“Did we know this might happen?” Maria asked.
“Always a possibility,” shrugged Flanagan. He looked at me, pointedly.
“What?”
He sighed. “We could do with some good luck. Maybe even an improbable escape?”
“From here?” I laughed.
Then I checked my link with the QRC. Still intact. The nullers were in operation throughout the planet’s crust, pointing upwards, preventing all beaconband transmissions from space. But if the QRC could give me the flit coordinates, I might still be able to—
“What can you do, babe?” asked Billy. There was no reproach in his tone. If we died, we died.
“Suit up,” I said. And we all raised our helmets and checked our oxygen supplies. Then we gloved off.
“Hold my hands,” I said, and held out both hands and they all clasped or touched my bare hands somehow. It felt strange to have Lena’s hand on mine.
Then I prayed a silent prayer to Ganesh.
And we teleported out, minus the Minotaur, on to the planetary surface. We landed in a messy ruck. Our warsuits protected us from the bitter cold of the winds; but our hands were bare and we had to struggle to put on space-mitts before our fingers fell off.
Finally the task was done. We breathed sighs of relief, and gave thanks to our gods, those of us who had them.
And then we walked about four hundred miles across treacherous terrain and through vile swamps, until we were out of range of the nullers. It took a long long time.
Finally, we were out of nuller-range; and we flitted all the way back home to the Rock. No misflits. We’d survived the mission with only one fatality.
And Morgan was dead. Or so we hoped. We had no way of telling. All we knew was – everything down there was dead.
A week later we got news of another sighting of the real Morgan. The mission had failed.
“Don’t take it to heart,” Flanagan told me. We were in a bar, just the two of us. The usual drill, for Flanagan: a thousand year malt on the table, one of the many bottles he had pillaged over the years. I had my glass full to the brim, but it tasted like stale peat to me.
“I’m not,” I said.
“And don’t blame yourself for Quentin’s death.”
“I don’t.”
“We have to do this all over again you know.”
“I know,” I said. “But—”
“What?”
“I can’t.”
Flanagan waited patiently.
“I’m not a fucking hero,” I said. “I never signed up for—”
I ran out of words.
“You thought this would be easy?”
“One last mission. That’s what Fraser—”
“He was lying.”
“How many? How many more?”
“No idea,” Flanagan said. “That’s how it is.” He was looking implacable. He did that very well.
“Shit, Flanagan.”
“You’re not a quitter.”
I shook my head. He was wrong.
“How could you do this?” I asked him, desperation in my voice. “All this? Again and again? For so many years?”
Picture the scene: me and Captain Flanagan, the greatest hero in human history, shooting the breeze together! Drinking malt whisky and setting the world to rights! I could hardly believe it.
And all I could do was bust his fucking balls.
“It gets to be a habit,” Flanagan said mildly.
“I do,” I said, bitterly.
“Do what?”
“Blame myself. For Quentin,” I admitted.
Quentin’s random death had totally spooked me. It made me think my luck was failing.
“You should, indeed, do so,” said Flanagan casually. “It was your fault. It’s always your fault. Get over it.”
That was harsh, I thought, sulkily.
But refreshing. Nothing like a slap in the face to break you out of self-pity mode.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.
Round about then, that’s when I learned the meaning of courage.
Because we did try again. Another planet, another mission. Another Morgan killed, which also turned out to be a cyborg. So we tried again.
Another planet, another mission, another cyborg destroyed, but once again we had failed to kill the real Morgan.
We tried again.
And again.
This continued for some time.
That’s courage.
We hit the ground standing.
And I took stock. Maria was dead. Her limbs mutated, and elongated, like a Laocoön. Her chest was crushed by the new body-shape, and she had vomited out her own heart.9
Jay was also dead. No outward signs of deformation, but no vitals either.10
Andrew, who had replaced Fraser on the last twenty missions, was also dead, with skin inverted and no organs in his flaccid body.11 Shannon, who had replaced Billy for the last twenty-five missions, was non-viable but put up a fight, so I had to plasma-blast her into oblivion.12 And Flanagan too was motionless. And when I took his face mask off I could see he was made of – glass. Yeah, that’s right. Fucking glass.13
Only Lena and me had survived, of the entire Kamikaze Squad.
“Is he gone?” asked Lena.
“Yeah.”
Lena didn’t say anything for a while but when she spoke her tone was calm.
“You’re sure?”
I checked again. “No vitals.”
“He’s made of glass?”
“He’s made of glass,” I agreed. There was something magnificent about it. I could see right through Flanagan’s face. I could see his crystalline brain inside his translucent skull. He was smiling, I swear he was smiling.
The others had died in equally terrible ways. But only Flanagan had died beautiful.
We didn’t try to move him. We didn’t even touch him, not so much as a light finger-stroke. But even so his body started to crack.
Flanagan died in a million splinters of glass.
We continued with the mission. Remarkably, we didn’t die. But we found no trace of the real Morgan. This mission, too, was a failure. I could tell you more about the specifics of the mission but, well, I’m not going to. Fuck that.
We ported back without revisiting Flanagan’s remains. I knew, however, that Lena had taken away a sliver of glass. A fragment of Flanagan’s face, the size of a diamond.
Brigadier Fraser didn’t believe it at first.
Because Flanagan didn’t die. Flanagan couldn’t die. That fact was at the heart of modern humanity, it was our prevailing myth. No matter what, Flanagan would always prevail!
In fact, even when Flanagan did die, after getting sucked in by that double star – no one really believed it. He was still the king who would one day return. As he had! The moment humanity was in deadly peril again, back came Flanagan. He was humanity’s greatest hero. Its saviour, no less.
But all that legend stuff is crap. Flanagan was just a man. For a long time, admittedly, he was an astonishingly lucky man, to survive when so many others died.
But then his luck ran out. It happens.
There was a public memorial service for Flanagan, which I did not attend. There were private gatherings of mourners, which I shunned. Speeches were made, and I ignored them.
Then Lena came to see me in my room. Billy made himself absent, with considerable tact. And Lena and I sat and stared at each other for a while.
“Are we friends?” Lena asked, eventually.
“No.”
“I thought not.”
She was silent a while.
“Will you ever forgive me?” she asked. “For being such a – you know.”
“No,” I said.
“I thought not.” She sounded almost relieved. “Can I offer you some advice?”
“No.”
“You don’t have to forgive me,” said Lena. “But you do have to—”
“Don’t give me that fucking cliché!”
�
�—forgive yourself,” said Lena.
Cliché or not, it was damned good advice.
All these years, I suddenly realised, I’d been punishing myself for what this bitch had done to me. And now she’d given me permission to desist with the self-flagellating. And get on with, well, my life.
Damn, I hate it when other people are smarter about me than I am.”What the hell,” I asked Lena, “do you want from me?”
“I want to hold a wake,” said Lena. She was eerily calm. “And mourn the man I loved. And I want you to join me, Artemis. Will you do it?”
I thought about it for a while. And then I shrugged.
“Yeah, what the fuck, why not?” I said.
“Another drink?” I asked.
“Bank on it,” said Lena, giggling.
We were the only two left, out of the entire platoon of mourning well-wishers.
It had been a long and disgraceful night. We’d been thrown out of eleven bars by bartenders who didn’t recognise Lena. Well how could they? She looked like a whore, of the worst and sluttiest variety. Her raven-black hair had been touched up to remove all hints of grey, and tinted with lurid pink stripes. Her skin was fake-rejuved into an eerie plastic smoothness. She wore lipstick, nail polish, eye paint, facial tattoos, and a low cut dress. She was, all in all, not dressed for mourning.
“Am I embarrassing you?” Lena asked. We were by now in a cabaret club of the sleaziest kind. Naked men were gyrating and Lena was heckling and leering. She was also drinking heavily, very heavily indeed, even by my standards. And she was cramming down drugs, mainly floaters and epiphanies, when she thought I wasn’t looking. And even when I was.
It was deeply awful. She was behaving like an evil witch who’d stolen the body of a nubile virgin, and was determined to ruin it before morning ended her spell.
My mother! Did I mention she was my mother?
This was gross beyond gross.
“Maybe we should call it a night,” I suggested.
“Or maybe I should drink till I puke.”
“When did that last happen?” I asked, genuinely curious.
She thought. “Twenty ninety-nine.”
“Rejuve, huh?”
“It spoils the experience. I remember—” The memory fled her mind. She had that lost look again.
I tried to reintroduce a mellow mood.
“You want to talk about Flanagan?” I asked gently.
She cackled. “Fuck, no.”
“Cool with me.”
I sat and festered in silence.
“Okay then. If you’re going to brood,” she sniped.
I brooded a bit more.
“What did you want to know?” she asked.
“What?”
“About Flanagan.”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Nothing. Everything. Did he have hidden depths?”
“None.”
“Virtues?”
“None.”
“Was he nice to you?”
“Never.”
“Will you miss him.”
“Oh yes. Yes.”
Lena looked even more wild. A hunky male dancer came to her and she – look, I’m not even going to repeat it.
Her voice was slurred too by now. She was drinking faster than the fucking rejuve could sober her up.
“He’d appreciate this,” Lena said.
“I doubt that,” I said sourly.
“He’d want me to—”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
“Let me take you to your room,” I suggested.
“Leave me. Just leave.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“LEAVE ME!” she screamed, and the bouncers came across and I gave them a warning look. But one of them grabbed my arm anyway so I broke his jaw. And—
And that was twelve clubs we’d been thrown out of.
“Have you thought—” I said to Lena, a little later, as we walked through the deserted night-time boulevards of the Rock. The sky above us was gunmetal grey. With a flick of a switch, it could be made translucent to reveal the vastness of space behind, but most residents of the Rock found that too spooky. And there were no clouds in this dimly illuminated sky – they vacuum them up every night, to filter for impurities. Oh, and someone had painted a moon on the inside of the biodome, for a gag. It wasn’t all that funny really.
“Thought what?” Lena asked.
“You can bring people back to life you know. It can be done.”
“Voodoo?”
“Cyborging.”
“Never,” said Lena, in a grey empty monotone.
“I don’t blame you,” I admitted.
We walked on. It felt like the sort of night where it should have been raining, in a melancholy and atmospheric kind of a way. But on the Rock, the rain came up from underground vents, watering the plants and humidifying the air without anyone ever getting wet. Shame, really, it just wasn’t the same.
“You can go now,” Lena said. “I’m fine from here. Go. I’ll drink another glass or two then I’ll go back to my room.”
“I’ll stay. I’ve got nothing else to do.”
We were now walking through the narrower streets of the Rock’s residential area. Billy was covering me from a discreet distance, with two surveillance squads. Wherever we staggered, Billy was close behind with his army of bodyguards. Twice, Lena had run out of the back of the club we were in, and Billy had MI’d me her location. Wherever she went, I popped up again. It was really pissing her off at one point during the evening, before she became too drunk to realise what I was doing.
We arrived at her apartment block, and I took her back to her room via the escalator. She threw up in the toilet. Then sobered herself up the old-fashioned way, by having a shower with her clothes on. And I dressed her in her pyjamas and dried her hair and tucked her up in bed.
I waited by her bed for six hours, while she pretended to sleep. Eventually she opened her eyes.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, weakly. And smiled. “You’re so sweet for staying with me. But you can go now. Honest!” And she smiled again. A small, wan, duplicitous smile.
“Give yourself a week,” I said grimly.
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t play your fucking games Lena.”
“Don’t swear at me. I’m your—”
I glared. She shut up.
“A week,” I repeated, “Before you kill yourself. If you do it then, well. That’s your choice. But not tonight. Not tonight. Okay?”
Tears were pouring down her cheeks. “Am I that obvious?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t live without him.”
“Then do another mission. You’ll almost certainly die.”
“I can’t live – even that long. I can’t—”
“Look, bitch,” I said, and could say no more.
“You want me to live, for you?” she said, pleadingly.
“I want you to at least,” I said, and the tears were pouring down my cheeks too now, “consider it.”
She gave me a sad look.
“If I do, you know. Choose to live,” she said carefully, “will you forgive me?”
“For what?”
“For being a bad mother, of course.”
I thought about it.
“Hell no,” I said.
“Hey, come on!” she protested, startled at my vehemence.
“No!” I insisted.
“Please! Forgive me, and I promise I won’t kill myself,” Lena wheedled.
I shook my head.
And then she grinned. She actually grinned. Though the tears, it looked malign not sweet, but the intention was still a good one.
“You ungrateful slut!” she sneered, theatrically. “You’re gonna reject my moral blackmail, huh?” And that sounded more like the old Lena.
“I certainly fucking am.”
“Wise,” she conceded.
“I thought so.”
And then – there was a moment b
etween us.
I’m not sure what sort of moment it was, but it was there. My mother in tears, desperate, suicidal. Me – what? Saving her life.
It was, I guess, a pretty major moment.
“What reason do I actually have to live?” she whispered, after a while. “Seriously, Artemis. I’m not some fucking teenager. I’ve lived – I can’t even remember. Somewhere between one thousand and two thousand years. I just lost the only man I ever loved—”
“You loved Andrei,” I pointed out.
“You read my diary then.”
“And Tom, the copper. You loved him. And—”
“Look, the thing with Flanagan worked for me. We’ve been together – can’t remember that either. A bunch of years. But I’m tired.”
“Then sleep.”
“I’m tired of – all this. The fighting. The endless jeopardies. You really think killing Morgan will make the universe a better place?”
“I do.”
“Okay then, we’ll do it. And then I’ll—”
“Don’t even say it,” I said. “Or think it. Just—”
“What?”
“Live one day at a time.”
“Come,” said Lena.
“Come where?”
“Into bed. Cuddle me. Stay with me tonight.”
I stared at her with horror.
“Are you suggesting we commit lesbian incest?” I asked, appalled.
She roared with laughter.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snorted. “You’re too fucking – young for me. Come on, cuddle your old mum. Wrinkled and withered as I am.”
“You certainly are that.”
“Wash your mouth out girl.”
“Fuck you ginch.”
I slept with her all night long.
In the morning I got up and showered and dressed and looked at the sleeping Lena. She was totally wasted. She smelled of booze and puke, despite the late night shower. She was old, very old. Her hair was flecked with grey again, despite the dye. She looked about a million years old.
But she was asleep. And at peace, for a little while.
And she was, fuck it all, my mother. And I – no, I’m not going to utter that ghastly cliché.
I’ll give you this much: I hated her less than I had ever done before.
She was snoring. Get that! Snoring. That’s how old she was.
I stayed by her bedside until she woke, about eleven hours later. When she saw me she was startled. I could see her trying to work out how the hell she was still alive. And she remembered what had happened. And how I had saved her life.
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