Dyson's Drop.

Paul Collins.

The Maximus Black Files.

OLD-FASHIONED methods were sometimes the best. Who would have thought that in this day and age you could place a gla.s.s against a wall and listen in on a conversation? Maximus Black, sublieutenant in the ranks of the Regis Imperium Mentalis (RIM) and special attache to Colonel Jake Ferren, screwed up his face in concentration as he pressed his ear to the base of the gla.s.s. He was in a small vacant room adjacent to Colonel Ferren's office. Of course, he wasn't only relying on old-fashioned methods, the work done on the cilia hairs of his inner ear, doubling their number, also facilitated his eavesdropping.

Sure enough, the Colonel was taking a highly confidential call on his n-s.p.a.ce receiver. Gravitonic telecommunication to this day had never been successfully bugged, though Black was itching to give it a shot. And, unfortunately for Black, Jake was extremely cautious in what he said, despite the room's sophisticated anti-bugging hardware and dampening fields.

Probably just paranoid, thought Black. Definitely old school.

*Rench will bear watching. Just wish I knew what his game was,' Jake was saying. *No, this whole mole hunt thing is getting out of hand. It's as crazy as a hen house around here. What? Hen house. H-E-N H-0-U-S-E. Look it up.' He paused a moment.

*That's what I'm telling you. Accusations and counter-accusations are flying in all directions. Got a grudge against somebody, just whisper it in the right ear, and hey presto, they're on disability leave until an investigating committee can get around to clearing them. Or not. We've already lost some good people.'

In the next room, Black nodded gleefully. *Give me chaos or give me death,' he murmured to himself, quoting some long-dead politician. Maximus Black was, of course, the mole that everyone was looking for. He was also privileged to sit in the eye of the storm his presence had created. It was a year since a sudden priority message had been received at RIM from Special Field Agent Anneke Longshadow. Anneke had broken into the headquarters of Quesada, one of the biggest armoured Companies in the galaxy, only to discover that RIM had been penetrated at the highest level.

What mad twist of fate, Black often wondered, had seen Black himself take her call?

No matter. The desperate hunt for the mole had lurched into being and, thanks to nimble footwork on his part, Black had gotten himself a.s.signed to the Task Force leading the hunt. Irony upon irony.

It had been an interesting year.

In any case, Anneke Longshadow had died six months ago, heroically saving the lives of a million people (she'd received a medal, posthumously), lives Black had unblinkingly tried to sacrifice to save his own skin from those d.a.m.nable Sentinels. Oh, how he would like to bring those semi-religious zealots to their knees, along with their pitifully obsolete Septum Misora. Who gave them the right to lay down the rules for what could and couldn't be done in the galaxy?

Certainly, Black had no intention of being bound by rules, theirs or anybody else's.

Jake finished his call. Black listened long enough to ascertain that Jake was voice-writing paperwork, then exited the room after making sure the corridor outside was clear.

As Black rounded a corner he b.u.mped into someone striding briskly towards him. *Out of my d.a.m.ned way!' barked the man. Black opened his mouth for an angry retort, but stopped himself as he recognised Major-General Rench, the man Jake Ferren had just been talking about.

*What's that, Lieutenant?' Rench snapped, his face beetroot red. *What did you say?'

*Nothing, sir!' Black snapped to attention and saluted. Rench threw him a sloppy salute back and shouldered past, muttering.

Black watched Rench march up the corridor and burst into Jake's office. Black smiled to himself The man was an idiot with all the subtlety of a wounded bear.

For the rest of the afternoon, Black processed his paperwork. At least holographic doc.u.ment shuffling was visually entertaining. He sent out mid-level priority field a.s.signments to agents in various systems, and then went home. As he left through the main entrance he ran into Esprin Harbage. The slightly overweight lieutenant gave Black a sour look.

Black clapped him on the shoulder. *Esprin, how are you? Haven't seen you for a while.'

Esprin hung his head. *I'm been busy, Maximus. You know, working.' The emphasis was intended as a rebuke to the fact that Black had inducted Esprin into the joys of a slave narcotic several months ago and had been sending secret a.s.signments his way. Without the antidote to the narcotic, Esprin would die horribly within a couple of days. Hence the word slave.

As Black watched the quintessential *fat boy' - the one who got beaten up at school and laughed at -plod off to his desk for the evening shift, he wondered if he shouldn't terminate Esprin. Oddly enough, Black felt sorry for him. Esprin was so clumsy, so downtrodden, and so bad at everything he did, it was a wonder he had made it so far in RIM. To be fair though, when cornered, old Esprin had a way of coming up with unique solutions to intractable problems. It was as if, somewhere beneath that chubby inferiority complex, there lurked a true man of action, one too afraid to show himself.

Tough, but that was the pecking order of life, Black mused. Some peck, and some are pecked.

Black, of course, was a peeker par excellence.

He caught a rapid transit threader towards home, sailing serenely above the jam-packed buildings of Lykis Integer. But he didn't go home. Instead, he bypa.s.sed the treadway leading to his door and plunged into a maze of backstreets and alleys, first picking up items he had concealed in a cleaning droid. Doubling back on himself several times, he took abrupt detours through conjoined shops. In a fashion shop he entered a scanning room, disabling the measuring machinery with his plasma burster. The short burst of dissolved steel plasma at two billion degrees cut a hole in the wall, through to the storeroom of the neighbouring building. Now he appeared on the other side of the city block he had entered minutes before from another point entirely.

After an hour, he took a drop tube down into the claustrophobic underbelly of Lykis, where the working cla.s.ses lived and laboured, and lost himself in a three-dimensional maze. To keep himself safe as he progressed through the tunnels and plazas, he switched on an array of dampener and deflector fields, rotating their range and frequency at random and performing sensor sweeps in all directions.

No one was following him.

Despite this, Black took advantage of the *cleaners' he had built into walls and archways at specific locations along his route. Disguised as ordinary utility panels, and supervising the host of munic.i.p.al functions required of such panels, they also cleansed chosen targets like himself of bugs, worms, and hi-tech surveillance tracker beams that might have locked onto them.

Pa.s.sing through a cleanser was like pa.s.sing through a waterfall with an old-fashioned transistor radio. The water shorted it out immediately.

Black used sixteen cleansers, each time becoming more and more sensor-invisible, before he arrived at his destination: a secret buried suite of compartments he had equipped as his personal command centre.

He called the place the *Spider's Web', in honour of an ancient fictional hero, Professor Moriarty, who fought valiantly against a cunning villain by the name of Sherlock Holmes. Unlike Black, however, Moriarty seldom won.

Once inside the Web, Black relaxed. He poured himself a cup of steaming Ruvian coffee, savouring the aroma.

*Give me an update,' he said abruptly to Karl, one of the three people who lived in the complex. They never ventured outside because they would perish immediately if they tried. Black had seeded nano sized i-bots into their bloodstreams that would react to the cessation of electromagnetic fields, causing them to excrete a deadly toxin that would leave the host brain dead in twenty seconds.

Karl had been recruited for his uncanny hacker abilities only two months before. He eyed Black with intense dislike.

Black sighed. *Yes, loathe me. Fine. Now, the report. Please.'

*The first set of coordinates are, as you surmised, just a key to the second set. And I would hazard a guess that the second set is the key to the third and final set. Mika has confirmed it with a high probability algorithm. There seems little doubt, then, that there is no meaningful data in this set of coordinates.'

*Decryption keys?' asked Black thoughtfully.

Mika, a short dumpy brunette in her mid twenties, whose face bore a tiny, ancient brand that revealed she had once been a slave like Black, shrugged.

*Certainly it's a decryption key,' she said. *But it's also a kind of Rosetta Stone.'

Black raised his eyebrows.

*I mean, I'm guessing it is. If I'm right, it won't just decrypt the second set of coordinates, it will provide the key to how it must be read. I suspect it has its own unique underlying software, a machine language, which uses base-six mathematics to describe the two hundred sounds in human speech. It also has relevance to the entropic informational theory of black holes. So it's a h.e.l.l of a lot more complex than I first thought.'

*Okay. That part's not too surprising. But there's not much we can do till we get the second set.'

*Which is your job,' said Mika.

Black ignored the jibe. For now, he needed the girl to be willing. Insubordination would be dealt with later. *Which, as you say, is my job. Any clue to the location of the second set?'

Here the third person in the room looked up. Jeera Mosoon was an emaciated eighteen-year-old with startling blonde hair and the bluest eyes Black had ever seen. She had an ethereal beauty that only Black saw and which he was sorry to have *captured' with his reverse-toxin field. A being like Jeera could not be incarcerated for long. Like an exotic b.u.t.terfly, she would wilt and die.

Black found himself, not for the first time, regretting that. He found her difficult to read. His intuition, not his calculating mind, told him she could not endure here. And it alarmed him.

Jeera stood up and paced the room. *Not simple,' she said, her voice blunt and emotionless. *It's a catalytic code on at least two levels.'

Karl frowned. *Which means what?'

*It means we don't crack it till we get the exact catalyst, then the whole thing cascades open. Only then will we get the second level.'

*Interpretation?' asked Black.

Jeera shrugged. *First level says where. Second says more specific where - or how.'

Karl sighed. *Could you be a little less obscure?' Jeera almost smiled. In that moment, Black wanted Karl dead and himself on the receiving end of that ghost of a smile. *To give you an example,' she began. *Maybe first level says where in s.p.a.ce, which planet, asteroid, system, which piece of empty/not empty quantum s.p.a.ce. Second level says where inside the previous location, like which patch of a planet's surface. That's my guess, anyway.'

*I figured it would be like that,' said Black. *The ancients aren't giving up their mysteries without a fight.'

*b.a.s.t.a.r.ds,' sniffed Mika.

Sarcasm, too. Black filed it away. *So we know there's going to be a where,' he said. *What about a when?'

Jeera locked eyes with him, defiant. *As I said, it is a catalyst code. Probabilities can't be calculated. One moment, not near, not even close. Then bam. Got it. Could be tomorrow. Could be next century.'

Black rolled his eyes. *Well, let's hope for all our sakes, it's closer to tomorrow.'

*Or you will kill us?' Karl asked.

Black stared back. He saw no reason to lie. *You do your job and one day you walk free. Not soon. And not until I'm bullet proof Then I don't give a d.a.m.n. h.e.l.l, you can sell your stories to the newzines for all I care.'

Karl studied Black, as if trying to read his mind.

*I believe you.'

*No reason you shouldn't,' said Black. *I don't eliminate people for the fun of it. Too messy. Raises more problems than it solves. So be good and do your jobs and one day you get to see the sun again. Now. Another matter has come to my attention. Major-General Rench. I want you, Mika, to work up a profile on him. Get me everything you can, any skeletons in his closet. The man might need to be removed. Karl, I want you to launch a smear campaign against Colonel Jake Ferren. It's time he went bye-bye.'

*Why don't you just kill him?'

*Maybe you weren't listening. I kill when I have to.'

*I thought predators killed when they were hungry,' said jeera. Black stared at her. The observation was so acute, so knowing, he was taken aback.

*So I'm not hungry,' he said. *Everybody back to work.'

That evening, he met with the Envoy, a member of the alien insectoid species who had, for arcane reasons, dedicated themselves to fulfilling Black's Kadros - his galactic destiny. The Envoy happened to be unkillable. While many boasted this, it was actually true for the alien: his hatchlings were his clones, containing all his memories and knowledge, which were constantly and mysteriously updated. Only a galactic cataclysm could wipe out the one-who-was-many.

Black chose a cutthroat dive in the Draco Quarter for his meeting and set up an array of dampening fields around their table, not only suppressing their sonic signatures, but scrambling intelligibility as well. In any case, the Envoy's species came with built-in dampeners, the oddest evolutionary development Black had ever heard of Unless, of course, genetic tinkering had occurred in their mist-enshrouded past. Either way, the Envoy's conversation was spookily hard to eavesdrop on and impossible to record. Black knew; he'd tried.

To add to the difficulty, the Envoy used code, which the neural jack in Black's neck translated.

*I don't like being summoned,' said Black, sipping Jai. The Envoy drank nothing. Indeed, Black had never seen him eat or drink.

*In your language, the two modes, brevity and command, are similar. My species does not waste speech. Nor do we command.'

*I will remember that,' said Black. *So what of the Sentinels?'

The Envoy said nothing for a long moment. Black never knew how to interpret his pauses. *Great secrecy enshrouds them,' he said, finally. *And there is a terrible thing, a dread that can not be spoken of, that lies at the heart of their pledge.'

*What kind of dread?' Black leaned forward, eager to hear.

*I do not know. It is very old. And old secrets that have stayed secret are the hardest to unearth, for the very nature of being has closed about them like the fist of life.' He seized thin air in his own chitinous fist, and squeezed. *Indeed, we say such secrets are entwined in the structure of reality itself But there is no doubt that the world the Sentinels have guarded for the last thousand years is the key to this secret.'

*Tell me what you think they guard on Arachnor.'

The Envoy looked at him. *What makes you think they guard anything there? What if they guard us from Arachnor?'

For the second time that day, Black was startled. Then he nodded curtly. The Envoy was right. Something in his words stirred an idea in the back of Black's mind, but it was too tenuous and faded before he could grasp it.

No matter. It would come back. Such stirrings always did. *What else did you find?'

*I travelled far, listening to the pulse of the rumours. The Sentinels figure in mythologies, nightmares. Sometimes in such things there is a kernel of truth.'

*And?'

*I need more data. The Sentinels are called monsters, demons, saviours and saints. They are linked with the old archetypes of Satan and G.o.d. Some believe they are the expression of humanity's collective guilt, the anima made manifest.'

*This is all you return with?' Black was disappointed. If he could not find the weakness of the Sentinels, he could not control them. And without controlling them, he could not win.

His Grand Plan depended on it.

Only no one had ever bribed the mysterious beings. They were said to be untouchable. Temporalis inviolate. Beyond the touch of the times: neither corruptible nor controllable.

Black intended to put such myths to the test.

*No.'

Black blinked. He'd forgotten that he had asked a question.

*It is not all that I return with,' said the Envoy.

*Well? Spit it out.'

*An odd expression,' the Envoy said. *Spitting for us is a form of attack. To blind. To maim. To win. But for you, it is to reveal, to unburden, to share.'

*Spare me the comparative etymology lesson,' said Black, irritated. *What exactly did you find?'

*The unfindable.'

Black sighed. It was one of those days. *Okay. I'll play along. And what was the unfindable thing that you found?'

*It is more a rumour, but from a credible source. A dreadnought.'

Black blinked. Twice. Then sat up slowly.

The Envoy went on, unaware that Black's heart was thumping. *Floating off the end of Orion's Belt. Five kilometres long. It is said that it blotted out the background stars like a hole in the fabric of s.p.a.ce.'