So I made my baby strong. I insisted that Fraser pay for augments that would enhance my son’s strength and speed and allow him to heal rapidly. When he was older – probably four or five years old – I’d pay for an oxygen capsule implant in his brain to allow him to survive body death for up to twelve hours. And if anyone tried to beat him up or bully him or murder him or rape him or torture him – all the things we parents worry about! – they’d have a surprise. ’Cause my son was going to be one savagely effective killing machine. His augments surpassed even mine.
The little devil would even be able to beat me at arm-wrestling!
The day before the mission briefing, I visited my son for the last time. I’d named him by now of course, after a long debate with Billy, which I won.
Douglas. That was his name. It was a name I’d always liked.
My son, Douglas.
By the way, Billy had been furious when I told him he wasn’t going with me on the next mission.
“Fuck you!” he’d argued.
“Final answer.”
“Fuck you!”
Billy had never sworn at me before. He’d sworn, of course, but not at me. This was a sign of how angry he was. Or rather, how strung out. The four years of battle during Invasion: Earth had turned him into a total war junkie. The idea of missing out on an entire battle filled him with horror.
“Reason?” he demanded.
“Someone has to look after Douglas, if I don’t – survive.”
“Bugger that. I’m a crap dad.”
“Are you?” He’d never mentioned that he had any children.
“Fucking right I am! Sixty-four kids, by forty different mothers.” His forehead knit with the effort of concentrating. “Can’t remember a single one of their names.”
“Liar.”
“Okay, I remember them. But I never see them. Crap dad. Soldier dads are just sperm donors, haven’t you heard that saying?”
“But I need you—”
“I need to fight.”
“—to look after Douglas. My baby. Our baby. IF I DIE!” I screamed.
“I’ll go, you stay.” But he knew as he said it that it wouldn’t work that way.
“They need me,” I told him. “They cannot do this without me. I’m their lucky charm!”
And he couldn’t argue with that. Because this whole mission depended on luck. My luck. My preternatural luck that allowed me to defy the laws of chance and survive the TP, again and again and again.
“If I die,” I explained carefully, “you have to look after him, okay?”
“You want me to actually raise our son?” Billy said, incredulously.
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
“Do you have any idea what a total fuck-up I am?” Billy seemed genuinely outraged that I should have such faith in him. “I’m a fucking psychopath, for Oshun’s sake!”
“Keep him safe,” I said. “Please?”
It was good to see familiar faces. Cons from Giger. Hard cases from Cúchulainn. And of course ex-Kamikazes, back for action. Many of them had the pale wasted features of former doppelgänger riders. A few had been taken straight out of the vats, and were in hoverchairs or even encased in plastic bodyshells.
We were back on the Rock, our home from home. And this was the official briefing for our mission.
Long story short, our job was to whack Morgan and his cyborg selves. Not capture, not redeem, not reform. Just find the real him and his database and his cyborg bodies and destroy them all.
It was one hell of a mission. Because there were hundreds if not thousands of the bastard out there, in his various cyborg manifestations. Morgan was on Gullyfoyle and also on Cambria. There were also at least forty Morgans in deep space, on flagship battle cruisers and on anonymous dirt buckets. There were rumours that there were Morgans on Earth, and Morgans inhabiting humaniform bodies were suspected to have infiltrated the inner reaches of the SNG government.
The War of the Morgans was a legendary battle. Many books have since been written about it.2 Many heroes gave their lives. Many Morgans died. There is a theory that some Morgans still remain to this day.
And so, to fight this absurd battle – an entire army against ONE MAN – the Kamikazes had been called out of retirement. And the doppelgänger riders were pulled out of the vats. And I had been bullied into doing what would certainly be, one way or another, my last ever mission for Brigadier Lachlan Fraser.
My particular assignment was to take a small team of Kamikazes deep into enemy territory, to the planet where Morgan’s first cyborg body was created, and where Morgan himself was believed to be hiding out. There we hoped to a) kill the real Morgan and b) er, there was no b).
There were seven of us in the Kamikaze team. Seven is my lucky number. Some prefer thirteen, or fifteen. It was me, an assassin called Maria, a Soldier called Quentin, a Loper called Deep Soul, and Fraser. Yeah, Fraser was returning to active service. Plus, there were two other guys who I hadn’t yet met, one of whom was to be our mission commander.
And by the way, I was EXTREMELY pissed off about that. I had assumed, quite naturally, that I would be in charge!
After I had visited Douglas, to say my final goodbye, we five spent the rest of the night before combat in a chapel praying with our gods. This was the Knights Templar influence; I always liked those guys.
Like Billy, Quentin worshipped the church of Santiera, the voodoo gods. His deity was Oshun. Maria worshipped Jesus Christ. An unusual choice, but we respected it. Deep Soul was a Lokian, and you can bet that mean mollyfocker loved his practical jokes. And Fraser clove to Cernunnos, a Celtic god with antlers. He actually wore a pair of antlers throughout our vigil, as well as a leather tunic and trews (as he called them). He looked like a fucking idiot – but hey! To each their own.
Ganesh, as you know, was my god. The elephant god. I have a wooden Ganesh carved by a Loper craftsman. He is the Remover of Obstacles. I’ve always had a thing about elephants, and I find the whole Ganesh thing amusing.
I don’t BELIEVE of course. I’m not religious. None of us are.
Just superstitious. That’s different.
So there I was, the following day, hyped for the mission to come.
I’d taken every conceivable precaution, of course, to help me survive the TP. I’d prayed. I hadn’t showered. I’d put my blouse on inside out. I was carrying my lucky knife and my lucky gun. My lucky elephant necklace was around my neck. I was also wearing my lucky red cotton knickers. I wore them once to a hit and survived an ambush by the slimmest of margins. Since then, the wearing of this particular pair of knickers has been a prerequisite for me when going into battle. Luckily, they’re made of smart cotton and never fade or fray.3
Some of the other guys, I have to tell you, had really stupid superstitions. I mean, REALLY stupid. One guy used to – no, you don’t want to know. And another used to – no that was disgusting, and not hygienic either to be honest.
There were about fifty other tables in the briefing hall, with between seven to fifteen Kamikazes at each table. We were Squadron 2412. Do the math. There was a podium in the middle of the room, from where Fraser would deliver the briefing.
“Gods be with you,” said Quentin to me, ritually.
“Whatever,” I retorted.
“Where the fuck are these jerks?” asked Maria. She was referring to the other two Kamikazes in our team. We hadn’t met them yet. Which I considered to be an act of ignorant rudeness on their part, as well as a potential blight upon on our luck. The two empty chairs at our table were a rebuke to professional soldier practice.
You see, a Kamikaze Squad needs to bond before a mission! And ritual sayings have to be said. Like the “Gods be with you”/“Whatever” gag. I said that on my first mission so I ALWAYS have to say it. And a ritual cup of coffee has to be drunk from the same coffee jug. We’d all spat on our palms of course, before shaking hands. And we’d had our vigil, that I told you about. The new guys had missed out on all of this,
and it was making me nervous.
And my greatest fear was that one of them would turn out to be an out-and-out Jonah. For a Jonah can never be allowed. Sometimes, you just have to kill them (I don’t mean true-kill!) before the mission for the greater good of everyone else. But it’s okay, they’re easy enough to spot. They’re the ones who exude potential bad luck.
Bill Handley had been my Jonah, back on Cúchulainn. I’d lost both lungs after that fiasco. You learn to recognise the signs after a while. And4
Fraser was pacing from table to table, chatting and joking, letting his confidence infect the warriors. Meanwhile, the virtual screen above the podium was set on slideshow to give an unfurling silent photographic record of the life of Hispaniola Morgan. From naughty child to evil cyborg army.
At that moment the door opened and our Squad Commander walked in and headed towards our table. An older guy, with grey whiskers and a barrel chest. And with him was the Seventh Member of the Kakimaze team. A heavily-rejuved raven-haired beauty with an impressive décolletage and an imperious gaze.
I recognised them both instantly.
Well, of course I did! It was like seeing fucking statues in the town square come to life.
“I’m sure you all know—” Fraser began to say, as Flanagan and Lena walked towards us, beaming.
I flew across the room in a series of forward flips, literally leaping over Fraser himself, and landed in front of Lena and delivered a forearm strike to her throat. She went down, gasping, and I caught her head in my hands and was within an instant of snapping her neck when—
When I woke up my head was the size of a balloon and I couldn’t move my body. Or rather I could but
s l o w l y.
I guessed I’d been punched in the head and shot with a stasis gun.
And Lena was still alive. I’d failed.
The fucking bitch was still alive!
Flanagan came to see me.
He’d trimmed his grey beard, so he wasn’t the wild man you see in the comic books. His blue eyes harboured a smile. His face was lined with terrible scars, which I recognised as wrinkles.
“What the fuck was that about?” he asked me. But I did not answer.
Billy came to see me. “It’s an automatic life sentence, doll,” he explained. “With moral rehabilitation. Nothing I could do about it. She’s – well. That was Lena you tried to kill.”
I did not respond.
Lena came to see me.
She too was scarred with wrinkles, when you saw her close up. But still beautiful, I’ll grant her that. Her neck was in a protective soft-collar and I was told that I’d broken her C2 and C3 vertebrae with my first blow. I was impressed at her resilience at getting back on her feet.
“Who are you working for?” she asked calmly.
I moved my hand, with painful slowness, towards my lips so she would know that I could not speak. She reduced the slo-mo field, so I could move my throat muscles enough to emit words. But there still was a hardglass barrier between us. I had no chance of jumping her a second time.
“Myself.”
“Why? What have I ever done to you?” Lena said scornfully.
“Nothing. That’s kinda the point.”
Lena stared at me. She seemed genuinely puzzled.
“I’m a fucking heroine,” she pointed out, more in jest, I have to admit, than arrogance.
I grinned, nastily. “I’ve heard different. They say you paid historians to fake the records of the Last Battle.”
She laughed, a big belly laugh. “Well, yeah. I did amend a few sections. Can you blame me?”
I was shocked at her candour.
“There’s stuff,” she said pensively, “I wouldn’t want anyone to know. Mainly to do with – Lena, shut up. Sorry. Bad habit. I talk to myself.” She paused, as if listening to an unseen voice. “Ah fuck off,” she said, but not to me.
Then she looked at me curiously.
“If you were going to kill me,” she asked, “why didn’t you wait? Until you had a gun in your hand?”
“I always said,” I told her, “I’d kill you with my bare hands.”
“Why do you hate me so much?” Lena asked, with that patronising “you should know better, you silly girl” tone in her voice that I’d never heard from her before.
And which I SHOULD have heard from her before.
Which was precisely why I’d tried to kill her.
Because this evil fucking ginch had never EVER patronised me.
Or bullied me.
Or annoyed me.
Or scolded me.
Or treated me like I was just a silly little fucking girl.
And she should have done. She should have—
“Oh fuck,” said Lena, as she suddenly realised the truth. She added up the clues. The scornful look in my eyes. My slightly-hooked nose, so like my dad’s. The shape of my face. My air of defiant contempt. My entire belligerent me-against-the-world fucking attitude.
“Yeah, you got it,” I told her. “My name is Artemis McIvor. And I’m your daughter, bitch.”
A few days later, I got the news from Fraser that I’d been pardoned. At Lena’s special request. I was still in the army, and hence not free to leave the Rock; but I wouldn’t be serving a prison term.
Billy was waiting for me when I was released.
“You know why—”
“Yeah.”
“Lena is my—”
“Yeah.”
“That’s why I—”
“We gonna have lunch?”
“Yeah.”
My Squad’s mission was aborted by the way. No one had the balls to make the trip without me. Without my fabled luck.
Our target had been Morgan’s World, a planet ninety-five light years from Earth. A drone TP had established a beacon two solar systems away from Morgan’s World, and a series of other beacons had been clandestinely seeded. The system was being patrolled by TP-detector ships whose routines had been precisely monitored. And so, to avoid detection, the Kamikazes would need to make an additional five flits to reach the surface of the planet, like escaping prisoners sprinting when the guards turn the corner of the cell-block. The return journey could be made – hell-for-leather – in a single flit, from Morgan’s World to the Rock. But even so the odds were terrible. That’s why they needed me and my fabled luck.
Round about then, however, I really wasn’t feeling all that lucky.
Six weeks after I had attacked her, Lena came to see me in my apartment in the barracks on the Rock, and told me her story.
Which I didn’t believe.
The lying bitch! Let me tell you about that braggart whore-ginch Lena Smith!
I never knew her. And I never knew anything about her. My father, as you know, refused to talk about her, except for a few dismissive references to “your mother who abandoned you.” My uncles told me she was a “bad woman,” and that she’d broken my father’s heart. All true. But it wasn’t much to go on.
Even so – or perhaps because of the lack of background detail – I had idolised her my entire life. Not Lena per se, but the whoever-she-was who was my mother. You know the way you do? My perfect mother! The one who must have loved me really! I had daydreams about what would happen when we met up. I would forgive her! She would burst into tears. And there would be a complex, absurd, but utterly satisfying explanation for why she had abandoned me as a baby. And after that, my life would finally make sense.
Then one day I found her photograph in a folder on my father’s private databox and my heart leapt with joy. And I showed the picture to my father, and asked him about her, and he – well, you know the rest.
Remember, she left me a parting gift. My augments. I have Soldier-class augments. It must have cost my mother a fortune to have them built into my DNA. I also had a Rebus chip more powerful than anyone else I knew. She gave me that too. Why? Paranoia maybe. She thought it was a dangerous world and she wanted me to be able to protect myself.
And yeah, I do get
the irony of that. With me, and what I had done for little Douglas. Not the same! Don’t go there.
Let me get to the point of this rant of mine.
After nine years six months and four days in captivity on Cúchulainn I escaped. As you know. And I was a wreck, as you may have surmised. And I tried to put my life back together. I convalesced. I rested. I read books. This was in the heady days after the fall of the Corporation, so naturally I read a copy of Lena Smith’s thought diary.5 Everyone was reading it. Someone had found an archive copy on an old database apparently, and sold it without her permission. It was a bestseller, or would have been, if anyone had paid for it.
It was the unadulterated truth about Lena Smith. Her earliest memories. Everything.
Except, you know, if you read it carefully you’ll see the evasions. The misdirections. Was she really so brave, so heroic? Did she really save Africa? The whole diary is full of boasting and exaggerating and misremembering. How the fuck can you misremember with a brain chip memory? But she did. She didn’t exactly lie, but she never told the truth without gilding it. And she left out vital bits.
Like, read the bit about Rebus again. And do you see anything about having a baby? No! One minute she’s screwing boring old Professor McIvor, then the next minute, she’s fucked off to Earth to see her tyrant son.
That’s how I found out. Who my mother was. And who my brother was, and what he did. Can you imagine how that felt?
Maybe you can. But believe me – it was worse.
That’s why I started keeping my own thought diary. To put down the truth about myself and what I feel. No lies. No evasions. Okay, I don’t tell you certain things – like exactly what happened to me during the nine years four months six days etc. But I always TELL you what I’m not telling you. I don’t miss anything out. No children concealed under stair carpets. No mistakes glossed over. You know it all. Okay? Whoever you are, reading this thought diary. I am an ENTIRELY reliable narrator.6 Trust me. Hate me if you like, but trust me.
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