Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  “What?”

  “You served as a real soldier too.”

  “For years. But mainly – this. Doppelgänger war.”

  “War is hell,” I told him.

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Yes!”

  I was lying. He knew I was lying. I thought about the fifty-three battle cruisers I had destroyed. I thought about the joy of death. I thought about the joy of dying, without consequence.

  I could tell Billy was having the same thoughts.

  “We should really try to fuck,” Billy said. He was aroused, now. The memories of his past combats had given him an erection.

  And so, after some manoeuvring, we lay on the bed and copulated. Billy, to his credit, succeeded in having an orgasm.

  I however felt nothing. Nothing at all. My flesh body was just dead weight. My mind yearned to be free of it. And I longed, with all my being, to be, once more, hull and rockets and cybernetic circuits and blazing guns and instant, appalling, destruction.

  We worked a 48/6 rhythm. Forty-eight hours in the vat, fighting the war of Invasion: Earth. Then six hours in our human bodies. A bath. A glass of champagne. A pathetically unenjoyable fuck. A heartless cuddle. A walk. A meal, barely tasted. Then back to the vat.

  The six hours were an eternity.

  Some warriors could not bear to take a break from the epiphany of Caracaras combat. They stayed in the vats round the clock. Their brains cabled to a computer interface. Their bodies kept free of bed sores by the vat waters, fed and hydrated through tubes. Safely cocooned until the war came to an end.

  Some of them are still there now.

  A thousand battles. Black space lit by ceaseless pillars of plasma fire. The rings of Saturn smiling upon the conflict. The cracked crust of Mars spewing out hot mountain ranges. Each infinitesimal fraction of a moment lived with such intensity. And victories! So many victories! Enemy ships holed or exploded, spaceborne doppelgängers blown to shards. Missiles destroyed before they could hit their target. Battles fought faster than a mayfly’s daydream.

  And then the force fields surrounding Earth failed.

  Not for long. Perhaps three seconds. But it was enough. Streams of enemy missiles poured through at near-light-speed velocity. The drone missiles set about their task of snatching each enemy vessel from the skies. And they did so with astonishing success. Missile after missile was intercepted and safely detonated.

  But one missile snuck through. A planetbuster of the Xerxes range. The D4.1

  In that moment I abandoned my Caracaras and entered the cybernetic consciousness of an Earth-orbiting Talos, a fatter but no less speedy craft. A thousand of them were in permanent orbit, for just this eventuality. So I seized a dozen and felt the thousand or so other ships of my type becoming possessed by my fellow warriors. And then battle was joined.

  The Xerxes planetbuster was the size of a small ocean-going liner. It was shielded and fielded and pursued a randomly zig-zagging path. Like a boulder hurled by a giant’s hand that bounces off each tree in the enchanted wood. Or so it seemed to me, to my hyper-actively imaginative mind.

  For I could, or so I thought, actually smell the foul reek of the Xerxes’ robot mind. I sensed, or so I imagined, its cold malevolence. I saw, and did actually see, the enemy missile in every part of the electromagnetic spectrum. I echo-located it, and I knew its velocity, its mass and its exact trajectory.

  And I pissed fire on it from my every gun. I swamped it with beams of divine radiance, in the form of energy beams. I pulverised its shields like a warrior pounding his enemy’s god-ugly face with projectile bullets larger than a human being. I sheared its soul with exploding star-bombs that spewed out diamond-sharp blades.

  None of my efforts prevailed. The Xerxes entered the Earth’s atmosphere and I pursued it, kinking and zagging and zigging to follow its course. I strove to creep closer to its hull whilst ceaselessly dodging the hail of energy fire and missile swarms from the dozens of the other Talos defence ships that were recklessly shooting past me at their prey.

  The Xerxes sped downwards. I sped after it. We burst through the clouds and I glimpsed blue oceans and snow-tipped mountains and sprawling beautiful cities. And finally I caught up with the Xerxes, and we touched hulls. At that instant, I teleported my bombs into its bomb hangar.

  And then waited.

  I felt the thrill of impact as the blast from the bombs reached me, and sundered my ship. I felt myself die, and once again, I exulted.

  And I knew the detonation would rain fire and foul radiation on the verdant planet below. But Earth was saved.

  Not every day was quite so exhilaratingly intense. But it still took a huge amount out of me. I had no strategic sense of the battle in general, but I fought and destroyed and fought and destroyed.

  Until eventually – after how long? Days? Years? Centuries? I couldn’t tell – the battle was over. The invading fleet had been destroyed.

  A second enemy fleet teleported into a region of space near Venus but was captured there by a black-hole mine and sucked into nothingness. And then a few more scattered vessels appeared. But it was over.

  The war was over. And we had won.

  But let me back up a little bit. How did things get to be so bad? How the hell could Earth get to be in such dire jeopardy?

  It was all because of the Devil. The Last Tarot.

  In other words: Captain Hispaniola Morgan. Ex-pirate, former best friend of Cap’n Flanagan himself.

  Morgan had been one of the great and legendary rebels who fought the Corporation. But then he changed sides, and joined the Clan, and became one of the SNG’s target Tarots. All the other Tarots had been captured or true-killed by now, but Morgan alone survived. And so in a last desperate attempt to save himself, he declared war on Earth. I knew that much.

  But I didn’t know that Morgan actually HAD been captured. The Devil had been taken prisoner, by a crack Kamikaze Squad led by a guy I’d met in sim training! His name was Dooley. He was a good warrior. It wasn’t his fault that – but let me come to that bit.

  Let me go back even further.

  Hispaniola Morgan wasn’t his real name. I mean! Get real.

  His real name was Daniel Morrow. But he changed his name to Morgan, in homage to a famous pirate on ancient Earth.2 And he called himself Hispaniola after an island which – look, this really isn’t relevant.3

  Morrow was born on Gullyfoyle. Yeah, the same planet where I worked as a barmaid, and stole that jewel. His parents were slaves etc. etc., and his father was killed by a Clan piccioto, for no reason really. A few years later, Morrow turned pirate and stole a Corporation cargo ship and recruited a crew of mercenaries. For a decade he stole and plundered and managed to elude the admittedly rudimentary doppelgänger cop ships. Because no one really gave a damn to be honest. The Corporation tolerated piracy mainly because they didn’t really notice it.

  Morrow, or Morgan as he was by then, recruited a young rebel called Flanagan to his crew.4 And the two of them wreaked havoc on Corporation planets and ambushed Corporation caravans with astonishing daring. But Flanagan was more of an idealist. Morgan was the hot-head.5 And he was merciless. He had no tolerance of collaborators – all those who savoured the good life under the Corporation regime. And his policy was to kill such people as painfully as possible. That’s why Flanagan fell out with him, and stole his pirate ship, and left Morgan behind on the planet of Xavier.6

  Morgan swore revenge. And who can blame him? Flanagan was the pupil who outstrips his master, beats the living crap out of him, then leaves him to die on a wilderness planet. Yeah, that old routine.

  Morgan tried but failed to escape from Xavier. It was a tough planet, colonised by religiously obsessive settlers who were convinced that the Cheo was God. Even so, the gangs had made inroads here, and there was a strong Clan rebel movement. So Morgan joined the gangs, killed a lot of priests, and eventually became capobastone. At that point, he emb
arked upon an auto-da-fé of staggering proportions which essentially led to the end of religion on Xavier. All the priests were dead. All the bishops and cardinals had been – let’s not go there. It was an inferno which consumed an entire tier of the settler society.

  And this was the guy we were facing. So, as I say, Dooley led his Kamikaze Squad to Xavier to capture Morrow. And to everyone’s surprise, he succeeded triumphantly, in a daring brilliant raid etc. And teleported back to his base where he surrendered Morgan to his boss Langan. Langan was Dooley’s Fraser – his handler I mean.

  But Langan, no fool apparently, took one look at Morgan and started shouting incoherently. He could recognise a cyborg when he saw it – don’t ask me how, because they can be very realistic. But he could, and did.

  Yeah, it wasn’t Morgan, it was a cyborg copy, with a bomb inside. Boom!

  Langan died, Dooley died, the entire base was destroyed. It was a masterly ambush.

  And that’s when the SNG cottoned on to Morgan’s game. He had cyborged himself into multiple versions. And it soon became apparent that many of his piccioti had done the same. They were no longer human, and there were hundreds of them out there, possibly thousands. Which was, to say the least, deeply scary.

  And all this meant that the victory for our side in the defence of Earth didn’t really mean that much. There were celebrations of course, and speeches were made. Songs were written about the brave doppelgänger pilots who saved the day; my name was mentioned in the chorus of one song because of the Xerxes missile incident.7 Roger Layton himself actually appeared in Parliament Square and shook hands with well-wishers, to mark this historic occasion. But even as we were being demobbed, we all knew that a battle had been won; but not the war. For Morgan was still alive; his armies were still legion; and humanity itself was still in deadly peril.

  And do you know what? I didn’t care.

  I’m serious! By this stage I was well past Who gives a fuck? and deeply into Never a-fucking-gain.

  I had done my bit, both as a Kamikaze and as a doppelgänger pilot. I’d given up years to warfare; I’d slain and died and slain again. And now it was time to get on with the rest of my life.

  Hispaniola Morgan and the continuing jeopardy of the human race were now, I firmly resolved, no longer my problem.

  Edited Highlights from the Thought Diary and Beaconspace Blog of Dr Artemis McIvor1

  BOOK 3

  REVENGE AND WAR2

  Chapter 12

  The Day I Was Born

  “One last mission,” said Fraser. And he actually smiled.

  I stared at him in horror. “Are you kidding me?” I said.

  “The future of humanity is—”

  “Jeez! Not that old routine again!” I said.

  He looked at me.

  I looked at him.

  “You look like shit,” he said.

  He had a point. I’d lost a lot of weight. My muscle tone was crap. My eyes were bloodshot. I looked like a mad woman. But not SO mad that I’d accept Fraser’s stupid fucking offer.

  “We’ll do it,” said Billy.

  “We will not,” I pointed out.

  Billy was in even worse shape than me. He looked like a skeleton with a paltry clothes budget. He was wearing a greasy stained T-shirt and an un-smart jacket that attracted lint and plant spores. His hand trembled when he drank his decaff coffee. He couldn’t drink alcohol. Neither of us could yet.

  “We’ll make you rich,” pointed out Fraser.

  “We’re rich enough.”

  “I can’t go back,” said Billy. “I can’t, doll. Not into the real world, not again.”

  The battle of Invasion: Earth was the four hundredth virtual war Billy had fought. I’d forgotten that.

  “We’re not spending the rest of our lives in fucking vats!” I said, outraged.

  As I mentioned, some did. Many, in fact.

  Indeed, of the tens of millions of soldiers who fought the war to save planet Earth – how many of them returned to reality? Look it up. It’s online. It’s a chilling fucking statistic.1 They are the real casualties. Those bastards will live pretty much for ever, fighting a war that was over aeons ago. It’s the price we pay for saving our mother planet, which most of us have never fucking seen.

  Sweet Shiva, I was angry! Except I was too tired to be angry.

  “This is a live mission,” Fraser explained. “A TP.”

  I beamed a big smile. “Oh great, so we could DIE, instead of living for all eternity in a stupid fucking war movie?”

  “The future of humanity,” Fraser pointed out.

  “What do I care about—”

  “You’re pregnant,” Fraser said.

  That stopped me in my tracks.

  Here’s a thing you need to know about rejuve: it fucks you up.

  I have so much of the stuff in my system that cuts on my skin heal almost instantly. I can survive wounds that would be fatal for other people. I don’t grow old. I never wrinkle. (Wrinkle! Me? Get real.)

  But there’s a downside. My fingernails grow fast, I have to cut them every day. My hair! Fuck, I need a haircut every seven days. If I let it grow I’d be Rapunzel. One time I went on holiday and slobbed and came back with six inch fingernails and toenails like sabres and pubic hair that – oh my GOD I wish I hadn’t – don’t let me even THINK about that.

  So, guess what happens when the rejuve decides that my contraceptive implant hormones are an illness that needs to be cured?

  Answer: I get pregnant.

  “We removed the embryo,” said Fraser, “while you were fighting the war. That was about four years ago. It’s healthy, in stasis. We can start growing the child in an incubator. Or if you prefer the old fashioned way, we can re-implant it into your womb. You can go to term using the Mother Nature method. You’ll get fat and ugly and grumpy and absent-minded, and a vast slimy heid will come out of your ginch, causing you appalling agony.”

  “I think – I’d like that,” I said, and there were tears in my eyes.

  “You bastard, Fraser,” said Billy.

  “You’re going to have a baby, Artemis,” said Fraser. “Oh, and by the way, the future of humanity rests in your hands.” He paused, and added the kicker: “That means the life and happiness of your baby is—”

  “I fucking get it!” I said angrily. “If you’re going to morally blackmail me, don’t patronise me too, okay?”

  “You’ll do it then?”

  I thought, but not for long.

  “I’ll do it.”

  “WE’LL do it,” corrected Billy.

  “How do you know you’re the father?” I taunted him.

  “Because I know you’d never be unfaithful to me,” said Billy.

  Fraser and I actually laughed in unison at that.

  “You’re the father,” Fraser told him. “100 per cent DNA match. It’s a boy. We can tell that now, even at this stage. And if you’re so minded,” he added, with a roguish twinkle in his eye, “you can name him after me.”

  “I seriously doubt that,” I said scornfully.

  “What actually is your name?” Billy asked, smiling.

  “Lachlan.”

  Billy’s smile froze.

  “So what’s this mission?” I asked.

  “First,” said Fraser, “we have to get you fit again.”

  I ate a piece of toast and a tooth broke. That’s how bad a state I was in.

  But the tooth grew back. I ate pasta for breakfast. I ate burgers for lunch. I ate ice cream – toffee & chocolate and butterscotch & liquorice were my favourites. But I drank no wine or beer. I slept twelve hours a day, ate a slow breakfast, swam all afternoon – for about six hours. Pigged out at dinner, then went to bed again.

  After about two weeks of this Billy began to touch my body in ways that seemed eerily unfamiliar. After those early repellent sexual encounters during Invasion: Earth we’d got worse and worse about reminding our bodies they were bodies. It was two years since I’d had a fuck in other words. A
nd that first time we did it post-Invasion was – well, it wasn’t great. But it got better. Oh believe me, it—

  Moving swiftly on.

  After three weeks we started running. Billy was dosing heavily on rejuve, and my own augments were kicking in. We were getting our skin tone back. The facial blotches had gone. That pursed-skin look you get from living in a vat of liquid nutrients for four years was starting to wane. My hair was not greasy any more. Billy could run his fingers through it without having to wash his hands afterwards.

  We began weight training. Boxing. Martial arts. Speed training. Impact training – that’s when you stand inside a warsuit and let people fire bullets at you for hours on end.

  After three months we were fighting fit and ready for the mission briefing.

  Once, during this period, I visited my baby. He was a single cell in a test tube but I held the test tube and talked to him. Not baby talk, of course. I mean! What kind of a wanker do you think I am!?!

  No, I talked to him properly, as the young man he would one day be.

  And I thought, very hard, about what he would be like when he was born. And what kind of child he would be. And what he would be like when he grew up.

  And of course, as any responsible mother would, I did my best to give him the best possible start in life.

  He was, for instance, supposed to have red hair; but I’ve never liked ginger as a colour. So I asked the lab team to make him black haired, with skin that tans easily.

  And he was tall, very tall, which I also don’t like. So I asked the guys to take four inches off his height, but factor in a muscular physique. I also asked if we could genetically engineer him to have a nice smile but apparently that’s not possible. But I knew he’d be fit, free from all genetic diseases, with a sound cardio-vascular system, no allergies, and – well, I didn’t expect he’d experience ANY problems when it came to affairs of the heart.

  I thought a lot about the kind of world he would grow up into.

  Fact is, it’s a cruel fucking universe out there. And there are no happy-ever-afters. Whatever terrible mess we cleared up now, there was bound to be another terrible mess further down the line. Another evil dictator, blah blah.