The Only Game in the Galaxy

Also by Paul Collins

Cyberskin

Dragonlinks

Dragonfang

Dragonsight

Wardragon

The Wizard’s Torment

Swords of Quentaris

Slaves of Quentaris

Dragonlords of Quentaris

Princess of Shadows

The Forgotten Prince

Vampires of Quentaris

The Spell of Undoing

The Earthborn

The Skyborn

The Hiveborn

Allira’s Gift (with Danny Willis)

Lords of Quibbitt (with Danny Willis)

Morgassa’s Folly (with Danny Willis)

Trust Me! (Editor)

Trust Me Too (Editor)

Mole Hunt

Dyson’s Drop

THE ONLY GAME IN THE GALAXY

Book 3 in The Maximus Black Files

Paul Collins

Most works of fiction are collaborations in their many manifestations. Although authors are gods to their worlds, we have angels. Mine include Randal Flynn, Meredith Costain, Anna Blay, Deb Gates and Gemma Dean-Furlong.

First published by Ford Street Publishing, an imprint of Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond VIC 3204

Melbourne Victoria Australia

© Paul Collins 2013

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to Ford Street Publishing Pty Ltd, 2 Ford Street, Clifton Hill VIC 3068.
www.fordstreetpublishing.com

First published 2013

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Collins, Paul, 1954–

The Only Game in the Galaxy / Paul Collins.

eISBN: 9781925000283

ISBN: 9781925000061 (pbk.)

Series: Collins, Paul, 1954– Maximus Black; bk. 3.

For secondary school age.

Subjects: Moles (Spies) – Juvenile fiction.

A823.3

Cover concept: Les Petersen ©

Book cover and design: Grant Gittus ©

In-house editors: Sue Jimenez and Saralinda Turner

Printing and quality control in China by Tingleman Pty Ltd

S
OMEBODY
was trying to kill Maximus Black, somebody good.

Maximus quickened his pace slightly, but otherwise gave no sign he knew he was being followed. His internal sensors – the bio-tactical implants wired into his basal ganglia – confirmed what his gut told him: his tracker had sped up as well, though he still hung well back.

The streets in the central precinct of Lykis Integer’s capital where Maximus walked were crowded, but not jammed. Black knew, however, there was no safety in numbers. If a member of a hostile company or clan wished to implement legal kill-rights, no one would get in their way, other than the local cops to check that the paperwork was in order and that the ink was dry. Come to think of it, they’d probably do that afterwards – too much high velocity death beforehand.

Maximus smiled to himself. He might not be able to call upon the protective services of the local hunkies, but he had a few surprises for his intrepid tracker. Nasty ones.

Maximus wasn’t in a mood to hold back. He was having a bad day.

A very bad day.

He had arrived back from the Kanto campaign having annihilated an entire planet, along with millions of
souls
(such a quaint term), to find the
Majoris Corporata
, which he had brokered into existence, a shattered wreck.

A bloody takeover bid, launched by the formidable triumvirate – Bodanis of Imperial Standard, Sasume of Myoto and il’Kiah of Stella Mercantile – had gutted the once powerful organisation, leaving it in ruins. Maximus was stunned. He had fashioned the
Majoris Corporata
as a tool, a tool of empire.
His
empire.

And they had set him a trap.

He had travelled straight from the spaceport to the new Quesada headquarters, the direct route being – sometimes – the least expected. The Envoy, as unreadable and remote as ever, sat behind him on the back seat. He had said little since the destruction of Kanto.

‘Glad to be home?’ Maximus asked, eyeing the distant top of Quesada Tower. He felt uneasy, without knowing why, and his doubt prompted the inane attempt at conversation.
Like a normal person
, he thought with a stab of nausea.

‘Home is inside,’ said the Envoy.

‘And where would that be?’

‘Inside oneself.’

Maximus glared. ‘Well, how illuminating. You’re a walking conundrum, aren’t you?’

‘Something is wrong.’

‘Is that a question? If so, I feel fine.’

‘Out there.’ The Envoy pointed in the direction of Quesada Tower. Maximus frowned. He had felt it too. An unsettling tug somewhere near his solar plexus. He pulled a modified illegal needler from his ankle holster, cursorily checked the charge, then amplified his personal deflector field. The Envoy did not bother with such protections; he was essentially immortal, which irritated Maximus. He preferred to work with beings who were killable. Just in case.

The robotic chauffeur swung the car into Quesada Square, the small landscaped park that fronted the main building. As the vehicle circumnavigated the square, Maximus surveyed the entrance to the headquarters through the ornamental trees in the centre of the ‘park’.

Everything looked normal. Too normal.

There were too many pedestrians, and it was raining. Maximus had ordered showers for late afternoons, not mornings. Also, when he computed the combined movements and trajectories of the pedestrians, he saw the tactical vectors at work: it was an ambush, carefully orchestrated.

‘We’re about to be hit,’ he said evenly.

‘What would you have me do?’

Maximus threw a backward glance. ‘The unexpected, naturally.’

‘Of course.’

Maximus leaned forward, deactivating the autopilot, and assumed command of the vehicle. He let it glide towards the entrance, neither altering its speed nor direction. Meanwhile, he punched in a new program and locked the controls. Pulling down the back of the middle seat and reaching inside, he flipped several switches.

‘What is that?’ the Envoy asked.

‘A surprise.’ Maximus closed the seat cover and sat back. ‘Brace yourself,’ he warned.

As the car nosed towards its parking slot at the curb, Maximus took a deep breath.

Party time.

Outside, the merest of ripples passed through the pedestrians who looked like any midday crowd of shoppers on any urban street. Only the ripple was of deadly expectation.

Well, can’t disappoint my fans
, thought Maximus, and barely had that thought formed when the car leapt the curb and roared straight ahead, mowing down two likely assassins. That was the signal. In slow motion, Maximus saw coats whipped aside from the rest of the crowd, hands reaching, and a sea of weapons snapping up and taking aim.

The car picked up speed, rocking as a fusillade of fire raked it from hood to trunk. Then it accelerated down the sidewalk, suddenly swerving and shooting towards the main entrance. More attackers, caught unawares, were bulldozed aside or caught in crossfire from their own comrades. Some were jerked out of sight like rag dolls, taking full armoured rounds in the chest. On all sides, the bulletproof car windows spider webbed under the lethal onslaught.

The vehicle barrelled forward, crashing through the plate glass doors in a rain of glittering shrapnel, then ploughed across the marbled lobby, annihilating a security desk and two defensive positions behind which attackers had installed themselves.

At the far end of the lobby, near banks of elevators and drop tubes, the car performed a flawless one-eighty with a screech of hover fields, slamming to a stop and blocking the entrance to the elevators. Maximus immediately popped the back window and dived out, hitting the floor and coming to his feet in a fluid roll, his needler already out and firing at his assailants. Two attackers screamed and died as the needler gave the others a healthier sense of respect. Meanwhile, the Envoy had gone out the other side of the vehicle and hit the up button for the elevator. The doors whooshed open. Maximus and the Envoy scrambled in. The doors shut and they rose on an anti-gravity field, express to the executive floors.

‘They will be expecting us,’ said the Envoy.

‘That’s true,’ Maximus muttered. He tried to hide his irritation. Not at the Envoy – the Envoy was constantly irritating; irritatingly inscrutable! – but at the implications of the attack.

Maximus sighed, adjusted the setting on the needler, and burned a hole in the floor, careful to avoid the lifting machinery. Then he looked at the Envoy. ‘You don’t have a field generator.’

‘I don’t need one.’

Maximus shrugged. ‘As you like.’ He dropped through the hole and started falling. Using his field generator, he ‘wedded’ his personal field to the gravitic field of the elevator and rode its bow wave, hanging four metres below the cabin. The Envoy dropped through a moment later, spun briefly in the coruscating field currents, then hung in another field’s ‘eye’ a metre from Maximus.

‘How do you do that without a field interface?’ Maximus queried.

Ignoring this, the Envoy said, ‘You realise what this attack means?’

Maximus nodded. ‘Myoto. Probably with Imperial Standard.’ He scowled. ‘When the cat’s away, the mice will – try to take over.’

‘The elevator is arriving. Prepare yourself.’

Far below, Maximus’ car exploded. He looked down to see the ground floor elevator door blow in and a ball of flame shoot up the shaft. The explosion was not large, but designed to distract, to stun momentarily, and to hide the nasty nerve agent being released into the air. In thirty seconds, every untreated human being within a block would be puking up their insides and evacuating their bowels.

Not the best condition in which to coordinate and launch an attack.

In another minute, maybe two, the gas would enter the building’s air conditioning system, elevator shafts and drop tubes, and then spread to every floor, including the one they were approaching: the floor immediately
above
Maximus’ private office and control centre.

The elevator hissed to a stop. Maximus heard the doors open and a burst of concentrated fire, the noise deafening. A hail of spent bullets cascaded through the hole in the cabin’s floor, dropping into the gloom of the elevator shaft.

Maximus looked up. ‘Surprise, surprise, no one was home,’ he said.

The Envoy raised a large-bore pulse weapon, took aim and silently blew a hole in the side of the shaft one floor below where the elevator was docked. Maximus and the Envoy manoeuvred through the hole and stepped into a deserted stretch of corridor not twelve metres from his office. It paid to do the unexpected.

The Envoy would lure the last of their pursuers to their death while Maximus made good his escape.

All of which explained why he was having a bad day. Trying to put all that behind him, Maximus stepped from the main Lykis Integer street into a busy shopping mall, noting that his tracker did likewise a few moments later.

They don’t give up
, he thought. Having failed to kill him in the attack on Quesada headquarters – the nerve gas proving the decisive factor – they were in for the long haul. Of course, it was possible he was being tracked by a freelancer wanting to pick up the bounty on the old Myotan fatwa, a quasi-legal instrument permitting open season on Maximus Black, aka Nathaniel Brown, with full indemnity against criminal charges. Kill-rights.

It then dawned on him that his pursuer could indeed be his nemesis, Anneke Longshadow. It was an odd habit that one usually considered assassins to be male. And in this day and age. Then again, Anneke was so good he would not know she was following him. He smiled to himself.

Maximus spent twenty minutes trying to shake his tail. He used the shopping mall to change direction six times, eventually exiting through a rear staff door into a garbage-filled alleyway. From there, he jogged into a large parking lot, climbed several floors to the roof, and crossed to an adjacent building. Finding another empty alley two blocks north, he used his ‘sticky’ field to slide down the outside of the building.

But his attacker was waiting for him. Impossibly, the merc had
anticipated
Maximus Black!

Anneke
!?

Sliding down the outside of the building made Maximus an easy target. In the time a super-computer calculates a basic algorithm, he assessed his own exposure, and acted.

He switched off the sticky field, amplified the dampener, and fell.

It was chancy and dangerous, but it worked.

Maximus hit the alleyway between two dumpsters, catching part of the feedback shock of impact, blinked twice to get rid of the black motes floating before his eyes, and fired as the merc appeared for the kill, assuming that his target would at least be incapacitated by the fall – or dead.

Unfortunately for the merc, neither was true.

Maximus fired, point blank. The man screamed as the needler’s impulses chewed into his nervous system, clawing their way along nerve pathways into his brain. The pain lasted a lifetime.

Eight seconds. Maximus knew it would feel like an eternity. While the man died, Maximus scanned the area for additional threats. He found none.

He leaned against the wall for a moment, composing himself, then checked the man’s pockets. As he expected, there were no identifying items. In lieu of these, he scanned the man’s prints and the retinal readouts underneath the fake ones. He smiled as he read the results. The merc was a freelancer, a solo artist who worked alone and was most often associated with Myoto. So not an employee as such.

An hour later, having showered and changed at a RIM safe house, he activated his bi-polar renovation, allowing him to switch between his original physical form and a renovated disguise – an optional ‘extra’ which cost a hell of a lot more. Soon after, he stepped into the lobby of RIM headquarters, passing stringent security checks.

All but destroyed by its previous commander – one Oderon Rench, Maximus’ successful puppet – RIM had staged a surprising come back as the
Majoris Corporata
suffered its worst setback. Now Commander Jake Ferren, another in a long line of do-gooders (not counting Rench), was in charge.

Maximus went straight to his own office, locked the door, and sat down at his desk.

It had been a busy week. Surviving the Quesadan ambush, extricating the Company from the collapse of the
Corporata
(which had annulled his chairmanship), setting up an independent banner to attract all those still loyal to his vision of empire, and now outfoxing a kill-merc.

Maximus sneezed. On top of all that, he had a terrible head cold.

Do would-be emperors just stay in bed some days
? he wondered. Probably not. Except when they’ve been poisoned. Or they’re old and frail – and
that
hardly ever happened.

The only bright spot in a lousy week was that he had finally rid himself of his nemesis, that galactic poison pill, Anneke Longshadow. Knowing she would be trapped on the dreadnought with the self-destruct counting down, he had deliberately pre-set the coordinates of the ship’s Dyson jump-gate.

He imagined the expression on Anneke’s face when she materialised on the death-world of Arachnor, knowing she would be dead within minutes, by animal, virus or outraged Sentinels, who had centuries ago placed their world under a no-exceptions interdiction. He could have just killed her, of course, but that somehow lacked imagination, and if nothing else, he prided himself on being innovative.