Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  Billy, by contrast, especially by the demanding standards of our age, really was an ugly fucker.

  So why was I with Billy, not the gorgeous Gabriel?

  Well, it was my policy, you see, and had been since I was a teenager, to only seriously date ugly guys. My theory was, the beautiful guys are always in love with themselves. Ugly guys, however, are less selfish. And more loyal. And more caring, and reliable, and blah, and blah, and blah.

  Of course that theory totally fell in the ditch when I went out with Daxox – old frogface, with a heart like Satan! But I guess it helps to explain why I had chosen to fool around with that old Space Marine Billy, rather than the sexy hunky Gabriel.

  Because, with Gabriel, it was definitely on offer.

  Trust me on this. I saw the way Gabriel looked at me. Like a puppy staring at a bone. With me as the bone in that metaphor. Or like – well, he just loved to spend time with me. That whole month of R & R, he was there every lunchtime. And we’d tell stories and the guys would join us and they’d tell us more stories. But Gabriel would always make sure he was sitting near me, or better still, right next to me, asking me questions about stuff. Billy used to wander off, get pissed with old Space Marine pals, or flirt with women. But Gabriel was always there by my side, smiling, happy, not inflicting, not stalking, just – there.

  After lunch Billy and I would go off for our afternoon siesta-fuck. Then we’d have a bath together and watch TV or a film, then have pre-first-drink-of-the-evening-sex, and then we’d have first-drink-of-the-evening. Then we’d get dressed and go down to the bar. And Gabriel would be there, with a bottle of champagne just for us. What a sweetheart!

  Gabriel was a mathematical genius. When he was a young guy, he was smart enough to be a Scientist, which wasn’t a bad gig back in those days. But instead, he’d left school at fourteen to run with a Clan gang. This was on Romulus, he was a Romulusan. Tough planet. But Gabriel rose to the top and was a vangelista in the Clan when the Corporation fell. He wasn’t the worst of them by a long chalk. But everyone knew his name and he was ratted out by all his pals and former girlfriends. That’s how he got a life sentence, and that’s how he ended up in the Kamikazes.

  And so, most nights, Gabriel would pour the champagne, making that our second drink of the evening. And by that stage, Billy and I were always flushed, in that special way that tells strangers you’ve been banging like, well, Cambrian Dilongs, who as you know are a species who do nothing but fuck.11 And when he saw us like that, all flushed and happy, Gabriel’s sad smile would emerge, but only briefly.

  And that last night, before training started up again, we all got slaughtered and Gabriel sang a song. He had a beautiful pure tenor voice, and he sang an operatic aria called “Hearts Are Broken And Lives Are Lost.” A real weepie. I didn’t weep, of course. No one did, we were warriors for fuck’s sake. But I felt a lump in my throat as he sang the lyric, about a teen gang massacre in which a girl kills the boy she loves in a berserker rage. It’s a lament for the loss of innocence I guess. Gabriel’s beautiful voice, well, it exalted me. Made me feel special and pure and human, and not like a sick murdering fuck who had done far worse, far worse, than that poor fucking chick in the song.

  That was a perfect night. I didn’t have sex with Billy when we got back to our room. I just went quietly to sleep, remembering. And when the hangover kicked in, about seven a.m., I still remembered. The soft light soaring splendour of Gabriel’s heart-achingly tender voice.

  Chapter 9

  Mission 2: The Magician

  We hit the ground standing. And a moment later I saw that Gabriel had misflitted.

  His body had grown. His eyeballs were bulging. He had four arms, and four legs. He was a freak, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was off the team. Tomas however was irrevocably gone, a puddle of shit and goo on the rocks. Caterina was sharded, and bloody. And—

  Gabriel came at me and grabbed me with one hand and threw me up against the rocks. His power was phenomenal. I crashed, and scrabbled, and got a handhold, just in time to see Billy hose Gabriel with a plasma burst. But Gabriel had his forceshield up. His mind was still functioning. Those were the worst.

  “Gabriel, stay, cool, you’re a viable form. Stop fighting us,” I subvoced, but I could tell he was lost to berserker rage.

  Jean had survived the flit intact, but Gabriel grabbed her with two of his arms and ripped her body apart. Her arms came away, then her head, even though she was warsuit-protected. That wasn’t possible! Or was it? The strength in his arms must be—

  Gabriel was running up the cliff towards me, with astonishing grace. He was cunning enough to know I would kill him if I could, despite my lying words. Billy was pounding him with bullets but they were bouncing off Gabriel’s body armour. All his body parts and the warsuit he wore had doubled in size without any loss of functionality. Utterly unlikely, but that was the quantum effect for you.

  I leaped off the cliff firing my Xenos in fast bursts straight at Gabriel’s face mask. The mask shattered. Bullets went through. Blood erupted. I’d shot a hole in his head!

  It didn’t slow him down. Gabriel caught up with me and grabbed my arm and was about to rip it off.

  BOOM. Billy fired the pulse cannon and it pierced the body armour and ripped off the bottom of Gabriel’s body. He was nothing but arms and torso now but he was still alive. But his mask was broken open and his eyes-on-stalks were glaring at me. The hole in his skull was as big as my fist and he didn’t appear to have a brain any more. I wondered what was keeping him going.

  I dropped a grenade inside his mask and fired my warsuit jets. Then I flew away, pursued by an exploding Gabriel.

  By now of course he was dead. My lovely Gabriel.1

  I rejoined Billy and Max and we took stock. Tomas had been rendered into a nothing, more oilslick than human being; we had no choice but to leave him. Caterina showed no trace of brain function, and was in about two hundred pieces, but we ported her shards back to base anyway. She had been a tall and beautiful woman. And I fancied I saw sorrow in her eyes, which were part of a large sliver of skull with a section of her brain attached.

  Jean was dead, but not true dead. The icy cold had frozen the stump of her neck, cauterising the flesh, so we ported her head back. With luck, unless she misflitted a second time, she would survive.2

  Then we assessed our location and mission progress. We were, just as we were supposed to be, in a snowy wilderness. The wind hurled tufts of ice and snow into the air where they formed a dazzling haze that reduced visibility to fucking awful. We were at the foot of a sheer mountain. I could see the peak, and it was haloed by clouds.

  All that data confirmed we were on Ice. Intel had suggested that the Magician aka Living Spirit was making a covert visit to this world to rally the locals. And we were seizing the opportunity to take him out. Intel was usually wrong about such matters of course, but we had to make the attempt.

  Our mission was covert. The space defence network in the Ice system was a masterpiece of overkill, and our doppelgänger Navy rarely even tried to invade.

  We were all aware that we were probably wasting our time here. The truth of the matter was that every month, sometimes every week, a Kamikaze Squad was teleported on to some godforsaken planet or other, in the vain hope of capturing or killing the elusive Magician.

  The three of us began to climb – me, Billy, and Max.

  I’d known Max in sim training, but not well. He’d survived his first mission – to Cargill’s World – but his entire squad of thirteen had misflitted, leaving him to complete his mission solo. Which he did – he destroyed an entire spaceship fabricator in orbit around Cargill’s World, teleporting out just 4.2 seconds before the anti-matter bomb detonated.

  Max had become a kind of hero among the other Kamikazes, for his daring, his bad language, and his contempt for authority. He’d been an Admiral in the Corporation Navy, despite his rebellious streak. And he’d been a hero to THOSE guys too.

  Thi
s is Max’s story.

  He was born on a badly terraformed planet – Delirium Tremens – yeah I know, there should be a sobriety test before anyone is allowed to christen a world.

  DT was a world riven with winds and haunted by black-winged alien scavengers who’d somehow survived terraforming and now hovered in the troposphere, far above the clouds. When they were hungry, they descended at speed, getting hotter and hotter until they plunged towards the surface to seize their prey. These beasts – the High Hoods – were strong enough to lift an infant from a pram. And they’d often eat their prey mid-flight, scattering bones and entrails as they flew.

  When Max was ten years old he’d been swept upon by a High Hood and carried away in its claws. But instead of panicking, he calmly cut the creature’s feet off with a pocket laser and then fell to safety into a forest. Well okay, as he admitted, he broke every bone in his body. But it was still safer than staying in the creature’s, and I quote, “fatherfucking cockgnawing claws.” That was Max for you.

  Max’s parents were farmers and miners and hunters. They raised cattle, and a billion stasis-preserved beef carcasses a year were shipped from Delirium Tremens to Earth, to feed the palates of the Earthian élite who eschewed factory-grown meat and liked the taste of “wild.” (For these cows and bulls were genetically modified savage beasts, who fought daily with local predators and could charge as a pack with terrifying unity.)

  Max hated farming. He resented the dominance of the doppelgänger élite who commanded the best land, the most resources, and treated the locals as slaves. In those days, Max admits, he had no idea how bad things were ELSEWHERE. His home planet was relatively liberal, untouched by the excesses of other parts of the Corporation’s empire. It was a work planet, not a “play” planet.

  So Max joined the Navy. He became a warrior. And then he was, in one memorable incident, abducted by aliens.

  “I’m proud of what I did in the war against the sister-sodomising anus-licking Heebie-Jeebies,” Max had told us one night. “For they were a truly fucking evil fucking species. And I should fucking know. I lived with those evil brother-raping ginches for eleven years.”

  “You?” That was me asking.

  “Me.”

  “How?”

  And so he told us.

  Max had been leading a fleet into H-J territory. His job was to strike a deal with the guerrilla Sparkler outfits in that region.3 However, it all went bollocks up. And Max’s fleet got caught in an ambush. And the H-Js took him prisoner.

  “Their fucking name is so fucking comical, it don’t prepare you for the arse-emptying reality. They are fucking… terrifying. And they’re shape-shifters, too. Sometimes they are little skulky things, sometimes – well, they can grow in a flash, and trust me, I’ve never seen anything so monstrous. They chill the air around them. They consume sulphur. They told me they were going to dissect me. But I knew that was a mollyfocking lie. ’Cause they’d already performed dissections on hundreds of human captives. There was nothing new for them to discover about us.

  “No, they were aiming to use me as a lab rat. Testing me, torturing me, making me fight aliens mano a mano. To learn more about human psychology, and weaponry, and battlecraft. I never lost, by the way, a single blowjobbing mano.”

  After six months it was obvious to Max that the H-Js were planning to eliminate humankind. As they were also attempting to do to the Sparklers – those beautiful albeit vicious bioluminescent creatures – and had succeeded in doing to the Hadas before that.

  Remember, it’s a dangerous universe. And mankind is by no means the most violent, or most dangerous of the species out there.

  “These fucking aliens were totally fucking alien. Obvious yeah. But there was no – nothing. No eye contact, ’cause they had no eyes. No body language. Their motives, I couldn’t fathom what the fuckall they might be. They didn’t need territory. They had started killing off Sparklers for no good reason, militarily. But I made it my mission to try and communicate. To try and understand the evil fucking shit-blobs.”

  I often think of what Max went through in those difficult years. We are so used to seeing alien life forms that we forget what “alienness” truly is. A different way of thinking. A different way of being.

  “They don’t see the world as we see it,” Max said. “They just don’t see – the same world. I learned their language. I empathed with their minds. After ten years I could see like a H-J, think like a H-J. They are reactive in a complex way to stimuli. They have no concept of loyalty. No love. No comradeship. Yet they work together as fireflies flash in unison. Or is there something more? There’s – I don’t fucking know – a tender quality to the H-J mind. They feel beauty. They are intensely aware of beauty, more than I am to be totally fucking honest. And they cherished, they actually did, the Sparkler species. I could feel it, the memories of their admiration for the wonder of the Sparkler biology, the precision of the Sparkler minds. Their war against the Sparkers was not fought for greed or land or rage. It was merely an attempt to perfect that beauty, by destroying it.

  “However, they consider us, the human species, to be a lower life form, wholly lacking in beauty. Maybe they have a point.”

  Max told us about the Heebie-Jeebie philosophy, their world view.

  These appalling yet mysterious creatures, he explained, believe the universe is divided into various states: animal, ethereal, intellectual, possibilistic, and patterned. They consider themselves to be not animal at all; they are “patterned.” Max tried to explain this, but couldn’t really. But approximately: an equation is patterned. A sonnet is patterned. But fucking the woman you love is merely animal.

  Their science, he continued, is phenomenally advanced; but bizarrely, they knew little about technology until they encountered humanity. They were swamp-dwelling creatures that we captured and attempted to study. But instead, they swarmed out of our zoos and laboratories and escaped off-planet in our spaceships, which somehow they now knew how to fly. And that was the period of the Terror Years, when three human planets were overwhelmed by the H-J plague.

  Then they took to the stars, and began to commit mass murder of every sentient species they encountered.

  Max admitted: “I came to adore the fucking Heebie-Jeebies. I lived like one. I thought like one.

  “And then I was rescued. And we killed every single one of the fatherfuckers that we could find. The few that survive – they’re just fucking swamp dwellers now. Their minds are gone. Their dreams are lost. Their pattern is broken.”

  Anyway, that’s Max.

  This was a winter world, rich in mountains, glaciers, and frozen lakes. The highest mountain on the planet was called Soul-Smasher, and it was the location of the Loper Ice Palace. The entire mountain was beaconband-nulled, so no doppelgängers could attack, and no Kamikazes could port to the summit. You had to start at the base and climb up.

  Or you could fly. Squad of Eagles had attempted to descend upon this mountain top, and had been killed in the thermals and the clashes of wind currents. Armoured Lopers in one-person fliers had suffered the same fate. Several Kamikaze Squads had attempted to land in aerofoil spaceships, but those too had been dashed against the rocks. Flying makes you vulnerable. And this was a planet where a mild breeze was equivalent to a tornado anywhere else.

  So we had to climb up, in our warsuits, with lead belts and uranium backpacks to weigh us down and hence make it more difficult for the wind to sweep us away. We wore crampon hands – gloved attachments to the warsuits which allowed us to dig deep spikes into the rock. Our boots were magnetic, to give us just a little more traction on the iron-ore-rich mountain. And we were wearing the new Sikko range warsuits, with heavy heating panels and extra oxygen cylinders in the legs and torso.

  Before we commenced the climb, we spoke the eulogy to our dead comrades: Gabriel, Tomas, and Jean.

  “Valhalla, Heaven or Hell. May your spirit know joy.”

  “Valhalla, Heaven or Hell. May your spirit know joy.”


  “Valhalla, Heaven or Hell. May your spirit know joy.”

  I wanted to weep for Gabriel, but I could not. For I had a mission, And besides, in that bitter cold, my tears would have frozen.

  Imagine a world so savage that only moss can endure the blazing hot summer’s days. And where even moss retreats into rock in the icy cold winter-time. Where the winds can pick up a boulder and dance it in the air like a pebble. Where the frosts can freeze the blood. Where glaciers can crack and sunder and tear a mountain range apart in a matter of months. A place where life cannot thrive. Yet Lopers live here.

  They live in caves and warrens, of course, and in tunnels dug aeons ago by the native life forms like the Horia and the Shalgara. The Lopers fought bitter battles to steal this underground terrain, before the terraforming process was complete. They clambered face first through narrow tunnels and wrestled with blind creatures of unbelievable savagery. And they killed them and they built bonfires out of their corpses on the surface in the hope of thawing the lakes of ice. They drove the Bantoqs out of their caves and slew them too. They fought, literally tooth and claw, and took the planet.

  These Lopers were mutineers of course – renegades escaping the Corporation’s domain. There were no doppelgänger robots on Ice back then. Just a hardy community of genetically engineered humans who could live in the coldest and the warmest and the most arid and the most flooded habitats the mind could conceive. And yet, on Ice, they struggled to survive.

  The mystery to me was why the Ice-Lopers had formed common cause with Living Spirit. He was a city boy. A gangster with blood on his claws. A butcher who had killed hundreds of thousands of (relatively) innocent people in his incessant campaigns of violence. But almost all Lopers, for whatever reason, felt that Living Spirit was their natural leader. Their god, some said. Agra, before she died and was cyborged, had always mocked this superstitious cult. But I could not doubt the Lopers’ sincerity.