by Ian Whates
"I don't... think..." Kyle gasped, faltering partway up the first flight.
"Then don't think," Leyton advised. "Just move. We're nearly there." Kethi had to be making for the roof, nothing else made sense. "A little bit further, that's all. Come on, Kyle, don't give up on me now."
The engineer had stopped, leaning forward, hand resting on his knee, chest heaving to suck in breath. Leyton didn't want to leave him, not after all this, but at the same time he didn't fancy dying on his behalf either. "Come on, Kyle!"
At Leyton's urging the other man started to move forward again. Not fast enough though, not nearly fast enough. A dark shape appeared in the doorway behind them. Leyton didn't hesitate, firing immediately, and then backing up the steps. The shape disappeared, but return fire answered his single round, smashing into the steps as he abandoned them like a wave lapping remorselessly in pursuit of a bather's retreating feet.
The resumption of gunplay evidently inspired Kyle to find his second wind, because suddenly he was moving far more freely again. Leyton fired off a couple more shots at the vacant doorway to discourage pursuit and then headed quickly after him. They had made it along the short landing and started up the second flight before he heard the clatter of feet on the stairway below. Leyton stopped and waited.
The presence of landings meant no stairwell, no opportunity for those below to take pot-shots, at least until they acquired direct line of sight. He crouched at the base of the second flight of steps, listening as the pursuers drew rapidly closer and judging when they reached the top of the first flight. He was already beginning to squeeze the trigger as the first man emerged around the corner. The shot caught him in the leg, just above the knee, punching straight through in a shower of blood and shattered bone. The man screamed and went down. Leyton was already sprinting upwards, taking three steps at a time and rapidly catching Kyle.
The stairs went all the way up to the roof. How Kethi knew that, he had no idea. He was beyond being surprised by her. Somehow, despite Kyle's flagging energy, they made it to the top without the pursuing troopers or agents getting to grips with them; largely thanks to Leyton's dogged rearguard defence.
As they took the final few stairs he heard a familiar rumbling - a craft coming in. He just hoped it was one of theirs. Then they were out of the door, onto a rooftop covered in a mosaic of paving stones. A courtyard garden, complete with slender, brick-built flower beds and metal garden furniture, currently in the process of being flung haphazardly about by the arrival of the craft: a gleaming silver flitter. He watched as a chair was sent skidding across the paving by the downdraft, tipping over before it could plummet off the roof. Joss waved frantically from the flitter's pilot seat as the landing skids touched down and the hatch popped open.
Built for speed, Leyton wasn't even convinced this sleek arrowhead of a craft would take all three of them plus Joss, but who was he to argue?
He covered the others as they scampered across to the flitter, emptying what remained in his final ammo clip down the stairwell blind before sprinting for the gaping doorway. Kethi was clambering in beside Joss, while Kyle made himself comfortable behind them. Leyton wasn't familiar with the habitat's flitters and could only hope there was an empty seat beside the engineer. Thank goodness they hadn't brought anyone else on this mission. He leapt up the short ladder and into the hatchway, half falling on top of Kyle before settling into the vacant seat that was indeed there, and fumbled to strap himself in.
The hatch retracted and sealed even before he'd fully repositioned himself. Dark clad figures erupted from the stairway and bullets pinged off the flitter's hull as she started to lift.
"Hang on," Joss called back above the climbing roar of the engines. "They've got copters closing in and have also scrambled a couple of jets from the military base. So far they only seem to have in-atmosphere fighters, so I'm going to take us as high as I can as quickly as I can. This might get a little rough."
Good tactic. Joss's clipped briefing was exactly the sort of thing Kyle needed to hear, keeping him informed while offering reassurance that the person at the controls knew what they were doing. Initially, Leyton had been a little surprised to see Joss here, certain that she was still grieving Wicksy's loss; then again, he doubted the habitat's native pilots would have had much in-atmosphere flight experience, so her being here made sense. Sentimentality was something they could ill afford.
The craft lifted almost ponderously from the rooftop, or so it seemed to Leyton's adrenaline-pumped senses. Bullets continued to ping impotently off their hull, sounding like hailstones hitting a window. Finally the nose tilted upwards and Joss was able to pour on the juice.
G-force slammed against Leyton's chest, pressing him into the seat. At the same time everything started to pale towards monotone. He knew what was coming, he'd been here before, which didn't stop him fighting it. He wondered how Kyle was coping beside him, but couldn't spare the effort to look. Concentration, that was the key; yet despite his every effort colour continued to leach from the surroundings and the world began to narrow, to close in, as peripheral vision shut down. He refused to accept the inevitable; there was too much going on. They weren't safe yet, he couldn't afford to black out; so he wasn't going to, not this time.
But he did.
Coming to again was always the worst part. Muscles turned rebellious, as if they'd enjoyed their lack of supervision and gained confidence from his temporary loss of control. His head twitched and jerked, refusing to either stay still or perform the simplest of tasks such as turning, and his arms flopped uselessly. He felt like a marionette with half the guiding wires cut. Fortunately, the effect passed in a matter of seconds but Leyton hated it, that sense of not being in command of his own body.
Kyle was still out, though doubtless he'd be coming around at any second.
Outside, the sky had lost its blue and Leyton could see stars, so presumably Joss had won her race with the jet fighters.
From beside the pilot, Kethi looked around at him and smiled. "Back with us, I see."
He wondered whether she'd blanked out at all. Probably not, given what he'd seen her do earlier. The smile withered away, presumably in the face of what she saw in his eyes. The fact that he knew; knew who she was, what she was.
When they first met he'd thought the name Kethi sounded familiar, now he remembered why. The sadness in her expression as she turned towards the front was like a door closing; the implication being that she recognised his newfound knowledge and regretted it, which suggested that his opinion mattered to her. Interesting.
A groan from beside him signalled Kyle's return to consciousness. He watched, amused, as the engineer struggled to reassert control over his defiant muscles. Finally the other man shook his head and grinned across at Leyton. "I hate it when that happens."
They reached The Rebellion and slipped inside her without incident. Once out of the shuttle, Leyton cornered Kethi, grabbing her arm before she could slip away. "We need to talk."
She glared at him but then nodded. He read reluctance and resignation in her face as she said, "All right, just let me get us underway before ULAW can muster anything to send after us. I'll meet you in your quarters."
He could hardly object to that. "Fair enough." He let go of her arm. As she walked away, Leyton couldn't help but watch. She moved with such grace. He tried to analyse his feelings towards her and failed.
"So this is where you make your home these days, huh?" Kyle said, joining him. The man had a knack for jovial bonhomie that Leyton could only envy.
"Indeed it is."
"And I take it you're looking for an engineer."
"Good guess."
"Very flattering that you've gone to so much trouble, but I'm guessing there's a reason you needed me in particular."
Leyton didn't want to get involved in this, not now. "Maybe, but time for that later." He wondered where he could find someone to palm Kyle off onto ahead of his meeting with Kethi. Emily Teifer, who had grudgingly taken
over engineering after the battle, seemed the logical choice, but he couldn't very well put Kyle to work the moment he arrived and, besides, engineering was a fair trek away.
"Look, let me show you the rec room," he said. There was bound to be somebody around. "You can relax, have a beer or two, and we can take things from there."
"That sounds good to me."
The first person Leyton saw as they entered the room was Joss, sitting on her own, warming down after her timely retrieval flight. Perfect; someone Kyle had already met. Only as he went to leave the two of them together did he register the wounded look Joss gave him and realise that to her Kyle was little more than a direct replacement for Wicksy, a reminder she could doubtless have done without.
Cursing his own preoccupation, Leyton returned to his cabin to wait for Kethi. Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing after all. Life could be a bastard at times and you had to learn to roll with the punches. Joss was an integral part of the crew; the quicker she accepted what had happened and moved on, the better, for all their sakes.
Scant moments after he arrived at his quarters there came a double knock at the door.
"Come in. It isn't locked."
Kethi looked stern faced, as if determined not to be apologetic for anything; neither for what she'd done nor for who she was.
"Well," she said, "here I am."
Okay, the direct approach was fine by him. "Your name, it's not really Kethi, is it?" he said. "It's K-E-T-H-I. Kinetic Entity Twinned with Higher Intelligence. I've heard about it - knew the name rang a bell when I first met you, but couldn't quite place it. Now, having seen what you're capable of, I can. Kethi's an experiment, isn't it? One that was abandoned, or at least so I thought."
"Abandoned by ULAW perhaps, but never by us," she replied. "Those involved came to the habitat and have continued their work ever since. Not with universal success, it has to be said. I'm the one that worked, and they're still trying to figure out why.
Her eyes flashed with... what? Defiance, challenge, suppressed anger? Perhaps a little of all of them.
He tried to reconcile what he knew of the KETHI project with the beautiful, vibrant woman before him. KETHI had been an attempt to produce human-AI synergy - much like the Kaufman Industries project, which had resulted in the needle ships that had engaged and defeated The Noise Within - but it had approached the problem from the opposite direction. Whereas KI had been intent on linking a human mind with the AI of a ship, the KETHI project had sought to introduce a nascent AI into the brain of a human baby at the embryonic level, where it would grow and develop as the child did. The aim had been to produce a more natural gestalt of the two forms of intelligence. It sounded viable in theory but the problems of rejection and the complications that arose in physical and mental development proved insurmountable. At least so Leyton had always believed. Apparently others had persevered, overcoming the obstacles. No wonder Kethi was so brilliant an analyst. She combined the processing capabilities of an AI with the intuition and leaps of logic that only an organic mind could make.
"Your aunt," he said, "the one who died defending the habitat...?"
"Was lovely," she replied, wistfully. "She was a 'near miss,' no deformity or rejection issues but incomplete meshing of the gestalt. The AI part of her brain didn't develop fully. None of which stopped her from being a wonderful person."
Leyton nodded. "You mention deformity," he said, suddenly making a connection and wondering if it was valid. "Is Simon...?"
Her turn to nod. "Yes. His arm is only the most apparent legacy. He nearly died at birth and had an incredibly difficult childhood. Eventually they had to kill the AI part of his brain entirely, with no guarantee how that would work out, but he came through it. Simon's a lot tougher than he looks. I think that's one of the reasons he's always so cheerful, almost as if he takes every day as a gift that he came close to never enjoying."
"That could have happened to you," he said, wondering how many had suffered worse during the course of the project.
"Yes, but it didn't." She took a step closer, her eyes gazing into his. As she stood before him, beautiful, vulnerable but proud, he struggled to think of her as anything other than fully human.
"I am human," she whispered, guessing his thoughts. Her face had drawn very close now.
"Are you? Prove it." He had no idea why he said that. Yes, he did. It was an invitation, but an ambiguous one; deniable and open to interpretation, which left the onus on her to make the next move. If she wanted to.
Evidently, she did.
As her lips moved towards his, he was reminded of another cabin, another unexpected encounter. Boulton. Yet this was totally different. Kethi's lips felt soft, plump and surprisingly cool. When he thought of Boulton, he remembered a body as rigid as steel; with her it had all been about need and dominance, with no room for anything gentle or loving and certainly nothing as feminine as the feel of Kethi's body against his as she pressed against him, encircled by his arms.
She drew back a little, a twinkle in her eye. "Human enough for you?"
"It'll do." He drew her into another kiss.
After all too brief a time she pulled away, easing out of his grip. "Sorry, I have to go. Still on duty."
He stared at her, not believing she meant it. "Surely they can cope without you for a little while?"
She giggled - a very young, girlish sound which surprised him coming from her. "Don't be so impatient. Aren't I worth waiting for?"
"Yes, but..."
"Shhh." She stepped forward, running a dainty fingertip down his lips and chin. "This is all so... Look, one step at a time, all right?" With a final, coy smile, she turned and left.
After the door had closed behind her, Leyton stood for a few seconds and simply stared at the empty space where she'd been. He shook his head and couldn't help but grin. Yes, that seemed all too human to him. Only then did he realise that she'd said nothing to explain the time-defying speed she'd displayed in dispatching Boulton. Had the kiss been intended as a distraction, to prevent him from pursuing the subject? If so, it worked remarkably well.
Chapter Fourteen
The first set of coordinates Lara provided them with proved to be a dead end, quite literally. It led them to an insignificant corner of Virtuality just off a main thoroughfare, a place that was never destined to be anything more than backdrop, the sort of thing programmers habitually filled in with repetitive bulk standard coding. This time around someone had clearly decided to be creative, and, at the far end of a stunted, brick-lined cul-de-sac, had added a distinctive flourish: a shallow, insignificant little alcove.
"One down..." Tanya murmured.
The second of Lara's 'possibles' looked more promising. The coding was integrated into the back wall of a club.
"I'm sensing a pattern here," Philip said.
"Either that or we're about to encounter another alcove or two," Malcolm added.
"I'm putting my faith in the name."
The place was called Veils and, had he been aware of it, this would have been the first place Philip would have looked even without Lara's recommendation, give the Byrzaens' apparent penchant for flowing lines and floaty things.
"I've never been in here before," Malcolm said, as if to defend his not thinking of the place without Lara's prompting.
That in itself was interesting. Philip had somehow assumed his father was familiar with every part of Virtuality. Evidently not.
Veils lived up to its name. The first thing that struck Philip was how different the whole vibe of the place was from Bubbles. The rhythmic thud of bass that underpinned everything might have been much the same, but here it was a little less frenetic. That was symptomatic of the difference, he realised. Bubbles had been all about high energy cranked up to the nth degree; the very atmosphere had crackled with anticipation. Here, while energy was still encouraged by the music and the drink, everything seemed less urgent, as if the designers had quite deliberately aimed for a more chilled and laidback ambience.
Then, of course, there were the veils.
Soft furnishings - padded sofas and curved corner units, chairs, bean bags, water seats, and even a few hover mats - were artfully scattered at the fringes of the dance floor in a manner that looked almost haphazard but which cleverly utilized the available space to its maximum. Around, above and within these seat arrangements were the veils. Floating, hanging, draping and wafting in the air currents created by the movement of patrons and the club's air conditioning, they were in a multitude of colours, though violets, blues and greens predominated.
Even the dance floor complied with the theme. Although clearly solid - at least to judge by the number of people confidently gyrating and quick-toeing their way around it - the surface looked to be anything but. Instead it seemed to consist of nothing more than a mass of swirling veils, twisting serpents of silken cloth which changed colour and definition constantly as lights beneath the flooring pulsed and transformed in time with the music.
Nor was this effect confined to the veils on the dance floor; many of those throughout the club pulsed in varying colours and brightness with perfect synchronicity.
Philip found his attention transfixed by one veil in particular, which hung immediately before him and dropped from somewhere high above, reaching almost to the floor. The veil writhed sinuously, despite there being no apparent breeze in this part of the club to stimulate it, and the purple, green and black patterning seemed to ripple and run up and down the material's length. It was as if the veil performed solely for him, and the way it swayed put him in mind of a woman - a wiggle of the hips and sway of the pelvis - dancing privately, just for him.
He reached out and grasped the veil by an edge, running the material through his hand. It felt silky and warm to the touch, almost as if it were alive. He let go, allowing the material to drop back into its undulating rhythm.
