The Only Game in the Galaxy (11 page)

Then, right in front of her, was Alisk. Not the Alisk she knew, but Alisk nevertheless: her features were blurred, distorted, and only someone with years of RIM training could have spotted the fragments of familiarity in the sea of deformed monstrosity.

‘Alisk?’

The creature made a shrugging gesture.

‘I have to pass.’

Again, the shrugging gesture. Did that mean yes?

Anneke took a deep breath and moved slowly past the creature. As she came abreast of ‘Alisk’ the creature’s eyes swivelled, locked with hers: in them, Anneke saw a world of pain and loathing. And a titanic struggle for control.

Then the creature spoke, a sweaty guttural snarl: ‘Run.’

Anneke ran. Behind her, Alisk took off in pursuit, barely ahead of the howling pack that had surged into the end of the street from the square.

Anneke zigzagged through a maze of streets, unable to put too much distance between herself and her pursuers as she kept trying to double back, to head for the chimneystack. Each time she was thwarted, either by the creatures, who guessed her intent, or by the topography of the town itself.

She rounded a bend and ran straight into another group of the creatures. With no choice, she blasted two of them, and leapt over the heads of the other three. One of them, reacting lightning fast, slashed upwards and caught her foot with a razor-sharp claw, opening it up. She tumbled in mid-air and landed badly, sprawling and sliding. Rolling to her feet, she kept going, ignoring the mind-sawing agony of her ripped-open foot, leaving behind a bloody trail that a blind fool could follow.

Behind her, the pack closed the distance.

She veered into a side street, then another, and suddenly found herself in a dead end. She looked up. The rooftops on all sides were lined with the creatures.

She’d been herded into a trap.

The colonel looked across at Marlock, working frantically at her console.

‘How long?’ he asked.

‘I’m rerouting power and right now most of it’s going to life support! I don’t think it’s going to happen …’

The colonel nodded, showing no other reaction. What would be would be.

Anneke turned to face her pursuers. She calmed her nerves, steadied her breathing, and
thought
herself into a fighting mode.

‘Guess I used up my ninth life,’ she murmured to herself.

The creatures poured into the open end of the cul-de-sac and fanned out; their quarry was going nowhere. Anneke spotted Alisk, hanging back, of no use to her now, no friend to this lone human, her loyalties altered at the genetic level.

The creatures stopped moving and an eerie silence filled the dead-end street. The silence was nerve-wracking.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Anneke muttered. She made sure her dampening and deflector fields were at max, and that her blaster was charged, that she was ready to die.

Still they did not move.

Anneke straightened slowly, staring back at the creatures. Then, in utter silence, they charged. At the same moment, a shadow swept up the street, a furious wind front following in its wake, and Anneke felt herself picked up by an invisible force and plucked from the jaws of death.

Twenty minutes later she was sitting in the cockpit of a battered space yacht. Beside her, in the pilot’s seat, sat a bear of a man, barrel-chested, broad-shouldered, with a bald head shaped like a bullet. The last time she had seen him he’d had a full beard, but that was gone. Behind him hovered a boy who was thin and serious, with a mop of unruly black hair and large dark eyes.

‘They’ve been feeding you, Pagin,’ said Anneke, ruffling his hair. ‘You’ve shot up since I last saw you.’

‘I be a man now,’ the boy said solemnly, then his face broke out in a grin and he hugged Anneke. Hugar, in the pilot’s seat, smiled.

‘You are a hard woman to find, Anneke Long-shadow,’ he said. ‘We thought you dead, but young Pagin here insisted otherwise, so we listened to the whispers from this great galaxy, and followed the boy’s hunches.’

‘And they led you here? Just at this moment?’ Anneke asked in amazement.

‘Well,’ said Hugar, ‘not quite. Your friend the Sentinel sent us here. Said we must arrive at this exact time, no sooner, and definitely no later.’

‘Ekizer sent you?’ She would have to think through the implications later. She looked at the other two in sadness. ‘I am sorry about your world.’

Hugar looked grim. ‘We will make them pay.’

‘Yes,’ said Pagin. ‘Many times over.’

Once on board the
Pulsaris
, Anneke ordered all personnel to transfer to Hugar’s ship. The
Pulsaris
was too damaged to be repaired anywhere other than a space dock. While this was happening she had the ship’s medic check her over and run a toxicology scan.

The results took some time, which was disquieting. Two hours later there was a knock on the colonel’s ready-room door. The medic entered. Anneke, Hugar, Pagin and Marlock were present.

‘Well?’ said Anneke.

The medic frowned. ‘We ran the scans twice, just to be sure. But it’s definite.’

‘What’s definite?’

‘You’re immune to the virus.’

Anneke sat up a little straighter.

The medic went on. ‘In the recent past you’ve been immunised against
this specific virus
. Furthermore, after you were immunised you were exposed to a form of the live virus.’ He paused. ‘We found second-generation anti-bodies in your blood work. Whoever did this knew that one day you would be landing on Omega.’

M
AXIMUS
Black was stumped. He and his men had reached his ship. Almost instantly the ship’s AI, having detected the virus, imposed a quarantine field around the new arrivals, a field Maximus could not breach. He was going to change. There was nothing for it but to endure the agony. The thought of killing himself crossed his mind, but he was no quitter.

One by one, his men changed around him. As they did so the AI transported them down to the surface, he presumed, the best place for them.

Soon, only Maximus was left.

He did not change.

Perplexed, he requested a toxicology kit, withdrew blood from his arm, and ran the standard tests. The results puzzled him; almost overcoming the elation he felt that he would not become a monster.

The question gnawed at him. Why was he immune? And who had made him thus? Maybe his own un-researched measures had been spectacularly more successful than he had even imagined.

A few hours later, finally convinced that Maximus was neither infected nor a carrier and unable to detect any trace of the virus on board, the AI grudgingly lowered the quarantine field.

Maximus went immediately to the bridge where he promoted young Lieutenant Torcas to the recently vacated position of captain.

Torcas, nervous and self-conscious in his new rank, gingerly took his seat in the captain’s chair. Maximus smiled to himself. ‘Captain, if you are ready, please plot our course for Arachnor.’

Torcas stared at Maximus. ‘Arachnor, sir? But that world is –’

‘Interdicted by the Sentinels. I’m aware of that. However, the Sentinels will not bother us on this trip. Please do as I ask.’

Maximus spent the next few days in his cabin, not even seeing the Envoy when he requested a meeting. Still shaken from his narrow escape from Hell, he was starting to place more faith in the Envoy’s alien religion: perhaps Maximus
was
the Instrument of Kadros … Perhaps he was
protected …

As he sat and pondered this, he also weighed up the significance of the data collected by long-range sensors shortly after departing the Malthus system. The sensors had revealed the brief flicker-bright emission of a starship’s engines as they reached launch mode. Anneke’s ship – or a backup vessel Maximus’ people had failed to detect – must have also left orbit around Omega. The ship’s signature had disappeared almost immediately, meaning it had been cloaked. Maximus did not doubt it was in pursuit of his own ship. His gut told him it was so. Yet only one person was driven enough to chase him all the way to Arachnor …

Had Anneke survived?

What were the odds they were
both
immune to the virus? Astronomical, of course. But that was the wrong question. So Maximus reframed it: who benefitted from protecting both Anneke and Maximus, keeping them operating as free agents?

Was there a game larger and more labyrinthine than his own? Could such a thing be? The thought shook him, undermining his confidence for a moment in his own abilities and messianic insight.

Who was this silent player?

His door buzzed. This time he opened it, glad of the interruption. The reptilian alien stared back at him through the doorway.

‘You spend much time within,’ said the Envoy, seating himself in the chair Maximus had just vacated. Maximus dropped onto the edge of his cot, frowning.
Within?
The word did not refer to his being cooped up in his cabin for days on end.

‘I’ve been preoccupied.’

‘You have seen the face of death, a grave matter.’

Maximus snorted. ‘What do you know of death?’

The Envoy shrugged, the perfect mimic of the human gesture, seeming to say:
More than you could comprehend.
‘We approach Arachnor.’

Maximus sighed. ‘Okay. So your question is, how shall we find what we seek?’

The Envoy nodded.

‘I believe I am immune to the virally lethal biosphere of Arachnor. I do not know how, but I shall take advantage of it. As for the final lost set of coordinates. Well, I have clues … as well as a hunch.’

‘Ah, the spirit of
Kadros
.’

‘Whatever.’

‘We shall not be alone on Arachnor.’

‘We?’

‘I shall accompany you. I am unaffected by viral life forms.’

‘Naturally.’ Maximus’ mood lightened; if what he had heard about Arachnor was true, he would be glad of the company of a being more lethal than himself.

Maximus’ ship slid into orbit around Arachnor forty hours later. A great armada of Sentinel vessels orbited the planet, but they made no challenge to the arriving ship, instead making room for them. Maximus wasn’t as mystified by this behaviour as his crew. He had blackmailed the Sentinels into withdrawing from the galaxy, discovering their ‘awful secret’ on Kanto Kantoris before he’d had the world annihilated. Yet he felt unnerved by their easy acceptance.

As if the Sentinels knew something he didn’t.

Arachnor was a hell world.

It was inimical to alien life forms. The trees and plants were heavily and lethally barbed, each pinprick tip laced with a paralysing poison, allowing the creeping trailers, suckers and tendrils to attach themselves leech-like to the still breathing carcass of its prey and suck the life fluids from it. The fauna was no better. Maximus caught glimpses, just before he blasted, of an array of teeth and claws, of jaws snapping like industrial bolt-cutters, of wild bloodshot eyes, or no eyes at all, but with refined and deadlier systems of echolocation or infrared sensors.

And the insects!

Biting, stinging, gnawing, gouging, burrowing little critters as lethal as the armour-plated mammals.

And the place was
hot
. Oven hot.

Maximus broke out in a drenching sweat within five seconds of materialising in a jungle clearing. He killed three tooth-infested attackers and vaporised a volume of insect-filled air before he could comment, with casualness, to the Envoy: ‘Charming place. The tourists must flock here in droves.’

The Envoy blasted a leaping porcupine-cum-primate over his shoulder. Maximus glimpsed its remains – a smoking fur ball with spikes.

‘That is humour?’ said the Envoy.

Was he being thick or simply sardonic? Maximus wondered. Probably the latter, he concluded, annihilating a tree in the act of whipping down at them with its crown trailing lethal-looking biological cato’-nine-tails. ‘To think the Sentinels call Arachnor home.’

‘This is the reason they are the most fearsome fighters in the galaxy,’ said the Envoy. Coming from him, that was high praise.

‘You think they’re just going to let us walk in and get the coordinates?’

The Envoy blasted several more attacking life forms, two of them a visual blur glimpsed from the corner of Maximus’ eye. ‘They could have blockaded us in orbit. They could have scrambled or jammed our jump-gate transportation. And they could have deflected our arrival to another place of their choosing, one more lethal than this.’

Maximus blinked. More lethal than
this
?

‘So what are they up to?’ Maximus wondered aloud. The Envoy didn’t answer. He was busy blasting a wide beam to clear the air of murderous hornet-like creatures that had rocketed towards them in a swarm as dense as a cloud of gnats and as swift as a brace of kill-trackers – the device Maximus had used to dispatch Anneke’s Uncle Viktus. Only these were the size of a human thumb.

‘The Sentinels are subtle and long-seeing. We shall not understand their plans nor their motives,’ said the Envoy.

Maximus’ generator belt emitted a double ping, signalling that it had restabilised. He and the Envoy ramped their deflector fields to max, adding the juicier shielding harmonics that Maximus had devised for Arachnor. Jump-gates employed detours through
n-space
and the consequent radiation could affect field generation and integrity. In this case, as Arachnor was shielded pole to pole, they’d had to deploy powerful and sustained
n-space
detours to punch through the planetary cloaking and make landfall. This had destabilised their field generating ability. Of course, part of the Sentinel’s plan in designing such a cloaking process was that most intruders would die before their fields came online.

Maximus and the Envoy headed into the tree line, making for a craggy bluff that rose up out of the tangled canopy two kilometres east. The deflector fields seemed to work. The nastier life forms were unable to penetrate the main field and those that did (emitting a field neutraliser) shrivelled instantly into fireballs as the combustible field consumed them. Any that avoided this fate were taken out the old-fashioned way: fast reflexes and blaster beams.

They travelled for an hour, making slow sweaty progress through the knotted and nearly impenetrable undergrowth. They took pains to avoid walls of poisoned thorns, pits of living stakes and gossamer-light curtains of molecular thin filaments, nearly invisible and dripping with a virulent acid, the tiniest drop burning through Maximus’ best armour. It would have eaten him through to the bone if the Envoy hadn’t helped Maximus rip away the armour in time.

Halfway to the bluff, they took a break. Maximus gulped a litre of ice-cold water from his canteen and scoffed a packet of enhanced field rations, taking extra salt tablets to help retain water in the oppressive heat. The Envoy ate and drank nothing, nor did he sweat.

Maximus found himself wondering again about the alien’s home world. ‘Why doesn’t this bother you?’

‘My planet is fixed in orbit, one side always facing the sun. That side is hotter than this, while the other side is arctic. The equatorial region is a cauldron of continuous thunderstorms as the two hemispheres of the planet seek an impossible thermodynamic equilibrium. My species evolved to function in both hemispheres.’

Maximus regarded the Envoy. It was the longest sustained speech he had heard the alien utter.

‘Is it as deadly as Arachnor?’

The Envoy considered. ‘It is deadly and beautiful in its deadliness.’

‘Why am I not surprised?’

‘We should keep moving,’ said the Envoy.

Maximus looked at him oddly. He heard the sentence completed another way: We should keep moving, your destiny awaits …

They reached the bluff two hours later, the terrain rockier and looser as they approached the foot of the sheer cliff. The cliff face was pockmarked with caves. At its base, a gushing stream issued water from the mouth of a wide dark cave that was deep and maze-like, according to Maximus’ sensors, and appeared to have no end to it.

The clues to the location of the third and final set of lost coordinates, as revealed by Jeera Mosoon, led here. Unlike the two previous sets, the third – though just as encrypted – was not beset by ambiguous clues. As if, having come this far, the attempt to conceal it had been cast aside.

Maximus did not let that fool him for one nanosecond. Appearances were deceiving. That’s why they were appearances.

‘How does it scan to you?’ Maximus asked the Envoy.

‘There is cloaking here, but I do not sense danger.’ He sounded puzzled by his own instincts. ‘That may be the biggest danger of all.’

‘Naturally. Why don’t you go first, O Deathless One?’

The Envoy cast him an unfathomable look, turned on his heel, and strode into the dark cave mouth. Maximus sighed, checked his sensors once more, and followed.

Instantly, the temperature dropped twenty degrees. Still hot, but the fall made Maximus shiver. And it was dark. He switched his iris overlay to night vision. The cave interior leapt out in eerie green detail, as if the entire place were radioactive.

In the middle distance and moving rapidly away was the Envoy. Maximus called to him, but the alien either did not hear or was intent on something else.

Maximus quickened his steps. Twenty-five metres ahead the Envoy turned a corner and vanished from sight. Breathing heavily Maximus hurried after him, running his sensor scans continuously.

Rounding the bend, he found a large underground lake. Paths zigzagged out across the water, but the Envoy was not on any of these. Puzzled, Maximus ramped up magnification and searched the cavern. The Envoy was nowhere to be seen, nor could he have crossed to the other side to the exits in the brief time he had been out of Maximus’ sight. Which left only one place he could have gone.