Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  Lena’s not like that. Don’t trust her.

  Bear that in mind. This is her story, as she told it to me.

  “I never loved your father,” Lena said.

  She was good, I’ll give her that. Her tone calm, factual. Her face composed, but hiding deep emotion. Yeah – lie bitch, lie!

  “Are you proud of that?” I said tauntingly.

  “No.”

  “Fuck you, bitch.”

  “I didn’t love my son either. Peter.”

  “I said—”

  “But when he summoned me – I had to go and—”

  “Are you trying to explain why you abandoned me, when I was just a baby?” I mocked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t give a shit, did you?”

  “I gave a shit,” said Lena, stiffly.

  “But you left me anyway.”

  Lena thought about it a long while. Her old face looked older now.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  The question haunted her; I could see her struggling to find an answer that would satisfy me.

  And so she tried to explain. She did, she really did try.

  She told me how she felt when I was first born. How something that was dead inside her was rekindled. How she lost herself in the joy of breastfeeding – yes, she really did that. Imagine!

  And she talked about she felt swamped in love. That rare and wonderful love that a mother feels for her baby. A love that is greater than – let’s tell the truth here people – any other kind of love.

  But my father didn’t approve.

  “Too much emotion,” he would say, “is bad for children. Don’t drown the poor soul in your vulgarity.”

  Or: “You demean yourself, my sweet, by exposing your breasts in that way. Do use a bottle please.”

  And also: “I fear, my dear Lena, that this child may be defective. Are you sure there’s nothing we can do about it?”

  He didn’t mean it of course. It was just his way of taunting her. I wonder if he was jealous? Of Lena’s greater love for her child?

  All in all, it was a shit time for Lena. She felt belittled, on a daily basis. And she constantly plotted and schemed about how she would take her child away with her. To a planet where children could run free, and be wild! A planet devoid, in short, of bone-dry sarcasm.

  “Then a certain terrible thing happened,” Lena told me. “You know what I’m referring to.” And I certainly did – the conquest of Earth. “And I thought – well. My fault. But he was my son. And—”

  Lena was crying when she told me that bit of the story. Imagine! Lena crying.

  “And I actually thought,” Lena concluded, “that you’d be better off without me.”

  I thought about what she had just said.

  And it didn’t make any sense, at any level. Emotionally, morally, intellectually.

  Leave me with a father who was cold and uncaring, for my own good? What CRAP! What was she thinking of?!

  “Is that your excuse? I asked her, scornfully.

  “That’s my apology,” Lena said, and there was a quaver in her voice.

  I stared at her. And I smiled. My moment had finally come.

  “I hate you, Mum,” I said. And I saw the pain in her eyes.

  And then she looked away.

  And then she got up, and left, without saying another word.

  I’d rehearsed this revenge for many years.

  Strangely, it wasn’t sweet.

  A few days later Flanagan came to see me.

  Remember, the mission was still aborted. The bastards still needed me and my lucky whatever-it-was, to launch their attack on Morgan’s World. So Flanagan had to make nice; and that’s precisely what he did.

  “Would you consider—”

  [Obscenity from me.]

  “Bear in mind that—”

  [Another obscenity from me.]

  That went on for a while. But Flanagan didn’t seem perturbed. He gave up questions, took a bottle of whisky out of his bag. I shook my head. But he produced two glasses and filled them both. I could smell the peaty aroma. I saw from the bottle this was a thousand-year-old single malt from Cambria. The best. Those bottles sell for – well, they’re almost priceless. That’s what you get for being a legendary hero who saved humanity.

  Great single malt.

  He pushed a glass across the table. I took a small sip, and felt the warmth seep into my body. I also felt instantly intoxicated. I slammed it back and poured myself a second glass.

  Flanagan smiled.

  Mellowed by booze, I listened as Flanagan told his tale. How he and Lena came to be still alive, despite their publicly reported deaths7 and subsequent vastly expensive funerals. It was all he explained, a fake. Carefully planned, superbly executed.

  “Why?” I said. “You were rich, famous. The most famous people in the humanverse. Why give all that up?”

  “We got bored,” Flanagan admitted.

  “All humanity worshipped you,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah,” he said, dryly.

  He thought for a moment. His scarred – sorry, I mean wrinkled – features made him look like a wizened old something-or-other. Something wrinkly and old. Look, find your own metaphor here, okay?

  “When I was a young man—” he digressed.

  “Just answer the fucking question.”

  “I had my own rock band. Music was my passion.”

  “I know.” I’d heard the Flanagan Rock Oratorio once. Pretentious shite. Some people should stick to what they’re best at. In his case, intergalactic carnage.

  “And when I was famous, I started to compose again. I wrote an oratario! Can you believe it? With rock guitar and drums. It was shite.”

  “I’ve heard it.”

  “Shite?”

  “Shite,” I concurred.

  “The reviewers said it was a masterpiece. The greatest piece of music ever written, ever. Beethoven’s oeuvre was a warthog farting in comparison with this great work by Flanagan. One critic actually said that!”

  “No critic ever said that.”

  “It was implied. So I thought – fuck this. I don’t want sycophancy.”

  “Why not?”

  “What do you mean, ‘why not?’ ” said Flanagan crossly.

  “What’s wrong with sycophancy? It beats being treated like shit.”

  “Only by a narrow margin.”

  “Oh what would you fucking know?” I snarled.

  “I would know,” he said stiffly, “as it happens. My generation—”

  “Oh Sweet Shiva!”

  “My generation suffered,” Flanagan insisted, like the mother who starts telling her child all the things that her mother used to say, and is appalled to discover she can’t stop herself. “It was a—”

  “My generation didn’t exactly have it soft.”

  “You have no idea what we—”

  “You just don’t fucking know what I—”

  “What was the question?” said Flanagan, calming himself down. I wanted to slap his smug, grizzled face. But there was something about Flanagan’s presence that I found – I don’t know – reassuring.

  “How and why did you fake your deaths?”

  “Why, I’ve already told you. Or maybe I haven’t. Lena and I – we were drifting apart. Nothing in common, except what we’d done together. She was getting really arrogant, and annoying.”

  “But you were still the same old humble wonderful guy?”

  “Pretty much,” he conceded, but in fairness he was smiling. “So I created an expedition. We went off to explore a double star. Our spaceship was sucked into a gravity well8 and never returned. We’d sent out a mayday message but by then it was too late. That was our story, and the world fell for it.

  “And after that, we just travelled. We stayed in space for many years. Then we found a planet, we called it Flanagan. Or rather, I called it Flanagan. She called it Lena. She really is fucking impossible you—”

  “So
why are you back?”

  “Well,” he said, “we heard about the war, you see. And Morgan’s role in it. And we couldn’t resist the challenge. The call, if you like. One last adventure! Before—”

  “Before what?”

  “Before the next one,” said Flanagan. And he laughed, and couldn’t stop laughing.

  “What will you do?” Billy asked.

  “Travel,” I said. “Find a stellar yacht, point at the stars, see what I see.”

  “And our baby?”

  “There is no baby. It’s just – a fucking cell.”

  Billy flinched.

  I was leaving him, by the way. Leaving everyone. Fraser. The mission. Fucking off. I’d had enough. My discharge papers were through, and I no longer cared if the human species lived or died.

  Okay? You got a problem with that?

  “You do realise,” said Billy, “that you could be the only human being left in the entire universe. If this mission of ours fails.”

  “I’ve always been the solitary type.”

  “They really do need you, you know.”

  “Lena would never accept me.”

  “Fraser bullied her. She’ll accept you.”

  “I don’t care. I really don’t care.”

  “Douglas,” said Billy, “is our child. He is NOT just a fucking cell. And the future of humanity really is in your hands. You selfish fucking stupid fucking bitch!”

  Billy had only ever sworn at me once before. And he hardly ever raised his voice to me. And he had certainly never criticised me before, and he was clearly criticising me NOW.

  It took a lot to get Billy this angry. And that shook me. And made me think twice.

  And so, I felt my resolve weaken.

  Billy waited patiently. He knew what was coming.

  I thought about Lena.

  I thought about Douglas.

  I thought about that bastard Morgan.

  And I sighed. “One last mission?”

  There was a pause. And then Billy smiled. And I knew that we were good again. We were pals, again.

  “One last mission. Oh and by the way, I’m coming with you,” said Billy. And for the first time since I’d known him, there was idealism and passion in his voice. “And if we survive, we’ll raise the child together, okay? But we have to do this thing. We have to do it. We have to kill the Devil.”

  Chapter 13

  Let’s Kill the Devil

  I’d missed, as you know, the final briefing for the Morgan’s World Briefing. The Strategic, Political and Historical Overview shit. So I was, to be honest, flying third. But I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll catch up as I go along.”

  So here’s all you really need to know for now.

  There were five of us, and Flanagan, and Lena.

  We hit the ground standing. We were like children, standing in a circle holding hands. Everyone was gripping me somewhere – my hand, my arms, even my head. And Quentin had his hands on my shoulders. I was their lucky totem.

  This was our sixth flit in a row. We’d skulked into the system, ducking behind metaphorical lampposts, and now we were on the surface of Morgan’s Planet.

  “You can let go, guys,” I said, and they did. All but Quentin. He was still gripping my shoulders.

  “Hey, inappropriate touching,” I said lightly. But he still held my shoulders. I shrugged to get him off.

  “We have a problem,” said Fraser.

  “Quentin!” screamed Maria. I shoved and rolled my shoulders and broke free.

  “Quentin you arsehole,” I said, and then I turned to look at him and realised he was dead.

  Not just dead. Frozen in place. I waved my hand in front of his eyes. Nothing registered. Fraser manually wound Quentin’s face mask down, and he just stared blankly at us. I took off a glove and touched his face. Ice cold. And rock solid.

  “He’s turned into a statue,” I pointed out.

  Billy did a vitals scan.

  “No brain functions, heart has stopped. He’s dead. Organs have solidified. Blood also. Flesh is calcified. Brain is, uh-uh, solid rock. He’s, uh, yeah. A statue.”

  “How come?” said Lena to me, in what I took to be an accusing tone. “I thought you had the lucky touch.”

  “You’re alive aren’t you?” I said angrily.

  “Yes but—”

  “It’s not magic,” I said, boiling with rage; I don’t know why, because she did have a point. “It’s not fucking magic! It’s just luck. Just slightly better – luck.”

  “Let’s move on out,” said Flanagan.

  “Should we…?” said Maria, patting her gun, and looking at the corpse of Quentin.

  “No,” said Flanagan. “Let him stay. He died a valiant death, he can be his own memorial.”1

  The air shimmered, and a vast shape appeared, neither real nor unreal, but awesome. Then a second shape. Then a third.

  The shimmering stopped. Three Minotaur armoured cars had been teleported to us, each stacked with guns and ammo. We checked for misflits. Discarded two of the Minotaurs, one of which appeared to be made of an element not known to science. Got in the third vehicle. And the chassis jets fired and we lifted up into the air.

  This was a ghastly, ugly planet, at a raw and angry stage of development. The indigenous life was extremophile, and exceedingly nasty. The smell of sulphur filled our lungs, even through the Minotaur’s air-con. We flew over fields of mud and shit and slime and green algae-like growths. There were crystalline rocks covered in grey mould, which glistened in the sunlight, when there was sunlight, which wasn’t often. Geysers of fire occasionally erupted, spraying mud and sending spatters of tiny swamp-dwelling mites up into the air before they rained, horribly, downwards.

  A volcano was erupting in the distance. This was, my brain chip informed me, a common occurrence on this planet. I asked for details of our target and a map scrolled down my visual array.

  It had taken an entire year for SNG forces to locate Morgan’s home world. Indeed, they would never have found it at all if they hadn’t been helped by the flame beasts. But more of that anon.

  On the maps, Morgan’s World was called X43, and it was considered to be unterraformable because it was subject to wild storms and violent and unpredictable solar flares. But Morgan, cunningly, had made a world here by burrowing inside.

  And that’s how he had evaded capture for so long. Because, from space, there were no signs of sentient life here. No lights. No electromagnetic radiation. In short, none of the traces normally associated with a civilisation. The place looked like exactly what it was: a primordial soup planet, where life was at the earliest stages of evolution.

  Oh, and it rained all the time, and lightning constantly flashed like a faulty torch in a dense mist.

  We flew through the haze and the rain and over the swamp, all the while preparing for battle.

  So, you may be wondering, how come the flame beasts were helping us?

  Flanagan explained it to me as we travelled. Making up for the briefings I’d missed.

  “The flames date from the dawn of time, and that makes them strange,” Flanagan said.

  I knew that much. “Is it true about the—”

  “Oh yeah,” said Flanagan, smiling. “They do have a fondness for television soap opera of the human variety. And blues, they love the blues, or some of them do. And there is something cool about the way they look and sound. Burning pillars of fire that turn into tumbleweeds of flame. The s-s-s-sssibilants. But they are not our friends. Get that? ’Cause I never got that. I had a flame who I thought was – never mind. That doesn’t matter.

  “The point is: remember that wasp that landed in your jam at the picnic? You put a glass over it and watched it die?

  “That’s us, the wasp is us, when the flame beasts turn against us. Which they may do, any minute now.”

  That’s what Flanagan told me, more or less. I forgot to save it to chip, I’m recalling all that from memory. I suspect he swore more. I mean, fuck! That man always swo
re. He2

  Picture the scene:3 the Houses of Parliament in London. Home to the new SNG Government. The President of Humanity, Roger Layton, was making a rare appearance in his seat on the back benches, as the Prime Minister of the Humanverse addressed the House, via holo links with every inhabited planet.

  And then the cry went out. Parliament is on fire!

  Slow murmuring was followed by hasty panic. An evacuation of the building was ordered and executed. But the sprinkler systems didn’t come on. And the Earth QRC reported no trace of actual flame.

  And so Roger Layton left the Commons Chamber and walked up the stairs to the river front balcony and saw for himself what was happening.

  An infestation of flame beasts! They were hovering above the three Gothic towers of the Palace of Westminster,4 in a pillar of fire that reached up into the sky and continued, for all anyone knew, to the further reaches of the universe. The river itself blazed with reflected light, in terrifying Turneresque frenzy.5 And swirling sibilant and sinister sounds emerged, as the pillar of flame began to talk.

  And that’s when the flame beasts delivered their ultimatum. Once, of course, they knew the beaconspace cameras were rolling, and they had everyone’s attention.

  Grandstanding or what?

  The message was brief, and transmitted in such a way that every word was heard clearly and intimately by the leaders of humanity like a whisssper in the ear.

  “Humanity mussst learn to become a civilissssed ssspecies,” the flames hissed. (Flanagan described this in general terms; but I subsequently read several eye-witnesss accounts of this event, which is why I have the words verbatim.)

  “You mussst desssist from the genocide and murder of other sssentient ssspeciesss,” said the flame-entity. “And you mussst punish and remove from power those who have done sssso. Or we ssshall eliminate you all. Thisss we pledge.”

  Then they ignited the River Thames. It burned all night, with flames that did not scorch. The sight of it was, apparently, extraordinary. Subsequent news reports erroneously described the spectacle – thanks to the work of the SNG propaganda department6 – as a “Fireworks Display to Celebrate the Freedom of Humanity.”7