The Only Game in the Galaxy (10 page)

Maximus knew exactly where he was and what had happened.

While he had been getting a jump lock on Anneke’s team, she had been doing the same to him, no doubt with the idea that whatever he was up to would have to cease, at least temporarily.

But Anneke had no idea what that was. Unfortunately, Maximus did.

Within seconds of arriving he had whipped a re-breather from his belt and locked it over his face. Bleaker, seeing this, did the same, his eyes startled above the cheek guards of the device. As one the other seven troopers attached theirs.

Maximus didn’t kid himself that the re-breather would protect him, but it stopped, for a moment, the terrible panic that gripped his chest.

He beamed a message through to the
Albatross
. No doubt by now his flagship had erupted into a glowing ball of fire.

The answer came back almost immediately. The
Albatross
had taken damage. It would be several minutes, maybe longer, before they could transport Maximus off-planet.

I will become one of my own monsters
, he thought starkly and ran. He needed to get indoors as quickly as possible. He needed as many insulating layers between himself and the outside air of Omega as he could get.

And then he needed to get off this world!

The others followed him. Reaching the nearest building, he glanced inside. Several Omegans were already in the process of transforming in the lobby.

As Maximus swerved to the next building, one of the men looked inside and almost vomited. He turned to the others, horrified. ‘What in the name of the gods is happening here?’ he asked, his expression pleading.

Ignoring him, Maximus pushed through the door mirage of the next building and found himself inside a shopping mall. On the primitive side, it was set up like an open-air market with a maze of stalls and banners. There, too, people were changing. Maximus realised with a jag of desperation that it was too late; nowhere was safe. Without a doubt, the virus had already penetrated his lungs, was now diffusing through his bloodstream, locking onto his red blood cells, injecting alien DNA into them, like something out of an industrial parts catalogue.

Well, it’s done
, thought Maximus.
So much for the Envoy’s Kadros
. He checked the charge on his blaster. It was nearly full – just as well. He was going to need it shortly, though he must be careful not to exhaust it; he would be needing one final charge.

For himself.

He checked his watch. Five minutes had passed. The first mild symptoms would appear in the next ten.

There was one thing he could do before he died. He could watch Anneke Longshadow die. There was no time for his planned inventive death.

‘Spread out,’ he ordered his men. ‘Find Anneke Longshadow. I want her
alive
, hear me?’ The men, grumbling and increasingly fearful, searched the nearest buildings and side streets. Maximus knew the two groups would have beamed down in reasonable proximity to each other.

There was no danger from the local populace as yet. They were too consumed by the horrific pain of transmogrification. If the group had jumped down twenty minutes later, it would have been different.

Maximus came on Anneke himself within minutes of landing. He didn’t bother shooting. In fact, he holstered his weapon and walked into the midst of Anneke’s team. She saw him coming, saw him put his gun away.

‘What have you done, Brown?’ she asked in a hushed tone. She was white-faced, stunned.

Maximus shrugged. ‘I’m building an army.’

Anneke frowned. ‘Like those – things – on the Orbital Engineering Platform?’

‘The virus needed testing, as did the effectiveness of the final product.’

‘Final product? Listen to me, you sick little bastard, these are
people
. They’re not
products
. They’re not here for you to play out your diseased God complex on!’

‘A cousin of this virus is what created the Sentinels.’

Anneke stared. Maximus saw that she had guessed as much, but the realisation still shocked.

Maximus went on: ‘But for reasons I haven’t been able to determine, the Sentinels retained not only conscious volition, but a rather pesky moral code.’

‘Are you immune?’ she asked, picking up on his lighthearted tone. She did not realise that only his training was keeping him from screaming in sheer terror.

I know what’s going to happen
, he kept thinking.
Oh God, I know …

‘Sadly no,’ he said, with a small wincing smile.

Alisk, who had been listening, said, ‘Will it hurt?’

‘There are no words to describe how much.’

Alisk swallowed. She looked sweaty and pale: precursor symptoms of transformation, or just a normal glandular reaction to fear. He felt pale and clammy himself, come to think of it.

Screams erupted from a nearby building. Anneke’s team murmured and backed away.

‘There’s nothing to be done,’ said Maximus. ‘The process is irreversible. If it’s any consolation, you won’t die.’ Some looked relieved at this. ‘You’ll just wish you had.’

Behind him, his own team had started to gather. For a moment both sides aimed weapons at each other, but as more bloodcurdling screams rent the air weapons were slowly lowered.
There is camaraderie in Hell
, Maximus thought cynically.

Suddenly, one of Anneke’s troopers fell to his knees, clutching his chest, his face contorted with pain. He tried to rip his tunic away, as if to stop the agony.

One by one, in quick succession, the others reacted the same way. One woman bolted, running down the street, shrieking.
Where does she think she’s going
? Maximus wondered.

So far, he had felt nothing. Nor was Anneke showing any signs of infection. No doubt they both possessed immaculate immune systems, but the virus, Maximus knew, would overwhelm even these. He had engineered it that way.

Alisk grabbed her arm, dug her newly-formed claws in and hissed in pain. Anneke lowered her gently to the ground and sat beside her, stroking her brow.

‘Maybe Lob was right,’ Alisk said through gritted teeth, managing a tight grin. Then came more pain, in great bone-wrenching jolts, Maximus knew. She swatted Anneke’s hand away, snarling in pain.

Suddenly, Maximus – and his men – were no longer there.

A
NNEKE
stared at the spot where Maximus had been. She knew his ship had transported him back, but it made no difference, she decided. He would simply carry the virus up to his shipmates.

Alisk grabbed her arm, dug her newly-formed claws in and hissed in pain. All around them, the others had started to change. But so far Anneke remained untouched.

It could only be a matter of time.

Anneke dug out her medkit and gave everyone in her team a massive painkiller.
It might at least lessen their torment a little
, she thought.

That’s when she saw the first monsters.

A small knot of creatures – the transformed citizens of Omega – came crashing into view at the end of the street. They saw her immediately, maybe smelt her also, as they continually sniffed the air like deformed hounds from Hell.

And like hounds they came loping towards her.

She flicked her blaster to maximum stun and opened up. The blasts slowed them, overloading their nervous systems, but didn’t put them down; Anneke had a feeling that, once the transformation was complete, nothing would stop them.

‘Alisk, I’ve got to go, I can’t stay here!’

Alisk’s transformation was too advanced for her to respond. She snarled and groaned and jerked in spastic contortions that caused her bones to crack and crunch. The sound sent shivers down Anneke’s spine.

I should help her die
, Anneke thought.
But I can’t
. ‘Goodbye, Alisk.’

Anneke leapt up and sprinted for a hotel at the end of the street. Behind her, the transmogrified humans bellowed in mindless rage and set off in pursuit, ignoring those writhing on the ground in the throes of transformation.

Anneke ran. And ran.

Everywhere she turned there were more and more monsters, as if creatures from her childhood fables had come alive. Just like the three she had encountered on the Orbital Engineering Platform near Reema’s End, they moved with strategic purposefulness.

They were, as Brown had implied, as powerful as Sentinels, but devoid of their moral code. Or else that code had been replaced …

‘Damn Brown to Hell,’ muttered Anneke as she ducked into a building to avoid a gang of marauding creatures. She burst through the door and found herself inside a hardware store, full of basic work-the-land and dig-the-mines equipment. Omega was an odd juxtaposition on the Fringe: the primitive and the pre-industrial living side-by-side with the sophisticated hyper-drive civilisation.

Anneke raced through the large store, dodging around display counters and neatly piled pyramids of tools and machine parts. Behind her, the door crashed open and a stream of transmogrified humans poured in, snarling and screeching.

On board the
Pulsaris
, the colonel had his hands full. He was taking damage reports (none good), monitoring the activities of the enemy fleet (what was left of it: three working ships), and trying to find out what had happened to the attack team, as their locator implants showed that they were now down on the moon’s surface.

The colonel’s first officer, a woman called Marlock, was organising a retrieval scoop via jump-gate, but damage to the power cells hindered her efforts.

‘Why can’t you raise them?’ asked the colonel.

Marlock looked fretful. ‘They seem to have transported down without their communicators.’

‘Odds of them doing that?’

‘Almost zero.’

‘Coercive transport.’

‘So it would seem,’ said Marlock. Clearly, no attack team would abandon its communicators before jumping to a new and possibly hostile arena. Somebody had transported them down and used the fine-tuning of the jump-gate to snatch away any communication devices they carried.
Nice piece of work
, thought Marlock.
But extremely annoying.

‘Implants?’

Marlock waved off the thought. ‘Without a booster, implant communicators could never punch out of the planet’s ionosphere.’

‘Beam down a booster.’

Marlock stared at the colonel. She wanted to smack her forehead.
She
was the first officer and should have thought of that.

‘Yes, sir,’ was all she said. ‘It’ll take a few minutes to get power up …’

Anneke slammed out of the rear door, shut it, shoved a heavy dumpster against it, then pelted down the back alleyway. She needed to find a hiding place or more open ground. The alleyway was too narrow, too hemmed in; she could outrun the beasts, but she could not dodge them in such a confined space.

Suddenly, ahead of her, four more of the creatures appeared. She skidded to a stop, turned, started back the way she had come, stopped again. She was surrounded.

Both groups of creatures charged.

Anneke leapt to the nearest wall and hit a button on her belt. Sticky attractor fields extruded invisibly from her hands and feet and she swarmed up the side of the building. Below her, the creatures’ howls changed to thwarted snarls of rage.

On the roof, with a momentary respite, Anneke assessed the overall situation. Most likely, Brown had seeded the entire planet, so there was no escape. Clearly she herself was – so far – unaffected by the virus. This was amazing and maybe scarier: was it taking longer to hijack her DNA or was her superb immune system blocking it? How long did she have?

As with any threat, waiting – and imagining – were the worst parts.

‘Anneke, can you hear me?’ It was the voice of Marlock, piped through Anneke’s internal implants. Anneke groped out to steady herself, feeling an intense wave of relief.

‘I’m here!’ she blurted, like a first-year cadet. ‘I’m okay – for now.’

The colonel’s voice came on line: ‘Report.’

Anneke gave a quick concise summary of the situation. ‘How soon can you get me out of here?’

‘We’re working on it.’

‘Work faster. But you’ll need to transport me to a bio-isolation chamber. I may be contagious.’

‘You’re not contagious,’ said Marlock, coming over the link. ‘We downloaded a chunk of Brown’s flagship’s database and got some of his experimental data. The virus is not infectious. It can’t be transmitted person to person. Only through direct infection.’

Anneke nodded. That made sense. The bane of biological weapons in the past was their limited controllability; creating an infectious agent didn’t make sense as it could infect one’s own troops as well. Brown was too smart for that.

Below, in the street, a group of monsters was pursuing a father and son who, perhaps from some natural genetic immunity, had not yet changed. There was nothing Anneke could do but watch helplessly as the creatures herded them into a dead-end and proceeded to tear them to pieces.

Anneke turned away, sick at heart. ‘How long?’ she asked quietly.

Marlock said, ‘Twenty minutes.’

Anneke heaved a sigh. ‘Just hurry,’ she said, breaking the connection.

She made a mental map of the area, the downtown section of a small township whose primary industry seemed to be extracting and processing ore. On the outskirts of the town there were great stone chimneys rising two hundred metres in the air, belching flame and smoke. Behind them loomed the grey shapes of processing plants and warehouses.

The chimneys looked inviting. With her field generator she could scale the outside of one of those, which the monsters could not climb.
One of their few shortcomings
, mused Anneke.

Only problem was, the nearest chimney was at least two kilometres away with several thousand creatures between her and her target. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. She could cross several rooftops in relative safety and reduce that lethal gap.

She scanned the area once more then sprinted for the eastern edge of the rooftop. The gap was about seven metres. She leapt it easily, her Normansk muscles barely warmed up yet.

From the streets below rose a continual cacophony of howls, snarls and screams; the cries of the hunted made her feel ill, while the cries of the hunters filled her with an ancient fear.

Anneke trotted across the next roof, then over a catwalk to a third. There she had to detour north, the easternmost gap – the direction she wanted to take – was too wide, even for her.

She was halfway across the next rooftop when a stairwell door burst open and a group of creatures spilled out, blocking her way forward and cutting off her primary escape route.

These ones were different, Anneke realised with a jolt. They hadn’t mindlessly attacked her the moment they laid eyes on her.

They were, she knew with a chill,
weighing up the situation
. Anneke digested this – a sign that the transformation had progressed: the creatures, in a short space of time, had ceased to be wild animals and had become tactical predators with that most frightening trait of all: self-control.

The lead creatures grunted at her, making a gesture. Anneke’s mind raced. Did they have language? Was it the same as that spoken by the miners of Omega, a bastardised ecclesiastical Latin from Old Earth? Or some new genetically imprinted military language designed by Brown?

The possibilities were chilling.

Anneke didn’t want to stick around to find out. She turned, raced towards the edge of the building, and leapt. Behind her, the leader of the pack snarled softly.

Anneke dropped four storeys to the street below, landing heavily – nothing her powerful leg muscles couldn’t handle with sticky field assistance. Growing up on a 1.9G world had its advantages, especially on a moon like Omega, half the size of Earth.

She was congratulating herself when there was a
thud-thud-thud
around her as the creatures dropped to the ground. Damn. She had completely ignored the fact that
their
musculature had also been enhanced.

Anneke broke into a run, darting between two of the creatures that had thumped into the ground, one losing its balance momentarily. She just managed to avoid a slashing clawed arm that flashed out as she dodged past.

She glanced up. The chimney she had targeted rose above a line of buildings to her right, but she was still a good kilometre away, maybe further in these narrow, winding streets.

She needed a diversion.

She flipped her blaster to an incendiary setting and opened up on the nearest abandoned wooden building, fanning the beam across the brittle, dry storefront until it erupted into flames. She did the same to the next and the next as she ran.

In no time at all, great billowing flames rose high in the air behind her, and dark smoke boiled into the surrounding streets. Despite this, Anneke didn’t want to underestimate the creatures’ eyesight. Assume they have infrared vision, she told herself, maybe some kind of night vision as well. If she’d designed them, that’s what she would have given them. No self-respecting monster should be without them!

She skidded round a bend into a large dreary square, the ornamental centre bearing a weakly gushing fountain and some tired looking trees. On the other hand, the place was full of nightmarish monsters, all of whom turned in her direction in eerie unison.

‘Great!’ she muttered. ‘A monster convention.’

With a collective roar, the creatures surged in her direction. She sprinted along the western side of the square, moving towards the northwest corner. There, two streets forked off. She chose the one heading north-eastwards, maintaining her original bearing as much as possible. The street ahead of her was a recreational zone, full of restaurants and outdoor cafes, though utilitarian enough to satisfy the grim religiosity of the Omegan miners.