And then she smiled.
Chapter 14
Never Said Goodbye
“This will never work.”
“Fuck off.”
“We look stupid.”
“Get over yourself, woman.”
In my hand, I held a pair of lucky dice.
Every army in history has had at least one soldier with a pair of lucky dice.1 These days, every soldier carries ’em. Standard dice. Polyhedral dice. Icon dice. Dice within dice. Before every TP, a soldier will throw his or her lucky dice to determine the outcome. Since there is no consensus on how to read the throw of the dice, you can pretty much decide for yourself what the outcome will be. And if you die, or become horribly distorted or mutated, well, you must have had the wrong pair of lucky dice.
Taking the lucky dice off a TP warrior is no easy thing. But we managed it. And now we stood in the Rock’s magnificent Star Chamber, where a visual array of every planet in the humanverse sprawled three-dimensionally around us. It was like floating free in the vast and awe-inspiring void of space, but without experiencing the deadly cold, and with helpful captions on all the stars and planets. I turned my back on the star map, tossing the dice from one hand to another. Fraser watched us, hiding his anxiety and concern beneath layers of dour Scottish melancholy.
“Good luck, lassies,” he said.
Lena snorted at his condescension. Whereas I tried to be more tactful, in recognition of Fraser’s role as my mentor and leader:
“Go fuck yourself you four-eyed Jock bastard,” I said. And I threw the dice over my shoulder.
They flew through the air and went straight through the virtual star array. I turned. Fraser had noted the points of impact, and was analysing the results.
“Die one,” he said, “a black hole in spherical sector D49.”
“Not so good.”
“And die two?” asked Lena.
“You’re not going to believe this,” said Fraser.
“I’ll believe anything,” I said. And it was true. Ever since the nine years, six months and four days, lucky breaks and dumb coincidences have dogged my life. I have come to accept it as normal.
“Just activate the TP,” said Lena. “We’ll take it from there.”
That was just plain stupid!
“Tell me where we’re going—” I began to say.
But then we were there.
Cúchulainn.
I should have guessed.
It had the perfect circularity of all coincidences. I was back where I started from. Journey’s beginning.
This, however, was wrong. I mean terribly, insupportably wrong.
I mean, just think about it! This is my life. It’s not a fucking story. The actual lives that actual people live aren’t like this. They’re – episodic. What you might call picaresque. Things just happen, then other things happen. Whereas stories are—
Sorry, let me tell this the way it happened, okay?
First, me and Lena hit the ground standing and I saw where we were.
And then the shooting started.
But just before the shooting started – yeah, my mind was really racing at this point! – I went on to realise that in fact my life has been a story. It has a shape, and a purpose. In other words, it has an author.
Morgan.
I recognised him at once. Or rather, not quite at once. Not till he spoke my name. But then. I knew him then.
I’m aware that I’ve never mentioned this person before, as someone who appears as a character in my life-story. That’s because I didn’t know who he really was. And I didn’t know, didn’t AT ALL realise, that he would be relevant to this tale.
You see, Morgan was my gaoler, in the villa of Baron Lowman, where I was imprisoned. But I knew him then as Henry, because that’s what Lowman called him.
Fucking Henry! I didn’t even know his (fictitious) surname. He was just a guy, whose name I vaguely knew, who was responsible (on a shift basis, alternating with two other guys) for supervising my internment. And who, from time to time, made me dance. By which I mean, he thought-controlled his remote control and activated my whedon chip, and turned me into a dancing grinning puppet. Just to show me what would happen if I ever dared to fuck around.
Henry wasn’t cruel to me though. He was just doing his job. In fact, he tried to be my friend. He brought me treats – food, chocolate, fine clothes – and made sure I always drank the best wine. And he never took advantage – you know what I’m saying. It would have been easy for him to do it, but he never did.
He even offered to help me escape once. But I saw that for the obvious trap it was. I never trusted him, to be honest. Though in fairness, I didn’t trust anyone by that point.
But within seconds of arriving in Daxox’s bar on Cúchulainn, the moment he spoke in fact, I realised that Henry and Hispaniola Morgan are one and the same person.
“Artemis,” he said. And that’s when I knew.
What a coincidence, huh?
There’s more.
Remember, we hit the ground standing and I saw Morgan and he spoke and I recognised him, and I thought all these thoughts, or rather an abbreviated intuitive version of them. But it all happened very fast and there were of course an awful lot of OTHER extraordinary facts to assimilate.
Firstly, we weren’t just on Cúchulainn, we were in Laguid. And we weren’t just in Laguid, we were in Daxox’s club, the Dahlia, where I had spent so many happy and indeed drunken hours. It was the early morning, the club was empty apart from a group of men playing a dice game at a table. The game was – it doesn’t matter what the game was! It just struck me as yet another eerie coincidence. For I’d thrown the dice at random and it had led to me being teleported here, where a game of dice was—
Spooky, huh? Wait till you get to—
No, let me get through this:
As I’ve explained, the first man I recognised was Morgan, aka Henry. Of course I knew Morgan from his photographs and the film footage of him, but had never made the connection. But when he spoke my name – “Artemis” – in that throaty growl of his, the years came rushing back.
I didn’t have time to reminiscence. I was too busy with my sitrep, identifying threats and planning a course of action. Morgan was an obvious danger, he was my deadly enemy and was sitting in a military warsuit, though with the face mask off. Next to him was—
This is where it gets really strange.
Next to him was Daxox. Old frog-face. My lover and—
“Glad you could make it,” said Baron Lowman, in his usual courtly tones.
Yeah, him.
Because the fourth man was a tubby guy with an eager look, and when he saw Lena he beamed as if she were his long-lost mother. “Lena!” he trilled, and beside me I could hear Lena gulp, literally gulp.
The fourth man, I kid you not, was Peter Smith, aka The Cheo, aka my brother and Lena’s son.
The fifth man was Flanagan.
“Lena!” I screamed and I threw myself across the room with guns drawn, firing in mid-air with unerring accuracy. While Lena stood like a fucking fool, gawping.
The first bullet fired by Morgan hit her on the chest, jarring her body armour and shocking her into action. When she moved, she moved fast. Meanwhile, I fired thirty rounds while in a crouching position, rolled and dived, and fired again.
Morgan was the first to die. His warsuit was strong enough to withstand a missile burst, but who the hell wants to play cards with a face mask on? So he was bare-faced, and I had a perfect target and I blew out his brains with my first six shots.
Peter Smith was the cautious sort. He was wearing his hardglass mask. I scored six direct hits on his face but all bounced off and by then he had drawn his gun and was shooting back.
Daxox stood no chance. Once she’d got her shit together, Lena engulfed him in plasma fire then fired exploding shells at the fireball. She didn’t shoot at anyone else, just Daxox. He too had a hardglass mask but it didn’t help him. He burned alive, as the bullets
cracked his hermetic seal and the plasma licked outside, then burned within.
Flanagan moved like the wind and shot me when I landed. The impact spun me back and I flipped and landed and fired about fifty shells all of which missed him. He was fast and he was graceful, and he really knew how to dodge.
Then Lena popped him with a bullet while he was in mid-sideways-leap, and it threw him off course and he crashed awkwardly to the ground. And she was across the room in four flips and put a limpet-mine on his face mask.
Then she looked at me. I could see her face through the hardglass. It was an expression of sheer horror.
I leaped towards her and caught her and we teleported twelve feet away. When the bomb blew off Flanagan’s head, we were out of range.
“Nice work,” I said. The explosion had tumbled Peter Smith off his feet and dazed him. I moved swiftly across and coup-de-grâced him by severing his head with my dagger.
Then we masked off. Sweat was pouring down our faces. Or was it tears?
“Come and see,” I said, beckoning to Lena.
“No.”
“Come!” I grabbed her by the hand, and dragged her over to Flanagan’s dead body. And I put my gun on laser setting and after sixty seconds, I managed to bore a hole in his armour. Then I carved a line down his torso. His body peeled open like a fruit.
“I can’t bear to, I can’t—” muttered Lena.
“Look,” I said. Inside the body of “Flanagan,” there was no heart, no lungs. No blood gushed out, no intestines spilled their vile load. It was all silver metal in hermetically sealed units.
“You do understand—” I said.
“I understand,” Lena snapped.
“And what this means is—”
“I get all that.”
“And this guy,” I said. I did the same trick on Morgan’s dead body. And his corpse split open to reveal robot organs.
“Cyborg,” said Lena.
“I know him,” I said, pointing at cyborg-Morgan, and sketching in the history briefly.
Lena got it at once. The implications I mean. She knew my life-story you see. Not from me, from Fraser. But she knew all about what Daxox had done to me. And fear was in her eyes.
“My fault,” she said.
“Not your fault,” I insisted.
“My fault, all my fault,” she said, in tones of utter horror.
And she was right. All the horror of my life. All the terrible things I experienced in the nine years, six months, and four days.
They all happened to me because of Lena. And her relationship with Flanagan.
Back up a bit.
What follows is the story of my life, as it really happened. Not the way I thought it was happening at the time.
Picture this flashback moment: there I was, an eighteen-year-old idiot, serving in a bar in Gullyfoyle and a guy came in. He was a gangster from Cúchulainn. And he told me tales of what it was like in Laguid, the wildest city in the humanverse.
And in return – well, why wouldn’t I? – I told him all about my life on Rebus. And about my dad, Professor McIvor, and my heartless mother who’d abandoned me. And we talked politics too. There was a big galactic war going on round about then. A pirate called Flanagan was hooked up with some relative of the Cheo called Lena Smith. Without FTL or TP, wars were slow protracted things in those days. So we discussed it. Why wouldn’t we?
So when I went on the run from Gullyfoyle, where did I go? Laguid, of course, capital city of Cúchulainn. The place this hood had just been telling me about… Coincidence?
Well, yes. But once I’d made that one random decision, the rest all followed.
Because this gangster now knew my story. And when he got back to Laguid, he told his pals about me. And when I turned up, fencing a hot jewel… you get the picture? The story spread.
And then I met Daxox.
Daxox was the boss of the gangster I met on Gullyfoyle, of course. So he too knew all about me. He also knew about Lena, and her fling with Flanagan, And her affair with McIvor. And the fact that McIvor was my dad, which meant Lena was almost certainly my mother. Because in the days of beaconspace, this stuff is so fucking easy to find out.
And he knew too that I’d stolen the jewel, so he sent his men to kill me knowing that I would kill them. Another test. You remember he had that thing about testing me?
The key fact here is that Daxox – though I didn’t know it then, I only know it now – had an ally, a fellow capobastone, called Hispaniola Morgan. Who, for reasons I hadn’t yet fathomed, was based on Cúchulainn and not on his home world of Morgan’s Planet.2
So Morgan too got to know about me, and my history.
Cause, effect. The ripples just never stop.
Morgan knew Flanagan, as you know. And he hated him with a vengeance, but had no way of getting to him. And then along I come…
And from that moment on, my life was authored.
You know what I’m saying? Morgan pulled the strings. Daxox did all the terrible things he did – because Morgan told him to.
Which means that despite everything, Daxox may actually have loved me. But Morgan was a hard guy to resist. And Morgan wanted to take revenge on Flanagan. Which he did, by punishing me.
Back up a little more. Why did Morgan hate Flanagan so much?
The history books say it was because Flanagan was an idealist, appalled at Morgan’s massacres. But that’s all shit. I knew Flanagan. He was my friend. But fuck me, he was ruthless. And unscrupulous too.
But in the course of their joint adventuring, Flanagan screwed Morgan’s wife, Medea – I got this from Lena, it’s the truth. Then Morgan found out and killed Medea with his bare hands, in a fit of blind rage. So Flanagan lost his rag and trapped Morgan on a spaceship leaking air. Morgan, somehow, escaped, to the nearby planet of Xavier.
And you know the rest.3
Cut to many years later. Morgan sees a chance to take revenge. A girl arrives in his partner’s club who is the daughter of Flanagan’s latest squeeze. So he arranges for her to become a – and now you’re with me.
Not quite the same as Morgan getting a chance to fuck over Lena, the love of Flanagan’s life. But near enough. Psycho logic, yeah?
And that’s the story of my life, as far as I’ve been able to piece it together. I’m just a pawn in the deadly game between Morgan and Flanagan. Eventually, I’m guessing, my dead body would have been sent to Flanagan, with a note explaining who I was, and where I had spent the last ten years. And that, yeah, that would have stung.
It’s like Hooperman and Saunders all over again except, of course, Saunders escaped. And that story never had an ending.
And the “author” thing? This is how it worked. Morgan wrote my life as a tragedy. Then I turned it into a revenge drama.
Backstory over.
As we were leaving Daxox’s club, we saw two cops arriving, carrying guns.
Both were Morgan.
“It’s a coup. They’ve had a fucking planetary coup,” I said to Lena.
“Why didn’t we know?”
We were out on the street now, making our escape as swiftly yet unobtrusively as we could.
Once we’d got out of the club, Lena had wiped the blood off my face; a smart move because I’d been drenched in it. Then we’d put on our street camouflage clothes and dumped our backpacks and Xenos rifles. But we still had warsuits on beneath our civvies, and our force field generators were strapped to our abdomens. And handguns. We were carrying, between us, an awful lot of handguns.
As we walked, a man bumped into me. It was Peter Smith. Lena stared at him.
“You got a fucking problem?” Smith demanded.
“No problem.”
Smith walked on. Lena continued to stare after him.
Three Flanagans walked up to us, talking animatedly. Lena stared at them. They ignored her. But they gave me a long hard appraising look. Followed by a wolf whistle. I smiled appreciatively and walked on. This was freaking me out.
The
re were plenty of ordinary citizens on the streets too, of course. Market stall owners. Pedestrians. Flybikers. This was the same old Laguid with polluted skies and busy walkways and too much traffic. But everyone we passed had a haunted look.
A holo image on every street corner said: CURFEW IN FORCE. ANYONE FOUND ON THE STREETS AFTER TEN P.M. WILL BE HUNTED UNTO DEATH. BY AUTHORITY OF HISPANIOLA MORGAN, LORD AND EMPEROR AND POTENTATE OF THIS UNIVERSE.
These old-time villains, they are so baroque.
I saw a Daxox, and approached him.
“Do you know me?” I asked.
“I’d like to,” he leered.
“What’s your name?”
“Daxox,” said Daxox.
“You remember me?”
He thought hard. “I fucked you once?” He leered.
“You were great,” I assured him.
Lena and I walked on.
“They’re not sentient,” I said to her.
“Of course they’re sentient. They’re cyborgs!”
“I mean they’re not – not smart. They’re like apes.”
“Degraded copies?”
“Or older copies. Cyborgs go mad, with time.”
“There are thousands of the bastards.”
“Millions maybe.”
A city full of dead people.
A city full of dead people who Lena and I had once, and intimately, known.
It was screwing with my head.
We walked on. Heavily armed Flanagans and Daxoxes stood at every street corner. Heliplanes hovered above, crewed by Peter Smiths, as well as flybuses in which Smith was both the driver and many of the passengers. And Morgans in the bodies of beautiful women strutted along, attracting admiring glances. Though most often the Morgans were male, and possessed of an eerie aura of authority. And the Baron Lowmans too were to be found in many guises – wearing rich robes, or in smart casual jeans and T-shirts flyboarding on the walkways, or in city suits.
And everywhere we went, electronic mosquitoes flocked, gathering data on all street-level activity.
Artemis Page 33