The Only Game in the Galaxy

by Paul Collins

RIM headquarters was opposite her on the other side of the river. To her right was the closest bridge, but as she looked she spotted half a dozen ‘obstacles’ – pedestrians who weren’t mere pedestrians. She turned and gazed downriver to the next bridge. It was further away, but she was pretty sure that route was also covered.

  ‘Well, I expected that,’ she sighed. She looked up at the night sky, wondering if she was being tracked by satellite. Who knew what devices had been planted on her – or in her. Worms, viroids, nanosignallers … There was no end to the ways in which a person could be tracked and with her amnesia there was no way of knowing if she had consented to such implants.

  She either had to get ‘clean’ or do some fancy footwork.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ said a voice behind her.

  She turned slowly. A tall slim man with whipcord muscles and a sharp face stood there holding a wide-angled vaporiser. Not a nice weapon – hard to dodge.

  ‘What won’t be necessary?’

  ‘Whatever you were thinking of doing.’

  ‘Neat. Didn’t hear a thing.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  Anneke nodded to the weapon. ‘So now what?’

  ‘Now you come with me.’ Anneke’s silence irritated the man. ‘That wasn’t a question. And I’m not trying to kill you.’

  ‘And you’re pointing a vaporiser at me because?’

  ‘Insurance,’ the man supplied. ‘My employers merely wish a word with you.’

  ‘They could have tried direct link. I’m connected.’

  ‘Not my department.’ The man indicated the door with his vaporiser.

  ‘Now, about talking to your bosses –’ As she said the last word, she hit a button on her field generator. The deflector field expanded many times in the blink of an eye, as she had set it up to do, then collapsed.

  It had the desired effect, knocking the man backwards off his feet and slamming him into the wall of the drop-tube housing. His weapon went flying.

  Unfortunately, it had another effect.

  It catapulted Anneke backwards off the roof. And into thin air.

  Very thin air.

  THE decryption computers hummed, never stopping. The sound was pervasive – so familiar – that the team of decoders weren’t aware of it. Karl, Mika and Jeera Mosoon had worked in Maximus’ buried bunker for so long that they had almost forgotten what the outside looked like. For Karl and Mika, introverted computer nerds, this wasn’t a huge problem. But for Jeera – an exotic flower, Maximus had once thought – it was a death sentence.

  Death sometimes comes faster than expected.

  The decoders had been working on the third set of lost coordinates for a while. As Jeera had predicted, breakthroughs came suddenly or not at all; it wasn’t a process of whittling away at vast number sequences, looking for primes or arcane theory patterns. It was luck. The kind of dumb luck programmed into the nature of the quantum universe. Except it wasn’t luck, Jeera knew. It was deeper – perhaps the deepest level of reality there was – so deep, human beings could barely conceive of it.

  Someone once said the universe wasn’t just stranger than we imagine. It was stranger than we could imagine.

  Jeera agreed. On the morning that the supercomputers found the catalyst code and unlocked – in a nano-second – the coordinate set, it came as no surprise to Jeera. Her fellow decoders, tall ascetic Karl and dumpy little Mika, were shocked and ecstatic. They broke out the champers and toasted each other. Jeera had a glass, too, celebrating the mercurial nature of the universe, which could have made them wait another century, but had (she felt) chosen to reveal its secrets today.

  Given what happened next she may have been right.

  Karl put down his glass and swayed, a little tipsy. ‘We better burst-code it out,’ he said, trying to be professional.

  ‘Oh, give me a break,’ said Mika who didn’t try to stand. ‘Let’s enjoy this. We’re the only three people in this universe who know where the last set of coordinates is. Think about it! The weapon caches of the Old Empire – at our fingertips!’

  ‘Black’s fingertips,’ corrected Jeera.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Mika, emptying her glass and refilling it with more champagne.

  Jeera dutifully crossed the room and prepped the data for a micro-burst transmission, encrypting it first. She had just finished when the wall in the outer corridor imploded.

  ‘What the hell –?’ said Karl, spinning round awkwardly to see the corridor full of smoke and dust. Mika’s face paled. Neither she nor Karl moved.

  Jeera, on the other hand, knew exactly what was happening. She leant forward, pressed her eye to a retinal up-loader and hit the send button. In a flash the encrypted micro-burst was uploaded onto a data chip lodged in her neo-cortex, a bio-wetware implant nearly every school child possessed.

  As high-energy beams stitched into Karl and Mika, vaporising raw chunks of them, Jeera sprinted for the panic room located in the back. Once inside, nothing could touch her until Black came for her.

  She didn’t make it.

  Maximus sat behind his desk and pondered. Life was full of surprises. Quesada Towers had been invaded this morning, yet here he was, the building refurbished and vacuumed of gas as though this morning’s events had never occurred. He’d thought Anneke dead, yet here she was alive.

  He guessed that she was never going to assassinate his opponents at Myoto – but nonetheless he would play out a plan he had devised for her.

  He wasn’t sentimental enough to think it had to do with her having been on his birth world, Tormat, or because she was hiding something from him. There was no denying her revelation had shocked him deeply. Indeed, he was trying to assess the seismic blow, and what it might mean …

  It was late and Maximus was tired. Not a good time to measure emotional fallout. Suffice to say that what he had thought dead and buried was showing an unhealthy desire to disinter itself.

  In any case, he thought Anneke – and her opportune amnesia – might be put to practical use, repairing some if not all of the damage she herself had caused.

  His mind was ticking over when a part of it, both wetware and hardware, became aware of running feet.

  The door burst open and a Quesadan flunky stumbled in, out of breath.

  Maximus felt instant foreboding. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Sir, we just received a malfunction report – from Spider’s Web!’

  The Envoy strode into the room at that moment. Maximus waved the flunky out. ‘Yes?’ he said to the Envoy.

  ‘Destroyed. All dead –’ the Envoy rasped.

  ‘All?!’ Maximus felt panic. It wasn’t the machinery he was worried about.

  ‘All but Jeera Mosoon.’

  Maximus felt weak and sat down. The Envoy assessed him, or so Maximus imagined. ‘She made it to the panic room?’

  ‘No. She was captured. The logs show that she made a micro-burst retinal upload just before she was apprehended …’

  Maximus stared. ‘They did it. They cracked the code!’

  ‘If so, the enemy has it in their possession. Further, the auto-toxin that should have terminated the girl’s life the moment she left the underground bunker did not succeed.’

  Maximus felt numb. His inexplicable attraction to the girl was becoming an interesting embarrassment. ‘What can I say, Envoy? I didn’t have the heart to infect her. Well … I gave her an antidote.’

  ‘You feel for her.’

  ‘That is no concern of yours. Now tell me the rest.’

  ‘Our spy informs us Jeera will be moved off planet tomorrow. Logically to Se’atma Minor since the IMC controls the Old Fortress and they have scheduled their shareholder’s meeting there next week.’

  ‘Yes. What better place.’

  ‘There is something else.’

  Maximus closed his eyes for a second. He felt something large and nasty rushing towards him.

  ‘Anneke Longshadow is gone. The safe house was attacked an h
our ago. Agents are combing through the debris as we speak. First estimations suggest she is dead.’

  Maximus, too weary to be shaken, managed a short barking laugh. ‘Trust me, Envoy, she is harder to kill than you imagine!’

  ‘As you say.’ The Envoy’s tone was noncommittal.

  Maximus climbed slowly to his feet. His mind, however, raced. ‘There will be no sleep this night,’ he said softly. ‘And perhaps for some time …’

  ‘As you wish.’

  Jeera Mosoon had escaped on the way to the Lykis Integer spaceport. Bodanis of Imperial Standard would have liked to remove her via jump-gate, but a mysterious virus had infected all the planet-based gates sometime in the small hours of the morning. The gates were still functioning but there was no way to predict where one would appear.

  Bodanis felt flustered. Sasume, CEO of Myoto, sat calmly on the other side of his desk. Her expression gave nothing away.

  ‘Nathaniel Brown is behind it, or I’m a fool!’ said Bodanis.

  ‘We would have done the same, if positions had been reversed.’

  ‘That is little comfort to me,’ said Bodanis. ‘It means there will be an attack en route.’

  ‘It means,’ said Sasume, leaning forward ever so slightly, ‘that we dictate the terms of the attack.’

  ‘What do you mean? Brown will pick his time and place. He’ll find our weak point and exploit it. That’s his nature.’

  ‘Not if we anticipate him.’

  Bodanis looked at her sceptically. Sasume continued: ‘There are only two practical routes to the spaceport and each offers a limited number of choke points. Any of these would suit Brown’s purposes. Thus, they must be avoided or else seized by our people. If we control the entire route we can determine where the weak point will be!’

  ‘Very little in this life goes according to plan, Sasume.’

  ‘Then let us plan accordingly.’

  Bodanis was right and wrong. Sasume had deployed vast numbers of field troops, flooding danger areas, interdicting others with a mixture of human bodies and field technology. She did not neglect rooftops or sewers and storm drains. She left but two points undermanned then set about booby-trapping the potential attack points and deploying discrete high-altitude air cover. As was her way, she left little to chance. Sasume did not like the unpredictable.

  Thus, when Jeera Mosoon, who had been apprehended before she reached the panic room, escaped from the ground car she was riding in, Sasume was livid.

  Bodanis on the other hand was phlegmatic. ‘She’s been wormed. She won’t go far.’

  They were both wrong.

  Maximus chose to launch his attack at the strongest point in the route against Sasume’s prediction.

  Jeera dived into the noonday crowd, incredulous that she had managed to make her escape. Everyone in the car coming down with acute hay fever had obviously helped, even if it was odd. On top of that, they were all big men, strong, well-trained, more than a match for a slender untrained waif of a girl like herself. That was probably why they hadn’t put her into restraint.

  The conceit of men, she mused, as she dashed through the crowd, keeping low. She spotted an alleyway to her left and veered into it, breaking into a full-throttle sprint. She needed to put distance between herself and the Combine. She had no doubt that once they had extracted the uploaded data burst – whether by neocortical surgery or old-fashioned torture – she would be deemed expendable. Very expendable.

  So she ran.

  She chanced a look behind her when a sudden commotion erupted. Then half a dozen men crashed into view, knocking pedestrians aside, unstoppable. Considering she had been imprisoned for so long, Jeera put on a surprising burst of speed.

  Bodanis and Sasume knew that they were under attack when the car ahead of them exploded in a ball of flame. Armoured as it was and protected by shaped deflector fields, those in the car would not have been harmed, other than by gyrations of the vehicle as it flipped onto its roof. Brown had no way of knowing which of the two-dozen armoured defence vehicles carried the IMC leaders.

  Just as well, reflected Bodanis, as his car swerved onto the sidewalk, overtook the one in front, and formed a defensive phalanx of nearly a dozen vehicles with a mutually reinforced deflector field that could withstand anything Brown threw at it.

  ‘You haven’t anticipated Mister Brown very well,’ he said sourly to Sasume who ignored him, reeling off rapid-fire battle orders. Sat pics showed her where Brown’s forces were concentrated. She called for immediate air strikes on their positions. These ‘forces’ would turn out to be facsimiles, false readings designed to trick surveillance telemetry.

  Sasume took two deep breaths to dispel some of her pent up frustration. There was no way to know where Brown’s people were or where they would strike from next. Outside, the road had erupted into a battleground, confused and noisy. Hand-to-hand battles dotted the road while sniper fire – from both sides – strafed clashing knots of men and women.

  Inside their car, Bodanis and Sasume felt safe, but the priority was to reacquire Jeera Mosoon. And quickly.

  ‘We have her sighted,’ said Sasume in a puzzled tone.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Brown’s battle order seems odd.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He’s not trying to recapture the girl.’

  Bodanis frowned. The objective was the girl. Or rather, what she carried in her head. The lost coordinates.

  ‘Then he’s up to something.’

  ‘Obviously. But what?’

  Maximus (now in his bi-polar renovation as Nathaniel Brown) studied the field of battle via the ramped-up magnification of his iris overlay. So far, everything had gone to plan. He had seen through Sasume’s guile and chosen this well-fortified point from which to attack the evacuating cavalcade.

  Indeed, it was Sasume who had given Maximus the idea. An ancient board game called Go had originated in the land of Sasume’s ancestors.

  It was a game with artfully simple rules but diabolically complex strategy and tactics. And it had many lessons to impart.

  One was, you don’t always have to win.

  Maximus had designed an attack that was staggeringly bold, meticulously planned, and which had no chance of succeeding in acquiring Jeera, in the hope she might escape. A virus had been administered to the decoders in the Spider Web bunker before the more terminal virus, a virus that made them the equivalent of human allergens.

  They made other people allergic to them.

  Often violently, pukingly, allergic. It took about thirty minutes to reach full effect, less in a car with the windows wound up. And that duration put the cavalcade where it was right now. Hence Maximus’ choice of where and when to attack.

  Besides, the sheer brazen gutsiness of the attack would prove great PR in the ongoing battle to win over the as-yet-decided Clans and Companies.

  Maximus’ internal microphone squawked. ‘What is it?’ he snapped.

  ‘We’ve sighted the girl. Sending coordinates.’

  ‘On my way.’ Maximus gave last minute instructions to his battle commander, a veteran named Dunmason, and used a bounce field to jump from the top of the building he had staked out to the next one, fifteen metres away. The bounce field reacted, briefly, against the natural harmonics of any large object, including the planet itself.

  He alighted, stumbling, onto the target rooftop and broke into a run. He covered the three blocks in record time, altering his route to match the changing coordinates of his quarry. His interest in the girl deepened. He admired spunk and luck, and she seemed to have truckloads of both.

  But her luck was running out. Maximus had to reach her before it did.

  He slammed into a parapet on the east side of an eight-storey building, peeking over the edge and ramping up magnification as he did so.

  Then he spotted her.

  He unslung the adapted rifle from his shoulder, propped it on the parapet, and took aim. And almost died.

&
nbsp; The wall beside him suddenly vanished in a silent maelstrom of tortured particles. He threw himself back, but the next shot went wide. He spun, rolled, brought his hand blaster up and got off a shot at his would-be sniper. And missed.

  Despite this, the sniper toppled, screaming, from his perch on an adjacent higher rooftop. Maximus looked around for his unknown benefactor and stopped, squinting, as he made out a figure crouched among stone-sculptured gargoyles on a high church spire.

  The figure threw him a mock salute. He returned it, with more feeling. Then he lunged back to the wall to see Jeera surrounded and being dragged back towards a waiting car.

  He had moments left.

  He took careful aim, tracking her towards the vehicle, waiting for a clear shot, and pulled the trigger as she glanced up towards him, as if a sixth sense had warned her. He saw the pale blur of her upturned face, then saw her slump.

  He dropped back down behind the parapet, breathing heavily.

  ‘Better get away from there,’ called a voice. ‘If they pick up your heat signature through the wall, you’ll be toast.’

  Maximus snorted but complied.

  ‘How many have joined our banner?’ Maximus asked hours later. He stood at the window of his office, gazing out. Rain poured from a leaden sky.

  ‘Two dozen,’ replied the Envoy.

  ‘Good. They admire the bold stroke,’ said Maximus, turning to face the alien. ‘I knew they would.’

  ‘Perhaps they sense the winds of fate.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m the Instrument of Kadros. The shaper of the galaxy’s destiny. All very well, Envoy, but you can’t take it to the bank.’

  ‘Do not underestimate the forces that even now play out towards their end.’

  ‘Is she here?’

  The Envoy nodded.

  ‘Bring her in.’

  The Envoy went to the door, opened it, beckoning someone inside. A woman, mid-thirties, with dark blonde hair and the look of a merc, marched in. Although she was plain, for Maximus’ purposes appearance was not important – not on this mission.