The Noise Revealed (36 page)

At first she hadn't believed it, hadn't
wanted
to believe it, but then she'd hacked ULAW's security systems and tracked down the recording of the mission. It had been taken via an eyegee's visor and stored by the gun's AI, as all missions were - an infallibly objective means by which to assess performance and effectiveness. Even afterwards she wondered whether the recording had been doctored, whether she was meant to find it, but that seemed ridiculously paranoid. This wasn't something that had been left lying around for her to stumble across, it had been filed and sealed under heavy encryption and a hell of an effort to get to. No, this was the real thing, she was sure of it; a recording of Jim's most recent mission. A triumphant success, of course. Except that at one point Jim had been forced to mow down two ULAW troopers in order to kill the man beyond them, who would otherwise have blown the mission wide open and killed them all. Collateral damage: necessary, unavoidable.

How was he to know that one of those troopers had been Louis, Mya's brother, the lynchpin of her existence?

Until she saw that recording she'd no idea that Jim was responsible or even involved, only that Louis was dead.

It wasn't Jim's fault; she knew that, logically. She'd have done the same thing in his place. Yet how could she possibly continue to love the man who had killed her only brother? She tried. Despite her hurt, her anger, the accusations she was desperate to scream at him, she tried. Never saying anything because her mind told her it wasn't his fault and because such a tirade would mean having to explain how she knew about the incident and likely lead to her losing her job. So she bottled everything up; the hurt, the pain, the fury. Instead she ended up yelling at him over other things, trivial things that didn't really matter but which gave her an excuse; until in the end she froze at his touch and couldn't bear the thought of being near him.

When it all became too much she left, without ever telling him why.

Tobias and the troopers hung back out of sight, leaving Mya to stride up to the conference room doors alone. The two guards must have heard the shooting; they were alert, with weapons drawn, but they relaxed subtly on seeing her and the muzzles of their guns didn't track her as she drew nearer. After all, they'd no reason not to trust her.

"Everything all right here?" she asked.

"Yeah," the one nearest her confirmed.

"Good," she said as she shot them both.

The conference room doors were locked. Tobias's gun, set to energy, had them open in no time. Within, they found Benson standing over the other occupants - Catherine Chzyski, Nyles and the engineer Kyle, all of whom were seated in a row, their hands placed on the table-top palms down. Pavel held a gun trained on the three of them.

"What took you so long?" her lover asked.

The odds didn't bother Leyton. Numbers were only relevant up to a point. His real concern was the fact that one of them was an eyegee. True, he had his gun back, but that was only half the story. Coming towards him now was the real deal.

He had one chance, and several lives including his own depended on his ability to take it. He needed to nail his former colleague before the gun's AI cottoned on to how well equipped he was. As soon as they realised he had an eyegee's gun, no matter that it lacked the usual guiding intelligence, all hell would break loose.

Leyton thumbed the dial round to energy and took aim. Before he could pull the trigger, a wave of heat washed over him, the section of wall just above his head catching fire and melting, while the habitat trooper beside him cried out in brief agony and collapsed, his uniform and skin burnt away to reveal a grotesque display of seared organs and blackened ribs.
The eyegee had used energy.
Either they'd sussed him out far sooner than he'd hoped, or this man wasn't taking any chances.

Something flashed through the air towards him.
Grenade!
Leyton flung himself to one side, reflecting on the fact that they must have upgraded the guns again. His grenades had nothing like this range. It was also a timely reminder that only the best of the best were selected for the eyegee unit. This guy had beaten him to the punch.

The shell exploded, buffeting him in mid-leap, slamming his body into the far wall. Shrapnel sliced a line of agony up one leg and he lost his grip on the gun. His head crashed against something - floor or wall, he couldn't be certain. Consciousness started to fade, but he clung to it doggedly. For a few dazed seconds he lay there, trying to focus. The gun rested on the floor just beyond his outstretched left hand. He sensed rather than saw people approaching.

What would the eyegee's visor be showing him as at the moment? An amber dot? Not red, technically he wasn't armed so didn't represent an immediate threat. Amber seemed most likely; but the moment he touched the gun it would flare up to red and the eyegee would react. He had to make this quick and decisive, or he was a dead man.

One more deep breath, allowing the enemy to come one more step closer; then he moved, snatching up the gun left-handed and firing. Body armour, clothing and flesh withered away as the deadly energies ripped into the eyegee at the front of the group. Even before the man had fully collapsed Leyton played the beam over the three soldiers behind him, taking all of them out before they could get a shot away. Only then did Leyton ease up, forcing his reluctant finger to lift from the trigger. Only then did he move, dragging his aching body into a sitting position.

He checked his weapon and cursed. The power was pretty much drained; he'd fired for too long. Projectile should still work and presumably the grenades - both of which were mechanical functions - but sonic and energy were denied him until he could recharge. He flicked the dial to projectile and fired an aimless round down the corridor, just to be certain. It worked. At least that was something.

Blood seeped from the gash in his leg but it was only a flesh wound. It would sting rather than disable. His ears were ringing from the force of the explosion, but that would fade with time, he hoped.

Having hauled himself to his feet, Leyton headed back to the conference room, conscious of how quiet everything was beyond the buzzing inside his own head. You'd never know there was a small war being fought in the building. The silence started to bother him. By now he ought to have heard the sounds from any other gun battle, at least on this floor, which meant Kethi and Mya's little skirmish must have ended; favourably, he hoped.

Evidently not. The two KI security men were lying dead. A pair of ULAW troopers now crouched in the open double doorway of the conference room, weapons raised, each covering an approach to the room. Pure luck that neither of them had been looking directly at him when he peeked around the corner. There was no point in hesitating, no telling who or what was inside that room. He stood flush against the wall, holding the gun two handed before him, pointed towards the ceiling. In his mind he held the image of the two soldiers, fixing their positions. Then he spun round, swivelling on his left foot, bringing his body round the corner and his arms level, firing twice in quick succession.

He was running before the two bodies hit the ground, leaping through the doorway, gun at the ready... to find himself staring down the muzzle of Mya's gun. Benson stood to one side, covering Kyle and the others. A further ULAW trooper stepped forward from behind the door, automatic weapon levelled. There was no sign of Kethi.

"Hello, Jim," said Benson. "We've been expecting you."

Malcolm considered it to be something of an anti-climax when all the avatars vanished again. Except for Tanya and the grinning man at the bar, of course.

Tanya tutted. "Repeating himself already? I'd have expected a bit more."

"Why is he here at all?" Malcolm asked. "I mean, if this is a virus, why a visible manifestation in Virtuality?

"To taunt us, to show us how clever they are," Philip suggested.

"Yeah," Tanya agreed. "My guess is that they're showing us how they got the virus into the system."

"A Trojan horse," Philip muttered.

"Clever bastards. They sneaked it in wrapped inside an avatar, like sugar-coating a pill." Tanya said.

Malcolm suspected she hadn't understood his son's ancient historical reference. They were all three on their feet by now. Tanya stepped forward, to interpose herself between Philip and the stranger, as though anything in this pseudo-physical world was likely to help if a virus was busy wreaking havoc on the files that sustained them. Not that the stranger had made any overtly threatening move. Not yet, at any rate; just that smile.

Malcolm didn't doubt for a second that they were in trouble, though. He let part of his consciousness slip away, spreading out through the vast computer network of Home in search of a countermeasure while keeping the main focus here. Doing this took practice, skills Philip hadn't yet learned.

Should he urge Philip to dissolve his focus and flee to the furthest corners of every system on Home? No, that wasn't an answer. They were clearly up against a sophisticated weapon. If it found its way into the files supporting Philip, hiding would be redundant.

The man stood up. Tall, tanned, golden-haired - an angel without wings. He took a step towards them and, as he did so, the world altered. The walls and ceiling around them slowly faded away. The tables, the chairs, their drinks, all the accoutrements of a bar remained, but the building that should have contained them was gone. Not just this building either; they stood on a vast, flat, featureless plain with not a single significant structure in sight.

"Has it taken out the whole of Virtuality?" Philip said.

"A good chunk of it," Malcolm replied.

"That's some virus."

"Yeah, a nasty one," Tanya agreed. "This is already getting messy and loud and it'll have every geek and hacker involved in Virtuality out for the blood of whoever sent it, but I suppose if you've got enough clout that's not a problem. You must have pissed somebody off royally, lover of mine."

Philip gave her a sour smile, doubtless wishing that he
had
been her lover.

The grinning man took another step forward and everything else that hadn't already vanished did - the furniture, the drinks, the ornamental hat stand that had stood sentry by the door, gone like the buildings - leaving just the four of them.

"I would suggest we run," Tanya murmured, "But somehow I don't think there'd be much point."

"Besides," Philip added, "I get the feeling that's exactly what Smiley here wants us to do."

Their nemesis had paused after those first two steps, as if inviting them to react. Now that they hadn't, he stepped forward again.

"Screw this!" Tanya said at the first sign of renewed movement, and she whipped out a gun. Before she could fire, however, what remained of the world came apart at the seams. Literally. The ground beneath their feet started to shake and convulse, cracking and separating as if a violent earthquake had hit this corner of Virtuality. Malcolm struggled to stay on his feet as a vast fissure opened, with him on one side and Philip and Tanya on the other. It didn't end there. More convulsions sent him sprawling to his hands and knees and continued to eat away at the patch of ground around him. He found himself kneeling on a small irregular rectangle of concrete, surrounded by an abyss on all sides. Philip and Tanya were on another: Tanya still on her feet and Philip in the process of regaining his. Around them stretched a whole vista of cracks and broken ground.

"Don't give up, either of you," Tanya urged. "The AIs will be onto this by now, hunting the bastard down, working relentlessly to identify the unique coding sequence that constitutes the virus. It doesn't matter how clever this thing is, how many variants it transforms into or where versions of it have been hidden, once they identify that coding they'll find all the caches and erase every scrap of it."

All well and good, if the AIs were to be trusted, but Malcolm wasn't so sure about that. What if the AIs chose to turn a blind eye? Ultimately, those vast inscrutable brains were connected to ULAW, and who was to say that this virus wasn't as well? Nor did he buy the idea that what they were being subjected to here in Virtuality was mere window dressing, an act of bravado. It seemed a hell of a lot of trouble to go to merely to twist the knife. After all, if the virus succeeded they would all soon be dead.

Then he had it - the reason for this. Those responsible weren't doing it for
their
benefit at all but for his, at least primarily. A warning, to emphasise that if they wanted to they could come into Virtuality and finish him off whenever they chose, just as they were about to put an end to his son. Philip was the target here. As his father, Malcolm was little more than an incidental bystander, but one that those responsible for the virus were keen to impress.

Ahead of them, the ground seemed to gather, fractured segments of concrete pulling together and rising in a tall wave, a ground-borne parody of a tsunami. Riding the crest of this wave was the avatar, the virus' vector. It had adopted a splay-legged stance, like a surfer, and rode the rippling swell of concrete towards the island on which Philip and Tanya waited.

Tanya still had her gun in hand, and presumably the avatar simply made too tempting a target. She fired. The vector didn't simply disappear as any normal avatar might have done. Instead, it melted, face first. Its eyes slipped downward, the mouth drooped into the sullenest of frowns, the right eye dropping beneath the corner of its lips while the nose slipped sideways. Its clothing too began to lose definition. Like thickly applied paint sliding off a non-absorbent surface, all the colours ran together. Then the body started to open, from the crown of the head downward, splits appeared in the image, and the skin peeled open in three segments, as if this were a seed pod about to release its spore.

The analogy struck Malcolm as particularly apt once the black mist started to rise from the vector's shattered torso; a mass of roiling darkness that rose in a billowing cloud and immediately started to spread.