the Noise Within (2010) (35 page)

This was almost too easy and the thought occurred to Jenner that he and his group were being suckered in, that the AI commanding
The Noise Within
was fully aware of their presence and had elected to toy with them, waiting until they were all close and committed before it deigned to swat them.

The full needle ship squadron consisted of fifteen craft and their augmented pilots, each, in effect, operating as a single fused unit. The squadron had been split into three flights of five, with each flight stationed in a system where it was calculated the pirate vessel
would be most likely to appear. Evidently, he and his group were the lucky ones.

Having practised this so often, each pilot knew their respective tasks and the ships slipped into position without fuss or hesitation. Soon the five craft surrounded the much larger pirate vessel.

They fired simultaneously, the other four targeting
The Noise Within's
primary weapons arrays while Jenner concentrated on the drive outlets at the pirate's rear. They weren't attempting to destroy, just to cripple by limiting the ship's mobility and removing her offensive capabilities. The strikes were therefore planned as an orchestrated series of clinical incisions rather than unbridled mayhem. Unfortunately, while clinical precision might be all well and good in an operating theatre with a sedated patient, it gets a whole lot harder in open space with a subject who chooses to fight back. That first salvo went as planned, but as soon as the needle ships revealed themselves by unleashing their attack,
The Noise Within
responded.

All the rehearsed scenarios then went out the window and the five needle ships found themselves in a dogfight. Yet the initial coordinated strikes had achieved their purpose, and the pirate had been robbed of some of its more formidable weapons - gaping wounds marring the outlandish hull where bristling arrays had previously sat - while the drive outlets were a charred ruin.

The Noise Within's three remaining crew members were in the common room, waiting for Hammond's return, when their world was rocked by what could only be multiple explosions, following one after another like some truncated drum roll. Kyle found himself thrown forward onto the table top in front of him, clinging to it for support while he braced his legs to keep from toppling over. Beside him, Blaine was less fortunate; he and the chair he had been lounging in were both sent crashing to the floor.

"What the hell?"

"The ship is under attack," a voice declared nonchalantly from out of the ether. This was the first time the ship had elected to address them directly without speaking through one of the zombies. "All crew please return to your quarters immediately and seal yourselves in."

"Our quarters?" Drevers snorted derision, hauling himself to his feet. "If this is a fight I'm hanged if I'll -"

"Think!" Kyle said quickly, grabbing the other man's sleeve. "We haven't got suits. If there's a hull breach anywhere near us, we're dead." It was a point that had vaguely disturbed him before but which now seemed a glaring oversight. "Trust me; I've been in battles before - there
will
be hull breaches unless we've the luck of the devil on our side. We were so busy grabbing people in the raids that we never thought to take any suits."

Drevers stared at him, as if still not fully understanding.

"In our quarters the ship can isolate us and ensure we've still got atmosphere even if there
is
a general breach somewhere."

The floor bucked again, as if they were taking further hits. Kyle was on his feet, dragging Drevers with him. "Now come on! It's our only chance of surviving this."

No further arguments; the three of them were sprinting out of the room and down the corridor, with Kyle and Drevers running virtually together and Blaine just behind them.

The floor beneath their feet now seemed to be shaking and stuttering constantly as they ran, presumably caused as much by the recoil as
The Noise Within
fired her own formidable weapons as any damage she was taking. The lights flickered, went out, and then came back on again.

There were no sirens, no strident alarms calling men to battle stations and no further instructions from the ship. Noise, that was the element Kyle missed the most, that and the lack of suits. Running men, the adrenalin rush, the judder of weapons use and the knowledge that death was prowling close by - he could almost have been back in the War, except that this was all happening in virtual silence.

The ship shuddered violently again, sending Baines careening into the wall, while Kyle lost his footing and went sprawling to the floor, a misfortune which almost certainly saved his life. Something ruptured, which hardly came as a surprise bearing in mind the slapdash finishing the ship had been treated to. A jet of pressurised steam bisected the corridor, engulfing Drevers. He screamed, a sound Kyle remembered from the darkest recesses of his nightmares. The sound of agony. The sound of someone dying.

They pulled him free, after he had collapsed. Kyle was able to haul at an arm and drag him from under the deadly plume of searing vapour while Baines pushed from the other side. They were too late. Even Kyle, hardened to such things, found it difficult to look at the man's face, at the blistered, scalded tatters of skin, the eye sockets, all of it bathed in a combination of condensed water and seeping blood; all red raw, like a slab of butchered meat.

Somehow, a part of him had always held back from fully liking Drevers, yet the man's company had been a godsend and they'd been friends in every way that mattered.

But this was far from the first friend he'd lost in battle, and Drevers was beyond helping now. He pushed himself away and concentrated on giving encouragement to Blaine, who had been caught in the wrong section of the corridor. At Kyle's urging, the younger man pressed himself against the wall from which the steam was erupting and, sinking almost to the floor, succeeded in sliding beneath it.

Blaine's trousers were sodden, and he was shaking with shock or fear, but at least he was still alive. The two survivors didn't say anything, didn't mention Drevers, but skirted around the body and ran on. A moment later they stood panting outside the doors to their respective quarters. There had been no further incidents, though the vibration of battle persisted.

Kyle nodded to Blaine, wondering whether he looked as afraid as the other man did to him. "Good luck."

Then he stepped inside his room. He ignored the bed and simply slumped to the floor, back pressed against the wall. It was a lottery now, who would survive: both, one, or none.

Yes, this situation brought back memories of the War, but he had been a part of the action then, not helpless and cowering in his cabin like this, where all he could do was hope and pray that again death would see fit to pass him by.

Success is a relative thing. Jenner and his colleagues were soon discovering that, although damaged,
The Noise Within
was far from helpless. The five pilots attempted to continue picking off their allotted targets - more weapons and sensor arrays - but their ability to do so suffered under fire and the need to preserve their own skins.

The pirate rolled ponderously, attempting to use her now limited mobility to make life harder for the much more agile attacking ships, while engaging the quintet with her still formidable arsenal of weapons. The barrage from both sides was unrelenting. So far Jenner had managed to avoid the worst of
The Noise Within's
retaliations, but X-rays and gamma rays still battered his hull. He pressed the attack, using a breakneck looping approach, centring on the next allocated target.

A weapon placement rotated, coming to bear on his ship. Jenner felt the weapon lock on and immediately revised his course, throwing the craft into a rolling evasive manoeuvre. Perhaps the weapon fired, sending a stream of lethal energies in his direction. If so, he never knew; which by no means ruled out the possibility. Depending on the nature of the beast, it was quite feasible that the energies slid past his ship unnoticed, that he would only ever have been aware of their existence had they actually struck him, wreaking whatever havoc they were intended for. In the event, they didn't, and he was not about to give them a second crack. With his needle ship still in mid-roll, he brought his own weapons to bear on the offending array and destroyed it with a burst of light-quick fire.

Next came a missile, fired from towards the aft of the pirate and heading straight for him; easily destroyed. Except that, as the missile detonated, it released thousands of tiny objects which continued towards him. Jenner reacted instantly, assessing the danger and responding even as this secondary threat started to emerge. He widened the focus of his primary energy cannon and fired again, taking out the swarm before it could disperse and become impossible to track or counter. He did this far more quickly than any normal human could have managed. The difference might have been marginal but it was significant; given a split second longer, the mote swarm would have expanded beyond the scope of his widest beam, spelling disaster. As it was, one or two motes at the very edges of the cloud escaped, but he picked those off with ease.

Nobody saw precisely what hit New Paris. An energy bolt of some sort, certainly, a stray shot from the nearby battle, but beyond that no one was certain. Common consensus seemed to be that the shot had originated from
The Noise Within
, since it was felt that, bearing in mind the distances involved, the ULAW needle ships would not have been packing anything that powerful, but this was pure conjecture.

All that could be attested to was that as people went about their everyday business on the orbital station, oblivious to the fierce battle raging in their system, they experienced a violent jolt, an unheralded judder as the earth, or at least the metal, moved beneath their feet. And that was it.

The hospital and medistops would report a marked increase in fractured arms and related injuries during the hours that followed, where the infirm and unwary had been knocked from their feet by the sudden convulsion, but the majority of folk simply shrugged, muttered imprecations at the authorities or whoever was responsible for the unexpected aberration, and then continued on their way.

Due to his job, Sam Sloane was one of the few people to have a slightly different reaction; one which he summed up in a single word: "Shit!"

"What now?" Denni glanced up from his adjacent workstation.

Sam didn't reply at first, but took the time to review his screens carefully again, to make sure he hadn't read this wrong.

"Well, have you tracked down what caused the jolt?" Denni asked.

"No... but whatever it was has affected the station's orbit."

"Affected how?"

Sam took a deep breath. "As in the orbit's started to decay."

"What? Let me have a look." Denni hurried across to peer over his colleague's shoulder.

There followed a brief pause while he studied Sam's screens. Then he too said, "Shit."

No question about it, the station was moving inexorably off course. Nothing major as yet, certainly the difference was too slight to be noticed by anyone on board without reason to look, but it was there, and every moment that passed would only magnify the discrepancy.

"Do you really think it was a stray bolt from the battle that clipped us?"

"Had to be," Denni replied. "A meteor or anything else as solid as that would have set off the alarms and the defence systems. Anyway, does it really matter?"

"No, I guess not." Sam sighed. "Suppose I'd better make the call."

"I wouldn't worry about it. Not even
he
can blame you for this."

"Want a bet?"

New Paris wasn't helpless. Her builders had not simply sent her sailing on her way with a wave and a smile but with no recourse. She had engines. Granted, not particularly powerful ones given her mass, but there was no need for them to be. The idea was not for her to go gallivanting around the solar system on some merry jaunt but rather to remain here, in the sedate orbit chosen for her; which was where the engines came in. They were there to effect the small adjustments occasionally required to maintain the station's orbit.

Now, for example. Except that, ever since a love-sick jilted maintenance engineer had attempted to seize control of the engines and plunge the entire station into a suicidal dive towards the planet it circled, access was strictly controlled. Subsequently, the engines could only be fired once authorised via a ten-digit code, which Sam knew the second half of. The other five numbers were known only by the mayor. The same mayor who had left strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances.

Sam and Denni both knew what that meant.

The institution of marriage might have been abandoned long ago on most human worlds, but not on New Paris. Here, in a community where the Jesuit faith remained strong, marriage and its attendant handmaiden fidelity were still viewed as integral pillars of social structure. Particularly by the mayor's wife and her parents, who represented the more traditional elements of New Parisian society, and who also happened to be the mayor's chief political and financial supporters. Which was why the mayor's liaisons with a certain Mrs Lindstrom - twelve years his junior and fifteen years younger than his wife - were such a secret. Unfortunately for the mayor, they were very much an open secret as far as the station's small band of civil servants was concerned.