The Only Game in the Galaxy by Paul Collins

noncommittal.
    Maximus climbed slowly to his feet. His mind, however, raced. ‘There will be no sleep this night,’ he said softly. ‘And perhaps for some time …’
    ‘As you wish.’

    Jeera Mosoon had escaped on the way to the Lykis Integer spaceport. Bodanis of Imperial Standard would have liked to remove her via jump-gate, but a mysterious virus had infected all the planet-based gates sometime in the small hours of the morning. The gates were still functioning but there was no way to predict where one would appear.
    Bodanis felt flustered. Sasume, CEO of Myoto, sat calmly on the other side of his desk. Her expression gave nothing away.
    ‘Nathaniel Brown is behind it, or I’m a fool!’ said Bodanis.
    ‘We would have done the same, if positions had been reversed.’
    ‘That is little comfort to me,’ said Bodanis. ‘It means there will be an attack en route.’
    ‘It means ,’ said Sasume, leaning forward ever so slightly, ‘that we dictate the terms of the attack.’
    ‘What do you mean? Brown will pick his time and place. He’ll find our weak point and exploit it. That’s his nature.’
    ‘Not if we anticipate him.’
    Bodanis looked at her sceptically. Sasume continued: ‘There are only two practical routes to the spaceport and each offers a limited number of choke points. Any of these would suit Brown’s purposes. Thus, they must be avoided or else seized by our people. If we control the entire route we can determine where the weak point will be!’
    ‘Very little in this life goes according to plan, Sasume.’
    ‘Then let us plan accordingly.’

    Bodanis was right and wrong. Sasume had deployed vast numbers of field troops, flooding danger areas, interdicting others with a mixture of human bodies and field technology. She did not neglect rooftops or sewers and storm drains. She left but two points undermanned then set about booby-trapping the potential attack points and deploying discrete high-altitude air cover. As was her way, she left little to chance. Sasume did not like the unpredictable.
    Thus, when Jeera Mosoon, who had been apprehended before she reached the panic room, escaped from the ground car she was riding in, Sasume was livid.
    Bodanis on the other hand was phlegmatic. ‘She’s been wormed. She won’t go far.’
    They were both wrong.
    Maximus chose to launch his attack at the strongest point in the route against Sasume’s prediction.

    Jeera dived into the noonday crowd, incredulous that she had managed to make her escape. Everyone in the car coming down with acute hay fever had obviously helped, even if it was odd. On top of that, they were all big men, strong, well-trained, more than a match for a slender untrained waif of a girl like herself. That was probably why they hadn’t put her into restraint.
    The conceit of men, she mused, as she dashed through the crowd, keeping low. She spotted an alleyway to her left and veered into it, breaking into a full-throttle sprint. She needed to put distance between herself and the Combine. She had no doubt that once they had extracted the uploaded data burst – whether by neocortical surgery or old-fashioned torture – she would be deemed expendable. Very expendable.
    So she ran.
    She chanced a look behind her when a sudden commotion erupted. Then half a dozen men crashed into view, knocking pedestrians aside, unstoppable. Considering she had been imprisoned for so long, Jeera put on a surprising burst of speed.

    Bodanis and Sasume knew that they were under attack when the car ahead of them exploded in a ball of flame. Armoured as it was and protected by shaped deflector fields, those in the car would not have been harmed, other than by gyrations of the vehicle as it flipped onto its roof. Brown had no way of knowing which of the two-dozen armoured defence vehicles carried the IMC leaders.
    Just as well, reflected Bodanis, as his car swerved onto the sidewalk, overtook the one in front, and formed a defensive phalanx of nearly a