The Noise Revealed (27 page)

She drew her gun slowly and pointed it at him, realising that she could kill him where he stood and he'd never know who was responsible, wouldn't even have a chance to recognise that he was dead. Perhaps he deserved such a fate... but perhaps not. Instead, she stepped into the room, knowing that her movement would be mirrored in the window he was staring out of.

He turned around sharply and on cue, and smiled as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if he'd been standing there just waiting for a psychotic woman to enter his room and threaten him with a gun.

He looked no different. He was just as confident, suave, and maturely handsome as ever, his brown hair showing the same degree of grey at the sides, while the crow's feet around his eyes conspired to be gentling rather than aging. Somehow, after all that had happened to her, she felt that he ought to look different, older perhaps, but he didn't. It was the same disarming smile that greeted her, the same Pavel Benson who stood before her and said, "Hello, Mya."

So calm, so composed, as if he was the one in charge here, despite the fact that it was her holding the gun.

"You bastard!"

Now the expression changed, to sorrow, remorse, perhaps even anguish. Yet she knew him to be the consummate politician, had seen him show the full gamut of emotions without ever being fully certain which, if any, were genuine.

"I'm so sorry. There was nothing I could do," he said, hands outstretched with palms towards her, beseeching. He took a tentative step forward.

"Don't!" She raised the gun a fraction and he froze. "You know what they do there, don't you? At Sheol. You let them do that to
me
."

"I know, and that's something I'll always have to live with. I did what I could. I let the rebels know about Sheol and about you, made sure they learnt how important you were."

"What?"

"I realised there was a leak, although I didn't know it was the habitat - we'd forgotten all about them - but someone was being fed information. We kept the leak open to learn more and for the potential it offered to disseminate false intel in the future. I doctored an outgoing info package, made certain it contained enough hint and detail to lead them to you."

She shook her head, knowing how devious he could be, not sure whether to believe him. "Why? What were you expecting to achieve?"

"I don't know... a public exposure of Sheol, a rescue...
something
." Another shuffled step forward.

"Crap, all of it. The habitat had never shown their hand before, why would you think they'd do so now?"

"It worked, didn't it?"

"Only because they wanted to buy Jim Leyton's loyalty. If not for that, I'd still be rotting in that stinking piss hole."

"Maybe, maybe not. Things are moving fast, Mya; the gloves are off. People are having to be bold just to stay alive. I think the habitat might well have made the move to gain you, irrespective of Leyton. You're one hell of an asset in your own right, and if that hadn't worked, I'd have come up with something else. I would never have abandoned you, not to Sheol, not anywhere. You know that."

She wanted so badly to believe him. This was the man who'd mentored her since she was first recruited, who'd looked out for her through her entire career. If she couldn't trust him, who
could
she trust?

He was suddenly there, standing directly before her with his chest resting gently against the muzzle of her gun.

"If you're going to kill me, Mya, do it now. Shoot."

For a tortured second she nearly did, feeling the muscles in her finger tighten as the urge to twitch that trigger finger vied with so many other considerations and came close to winning. She almost surrendered to the moment, could see in her mind's eye the bloody hole punched through the torso of the man who had betrayed her. Almost, but not quite.

The gun felt abruptly heavy. Her arm sagged and the barrel slipped downward. He reached up to hold her wrist and gently move the hand and the weapon it held to one side.

He took a deep breath. "For a moment there, I thought you were actually going to do it."

"For a moment, so did I."

His hands reached up to stroke either side of her face. "I'd never abandon you," he repeated, as if by saying it often enough he could make her believe him. Perhaps he was right.

His hands reached behind her, drawing her to him, his lips lowering to meet hers, and she clung to that firm body, dropping the gun and responding to his kiss as all the grief and the hurt and the need rose up, threatening to overwhelm her. Mya felt herself picked up and carried into the next room, wondering if he'd always been this strong or if she'd lost more weight during her ordeal than she realised. Gently he lowered her onto the bed and she felt him lie on top of her. They were still clothed but she wished they weren't as she opened her legs and wrapped them around him, her heels pressing against his buttocks, drawing him onto her, into her. He shifted again, pulling back so that he could remove his top, revealing a toned body and near hairless chest. Her arms reached out to either side of her, opening herself to his mouth, his lips, his hands, as their clothing slipped away. She clasped at the black silk bed sheets as his tongue found a nipple, the same sheets she had clung to in the deepest recesses of her mind when Sheol unleashed its worst; her haven, her retreat. None of that seemed important anymore. All that truly mattered was here and now.

Chapter Sixteen

Kyle felt sure there was an old saying about frying pans and fires that would have fitted his current situation perfectly.
Byrzaen engines?

He hadn't seen much of Leyton in the past couple of days, nor of Joss, the pilot who'd pulled them off the rooftop in Arcadia and whom Jim had subsequently dumped him on in the rec room. She was an odd one, Joss. He couldn't quite make out whether she liked him or despised him. For all her outward politeness she treated him with a reserve that bordered on distaste at times, as if afraid that he was going to infect her with some hideous disease. Perhaps she simply resented the fact that she'd had to put herself at risk to rescue him. There was definitely some issue. All of which he found intriguing. She wasn't the sort of woman he usually went for - not that she was ugly as such, but he certainly wouldn't have called her pretty. More homely. There was a warmth to her, though, a passion that showed sometimes in her smile, her humour. The fact that he felt excluded from that passion and warmth much of the time galled him, offending his male pride.

He hated to admit it, but he was beginning to think of Joss as a challenge.

Most of his time since coming aboard had been spent with Emily Teifer - a stocky, solidly built rock of a woman whom he wouldn't have cared to face in an arm wrestle. He'd expected her to resent him for arriving out of nowhere and taking over her position, but nothing could have been further from the truth. So much for his expertise in women. He'd never seen anyone more relieved to relinquish responsibility and pass it on to someone else. Then he got a look at the ship's engines and began to understand why.

The energy veils were instantly familiar, though the engine units they fed into were less so - not Kaufmans, that was for sure; the fruit of some other line of development. That aside, he could easily have been back aboard
The Noise Within
.

"Gods in heaven," he said. "Byrzaen technology. They don't seriously expect me to work with
this
, do they?"

"'Fraid so, lover man," Emily replied. He'd made the mistake in an off-guard moment of referring to some of his previous sexual exploits and she'd taken to calling him 'lover man' since. "That's why they chased halfway across the galaxy to find you: 'The Man Who Works with Hybrid Engines.'"

He opened his mouth to say something and closed it again; thought for a second and then had another go. "I tinkered with the engines on
The Noise Within
, that's true, but that was
all
I did: tinker! I haven't a clue what to do about this." He gestured to where the shifting, multi-coloured veils that led to or from the drive units were clearly damaged. There were no pastel shades in the veils, the ever changing patterns were depicted in dark greens, royal blues, deep purples and burgundy reds - gothic silk that never stopped flowing, shifting, mutating. Except where the silk was torn. For some reason the energy didn't simply flow over the rents, closing them as if they'd never been; the tears remained, as if the veils genuinely were a type of material with defined form and boundaries. Yet clearly, they weren't. Energy shouldn't behave that way, not in this universe. Around the damaged areas the shifting colours slowed, as if the rents formed a choke point, and the edges of the holes themselves were jet black; blockages around which the energy could flow only sluggishly.

"Tinkering is more than most of us have done, Kyle," Emily said. "It still makes you the expert."

"Haven't you tried to fix this?" he asked in desperation, certain that others here must know far more about these energy fields than he did.

She guffawed. "Oh, yes, I've tried... sort of. Did bugger all good, though."

"What do you mean 'sort of'?"

She shrugged. "Well I didn't want to make things worse."

In other words she'd looked at the problem from a dozen different angles before deciding to leave things well alone. He could understand that. In fact, he sympathised entirely, which was why he said after a moment's consideration, "I need to talk to the captain."

"You could do that, of course."

"But?"

"Look, the captain's a busy lady, with a hundred things on her mind. If you asked to see her, she'd make the time, I'm sure she's that sort. Then you explain to her that you don't really think you're up to the job. Bearing in mind that she took the ship all the way across ULAW space and then risked her own neck to extract you from some backwater world, all just to get you here, what do you reckon she's likely to say?"

He sighed. "Give it a go anyway."

"Exactly. So why not cut out all the bits in between and just go straight to the giving it a go part? If you're as unsuccessful as you seem to think you'll be,
then
go and trouble the captain."

"That's certainly a plan," he conceded. Actually, even though he hated to admit as much, it was a pretty good plan.

So instead of approaching Kethi or even Jim Leyton and pleading his ignorance - not incompetence, no, he'd never admit to that - he decided to take a closer look at things for himself, starting with the most familiar element, the drive units. Outwardly, they looked similar to those he remembered from the war, but as he began to delve beneath their shiny metal cowlings he soon realised they were a far cry from anything he'd ever seen before. These were no Kaufman drives jerry-rigged to accommodate the Byrzaen energy fields as on
The Noise Within
, but had been purpose-built to utilise them.

"They had to adapt what they learnt from the Byrzaen derelict into a more familiar form," Emily explained. "No one could fully understand the mechanism of the alien drive units themselves, still can't as far as I know. It's one of the things they keep working on. We suspect our version isn't as efficient as the original, but who cares? It works."

Energy from the veils was drawn in through intake valves, he could see that much... computerised regulation, as precise as any he was used to... He summoned up instructions and 3D schematics, which scrolled across a virtual screen and hung suspended in the air before him, enabling him to compare the details in the manual to the physical reality. He rotated the schematic, studying every intricacy, freezing the image in place and crawling under the drive unit, pulling himself out to squint at the diagram once more before going back again, as he traced the flow of energy. Gradually, the whole process began to fall into place.

Then, once he was confident that he'd mastered the principles and mechanics of the drive units, he took another look at the energy veils, and realised that he still knew absolutely nothing.

"This is hopeless."

"Hey, don't be so defeatist," Emily said. "You're doing great."

"Yeah, until it gets to the difficult bit."

He frowned and stared at the tattered veils for the hundredth time. It still made no sense whatsoever - how energy could behave like that. One rent in particular claimed his attention, for good reason; it was getting bigger. When he first arrived, the tear reached perhaps a third of the way across one of the central energy curtains, it now stretched across at least half. What would happen when the veil tore all the way across was anyone's guess, but Kyle was willing to bet it'd be nothing good.

For the moment,
The Rebellion
hung in an anonymous part of space, going nowhere very slowly indeed, Kethi unwilling to risk another jump with the energy fields in their current state. Nor could Kyle blame her. In fact, the only detail he had a problem with was the bit where he was the one expected to fix things.

Suddenly he raised a finger and smiled, as if struck by sudden inspiration. "I know what I need to solve this."

"What?" Emily asked, all eager.

"A beer."

"And you really think will help, do you?"

"Of course; stimulates the old grey cells. It's a well known fact."

Emily shook her head. "Come on then, lover man, let's go to the rec room and feed those grey cells of yours. Maybe we can even get them tipsy enough to spark an answer, preferably before the engines pack up for good."

Who was he to argue?

Kyle walked around the engine room. There was no one else there. Emily had hit the sack an hour ago and he should probably have done the same, but he was restless and felt compelled to come back here to do... what exactly? He wasn't sure.

Joss hadn't been in the rec room and he didn't really know any other crew that well yet, so after Emily left he just sort of ended up back here again.

There was a new wall in place, where the old one had been holed and melted in the attack. Gun metal grey, like all the rest. If Emily hadn't told him he might never have known about the damage. The wall looked no different, no newer, than any of the others, apart from the fact that a patch of flooring in front of it was blackened in a streaky, irregular pattern. Evidently the cowling to one of the drive units had also been partially warped and blistered, but again that had been replaced before he arrived, and Emily had taken care of any slight glitches in the drives themselves. He'd run a diagnostics first thing, and the engines were purring along nicely, which just left those damned energy veils to worry about. Problems only arose when the ship initiated a jump. Kyle had seen it for himself. The engines' performance dropped drastically, and there was no mechanical reason for that. It was the veils. During a jump they became stretched, pulled towards the drive units, the flow of energy around the tears interrupted. Damaged as the veils were, the feed wasn't constant, and the rents grew a little wider each time, causing performance to drop a little lower still. Eventually, the engines would fail completely, starved of energy, and if that should occur in mid-jump... There were rumours of ships which had suffered that fate. Only rumours, because no one had ever come back to give an actual report.