Artemis

by Philip Palmer

  “Why the fuck,” gasped Cassady, “did you do that, bitch?”

  “To prove a point.”

  “What fucking point?!”

  “No way,” I said patiently, “could you have killed a trained Soldier. Not with those pathetic little fingerblades. Julia could have dodged you easily, like I just did. Or she could have tautened her neck muscles to bury her arteries under flesh. That way, you could have stuck a kitchen knife in her throat and it wouldn’t have harmed her.”

  “What are you saying?”

  I looked at Cassady with the fondest of looks. And then I broke her heart.

  “I’m saying,” I said, “that Julia let you kill her. She had her orders. Murder your lover, or die yourself. And she cared about you too much to kill you. So she chose B. She chose to die.”

  There was a terrible silence.

  “Not possible,” said Cassady, re-evaluating the single most important experience of her entire life. An experience she had mis-read and misconstrued totally.

  “She loved you,” I said, “so she broke her conditioning. She let herself die rather than hurt a hair on your head.”

  “But she had—” said Cassady. “That’s just not—” She thought about it some more. “She took six hours to die,” said Cassady, her voice trembling. “She didn’t say anything, she didn’t try to write a note. She just looked at me, for six hours. What must she have been thinking…?”

  “That,” I said, “she loved you.”

  My plan was to seduce Cassady, so that I could use her as a pawn in my escape strategy.

  Instead – although it took me years to realise this – she seduced me.

  I fell in love with her, totally. I yearned to spend time with her, I looked forward to being with her again, even when I was still with her. I gave her, yes I did, my entire fucking heart.

  Though she never loved me, not really and truly, the way she’d loved Julia.

  I’m sure about that. Which was fine. I didn’t expect her to love me that much. ’Cause I mean, how the fuck could I, someone with no soul or conscience or compassion, compete with a dead lover?

  Can’t be done! That was my attitude.

  And yet—

  Skip it.

  Long and short is: we became lovers, and it wasn’t just about sex. It was the happiest time of my life.

  Fuck it, I adored that sweet-hearted girl.

  And it wasn’t all nights of passion. We talked politics too. After leaving her garrison planet, Cassady had become an anarcho-pirate, with a hidden agenda of overthrowing the evil Galactic Corporation. Just like Flanagan.

  But half a century later, the evil Corporation was overthrown. And Cassady was arrested on multiple charges of piracy and murder, and was guilty on all counts. Because over the years she had become, when all is said and done, nothing but a cheap hood.

  But, hey, I don’t like to tarnish her memory by talking about that shit.

  We talked sometimes, too, about aliens. Like me, Cassady had read all about the great alien threat to human civilisation – the gestalt swarm entity known as Bugs, who at one point looked set to kill off the entire human race. These creatures swarm, and kill, and eat people alive, and can write messages in the air with their own bodies, most famously, thus:

  But for centuries the feared Bugs were trapped behind walls of improbability or some such shit in the region of the galaxy known as Debatable Space. The place where the pirates and the outlaws and the roaring boys and girls dwelled.

  And all that, rather skilfully I feel, brings me back to my original point.

  Namely, that whilst I was fucking Cassady, and plotting escape from Giger, terrible shit was happening in Debatable Space. The human species was, once more, in deadly jeopardy.

  And, once again, this was an unintended consequence of the overthrow of the Galactic Corporation. Because you see, once we had a democratic Solar Neighbourhood Government in place, their first act was to clean up all the outlaw planets and restore civilised values to these dens of depravity.11 Before of course granting them full democratic and independent status.

  And, as part of this pitifully well-intentioned lunatic-liberal strategy, the SNG – responding to some admittedly outrageous acts of piracy and murder – foolishly attempted to “pacify” Debatable Space.12

  It went badly.

  I read about all this three years later, when I was on Cúchulainn. And I was briefed more fully on it all much later when I – but let me get to that part of the story when I do.

  I found the history of the second invasion of the Bugs absolutely fascinating. And I thought a lot about the people involved, and how it would have felt for them.

  Imagine what it would be like, to be a Sentinel! Doomed to spend all your military career and indeed your entire fucking life trapped inside a quantum cage; unable to go home, or ever see your loved ones.

  For, you see, when humanity first discovered the uniquely dangerous nature of the Bugs, the Sentinels were the soldiers who were sent in to be the line of first defence. Thousands of them in warships created a cordon of steel around the Bug Planet, while a quasi-magical13 quantumarity cage was being created, and was then conjured into place.

  Then, some bureaucrat decided to play safe. Instead of withdrawing the Sentinels, a second quantum cage was created all around them. They were left with specific instructions to attack the Bugs if they ever escaped; but the Sentinels themselves were trapped behind an invisible unbreachable screen, for all of time.

  What crap. And so fucking typical of the way warriors were treated back then.

  And so thousands of these Sentinels were liberated when the walls of the outer quantumarity were breached by that – accidental? inadvertent? just plain fucking stupid? – anti-matter bomb explosion. There would have been millions dwelling there if the Sentinels had bred. But that was against their code. They saw it as their role to watch and guard, not to fornicate and have pleasure. So they watched and guarded for century upon century, oblivious to the fact that their existence was utterly futile.

  For you see, no human being can withstand an attack by the Bugs.14 No human-designed weapon can kill them. No battle-armoured force fielded spaceship stands a chance against their inexorable advance. These sentient swarm monsters can be caged, but they cannot be killed.

  But the Sentinels believed otherwise. They had guarded the inner quantum cage for all this time in the firm belief that they might need to one day combat an escaping Bug armada. They had built, with formidable ingenuity, plasma-based weapons which, so their scientists believed, could slay the Bug swarm. They had explored the deepest reaches of quantum theory in order to create a way of rendering the bugs “impossible.” And the weapons that they created to do this were magnificent and beautiful and utterly futile.

  For centuries these poor saps had convinced themselves that they were the last and only bastion that stood between civilisation and the most deadly alien species ever found.

  Then, as I say, the SNG pacification fleet arrived in Debatable Space. And the whole fiasco played out.15 A space battle raged. Pirates fired their missiles at the SNG fleet; the SNG admirals fired their missiles back. And then Captain Hawksmoor, exceeding his brief, punched the icon that launched the anti-matter missile that failed to connect with the space pirates’ flagship but instead was tractor-beamed away with incredible force so that it accelerated to something close to light speed by the time the bomb blew up.

  RIGHT NEXT TO THE FUCKING QUANTUMARITY CAGE.

  This explosion shattered the delicate balance of space-time whatever; and the cage was breached. And that’s when the Sentintels were, finally, freed.

  But THEN the inner quantumarity collapsed too, rent apart by the aftershocks of the anti-matter/matter collision – and the Bugs emerged into open space for the first time since, oh, since the Earth was ruled by a vast array of different nation-states.16

  The Sentinels were ready for the challenge. They marshalled their ships. They fired their exotic weapons. Th
ey drew a line in the metaphorical sand. And then they were annihilated.

  And the Bugs swept onwards, into Debatable Space itself – that motley assemblage of frontier worlds and pirate planets – and were confronted by the massed armada of the SNG pacification fleet. And that too was annihilated.17

  But a few Sentinels remained alive – the senior officers who had been taken aboard the SNG flagship, and who watched the ghastly space war on the bridge screens of their hosts’ vessel. Imagine how that felt for them! These people had spent hundreds of years preparing for the apocalypse. And then the apocalypse arrived, and they were caught napping.

  For the Sentinels believed the Bugs – or the Great Swarm Mind as they are now called – to be, quite literally, the Devil. They represented the End of All Things, the veritable coming of the Last Demons. The Sentinels further believed that our One True God was the God of an infinite number of universes. Hence, His appalling neglect of our own.

  And those poor Sentinels then lived to see their Devil escape from Hell. And then, to their even greater astonishment, the Sentinels saw the GSM eradicated in a blaze of fire and fury such as the universe has never seen before. And which we can only hope may never see again.

  I’ve seen the film footage. It truly awes.18

  You can see the few surviving ships in the SNG armada turning to face their doom, in the blackness of space. You see them slowly encroached upon by the numinous haze of swarm-mind nano-creatures. You see them fire their engines and hurtle futilely towards their barely corporeal but utterly deadly adversary.

  And then space itself ignites. Pillars and plumes of flame shoot across the firmament, each the size of a supernova in full eruption. Rich yellows and golds and oranges spew and spill in a ceaseless frenzy. The blackness of space becomes a light too bright to perceive. All this the Sentinels saw.

  What must they have thought?

  I can imagine only too readily. I think they thought they saw their God. The God of All the Universes, enraged. Imagine that!

  The truth was far more mundane. The Sentinels had “merely” witnessed the first known example of the flame beasts waging war. It was a war of utterly astonishing power. Afterwards, no trace or remnant remained of the Bug intelligence. And not a single planet or asteroid or fragment of space debris survived in the region once enclosed by the two quantumarities. We talk about the void of space – but space is usually full of something, even if it is infinitesimal, or comprised of dark matter. But in this one region, there was truly nothing.

  I wasn’t there when all this happened. Nor were you. We read about it in the paper, or saw it on the telly, or in our eyes via our MIs. There were no heroes that day, No warriors mightily fought the dragon and slew it. Rather, the human species was threatened with extinction by the Bugs, an enemy as coldly indifferent as waves attacking grains of sand. Or as glaciers slowly carving valleys out of a mountain range.

  And then, to our ultimate chagrin, we were saved from oblivion by the intervention of a second implacable and all-powerful alien species – the flame beasts. We were lucky, on that occasion. The flames – immortal, all powerful, utterly strange – saved us. But we could just as easily have been unlucky. Our entire species might now be just a dim memory in the minds of a few alien sentients. And all our culture and the great achievements of our civilisation would be entirely lost and forgotten.

  I find that sobering.

  But as I say, I knew nothing of all this scary shit at the time it was happening.

  And if I’d known, I wouldn’t have cared. Because I was totally caught up in my own immediate concern: my desire for murderous vengeance. This was the ugly passion that consumed every part of my being.

  And this is my point – do you see? We each think we are the hero of our own life story; but the real story is always elsewhere. So what you are and what you do is all, in the grander scheme of things, NOTHING.

  Yeah, that’s brought you down, hasn’t it?

  Anyway. Back to my revenge story. I was one hard mollyfocking bitch during my time at Giger. No one can deny that. But Cassady – well. She was my weak spot.

  Because of her I almost—

  She made me feel – I’d never before realised that—

  At times, I wanted to—

  But what am I saying? The truth is, I didn’t falter, nor did I flinch.

  When I didn’t need Cassady any more, I abandoned her. Left her to live her life without me. Which she wretchedly failed to do, and instead died sad, and lonely, and betrayed by me.

  Cassady!

  Hey!

  I’m sorry.

  Chapter 3

  His Friends All Said He Was a Good Man

  Hamilton Brandish was a good man, or so his friends all said.

  Hamilton was a lawyer. But not the greedy grasping kind of a lawyer. No, he was a campaigning lawyer who fought for the disenfranchised and the hard-done-bys. He sued corrupt police officers on behalf of their beaten-up victims. He prosecuted negligent corporations. He won billions in compensation for those traumatised by the effects of the Corporation’s evil regime.1

  And even when he’d been a young lawyer, in those bad old Corporation days, he had never served the forces of darkness. Instead, he had been a public defender. Nobly striving to achieve justice for the innocent in the face of a corrupt legal system. A system in which bribery was so rife it was blatantly acknowledged on Plea Forms for the criminally accused, thus:

  Gratuity to Court Officials paid: X for Yes, 0 for No.2

  These days, much of the work Hamilton Brandish did was pro bono, on behalf of the poor, crippled, defrauded, disabled, mutated, and otherwise pity-worthy.

  However, slyly and clandestinely, he also managed to find time to work for a few high value clients, including several Food Councils accused of profiteering. And a number of planets in bitter dispute with the SNG over their treatment of indigenous (aka alien) life forms. And this shamelessly immoral commercial work enabled him to keep a mansion in the smartest part of Laguid, a dacha in space, and two wives.

  All in all, Hamilton Brandish was a high maintenance, well-dressed, smooth-talking modern saint whose feet were made of the slitheriest of clay.

  He also fancied himself as an amateur marksman. Every week he would go down to the shooting range in the Avenue Cuba, where a life-size dummy of a terrorist with guns and body armour and the obligatory red bandana would trundle slowly towards the shooter, blazing off blanks. Hamilton prided himself on his ability to get in twenty head shots and a bullet to the vulnerable crotch region in less than five seconds.

  Today, the terrorist dummy had been lifted off its spindle. And when the lights came up – I was there, standing in its place.

  My legs straddled the rail. I was clad in a long black Kwaal-leather jacket that brushed my knees. My hair was in a ponytail. And I was staring down at Hamilton Brandish with my blue eyes (as they now were) as he aimed his Magna XI34 projectile handgun at me, in startled disbelief.

  Then I started walking along the track towards him, one leg either side of the magnetic rail, making me swagger even more than I might otherwise have done. My hands were by my side. My ponytail bobbed rhythmically against my back.

  And I walked slowly at first, smiling all the while. I was careful not to spook him by making threatening moves, or revealing that I too was carrying a Magna XI34 projectile handgun in a side-holster under my jacket.

  “Is there a problem?” shouted out Hamilton Brandish.

  I said nothing. I just kept walking. Slowly, somewhat bow-legged, my eyes like hooks.

  “I have paid for this session, you know,” reasoned Hamilton Brandish.

  I kept on walking. It wasn’t far, but I really did milk that walk.

  “Can you get out of my fucking way?!” shouted Hamilton Brandish.

  I kept on walking.

  By this point I was close enough for him to see how blue were my eyes. He didn’t, of course, recognise me.

  “Oh beloved, kiss me my belove
d, please,” I said to Hamilton Brandish in a sultry voice. I noticed, once again, how very attractive his face was. Handsome yet ripe with laughter lines. The face of a dashing god with a semi-permanent rueful half-smile.

  “Anything you want me to do I will do, my darling Hamilton,” I added, sharing a quotation from our mutual past, and injecting further irony with a sweetly compliant excrement-consuming smile. And he finally got the message.

  He raised his gun and began firing.

  He telegraphed every shot. I ducked down low, bobbed my head to the right and then the left, then walked onwards through a haze of bullets and smoke. Then I drew and fired my own weapon in a single fast move and hit the snout of his gun, which melted in his hand.

  I’d sabotaged his ammunition in advance of course – do you really think I could dodge so many bullets at point blank range? But it was still a cool trick.

  Hamilton then pulled a plasma gun from a side holster, but by then my next twelve bullets were in transit. And all of them hit their targets.

  Hamilton’s body exploded. His jaw drooped and yawed as a bullet entered his mouth and detonated. Large red-rimmed holes appeared in his chest and stomach and pelvis and one hand fell off its arm. I carried on walking, then stepped over the barrier, put a final bullet in Hamilton’s skull, or what was left of it, and stuck my knife in his ribs. I burrowed for a while, then tugged out his heart, or as much as I could, and stuffed it in Hamilton’s gaping mouth. Then I left the shooting range.

  My boots were slippery now with Hamilton’s blood, as I walked away. Behind me the amateur marksmen continued to blaze bullets at their replicas of Terrorists, Coppers, Zombies and Space Pirates. No one had noticed the death of Hamilton Brandish. And the sound of my killing shots had been lost, of course, in the constant low roar of gunfire, merging with the arrhythmic pounding of the nu-rock that blasted out of speakers in the floor and walls and ceiling, like a cage of sound.