The Only Game in the Galaxy

by Paul Collins

  ‘The neuronosis is complete?’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘You understand what must be done?’

  ‘Yes, your lordship.’

  ‘I cannot condone failure.’

  ‘There will be no failure.’ The woman spoke with utter certainty but Maximus could not tell if that was her own sense of confidence or a result of the gruelling but effective neuronotic process – the neural implantation of memory and instruction was powerful and painful.

  ‘I hope so. What is your primary mission?’ he asked.

  ‘Retrieve the lost coordinates.’

  ‘Window duration?’

  ‘Twenty-four hours. The amnesia toxin you infected Jeera Mosoon with will be detected and counteracted by that time, then IMC operatives will extract the data … one way or another.’

  Maximus frowned. He didn’t like being reminded of the collateral damage his plans often entailed. ‘And the secondary objective?’

  ‘Eliminate Bodanis of Imperial Standard and Sasume of Myoto. If il’Kiah of Stella Mercantile can be neutralised at the same time, it will be done.’

  ‘Very good. I want Bodanis and Sasume dead, but don’t obsess over it. Encompassing their deaths would simply be a plus.’

  The woman nodded, seemingly impatient to be gone.

  ‘You leave for Se’atma Minor within the hour. Prepare yourself.’ He paused. ‘How will you be known?’

  ‘Hacker, PJ.’

  Maximus nodded, finding the name amusing. The woman said nothing more, turned on her heel and left.

  ‘You take a great risk,’ said the Envoy, referring to the larger issue.

  ‘The more you gamble the more you win,’ Maximus said. Then added: ‘Stay with her. She may need backup. If she fails, it’s up to you. In the meantime, I will initiate the Omega program. We may need it sooner than I thought.’

  ‘Taka il hutta il Kadros,’ murmured the Envoy as he turned away.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Now we are in the Hands of Fate.’

  ANNEKE fell.

  Cold night air whipped past her. The world spun, sickeningly. One moment the dark river was beneath her, then the next the faintly glowing atmospheric shield, then the garish cityscape, pulsing with light and life.

  And Anneke had scant time to save her own. She couldn’t survive a fall from this height, even into water. She would reach terminal velocity before slamming into the river (or before slamming into the inside ‘skin’ of her personal field) and it would be final.

  Nor could she collapse the field in so short a space of time. Riding a collapsing field down, like a deflating balloon, would have been a possibility.

  Pity about that.

  That left only one thing.

  She punched the emergency release of her belt, separating the field generator unit from the harness, the two still attached by an elasticised line that could winch out fifty metres or more. Anneke reversed the fields’ polarity – shoving the dial into the red zone, past the safety clicks alerting her to never do this – and flung the belt skyward. From rooftop blast, to reversing the polarity, took less than two seconds, during which Anneke was hurled sideways and then …

  Dropped. Like a stone.

  The fields built up almost instantly into a spastic recoil of each other and every other field nearby, including the planet.

  Anneke’s belt shot upwards, riding a recoil field that tried to escape the planet’s vicinity and which would peter out as quickly as it started. However, it might just slow Anneke’s descent.

  The elasticised line screamed out of the feed unit on her harness, like a deep sea fishing line that had hooked a monster fish. Anneke’s plummeting drop slowed. But the river still rushed towards her, way too fast.

  The line stretched, and stretched, slowing her fall as it did so, then rebounded far too soon. She was still fifty metres up, high enough to break her bones and snap her neck like a twig. But Anneke had no choice. She was already being pulled back up by the recoiling field generator. She punched the second release button and plummeted towards the dark oily river.

  This is going to hurt, she thought.

  As she neared the water she shut her eyes, feeling a visceral jolt through every cell and sinew of her body. Something had seized her and slowed her descent.

  She hit the water as if from a twenty-metre diving board. Still too damn high.

  Anneke came up for air twenty seconds later. Dazed. When she broke the surface she saw stars, just not real ones.

  She had just reinvented the ancient art of bungee jumping.

  As she swam towards the opposite shore, her public radio implant picked up a targeted broadcast.

  ‘Are you down and depressed? Tired of life? Suicide is not a solution to one’s problems. Should the urge to kill yourself come upon you again, contact the suicide hotline. This has been an authorised broadcast by the Suicide Prevention Committee. A fee of fifty-two credits has been charged to your account in payment for your one-time use of the Municipal Riverside Field Generator Facility. Have a nice day!’

  An hour later, Anneke had acquired street money (pickpocketing being one of the skills she had apparently been trained in), eaten hot food and booked herself into a tacky two-star hotel in a disreputable part of the city. She had even bought herself clothes.

  She slept soundly, ate a big breakfast, and hacked into Myotan battle orders which indicated the location of some imminent mayhem. Then she went looking for Black.

  She found him on a rooftop about to be wasted by a hit-merc working for the Imperial Myotan Combine which was being ambushed nearby by Maximus’ people. Black was wearing an expensive renovation, but Anneke saw through it: the situational stress causing him to revert to a default ‘inner jacket’ of body language, gestures and movements far harder to conceal than appearance.

  Anneke crouched between two gnarly old gargoyles, left over from some bygone spasm of architectural hubris, and considered whether she should intervene in the dispute or let nature take its course.

  But one should try to stay loyal to one’s boss, even if one didn’t like him very much.

  She took out the hit-merc with a direct shot to the chest, whereas Black’s rushed reflexive shot merely hit the man’s kneecap. (Not bad though, considering.)

  The hit-merc dropped.

  Maximus scanned the skyline for his saviour, spotting her. Anneke threw him a mock salute, which he returned, though his gesture was more heartfelt than hers.

  While he attended to business, Anneke used her new field generator to jump to Black’s rooftop. He had dropped, panting, behind the parapet when she came up from his blindside.

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

  Maximus snorted but crab-crawled to a safer spot.

  ‘You’re sure it was Anneke?’

  The young RIM captain, Arvakur, nodded. ‘My team was detailed to act as witnesses to the IMC-Quesadan confrontation. We have pictures.’

  Commander Jake Ferren, head of RIM and the nearest thing to family that Anneke had since the death of her Uncle Viktus nearly two years ago, smiled. ‘Thank god she’s alive.’

  But his smile turned to puzzlement. ‘You say she saved Brown’s life?’

  ‘Yes.’ Arvakur was having a hard time with this, too.

  ‘Then she’s working undercover, that’s the only explanation.’

  Arvakur raised his brows. ‘Un-renovated? Brown would know her immediately.’

  ‘This is Anneke Longshadow, Captain. And if Anneke wants to walk around stark naked, she’s got my support.’ He sighed. ‘I just wish I knew what was going on.’

  ‘Then I take it I shouldn’t try to bring her in?’

  ‘Let’s monitor the situation, but keep a Combat Retrieval Team prepped. Just in case. Oh, and put somebody on her. Somebody from outside the agency.’

  Arvakur got to his feet. ‘I know just the person,’ he said.<
br />
  Hacker, PJ, stepped out of the Dyson jump-gate and went straight to the ladies’ restroom. The arrival facility was bustling with the morning crowd of interplanetary commuters. No one took any notice of PJ, which is how she liked it. She did not kid herself that the Imperial Myotan Combine was unaware of her mission. They might know when and where she was arriving.

  That’s why she had assumed a temporary renovation before meeting with Nathaniel Brown. Now, in the privacy of a restroom cubicle and with the usual toolkit designed for the job, she peeled off the removable parts of the ‘jacket’ and reversed others, such as hair and eye colour. A tailored drug cocktail did the rest.

  When she was done, she no longer looked blonde or merc-ish. Now she appeared several years younger, with luxurious black hair tied in a knot. There was an old scar on her left cheek. She was slim, fit and Asian by ancestry. Her real name was Hatsu Kaan.

  Hatsu exited the arrival facility by a side entrance reserved for staff. Her eyes never stopped panning the street or the skyline. Air traffic was a problem, but she planned to get indoors and travel underground as much as possible. She felt too exposed outside, like a rabbit hunted by eagles.

  An hour and a half later, after she had cleaned her trail, she took a room in a dingy lodging house that bordered the port district and stood opposite a bar frequented by longshoremen and guest factory workers from nearby worlds. There, dressed in worn dungarees and a cap, she blended in.

  Rising above the port was the great stone Fortress of Kestre, an imposing edifice raised over a thousand years ago which sat on a low hill like a huge old toad turned to stone.

  Hatsu spent the first few hours checking out the Fortress. She had the building’s internal layout downloaded into her implant and the beginnings of a plan of attack. She would penetrate the Fortress that night. IMC agents aware of her presence would assume she would spend time tactically assessing her target – standard operating procedure, not to rush in where angels feared to tread.

  But Hatsu was no angel.

  Besides, she wished to get off that planet as soon as possible. It gave her odd feelings she couldn’t explain. Earlier, sighting the esplanade and the harbour and a certain café, she had felt inexplicable pangs, sadness making her teary.

  She smacked herself mentally. What next? she wondered. Poetry readings?

  Night found her crouched in a small room half a mile east of the Fortress’ outer walls, inside a treatment plant. There, scanning to make sure the building was as empty as her earlier surveillance had shown, she climbed into a sealed skin-tight suit that covered her from head to toe and was equipped with a miniature jump-gate breather, delivering breathable air via a tiny Dyson gate.

  An airtight moulded helmet fitted over it. Hatsu sealed herself in. She opened the door of the small room and peered out. Dim lights dotted the large mainly automated space, which at this time of night did not have much security.

  She padded out, coming to a large concrete holding tank, and climbed down a ladder. Within moments she was dipping into a huge pool of raw untreated sewage – some of which flowed from the Fortress.

  Sinking below the surface, Hatsu allowed herself only a tiny shudder. Then she was on the move, navigating by field radar, proximity detectors and superimposed blueprints. She disabled a pump at the mouth of one of the main sewers from the Fortress; she half walked and half swam into the tunnel, then reactivated the pump, its rhythmic throb filling her head for the next hour and a half – the time it took her to make her way to the main cesspit beneath the Fortress.

  As foul and disgusting as the journey was, she only once felt a jag of revulsion. She was glad she had requested an inhibition during the neuronosis sessions. Otherwise, she would have gagged to death by now.

  The cesspit was designed when the Fortress was built, at which time it had been repaired, serviced and monitored by human workers, many slaves under the old evil regime. As such, it provided egress via huge stone steps and old gyp-iron ladders.

  Hatsu found a faucet, washed herself clean, and removed the suit, stowing it in a small dark recess in case she needed to return this way. She did not, however, remove her nose filters. Not yet.

  Thirty minutes later she stood inside a huge pantry in the maze-like cellar of the Fortress’ east wing and breathed air, pungent with the smell of ripe apples and aged Ruvian coffee.

  Taking several deep breaths, Hatsu sank to the floor and meditated briefly, inducing an icy inner calm, like the eye of a storm. Then she stood.

  She checked her field generator and set her cloaking devices at max. The Fortress’ security systems would pick up her signature fairly soon – that was part of the plan.

  For the next hour, she planted non-lethal explosive devices, designed to cause mayhem with noise and smoke, and to shut down vital systems, including the main surveillance hub. The hub would only remain out of action for twenty minutes max but that was no problem.

  By then she would have recovered Jeera Mosoon – or at least the lost data – and set in motion events that would lead to the termination of Bodanis and Sasume.

  Or Hatsu herself would be dead.

  Once ready, Hatsu boldly took a cargo elevator to the tenth floor. Now wearing the typical blue overalls favoured by the Fortress’ army of maintenance workers, she moved through the crowded corridors unchallenged. At any minute, however, she expected the alarm to sound. Indeed, her mission required it to.

  Hatsu moved purposefully along several corridors, following the mental map downloaded into her wetware implant. She made her way to a large cafeteria, collected a tray of food supplied by automatic vendors, and sat down at a crowded table. A device attached to her field generator activated and went questing for Brown. The device created a ‘field’ virus (an EM field process that Brown called webbing), infecting all adjacent fields, piggybacking a replica of one’s signature (or any desired encoding) onto the signatures of those nearby; these in turn ‘infected’ other adjacent fields, and so on. A by-product was that other ‘signatures’ would also be shared, and overlapped, like signals rippling off in all directions on a spider’s web – more like hundreds of spiders’ webs, superimposed on each other.

  A clever, diabolically simple concept, driving any AI insane within nano-seconds.

  God knows what it did to system operators, thought Hatsu.

  Hatsu ate, mentally ticking off the seconds. Suddenly, she put down her spoon and stood. No one paid her any attention. She went to the rear of the room just as smoke emanated from the table where she had been sitting. At the same time a series of distant explosions could be heard.

  Then the webbing device signalled it had reached critical mass.

  As Hatsu watched, red warning lights flickered on waist-worn field generators. More lights on more units joined in. Soon the entire room was a smoke-filled landscape dotted with red blinking eyes. Chairs scraped back as mild panic rode the crowd. Someone called for security. Several others fled the room.

  Hatsu used the smoke cover and confusion to disable the locking mechanism on a maintenance hatch and climbed inside. Within minutes she was four levels higher and one hundred metres west of where she had entered.

  More explosions vibrated the floors and walls. Sirens could be heard now and the rumble of running feet.

  Security lockouts would begin shortly – as soon as the mainframe AI came back online.

  Hatsu located Jeera Mosoon without trouble. Maximus had not infected her with a lethal self-de-structing toxin, but he had her well wormed, utilising the old Rusky method, worms within worms within worms. Canny bastards, those Ruskies.

  Hatsu shut down the grid on the floor where Jeera was being held. She then set off an ultrasonic field wave knocking out any living organism larger than a bacterium. It would also rattle their teeth and give them a lousy headache.

  Hatsu found Jeera collapsed on a couch in a small room, part recreational room, part torture chamber. Two beefy goons were out for the count nearby.

  Jeera
appeared untouched, as Maximus had predicted. The allergen-producing virus he had infected her with would have to be neutralised before anyone could stay in a room with her for as long as required to counteract the amnesia toxin.

  Obviously, Black was an expert when it came to poisons, toxins, viruses and nerve agents. Hatsu filed that away for future reference.

  Kneeling beside her, Hatsu revived Jeera with a drug cocktail designed specifically to match her DNA fingerprint. As the girl opened her eyes, Hatsu said, ‘Don’t take this personally,’ and kissed her full on the mouth.

  Jeera screwed up her face, but she didn’t recoil.

  Hatsu pulled back. ‘Don’t be frightened.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Jeera seemed dazed.

  ‘Not much. I just administered, saliva to saliva, an agent to unlock the code on the micro-burst. Your inability to remember the coordinates will dissipate on its own.’

  ‘Black sent you.’

  ‘The man himself.’

  ‘Are you here to get me out?’ Hope glittered in her eyes, along with doubt.

  ‘Yep. But first things first.’ Hatsu pulled out a retinal uploader, fitted the upstream end to Jeera’s eye and the downstream end to her own, and triggered it, causing a brief double flash.

  ‘Okay. It’s now uninstalled from your implant and loaded into mine. Let’s go.’

  Jeera had a dozen questions but Hatsu, neuronotically inclined, did not answer them. The girl remained dazed. Hatsu wondered what they’d done to her.

  By now the mainframe AI would be back online, busy searching for Hatsu and Jerra’s intruder signatures. But the webbing effect would give the AI a nervous breakdown as it discovered that Hatsu’s signature was in five hundred places throughout the Fortress at once. Of course, the moment they realised Jeera had escaped they would soon latch on to her.

  ‘Put these on.’ Hatsu tossed Jeera a set of blue overalls, identical to the ones she herself wore. She’d stolen both sets earlier on.

  ‘Where are we going?’