The Only Game in the Galaxy (20 page)

Deema was sitting pensively at a window (a view-window, which replicated the world outside so flawlessly that most people never realised it was fake). She turned as Anneke entered, giving her a hopeful look that quickly faded, augmented by a big sigh. She noted the careworn expression on Anneke’s face. ‘It’s not over, is it?’ Deema asked.

‘Not yet, sweetie.’ Anneke sat down and put an arm around her foster child. ‘It’s going all right,’ she lied. ‘Some friends just turned up.’

‘A present arrived for you.’

Anneke’s brow creased. Deema pointed at the data package Jake had sent. Anneke laughed. ‘It’s not a present, Deema, it’s just some old –’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Deema. ‘It’s very important.’

Anneke pulled back from her. ‘Did you look at it?’

Deema’s querying look answered the question. Anneke fetched the package and sat down again. She could see it hadn’t been breached. She pressed her thumb to the tiny scanner on the top and watched the privacy field ripple and vanish. Inside was a data disk. She keyed in her combo, pressed the stud, and closed her eyes as the data flowed into her computational implant, waiting a few moments for the information to be integrated. As often happened with data flows, it would turn into a ‘movie’ in her head, where she saw and experienced the data rather than reading it.

‘What’s it say?’ said Deema, curious.

‘I’m still wait –’

The information on the data flow stopped her dead. Several key factors not only leapt out in their own right, but cross-referenced themselves with other pertinent data in her storage implants – including some recent analyses she’d ordered.

‘Oh … my … god,’ she whispered, turning to look long and hard at Deema.

‘I was right, wasn’t I? It
is
important.’

Anneke put her arms around the girl and held her tightly. ‘Yes, sweetie. It might be the single most important thing in this conflict …’

Alisk was so close she could taste it.

She had been here an hour ago, but reinforcements had arrived, low-level vessels sweeping in over the city, strafing, bombing. More humans had showed up, trained in advanced forms of face-to-face combat – so the Omegans were driven back, and back. She’d gnashed her teeth in frustration.

But now she was alone. She’d left the others behind, penetrating buildings, leaping rooftops, moving around behind enemy positions, flanking them, going deeper and deeper, all the time closing in on the Fortress.

Go to Him … He is there … waiting …

A bittersweet pain throbbed in her chest, and she rubbed it, unaware of its meaning.

Anneke hurried down the passageway, heading for the war room. She was excited, and apprehensive, even scared. The words of the Envoy echoed in her mind:
The time of
Kadros
is at hand. It is time for one to step forward and seize the threads of history, wield them as they choose – to bind, or to unravel.

Anneke shivered.

She had felt the hand of Fate brush her. Maybe the Cosmos was taking an interest in what unfolded. Maybe everything was preordained, as the Envoy implied.

Maybe.

As she entered the long hall leading to the war room she broke into a run. Men and women, hurrying about their business, saw the tightened jaw, the dark revelation in her eyes, and flattened themselves to the wall to let her by.

She was barely aware of them.

She burst into the war room and skidded to a stop. Arvakur and Fat Fraddo stood in the middle of the room, their faces pale.

‘What’s happened?’ she demanded.

‘It’s Black,’ said Arvakur. ‘He’s escaped.’

Fat Fraddo hung his huge head. ‘And he done took that little girl, your Deema.’

H
E
was getting soft.

Not only had he not killed his guards, he had checked to make sure they were still breathing. A waste of time, though he consoled himself that by not killing them he increased his own chance of avoiding being lynched by their friends if he was caught. The golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These people believed it, more fool them.

Maximus hadn’t gone so soft that he didn’t strip the field-generator from the captain of the guard, or relieve the guards of their weapons. Finding the girl had been pure accident (though thanks to the Envoy he was beginning to believe nothing was an accident). He’d stumbled down a long passageway and ducked out of sight as a door opened and Anneke strode swiftly off in the opposite direction. Curious to see where she had come from, Maximus stepped into the room.

Deema turned and regarded him. She showed no surprise, or fear, though she remembered him, despite his renovation. Interesting.

‘Are you going to kidnap me again?’

‘Haven’t decided.’

‘I think you have to,’ said Deema, matter-of-factly.

Maximus almost laughed, then saw she wasn’t joking.

‘Do you
want
me to kidnap you?’

Deema seemed to ponder. ‘You haven’t asked it the right way,’ she said.

‘How should I have asked it?’

‘Like this: Is it
necessary
for me to kidnap you?’

‘And I take it the answer is yes?’

Deema nodded. Maximus gave her a mocking bow and shaped a restraining field around her, lassoing it to his own field. She could not run away, nor could she make sudden moves. A dampening field around her head would suppress any shouting.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Step one is to get out of the Fortress. Step two is to steal a ship and get back to my vessel in orbit.’

‘I won’t be going into space with you,’ Deema said, in that same business-as-usual tone of voice. Maximus shook his head, amused; a faint prickling at the back of his mind suggesting he should analyse what she was saying. Instead, he dismissed it as childish nonsense.

Shortly, Maximus and Deema were several levels lower and a significant distance from where they’d started. He should have been moving upwards, towards the docking bay on the roof where there were plenty of ships and probably a useful degree of chaos. But Anneke would anticipate that move, and the one he was making. Fortunately, long ago he had had the internal layout of the Fortress tattooed onto his neural circuitry for the day when he would lay claim to his ‘throne’.

With the help of this mental map, he quickly located one of the arsenals scattered about the Fortress, arming himself with more powerful weapons and low-level bombs and incendiaries.

As per the RIM agent’s manual, he planned to ‘implement any and all forms of sabotage’, ‘create opportunistic diversions’, and ‘cause maximum mayhem’ to the ‘enemy’.

A straight-down-the-line, by-the-book mission. His RIM trainer would be proud.

He found an abandoned room, buried at the back of a maze of disused offices and storage rooms. He restrained Deema, leaving her room to move about, but unable to make a noise or call out.

‘I’m placing a time lock on the field so that if I’m killed or don’t come back, you’ll automatically be released,’ he said. He had not forgotten that, like him, she had once been a slave.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But you’ll be back.’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

Maximus squatted in a dark doorway, sweating. He’d pushed his luck too far, but come through unscathed. He couldn’t say the same for several trackers, but he had stuck to his original intention of not killing anyone. Stunned humans dropped as quickly as dead ones. Odd that the idea had never occurred to him before.

After leaving Deema, he’d gone deeper, heading down to the bowels of the Fortress, to parts unaltered since the time of his visit one thousand years ago. He noticed a mark on the wall, very old, blurred by time, and realised he had made it while showing engineers how their new field-generated fuel source would work. His stomach tightened with fear, as if ghosts surrounded him.

According to his memory tattoo, part of the Fortress’ life support system looped through these lower levels, avoiding a massive neutronium battle shield that was part of the inner defences that protected the heart of the Fortress, even from a nuclear bomb detonated nearby.

He intended to sabotage the system, then hightail it out of there. He’d laid a few explosives on the way and he would blow the ones furthest away simultaneously, making it difficult for those tracking him to pinpoint his position.

He stood up, having gotten his second wind. He checked the corridor up and down, then stepped out – straight into an engineer.

The man was bald, short and stocky, his hands and overalls stained with grease. He looked tired and overworked. ‘Who the hell are you?’ the engineer asked.

‘Enemy spy,’ said Maximus cheerfully. ‘Thought I’d blow up the life support system.’

‘Where the hell were you last Tuesday?’ grumbled the man. ‘Coulda had the whole week off!’

He laughed. Maximus followed suit, then hit him in the throat. As the man gagged, he stunned him, then dragged his body into a side room. He’d recover, just not for several hours. He might also be cold, since Maximus stole his clothes, ill fitting though they were.

He found the environmental system, planted several explosives, field-synched them, and departed. From a safe distance, he set them off. They made a satisfying series of booms. He then detonated three other devices more than a kilometre from his position.

Alarms sounded, automatic suppressant systems kicked in, and he heard shouts and running feet. Dressed like an engineer, he fell in with one group then peeled off into a side passage where he got an odd itchy feeling in the middle of his back. He ducked.

A blaster beam –
not
on stun – blazed past.

The heat-flash gave his arm and cheek second-degree burns. He suppressed his pain and threw himself at a door, taking it off its hinges. From the corner of his eye, as he slammed through the doorway, he glimpsed Anneke Longshadow readying her aim for the next shot.

But by then he was gone.

He passed through three offices, along a short access corridor, doubled back up a side passage then took random turns: left, left, left, right, left, right, right … He didn’t think about it, didn’t choose; he let the turns choose him. He wished the Envoy was here so that he could consult him.

His primary aim was to put as much distance between himself and Longshadow as he could. He didn’t kid himself. At that moment she was better than he was. For weeks he’d felt that softening process, the lessening of his inner sharpness, as though he was losing focus. Worse, he didn’t seem to
care
.

And without that focus, the killer instinct he’d carried for so long, he was no match for Anneke. He didn’t have the heart for it anymore.

Still, he wasn’t about to give himself up and start writing poetry.

He was still Maximus Black – but Jeera’s proposal, the implication, had grown more and more attractive in his mind – especially when he was being shot at.

Even so, he had to get
some
focus back, or he’d be dead.

He cleared his mind, breathed deeply and slowly, then ran through a RIM training mantra.

An icy calm settled on him.

He was through being Mr Nice Guy – for the time being.

The battle raged closer and closer to the outer wall. In some sectors, it had come within four city blocks and the demonic howling of the Omegans could be heard inside the Fortress, even through the dampening of the field-walls. A murmuring apprehension swept through the corridors, wardrooms and barracks of the Fortress, infecting everyone with foreboding.

Outside, men and women – and Omegans – died. Bloodied streets stood out, dark and dazzling, to aerial observers, a gruesome map of the history of the battle.

The fighting was at its fiercest in Herik Plaza. Ironically, the human contingent was led by Herik himself, who’d spared a few bemused moments to savour the dubious immortality of having a shopping precinct named after him.

The battle surged back and forth. Bombs were lobbed into the thick of the Omegans, blowing them apart; snipers picked them off by the dozen, but nothing stopped the inexorable flow towards the walls.

Maximus vaporised a section of wall and plunged through, bursting out of a cloud of smoke and dust on the other side. A blaster beam sizzled and he snap-rolled aside, coming up against a wall, then returned fire, making whoever was still out in the corridor think twice.

Using the lull, he darted through an open door, finding himself in a large warehouse-style chamber with lots of open space. He’d never make it across alive. He lobbed a microspike in the doorway he’d come through and broke into a manic sprint, adopting a zigzag pattern as he crossed the space. Behind him, the spike blew, picking up someone in its proximity.

If that was Anneke, Maximus had no doubt she was still upright.

But that hadn’t been his intention: making it safely to the other side had. Now
he
controlled the field of fire. He dropped behind a tractor, scooped out a handful of mini-microspikes, and spilled them onto the floor of the chamber like odd-shaped marbles.

Since they worked on proximity, sensing the natural field given out by organic life forms, he’d effectively stopped anyone from crossing the chamber.

For a while, anyway.

He paused to rummage through his medkit, giving himself a shot of stimulant plus painkiller. He needed to stay sharp and loose.

But nothing prepared him for Anneke’s next move. She hadn’t tried to come across the floor because she didn’t need to. Instead, she launched a heat-seeking shredder, or the ‘humane’ RIM equivalent: instead of gouging into his nerves and chewing its way to his brain, causing an unpleasant amount of pain along the way, this type went straight for the neo-cortex …

And shredded it.

The brain had no pain receptors, hence the designation ‘humane’.

Nitpicking
, he thought, as he took to his heels, firing blindly back over his shoulder. He threw himself through a doorway, slammed the door shut, pelted down a corridor to a T-junction and swinging into the left-hand turn. Behind him, he could hear the faint eerie whistling of the shredder as it gained on him.