Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  “Don’t let me down.”

  “I won’t.”

  “This war is important, Artemis. We value your courage.”

  “Yes sir,” I said, starting to smile for the first time in a long while. “Yes fucking sir!”

  Chapter 8

  Mission 1: The Fool

  We hit the ground standing. I took stock. Three misflits. Carter, Brown, Anderson.1 I touched my face with my hand, just to be sure. Nose, eyes, cheeks, I had both hands, all my fingers. I stroked my torso, my breasts, shook out my legs.

  Carter lunged at me with fangs protruding from her misshapen head. I took her down with a plasma blast, then rolled as Brown aimed his own plasma gun at me. But his hand was jelly, his face was melting. Billy incinerated the dying scraps of Michael Brown. Anderson was already dead. His heart was no longer inside or in any way attached to his body. We burned the remains.

  Four of us were left alive.

  The gravity was lighter than most of us were used to. Agra was struggling to stay on the ground. Her lightest step was like a rocket launch. For our first few minutes on the planet Gabriel had to piggy-back on Agra to hold her down, his lean sleek body emerging like the human half of a centaur from her stocky animality.

  We hiked. No point risking a radar pickup. The fields were bare. Crops were burned, corpses of animals were strewn on the grass and clogged the streams and rivers. Hendry’s Jayhawkers2 had hailed down poison rain upon the land, killing all below. The colonists of this planet – Makari3 – had cowered in bunkers and beneath hardplastic domes, until the invading forces had landed and winkled most of them out, gruesomely.

  The planet was now thinly garrisoned. The surviving settlers were allowed to live in the cities, eking out a miserable existence. Three military domes were built to safely house the occupying Jayhawker troops. Meanwhile robot drones ceaselessly patrolled the planet’s surface and underwarrens in search of hold-out guerrillas.

  In the days of the Corporation, Makari had been an pseudo-African idyll. A playground for Earthians who wanted to hunt, or simply admire nature. After the Last Battle it had become a Gaian4 commune in which the colonists had declared their intention of living as one with the creatures of their rich biosphere.

  Now, Makari was a wasteland. Hendry’s plan was to make it one of his supply chain planets, furnishing wealth for his necklace of occupied worlds that revolved around the central hub of Hyboria.5

  But SNG forces had quietly infiltrated this system and were preparing to devastate Hendry’s doppelgänger-led Navy. And our job was to prepare the way by taking out Biodome Alpha and killing all the Soldiers within.

  We were entering the Hunting Lands now. Around us, filling the savannah as far as the eye could see, were the skeletons of tigers, lions, elephants, giraffes, wildebeest, bandersnatch, Shakils, and numerous other exotic oxygen-breathing animals. The bleached white bones formed a landscape of death.

  “I have a sighting,” said Gabriel, looking at his little black box.

  “Of?” I said.

  “Spaceship, hovering, two miles north.”

  “Not on our mission plan,” said Billy.

  “Let’s check it out,” I said.

  We checked it out. Our pace was fast, a trot not a walk. We were all clad in black warsuits and masked; night-shadows sprinting through the day time glare. We each carried two Xenos rifles on our back; as well as grenades, handguns, cutting gear, and the Wah-Wah anti-matter device, which was kept in a bright red rucksack with a skull insignia. Agra was now carrying the heavy pulse-cannon, which helped her cope with the low gravity and made her look like an ant carrying a straw on its back. The plan was to cut through the biodome shell and enter, infiltrate with nanotech to leach the dome’s computer of data, then trigger the anti-matter detonator and get the fuck out again.

  We would, we estimated, then have about eleven minutes to get beyond the range of the dome’s beaconband-nuller and thus re-access our teleport link. After eleven minutes, the anti-matter/matter interaction would occur and everything within twenty miles of the Dome would die.

  In other words: we needed to run like fuck to avoid being killed by our own bomb.

  That as I say was that plan. In fact, none of that happened. Instead, we saw the Fool, out hunting a lion.

  We were on a ridge, looking downwards. Stealthed so that our warsuits now blended with the yellow savannah. And I increased the magnification on my eyes and saw an extraordinary sight. It was Hendry – followed by a platoon of thirty-nine Soldiers, stalking a lion that was eating its prey. I focused on the lion. A yellow-skinned predator with a fine mane. An Earth-native creature that now lived on an alien planet forty-five light years from its homeland. Hendry was unarmoured, and carried only a single pistol in a holster on his belt. He was also naked from the waist up, remarkably muscular, and was clearly revelling in the sensuality of his imminent kill.

  Hendry walked up close to the beast. It raised its head from the bloody haunch of whatever it was, and roared at him. I realised the lion’s fur was patchy. It had been poisoned by the Jayhawker rain-slaughter. But it was still a proud and beautiful beast. Hendry stepped up close. He made no attempt to draw his gun. I realised he was trying to use his charisma to captivate the beast. The gun was his back-up. But for a man like this, there was no challenge in using a weapon on a mere animal. No, Hendry wanted to prove that—

  Billy took a shot with his Xenos rifle. It hit Hendry, and he fell down dead. The rest of us opened fire on the platoon of Soldiers.

  They were fast, I’ll grant them that, and disciplined. The minute the shot cracked the air, they hit the ground and began firing up at us. But we had the ridge, and they were exposed on the savannah. Each bullet I fired was a hit. In return, they shot me twice, in the chest. My warsuit armour held but I felt as if I’d been kicked by an elephant.

  None of the Soldiers were dead. Their armour was as tough as ours. But most of them were badly wounded or dazed. Even so, they got to their feet in a dazzlingly coordinated movement as they rained gunfire up at the ridge with terrifying accuracy and remorseless speed. Meanwhile one of them primed and then fired a One Sun.

  Agra shot the OS missile with a navigational burr, and for a few moments it continued to hurtle towards us; but then arced up, and up, and carried on flying into the clouds. Eventually, a Soldier manually triggered it and the One Sun missile exploded, turning day into blazing inferno.

  A mortar shell exploded behind us and the earth and grass on which we lay was spattered to the heavens. Gabriel rolled down the bank like tumbleweed. I got up and ran after him firing bullets fast and furiously from my Xenos rifle. Then I switched to plasma beam and fired three quick shots and three Soldiers ignited and burned. It’s a tradeoff. Keep your force field on high, or move fast. They traded wrong.

  I reached Gabriel and grabbed him and stopped his mad descent. And he came up holding his Philos pistol and we both fired and rolled, and fired.

  A bullet hit my abdomen and went through. My warsuit armour was cracking. Blood welled inside the suit. The wound was immediately staunched by my autodoc, but I was gutshot now and in a lot of pain.

  The trick, you see, is remembering where you shoot people. I’d landed three headshots on the Soldier who had commenced the firefight at position A5 in my mental grid. I fired another bullet and hit him again on the head and this one went through and he was down, dead and probably true dead.

  Three minutes had elapsed. Enough time for the enemy to scramble their landing craft. We realised this had occurred when missile shells began erupting around us. Their ship was stealthed, invisible to the naked eye. But I knew Gabriel would be able to target it with his little black box, once he got under cover.

  A moment later I heard Gabriel’s voice over my MI, giving coordinates.

  “Reading you Five,” said Agra from up on the ridge, and high above us, the air exploded. I filtered my eyes, kept low. Debris scattered and fell. The burning shell of the landing ship was visible now,
like a cloud lit by dawn. I could hear screams with my enhanced hearing. The pop of gunfire was all around.

  “Two hostiles, X43 and C21, X43 is mine,” said Billy and a man in armour flew upwards into the air. Billy had grenaded him. I put a plasma burst into his body as Billy rained bullets on the flying corpse. Then I hurled a grenade blind, to sector C21 which was near the lion’s bloody corpse. The lion exploded. No Soldier. I threw again and so did Billy then a bullet hit me in the face mask and I went down and blacked out.

  When I woke up thirty seconds had elapsed. Billy was easing my mask off. I breathed gulps of thick yeasty air. The bullet had penetrated the mask and hit my forehead but without velocity. Billy tugged it out of my skull and blood gushed down my face and sheeted me warmly. I was breathing hard.

  “Hendry?” I gasped.

  “On it.”

  Another shot. Agra finishing off survivors.

  Another shot. Another survivor true-dead.

  Another shot.

  Soldiers, the brainwashed kind, are remorseless creatures. Even when they have lost all frontal lobe brain function, the reserve oxygen capsules in their cerebellums allow their bodies to continue fighting. I’ve heard stories of blind and armless Soldiers with their guts spilling out lunging up out of the midst of charnel-fields to recommence their slaughter. So, you can’t take chances, or prisoners.

  Yeah, yeah – war is hell. Tell me about it.

  Billy helped me to my feet. My bowels had erupted long ago. The bullet in my gut was causing me considerable agony. I had a headache, from the bullet that had smacked me in the forehead and embedded itself in my skull.

  Agra joined me. “DNA negative.”

  “It’s not him?” I said.

  “No. It’s a double.”

  I thought a second. “Mission abort,” I said. We’d lost our element of surprise. We stood no fucking chance now.

  “I’ll call it,” said Gabriel, and spoke via his MI to the invasion fleet remote computer.

  Our bodies started to shimmer.

  We ported away.

  Agra misflitted. I’ll miss her.

  Billy was the one who killed her malformed body. It wasn’t easy. Her rage survived even though her brain was mush.6

  We had all suffered major injuries, but at least Gabriel, Billy and me had survived intact after two teleports, i.e. there and back. Three Kamikazes left out of the original squad of seven. Acceptable.

  We won the battle of Makari, of course. Though I guess that had never been in doubt.

  I read the battle log and marvelled at the ingenuity of the SNG Admiral7 who had planned and executed this textbook invasion. Stealth bombers had taken out all fourteen of the enemy’s orbiting command and control bases. And a fleet of Caracaras and Kestrels had engaged with Hendry’s doppelgänger space navy. A battle royal had erupted, with our ships mingling in with the enemy fleet and firing from all sides. Ten thousand SNG doppelgänger riders8 were involved in this operation, each working one hour shifts in a relentless rota system. Eventually the entire enemy navy was obliterated and the SNG took control of the planet.

  By then, however, it was too late. The other two Kamikaze Squads had, covertly and simultaneously, taken out Biodomes Beta and Gamma, but Biodome Alpha remained intact. And as soon as the space invasion commenced, the enemy Soldiers in that biodome had followed standing orders. They had left the dome en masse and hunted each and every member of the original colony community. These peoples were dwelling peacefully – this wasn’t the guerrilla army, remember, it was what was left of the original population of the fucking planet – in their ruined cities and in their warrens under the ground. And the Soldiers in their warsuits sought them out and slew them all. And I mean, all.9

  By the time the SNG navy landed on the planet, the streets and basements and savannahs of Makari were drenched with human blood. Not a single man, woman or child remained. And their bodies were left to rot. In time their white bones would be indistinguishable from the bones of the massacred African predators.

  My fault of course. We should have ignored Hendry and proceeded to the biodome. But according to standing orders. if you see a Tarot, you have to take that Tarot out.

  I was given a commendation for my leadership of the squad on that mission. It was worth a hundred thousand scudo bonus on my Three-Mission payoff.

  If, of course, I lived that long.

  “To Agra,” we concluded. We clinked glasses. We had mourned them all, our gallant comrades. Carter, Anderson, Brown, Agra. I’d known them for six months, and now they were dead.

  But we were alive! That’s all that mattered. One mission down. Two more missions, and we were home free. Redeemed. Amnestied. Rich.

  They called us the Crazy Squads. Or the Kamikazes. There were a lot of us. Tens of thousands, in the Rock alone. And fuck only knew how many more bases like this there were.

  A few things you need to know here. Tech stuff, but it matters.

  Thing One: all enemy installations have beaconband-nullers as part of their security system. That means – crap! – no beaconband communication inside the nuller beam’s radius.

  Which means doppelgänger robots don’t work, they become just dumb robots without their human riders. That’s why the SNG need real people to fight their up close and personal battles.

  Thing Two: as we all know, quantum teleportation, which is what we use to get on-planet, only works fifty per cent of the time. Hence, the misflits.

  But there’s just no other way to use real soldiers. It could take decades to send troops from one battlezone to another. So that’s why you need kamikazes. Crazy fucks like us. Because we will take a risk that no sane person would ever accept.

  Toss a coin: live or die.

  Toss a coin: live or die.

  Toss a coin: live or die.

  That’s what they call the 3. It gets harder, I’m told, every time. Thank fuck I’ve never been any good at maths!10

  But there are, as I say, an awful lot of us.

  That’s worrying really. I mean, you wouldn’t think there’d be a queue of people wanting to do a fucking crap job like the one I’m doing. Half the friends I’d made in my time on the Rock died in that first mission. And half of those remaining were about to die.

  Resurrection was, however, an option.

  Carter, Brown and Agra were now back with us. Anderson, however, had ticked the box that said DO NOT RESURRECT. Which I was glad about. I’d liked Anderson – and was relieved to see him stay dead.

  “Good to see you.” I shook Carter’s hand.

  “You’re squad leader now?” she asked, contemptuously.

  “I am.”

  Carter stared at me, with even greater contempt, and stalked off.

  Brown had always a good-looking devil. And even as a cyborg, he was a heart-throb. Only the lack of facial movement betrayed the fact that he was made of plastic and metal. “Good to see you, Brown,” I said, and shook his hand.

  “You could have saved us,” said Brown coldly.

  “Don’t know what you mean,” I lied.

  “You didn’t give us a chance. You evil bastard!”

  “Whatever.” I shrugged.

  And off he stalked.

  And Agra – that was the worst.

  When I met Agra, she glared at me with open hate. I recognised her, but only just. Because instead of her normal fur-covered body, she wore the standard plastic-skinned cyborg chassis. No body hair, no claws, no fangs. But she was as strong and fast as ever.

  “Fuck you Artemis,” she said. “You evil fucking ginch. You should have died on that mission – not me!”

  I smiled nicely at her. “Yeah,” I said, and this time I was the one who turned and walked away.

  I’d missed Agra when she died. But I missed her even more now that she’d come back to life.

  Cyborgs, you see, are by and large fucked in the head. Don’t ask me why. Their minds get copied and downloaded into a robot body. But something goes missing, and the lac
k of it twists them out of shape.

  Soul, maybe?

  We had a month’s R & R after the first mission, followed by a month’s fitness and sim training and sobering up.

  I was high for most of that first month. High on drugs, drunk almost all the time, and dripping with endorphins because of all the sex Billy and I were having.

  And of course, high on rejuve. Those little nanobots had taken out the bullets and sewed up my colon, and my torn stomach lining had been glued back together. Then heavy rejuve and my augmented body did the rest. My injuries healed, my scars disappeared, and Billy and I ran riot.

  There was a limit, I must admit, to how much fun we could have on the Rock. It was after all an artificial habitat, no Eden planet. But even so there was a pool and a lake and a mock mountain and there were bars and restaurants and clubs, and bands playing music every night.

  Our favourite meal was breakfast, of the full cooked variety. Washed down with huge cups of coffee. Bacon, scrambled egg (me), poached egg (him) sausages, three kinds of sauces, grana bread, chitterlings, waffles, syrup. After four hours’ sleep and a needle shower, this was exactly what our bodies needed. Then we took a stroll, admired the botanical gardens, swam, sunbathed under lights, and then it was time for lunch.

  Oh and champagne. Champagne for breakfast, to go with the coffee.

  Gabriel always joined us for lunch, looking sad, mostly. But it was always nice to see him.

  Gabriel was a strange guy. Sweet, very sweet, I was fond of him. And brilliant. A total boffin-brain. And also quite uncannily beautiful. I mean, really, he was a stunner.

  Beauty is no big deal these days, I know. With genetic manipulation and reconstructive surgery and rejuve, there are SO many beautiful people out there. But even so – Gabriel had something special. A lean athlete’s body. Piercing hawk eyes. A crooked smile. Perfect cheekbones, and smooth chocolate-coloured skin, betraying his distant Mayan heritage. And a body and face that made you want to weep with joy. Girls used to stop and stare when he passed by. Guys too, to be honest.