Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  Because the following day, the day after the “what colour to paint the nursery” shit, I received a mass MI message saying, “Watch the news.” Just that: “Watch the news.”

  I was in the supermarket at the time. And it was astonishing to see how everyone there suddenly stopped moving, and started listening, as the mass MI flash hit us. And then, almost in unison, we all switched our MIs on to the news portal setting. And, frozen and hushed, we all watched the images of destruction play over our retinas. No one moved, or attempted to shop, or tried to pay for fifteen minutes, as we watched the news images on our visual arrays in rapt horror.

  It was one of those days when all of humanity seemed to unite. Because this was a disaster that dwarfed anything we had ever known before. And in a way it was – well – it was actually quite inspiring. To be one of the ordinary people, and sharing in something so vast and so terrible. To be—

  Anyway, long story short. We watched the news, and saw the extraordinary events that were occurring.

  Earth was being invaded, and our guys were losing.

  Chapter 11

  Invasion: Earth

  A week later, I re-enlisted.

  I don’t know why. Loyalty? Patriotism? Boredom?

  My motives were and are a complete mystery to me. But Billy, as it turned out, was happy enough to go along with my plan.

  But that’s the way it was with Billy. Never any fuss, never any arguing. If I said to Billy, “I’m bored, I want to move,” Billy would say, “Yeah sure,” and then we’d move. Job done.

  Or if I said, “Let’s have Cantonese for lunch,” he’d say, “Sure thing,” and he’d go and order it. If I wanted to go on holiday somewhere nice, he’d research nice places and we’d go there. If I wanted sex – you get the idea?

  No trouble! No hassle! No temper tantrums! Billy was never mean or belittling. Never petty. Never quarrelled with me, even when I was wrong. Never found fault with me. Fucking great in bed! All in all, Billy must surely be the template for the ideal man. Apart from the fact he’s a mass murderer. But come on, haven’t we ALL got things in our past which – skip it.

  Where was I?

  Yeah, Billy and I joined the army again. But it was no sweat, not really. Because after all, there was no actual jeopardy. We didn’t even have to travel far. The nearest War Camp was an hour’s flight from our home. And I think Billy fancied the idea. After all, he’d been a space warrior for a large part of his life. And this was surely the greatest space war of all time apart from – well, the obvious one, which Billy’s side had lost.

  I have to admit, I was feeling pretty blue at the time. I was having mood swings again. Insomnia, of course. And I was lonely. And all this may have influenced my decision to go back to war.

  Why lonely? After all, I had Billy, And I had my dozen or so “ordinary” friends, including the delightful Alice. And I even had a chance of starting a family. Because the baby was STILL on the agenda. That was definitely the plan. Once we’d won the war of Earth, I’d get pregnant. And then it would all be wonderful, ’cause I’d be a mother!!

  The idea of parenthood did worry me a little though. Because, I wondered, would I actually be a good mother? That’s what I kept asking myself. Fairly obsessively to be honest. After all, my own ginch-whore of a mum had abandoned me when I was a baby. And my father—

  Yeah. Right. Let me tell you about my father!

  When I was eight years old he punished me for disobedience by locking me in the—No I’ve told you that story. Locked in the library. Traumatised. Blah blah.

  But did I tell you why? The first time I mean? It’s because I found a photograph of my mother, and asked him about it. “What was she like?” I asked. And a look of fury came upon him, and the punishments began.

  (I may have added, “And why the fuck did she marry a withered old pintle like YOU?” Look, I was a kid, and I never claimed to be perfect.)

  He never talked about my mother you see. But he made it clear I had to hate her, and so I did.

  One time he hit me – a powerful slap across the face. That was in response to a comment I made about – well, okay, that was another example of me being not-perfect again. But I was only ten!

  Then I struck him back and knocked him off his feet. I had the augments, don’t forget. So in retaliation, he programmed the Rebus computer to broadcast white noise directly into my head, all day and all night. I couldn’t turn the chip off – not without cutting my head open. After a week of that I begged him for mercy. And he laughed. The white noise lasted another two weeks.

  In company he was courtesy itself. But in private, he treated me like a wild animal. A creature to be tamed and humiliated. And he told me my destiny was to be a librarian. He forced me to memorise entire books, and I still know them all by heart.

  It wasn’t teenage pique that made me run away from Rebus. It was fear. My father tortured me, incessantly. Physically, mentally, and through the use of his constant withering sarcasm. Does that sound like I’m whining over nothing? Let me tell you – I’ve taken a bullet in the guts, I’ve been tortured by professionals. But nothing hurts me so much as the memory of what my father did. He made me feel like nothing.

  And—No, that’s enough of that.

  The point of that rant? There are two points, in fact. Which are these.

  Point One: Billy, in a strange way, even though he was my lover, was also the father I wish I’d had. Which is, like, weird, and not good.

  Point Two: I was, and am, totally fucked up in the head. And I knew there was no fucking way I was ready to be a mother.

  Joining the army, therefore, was my way of evading all these difficult issues. It meant that, for a while at least, I could go back to doing what I was best at.

  Killing.

  Once we’d signed the paperwork, Billy and I flew to our local War Camp, where the dreamers were kept. As our heliplane lifted off I looked down fondly at the wilderness lands and the mountains where we’d had so many happy times.

  A week later I was in orbit around Mars.

  This was just after Phobos and Deimos were destroyed, after a prolonged battle that had led to the evacuation of Mars by all SNG forces. The robot ships that remained had stood their ground, or rather sky, and fought like buggery. But the advancing armada had swept them away, like – well, there is no comparison. I saw the images – ship after ship exploding until the sky was full of stars that oughtn’t to be there.

  Then the enemy moved on down and obliterated all trace of sentience on the planetary surface. Carterville was just a crater now. Dejah Thoris City had been nuked into oblivion. Lowell City was also gone. And the farmlands – they were desolate and arid. The seas had boiled dry. The forests had burned. The entire planet was reverting back to its previous barren state. The atmosphere remained, but for how much longer? Without forests and seas and plants to sustain the ecology created by terraforming?

  And, almost as an aftermath to this act of total annihilation, the two moons had been targeted by planet-busting anti-matter missiles. And their falling debris had rained upon the dead planet.

  Enceladus had been annihilated in similar fashion, as had Titan, Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Ceres, Miranda, and Charon. The biodomes of Venus were also gone. And almost all of the Dyson Jewels had been obliterated, leaving shards of debris in elliptical orbits round the sun that would remain there for all eternity.

  The invasion had been beautifully orchestrated. Teleported missiles had materialised inside the Sol Defensive System. The Earthian robot attack ships had been outmanoeuvred. The Plutonian Force Ring had proved useless against energy beams being fired from within. And the sheer scale of the attack had beggared belief.

  Now the invading armada ringed Earth itself. Half a billion battle cruisers each the size of the Central Hall of the Rebus Library. Earth itself was protected by the Inner Force Ring, and its robot anti-missile drones were so plentiful that all the enemy’s teleported missiles were destroyed as soon as they mater
ialised. The invasion had now become a war of attrition. They fired missiles at us, we fired missiles at them. They fired energy beams at us – you get the idea. Explosions and plasma flares assailed planets and asteroids and moons, and created moments of wild kinetic violence at many of the points in between. If space could bleed, it would have gushed crimson.

  Into all this, we flitted. Ten million soldiers, lying down in virtual-reality vats on ten thousand different planets. Each remotely controlling a bomber or fighter craft, which were teleported out of the furthest reaches of the SNG territories to sit on the rump of the invading fleet.

  There were, I later learned, six million misflits in the course of that first counter-attack. Not human misflits – but ships and computer brains maimed so badly by the TP process that they could not function and had to be auto-destroyed.

  But the remaining robot ships were immediately launched into battle by the minds of their virtual warriors. We piloted the fastest and most powerful space warship ever built, the Caracaras Mark VI. And we were those ships. My skin was hull. My eyes were camera. My fists were bullets of compressed plasma.

  And I was fast. Astonishingly fast. My mind fitted over the craft’s cybernetic intelligence like a glove over a hand. My reflexes were part of its nervous system. My decisions were instantaneous, as swift as a quantum’s act of being. Faster than light itself, or so it seemed, because I could see pillars of plasma fire coursing towards me like waves crazily attacking the shores on a storm-tossed lake.

  The Caracaras was a hedgehog – it bristled with guns that fired eleven different types of projectile weapon and energy beams, controlled impatiently by my speeding mind. A game of chess played and replayed a million times each millionth of a moment. And it had rocket jets in seven locations, powered by super-dense Bostocks. Achieving speeds that nudged towards the Einsteinian horror of infinite mass, before declining to zero velocity in what seemed to be a heart’s beat.

  Each of our four million minds controlled a single Caracaras. And we appeared behind the enemy battlefleet at the same instant, and were greeted with a hail of missiles and plasma pulses. Our force fields swelled as the enemy’s plasma pulses crashed upon them. We darted through space towards our foes in an angry flock. And then the enemy fired another fusillade of missiles and energy beams, an onslaught of such immense power that it could, if harnessed into a single focus, have shifted a gas giant from its orbit. And two million five hundred thousand of us died in a moment.

  But the rest survived the onslaught and struck the enemy force field. And embraced it. And slurped through it, despite our loss of momentum. And emerged the other side and re-fired our jets in a final charge that culminated in a wild host of crunching collisions, as each of us clamped our vessels fast to the hull of an enemy craft.

  And then, once this contiguous spatial lock had been achieved, I and all the others like me focused on the mental command that would initiate the teleporting process in the bomb bay. And in an instant—

  Our frag bombs were inside the enemy battleships.

  These were Russian doll devices that contained matter-antimatter volatiles within a crust of an exploding fusion bomb. And, at its very heart, a swiftly pulsing consciousness disruptor of awesome power. A sabre that could shred a mind into bloody fragments in an instant.

  And as I felt the bomb vanish from within my womb, I could imagine, though I could not see, the DR crew’s look of blank disbelief as a large square box appeared in front of them. Hovering like an enchanted object in an ancient tale.

  And then the detonation! The fire and the crush and the blast and the glare and the shards of metal flying a million ways at once as the robots on board were blasted into pieces. And then their controlling minds being crushed and shredded by the consciousness disruptor’s pulsing pain that swirled and appalled and, before they could break the remote link, killed the doppelgänger riders outright by shocking their minds into incoherence.

  Moments later the blast from my own bomb hit my vessel and shattered its force field and tore its hull with the calm malevolence of a child shredding its homework. I felt myself, my ship, my hull, my cybernetic brain, explode into fragments. And I felt – I felt myself die! And then—

  And then I was inside another Caracaras, that had just been teleported in, attacking another battleship. Around me space was wispy with sundered matter. No fires blazed, no living creatures howled their death cries. And if they had, no sound would have carried in the emptiness of space. And yet I felt as if I were on a battlefield, surrounded by the dying bloodied screaming bodies of my enemies.

  And, of course – why would I not? – I exulted.

  “Hello sweetheart.”

  “Hello darling.”

  I was breathing heavily. So was Billy.

  “Champagne,” he observed.

  “Of course it is. You stupid fucking imbecile,” I observed.

  “Yeah.” He nodded slowly, as if remembering how to nod. I’d bought champagne. I was wearing a dress – me! A dress! I’d even put flowers in a vase by my bed. Seduction was clearly on the agenda. Billy could tell that. There was fear in his eyes.

  “You’re looking good,” he said.

  “I’ve lost weight,” I informed him. I was two stone down. My skin felt like parchment.

  “So have I.”

  “Of course you have. You idiot!” I informed him. For it was obvious he’d lost weight. I’d seen that the moment he walked into my apartment. I mean, in god’s name, it took him long enough! He walked like an old man. And I, of course, walked like an old woman. The smell of the flowers was making me sick.

  “I guess you want a kiss,” he said anxiously.

  “We have to do this, Billy.”

  “No we don’t. Celibacy is an option.”

  “We can’t degrade the materiel.”

  “The vats keep our bodies fit.”

  “Bare minimum. Loss of muscle tone. Loss of – you know all this.”

  “Of course I fucking know all this. I know the meaning of everything you fucking SAY,” Billy shouted, “and I know you’re going to say it, before you say it. And then you say it.”

  “I really hate your fucking guts,” I advised him.

  “I you also,” he said, incoherently. I sympathised. These days, words seemed a strange imposition on our godlike minds.

  “How’s your war?”

  “Twelve battle cruisers,” he said. “You?”

  “Fifty-three,” I said.

  “Is that a record?”

  “It’s a record.”

  “They say you don’t – you know,” Billy ventured.

  “Withdraw?”

  “Withdraw. You wait till—”

  “The last minute.”

  “The last minute.”

  “Yeah that’s true.”

  “You feel yourself die.”

  “I feel myself die. Fifty-three times so far.”

  “How does that—”

  “You should try it.”

  “Too dangerous.”

  “It’s the best.”

  “The best – what?”

  “Best anything. Best there’s ever been – of anything, ever,” I confessed.

  “Come walk over to,” said Billy, forgetting the last word. And I tottered towards him. I decided that swaying my arms helped me to keep my balance. I blinked my eyes furiously, in the hope of catching some ultraviolet or x-rays, but nothing doing. Billy was waiting for me, still standing in the same place. A long time elapsed, or so it seemed to me, but finally I reached him.

  “How we going to do this?” I asked. I had to stop walking before I could speak. Which I found infuriating.

  “On the bed.”

  “I’m not aroused.”

  “Me no either not,” said Billy.

  “I’ll take my clothes off.”

  “Try that.”

  I took my clothes off. That took about twenty-five minutes.

  It occurred to Billy that he should take his clothes of
f too. That took a further twenty-six minutes. When naked, he was repellently thin, and pale, and his penis was limp. I wondered why those particular organs had such an iconic cultural status. Six inches of soft wrinkled flesh, topped by a radish head?

  “You look good, naked,” Billy offered, insincerely. I realised he was making an effort. It occurred to me that I ought to find that sweet.

  I did not.

  “I can’t,” I said, and tried to express my feelings in words. But I could not express my feelings in words. Not at all. Not one bit, jot, particle, or iota. It was all just blankness. And I hated that I couldn’t feel my hull. I couldn’t taste space. I couldn’t experience the multiple thrills of rocket blasts from my seven engines. My guns did not fire. My mind no longer functioned in units of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

  Billy touched his flaccid penis with a hand that looked as if it didn’t know how to hold anything, let alone an inert and loveless sexual organ. “Help me with this,” he pleaded.

  I eased myself on to my knees and performed the necessary actions that were supposedly the prelude to viable lovemaking.

  “That’s not helping,” Billy pointed out.

  I took the soft pintle out of my mouth. “We don’t need to do this,” I pointed out.

  “Now? Or ever?” There was, I noted, a tone of barely suppressed relief in Billy’s voice.

  “Ever. We could—”

  “No,” Billy said, as his loyalty to his own biology won out over his actual desires.

  “Some people—”

  “No.”

  “Let’s drink some champagne,” I suggested.

  “Now you understand,” said Billy. “What it was for me like.”

  “What was like?”

  “Before,” said Billy. And there was a glint in his eyes.

  “Ah.”

  “The bad – yeah?”

  “The bad old days.”

  “When I served the Corporation.”

  “They were evil.”

  “They were.”

  “You were—”