The Only Game in the Galaxy (6 page)

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.

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.

‘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.’

A
NNEKE
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.

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.