And then there was the Devil. More of him, later.
These five were our Tarot pack. The other rebel capobastone had already been killed, or captured and sentenced to moral rehabilitation.3
This was a red desert land with bitter winds. Our sims were clad in warsuits, and the wind effects were strong enough to rock us on our feet. We flew in our warsuits across this bleak and glorious terrain.
“I’m in,” said Agra over the secure MI link. Agra was our Loper undercover warrior, who was already mingling with the Magician’s Loper Army. We were heading for the outcrop, with the aim of laying down covering fire while Agra closed in for the kill.
We saw a Loper below us, its yellow fur standing out vividly against the red sand. It was running as fast as we could fly. We dropped a frag on it, and the puff of sand was all that remained of this proud and beautiful beast.
“We’re blown,” I told Agra on the MI.
“So am I,” she said. I could hear screaming and gunfire, through her ears, via her brain chip. Then her light on my visual array went out. Agra was dead.
I waved a hand to the others as I flew. We were going in.
We flew up and over the sheer rock of the Mountains of Excess, and saw the Loper base below. A military plane appeared above us, and we banked and shot energy blasts, and the aircraft vanished in a flash of fire.
The Magician was born on this planet. Our intel claimed that he always returned here on the anniversary of his birth. And so there was a chance, albeit a slim one, that he was down there. But we were outside the Loper biodome, and all our Loper scouts including Agra were dead. In the skies directly above us, plunging through the clouds, an entire fleet of military planes appeared – Hawks, by the look of them. And over the horizon, like a flock of savage birds, we could see a vast aerial armada of Lopers in their richly coloured warsuits.
This mission was going nowhere.
I increased the magnification on my eyes. The Loper who led the advance against us was a magnificent and large silver-maned beast.
I would have known him anywhere. I’d seen his image every minute of every day for the last month.
“Magician sighted,” I said into my MI. “Go nuclear.”
Gabriel dropped the nuke and the ground directly below the Hawk convoy erupted. A mushroom cloud gusted up from the ground. The planes that were descending upon us were suddenly ripped from the sky, as a blaze of light billowed and made the sands shimmer and vanish, and the powerful blast slapped reality and created winds of terrible power. And we too were battered and buffeted by the storm and the shock waves.
But our warsuits were built of the toughest tectonite, with a force field capable of allowing us to survive the shock waves of even a close quarters atom blast. We were also, so we had been reassured, entirely radiation proof.
So the world vanished and my body was brutalised and I found myself being hurtled and bowled among the clouds, and I imagined that I could feel the heat of the radiation burning me like the fires of Hell; but that was just an illusion. For in fact the suit kept its integrity; the force field held; the blast energy was sucked away and spat out in some other dimension.
And I was still alive; and floating in the air above a seared and blackened desert.
However, I was not safe yet. For my force field was calibrated for kinetic energy dispersion, not particulate repulsion. Which meant in other words it was on completely the wrong setting to repel the impact of a high-velocity explosive bullet.
And so, just as I thought I had survived what no human being should ever be able to survive, I heard a crack that I recognised as body armour rupturing. And an instant later, a single rifle bullet plunged into my body and detonated in my heart.
I died.
“How are you getting on, lassy?” Frasier asked, in that gentle Scottish lilt that continued to annoy me so much. He was today in his full brigadier’s uniform.
I shrugged, what-the-fuckly.
“Coping are you, dear?”
I shrugged again.
“Or not,” said Fraser, softly.
“Huh?”
I stared at him. He took off his glasses and cleaned them. Cleaned them. Then he put them back on and peered at me with his blue eyes. I realised the eyes were artificial, and wondered why he wore the glasses.
“Your failure rate in simulated missions to date is 100 per cent,” Fraser assured me. “That indicates a lack of—”
“You should fucking try it,” I snarled.
“I have.”
“You have?”
“Three real missions.” Fraser touched the medal ribbons on his chest. One of them carried a single number. “I bear the 3,” he said.
“Impressive.”
“Our team captured the Lovers. Kave and Asbury. The golden couple.”
“I heard about that.”
“Three missions, I did not die once. Why is that?”
“Luck?”
“Because I gave a damn!” Fraser spat.
I shrugged. I was wildly over using my what-the-fuck shrug by now.
“You have a point?”
“I fear your heart is not in this.”
“Exercises. Simulations. I can’t—”
“So I’m letting you go.”
I froze.
Then I realised he was kidding, and I laughed.
Then I realised he wasn’t kidding.
“We had a deal!” I said angrily.
“And I’ll honour it,” said Fraser mildly. “You’re free to go. All criminal charges will be erased from your record. You won’t get any money, but you can’t have everything. Goodbye, Artemis, I expected better of you.”
“Hold it one fucking minute!” I roared.
“You’re not,” said Fraser softly, “up to the job.”
“The nerve of the fucking guy!” I told Billy, in a blind fury.
“That’s the way it goes,” Billy replied, unsympathetically.
“Yeah but—”
I saw the look on Billy’s face.
My blood froze.
It was clear that he also thought that I wasn’t up to it.
Billy was the love of my life. My own and only true passion.
And as for me – I was the greatest hero of all time! The maverick! The wild card! Earning my freedom and my redemption by killing the entire fucking Tarot pack on my own!
Those two fond beliefs of mine were, I realised, nothing more than ego-sustaining delusions. They were the fantasies that gave me my sense of who I was, and might be.
In reality, Billy was just a casual fuck. He didn’t even seem to care very much that I was leaving the Rock.
And the bitter truth was, I’d been thrown off the team for slacking. Some fucking hero!
I spent two days lost to that old devil self-pity. Then I began to seriously analyse my own situation.
Was Fraser being unfair, or was I really at fault? Was I, perhaps, deliberately fucking up? Did I, maybe, have some kind of death wish?
Three rhetorical questions. But I knew the answers.
Yeah it was my fault.
Yeah, I was deliberately fucking up.
And yeah, I did.
I should have died when Daxox did. That had always been my plan. That was always meant to be my moment of release, and peace.
Does that make sense? No?
You don’t really get me. I can tell that. No one does.
Because how can you understand what it was like – when – when the bad stuff happened. In Baron Lowman’s villa. You may think you’ve got the idea. You know the sort of bad stuff I’m talking about.
But those things don’t matter. The actual facts of my experience don’t matter. What I endured doesn’t matter. It’s the—
What is it?
It’s the sense that I fucked up my entire life. I trusted a bastard and he did what all bastards do, and then some.
And I should have expected it. I mean, how dumb was I? Daxox had a serpent’s tattoo on his throat. Tha
t’s the equivalent of having his forehead imprinted with the words: I’M AN EVIL GINCH AND I WILL FUCK YOU UP.
So why did I go to him? And why did I stay with him?
Why did I ever leave my home on Rebus, the peace and security that was to be found there, the family who – well okay they didn’t love me – but the family who had a place for me?
Was it really so bad, back there on Rebus? Did I really have to run away, stealing the money from my father’s bank account to live a life of crime?
Fuck yes, it was! And fuck yes, I did!
And I’ve already told you why. I had no friends. My mother left me. My father didn’t love me. He was a bastard in so many ways. No one loved me.
Yeah, yeah. Boo fucking hoo. Poor little spoiled kid.
But wait, there’s more.
My father was a cold man, you see. And also a bitter man. Bitter, because he’d only ever loved one woman, my mother, and she’d fucked off and abandoned him.
So he retreated into his books. And discovered a new purpose in life: hating me.
I was her, don’t you get it? I reminded him of the woman he once loved. That’s why he wouldn’t let me wear my hair long. Because she must have had long hair. So I had a military cut, sheared like a Woola, from the age of three years. He didn’t let me dress like a girl. He didn’t even tell me about menstruation, that was a real fucker. When I first bled, I had to do an MI search to find out what was happening to me, and how and where to buy absorbent pads.
I once sang to him. He’d heard me singing in the bath badly and so he made me sing a madrigal to him a capella to “find out” if I had any talent and a vocal instrument. I didn’t. My voice was shit. He sneered. So I never sang again.
She could sing. I knew that. Or rather, I could guess it.
And whenever I rebelled, by answering back, or looking defiant, he would punish me by locking me in the library.
Yeah, this is my “being locked in the library” story.
I was generally trapped in there for three or four days at a time. There were food supplies, of course, there was even a kitchen. But it was a library! It wasn’t even the nice part of the library – I’m talking about the vaults now, where the books are stored in glass cases. Every now and then the glass would open and a book would be tractor-beamed out, floating through the air and up into the reading rooms.
And there I was, little Artemis with her shorn head and frightened eyes. Trapped in the dungeons of the Rebus Planetary Library. Cold and scared and desperately wanting a hug. I was five years old when he started doing that to me. Fifteen when I fled Rebus. A lot of scared nights came between those two times.
His plan was to break my spirit. And every time he did it, I pretended that he had. I would call him “sir” for weeks. But then my resolve would falter, and the scorn would return to my voice. And I would be punished once again. In that way, and in other ways.
My hate ran deep. I vowed to take revenge. Hence, pillaging his precious savings, buying a ticket on the interstellar transit, and fleeing my home.
From that day on I was pure badass. I stole, I cursed, I fucked around. I stole jewels, then worked as an enforcer and killer for the Clan. My destiny was forged. Because I had been, you see, “traumatised.” That’s what I truly believed, in all those years when I was with Daxox. I was a killer, for sure; but also a victim.
But later, as a body-for-hire in the house of Baron Lowman, I knew what it was to be truly traumatised. And I heard the stories of my fellow captives. Terrible stories. These were the children of the Corporation, remember. They’d had no childhood, none at all. They’d known – well, terrible things. By contrast, my life had been a fucking breeze.
I gained a lot, I have to admit, from that period in captivity. I learned that I wasn’t so terribly important after all. I learned that other people mattered too. I learned I hadn’t been so uniquely and terribly treated as I had always thought.
And most of all, I learned how to disengage my mind.
It’s a rare knack.
This is how it worked:
Pain and shit would engulf me; I would endure it all, until I achieved a climax of agony that led into epiphany.
Then I would enter my inner core.
And then my thoughts would float free.
I would feel as if my body belonged to someone else. And whilst in this state of zen-detachment, I would use my Rebus chip to forge a connection with the Cúchulainn QRC, Magog. I don’t mean hacking. I mean – we became friends. I entered its dataspace and, at times, was more machine than human.
And thus I survived.
And eventually, once I’d learned how to use my unique relationship with Magog to disable the security systems and whedon chip, I escaped. Epiphany was my rope ladder; it got me free.
But let me get back to the point. My despair during my training period on the Rock was caused by the knowledge that I’d brought all the shit in my life upon myself. I was to blame. I’d sought out danger and evil, and I’d found those two vile bastards, and they had consumed me.
That made me, frankly—
You know where I’m going with this.
I wanted to die.
I needed to die.
Fuck. I really had to find a way to re-enlist.
I replayed the sims.
Again and again and again.
I had died two hundred and forty times. And so I reinhabited my body and watched myself die two hundred and forty times.
Then, breaking all the rules, I re-played the sims, one by one, by using my Rebus chip to switch from inactive to active mode. I lived all my lives again in other words.
And the plasma blast came out of nowhere but I was ready for it, and I amped up my force field seconds before.
The explosive bullet hit my armour but I saw the flash and rolled with the bullet and it slid across my chest plate instead of penetrating.
I did not step upon the landmine.
I was not fooled by the Clannite’s disguise.
I did not run to Billy’s defence, I let him die, and continued on my way. I did not attack the Mutant Monster, I hid.
I did not pursue my enemy, I let him go.
I realised there was something wrong with the door handle – it had been forced open and relocked – and I did not walk through the door.
Two hundred and forty times I anticipated the danger and continued the mission to its climax. I did not die once.
The two hundred and forty-first time was a new sim. An attack on the Empress. Her snipers shot at me but I had my force field on projectile-repulsion so that my armour was at its toughest, and the bullets bounced off. A bomb exploded next to me but I threw myself behind a pillar which took the brunt of the blast. Then I breached her security wall and killed a hundred of her soldiers without sustaining a single hit. And then she set an army of alien scarabs on me and I dropped an ultrasound bomb to paralyse them and walked upon their carapaces and blew a path through a thick wall into her inner sanctum and – found her gone.
But I was alive, and I ran the fuck out of nuller range pursued by angry soldiers and TP’d away safely.
And on arrival back at the Rock, I realised a scarab had burrowed through my armour and I burned it off with seconds to spare. I had failed to kill the Empress, but I had survived. Victory enough.
I spent a week in the sim room in all, without permission, and when I emerged I was pale-faced and exhausted. And triumphant.
And I staggered into the bar. News of my triumph in the sim room had preceded me.
“Here she fucking comes!” said a voice. A cheer rose up. I reached the bar, feeling dizzy. Free drinks appeared. Hands clapped my shoulders, grins surrounded me, I was the hero of the moment! And I swigged a whisky fast and felt myself become dizzy, and loose. And for a moment I enjoyed the sensation; then alarm bells began to ring.
So I took a deep breath, composed myself, found my inner core.
And I knew that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.
I looked around and saw my smiling friends and I mistrusted them all.
I listened for the sounds of distant gunfire, and heard nothing. I sniffed for the smell of rancid sweat, the sign that someone here was scheming murder, but I smelled nothing. I patted my gun in my holster to make sure I was carrying and that my gun was charged. And I moved away from the bar stool to the snug. I wanted to sit with some protection at my back.
But there was no reason to believe I was still hallucinating within a sim, as I had at first suspected. This was definitely reality. All my friends were around me. I had another whisky in my hand. I no longer felt dizzy. The mission was over. I could relax – couldn’t I?
Then Billy approached me, beaming proudly, and I knew.
I gave him two seconds then I lunged to the right, avoiding the dagger he was aiming at my throat.
I lunged back up and smashed Billy’s skull with my fist. It should have been a killer punch, but instead my knuckles shattered. Billy’s smile didn’t falter but he lunged again with the dagger and I dodged again, and broke his arm, then smashed his head upon a table. The sound was like a thunderclap. I knew then for sure that “Billy” was made of pure metal. A robot replica. And then I killed him.
And when I surfaced from my killing rage I saw Fraser, in his Brigadier’s uniform, standing at the bar and looking at me with approval.
“Mission is now concluded,” said Fraser, crisply. The real Billy entered the bar. He wasn’t beaming and happy to see me – hell no. He was grim, impassive, and emotionless, as per usual. That’s how I’d known. The real Billy always was a hard-faced bastard.
“Cheap trick,” I informed both Fraser and Billy.
“We used to do it all the time,” said Billy, “when I was—”
“No more fucking stories about the ancient days,” I protested. I was weary beyond weary, ready to drop.
I looked at Fraser.
“Sir?” I asked.
“I take it,” said Fraser, “you would like one more chance.”
“You fucking bet I do,” I said.
Artemis Page 19
