The Only Game in the Galaxy

by Paul Collins

  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.

  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.

  HALFWAY 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.’
<
br />   ‘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.