the Noise Within (2010) (21 page)

"Kethi," the voice was a murmur at the edge of her awareness, "could you please meet me at the hub right away?"

She kept the mild irritation from her voice as she replied, "Nyles, I've just arrived to do a shift at the pod. Can this wait?"

"No, it can't. I'll assign someone else to take over from you. This is a matter of some urgency."

"Very well. I'm on my way."

Kethi blinked twice in rapid succession, wiping the data from her lenses and shutting off the flow. So much for a few hours' peace and quiet out here. It would be weeks before her next pod shift came around.

With a sigh, she unfastened the seat ties and then carefully positioned her feet preparatory to stretching up through the semi-solid barrier of the pod's door, in order to grasp the bar guard beyond and haul herself outside.

A simple enough manoeuvre when you knew how, a nightmare the first couple of times you tried it.

As she sailed back along the chute scant moments after having travelled it in the opposite direction, she wondered what was so urgent that Nyles had seen fit to pull her away from a duty. None of the alternatives she came up with were in any sense good or reassuring, whichever way she looked at it. This would prove to be something to do with ULAW no doubt; perhaps a newly announced policy which Nyles and his people saw as an opportunity, or a trend which they chose to interpret as a sign of undue influence. Nyles seemed incapable of realising what most people here had recognised long ago: this place and its population were a complete irrelevance to the rest of humanity. Ever since the founding of the habitat and their decision to withdraw from the arena of politics, and indeed society in general, their community had been dismissed and forgotten about by the wider populace.

Stubbornly refusing to acknowledge as much, Nyles and his more ardent supporters continually scoured news feeds and data flows in search of some whispered snippet or rumour that they could cling to in order to justify the habitat's existence. This latest summons was doubtless another example of his clutching at some cosmic straw or other.

Kethi knew her history, and was aware that William Anderson, the habitat's founder, had once been a significant political figure. Anderson's position as head of one of the largest resource conglomerates of its time had provided him with extreme wealth and the influence to match. At one point, the food synthesis wing of his empire alone was said to have fed nearly a quarter of all the people across human space. Yet his apparently extraordinary claims at the height of the War that ULAW were not the real enemy, that there was a bigger, darker threat waiting in the wings, had caused outrage and widespread condemnation. Hindsight was a wonderful thing and it seemed extraordinary to Kethi that anyone would have expected otherwise. How naïve were Anderson and his people? Of course nobody was interested in the 'evidence' he claimed to have to support his assertions. The only enemy claiming people's attention at the time was the one whose armies and warships were arrayed before them.

'The Prepared' Anderson and his followers had styled themselves. 'The Pre-Scared' some media wag had dubbed them, a tag which quickly degenerated to 'The Scaries' - they became a joke. Worse, they stood accused in some quarters of being ULAW sympathisers, of collaborating with the enemy and attempting to undermine the war effort. Discredited, humiliated and frustrated, Anderson gave up any hope of being listened to and chose to withdraw from public life. It was then that he decided to lead his followers to the fringes of human space and establish the habitat, a safe haven where they could continue their work and ensure that they at least would be ready. The project all but exhausted their leader's personal fortune, but it was a price he had been more than willing to meet.

From her own studies of the man's life, Kethi concluded that Anderson never believed the habitat would become such a long-term home but rather viewed it as the platform from which he would relaunch his political career, returning as society's champion in its hour of greatest need.

Yet that hour never came. Little more than a decade after the War ended Anderson had died, leaving his aging contemporaries and their successors, the next generation, to continue his dream and live the lives he had shaped for them. There was a growing feeling of restlessness among the younger folk, some of whom resented the great 'founder' for his legacy and a few of whom even harboured misgivings about the habitat and what it stood for.

No such concerns troubled Nyles, that much was certain. As a man who had actually fought in the War he had been one of the very first to convert to Anderson's cause, and believed in it as fervently now as he ever had. It was a level of zeal that Kethi was finding increasingly hard to feign, let alone emulate.

She arrived at the end of the chute and entered the habitat proper; surrendering to the pull of gravity once more. As she stepped across the threshold and felt her body's weight again, she reflected on how easy it was to take such things for granted and wondered how many here even noticed the technology which allowed a limited-area gravity field to be so accurately focused. Few, she suspected.

"Kethi!" The shout came from behind her as she neared the hub. She knew who it was even before turning around to see the familiar, slightly gangly form of Simon running towards her, narrowly avoiding collision with a startled pair of elders in the process. He skipped past them, oblivious to their disapproving frowns.

His boyish grin as he reached her was as infectious as ever, and she couldn't help but smile in response. Simon was one of her closest friends and her greatest worries. He was besotted with her. He knew it and she knew it, just as they both knew that she could never love him in return.

He held his crippled hand close to his stomach, a habit that was entirely subconscious, cradling it as if to protect its imbalanced combination of organic and prosthetic digits.

"Thought you were at the pod this shift," he said, a little out of breath from the quick sprint.

"I was; until I got a call from Nyles. He's summoned me to the hub."

"Oh wow, that means you'll be one of the first to find out."

"Find out what?"

"Whatever it is that's going on around here. Something's up but nobody seems to know what, or if they do know they're not saying."

"Really?" This must all have been very recent; she hadn't noticed a thing before heading out to the pod.

"Yes,
really
! Nyles's cronies are running around as if they're expecting a visit from someone really important at any minute. It must be what he wants to see you about. Let me know, Keth, won't you - as soon as you find out what's going on."

"If I can," she assured him, and laughed, all too familiar with Simon's appetite for gossip; being out the loop when there was the prospect of something juicy going down for once was guaranteed to drive him nuts. She started to walk away from him. "Gotta go."

"I know. Remember, though, call me," he yelled after her.

"We'll see."

Predictably, Nyles was already at the hub waiting for her, pacing across the auditorium's polished floor with its emblem of a cause long lost in a war which the wrong side had always been destined to win. The Allies were never more than a gathering of grudgingly cooperative states which lacked the focus and all round unity of the United League of Worlds. The concession of inserting an 'A' so that it was the 'United League of Allied Worlds' which seized the reins of humanity's fractured society in the War's aftermath hadn't fooled anybody. Only the stubbornest of die-hard supporters could possibly view the outcome as anything other than a ULW victory.

Kethi wondered whether anybody even noticed that symbol any more, though if anyone did, it would be Nyles. She also wondered, not for the first time, whether the 'Prepared' might just have been able to turn the tide of the War had Anderson chosen a different course. A redundant question; this was all ancient history now, and their only option was to deal with the present that faced them.

She banished her heretical musings as Nyles stopped pacing and turned towards her. Seeing him now, he looked anything but the hero he was, instead seeming tired and old. In recent years his face had steadily grown into that prematurely greyed hair which had been his hallmark even during the War.

"Ah, Kethi, there you are."

"Sorry to have kept you waiting, Nyles."

"No matter," he assured her, smiling to prove the point. Being Nyles, he'd missed the sarcasm entirely.

"So, what's up?"

"I'll show you. Image." He spoke the latter to the empty air.

A bulbous and ill-conceived starship appeared in the space between them.

"Ugly so and so, isn't she?" Kethi observed.

"
The Noise Within
. Have you heard of her at all?"

Kethi shook her head, wondering what all this was leading up to. "No, sorry. Should I have?"

"She appeared out of nowhere and has been wreaking havoc with ULAW's luxury-end shipping - preying on cruise ships it would seem, but choosing her targets with great care."

"A pirate?" Kethi snorted and began to wonder whether Nyles was losing the plot. "Come on, Nyles, do you seriously think I have the time to take an interest in this sort of thing?"

"No, of course not; nor the inclination, I'm sure, but you might be tempted to after you've had a look at her weapons systems."

On cue, a component of the hovering image started to glow bright orange, then another did the same in red. Both were systems connected to the ship's exterior but which lay largely hidden beneath her hull.

As each section glowed an enlarged cut-away version appeared beside the full image, showing greater detail.

"Where did the intelligence for this come from?" Kethi asked, as her gaze flickered across the cut-away.

"You'd be surprised. Our little pirate is far from modest about her assets. This sort of thing's all over the media streams. Obtaining it was hardly a challenge."

Kethi looked more closely as another array lit up. Something about these components looked uncomfortably familiar. Then she had it. "Sanctity!" She felt a chill shiver course through her body.

"Recognise them?"

Of course she did, as he well knew.

Deep down, she had always hoped that nothing like this would ever happen, that these sort of arrays wouldn't be seen again; at least not in her lifetime. She felt a vast pit of dread open inside her. This was what she had been preparing for, almost since she was born, what the whole of the habitat was established to face. Yet now it was actually happening she felt anything but ready. For a few numbed seconds Kethi was grateful to fall back on her training and, operating on automatic pilot, opened the feed so that figures and equations poured in, enabling her to study the information in greater detail. The raw data started to pan across her lenses as a sequence of further elements within the ship glowed in differing colours. The familiar flow of information provided the anchor she needed, and she was able to haul her emotional responses back under control.

A detached part of her mind realised that she would remember this moment forever. The Kethi who was shortly destined to walk out of the hub would be a very different Kethi from the one who had walked in; different expectations, different ambitions.

That went for everyone in the habitat after they had seen this, not just her. They were no longer waiting for something to happen - it just had. Now they were faced with the far more challenging prospect of having to do something about it.

Then, on the heels of the numbness and the dread, an odd calm settled over her. "So," she said, "it begins." She was aware of Nyles watching her intently, so made sure that she didn't flinch, didn't waver, and was proud of how steady her voice sounded as she asked, "When do we leave?"

"In two hours."

Two hours?
She knew the ship was kept at a state of permanent readiness, but even so... Yet she nodded and said calmly, "See you aboard
The Rebellion
."

CHAPTER TEN

E
milio knew about life, knew that 'fair' didn't come into it. Life was all about taking whatever you could whenever the opportunity presented itself. People who chose to hang around waiting for 'fair' to lend them a hand were never going to see old age. Not Emilio, who had already made it as far as his teens.

His people might refer to their world as
Paraíso
but that was only because they enjoyed having something to laugh about; though with the passage of time the joke had lost its flavour. Frysworld was a cesspit; a stinking mire of human misery in which desperation had taken on almost tangible proportions. Oh, sure, that wasn't what the tourists saw, but it
was
what the people here had to live with. You could see it etched into the faces of those around you and burning deep within their eyes - everyone who hadn't already given up, at least. Desperation was a taste that tainted the air. Young tigers on the make; twitching, calculating, sizing everything and everyone up while searching for a way out, for a route to a different world and a better way of life. The pretty and the young selling their bodies and their souls to the tourists for a handful of Standards, they could tell you about it. Without desperation, there was only despair.

Which was where the stranger came in. He was Emilio's ticket out of here.