us left the bar, and went to my cabin. And that’s when we had that exchange of dialogue I told you about just now. The one that goes:

  “Fuck?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure.”

  I SO love that as a chat-up line!

  Anyway, long story etc. We fucked like – like two weary soldiers trying to find refuge in mindless fucking. Billy was phenomenal in bed – not imaginative, but his passion took him a long way. We Big O’d three times, or at least I did, and afterwards I burst into tears and cried in his arms. He didn’t ask me why. That was as it should be.

  I’d never cried in a lover’s arms before. Not even with Cassady. That’s odd, isn’t it?

  I don’t get why that happened either.

  From then on, every night after training, we fucked. And after fucking, I cried.

  I let out all the pain and anguish that had accumulated in my soul by weeping in the arms of a man who never asked questions. And who prided himself on his ability to never think about the bad stuff.

  Billy was good for me. I didn’t need love, at that moment. I just needed a shoulder, or sometimes an abdomen, or even a hairy thigh, to cry upon.

  I think also that if I hadn’t been able to cry in Billy’s arms all those many times, I would have followed the way of Darius.

  The Fool. That was Hendry.

  Hendry had been Planetary Director of Arkadian in the early days of the Corporation. Proconsul and administrator to what at that time was a highly prosperous factory planet. But the planet had descended into anarchy when the gangs got organised and started extorting from the workforce. It was happening all over of course. The old mafia and urkas and vory and ’Ndrangheta and the secret societies like the Masons and Knights Templar were banding together to form a new political force. The Clan. A secret criminal society that wasn’t secret any more.

  Hendry had knuckled under, paid off the gangmasters, and offered obeisance to the Clan capobastone on Arkadian.

  And then he joined the Clan himself, and worked his way up, one step at a time. He committed a murder. Then nineteen more murders, to earn his dragon. He destroyed a DR. He slept the night on a cold mountain top without thermals and without dying. He mastered the Clan language, the murmurash. He observed the seven sacred Clan rituals, without error. And thus he earned his tattoo of full membership, the serpent’s tail of the Clannite around his neck.

  Within ten years Hendry was capobastone of Arkadian and its four affiliated planets, after gang wars had killed the previous incumbent. And Hendry now became a Janus. He worked for the Corporation, but he also led the Clan. The two jobs fitted together comfortably, for Hendry’s criminals stifled rebellion and assassinated all free thinkers and nonconformists on Arkadian. And this was exactly what the Corporation wanted.

  That’s why some people call the Clan the “Overworld.” It’s not a hidden criminal society; it’s the establishment.

  You should know here that Arkadian factories specialised in the manufacture of weaponry of all kinds. Missiles, mortars, magnetic bombs, projectile guns, energy guns, and anti-matter missiles – both the cartridges and the microns – and force fields. Its workers supplied a hundred planets within a radius of fifty light years with state of the art munitions. The space caravans of Arkadian were legendary.

  And when the Corporation fell, Hendry was sacked from his post and charged with four counts of Category A War Crimes. He was guilty on all counts of
course.

  By that time, however, quantum teleportation had been invented. And Hendry and his gangs had weapons so sophisticated they could blow a battleship out of space with ease. He used his power to seize control of his entire spherical sector. And thus Hendry became the first and the most feared of the Clan Bosses, the Fool in our Tarot pack.

  Living Spirit was the Magician.2

  And the Magician commanded, as of right, the loyalty of all the Lopers in the humanverse. He was seven foot tall, silver maned, and was apparently irresistible to all women, whether furred or not.

  Living Spirit had sent a covert signal to all the Lopers in the Sphere of Human Colonies to foment rebellion and defy the new and democratically elected government on Earth. No one knew which planet served as his home. He was a shadowy figure, despite his high visibility on beaconband. Every week he would send a message of defiance to “his” people, urging rebellion and the right to Loper self-determination. (Which they already had of course, on all the Loper planets, as a consequence of the SNG’s liberal and anti-colonial policies. I guess these guys don’t like to read the fine print.)

  Loper bombers had been targeting schools and nurseries across the humanverse for eighteen months. Thousands of innocent children had been killed.

  I hated the Magician dearly. All the Clan Bosses were evil, but for his terror on children campaign, Living Spirit had earned my special loathing.

  Gina Goodrick was the Empress. She had been an associate of Daxox. He’d considered her to be one of the great capobastone. She ruled the Byzantium Clanning, and her court was apparently a marvel of ostentatious beauty. Rome, Byzantium and Xanadu were the three planets under her control. Gamer planets in which great civilisations of the past were recreated. Gina’s whim was to dress like a princess from the Ancient Egyptian period of Earth history. I never met her; I never got to kill her. She was, apparently, an astonishingly cruel woman.

  Sinara Lo was the High Priestess, and her home was Kandala, where I had “died” so many times. She was saner than Gina, less ruthless than Living Spirit, and less feared then Hendry. But she too had blood on her hands. She stood accused and indeed had been convicted in absentia of four million war crimes.