The Noise Revealed (20 page)

Benson's smile had grown markedly thin-lipped. "I did stress that this was only a
potential
lead."

Sod the eggshells. She felt them grind to dust beneath her feet as she said, "Sounds like a long shot to me."

"Which is better than no shot at all."

Barely, in Boulton's opinion.

Benson was still speaking. "We've tracked down this 'Kyle.' He recently signed on as crew to an old trader-cum-smuggler called
The Peridon
. The ship's currently bound for a backwater planet called Arcadia. We've diverted a courier ship and have it waiting to take you directly there. If you leave now you should arrive a little ahead of
The Peridon
, and will have full authority to co-opt whatever local support you require."

Boulton knew she ought to feel delighted. After all, up until a few moments ago her very future as an eyegee had been in doubt, and now here she was being handed an assignment. Yet she couldn't escape the feeling that this was a wild goose chase, and that while she was dispatched to some forgotten corner of the galaxy on a pointless waste of time, a genuine lead would come in and be handed to somebody else. That was her greatest concern, that somebody other than her would be granted the pleasure of taking down that bastard Leyton. The prospect gnawed at her innards like a festering ulcer.

Not that she had a choice here, and the sooner she left the sooner she could be back. So Boulton made no further complaint but instead simply nodded and said, "Sir!" with only a hint of irony, before hurrying away to prepare for her imminent trip.

PART TWO

Chapter Twelve

Kyle had visited a fair few worlds in his time but never Arcadia, as far as he could recall. Once, the prospect of landing on a new planet would have thrilled him, but not anymore. Too many new places had disappointed by being anything but. He might not know this particular town but he knew plenty like it. Cramped bars and narrow streets, cheap rooms, doss houses, narc-dens, quickthrill booths and seedy gaming halls, dealers on the prowl, whores on the hustle and bum-boys on the make; hawkers, fixers, pimps, thieves, contractors, pedlars and opportunists, all on the lookout for a mark. Spaceports attracted them like flies to a dung heap. All it took was for some forgotten patch of open ground to be designated a landing area and before you knew it a town sprung up, or existing, formerly-sleepy surburban streets would be overflowing with gaudy souvenirs, knocked-off cyber gadgets, cheap leather goods and sweat-shop clothing outlets sandwiched between fast food stalls and bootleg booze stands. Everything your average spacer, starved of life's little luxuries, could possibly wish for. Freshly released from the confinement of their star-flitting metal tubes with credits in their pockets - and even for those a little short on credit but still long on urges - this was exactly the sort of place most of them would be dreaming of.

Normally, you could have counted Kyle among them; this would have been home from home, but right now 'normal' didn't come into it. There'd been nothing normal about his life since he jumped ship to join a pirate crew, only to discover that he was the only human on board.

As far as he could determine, he'd barely escaped a lengthy stay in a ULAW jail following that fiasco, thanks to the intervention of the government man, Leyton; Jim, as he'd originally introduced himself. Since then, Kyle's life had gone into freefall, with one disaster following hot on the heels of another, this most recent career move merely the latest entry in a sorry catalogue of misfortunes.

Buchan had seemed a decent enough sort; Captain and owner of a small trade vessel, a scavenger, pootling around the fringes of ULAW space picking up cargo here and delivering it there - surviving on the jobs that were too small or where the margins were too tight to interest the corporate boys - and Buchan was short of an engineer. Perfect; the sort of venture which would never make you rich but where a decent living could be eked out, if you were savvy enough.

Kyle had taken the job with every expectation of revisiting his past. He'd assumed this would be much like life aboard
The Star Witch
, his first civilian position after leaving the navy - a period which he remembered with great fondness. However, he soon discovered that nostalgia wasn't all it's cracked up to be. True,
The Peridon
had seen better days, much like the earlier ship, but there all similarity ended. As soon as he stepped aboard
The Star Witch
he'd been welcomed with open arms, made to feel part of the family, and had soon found himself an accepted member of a tight-knit crew.
The Peridon'
s crew also seemed pretty tight, but they were far from welcoming. Instead, Kyle found himself excluded, treated with suspicion that fell just short of outright hostility. Conversations would stop as he entered a room, and smiles were few and far between. The longer this first trip went on, the firmer his conviction grew that the others were hiding something, that it was more than mere camaraderie that bound them together and cast him as the outsider, but rather a sense of shared guilt.

Kyle had never been so grateful to get off a ship in his life, not even
The Noise Within
. He determined to use the time in port to try and hustle up a berth on another ship as quickly as possible - on
any
other ship - and the scene that unfolded on the dockside as they disembarked did nothing to change his mind.

The five of them - with him lagging slightly behind the four regular crewmembers - were just leaving the docking arm when three figures came striding towards them.

"Buchan!" yelled the first - a short, grizzled man who was clearly livid and spoiling for a fight. The other three members of
The
Peridon'
s crew tensed and drew a little closer to their captain. Hands strayed towards weapons.

"Heard you were coming in," the short man said, stopping before them an arm's reach away.

"Low, what a pleasure," Buchan replied. If a smile could ever imply a sneer, this was it.

"You owe me, you bastard." The pointed finger stabbed out, a hair's breadth away from Buchan's chest.

The Peridon'
s captain didn't flinch. From the look on his face and those of the other crew members, Kyle guessed he was finally catching a glimpse of whatever guilty secret they were hiding. At least, that was his hope.

"You weren't the only one to get burned, Low, we lost our engineer, remember?" Eyes flickered briefly in Kyle's direction, while he berated himself for not asking more about his predecessor. What had it been, this incident that had developed into a festering sore on the collective conscience of
The Peridon'
s crew? Robbery, smuggling, narcotics, illicit tech, passage for a wanted felon, what? Something high risk, high gain and highly illegal, that much was obvious.

"Your
engineer
? I lost my fucking
son
!"

"Yeah, I heard. Sorry and all that, but everybody knew the risks going in."

"What risks? There
were
no risks. Not until you tried to muscle in on my operation."

"Bullshit! The whole thing was obviously a scam from day one. Tech like that doesn't suddenly pop up out of nowhere onto the open market."

Ah, so that was it. Illicit tech; weapons system or AI interface, most likely. They seemed to be the two hot topics these days.

"No, no," Low was shaking his head, his fury unabated. "I'm not letting you slither out of it that easily. Everything was sweet as a nut until you came blundering in with your greed and your half-assed crew. Three men I lost, one of them Jamie; not to mention the damage to the ship." Low was literally shaking with anger, and Kyle wouldn't have been surprised to see the smaller man launch himself at Buchan there and then, but he controlled himself with evident difficulty, and actually took a step back. "And you're going to pay for what happened, all of you." He swept a pointed finger, taking in the group of them.

Kyle considered himself a bystander in this, no more than an interested observer, but of course he wasn't, he was a part of
The Peridon'
s crew. He felt Low's glare sweep over him, and knew that in this man's eyes at least they were well and truly united. Low had clocked each and every one of them, as if to lodge their faces indelibly in his mind's eye. Kyle was now guilty by association and Low didn't seem the sort to concern himself with technicalities, such as the fact that all this had happened before Kyle even signed on.

"By the time I'm through with you, you'll wish you'd never even heard of
The Peridon
."

There was a flurry of movement behind Buchan. Kent, tall, swarthy Kent, moved more quickly than Kyle would have believed he could, sweeping up an arm and producing a gun from somewhere; a brutal looking rifle. Nothing fancy and all business, it pointed straight at Low.

The docks were quiet, at least this section was. Their altercation had drawn little attention and Kyle didn't imagine the presence of a gun was going to alter that. Somehow, he doubted this was the first weapon to ever be drawn here.

"Fuck off, Low," Buchan drawled. "You're beginning to annoy us."

Low didn't appear to be intimidated. In fact he guffawed, as if this was exactly the sort of contemptible response he'd expect from the likes of Buchan and his crew. "This isn't over. Don't think for one moment that it is." With a final glare, he swivelled around and stalked off, flanked by his two men.

A melodramatic oaf, no question, but that didn't mean he wasn't dangerous.

The gun disappeared back inside the long coat Kent was wearing. Buchan and his three cronies exchanged glances. Kyle didn't feel remotely reassured by the uncertainty he saw there.

"Don't take no notice," Cully, the navigator, advised, directing the comment at his captain. "Now that he's got that little outburst off his chest, he'll leave us alone."

Buchan grunted. "Yeah, most likely you're right." Although he sounded as if he were trying to convince himself rather than anyone else. "All the same, everyone watch your backs while we're here. There are a lot more of them than us."

Great. Just the sort of thing Kyle wanted to hear. "Is someone going to tell me what that was all about?" he ventured.

"No," Cully replied, which hardly came as a surprise.

"Best you don't know," Buchan added.

Perhaps he was right. Best for whom, though?

Kyle suspected that all those present realised he wasn't going to be around for much longer, one way or another.

They left the port facility without further challenge, and stepped forth into bedlam. The mass of people came as a shock after so long spent in an environment populated by just the five of them. Kids were the first thing, flocking to them the moment they emerged into the street, trying to tempt the new arrivals with everything from gaudy trinkets to guaranteed aphrodisiacs, from bootleg drugs to their own scrawny bodies.

They walked on unheeding, soon shedding the posse of young entrepreneurs, who slid away one by one, drifting back to haunt the port entrance, waiting for the next batch of freshly docked spacers. The kids were only the first irritation, though. Maybe this was Market Day, or even 'Get in the Way of a Spacer Day,' Kyle wasn't sure. All he knew was that the streets were heaving, with most folk evidently not in a hurry to be anywhere except in his path.

At least the crowds provided ample cover. He ducked away from the merry
Peridon
quartet as quickly as he could, no doubt in his mind that Low meant business. While the rest of them might be able to rely on each other in a scrap he didn't feel inclined to do so, which left him vulnerable - the one most likely to be picked off first. Therefore he removed himself, wishing Buchan and the crew a silent
bon voyage
as he slipped between two market stalls and headed off in a random direction. If nobody had noticed him slope off, this might even spook them a little and leave them wondering whether he'd gone of his own accord or been snatched by Low and his men. He hoped so. Petty, perhaps, but it was what he was reduced to.

They still owed him a bit of pay for the trip, but Kyle had always placed a higher value on his own skin than on his credit balance. Besides, slipping away for a little 'me' time while in port was hardly jumping ship, and he could always go back later if he changed his mind. Not that he expected to.

Finding a bar proved predictably easy. He strolled straight into a ramshackle place that didn't need a door - its entire front was open, the roof supported by slender metal pillars, half peeling white paint and half rust. The kid who served him seemed friendly enough, in a 'you-might-have-money' sort of way, and recommended a locally brewed beer. It turned out to be a little sour to Kyle's taste, but right then he'd have settled for anything cold with bubbles in it. Most of the urine-coloured liquid had disappeared before a plump middle-aged man in a blue and white hooped top decided to move on, enabling Kyle to claim a seat - one of the spindle-legged high stools clustered around the bar.

Drinking alone when he was already feeling lower than a midget stooping to tie his shoelaces probably wasn't the brightest of ideas. It set him thinking about his life and the choices he'd made. Truth was, he missed
The Lady J
- the luxury liner he'd been paid a small fortune to strut around, the ship he'd abandoned to go pirate. What was that old saying about the grass being greener? He hadn't appreciated how good things were back then. Returning to his roots, to working on rickety old rust-buckets three rivets away from the scrapheap wasn't as much fun as when he was fresh out of the navy. He'd been hungrier then, keener, with a flatter stomach and a less wrinkled visage. This was a young man's game and, much as he hated to admit it, he wasn't one, not any more. When had that changed? He thought back to
The Lady J
and the success he'd enjoyed with that cute little trolley dolly, what was her name? Marie, that was it. Marie and all the girls like her, always one to take the place of the last in a chain of casual encounters which he'd never expected to end. It hadn't been all that long ago, yet in those days doubt would never even have entered his mind. He'd taken for granted that he was charming, amusing, seductive and irresistible. So where had all that self-confidence gone?