by Paul Collins
He had originally thought he would give the mercs the slip, but what he actually did was filter them out. With the mercs gone he became aware that somebody else was tracking him. Someone who made the mercs look like kindergarten dropouts.
Maximus began to sweat. That was bad. Fear could be detected in sweat, and letting people know that he was frightened was not a good way to stay alive.
Myoto knew he was in Hurqurl. They had interdicted the whole area, setting up roadblocks, closing the subway entrances, and stopping threaders from docking. Maximus was impressed. The company had resources, influence and a bad attitude where their enemies were concerned. They were determined to get him.
The joke was that he could not call for help. If he did, he lost. He would also lose face. The Cartel would relegate Quesada immediately and appoint another CEO. Besides, who would come to help him?
If Maximus’s great plan was to succeed, he had to survive. Even if his great plan failed, survival was a big improvement on the alternative. He had already bested Myoto, but now the net was drawing tighter. There was a new player in the game, and this one was cunning and intelligent.
Maximus got a funny feeling between his shoulderblades. A special gift of genetics, an extra sense, warned him a trigger was being pulled on a weapon aimed in his direction. Maximus ducked to the left, dropping as he did so. An almost silent shredder hissed past as he bolted into an alleyway. Shredders the size of a pinhead bore into any fleshy bodies and started mincing tissue, needler technology in a different package, excruciatingly painful – at least for a short time.
He dropped a microspike as he ran, taking full advantage of twists in the maze of alleys and lanes, as well as the huge rubbish skips, burned-out wrecks and printfab hutments. His pursuer had to negotiate this and single him out amid the chaos. All Maximus had to do was run. He had put two hundred metres between him and the spike when he heard it detonate. A satisfying scream; someone had come within its detonation radius; someone carrying lethal hardware.
Maximus saw a figure, just a flicker of movement, a blurry shape between buildings three hundred metres ahead. He thought he recognised it: tall, elongated, blood red tunic, moving with an odd inhuman gait. That was bad. Most predators wore black, going about their business unseen. Someone wearing red had to be confident.
Maximus skidded to a stop.
Had he seen the Envoy? Don’t be stupid, he told himself. What you saw was a member of the Envoy’s species. There was no reason for Lotang to employ only one of these creatures. For all Maximus knew, the man had a whole garrison of them.
This was the new player he had sensed earlier.
Predicting the kill-patterns of mercs was one thing. Trying to profile an alien was another. He had no parameters to work with. What were its values? What was it frightened of? How fast could it react? Did it get angry and make stupid decisions? Did it get angry at all? In terms of pursuit, it was ahead of the mercs. It was probably from a predator species, cat or wolf.
In that moment, Maximus knew the chase had become serious.
He took another lane, at right angles to his previous path, and tried to put distance between himself and the new exporter. He assumed the Envoy look-alike was working for Lotang, but what did that mean? Perhaps the red alien was yet another innocent bystander. Well, that would be no problem, because Maximus had killed more than his share of innocent bystanders.
Had Lotang decided he would rather die than be controlled and manipulated? Maximus’s profile of the man said otherwise, but sometimes people’s profiles changed when pushed too far. The survivor suddenly became the suicidal terrorist.
‘Cheer up, Lotang, life is worth living,’ Maximus muttered hopefully.
Were the two Corporations working together? If not, there was a possibility Maximus could play them off against each other. At the same time, the risk was that his evasion measures calculated for Myoto’s specific hunt pattern, could drive him straight into the path of another hunt.
Maximus came to this realisation just as it happened.
As he raced down the permamac lane, his body sensors picked up leakage of constrained energies from blast weapons. He swerved into an alleyway but it began to curve, taking him back in the direction of the Envoy.
Time for a change of plan, thought Maximus. He swung sideways into a store. It was attached to a restaurant. He hurried out through the kitchen and into the dining area. As a waiter came forward to greet him he shouldered past, then, seeing the front door starting to open, hurriedly turned back. Knocking the waiter aside, he raced down a corridor and burst back into the kitchen.
Maximus sprinted past the surprised staff and slammed open the back door, darting into the alleyway. Instead of turning left or right he raced across the alleyway and into another open doorway. A maze of narrow corridors frustrated his pace, but five minutes later he was out the other side, leaving behind a security guard with a broken jaw. Hailing a hover taxi, he waved a one hundred cred note in the driver’s face. The money spoke with its usual persuasive charm, and the taxi took off at speed.
Maximus was too canny to stay in the taxi for long. Five blocks away, as the taxi slowed for a corner, Maximus upped the amplitude on his deflector field and jumped from the moving vehicle just in time. The almost frictionless field let him coast sideways into a parking lot. He slid down an exit ramp, narrowly avoiding a hover truck. Behind him the taxi blossomed into a fireball of lurid red and yellow. He managed to switch off his field and snap-roll to a stop. Would anyone be fooled by their hit on the taxi? Probably not. I wouldn’t be.
Maximus took the ramps towards the underground. Down more than a dozen levels, he slowed, moving along rows and rows of parked vehicles, formulating his plan.
He need not have bothered.
A beam pulsed out at him from nowhere, missing him only because of his deflector armour. He could smell ozone, and feel scorching heat on his face, but his body had already taken over and he was fifty metres away, crab-running behind hover cars, vigilant, every sense on alert.
That was close. How had he been found so fast? Whoever had ashed the taxi would have thought him dead, but whoever else was hunting him had a more realistic view on his ability to survive.
Damn, it must be that Envoy creature.
Maximus turned back. It was time to become the hunter. He had to remove this threat before it completely overwhelmed his profiling of the hunt patterns.
He still had an hour till midnight. An hour until he could no longer be killed. Not legally, anyway.
He heard them. Three, maybe four pursuers, moving with utmost stealth. This was good; it meant they were uncertain, unable to track him properly. His deflectors were doing their job, blurring his heat signature, messing up his neural emissions, even dampening the sound of his footsteps. They were also blocking planetary net traffic in the vicinity, which was to his advantage. The mercs had come after him underprepared. An enemy without comm is a weaker enemy.
His own sensors showed three blips nearby, a fourth hanging back. Probably the real hit man with the biggest cannon. Well, I hate to disappoint you guys, but I don’t plan to die today.
Maximus dropped noiselessly to his knees, stretched out on the ground, and rolled beneath a hover vehicle. Inside the car’s parking support field it was difficult to breathe, but he would be virtually invisible to trackers.
They came, three sets of boots, moving silently, expecting him to play the role of the hunted. The boots started to pass the car, and then something went wrong. Within seconds they had surrounded the car he was lying beneath and a sharp voice was barking down at him.
‘Either you’re outta there by the time I count to three or we vaporise the whole friggin’ thing. Me, I don’t care, never liked this model hover car.’
Maximus didn’t move. He would die either way. Here at least the dampening field might reduce some of the blast impact. Besides, he had until three. He started to sweat.
He had a surprise in return. Only proble
m was, while the surprise would kill the hunters it would almost certainly kill him, too. But at least he would die on his terms.
‘Three,’ said the hunter. ‘Have it your way, Brown. I declare kill-rights in the name of Myoto Corporation.’
Maximus reversed the polarity of his personal field unit. For a moment a coherent field intersected with the parking field of the hover vehicle. Energies reversed, sending them back along the line of their charge track. The field lost coherence, expanded, and met with the stored energies of the hand weapons held by his pursuers. There would be three nasty explosions. Or maybe not. What happened to Maximus was also open to debate.
Covering his head, Maximus scrabbled aside. Three little blasts sounded like one, as did the three screams of the mortally wounded pursuers. Maximus rolled clear of the unsupported hover car just as it crashed to the ground. A messy-looking body was slumped on the plasteel ground beside him. Maximus squirmed around, craning his neck to scan the area behind the hover vehicle. The hemline of a blood red robe swished confidently towards him beyond the neighbouring vehicles.
He dived over the bonnet of the adjacent car, landing and twisting in one fluid move; then brought up his own needler, all the time listening to the swish-swish sound as it grew slowly louder.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ Maximus called out. The swishing stopped. ‘I appreciate you taking out the garbage for me.’
‘You are welcome, Mr Brown,’ came a familiar hissing voice.
‘The head toll on me must be pretty hefty.’
‘One million credos.’
Maximus whistled. ‘Not bad. Is that dead or alive?’
‘A seven percent premium has been offered if you are returned still breathing.’
‘Hardly worth the effort.’
‘My thoughts also,’ said the alien.
‘So how do you want to do this?’
‘Rites must be observed.’
‘Naturally.’
He zeroed the voice, placed it within the three dimensional map he mentally constructed of the parking lot space. As he spoke, Maximus started to stand, but it was a feint. No sooner had he shown the crown of his head than he dived to one side, firing as he fell. He hit the ground and then stumbled to his feet and crab-crawled as fast as he could between parked vehicles, keeping down. The alarm systems of several vehicles shrieked warnings of his proximity but he ignored them.
There was no return fire, but neither was there any scream. Did this alien scream? He didn’t wait to find out. By his calculation he only had another forty minutes till he could call for reinforcements, and he did not plan to spend those forty minutes as an easy target, or risking a shootout.
Instead, he got out of there.
At the end of the line of parked hover cars he came up against a wall with a maintenance hatch. He burned off the lock with the pencil beam setting on his backup laser, and then scrambled along a maintenance tunnel, taking random turns. He continued until there were 150 metres and twelve minutes between himself and the parking lot and then he stopped long enough to call up a schematic of the maintenance network. A green pulsing blip on the screen showed his position. Unfortunately, it also showed four red entities swarming into the tunnels behind him. He figured these to be Myoto hunkies. The whereabouts of the Envoy-alien was unknown.
Maximus swore softly under his breath.
He scouted out an escape path, scrambled into a side tunnel, and became caught in a rat trap, an immobiliser field specifically designed to hold rodents. Once a rat entered the field they could not leave it. Maximus’s foot was stuck inside the field. Ordinarily, a fit adult could wrench free, but there was nothing for him to get a purchase on, just smooth floor and curving walls. Perhaps it was also a burglar trap.
He spent several useless minutes trying to twist free. A glance at his screen told him he did not have much time left. The four red blips were within twenty metres of him.
It was time to get out, even if his position was broadcast – assuming his dampeners had stopped the Myotans from already doing this.
Maximus reset his laser to emit a coherent pulse, took aim at the wall where he calculated the immobiliser’s chip-brain would be, and fired. The chip was distributed, and it took two more shots to deactivate its field. A chorus of yells nearby told him that the shots had been heard or the energy discharges picked up on sensors.
Too bad. Another seven minutes and he could call for assistance.
His left foot tingled where the immobiliser field had gripped it but otherwise he was unhurt. He hurried down the corridor, reached an intersection, and froze.
He had reached a dead end. For a second his mind went blank. Then he checked the maintenance schematic. No dead end showed. With a sinking feeling he ran a quick diagnostic on the device. Frigging hell! The bastards had scammed him. While he’d lain trapped and preoccupied in the immobiliser, they had contaminated his e-pad with a low-level virus that had overlaid a fake schematic of the tunnels on top of the real ones.
The dead end was real and solid.
No doubt they were congratulating themselves about it right now. Nice job, he had to admit. They had sited the trap in a section of reinforced support walls. It would take him ten minutes to burn a hole big enough for him to crawl through.
He didn’t have ten minutes. He didn’t even have one.
But he had the knowledge that they were probably feeling cocky, and that would be a dangerous way to feel.
THE colossal shape of the Orbital Engineering Platform looked like a giant cockroach, with great sprays of antennae and sensors projecting from one end while from its underbelly rows of massive jointed arms extended, waiting to embrace damaged starships. Its stealth mode momentarily destabilised, it loomed like a dark inkblot against the splash of a galactic star field, its lower edges etched in harsh sunlight.
Anneke located the suitcase probe and tractored it inside where it locked itself to the nearest bulkhead.
‘Well, that was fun,’ it said.
‘Where’s your sister?’
‘Please. Like we’re related.’ Anneke could swear it sniffed. ‘She’s inside where she ought to be, doing what she ought to be doing. Unfortunately …’
The suitcase fell silent.
Anneke swivelled her head to look at it. ‘Unfortunately what?’
The suitcase made a tsk-tsking noise. ‘Well, it’s not her fault, you know. She’s an idiot studying to be a moron. Very primitive programming, if you ask me, not at all up to the task. Unlike moi.’
Exasperated, Anneke powered up one of her hand lasers and pointed it between the machine’s stereo cameras.
‘All right, all right, no need for dramatics.’
‘I have a need for straight answers, so start answering. Now, about your sister?’
‘She stopped talking.’
‘She stopped talking?’
‘Do you hear an echo?’
‘Just like that? No warning?’
‘Nada. Zip. Zilch.’
Anneke contemplated this. There could be many reasons for the probe to cease communication. It might have been forced to shut down all transmissions, including its own energy signature, to avoid detection.
‘No self-destruct signal?’
‘She’s got vacuum for brains. Sorry, vacuum is the conduit for virtual gravity communication within the MacroSpace structure of the multiverse. It serves a purpose and transmits it. She does not.’
‘I’ll take that as a no.’
‘Not a peep.’
‘Now here’s a question. I intimidated you with a laser pointed between the cameras. You can feel fear.’
‘It depends on your school of thought and semantic –’ Anneke raised her laser again. ‘Well, yes,’ said the suitcase.
‘Can your sister feel fear, too?’
‘Absolutely, totally and more intensely. She is built to be timid, hence the wisdom of using her in infiltration ventures. Send someone like myself in, being much bolder I would be likely to
take a chance and get fried.’
‘Promises, promises. So, if she had hit a trap and got fried, you would have registered the energy spike?’
‘Yes.’
‘And if something had smashed her, there would have been a destruct pulse transmitted by her core circuits to tell you going in there was a bad idea.’
‘That is an inbuilt altruism function, designed to protect the more elite units from low-level threats.’
‘So she is intact but silent. That could mean that she is too frightened to transmit.’
‘Frightened? That’s … That’s not bad logic. I am impressed. You could have been an AI.’
‘Spare me.’
Anneke eyed the gigantic bulk of the Old Empire relic, noting the great wounds and ugly strips of repair metal covering its flank like scars. She guessed its age at around twelve hundred years. This thing had seen a lot of action. Distinctive circular meteorite impacts were scattered across it, craters in the metal.
‘Okay, I’m going aboard,’ said Anneke. ‘I want you to monitor my comm signal.’
‘And what if you stop talking?’
‘Let’s discuss that if it happens.’
‘Oh, very funny. But seriously?’
‘Stay here unless there is a clear and present danger. I may have to go silent if keeping comm open is a threat to remaining alive. Remember, no heroics. I want you intact to get me away from here.’
Being old doesn’t always make people feeble, but it often makes them crabby about being disturbed. The same applies to ancient weapons systems with on-board intelligence.
The ancient weapons platform had defences, and those AI defences were quite sensible. Rather than denying entry to potential intruders, who might go away and fetch battleships, it allowed them in. Then it slammed the doors shut and disposed of them neatly, with a minimum of disturbance to the infrastructure.