The Only Game in the Galaxy by Paul Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

turned and gazed downriver to the next bridge. It was further away, but she was pretty sure that route was also covered.
    ‘Well, I expected that,’ she sighed. She looked up at the night sky, wondering if she was being tracked by satellite. Who knew what devices had been planted on her – or in her. Worms, viroids, nanosignallers … There was no end to the ways in which a person could be tracked and with her amnesia there was no way of knowing if she had consented to such implants.
    She either had to get ‘clean’ or do some fancy footwork.
    ‘That won’t be necessary,’ said a voice behind her.
    She turned slowly. A tall slim man with whipcord muscles and a sharp face stood there holding a wide-angled vaporiser. Not a nice weapon – hard to dodge.
    ‘What won’t be necessary?’
    ‘Whatever you were thinking of doing.’
    ‘Neat. Didn’t hear a thing.’
    ‘Thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment.’
    Anneke nodded to the weapon. ‘So now what?’
    ‘Now you come with me.’ Anneke’s silence irritated the man. ‘That wasn’t a question. And I’m not trying to kill you.’
    ‘And you’re pointing a vaporiser at me because?’
    ‘Insurance,’ the man supplied. ‘My employers merely wish a word with you.’
    ‘They could have tried direct link. I’m connected.’
    ‘Not my department.’ The man indicated the door with his vaporiser.
    ‘Now, about talking to your bosses –’ As she said the last word, she hit a button on her field generator. The deflector field expanded many times in the blink of an eye, as she had set it up to do, then collapsed.
    It had the desired effect, knocking the man backwards off his feet and slamming him into the wall of the drop-tube housing. His weapon went flying.
    Unfortunately, it had another effect.
    It catapulted Anneke backwards off the roof. And into thin air.
    Very thin air.

T HE decryption computers hummed, never stopping. The sound was pervasive – so familiar – that the team of decoders weren’t aware of it. Karl, Mika and Jeera Mosoon had worked in Maximus’ buried bunker for so long that they had almost forgotten what the outside looked like. For Karl and Mika, introverted computer nerds, this wasn’t a huge problem. But for Jeera – an exotic flower, Maximus had once thought – it was a death sentence.
    Death sometimes comes faster than expected.
    The decoders had been working on the third set of lost coordinates for a while. As Jeera had predicted, breakthroughs came suddenly or not at all; it wasn’t a process of whittling away at vast number sequences, looking for primes or arcane theory patterns. It was luck. The kind of dumb luck programmed into the nature of the quantum universe. Except it wasn’t luck, Jeera knew. It was deeper – perhaps the deepest level of reality there was – so deep, human beings could barely conceive of it.
    Someone once said the universe wasn’t just stranger than we imagine. It was stranger than we could imagine.
    Jeera agreed. On the morning that the supercomputers found the catalyst code and unlocked – in a nano-second – the coordinate set, it came as no surprise to Jeera. Her fellow decoders, tall ascetic Karl and dumpy little Mika, were shocked and ecstatic. They broke out the champers and toasted each other. Jeera had a glass, too, celebrating the mercurial nature of the universe, which could have made them wait another century, but had (she felt) chosen to reveal its secrets today.
    Given what happened next she may have been right.
    Karl put down his glass and swayed, a little tipsy. ‘We better burst-code it out,’ he said, trying to be professional.
    ‘Oh, give me a break,’ said Mika who didn’t try to stand. ‘Let’s enjoy this. We’re the only three people in this universe who know where the last set of coordinates is. Think about it! The weapon caches of the Old Empire – at our fingertips!’
    ‘Black’s fingertips,’ corrected Jeera.
    ‘Whatever,’ said Mika, emptying her