Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  I knew I had only a few minutes in which to work, to achieve direct Rebus-chip access with the planet’s QRC. Andres and Durando and Billy seized some stools by a food stall and bought beer and rolls filled with meat, and kept up an incessant loud chatter full of swear words and threats against unnamed enemies. Sheena created a further distraction by flirting with a headless Mutant, bravely flaunting all the femininity of her big-breasted body, and endeavouring to allure with her wiles, despite her own lack of a head.

  And I withdrew into my mind.

  My brain by now had died – or rather, my Rebus chip access to the outer city’s QRC was extinguished by the nullers in the walls.

  Then I attempted to enter the mind of the Citadel QRC. I seduced it. And wooed it. And tried to introduce myself to it. But the computer’s mind-barriers were high and it greeted me with suspicious hostility.

  I persevered.

  This took a little while.

  Eventually, I prevailed.

  Meanwhile, the limpet-mine that Billy had planted outside the Citadel walls now exploded. There was a huge bang and a considerable amount of smoke billowed above the jewelled walls. Some of the Soldiers on the parapets flew into a panic and fired their plasma cannons randomly at an unseen enemy; creating more noise and generating screams of panic outside the walls. Billy grinned. He was in his element.

  Then Billy and I walked shoulder to shoulder, flanked by our four comrade warriors and Majalara, into the next courtyard; and then into the courtyard inside that. Seven headless giants striding away from danger in search of new instructions. Billy’s eyes were once more darting in all directions, absorbing information, identifying threats, while my mind was in two places. Here, and there. In the Citadel. And in the mind of its controlling mind.

  And we seven mutant warriors were the smallest part of a truly gigantic army. There were hundreds of thousands of us. Regiment upon regiment of headless mutants had returned to sit out the planetary attack, until the enemy’s inevitable defeat.

  We passed through the final gateway and we saw the base of the tall and eerie White Tower ahead of us, at the centre of the Forest of Towers. A structure made of stone stuccoed with white gold and secured by fields of force.

  Inside this edifice, the QRC informed me, was to be found Sinara Lo, the High Priestess in our Tarot pack. We were close, so close, to achieving our goal.

  Then everything changed.

  I mean, really changed. Terrifyingly changed. For up to this point we had created as much chaos and madness as we could, and we had experienced savage violence in our battle with the Mutant warriors. But from our point of view, it was all familiar stuff.

  Picture it: Above us, the sky was lit by the fires of space battles between distant robot ships in space. More of the limpet-mines planted by Billy were exploding regularly in the city, creating a constant crash and roar in the background. The sky was black with smoke which flickered and flashed with blazing explosions of light, like night that yearned to become glorious day. And the Mutant Army were all around us, their vast ugly bodies contained in rich red armour, like giant red ants hurrying back to their nest.

  It was a vision of Hell, but that was just the way we liked it. We were guerrilla soldiers who knew our game, and were masters of our trade. It was scary, yes, but this was our job.

  But then Majalara’s body shimmered and he lost his mutant Soldier disguise.

  And a new Majarala was born. Tall. Powerful. Numinous. He was like mist in the form of a six armed reptilian monster. Except he was not reptilian, he was—

  Majalara struck. His arms swung and a mutant Soldier fell and his armour ripped open and his viscera spurted and he screamed and then Majalara struck again and the screams stopped and the soldier was dead.

  It is not in any conceivable way possible to kill a Soldier in full body armour with a single punch. Yet Majalara had done so.

  The reaction was almost instantaneous. The surrounding mutant Soldiers seized their rifles and a fusillade of projectile bullets erupted from guns, creating a sound like an earthquake. Or like thunder cracking the sky, if you happened to be inside the thundercloud.

  To no avail. Did the bullets miss? Bounce off? Pass through? I couldn’t tell.

  Majalara struck again and more bullets flew past him or through him and crashed against the jewelled walls, spitting out rubies and diamonds. Another Soldier’s body was ripped in half and arterial blood spurted, and Majalara struck again.

  Seconds had passed and I realised that Majalara was a shapeshifting alien and this was his true body. The squat clown shape was mere subterfuge. And, furthermore, he had six or maybe nine or maybe eleven arms but also a multiplicity of cilia that emerged from his body and lashed like whips. And each lash severed the body of an armoured Soldier. And fire could not burn him, and bullets could not impact on his flesh.

  I had my Xenos rifle at my shoulder and fired a plasma pulse at Majalara. I have no idea what actually happened then. But I know that the air in front of me burned and my suit overheated and my holo projection vanished. Had he thrown the plasma burst back at me? I fired again and Majalara now hurled a handful of bodies at me and they arrived in large gobbets of flesh and armour, dripping blood as they spun through the air.

  And so, that day, there was carnage.

  Majalara had claws, perhaps, or merely teeth, or perhaps horns. And his cilias lashed and whipped and he roared or perhaps snarled, or perhaps there was an absence of sound. But more than anything there was

  Terror.

  I have, I must tell you, experienced a terror such as this before. Not quite so intense. Not actually as appalling. But – comparable. I have felt it – perhaps once before. Or perhaps it was twice. No actually, more than twice, many more than twice. For I remember—

  Yes, I remember when I was locked in the Rebus library by my father. As a child.

  You remember I told you how he used to do this? My father felt that that I did not have, or if I had I did not sufficiently demonstrate, “respect.” So to teach me respect, he caged me like an animal.

  And I never got used to it. I used to try and persuade myself that this time it would be different. This time I was “tough enough” to take it.

  And for the first few hours of my every incarceration, I WAS tough. And angry, and rebellious.

  And then I would go through a stubborn phase. I wouldn’t give in! I wouldn’t yield to this bastard!

  But then, every time, the Terror would come upon me.

  Imagine the sheer loneliness of being a child trapped in a vault of books in a lonely library full of dark alcoves where even scholars rarely ventured. The shadows oppressed me. I was convinced that creatures of supernatural horror existed in this dark, spooky, library. And for four or five or sometimes six or seven days and nights I would live with that terror.

  The fears I felt in those long dark nights have never left me. Whenever I am truly afraid, I remember—

  And Majalara struck again, and smote with claws and cilia and bit with teeth. And dozens died. Then scores. Then hundreds. It was a massacre beyond imagining. A single unarmoured alien confronted with Soldiers who had force fields and plasma guns and grenades and mortars, and yet Majalara kept killing. The air was bright with flashes of light as missiles were fired at his body, but somehow he was never there and the explosions did not dissipate his form. So surely he was more mist than monster? Or perhaps—

  I saw Max ripped into bloody pieces before my eyes.

  I heard Durando scream over the MI network, for a snake was winding its way down his throat. Was it a cilia, perhaps, that resembled a snake? And then his body erupted and his brain remained alive long enough to register that he was now in shards and then the brain itself was in pieces and Durando died.

  I saw a head, bobbing on the ground, wrenched from its body. I recognised it as Sheena. As for Andres, I have no idea. I never saw him again.10

  Then Billy waved to me. And we ran towards the White Tower.

  Th
ere was no hope of defeating this creature. Nor was there any way of enduring what I felt – what I—

  “You feel it too?” screamed Billy.

  I nodded. We stopped, in the shadow of the White Tower. And Billy stared at me and I stared at him. And we hugged. And I wept. And so did he. I cradled him, he cradled me. The Terror!

  The other time – you know what I’m referring to.

  The other time I felt the Terror – yes of course it was on Cúchulainn, during my captivity. I was, by that time, a hard mollyfocker. I had endured all that I had to endure. But then—

  The Terror came to me.

  And it came to me one year, two months, three days and six hours after I was first taken in the custody of Baron Lowman.

  I remember the moment so vividly. It occurred when Daxox visited me for the first and only time. There I was, sitting sullenly on the Manxbull hide sofa of the Baron’s private suite and Daxox entered and sat down opposite me. He was sombre, and bore a haunted look.

  And then he said to me, quietly: “I’m so sorry Artemis.”

  And I stared at him with hate, but also with a faint, slippery stirring of hope.

  “I should never have done this!” Daxox continued, in broken tones. “I am a monster! But now I have come to save you. Please, forgive me.”

  And my heart leapt with joy!

  For I’d always known, you see, that Daxox hadn’t meant to do what he did. It was, as I’d always suspected, just a test! To gauge the full extent of my loyalty!

  And thus my heart was filled with love and gratitude once more.

  And then Daxox smiled, a thin evil smile. And I got it.

  Yeah, I got it.

  And as I was led back to my rooms, following Daxox’s triumphant and leering departure, I felt it, then. Not despair. Not fear. Not distress. But sheer blind

  Terror.

  “Shapeshifting,” said Billy, “and empathetic, it can affect our thoughts, our emotions, our perception. That’s why we can’t—”

  “Where does the fucking creature come—” I began to say and then my way into the QRC’s most securely barriered datapools was clear and I was deep in its mind and possessed by its spirit and I knew.

  “It’s the last survivor,” I told Billy. “These creatures11 killed a planetary expeditionary force. And then their planet was obliterated. It was genocide as self-defence. But one remained. A spore. Clinging to the flagship.” I saw the images in the mind of the QRC, from the camera footage that had survived all these years. “And the ship returned here, to Kandala. And the spore grew. And it took the shape of a familiar alien being and has lived here since. Waiting for an opportunity to breach the security of the Citadel, so that it can wreak—”

  “How do we kill it?” interrupted Billy. Pragmatic as ever.

  I rummaged the mind of the QRC and it yielded me the answer, with quiet friendship.

  “Oxygen,” I said. “It needs oxygen. That’s how these creatures were killed. The fleet blew up its planet. The survivors choked to death in space.”

  “Yeah, okay, so we cut off the air to the dome,” said Billy, his mind racing. “Most people in the Citadel will have oxygen capsules in the brain. The others – well, tough. We have to kill this mollyfocking thing. I’ve never seen anything like it!”

  “I’ll do it,” I said and spoke to the QRC, but it would not obey me.

  “Okay, this way,” I said and I blew open the doors of the White Tower with an exploding bullet and ran inside.

  And we carried on running within the Tower. It was a building of glass and diamond floors and mirrored ceilings. Dazzling and alienating and bewildering. Without the QRC to guide me, we would have been hopelessly lost. But, following the grid plan on my visual array, we climbed a narrow staircase, then a broader staircase, then a broader staircase still. There were no walkways or lifts, the entire building was a rabbit warren of dimly lit Möbius strip corridors and dizzyingly steep staircases; but we found a route through.

  Until finally we reached the Hall of Power. A vaulted cathedral with a beamed roof made of purest yellow gold. Light poured through the stained-glass windows like sunshine in a kaleidoscope. And the walls were decorated with paintings of space; black canvases lightly speckled with stars; futile images that sucked in the light from the windows and somehow chilled the blood.

  Six headless mutant Soldiers guarded this Hall, and blocked our path, and raised their weapons; but we barely registered their presence as we slaughtered a way through.

  More Soldiers came running in from every door; the Hall was now alive with troops all carrying plasma weapons and wearing burnished red body armour. And we set to it.

  Fighting. Slaying. Running. Ducking. Rolling. Slaying again. My heart pounding. My body at its peak of alertness. All conscious thought deserted me and I was an animal steeped in blood and driven by fear.

  And finally the last of the guardians of this room were dead; and there she was, in front of us, at the far end of the nave of the hall. Tall. Beautiful. Her hair jet black and straight; her skin the colour of ebony, burnished, with eyes like pools of night. Standing, calmly, in the spot which in a real cathedral would have been the altar, which here was occupied by a virtual replica of a city with touch-air controls – the City Array.

  It was of course the High Priestess herself, Sinara Lo. Billy raised his gun.

  “Sinara! We have to work together!” I screamed at her, and Sinara looked at me in shock at first, but then in astonishment as my words penetrated her awareness.

  Billy lowered his gun. He was a man who could take a hint.

  “What is this thing that is attacking us?” she whispered. “And what does it want?”

  I knew the answers to her questions. But I was in no mood to explain it all to such an evil ginch.

  But let me explain it to you. So you can understand the true horror of what was about to happen.

  You see, the QRC with whose brain I was communing was in effect a cybernetic zoo. In other words, its databases contained the DNA codes for every alien species discovered by humanity. Including all the high-sentience species deliberately genocided by the Corporation.

  And the White Tower itself contained, amidst the mazes of its rooms and corridors, the laboratories where these alien beings could be grown from cells to fulfil Sinara’s mad fantasies. Thus, the Citadel of Kandala was home to a myriad different alien species.

  And Majalara’s plan was to liberate all these aliens, and unify them into an army; and then lead them in a war to the death against humanity.

  And yeah, I know what you’re thinking. He might have been an evil fucking alien, but he had a point.

  I mean, for fuck’s sake! We exterminated all these fucking creatures! Destroyed their homeworlds. Just for the sake of a bit more land for Homo sapiens. We destroyed all of Majalara’s kind too. For centuries our species has been sweeping through the galaxy, killing wise and wonderful and beautiful sentient creatures as if they were ants on our kitchen floor. Stamp, stamp, stamp – and yup, another unique and brilliant species becomes extinct.

  But just imagine if all the species that humanity has wronged were able to get their payback. Just imagine it!

  I didn’t, however, have time to imagine it.

  Indeed, it wasn’t until much later that I started to have moral qualms about the rightness of my cause. But at the time – in the gold-vaulted Hall of the White Tower, hot and desperate, doing a deal with that bitch Sinara – I was running on instinct. I saw an enemy. I wanted to kill it.

  So I set about the task of killing the mollyfocker.

  “Cut off the air,” I told Sinara. “Cut off the air to the dome.”

  Sinara was a proud and beautiful woman. Her whiteless Noir eyes stared eerily at me like holes ripped out of the fabric of space. She didn’t like to be told what to do.

  “Or don’t you know how to do that?” I sneered.

  “I know how to do it,” conceded Sinara.

  And she touched her virtual sc
reen and conjured up a series of images as she scrolled through the commands, typing and waving the security codes as she went. And I felt the QRC yield to her authority, as it would not do to mine.

  And I saw and felt through the sensors of the QRC what happened next.

  First, the vents which circulated fresh breathable air into the hermetically sealed domed city were closed. Outside the impermeable force field dome was breathable atmosphere; the gusting winds of Kandala still blew. But inside the Citadel, the air was getting stale.

  Then the air pumps were switched into reverse setting. And the air already in the Citadel was sucked up by the nozzles, and swallowed, and stored. Thus, the atmosphere grew thinner, and thinner. Birds started to fall out of the sky. Trees no longer stirred in the breeze, for there was no breeze. The Citadel’s artificial clouds dissipated. Children began to cough. Old people found their throats were dry and they were gasping for breath.

  All this we knew, because Sinara had conjured up a series of giant holo screens; so we could see in panorama and also in multiple close-ups all that happened in the Citadel. We saw the carnage wrought by Majalara; the bodies strewn; the blood hanging in the air like mist. And we saw too the surviving mutant warriors slowing down, and gasping for breath, then collapsing. And we saw all the many citizens who cowered in safety choking, and wheezing, and weeping in fear; before drifting off into the sleep that leads to death.

  Then the White Tower itself shuddered as it received a massive blow from Majalara. He was trying to get in.

  Sinara switched to another camera; and we saw Majalara outside, punching and kicking and ripping at the walls of the White Tower. His strength was awesome. The bricks which comprised the Tower were strong enough to survive a direct blast from a Tang missile. But Majalara had managed to break through the brickwork in a dozen different places, and he was slowly gouging out a doorway large enough for him to pass through. In minutes he would be inside.