The Only Game in the Galaxy (17 page)

Barely had they landed when the ship shuddered again, but this was no minor onboard explosion.

‘Attack’s begun,’ said one of the shooters they’d brought with them, a lean young man with a scar and a good-natured smile.

‘That should keep them busy,’ said the other shooter, also grinning. Anneke liked her ancestors – a lot. They were a wild, hotheaded, amiable bunch of individualists – freedom fighters.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

She led the way forward, keeping her field around them. When they were within metres of the bridge, a small band of Bok’s men opened fire on them. Herik shot one, and the scar-faced young man dropped another. Then they were among them, their physical bodies unaffected by the field that repelled the tortured energies.

Anneke put two of the attackers on the floor within seconds, lunged, smashed the nose of another, jabbed the solar plexus of a fourth. In short order, the passageway was clear. The scar-faced shooter would have another scar, but Herik’s team was still intact.

‘They’ll know where we’re headed now,’ said Anneke. ‘We have to move!’

They broke into a run, pelting down the corridor, slamming into a side passage and burning down two guards going for their guns. They finally arrived at the port-side bridge entrance. Anneke used a shaped field to punch in the reinforced doors, and the four of them burst onto the bridge. ‘Down!’ she yelled, and swept the room with her blaster, set on high stun.

Several crewmen and women sent off shots, which were effortlessly absorbed by her field dampener, and the bridge was theirs. As Anneke lowered her blaster she was knocked off her feet by an explosion that kicked her halfway across the room. By the time she’d picked herself up, the two shooters were dead and Herik had burns on his legs and a bloodied arm.

‘What happened?’ she gasped.

‘Grenade. The ensign rolled it in under the field. Went off before I could yell a warning.’

Anneke nudged the slumped ensign. ‘Smart boy,’ she muttered darkly, then helped Herik barricade the portside doors.

‘How long will they be out?’ Herik asked.

‘Eight hours, minimum. Got the key?’

Herik nodded, went to the captain’s chair, tapped a code into a keypad on the armrest, and stepped back as a hidden console slid out. He opened a protective lid, inserted the key, then turned it. A green light came on. Herik entered a new code and the console slid out of sight.

‘We can control the other ships from this board,’ he said, indicating the captain’s tactical station.

‘Bring your ships into the dock. Let’s make an announcement to the crew.’

They were rushing across space, accompanied by a third of the Imperial Fleet – all those ‘taken’ by Herik’s forces.

The others, split into two groups, were already on their way to their own secret locations, each with an imprisoned crew helpless to turn their ship about. Anneke felt sorry for them, but most had been given the chance to surrender. Those that hadn’t – and those already out of the system or escaping – had been overridden and sent on a one-way mission.

The crews trapped inside would perish, slowly, but it could not be helped.

The loss of thousands of worlds, billions of people, galactic peace and prosperity – would be the cost of doing nothing. But it didn’t stop Anneke having nightmares.

Using the dreadnought’s ability to jump vast distances (as the Dyson gates in her time did for individual humans) she was taking ‘Herik’s Fleet’ to one of the loneliest, least known parts of the galaxy, a sector where local
n-space
conditions made navigation and long-range scanning almost impossible. There were thousands of ‘badlands’ scattered through the galaxy, and Anneke had used her knowledge of these to choose the three weapon caches.

The coordinates of the three locations were heavily encrypted and entrusted to two people only: Ethon Sed and Hester of Vane. If history was good for nothing else, it was good for telling you whom you could trust.

It didn’t tell you the true nature of a person.

Take Herik. Anneke had discovered that he liked music, knew the mainline stars by name, and had – until the Insurrection had swallowed him up – written poetry, though he begged her to keep his secret. Heroic commander types required, he said, a manly
mystique
.

‘Good for historical biographies,’ Anneke pointed out.

‘If I’m not mistaken, the rule for those is that the subject be long dead, which is fine by me.’

Anneke started to smile, then stopped. Something had been nagging at her; the mention of death and history aggravated it, like a mental toothache. She rubbed her jaw, unconsciously.

‘Something bothering you?’

Yeah
, she thought.
You’re bothering me – in a way I like
…

They exchanged a long knowing look, accepting that this was not the time, or the place.

Herik shrugged, laughing. Anneke smiled but said nothing.

Six weeks after departing Se’atma Minor, they entered Carson’s Vortex and hove to within a densely populated asteroid field. The asteroids were composed of
ilium
– an unstable compound that existed in a perpetual state of near-chaos. Added to the instability of Carson’s Vortex and its impenetrability to all scans and probing devices, the ilium was highly radioactive and destructive to human tissue. Anyone remaining longer than a week in the vortex would be dead.

No wonder no one had ever found the caches.

Despite all these obstacles, Herik still worried. ‘Someone might stumble on this place. I mean, sheer dumb luck could strand someone here – for a while anyway …’

Anneke grinned.

Herik crossed his arms. ‘What?’

‘You non-time-travellers don’t get it, do you?’

‘Get what?’ He sounded grumpy. His arm had healed, but perhaps it still ached.

‘Nobody’s going to find the caches, Herik.’

‘But how do you
know
?’

‘Because nobody ever did.’

He looked at her with a disgruntled expression, then laughed. ‘Okay, you got me. Fine. Now what?’

‘We lock the ships in a self-positioning grid system, switch off all systems, and get the hell out of here.’

The grid was set up, the ships were powered down, but the moment their everyday
em-fields
collapsed, there was a sickening
lurch
.

Anneke and Herik exchanged alarmed looks. ‘What the hell was that?’ asked Herik.

Anneke had the bridge powered up again and the forward viewscreen switched on. Outside, everything looked normal. Then something caught her eye. To the ensign at the navigation comm she said, ‘Run a star fix.’

‘I ran one ten minutes ago,’ he said.

‘Run it again. I’ve got a bad feeling.’

She waited patiently for the results. After several minutes the ensign looked up, puzzled. ‘I ran it three times.’

‘And?’

‘The stars have shifted.’

Herik spluttered. ‘What? Talk sense, man!’

The ensign shrugged. ‘The stars have shifted, sir.’

Anneke pushed him aside, then ran several checks herself, consulting her own implants. Groaning, she sat down heavily in the navigator’s chair. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

‘Well?’ asked Herik.

‘You want the good news or the bad?’

‘I’m optimistic.’

‘The good news is I’m home.’

‘And the bad?’

‘You’re not.’

M
AXIMUS
had a good idea of where the dreadnought
Saviour
– along with four hundred other ships strung out behind in a loose, unwilling armada – was going: a place they’d never be found – not for a thousand years.

He did not pass this information onto the crew; they were demoralised enough, and so far social order – including military command structure – had not yet broken down. Maximus had no doubt that it would, sooner or later, but it didn’t concern him.

He didn’t intend to remain on board.

The ship’s lifeboats were still functional and could be launched and he had plotted the ship’s course. They would pass near several star systems. They would also make a jump – or so he calculated – near a planetary body of interest to him.

Meanwhile, he proceeded with his analysis – and his tinkering – of the doomsday virus. A mishap occurred. Through sheer negligence, he exposed himself to the virus, and spent twenty sweaty pulse-racing minutes until he realised he wasn’t getting sick. Like Anneke before him, he soon discovered why.

He sat and considered the implications. The other unsettling aspect of the business was that the moment the virus container was breached, the moment he became infected, he experienced that same rippling effect he’d felt back in the Fortress when his prosthetic fingers had vanished, then reappeared.

Had time been changed? The future affected?

As he explored this new aspect of the virus, he noted fluctuations within its sub-structure, as if additional quantum-entangled molecules had been shifted sideways into other dimensions to reside in a space/time-spanning symbiosis – there was no precedent for it in the literature. He filed it away, and moved on.

Four weeks out the mutiny occurred, taking Maximus by surprise. Locked in his remote lab in the aft storage bay, he’d had little contact with the men and women of his command. Even the captain had given up making daily reports.

By the time Maximus assessed the damage, half the crew were dead or wounded (some he had to put out of their misery) and the other half had escaped in the lifeboats. He had no idea what was happening on the other dreadnoughts – they’d never been able to contact them, not that there was much point.

Interestingly, the captain had not left. Maximus found her sitting stoically on the bridge, gazing into the forward viewscreen. She did not look up as he came in.

‘You should have gone with the others,’ said Maximus.

She blinked. ‘Imperial captains do not abandon their ships, sir. You would know that – if you were an imperial officer …’

‘And not some upstart.’ Maximus grinned. ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

‘Do you know where the ship is headed, sir?’

‘Yes, and no.’

The captain swivelled her head and gazed at him, then she got slowly to her feet. Maximus saw that she’d been shot in the chest. She staggered, and he caught her.

‘Where …’ Blood pooled in her mouth. ‘Where are we – going?’

‘Hell, Captain. We’re going to hell.’

Presently, he closed her dead eyes and covered her with a discarded jacket. Whistling softly and off-tune, he returned to his study of the virus.

Days later, whilst still in his lab, they made a jump, coming out near the planet of Arachnor, as he’d guessed they would. (The Envoy would have been proud of him!) Still whistling his aimless tune, he loaded the modified doomsday virus into a search probe and launched it at the planet. The probe was designed to explode high in the planet’s atmosphere, seeding the virus into the globe-spanning stratospheric winds.

As the ship made its next and final jump, he analysed his feelings. He had become a shaper of history – in this case, the father of the Sentinels.

He wasn’t sure why he’d done it.

He had a wish to thwart the tyranny of time, but another perverse impulse drove him to acknowledge that the centuries-long drama was in a sense
his
father, his maker, and one should always respect one’s father.

A week later he determined the destination of the ship.

Draconis Minus
.

The Lesser Dragon. His spirits sank for the first time.

Draconis Minus was a no man’s land, a vast uncharted nebula where great space-time ruptures occurred with deadly frequency. Few who entered were ever seen again. Rumours surfaced from time to time that paths through the tortured spacescape had been found and charted.

But while the dreadnoughts were large enough to ride the ruptures, there was no possibility that one small human could escape their clutches.

One day out from the nebula the ship’s external scan noted a hull impact. Maximus half hoped the ship would break apart, explode, but the impact turned out to be annoyingly minor.

That evening, Maximus drank a bottle of Ruvian wine, smoked a cigar, then raised a blaster to his temple and pulled the trigger. A split second before he squeezed the trigger, he saw the flash of a discharge from the corner of his eye. His own blaster vaporised, leaving his fingers singed and tingling.

He turned to find the Envoy – correction, one of the Envoy’s species – regarding him.

‘Nice shot,’ stammered Maximus.

‘Probability was high that you would seek to terminate your existence. This could not be permitted.’

‘You know me?’ said Maximus.

The alien nodded.

‘But that’s – not possible. It’s a thousand years until I meet one of your people.
How
do you know me?’

‘You watched me die, do you not remember? We have fought together.’

Maximus staggered and sat back down. Busying himself, he pulled out a medkit and tended to his burnt fingers. Once he had his emotions and his whirling thoughts under control, he said, ‘You’re the same Envoy I knew on Lykis Integer?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have time travelled?’

‘No.’

‘Then how did you get here?’

‘The belief that time is linear and flows in one direction is a peculiar conceit of humans.’

Maximus took a deep breath. ‘Okay, so we don’t understand time, but I’m curious.’

‘Consciousness exists outside of time. It
makes
time.’

‘Enlightening,’ said Maximus. ‘Truly enlightening.’

‘It is important that you live.’

Maximus scowled at the alien.

A day later, the ship plunged into the nebula following, Maximus presumed, one of the mythical pathways. After three more days it went into orbit around an undistinguished planet, along with the rest of the armada. The planet below was an ocean world. Before Maximus could run a scan of it, the entire fleet dropped out of orbit, down through a storm-gusted atmosphere, and dived beneath the purple-black waters. Down and down they went, till they settled on a rocky plateau.

And there they stopped.

‘Good hiding spot,’ said Maximus. ‘Never would have guessed.’

‘Prepare yourself,’ said the Envoy.

Maximus turned. Around him, the ship’s systems were shutting down, going into hibernation. Dimly, he was aware of the dull creaking of the hull as it adjusted to the external pressure of the ocean.

Then he felt a jerk deep in his gut, as though someone had plunged a hand inside him and yanked. Maximus gasped.

The Envoy was gone. Well, not completely. An outer casing – his exoskeleton – stood where the living, breathing Envoy had a moment ago, like the shell of a cicada that had finished its metamorphosis.

Maximus took a step towards the shell. Behind him, a voice called out.

‘Welcome.’

He turned. It was the Envoy.

‘How did you do that?’

‘Come,’ said the Envoy, ‘we must leave. I have been waiting for you.’

Maximus frowned. ‘Waiting?’

The Envoy didn’t answer. Maximus shifted his gaze, taking in the room, and noting differences, some subtle, others not. The air smelt canned – recycled mustiness. Dust covered surfaces, tables, the rims of cups; a patina of age lay over everything.

Maximus gave the Envoy a look of horror as the truth dawned on him.

‘You’ve been –
waiting
?’

‘I am the ninth Envoy to occupy this ship. For a thousand years I have dwelt here, awaiting your return. It is time.’

Bones. Skulls. Hair.

Everywhere.

An exaggeration, but he could not escape the feeling that the long dead crew and captain, those who hadn’t escaped by lifeboat (and hadn’t leapt forward in time like him), still walked the echoing passageways of the
Saviour
, ghosts of the past, aggrieved and accusing …

Yet it wasn’t he who had condemned the fleet to the oblivion of time. That would have been Herik and – if he wasn’t mistaken – his angelic helper, Anneke.

The guilt Maximus felt was irrational – survivor’s guilt. He had little experience with the emotion so couldn’t be sure.

As he stepped onto the bridge a week after his attempted suicide (a millennium, actually) he saw that they had made another jump. Two days before, the ship had mysteriously powered up, run laborious self-diagnostics, and, along with the other dreadnoughts and OEPs, risen from the depths of the planetary ocean that had hidden them for so long, and departed the nebula of Draconis Minus.

The great weapon caches of the old Empire had finally been awakened.

It didn’t take a genius to realise that the master key had once again been activated. Maximus thought he knew where they were going and who had instigated the activation. As he sat in the captain’s chair, however, he was not in a good mood. Being at somebody else’s beck and call did not suit him.

‘Have you plotted our destination yet?’ he demanded of the Envoy, who stood, unperturbed, at the navigation comm.

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll do it my–’ He sensed a sudden change in the ship. The Envoy looked up, puzzled. He had felt it, too, though Maximus was certain it was not physical.

‘What happened?’

‘I’m unsure, but …’ The Envoy ran several scans, looked up. ‘We are no longer under master override.’

Maximus took a moment to digest this. ‘The master key has been removed, or the override cancelled? Why are we still moving then?’

‘The ships will carry out their last command, unless –’

Maximus grinned as he said, ‘Unless somebody else overrides them!’

He leapt into the captain’s chair and ran his own checks, confirming what the Envoy had said. The override could be reinstated at any moment, but he would proceed on the assumption that he had complete control of his own vessel.

What remained to be seen was whether he could co-opt the other dreadnoughts and OEPs trailing behind the
Saviour
in a loose armada. If so, he could get history back on track – the history
he
had planned for such a long time …