The Noise Revealed

by Ian Whates

  No, a medieval torturer might see nothing familiar in the clinic at first glance, but only because he lacked the understanding to interpret the modern world. Once all was explained to him, he'd doubtless feel right at home.

  A further tingling, this time in her other wrist, told the prisoner that the second drug had been administered, the one designed to break down resistance. She knew the drill, had been trained to hold out against such things, but training only carried you so far and reserves of strength had their limits. She felt herself relax and tried desperately to cling onto her resolve, even as it slipped inexorably away. After a moment, Deathrington came forward to peer into her eyes. She stared back, trying to focus on one of his brown, flecked orbs and its black-hole centre, imagining herself plunging something sharp into that eye and twisting, rummaging around in the soft tissue beneath.

  Evidently satisfied with whatever he saw, Deathrington grunted and stepped back. The rest of the room had lost focus. All she saw was the distorted oval of his face.

  "I think we're ready. Do you feel ready, 516?"

  No! she screamed in her head, but, "M - yes," her treacherous mouth mumbled.

  "Good. Now, I want you to tell me something; I want you to tell me all you can about a man you know well, a man called Jim Leyton."

  Leyton? That was new. Why did they suddenly want to know about Leyton?

  "We'll start with how you met him, shall we?"

  Somewhere deep inside, a lingering shadow of the person she'd once been quailed, but it was only a tiny scrap of character, easy to ignore. Prisoner 516 began to speak and knew that once she started there would be no holding back. She prepared to lay bare her soul.

  Chapter Three

  A figure stood in the shadows, biding his time, waiting for the moment to kill. Sheol Station. Hell in space. The last place Jim Leyton had ever expected to find himself.

  When he and several other eyegees had been assigned to hunt down the crew of The Noise Within, Leyton questioned the wisdom of devoting so many key resources to deal with a mere pirate, little realising there was nothing 'mere' about this particular vessel. Clearly somebody in authority had realised, and while, admittedly, superiors were supposed to be privy to information you weren't, in this particular instance the implications were profoundly disturbing. The Noise Within had quite literally changed the world, all human worlds. How could anyone have known that was going to happen?

  Conspiracy theories had been around forever. Leyton had even helped to fan the flames of one or two in his time - misdirection, smoke and mirrors. Most were preposterous nonsense perpetrated by crazies with a skewed sense of reality but, even granting that, some still held at least a kernel of truth, as he well knew. The perpetrators of such things were currently having a field day, convinced that the 'first contact' represented by The Noise Within was anything but the first. Leyton had seen smear campaigns, cover-ups and hoaxes, knew how ULAW en-masse and officials individually reacted to given situations, and the longer he watched what was going on right now, the firmer his conviction became that this time the crazies might just be on to something.

  All of which went a long way to explaining why he was here now, breaking into a facility operated by the United League of Allied Worlds, who, until recently, he had served faithfully and unreservedly. Yes, The Noise Within had changed worlds all right; his more than most.

  Such musings weren't like him, not once a mission was underway; another indicator that something was wrong with his mindset. Not that he needed the benefit of any clues - he knew exactly what was wrong.

  They'd taken away his gun.

  Leyton felt naked. He could understand the logic, even if he didn't entirely accept it. The explanation that the gun's AI was slavishly loyal to his former masters and would inevitably betray him to ULAW sounded all too plausible. Then again, a really good lie generally did. He might have argued more forcefully were it not for the way the gun had deceived him aboard The Noise Within. That incident had shaken him all the way down to the soles of his boots, and ultimately was the reason he'd relinquished the weapon with such minimal fuss. But understanding that did nothing to assuage his sense of... loneliness? He could think of no better word.

  Nor was he oblivious to the fact that depriving him of the gun made him that little bit less formidable and all the more reliant on these newfound allies, these people who called themselves 'the habitat.'

  Kethi was the key. The beautiful, enigmatic girl had been the bait that lured him here with her casual reference to Mya, the woman he'd never really stopped loving. Could he trust her? The jury was still out on that one, but the longer he remained in this company the more limited his options became.

  So the gun stayed behind, its AI brain deactivated, essentially useless until someone figured out a convenient way of switching between the weapon's various functions without AI supervision.

  This shouldn't have been a problem. After all, as he kept reminding himself, most of his career had been spent without the gun; just not recently.

  Old habits die hard. Leyton trusted that the same held true for old skills. He'd killed with his bare hands often enough of late but this was different: no gun to back him up this time, no voice whispering in his ear and relaying information about concealed defences or how far away any other guards might be. He was on his own.

  Nor had the significance of the moment escaped him. Currently ULAW would have him listed as absent; suspiciously so, granted, after he disappeared from New Paris without a word. Doubtless there would have been a fair bit of fuss at the time - eyegees, those elite agents trusted with Intelligent Guns, were few and far between - but he'd always been confident that he could go back if he chose to, could explain his actions and be welcomed into the ULAW fold once more. Not after this. He was about to cross a line. Killing a ULAW officer, no matter how minor their status, would change everything. What he was about to do represented a firm commitment to a cause he had yet to be convinced by. It would mark him as a rebel through and through.

  Too late for misgivings. The target was an arm's length away.

  Everyone who is ever likely to be called upon to kill - be it soldier, assassin, terrorist or ship's gunnery officer - should be made to do so with their bare hands at least once. Such intimacy is the only way to truly experience the act, to appreciate that when they pressed that button, pulled that trigger, detonated their bomb or released their pathogen, they were putting an end to something precious.

  Leyton reached forward, clamped his right hand firmly around the guard's jaw - covering the mouth - while his left arm wrapped around the man's torso, pinning both arms to his side. He gave the guard no opportunity to react, no time for defensive reflexes to kick in, but immediately pulled the hapless victim back against his own chest, while at the same time pulling forcefully with his right hand. He heard the snap of bones and felt the neck break, felt the life slip away.

  Few things were more final than snuffing out a life and removing an individual from the tapestry of the universe. It was an act that merited respect. Not that Leyton saw himself as a killer with a conscience or any such sentimental twaddle. He never questioned his own actions, never doubted they were necessary, but nor did he underestimate their impact.

  He eased the lifeless body to the floor. There was nowhere to conceal it and, in any case, no need to do so if their timing was right. They should be done and gone long before anyone ventured down this particular corridor again. Eight shimmer-suited figures ran past, his own suit's visor enabling him to see them.

  He stood up and followed, focussing on one person in particular. To his practiced eye, Kethi's tall, lithe form and her effortless gait were unmistakeable, even in the all-encompassing suit.

  Almost at once he was acutely aware of a void where there ought to have been a reasoned voice calmly providing information about enemy deployment and potential threats.

  Leyton had always prided himself on being a loner, particularly once he was chosen to be an eyegee. Members
of the elite unit were a caste apart within the military hierarchy. Not for them the discipline of fighting in formation or partaking in massed troop movements, nor the esprit de corps of a platoon. The eyegees were the cutting edge of ULAW authority, sent to those hotspots where a problem might be solved more readily with a swift clinical incision than with the bludgeoning of a military sledge hammer.

  He was coming to realise, however, that he'd been kidding himself. He'd never been a loner at all, but had still been part of a team: him and the gun. The weapon's silence was now a constant absence. An acute lack that gnawed at his concentration and left him straining to hear, wanting to hear its reassuring presence, even though he knew the voice was gone forever.

  They ran through dimly-lit passageways of dull grey functionality, defined by pipes and turbines and humming machinery. Members of their small party split off in ones and twos, peeling away to left and right at intersecting corridors, each with an allotted task to perform, until only he and Kethi remained.

  Their point of entry had been carefully calculated, allowing them to spread quickly through the bowels of the station like an infestation of vermin, with a minimum of human contact. So far, so good - just the one guard, not even an engineer or maintenance man to deal with. That couldn't last, though. There had to come a point where they were forced to step out into the densely populated areas of the station proper, and, as far as he and Kethi were concerned, that point had just been reached.

  They stopped before an oval metal slab standing slightly proud of the wall; a bulkhead door, the demarcation between habitation and the network of supporting machinery. Without hesitating, Kethi slapped a gelatinous patch against the door seal. Nothing to do now but wait. Neither spoke. Words would have been redundant, reassurance and banter an unnecessary distraction.

  Beyond that door lay the beginning of Sheol Station itself - one of ULAW's darkest secrets, a place that appeared on no official record and was claimed to exist only in whispered rumour and unsubstantiated tales of torture and terror.

  Minutes dragged and Kethi began to fidget, as if worried that something might have gone wrong. Leyton stayed still, having learned the value of patience long ago. Then he felt it: the sudden absence of a subtle vibration, accompanied by a sudden sense of lightness. The station's gravity field had gone. They both stood firm, anchored to the floor by their smartboots, which clung resolutely to any surface until the foot lifted in just the right way. As soon as the weight of gravity left them, Kethi pressed her thumb into the centre of the gelatinous device. For a couple of agonised seconds nothing happened at all, but then the door sprang ponderously open with a hiss, and they were able to step out into the ominously dark corridors of ULAW's least talked about prison ship.

  Something was wrong. The first clue came when the lights dimmed. Time was a difficult thing to keep track of in here, but prisoner 516 knew enough to realise that the next night cycle was a long way off yet, and the lights only ever dipped in the final few minutes before total darkness descended.

  The dimming became a flickering, which heralded the lights failing entirely - everything went out, even the pale 'nightlights' that provided the grey-green glow at either end of the corridor during night cycles. The reaction was as immediate and forceful as it was predictable. Angry voices rose from the stygian blackness all around in query and outrage. Chains were rattled and walls and bars beaten, punctuating the roars of consternation and the mock-screams and hoots of derision. During the brief period of darkness the crescendo of noise reached a peak which threatened to be self-sustaining, especially when the lights only came back on after a fashion - the twilight radiance of a back-up system kicking in. Thankfully, after a while, being able to see again seemed to mollify the inmates and the noise started to subside, but the respite was to be short-lived.

  The gravity failed.

  She fought to focus, battling against the residue of drugs that still lingered in her system. She had been trained and conditioned to resist such methods, but the authorities knew that. After all, they'd been the ones who trained her. They also knew that her mind would collapse entirely before it yielded anything to the more invasive mental probing of AIs, so they persisted with the drugs and the nerve stimulation, wearing her down by degrees. They could afford to be patient. She wasn't going anywhere.

  But this might just be her chance, so she did her best to rally her fractured thoughts and her abused body, anchoring the latter to the bed by hooking her feet beneath its frame. Secure for the moment, she strained to hear beyond the surrounding cacophony, to seek clues as to what was going on.

  The dim light began to pulse rhythmically; among the shouting and the yelling, she detected the blaring of an alarm. She felt, rather than heard, a faint vibration which seemed to course through everything and then cease. That had to have been an explosion. Whatever was happening here, it was more than simple equipment malfunction. A breakout, she guessed, or perhaps a raid to free a particular prisoner. Whatever the specifics, it provided a potential opening, an opportunity she intended to seize. With the station's systems disrupted, the physical confines of her cell looked to be the greatest and most immediate obstacle. No chance of escape if she couldn't even get out of the cubicle.

  She pushed off from the bed and floated across to the front of the cell. As suspected, the energy fields that normally hemmed each prisoner in were gone, but the solid metal bars remained. Nor had the loss of power shorted out the door locks; that would have been too much to hope for, but it never hurt to test the obvious. A wave of nausea swept through her, causing her to cling to the metal bars and breathe deeply as it passed. Concentrate! There had to be a way she could exploit what was happening here.

  A pair of guards clanked along the corridor, their movements awkward in the unfamiliar lack of gravity. Magnetised boots anchored them to the 'ground' and provided a sense of normal perspective. The boots were cumbersome, intended for emergency use only, and lent the proceedings a surreally comic edge - the two guards having to exaggerate every move and gesture. They wore white and blue armour - not the full protection of a military battlesuit but the lightweight half-armour designed for riots and civil disturbances. The combination of costume and inhibited movement gave them a mechanical, robotic semblance.

  Some bright sparks in neighbouring cells tried to spit at them, producing stringy globules of viscous fluid that floated out into the corridor, invariably missing their moving targets. One lucky shot splattered against the shoulder of the second guard, attaching itself and trailing in his wake like some nebulous tattered banner.

  Other than that, the globules of saliva presented more of a threat to fellow inmates on the opposite side of the corridor than they did to the guards. A spitting war started, as indignant prisoners retaliated at their neighbours opposite.

  She ignored all of this and doggedly clung on to her fractured thoughts, holding things together by sheer force of will. She was determined to be ready for whatever came next, anxious not to miss a fleeting opportunity because her mind or body was too flaky to respond.

  Another explosion, unmistakable this time and sounding a good deal closer. It even caused a brief lull in the spitting and shouting and the rattling of plastic cups on bars. The noise returned with added impetus, perhaps fuelled by an edge of panic, but at least the spitting seemed to have been forgotten for now.

  She examined the cell door, knowing that with the right equipment she could have it open in seconds.

  How? What needed to be done? She might not have the necessary tools but if she could remember the process, perhaps she could improvise? Improvise? With what, for God's sake? This was a prison, a cramped cell - a featureless box.

  Panic welled up; she was in danger of losing it, could feel her precious grip on sanity slipping away. She had to stay focused, had to be ready to seize that one chance if and when it presented itself.

  "Go on, you can do it." Louis's voice. She turned to find him smiling at her. They sat on a hillside covered in
grass and wild flowers, the sun beating down. They were both little more than kids. "You can do anything," he told her.

  Something floated past, banishing the vision. Vomit. Somebody had thrown up in the zero g. She watched, mesmerised, as strands of semi-digested food and bile drifted past, none of it coming too close, thank heavens.

  Another guard came clanking along the corridor, this one with shockclub drawn. The deceptively elegant baton of polished white ceramic could deliver a jolt of electricity, via its metal tip, graduated from mild to near-lethal, sufficient to incapacitate even the most formidable of drug-crazed prisoners.

  She watched his approach with a predatory intensity, willing him to stray just a little bit too close, but he didn't. He stuck rigidly to the very centre of the corridor, out of reach of any arms that might stretch towards him from either side. He was almost past her cell when the third explosion came. The whole world lurched. Caught in mid-step, the guard tottered and stumbled, but not towards her. Instead he staggered in the opposite direction, nearer the opposing row of cells. She watched in despair as a pair of strong, hairy arms reached through the bars and grappled with the hapless guard. No! Did she shout that out loud or only in her thoughts?

  Even as cruel fate seemed determined to rob her of the very opportunity she'd been waiting for, hope was resurrected. In his desperate, futile attempts to free himself, the guard let go of his shockclub. It floated away from the struggle, spinning languidly as it drifted across the corridor towards her. No, not quite towards her. As the spinning stick drew nearer she realised, with sinking heart, that it was actually heading for the cell beside hers. Salvation was going to evade her again.

  She pulled herself frantically along, squeezing into the corner, cheek pressed against the bars, and thrust an arm out towards the white baton. Her shoulder burned as she stretched desperately and she was shocked to find herself sobbing from the effort and the frustration. Her fingers brushed against something and she closed them quickly, too quickly. They grasped only empty air. That touch, however, was enough to deflect the shockclub, to divert it in her direction.