Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  “How does he know we’re here?” Sinara reasoned.

  I took over her virtual controls and panned the camera. We saw the Red Tower, the Black Tower, the Green Tower, the Bailey, the Bulwark, the Highest Tower, the Campanile, the various outbuildings. All reduced to piles of rubble. “He doesn’t,” I said, “he’s just guessing. We’re next.”

  Majalara had now managed to rip a hole in the tower and tried to force his vast bulk through. I looked for signs that the monster was feeling the effects of the air drought; and saw none.

  “The air is venting out too slowly,” I concluded, reluctantly. “And this creature’s lungs are too big. We haven’t got time. Show yourself, Sinara. You have to be the bait.”

  Sinara stared at me. Then she saw the sense. She nodded.

  A missile flew at Majalara, fired by the remnants of Sinara’s defence force. But he seemed to disappear or dissipate or maybe he just dodged – and the missile crashed into the White Tower and further weakened our foundations. “He’s not corporeal,” I said to Billy. “Not in the way that we are, anyway. But there must be – something real there. We need to—”

  “I get it,” he said.

  Sinara opened the windows of a chapel-niche that led off the inner chamber, and stepped outside on to a small balcony. She stood – and we saw her on the holos – beautiful and magnificent and unafraid looking out over the wreckage of her Citadel as Majalara pounded her Tower.

  Then she screamed.

  Not a scream – a cry. A beautiful howling call. Like a bird call and a wolf howl merged into a single chilling but compelling noise.

  And Majalara backed up and stared at her on the balcony, seemingly enchanted by her strange song-like cry. For a moment he was utterly still. And, in consequence, he was for that moment entirely present in one place at one time.

  My mind was inside the QRC. And my body was standing next to Billy, clutching the limpet-mine he had handed me.

  Then I instructed the QRC to teleport the bomb so that it materialised INSIDE Majalara. And it did so.

  It all took the tiniest fraction of a second. The limpet-mine was in my hand and then it wasn’t, it was in quantum non-space. And then it rematerialised in the exact place where Majalara’s essence had cohered.

  Let me put that in English. This slippery fucker was a moving target we just couldn’t hit. But the second he stood still, I blew a bomb up inside him.

  The bomb scattered Majalara’s essence. He swirled like a tornado. I felt a screaming in my head. The Terror was terrified.

  But then Majalara reformed again. His shape was more amorphous now, and less vivid. But he was still the same murderous all-powerful bastard we couldn’t kill.

  Billy pressed another limpet-mine into my hand. I tried again.

  The second bomb blew up. But this time it exploded in empty air. Majalara wasn’t there.

  And then he was. Roaring and smashing and actually spitting – or was that spit? Or were those daggers flying out of his lips? No matter: our strategy was failing.

  Sinara was still standing upon the balcony, staring down at the beast. And then she called out: “Come and get me, you ugly bastard!”

  And Majalara roared again. And he leaped and began clambering up the tower, using his claws to gouge a pathway up.

  I gave it a third try. This time I ported my entire body, holding a third limpet-mine, and rematerialised inside the body of the beast.

  It was a writhing creepy oozy misty nothingness.

  It was – what can I say? – it was fucking horrible. I was inside the Terror and it was like every person I had ever met in my entire life screaming in my face that they fucking hated me and wanted me to fucking die.

  But I was connected to something – my body was being held up high in the air by its body. And so I embraced the Majalara-essence and for a brief moment, I felt it become fully corporeal.

  I triggered the bomb and ported out.

  I hit the ground standing then flew across the floor. Hit by a blast that was in reality outside the Tower, but somehow had followed me across the rift in space. My body was battered. I think I blacked out for a few moment.

  Then I staggered to my feet. And saw on the holo the tottering body of Majalara. He was not dead, but he had lost his power to decorporealise. He was a vast giant with flailing arms but the few surviving Soldiers were raining projectile bullets into his body and burning him with plasma and he stumbled and then he burned and then he exploded.

  And his body was mist and fog and hail and then it was nothing. It dissipated, and his unreality became memory.

  Majalara had indeed been an impossible creature. Yet made of some sort of substance, however mutable. Perhaps – I later speculated – his kind had the power to control their own probability. Perhaps they were indeed quantum warriors. Or perhaps not. I will never truly know. But he had still been a living creature. Breathing air. Having emotions. Thinking thoughts. And he had been the last of his kind.

  And now he was gone.

  But the Terror – the Terror remained.

  I felt as if I were in the midst of an emotional hurricane. I couldn’t breathe for fear. Waves of anxiety lashed me. My world rocked beneath me. Fear burned me like acid hail. It was, I realised, the aftermath of my possession of Majalara. And I knew I had to conquer my fear. I had done it before, I could surely do so again.

  And I did. I forced my fears to exist outside of me. I didn’t defeat the Terror but I succeeded in caging it.

  And so I became myself again.

  Then I looked around and saw Billy, who stared at me with awe.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “You bet,” Billy said, grinning.

  “Although,” I said, suddenly remembering. “Fuck! The mission! The Tarot! The High Priestess!” I shook my head. Thoughts were eluding me. “Sinara!”

  Billy grinned again. He took his tag bag out. He shook it, and opened it so I could see inside.

  Inside was the severed head of Sinara Lo.

  “Mission accomplished,” he said.

  “Are you all right?” asked Fraser, in that solicitous tone grown-ups use to children who have suffered a minor scrape and who are being totally babyish about the ensuing pain.

  “Grand,” I said, sourly.

  “You’re not sleeping I gather.”

  It was a week since I had returned from Kandala. I was, you understand, a hero. Two Tarots! First Living Spirit, now Sinara. I’d equalled Fraser’s record. Or excelled it really, since The Lovers had been a partnership, in effect a single capobastone. There was talk of naming one of the latrine blocks after me.

  And I was free of course. I had my 3. I was a wealthy woman. All criminal charges against me had been dropped. All I needed to do was finish my debrief, get a clean psychological bill of health and I could walk away from the whole fucking lot of them.

  The debrief, however, was taking time. And I was unable to focus on my leaving plans. I had difficulty – listening to people. I couldn’t sleep. Wide open spaces terrified me. Yet I hated my room because it was claustrophobically terrifying. The smell of other people made my heart race and my skin become tacky. But being alone appalled me.

  And insects! Don’t get me started on insects!

  I was living, in short, in a state of total and abject terror. I was everything-phobic. That’s why Fraser was being so nice to me. I was a total mental fuck up, and he knew that I knew that it was all his fault.

  “I choose not to,” I said, in response to the comment he had made about whether I was sleeping. “I get a lot more reading done.”

  “You’re a genuine hero Artemis, we’re all very proud of you,” he guffed.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Let me buy you a drink. We can celebrate your victory. Before you leave. Because you can leave Artemis. You’re free now. Aren’t you? Free?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Why are you so angry with me, lassie?”

  “Fuck off.”
/>   “Why—”

  “You press-ganged me,” I pointed out. “Blackmailed me. Tried to get me killed. And now because I happen to be still alive, you want me to give you a fucking hug?”

  Tears were pouring down my cheeks. I hated myself. I mean, shit, I’m a stone-cold killer. Emotion embarrasses me.

  “I don’t expect a hug,” Fraser said, faintly amused.

  “Damned fucking right.”

  I was also terrified they would cut me open. Like a lab rat. Probe into my brain. Wire me up to a computer.

  These were quite reasonable fears on my part. Governments actually do this kind of shit. And I didn’t swallow the SNG’s liberal lies. It was just another fucking government as far as I was concerned, and I was their secret weapon. But they didn’t know, even now, how I could do what I did.

  You know what I’m talking about. The stuff with computers. The flitting. My astonishing luck.

  I teleported into the body of an alien monster with a bomb in my hand, and walked away! What are the fucking odds on that?

  It all connects up of course, as you already know. Cúchulainn. Magog. That’s what did it. That’s where I developed my superpowers.

  And Fraser had figured out all or at least most of this – I mean, the man wasn’t a total fool. And he was obviously under pressure from his people to learn more about me. So that they could replicate my powers, and use them against the enemy.

  That’s why Fraser, eventually, asked me to stay.

  “We need you,” Fraser said, smiling his nicest smile, which was really not all that nice.

  “Fuck off.”

  “This is a war worth fighting.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “You have a special power, lassie,” he wheedled. “You could use it to save humanity.”

  “Fuck—”

  Look, I’m not continuing with this – you’ve surely got the idea by now. Fraser pleading, begging, trying to appeal to the better part of my nature. Me, not having a better part to my nature, telling him to fuck off.

  That went on for a while, but eventually he gave up and left.

  The Terror lasted for a while too, about six months. But then, slowly, it wore off.

  And – get this – I wasn’t a fucking coward, right? Not for a moment. The Terror was a war injury. A direct consequence of being so closely exposed to the empath-monster Majalara. It was my version of shell shock. And I knew that. Even when I was feeling the fear, I knew I could lick it.

  And I did. I licked it. And I became myself again. I fought the fear, and it almost defeated me, but in the end I won.

  Okay? Got that? I won.

  I won.

  After six months I was discharged from the psychiatric unit and sent on my way. Fraser had finally accepted I was no longer going to fight the war for him. And to his credit, he didn’t try to bully and coerce me. Nor did he threaten my life or the lives of those I cared about; nor did he abduct me and hold me prisoner in the SNG’s secret lab so that scientists could experiment upon my brain; all of which I’m sure are options he considered.

  I returned to the base to pick up my things and found Billy there waiting for me.

  I was impressed. Billy really was a persistent little bugger. He’d tried to visit me in hospital on numerous occasions, but each time I had told him to – yeah, you guessed it – “Fuck off.”

  But he hadn’t. He’d stayed. But not in a stalky kind of a way. No, he just hung around on the base, drinking beers with the guys and shooting pool. And when he saw me he strolled over and took my bag and carried it.

  And I thought, yeah, this is okay. I can hang out with this guy. He’s not too irritating, and at least he’s company; and a good fuck to boot.

  I could, I realised, imagine spending the rest of my life with this guy.

  And so I asked Billy to marry me, and he said yes.

  And here I am. Happy! Can you believe it?

  Look, it’s true. We left the Rock on an ion shuttle which took us to the nearest stellar system, the planet of Heorot. Nice planet. We got married, a simple ceremony, we did it online. We bought a ranch and raised horses and cows and sold the cows for meat. We had a lot of cows, huge herds that roamed our land freely, and robots to keep an eye on them. And when they were slaughtered, heliplanes came and took away the butchered carcasses.

  It was a good business. Billy told me I was a natural cowboy. He was actually old enough to remember the American West. Or at least, old enough to hear the legends of it from people who’d seen the movies about it. He’d actually flown a hoverjet through the Grand Canyon.

  Billy was at ease in a wilderness. He liked the big empty spaces, and he loved horses. He had an uncanny knack of winning the trust of the darned creatures. I found it all a bit freaky – I’d never ridden on an animal before! But I was enjoying myself.

  For a while anyway. The first couple of years were great. Then I got bored. But when I told Billy I was bored, we just upped sticks to the city, Kazam. And we bought a little apartment in the built up part of town and spent our days shopping and going to theatre and watching movies.

  I’d never been to a theatre before – with real live people on stage who’ve memorised all their lines, instead of using a brain chip. On Rebus, drama was considered an inferior art form. Though it was considered acceptable to read aloud play texts by classic authors. And on Cúchulainn – well, WAS there a fucking theatre there? I wouldn’t know. I spent all my time in clubs or bars, usually drunk. It didn’t occur to me there was any other form of leisure pursuit on offer.

  So I decided city life was cool.

  But after a while I got bored of it. And so we moved back to our ranch again and played at being cowboys, again.

  And when that got boring, again, we went white water rafting. This was some wild country. We fucked up totally in fact and got caught on a fast-moving river with a serious undertow that whipped us along and threw us over a waterfall. We fell half a mile and we were smashed up badly by the waters. Billy broke his back and arm and I suffered a skull fracture and internal bleeding. So that put a damper on it. A robot medic ship found us from our MI alarm beacons and took us to the hospital.

  It took me almost a year to stop slurring my words, and Billy’s back never did heal fully – he could no longer touch his toes, poor boy – but after a year we were right as rain. So we tried skydiving for a while. And when that got boring, we went to live in a habitat under the sea. But that was, you know, depressing, because of all the fish.

  So we went back to dry land and I decided to write a novel. But that was a disaster because I couldn’t get past the first page. So Billy persuaded me to write a history of the Middle Ages on Earth and I started reading the archive material on the Heorot QRC. That was fascinating but I couldn’t work out what my angle would be so I decided to learn guitar instead. But I had no aptitude so we decided to explore the Polar regions.

  Hey, and I made friends! Me! Friends! Can you believe it?

  Dozens of them. Nice people too. They had interesting jobs and hobbies and small talk. None of them were criminals or assassins. It was all so utterly bourgeois. We met for dinner regularly and swapped stories and bantered and pretended to care about each other. I started to feel like I was “having a life.”

  One of my friends was called Alice. Alice was a doctor, which is a really cool job. She worked in the emergency room and saved lives on a regular basis. I showed her how my healing factor worked by cutting off my little toe, and encouraged her to watch it grow back. She went a little pale at that, but to her credit it didn’t dissuade her from hanging out with me. We had “girls nights out.” We swapped song choices. I started studying what was on TV, so we’d have something to talk about when we hooked up.

  And she could tell tales too. Stories of patients, medical disasters, doctors who were impossible to work with, all that shit. I loved her tales. And in return I told her a few of mine. The less graphic stories. I did a lot of self-editing to be honest.12 I told her I�
��d worked in a nightclub where there were strippers and cross-gender artistes every night, and she thought that was wonderfully exotic. But I didn’t mention the contract killings. I told her I’d once sold untaxed liquor for a living, but I didn’t mention the drugs and the pimping.

  It was an odd friendship. I liked Alice a lot, but after a while it occurred to me that I was telling her a pack of lies about myself. She didn’t really know who I was.

  But fuck, I couldn’t tell her the truth, could I?

  Around about this point Billy suggested we might like to have children. I asked Alice what she thought, and she thought it was a great idea. In fact, she was thinking of having kids too! Her husband Joe had been dropping hints. Maybe we could even go to ante-natal classes together?

  I wasn’t sure if Alice was being creepy or cute, so I decided to believe cute. It really was great having a best friend! I’d not really had that, well, since Jimmi. Though that friendship, as you know, ended badly.

  Alice didn’t even, so far as I could tell, want to fuck me. So it was just like a proper ordinary relationship between “mates.”

  Anyway, the baby thing was on my mind. So I went for a medical check up to see whether my ovaries and womb were still in working condition, after all the shit I’d been through. And it turned out they were fine. I was warned, however, that I wouldn’t be able to breast feed. With all my augments, the rejuve in my system meant that a mouthful of my breast milk was equivalent to a kilo of heroin. I found that news – well, unsettling really.

  But formula milk is just as good. In fact it’s engineered to be chemically and hormonally identical to a mother’s breast milk. So I wasn’t too worried.

  All was cool. Billy and Alice and Joe and I went for a meal and began hatching plans. I made an appointment to have my contraceptive implant removed. Billy and I even discussed what colour to paint the nursery!

  We must have been tempting fate. (Which of course, you should never do. Fuck it, I, of all people should have known better!)