The Only Game in the Galaxy (12 page)

Maximus stared down at the oily dark water lapping languidly at his feet and felt distaste at the prospect of touching that liquid. His sensors said it was water, accumulated scum and mineral oils leached from the rocky bottom, but it
felt
cursed, the only word he could think of.

Maximus shook his head. That was just plain stupid.

He was letting the dark get to him. A childhood fear had chosen this moment to pop up on his adult radar.

Even so, this final retrieval felt anticlimactic.

He had expected more. Maybe the expectation was a clue to the conundrum … he could almost sense the answer.

Then his head whipped around at a noise, his blaster flashing up at the same time. He snap-rolled to one side, jamming the trigger of the blaster, but as he came to his knees ready to loose off another round of pulses, he realised that his blaster had misfired and he was clicking on empty.

He released the trigger and rose, smiling lopsidedly at Anneke Longshadow, standing in the mouth of the entrance tunnel, her blaster aimed at his heart.

Lowering his useless weapon, Maximus said, ‘You have me at a disadvantage.’

His eyes went to Anneke’s trigger, fully depressed, her finger white with pressure. He pocketed his blaster and laughed.

‘I see the Sentinels have a sense of humour,’ he said. ‘How did you get through their cloaking?’

Anneke holstered her own weapon. ‘A Level Five dampening field.’

‘There’s no such thing as a Level Five.’

‘There is now,’ said Anneke.

Maximus removed a long slim-bladed knife from his boot. ‘Dampening fields don’t affect cold steel.’

Anneke eyed him without the slightest trace of fear. Indeed, she might be sneering, if that weren’t an un-Anneke-like trait. Maximus reassessed the situation.

With a sigh, he slid the knife back into its hidden sheath. ‘You’re right, of course,’ he said. ‘If the Sentinels don’t want us to kill each other – yet – then they may have a reason for it.’

‘What happened to your watchdog?’

‘He went for a swim, I think.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser.’

‘My thoughts exactly.’

Anneke gestured at the lake and the bifurcating paths. ‘Lead on then.’

Maximus moved out into the lake, with Anneke following. He was aware she was keeping a fixed distance behind him and smiled. While he could trust Anneke not to stab him in the back, she would never be so certain about him.

His expression changed for an instant as he felt a stab of shame, as if being trustworthy were enviable, and not just naive.

The uncomfortable feeling passed and Maximus pushed the thought from his mind. He probed ahead, looking for dangers in the environment and searching for ways to rid himself of Anneke Longshadow.

‘You know, when the virus didn’t affect me I had a feeling you might also prove immune. Rather odd coincidence, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t believe in coincidences,’ said Anneke.

‘Neither do I.’

A splash sounded in the lake to Maximus’ left. He spun, knife flashing out. Anneke adopted a posture of readiness, but nothing happened.

Another anticlimax.

H
ALFWAY
across the lake, the water began to bubble and steam.

Anneke and Maximus exchanged dark looks. The ease of their progress disturbed Anneke as much as it did Maximus. Their separate immunity to the lethal virus that infused the atmosphere of Arachnor, and the clue to the location of the last set of coordinates, was too convenient. It could not be a coincidence.

Anneke was worried. Dark forces were at work here. Perhaps the Sentinels – having been blackmailed off the grand galactic chessboard by Nathaniel Brown – now sought to influence events in more circuitous ways.

They might
want
them to find the last coordinates. But why? What could be gained by unleashing the great weapon caches of the Old Empire except devastation and grief?

Unless –?

No, the Sentinels had proved their dedication to the people of this galaxy for a thousand years. It was not time to start doubting them.

The steam thickened, became a fog. Shapes moved in the haze. It became difficult to find the paths. As the water bubbled it lapped over the walkways, submerging them, though only by centimetres. Difficult became impossible – to ordinary sight. But this was no match for modern technology.
The builders must have known this,
Anneke reflected. They’d had infrared scopes and other ways of seeing what the human eye could not even a thousand years ago …

So why the subterfuge?

‘Pathetic really,’ said Maximus, voicing Anneke’s thoughts, though more bluntly. They both switched their iris overlays to
n-vision
, utilising
n-space
radiation. It revealed different phases of matter in contrast to each other – solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma – but didn’t differentiate between objects in the same phase state. As such, a human body looked much like a tree or a rock in
n-vision
, but the solid path beneath the water, and the water beneath the fog, stood out from each other.

‘They’ll have to do better if they want to stop us,’ said Maximus.

Anneke thought:
That’s just it. Maybe they don’t want to stop us
.

They made good time across the lake though, feeling drained from the heat and drenched in sweat from the humidity created by the fog.

Another cave mouth opened in the rocky wall of the cavern. They both scanned the interior, but the inside of the cave was scan-proof. Not that their devices were being jammed, or deflected, it was more like the interior simply did not exist.

Maximus started forward with a shrug.

‘Wait,’ said Anneke.

Smirking, he paused. ‘Scared?’

‘Yes,’ said Anneke. ‘I am.’

Maximus frowned. He hadn’t expected such forthrightness. ‘All right, what do we do?’

‘Why don’t we try an old-fashioned trick?’ She picked up a rock, hefted it for a moment, and then tossed it into the cave mouth. The darkness swallowed it.

‘Did you hear that?’ said Anneke.

‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘Exactly.’

Maximus looked at Anneke thoughtfully.

She said, ‘We should have heard it hit the ground.’

‘Maybe it’s still falling.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You might have just saved my life,’ said Maximus.

‘Lucky me.’ Anneke suddenly looked behind, squinting. ‘You notice anything about the lake?’

Maximus glanced beyond Anneke. ‘It’s rising. If we stay here much longer we’ll have to swim back.’

‘Long swim.’

‘Nothing I can’t handle.’

‘Unless there’s something
in
the lake.’

He blinked, his face turning sour. ‘As you say.’ He turned back to the cave, and ran more scans, but to no avail. He tried peering into it using every vision enhancement he possessed. When he was finished he shook his head in frustration.

‘What’s their game?’ he muttered to himself.

Anneke wondered the same thing. She sat on a large rock in a meditative posture, and went into a light trance. Her mind whirled: images and calculations flashed across her inner eye. Exploratory threads appeared, snaked through vast quantities of data, retrieving information from her first years at RIM Academy, and from all she had learned since, all focused around the Sentinels.

Abruptly, she straightened, and her eyes opened. Maximus sat with his back to a rock three metres away, watching her.

‘You’ve been gone some time,’ he said. He indicated the cave mouth. Anneke saw that the lake water was now lapping the entrance … yet it did not pour into the cave, seeming to stop mid-air.

Anneke dipped her feet into the water and stood. Maximus did the same. The water came to their knees. Anneke’s internal clock told her she’d been in the trance state for an hour. Given the lake’s size, the water was rising rapidly.

‘We need to enter the cave,’ said Anneke.

‘And you base this on?’

‘A hunch.’

Maximus snorted. ‘You go into a RIM trance just to come up with what I figured out after two minutes?’

Anneke smiled. ‘Well, we can’t all be huge geniuses, Brown. So who goes first?’

‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world. Please, after you.’ He bowed and politely waved her ahead of him.

An ancient gesture, Anneke suspected. She shrugged and stepped into the mouth of the cave. But just as the water could not enter, neither could she. And it wasn’t that she encountered a force field or a repelling property, she simply couldn’t move forward.

She tried again and again. Nothing happened.

Impatient, Maximus thrust her aside and strode into the cave mouth, but the same thing happened. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘The rock went through.’

‘Inanimate objects can enter?’

‘What about the water?’ Maximus realised with a start it was now above his knees.

‘Okay. The water has a higher energy level than the rock, less stable.’

‘I’ll buy that. So how do we get in there?’ he said.

Anneke had a sudden insight. ‘We hold hands.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t you see? This whole thing has been engineered to bring us here at the same time. Even your pet alien conveniently disappeared just when you needed him.’

Maximus’ face showed deep concentration. Then that grin appeared once more and he held out his hand.

Anneke stared at it. With great repugnance, she grasped it. His skin felt smooth and cool, like a snake’s.

‘People will talk, you know,’ said Maximus.

‘With any luck you’ll never get to hear them.’

Anneke started forward, wondering what she was doing. She felt disloyalty – to herself, to her Uncle Viktus, to everything she’d worked for – for holding hands with Nathaniel Brown, for not doing everything in her power to kill him. Yet from the moment she’d entered the cave under the bluff, she’d experienced a strange …
certainty
… as if she knew that each action was the right one to take, while another part of her mind raged at the obsceneness of colluding with the enemy.

They faced the wall of darkness obscuring the cave mouth. Together they stepped through into an arched hallway made of stone and lit by flaming torches in brackets fixed to the walls. Anneke and Maximus blinked. They let go of each other’s hand. Electric lights flickered in small alcoves in the ceiling, but were unreliable enough to justify the torches, which reeked of sulfur and pitch, and threw torturous shadows up and down the passageway.

‘Listen,’ said Anneke. Maximus paused. Both heard a far-off commotion: shouting, confused voices, the tramp of boots. Anneke moved to the end of the corridor, peering round into another stretch of corridor. Without waiting to see whether Brown followed or not, she slipped around the corner, stopping at a slightly open heavy wooden door and peering through the crack.

On the other side she saw a large banquet hall, stripped of tables and recreational furniture, and filled with fighting men and women and the consumables of war: rations, canteens, medkits and the like. Weary-looking fighters were eating hungrily, sitting on the cold flagstones, squatting or standing alone or in small groups. They were battle-scarred and looked glazed from lack of sleep and that perennial, debilitating need to be ever ready, no matter how long the wait. Anneke knew that look like the back of her hand.

Maximus suddenly whispered in her ear. ‘Do you know where we are?’

She nodded. She’d seen a familiar crest on the wall over the great ornate fireplace at the far end of the banqueting hall, though its recognition made no sense to her.

‘We’re back on Se’atma Minor,’ she said. ‘In the Old Fortress.’

Maximus said nothing. Anneke supposed he was churning through myriad scenarios, trying to account for the unexpected and enormous spatial jump they had made. Anneke herself wondered at it. No known technology could transport an atom across dozens of parsecs of space. The feat was incredible.

Though the
intent
was more inexplicable …

Suddenly a knot of fighters broke off from the main group and headed their way at a fast dogtrot. Anneke straightened, staring about. ‘There!’ she hissed. Maximus was already moving towards the door, flinging it open before darting inside. Anneke followed just as the fighters hurried past.

When it was safe to talk, Maximus fixed her with a look. ‘Any ideas?’

Anneke ignored his peremptory tone. Once an arrogant megalomaniac, always an arrogant megalomaniac, she supposed.

‘Okay. The obvious first,’ she said. ‘The cave mouth was interfaced with a transportation device. That’s why we didn’t hear the rock hit the ground …’

‘Curious that there was no rock in the corridor.’

‘Yes, I wondered about that too. So either the rock went elsewhere or it was picked up by a cleaner, maybe.’

‘That presupposes this is where we were meant to come.’

‘I sense that to be the case.’

‘Yet it’s just as possible that this transportation device jumps people and objects to random locations throughout the galaxy. We just happened to get Se’atma Minor.’

‘I concede it’s a possibility,’ said Anneke, ‘but my gut says otherwise. I think this is where it meant to send us and this is where we are meant to be.’

Maximus snorted. ‘You sound like the Envoy.’

Anneke frowned. ‘Where do you think he went?’

‘If I could answer that, I could answer many puzzling things.’

‘He is involved with all this.’

‘Another
gut feeling
?’

‘Call it what you like, but he has played an ambivalent role in events to date.’

Maximus said nothing. Anneke read agreement in his eyes, though he tried to conceal it.
So Brown isn’t quite sure of his pet
, she thought.
Interesting
.

‘We need more intel,’ said Maximus.

‘I’m all for that,’ said Anneke, ‘as long as we don’t kill anyone to get it.’

Maximus smiled. ‘The fate of the galaxy may hang in the balance and you have qualms?’

‘Maybe the fate of the galaxy will hang on my qualms.’

Maximus continued to stare at her, scowling, as if her words irritated him. He made an ostentatious display of setting his blaster to ‘stun’.

‘Happy now?’

Anneke pointed her gun at his head.

‘Ah,’ he said.

Anneke backed away. ‘It’s probably healthier for me if I end our truce.’

‘I’m hurt.’

‘Rather you than me.’

‘So the next time we meet –?’

‘Anything goes.’

‘Wouldn’t have it any other way.’ Maximus half turned, as if he’d heard a noise, but then lunged sideways into a corridor and was gone. He did not trust Anneke any more than she trusted him.

‘Fine with me,’ Anneke muttered to herself. She hurried away in the other direction, moving quietly, listening with more than her ears.

She hadn’t admitted to Brown how perplexed she was. To be brought halfway across the galaxy was one thing, to be brought to Se’atma Minor was another – the place that had figured hugely in galactic history. The rock from which the Fortress was fashioned seemed charged with portent and meaning.

Anneke padded down the corridor, took a left, another left, then a right. She knew the Fortress well and moved deftly, with silent purpose, making for the old Imperial Level. Only she suddenly came up sharp.

A wall blocked her way. A wall that hadn’t been there a few days ago when she had entered the Fortress to find Jeera Mosoon; indeed, she and Jeera had passed along this very corridor.

Anneke hesitated. Could she be mistaken? Had she unknowingly wandered into a duplicated wing? The builders of the Fortress had constructed identical sections, creating a sense of sameness to throw off invading enemies.

She added it to the list of questions that needed answering. She took a detour, forcing her to swing wide around the obstructing wall and bringing her perilously close to a guardroom. Her scanners indicated the room was lightly manned, with only three sleeping guards inside. This was odd, suggesting the inmates of the Fortress were overworked – or engaged in battle.

Anneke knew it was pointless to interrogate a lowly guard or trooper. She needed to find someone in the chain of command, as high up as possible.

Then she hit another roadblock: a corridor that she ‘knew’ swung to the east now swung to the north, taking her away from the maintenance nexus she wanted.