Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  “It was trying to kill me,” I countered.

  “That’s impossible!”

  “Then what,” I asked gently, “was it doing in my fucking cell?”

  She had no answer to that.

  Two days later the Recon Committee representative returned and interviewed me. I told him that the DR had attempted to kill me in the night, and that I’d acted entirely in self defence. I also explained that all the prison officers were being bribed by the Clannites who ran the prison. Giger was utterly corrupt, I told him.

  My story was believed. The prison was fined for failure to exercise its duty of care towards an inmate.18 I was even granted privilege points, redeemable at any point between now and the expiry of my sentence. These entitled me to extra hours in the gym, and additional time with my moral therapist.19

  Yeah, my heart skipped a beat at THAT bit of news.

  That’s the story of how I killed a DR, single-handedly, and with no weapons aside from my claws. And it’s all true, just the way I told it.20

  But did I mention how afraid I was that night? How terribly and soul-quakingly afraid?

  Yeah, okay, I was warned in advance that the DR would come for me. And yeah, I was ready for it.

  But even so, I was terrified.

  I wasn’t afraid of dying, get that, okay? Death holds no terrors for me. That’s the way of my kind. People like me, the gangsters, the criminals, the killers for hire, we hold to the Viking way. We don’t believe in death and glory, like the Soldiers, we just don’t cling to life. That’s what makes us so very good at killing others.

  No. I was afraid of failing in my mission.

  ’Cause I knew I would only have once brief moment in which I could disable the robot’s brain. And I knew that if I fucked it up, I would be killed outright. True-dead killed. And in consequence, my revenge would be aborted. My reason for living, my reason for being, would be gone.

  That was my fear. The fear that when my moment came, I would be proven unworthy of it.

  And this isn’t, I hasten to add, me bragging in reverse. I’m not one of those warriors who coyly admits she sometimes feel fear, knowing damn well that most ordinary citizens are shit-scared all the time. I hate that kind of mindfuck – the false modesty shtick.

  No, what I’m saying is that I feared I would fail and hence prove unworthy – because it’s happened to me before. Not often – only once in fact – but it’s happened.

  And I can still remember, with a terrible vividness, the occasion when that occurred. When my life was destroyed because of my astonishing, pathetic failure to act. I could have fought! Or tried to escape. But I failed to do so. Inertia had possessed me.

  And I know that such a moment of weakness could occur again. Easily. And that awareness haunts me like – well, like nothing at all I can think of. It just haunts me, and renders me permanently afraid.

  Anyway! I just thought I should mention that. So you know the truth about me. My inner fears. My weaknesses. All my frailties. I owe you that, okay?

  But even so – despite my soul-quaking fear – I fought and killed the evil, gigantic doppelgänger robot with nothing but my bare hands and claws.

  How fucking cool was that?

  “Teresa,” I said.

  Shalco stopped, and stared at me.

  We were in the prison yard. Every prison has a yard, but this one was bleaker than most. A narrow walkway on the outer edge of the spoke. There was rough gravel underfoot. The space wasn’t wide enough to play a game of football, even if the dubbers had had the wit, or the generosity, to give us a ball. And outside – nothing but bleak airless wilderness. The craters and mountains and empty dust-strewn landscape of Giger’s Moon.

  And that’s where I called out Teresa Shalco, capobastone of Giger Pen.

  “You look like shit,” she said. She was smiling again, looking like everyone’s favourite momma.

  I knew her history. She’d run the Russian gangs on the planet of Gorbachev. Everyone who knew her spoke highly of her fairness. She was cruel, yes, a killer, yes. But fair. You couldn’t ask for a better Boss. She’d been ideally suited for the role of liaising with the doppelgänger ruling élite on her home planet. Because everyone trusted her, and yet she could kill without conscience.

  And in fairness, she’d done a good job, back there on Gorbachev. Okay, many died because of her, but they would have died anyway. At least she organised her people into some kind of civilisation. She was a collaborator, for sure, but back in those days, the ones who didn’t collaborate were either dead or trapped in Giger and places like it with their brains burned out.

  All that was the ancient history about Shalco. Right at that moment, however – prison yard, airless wilderness stretching out eerily beyond, me staring nastily – the issue was that Shalco was the top bitch here. And it was my job to goad her into losing control.

  “You ran to Mummy, did you?” I sneered. It was the gravest of allegations. That she had informed on me to the prison authorities.

  “Never,” she said coldly.

  “You told them I killed that robot.”

  “It was obvious,” she said politely, “that you killed the goddamned robot. It was in your fucking cell!”

  “Kiss my finger,” I said and held out my middle finger. She stood still, stared at me. This was sacrilege; for me to do this to her.

  I laughed. Turned my back on her. And walked away.

  I could feel her hatred burning after me. But she daren’t attack me. Not here. Not in front of the DRs. So she had to let my insubordination ride.

  Shalco was of course diminished by my actions. She had lost status in the eyes of all who saw us together. Which was only two or three people, but they all had big mouths. And so, sooner or later, to redeem her honour, she had to fight me mano a mano.

  Either that, or acknowledge that I was the new leader of Giger Penitentiary.

  Prisons are like cities. The rules are the same. The hierarchies are the same. It’s just the quality of the booze that’s different.

  And I know what I’m talking about here, right? Cities and prisons, I know ’em both.

  (I’m digressing here, by the way. Stick with me, I like to snake my way around to the point. In fact, I remember one time.)21

  Anyway, back to the actual digression.22

  I killed three piccioti in the ensuing brawl. That made me a piccioto. And a legend. I was seventeen years old, in biological terms, by that point. No longer a child. But still – yes, still – a virgin.

  So I knew about prisons. And I knew how to work the system in Giger. Swagger, brag, taunt, and build a myth. That way, I would be top bitch in no time.

  What’s more, Shalco’s people on the outside had access to my criminal record, which was dark and devious. I was, supposedly, a psychopath, and a multiple murderer.

  In reality, I was a multiple murderer, and quite probably a psychopath to boot.23 But my fake criminal record had different victims listed, and different motives. And I have to say, this girl I was pretending to be – Danielle Arditti – was a total fucking monster. In the old days she’d have been executed, or promoted to Admiral in the Cheo’s Navy. These days, lifetime incarceration is the preferred way of dealing with nutjobs like her. Or rather (since she was dead) me.

  Two days had passed since I’d offered my finger to Teresa Shalco. I lived those days with my senses at their highest pitch. Expecting a knife in the back. Or poison in my food. Or – well, the possibilities were endless, and I was alert to them all. But I’m a hard girl to ambush. And my taste buds are pretty acute – another genetic modification – so I can detect most poisons in my mouth before I actually swallow them.

  But my point here is – you don’t know what it’s like to live like that! In a state of constant fear. Worried that everyone who passes by may be plotting murder. Afraid to take a shower in case it will be the setting for a brutal execution. I took to carrying a sharpened chess piece as a weapon. I knew that everyone in the prison was my e
nemy and I lived every moment in terror.

  No, you don’t know what that’s like.

  It’s great. It’s the adrenalin rush to beat all adrenalin rushes. I have no fear of death, you see. And that liberates me. It allows me to be truly alive.

  Bargan Oriel came to see me, and offered a deal.

  “Back down,” he suggested. “Go on one knee, kiss Teresa’s finger stump, beg for her forgiveness. And then it’ll be fine. She’ll forgive you.”

  “And in return?”

  “There is no ‘in return’,” Oriel said coldly.

  “I capitulate, she grinds my face in the dust. That’s your deal?”

  “Pretty much,” Oriel admitted. “Take it or leave it.”

  “I leave it.”

  “You’re a foolish girl, Danielle,” Oriel told me.

  I seethed at that – I hate being “girled” – and resisted an urge to beat his face to a pulp.

  “How exactly am I a foolish girl?” I asked Oriel, with a girlish flick of my hair, and a girl-like twinkle in my girl-sized eyes.

  “You could be a vangelista in Giger,” he told me, in the same patronising tone. “I have the power to acknowledge your status. But you have to stop rocking the boat.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Oriel sighed. His face assumed an expression of patient forbearance. “Then bad things will happen to you,” he said.

  “Bad things have already happened to me,” I said lightly. “I’m used to it.”

  Oriel eyed me up. It was a possessive glance. This was clearly a man who had owned a lot of slaves and fucked a lot of whores in the course of his long and badly lived life.

  “The entire prison population,” he pointed out, “answers to the capobastone.”

  “How would you like to be capo?” I asked him, and for a moment Oriel’s eyes lit up. I could see his excitement, his almost sexual longing for power.

  Then he came to his senses.

  “Is this your plan?” he asked, with open scorn, though, at the same time, barely able to conceal his greed. “You’re trying to launch a coup? You want me to be the next boss?”

  “Maybe,” I said, just to taunt him.

  Sweet Shiva! It was like offering raw bleeding meat to a jackal.

  The hooded expression returned to his face, eventually. “I am loyal to Teresa,” he said, in brittle tones. “Totally loyal.”

  He was scared of me now. He’d guessed that I was playing a dark game. Either on my own behalf. Or, more likely, for Teresa Shalco, acting as an agent provocateur to lure him into being disloyal. I could be her way of testing him – by setting me up to provoke her, and then suborn him into treachery.

  This entire complex chess game unfolded in his mind in an instant, and now he had me marked as a real threat to his life and power.

  None of it was true of course. But that’s the great thing with paranoid people. You just have to give them a hint, and they create their own mad conspiracy thriller in their heads.

  “Tell Teresa I want to see her,” I said, and Oriel flinched. Only the five quintini were allowed to call Shalco by her first name.

  “She won’t see you,” he said.

  “Then send her a message.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “ ‘I challenge thee.’ ”

  Oriel went pale.

  I looked at his eyes. I could almost hear the thoughts whirring. Should he pass the message on or not? If he didn’t, he might be failing some kind of test. If he did—

  “I’ll tell her that,” said Oriel calmly, and I knew he was planning how he would seize power if and when I defeated Teresa Shalco.

  We met in the rec room of A Spoke.

  This was one of the few public areas in the prison which hadn’t been attacked by the SNG interior designers. Instead of wishy-washy pastel coloured walls, there were jet black walls with, if you looked closely enough, dried blood stains. There was a stench of defeat and decay here. And it was the biggest rec room in the prison, more an amphitheatre really, with tiered seating. I didn’t know what the former prisoners of Giger had done in this place, but it was a fair bet that death was involved. Maybe gladiatorial games? Or eviscerations and executions?

  We had a full house. Every seat was occupied, and Shalco’s goons were acting as stewards. I was wearing a T-shirt and joggers. Shalco wore an old vest, with a slogan on it (DEATH TO MUTANTS, which I assumed was the name of a band or a TV show, though I didn’t know for sure).24 Her arms were bare and muscular. Her brown hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was a big woman, but I could see now how little of it was fat.

  Shalco had the right to choose the manner of combat, and had elected to wrestle me. I would have a preferred a sword fight – for with a blade in my hand, I’d have defeated her easily. Boxing would also have favoured me, because of my speed and grace and skill. But wrestling was Shalco’s game. She’d been a pro fighter before she became a gang boss, and had won her partial freedom after sixty successful bouts to the death. And she still kept in shape.

  She was about six feet four inches tall and I was five-five. She was built like a barn, and I was slight and slender. It was, on the face of it, a complete mismatch.

  Oriel clapped his hands once and we circled each other.

  I kept my hands high, boxing style. Shalco let her hands drop to her side, swaying as she first moved towards me, then stepped away. Her strategy was clearly to get me in a death grip. If she did, I doubted I could break it. I knew she was also augmented, and I’d heard she could bench press an army jeep.

  I moved in fast with a flurry of punches and Shalco tried to catch me in a bear hug but I fell on the floor, slipped under her open legs, stood up, and toppled her.

  She did a back somersault and landed on her feet and turned to face me. Fast and graceful, as well as powerful.

  I threw a roundhouse kick at her head and it connected. But she caught my leg as I drew it back and now she had me. She twisted the leg and yanked and tried to pop it out of the hip socket. But my body bent like softplastic and I spun around and landed a two-fist strike to her face, breaking her nose.

  She lashed out with an elbow strike to my face and the pain hit me. Then she threw me across the arena towards the ring pillar. I spun in the air and avoided a face-first collision with the metal post.

  I got back on my feet and somehow Shalco had me in a neck hold. She really was fast. I forward rolled, as she broke my larynx, and then I turned and punched her between her breasts to stop her heart.

  It didn’t work. She grabbed me by the throat and began strangling me. I activated the oxygen capsule in my brain and pounded her arms which were like granite. She jackknifed me over and pinned my shoulders to the floor. Oriel began the count.

  I jolted my body and threw Shalco off me. She flew about five feet in the air and I could see the look of total astonishment on her face. She’d had no idea I was so damned strong.

  She recovered fast and turned the fall into a parachutist’s controlled landing. But I leaped and grabbed her arm and spun her round and threw her to the ground and pinned her. Oriel counted it. Eight, nine, ten. First pinfall to me.

  Shalco got to her feet, snarling. She’d never lost a wrestling bout, and she didn’t like the way things were going. And so she lost her temper and came at me hard, with forearm strikes and vicious leg swipes.

  I avoided them all, dancing around her, not hitting her but making her feel slow and old. Then I grabbed her in a hammerlock and twisted until I could hear her shoulder pop.

  “Submit,” I whispered.

  She didn’t. I knew she never would. I let her go and as she experienced a moment of joyous release I leaped across her body and spun her over then pinned her in a la magistral.25

  Second pinfall to me.

  Shalco got up, then simply leaped up in the air and landed on me. It felt as if a truck had descended from the clouds and crashed upon me when I had been out for a stroll anticipating mild rain. I’d no idea a human bei
ng could leap so fast, or fall so hard. Then she pushed up with her hands and flew upwards with arms outstretched and fell with what seemed like preternatural speed and landed upon me a second time.

  This time, it felt like the truck’s lardarse older brother had landed on me.

  She raised herself up a second time and this time tried for a cradle pinfall, but I kicked free and rolled away. But she got me in a killer neck grip and whispered to me: “Let’s deal.”

  I turned my head and looked into her eyes, which wasn’t easy considering the agonising position I was in, and I nodded. But I couldn’t speak, because she’d shattered my larynx, so I authorised a shortband MI transfer and spoke into her mind.

  “What can you offer?” I said.

  “Anything. What do you want?”

  I told her.

  Then I threw her off me and we battered shit out of each other for another hour and a half before I allowed her to pin me three times in a row.

  What the hell – there was a crowd, they deserved a decent show.

  That night in my cell I sat immersed in agony. It would take weeks for my throat to heal. Weeks too for my bruised limbs to stop hurting. I feared there was internal bleeding too. And my head hurt. One of those really painful headaches, you know? The kind you get when someone very strong punches you in the face a great many many times in a very short period. That kind of headache.

  But I was happy. Because the entire landing of the cell block was silent. The doors had not opened. There were no footsteps outside. There were no groans and screams and howls of pain. There were no atrocities at all that night, nor would there ever be again. That was my deal with Shalco: she stopped the rapes.

  There were twenty-five other landings in Giger of course. And what happened on those other landings would continue to happen. That wasn’t part of the deal – I knew I dare not ask for that much. So it was a partial victory. Bad stuff was still happening in Giger – but at least it wasn’t happening near me.

  All this, I should point out, had nothing whatever to do with my real reason for being in Giger Penitentiary. It wasn’t part of my plan. This was just, well, something I felt I had to do.