The Noise Revealed (19 page)

"Gun, are you damaged?"

Silence. Great, the impact had knocked out communications.
But had it done any more damage?
"Energy." She fired at the dead man. A bullet made a bloody mess of his right eye and everything beneath. Shit! The gun's AI was out of commission, which meant the weapon's various offensive options had just been kicked out of her reach. It was locked into 'projectile.' Nor did the bad news end there. Her visor was also dead; hardly a surprise since it relied on information supplied by the gun's AI, but still a handicap she could have done without while in the middle of hostile territory.

A shadow moved at the window she'd entered by. Boulton swivelled and squeezed off two rounds. A grunt of pain confirmed that she'd hit someone and she was on the move immediately, racing to press herself against the front wall. Her eyes stung and her lungs were filling with smoke. If these goons had any sense at all they'd simply stand back, make sure all the exits were covered and wait for the smoke and the flames to drive her out, but apparently they didn't. A snub-nosed machine pistol jabbed through the window and squirted a stream of bullets at the space where she'd been; presumably the weapon was fired blind. The flames lapped closer. Caution was no longer an option. Boulton ejected the nearly spent ammo clip, loaded a fresh one, and then stepped away from the wall. She thought about trying something clever - picking up a corpse and tossing it through one window before diving out the other, but there wasn't really the time. Besides, she'd always been an advocate of the simple approach. So she ran at the other window, the one through which no bullets had come as yet, lifted her arms to shield her face and dived.

Most of the glass had already gone, probably smashed so that the occupants could take pot-shots at her when she first approached the building, but shards still clung to the frame like teeth around a maw, tearing at her arms as she sailed through. The gun was clasped in her left hand and she had the trigger jammed down from the instant she felt the glassy daggers bite, firing back along the front of the building. No great surprise that she hadn't hit anything, but at least it kept them sufficiently occupied ducking bullets that they didn't have a chance to zero in on her. She rolled on landing, coming to her feet in a crouch. There were two of them. Whether these were from the other building - the one whose windows she'd blown in with the sonics - or newcomers to the party was hard to say. Her appearance, spitting bullets, had clearly startled them and they were slow to recover, one picking himself up from the ground where he'd dropped to, the other firing erratically and inaccurately. She dispatched them both clinically and efficiently - one bullet for each.

Behind her the fire still crackled as it greedily consumed the house, but other than that all was ominously quiet. Decisions: should she secure her back trail by checking out the opposite building - the gun had reported three gunmen in there, after all - or continue forward and get this over with as quickly as possible?

Onward; the sooner she was out of here the better. She ran, almost glad when the fragile silence was shattered by renewed gunfire. Bullets peppered the ground behind her and tore into the wall of the building she was running past. She fired back, at the windows of the second house opposite.

The throaty roar of a souped-up engine heralded the arrival of an outlandish vehicle, an armoured car sporting a rear-mounted machine gun. A trail of bullets churned up her footmarks as she dived behind the brick wall around the small front garden of the next house, death snapping at her heels. She raised her head and tried to shoot out the car's tires but to no avail. It tore down the street, turned and came back for another pass. The gun's AI brain might have been inactive but she still carried a spare clip of the barrel-mounted grenade shells. She clawed at her belt, freeing the clip even as she hunkered down, feeling shards of shattered brick sting her back as the machine gun chattered and chewed away at her hiding place. Somebody was laughing, enjoying himself - the bastard manning the gun.

As the jeep skidded around and leapt back for a third pass, she tossed the spare grenade clip into the road, directly into its path. She then slithered on her stomach so that when she popped her head up a few seconds later it was at a different spot, a little further along the wall. The car was almost on top of the clip. The machine gun chattered away but she ignored it, steadying her arm, focussing on the clip to the exclusion of all else. She gently squeezed the trigger, once, twice. The grenades exploded just as the car arrived, bouncing the vehicle into the air like some ungainly fish freshly landed and desperately seeking water, ripping open its front - the hood flying off in one sturdy sheet while the engine beneath flew apart in myriad fragments. Boulton ducked back behind her wall, hearing shrapnel ping against the outside, feeling the impact of a few heavier pieces through the bricks. So much for armour.

As soon as it stopped Boulton vaulted the wall and strode up to the smouldering wreck even as it rolled to a halt. The two men in the drivers' compartment looked dead, but she put a bullet in each of them to make sure. The pillock in the back - the one who'd taken such glee in shooting at her - had been thrown clear in the explosion and was crawling feebly along the ground; dazed and most likely injured. The two bullets she pumped into his head doubtless stopped the pain.

Boulton moved on, her target - the big house - directly ahead.

The gun's silence was uncanny, a prickling void, but not really a distraction. She was still new enough at being an eyegee to feel comfortable in its absence. In fact, she was almost glad to be free of the gun's presence for a while, that sense of something always watching over her shoulder. This was like getting her privacy back.

Something caught her attention, a sliding of detail in the corner of her eye, a bush and a flowerbed that seemed to flow fractionally to one side, as if viewed through a heat haze...
Shimmer suit
. On the other hand, the gun and visor combo could be fucking useful sometimes, especially when there were enemies around which the naked eye might not be able to see. She dropped to one knee and brought the gun up to spray a fan of bullets, centring on where she'd seen that patch of shimmer. Her reward was to hear a cry of surprise and pain and to watch an armed man collapse to the floor, his suit deactivating as its wearer died.

She was up and running immediately, crouching low, gun at the ready. Were there more of them? She cast her gaze about, not seeing any further tell-tale flicker of warped light, but then she wouldn't; not unless they moved. A single shot rang out and she felt a shaft of agony lance through her left arm. Drops of warm blood speckled her face as the bullet punched through her forearm. The shooter was behind her somewhere. Screw the idea of crouching low, the gunman clearly had her in his sights. She straightened and sprinted, ignoring her wound - that could wait - and using the pain as a goad. She ran at an angle, heading for the shimmer suited body, hoping walls and gardens might provide her with some protection, and even threw in a tight zigzag for good measure. A second shot rang out and she fancied she could feel the bullet's passage as it flew past her ear, but no fresh blossoming of pain resulted.

Then she was around the corner, at the side of the big house, with solid brick between her and the sniper. Her wound pulsed with pain and blood flowed freely down her left arm, its sticky warmth coating the back of her hand and running around to work into the creases of her palm, but she couldn't stop to patch the wound, not yet. A window. She fired three shots on the run and then leapt through the shower of shattering glass, bringing renewed agony to her already throbbing arm.

Beyond was a formal dining room which might have been lifted straight from some stately home. Very retro-classical - high ceilings and everything crafted out of polished rosewood, from the ornate round-cornered table that took centre stage to its attendant twelve disciples - the matching high-backed chairs that clustered around it - and the twin sideboards that stood against the walls. If that didn't provide enough of a clue, then the large heavy framed canvases above, depicting hunting scenes and the portrait of a regal-looking man, told you instantly that this was not your average slice of suburbia.

Boulton loaded a fresh clip of ammo and headed for the room's open doorway. Neither of the gun-toting goons beyond stood a chance, mown down in the hail of bullets that heralded her arrival. The sweeping stairway and the high-ceilinged entrance hall itself might have been impressive if she'd had the time to consider them properly. Instead her attention focussed unerringly on the solid wooden front door, which stood to her right as she burst from the dining room. Somebody yelled from behind her, words she didn't catch as she lunged at the door, her hands closing around its gleaming brass handle.

The instant her hand clasped the cold metal the simulation faded, winking out as if it had never been, to leave her standing in the vast warehouse-like space of the honeycomb's sim room. She was breathing heavily, having pushed her body hard in this one, but at least the agony of her injured arm faded with the rest.

Somebody clapped and a tall figure stepped forward from the shadows: Pavel Benson. "Very clever," he said, "coming at the door from the inside like that."

She shrugged. "You told me that reaching the door was the goal; nobody said anything about which
side
I had to reach. It struck me that you'd probably have some nasty surprises lying in wait if I'd gone for the direct approach."

"We did."

"Well" - now came the moment of truth - "did I pass?"

She had been exonerated of any blame for what went down at the habitat, at least officially, and nobody was referring to the operation as a fiasco, not in public. After all, the principle objective had been to eliminate the habitat as a threat, and they'd achieved that, no question. Yet when the specialists moved in to pick over the corpse of their enemy, they'd found hundreds of dead in a facility that was clearly capable of accommodating thousands, just as her gun had suggested, and the bald facts were that ULAW had lost one of its precious eyegees, while of the one hundred and eighty marines she and Case had led between them, only four had come back alive. Those four owed their survival not to any brilliance on her part but to the lightning-quick response of the retrieval drones, much as she herself did. No, nobody was calling this a debacle in public.

She'd gone through the mission a hundred times in her head, wondering if she could have done anything differently. The only thing she might have changed was the automated weapon placements. If she'd stopped to take them out when the gun first identified them, lives might have been saved there if not in the long run, but she'd counted on the gun's assurance that they weren't a threat. That was what this latest exercise was all about, she suddenly realised, to gauge just how dependant on the weapon and its guiding AI she'd become.

Benson was nodding and smiling. That had to be a good sign. "You did okay."

Coming from him, that was high praise indeed, and Boulton was amazed at quite how relieved she felt on hearing those words.

"Well enough that I'm sending you out again."

"Oh?" She hadn't expected a full reprieve
that
quickly.

"We've got a potential lead on Jim Leyton."

She stared into Benson's eyes, saw him smile and knew that her reaction had given her away. He now knew beyond any doubt how much she wanted this.

"The needle ship squadron recently engaged a habitat ship - the one we've identified as being responsible for the raid on Sheol, the one that Leyton is almost certainly on. After careful study of the intel gathered during the attack, we're confident that the rebel's engines took substantial damage. There was also a deal of collateral damage to the sections of the ship adjacent to the drive. Our best guess is that we've crippled her engines and taken out most if not all her engineering personnel."

"That's a heck of an assumption," Boulton couldn't help but comment.

"Taken on its own, perhaps, but hear me out. One of our monitoring stations picked up a hack into ULAW security systems. An apparently trivial thing that would normally have been noted and added to a list of thousands of things 'to be looked at later,' but some bright spark made a connection. The hack was designed to ferret out information on a particular individual, an ex-navy engineer by the name of Kyle, who happens to have been the first human recruited by
The Noise Within
and is, as far as we know, the
only
human to have ever worked with Byrzaen engines.

"Knowing my connection to the Byrzaen operation at New Paris, our friendly bright spark made sure the information was passed up the line to me.

"We're pretty sure that this hack was carried out by the habitat, and why else would they be interested in an engineer unless they needed someone who might just be able to fix their ship?"

Boulton frowned. There was a gaping hole at the heart of Benson's argument, and as far as she could see only one thing could fill it; something that made no sense at all. "All right," she said carefully, "but why? Are you trying to tell me that the habitat have Byrzaen technology?"

He shrugged. "Habitat ships can jump without using wormholes. So can the Byrzaens. Now somebody is trying to track down the only man in ULAW space with firsthand knowledge of alien engine systems at a time when we know the habitat needs a mechanic. You tell me."

The bastard knew far more than he was saying. Benson had one of those faces that might as well have been carved from granite. He never gave anything away, but right now she knew he was holding out on her, despite his deadpan expression. He was also her boss, though, and after recent events she was walking on eggshells, which meant her options were pretty limited at present, so she turned her attention back to what he
had
said rather than what he'd so studiously left out.

"So
if
Leyton is on that ship,
if
its engines were sufficiently damaged,
if
enough of their specialists were killed and
if
they have a means of tracking down this engineer... they might be going after him."