“One last mission,” said Fraser. And he actually smiled.
I stared at him in horror. “Are you kidding me?” I said.
“The future of humanity is—”
“Jeez! Not that old routine again!” I said.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
“You look like shit,” he said.
He had a point. I’d lost a lot of weight. My muscle tone was crap. My eyes were bloodshot. I looked like a mad woman. But not SO mad that I’d accept Fraser’s stupid fucking offer.
“We’ll do it,” said Billy.
“We will not,” I pointed out.
Billy was in even worse shape than me. He looked like a skeleton with a paltry clothes budget. He was wearing a greasy stained T-shirt and an un-smart jacket that attracted lint and plant spores. His hand trembled when he drank his decaff coffee. He couldn’t drink alcohol. Neither of us could yet.
“We’ll make you rich,” pointed out Fraser.
“We’re rich enough.”
“I can’t go back,” said Billy. “I can’t, doll. Not into the real world, not again.”
The battle of Invasion: Earth was the four hundredth virtual war Billy had fought. I’d forgotten that.
“We’re not spending the rest of our lives in fucking vats!” I said, outraged.
As I mentioned, some did. Many, in fact.
Indeed, of the tens of millions of soldiers who fought the war to save planet Earth – how many of them returned to reality? Look it up. It’s online. It’s a chilling fucking statistic.1 They are the real casualties. Those bastards will live pretty much for ever, fighting a war that was over aeons ago. It’s the price we pay for saving our mother planet, which most of us have never fucking seen.
Sweet Shiva, I was angry! Except I was too tired to be angry.
“This is a live mission,” Fraser explained. “A TP.”
I beamed a big smile. “Oh great, so we could DIE, instead of living for all eternity in a stupid fucking war movie?”
“The future of humanity,” Fraser pointed out.
“What do I care about—”
“You’re pregnant,” Fraser said.
That stopped me in my tracks.
Here’s a thing you need to know about rejuve: it fucks you up.
I have so much of the stuff in my system that cuts on my skin heal almost instantly. I can survive wounds that would be fatal for other people. I don’t grow old. I never wrinkle. (Wrinkle! Me? Get real.)
But there’s a downside. My fingernails grow fast, I have to cut them every day. My hair! Fuck, I need a haircut every seven days. If I let it grow I’d be Rapunzel. One time I went on holiday and slobbed and came back with six inch fingernails and toenails like sabres and pubic hair that – oh my GOD I wish I hadn’t – don’t let me even THINK about that.
So, guess what happens when the rejuve decides that my contraceptive implant hormones are an illness that needs to be cured?
Answer: I get pregnant.
“We removed the embryo,” said Fraser, “while you were fighting the war. That was about four years ago. It’s healthy, in stasis. We can start growing the child in an incubator. Or if you prefer the old fashioned way, we can re-implant it into your womb. You can go to term using the Mother Nature method. You’ll get fat and ugly and grumpy and absent-minded, and a vast slimy heid will come out of your ginch, causing you appalling agony.”
“I think – I’d like that,” I said, and there were tears in my eyes.
“You bastard, Fraser,” said Billy.
“You’re going to have a baby, Artemis,” said Fraser. “Oh, and by the way, the future of humanity rests in your hands.” He paused, and added the kicker: “That means the life and happiness of your baby is—”
“I fucking get it!” I said angrily. “If you’re going to morally blackmail me, don’t patronise me too, okay?”
“You’ll do it then?”
I thought, but not for long.
“I’ll do it.”
“WE’LL do it,” corrected Billy.
“How do you know you’re the father?” I taunted him.
“Because I know you’d never be unfaithful to me,” said Billy.
Fraser and I actually laughed in unison at that.
“You’re the father,” Fraser told him. “100 per cent DNA match. It’s a boy. We can tell that now, even at this stage. And if you’re so minded,” he added, with a roguish twinkle in his eye, “you can name him after me.”
“I seriously doubt that,” I said scornfully.
“What actually is your name?” Billy asked, smiling.
“Lachlan.”
Billy’s smile froze.
“So what’s this mission?” I asked.
“First,” said Fraser, “we have to get you fit again.”
I ate a piece of toast and a tooth broke. That’s how bad a state I was in.
But the tooth grew back. I ate pasta for breakfast. I ate burgers for lunch. I ate ice cream – toffee & chocolate and butterscotch & liquorice were my favourites. But I drank no wine or beer. I slept twelve hours a day, ate a slow breakfast, swam all afternoon – for about six hours. Pigged out at dinner, then went to bed again.
After about two weeks of this Billy began to touch my body in ways that seemed eerily unfamiliar. After those early repellent sexual encounters during Invasion: Earth we’d got worse and worse about reminding our bodies they were bodies. It was two years since I’d had a fuck in other words. And that first time we did it post-Invasion was – well, it wasn’t great. But it got better. Oh believe me, it—
Moving swiftly on.
After three weeks we started running. Billy was dosing heavily on rejuve, and my own augments were kicking in. We were getting our skin tone back. The facial blotches had gone. That pursed-skin look you get from living in a vat of liquid nutrients for four years was starting to wane. My hair was not greasy any more. Billy could run his fingers through it without having to wash his hands afterwards.
We began weight training. Boxing. Martial arts. Speed training. Impact training – that’s when you stand inside a warsuit and let people fire bullets at you for hours on end.
After three months we were fighting fit and ready for the mission briefing.
Once, during this period, I visited my baby. He was a single cell in a test tube but I held the test tube and talked to him. Not baby talk, of course. I mean! What kind of a wanker do you think I am!?!
No, I talked to him properly, as the young man he would one day be.
And I thought, very hard, about what he would be like when he was born. And what kind of child he would be. And what he would be like when he grew up.
And of course, as any responsible mother would, I did my best to give him the best possible start in life.
He was, for instance, supposed to have red hair; but I’ve never liked ginger as a colour. So I asked the lab team to make him black haired, with skin that tans easily.
And he was tall, very tall, which I also don’t like. So I asked the guys to take four inches off his height, but factor in a muscular physique. I also asked if we could genetically engineer him to have a nice smile but apparently that’s not possible. But I knew he’d be fit, free from all genetic diseases, with a sound cardio-vascular system, no allergies, and – well, I didn’t expect he’d experience ANY problems when it came to affairs of the heart.
I thought a lot about the kind of world he would grow up into.
Fact is, it’s a cruel fucking universe out there. And there are no happy-ever-afters. Whatever terrible mess we cleared up now, there was bound to be another terrible mess further down the line. Another evil dictator, blah blah.
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
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 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.
Lena’s not like that. Don’t trust her.
Bear that in mind. This is her story, as she told it to me.
“I never loved your father,” Lena said.
She was good, I’ll give her that. Her tone calm, factual. Her face composed, but hiding deep emotion. Yeah – lie bitch, lie!
“Are you proud of that?” I said tauntingly.
“No.”
“Fuck you, bitch.”
“I didn’t love my son either. Peter.”
“I said—”
“But when he summoned me – I had to go and—”
“Are you trying to explain why you abandoned me, when I was just a baby?” I mocked.
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t give a shit, did you?”
“I gave a shit,” said Lena, stiffly.
“But you left me anyway.”
Lena thought about it a long while. Her old face looked older now.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The question haunted her; I could see her struggling to find an answer that would satisfy me.
And so she tried to explain. She did, she really did try.
She told me how she felt when I was first born. How something that was dead inside her was rekindled. How she lost herself in the joy of breastfeeding – yes, she really did that. Imagine!
And she talked about she felt swamped in love. That rare and wonderful love that a mother feels for her baby. A love that is greater than – let’s tell the truth here people – any other kind of love.
But my father didn’t approve.
“Too much emotion,” he would say, “is bad for children. Don’t drown the poor soul in your vulgarity.”
Or: “You demean yourself, my sweet, by exposing your breasts in that way. Do use a bottle please.”
And also: “I fear, my dear Lena, that this child may be defective. Are you sure there’s nothing we can do about it?”
He didn’t mean it of course. It was just his way of taunting her. I wonder if he was jealous? Of Lena’s greater love for her child?
All in all, it was a shit time for Lena. She felt belittled, on a daily basis. And she constantly plotted and schemed about how she would take her child away with her. To a planet where children could run free, and be wild! A planet devoid, in short, of bone-dry sarcasm.
“Then a certain terrible thing happened,” Lena told me. “You know what I’m referring to.” And I certainly did – the conquest of Earth. “And I thought – well. My fault. But he was my son. And—”
Lena was crying when she told me that bit of the story. Imagine! Lena crying.
“And I actually thought,” Lena concluded, “that you’d be better off without me.”
I thought about what she had just said.
And it didn’t make any sense, at any level. Emotionally, morally, intellectually.
Leave me with a father who was cold and uncaring, for my own good? What CRAP! What was she thinking of?!
“Is that your excuse? I asked her, scornfully.
“That’s my apology,” Lena said, and there was a quaver in her voice.
I stared at her. And I smiled. My moment had finally come.
“I hate you, Mum,” I said. And I saw the pain in her eyes.
And then she looked away.
And then she got up, and left, without saying another word.
I’d rehearsed this revenge for many years.
Strangely, it wasn’t sweet.
A few days later Flanagan came to see me.
Remember, the mission was still aborted. The bastards still needed me and my lucky whatever-it-was, to launch their attack on Morgan’s World. So Flanagan had to make nice; and that’s precisely what he did.
“Would you consider—”
[Obscenity from me.]
“Bear in mind that—”
[Another obscenity from me.]
That went on for a while. But Flanagan didn’t seem perturbed. He gave up questions, took a bottle of whisky out of his bag. I shook my head. But he produced two glasses and filled them both. I could smell the peaty aroma. I saw from the bottle this was a thousand-year-old single malt from Cambria. The best. Those bottles sell for – well, they’re almost priceless. That’s what you get for being a legendary hero who saved humanity.
Great single malt.
He pushed a glass across the table. I took a small sip, and felt the warmth seep into my body. I also felt instantly intoxicated. I slammed it back and poured myself a second glass.
Flanagan smiled.
Mellowed by booze, I listened as Flanagan told his tale. How he and Lena came to be still alive, despite their publicly reported deaths7 and subsequent vastly expensive funerals. It was all he explained, a fake. Carefully planned, superbly executed.
“Why?” I said. “You were rich, famous. The most famous people in the humanverse. Why give all that up?”
“We got bored,” Flanagan admitted.
“All humanity worshipped you,” I pointed out.
“Yeah,” he said, dryly.
He thought for a moment. His scarred – sorry, I mean wrinkled – features made him look like a wizened old something-or-other. Something wrinkly and old. Look, find your own metaphor here, okay?
“When I was a young man—” he digressed.
“Just answer the fucking question.”
“I had my own rock band. Music was my passion.”
“I know.” I’d heard the Flanagan Rock Oratorio once. Pretentious shite. Some people should stick to what they’re best at. In his case, intergalactic carnage.
“And when I was famous, I started to compose again. I wrote an oratario! Can you believe it? With rock guitar and drums. It was shite.”
“I’ve heard it.”
“Shite?”
“Shite,” I concurred.
“The reviewers said it was a masterpiece. The greatest piece of music ever written, ever. Beethoven’s oeuvre was a warthog farting in comparison with this great work by Flanagan. One critic actually said that!”
“No critic ever said that.”
“It was implied. So I thought – fuck this. I don’t want sycophancy.”
“Why not?”
“What do you mean, ‘why not?’ ” said Flanagan crossly.
“What’s wrong with sycophancy? It beats being treated like shit.”
“Only by a narrow margin.”
“Oh what would you fucking know?” I snarled.
“I would know,” he said stiffly, “as it happens. My generation—”
“Oh Sweet Shiva!”
“My generation suffered,” Flanagan insisted, like the mother who starts telling her child all the things that her mother used to say, and is appalled to discover she can’t stop herself. “It was a—”
“My generation didn’t exactly have it soft.”
“You have no idea what we—”
“You just don’t fucking know what I—”
“What was the question?” said Flanagan, calming himself down. I wanted to slap his smug, grizzled face. But there was something about Flanagan’s presence that I found – I don’t know – reassuring.
“How and why did you fake your deaths?”
“Why, I’ve already told you. Or maybe I haven’t. Lena and I – we were drifting apart. Nothing in common, except what we’d done together. She was getting really arrogant, and annoying.”
“But you were still the same old humble wonderful guy?”
“Pretty much,” he conceded, but in fairness he was smiling. “So I created an expedition. We went off to explore a double star. Our spaceship was sucked into a gravity well8 and never returned. We’d sent out a mayday message but by then it was too late. That was our story, and the world fell for it.
“And after that, we just travelled. We stayed in space for many years. Then we found a planet, we called it Flanagan. Or rather, I called it Flanagan. She called it Lena. She really is fucking impossible you—”
“So why are you back?”
“Well,” he said, “we heard about the war, you see. And Morgan’s role in it. And we couldn’t resist the challenge. The call, if you like. One last adventure! Before—”
“Before what?”
“Before the next one,” said Flanagan. And he laughed, and couldn’t stop laughing.
“What will you do?” Billy asked.
“Travel,” I said. “Find a stellar yacht, point at the stars, see what I see.”
“And our baby?”
“There is no baby. It’s just – a fucking cell.”
Billy flinched.
I was leaving him, by the way. Leaving everyone. Fraser. The mission. Fucking off. I’d had enough. My discharge papers were through, and I no longer cared if the human species lived or died.
Okay? You got a problem with that?
“You do realise,” said Billy, “that you could be the only human being left in the entire universe. If this mission of ours fails.”
“I’ve always been the solitary type.”
“They really do need you, you know.”
“Lena would never accept me.”
“Fraser bullied her. She’ll accept you.”
“I don’t care. I really don’t care.”
“Douglas,” said Billy, “is our child. He is NOT just a fucking cell. And the future of humanity really is in your hands. You selfish fucking stupid fucking bitch!”
Billy had only ever sworn at me once before. And he hardly ever raised his voice to me. And he had certainly never criticised me before, and he was clearly criticising me NOW.
It took a lot to get Billy this angry. And that shook me. And made me think twice.
And so, I felt my resolve weaken.
Billy waited patiently. He knew what was coming.
I thought about Lena.
I thought about Douglas.
I thought about that bastard Morgan.
And I sighed. “One last mission?”
There was a pause. And then Billy smiled. And I knew that we were good again. We were pals, again.
“One last mission. Oh and by the way, I’m coming with you,” said Billy. And for the first time since I’d known him, there was idealism and passion in his voice. “And if we survive, we’ll raise the child together, okay? But we have to do this thing. We have to do it. We have to kill the Devil.”