the Noise Within (2010) (37 page)

"Oh for a working elevator," he said, mostly to himself. It would have made planning the evacuation of the entire station a whole lot easier.

The comment might have been intended as rhetorical but clearly it had been louder than he realised. "Wouldn't be much help," Denni said. "The elevator would have been the first thing to go when we were knocked out of orbit - torn to shreds."

"Yes, I know." Sam sighed. "Just daydreaming."

"Glad you've got the time to."

Not that either of them did, of course. Planning the emergency evacuation of a tad under 13,000 people from the stricken station was keeping them more than occupied. By Sam's reckoning, if they were to commandeer every available ship and set up a non-stop shuttle from the dock to the planet below, they could get everyone off in a little over three days. Assuming, that is, that everything went smooth as a baby's bottom and there were no glitches of any sort. The only problem being that, if Denni's calculations were correct - and he had no reason to doubt them - they had something less than two and a half days before things turned decidedly hairy up here.

The stark reality was that unless they could conjure up a minor miracle, more than two thousand New Parisians were not going to make it. So, Sam was now busy looking into supplies of spacesuits, oxygen, rocket sleds - anything that might enable as many people as possible to survive off-station until a ship could return to collect them.

It wasn't looking good.

Jenner watched as the energy continued to build within the 'claw' at the prow of the enormous vessel. He had no idea of its purpose but presumed it was nothing good.

He tried hailing. "This is Captain Jenner to unidentified craft. You are in ULAW space. Please identify yourself and power down your weapon."

He received exactly the response anticipated - none - but determined to give it one more try. "If you do not power down your weapon you will leave me with no choice but to treat this as an act of aggression and respond accordingly."

Silence.

"All right, Muller, follow my lead and give her all you've got."

The two needle ships leapt forward. Still the energy levels cupped within the intruder's crown of tips continued to build. Like gnats attacking a bull, the ULAW vessels closed in. Muller must have realised this was tantamount to an act of suicide, even as he did, but neither of them wavered, which made Jenner feel oddly proud. He let loose with his primary energy cannon, following up with secondary guns for good measure. Beside him, Muller did the same.

Their attack spent itself against an energy shield, the section immediately in front of them lighting up as beams dissipated and missiles detonated, their fury and force quenched. Where Jenner's primary beam struck, strands of impermanent silver lightning flickered across an area of shield lit up in a pale blue nimbus of coruscating energies, but none of it broke through. What he found most disconcerting was the fact that the interloper made no effort to respond, as if their efforts were beneath its notice.

We might as well be chucking stones at the thing.
Yet they had to keep doing something. The long body of this enigmatic ship, with its still-building sphere of controlled energy which surely had to be reaching some sort of critical point soon, was orientated directly towards New Paris.

"Muller, centre your beam on exactly the same section of the shield I'm hitting. Between us we might just be able to break through." A forlorn hope, but better than none.

As the other needle ship adjusted his attack to comply, Jenner sensed a change. The accumulation of energy at the alien ship's prow - he could only think of this intruder as alien - had lasted no more than a few seconds, though it had seemed far longer. Now it stopped.

The ship fired on New Paris.

12,860 people: the station's current population according to official records. If Jenner could have redoubled his efforts he would have, but he was already throwing everything he had at the intruder. His secondary weapons were now exhausted and his primary was already firing at maximum - something he could let continue for a while yet, but not indefinitely without exhausting his ship's power.

All he could do was watch with a growing sense of frustration and impotence as the intruder struck. The alien didn't release the tight knot of gathered energies in one shot as the needle ship pilot anticipated, but instead bled it into a stream of energy which bridged the gap between aggressor and victim. Jenner's instruments recorded the energy ball's depletion and he felt more than a little awed by the forces brought into play. He also studied New Paris, waiting to see the beam's effect. If he was anticipating a violent explosion, or anything else dramatic for that matter, he was disappointed. In fact, initial observations suggested the alien energy was doing nothing whatsoever. Jenner immediately accessed recent observations, analysing the space station as it appeared to him then and as it had previously, taking into account current position, trajectories, and anticipated orbital course. Having set those parameters, the effect of the intervention became immediately clear.

"Muller, cease firing!"

Wherever this strange, unsettling craft originated from, she was not attacking New Paris at all, but was rather saving it.

The general populace of New Paris remained oblivious to the approaching disaster. Sam knew that the inevitable public announcement could not be put off for much longer, but this was one thing he was determined to leave to the mayor, when and if the bastard ever put in an appearance. The man had promised to come straight back to the office, but, as yet, no sign.

"Any more word from the boss?" he asked, knowing full well that Denni would have said if there had been.

"Are you kidding? He's probably halfway to the dock by now."

Sam smiled thinly. "I doubt that very much. He wouldn't dare. It would mean having to explain to people why he wasn't here with us when the emergency broke. Mrs Mayor would be especially interested."

"True," Denni agreed. He then produced a startled, "Whoa!"

"Care to expand on 'whoa'?"

"Check your screens."

Sam cleared away local contact details and returned his screen to the default monitoring display. What he saw there made no sense at all. According to this, New Paris was adjusting orbit again, her course slowly but surely veering away from the projected decay curve and creeping back towards stability.

"This day just gets weirder by the minute," Denni muttered.

Sam would have had to agree but was too busy searching for an explanation. He was getting the oddest readings from all over the station, readings which spoke of gentle stress, of something pulling the station in a very specific direction, almost as if New Paris were suddenly being subjected to gravitational pull from a planetary body or moon which couldn't possibly be there. He pushed the sensors outward, seeking an explanation, and froze.

"Denni, patch your screen into mine and take a look at this."

"Will do." Denni's fingers danced across his screen. Then, "What in mercy's name is that?"

"No idea, but whatever it is, I'm not complaining. Somehow, that thing is pulling us back into a stable orbit."

"It has to be some sort of ULAW secret weapon; a super ship or something."

"Maybe," Sam said, far from convinced.

"Well what else could it be?"

He didn't even want to think about that.

The pair watched spellbound as, with agonising slowness, proper orbit was restored. Sam sat and watched the final alignment with a huge grin on his face. He had rarely if ever felt so relieved, so excited and so drained, all at the same time.

"Shit!" Denni suddenly exclaimed.

"What now?" Sam's anxiety came flooding back. He suffered a moment of déjà-vu and feared some new calamity - perhaps the station's structural frame, weakened by the initial hit, was showing signs of buckling under the strain of all this unaccustomed manoeuvring.

"The evac won't be happening now, right?"

"Hopefully not," Sam replied, wondering what he was missing.

"That's what I thought. Have you any idea how much time and effort I put into those frigging calculations?" Denni complained. "All for nothing."

Sam stared at his friend in astonishment. "You are kidding me, right?"

Denni stared back for long seconds, deadpan, as if wondering what the hell Sam was on about. Then he broke into a broad grin. "Yeah, I'm kidding you. Well spotted."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A
s the man on the spot, Leyton was kept ridiculously busy, even after the cavalry arrived. When ULAW did eventually turn up they did so in force, and New Paris quickly took on the semblance of a territory under occupation. Suddenly the place was crowded and there were officials, experts and uniforms everywhere.

Leyton did not hold back when making his report, and was scathing about the part that the station's mayor had played in events, or rather the lack of one. Local gossip, which had it that the man was busy rutting with some married woman when he should have been taking charge, did nothing to improve the eyegee's opinion. The fact that these rumours had even reached an outsider such as himself suggested to Leyton that just about everyone else on New Paris had probably heard them as well. He was not in the least surprised when it was announced that the mayor had decided to step down due to 'the stress of recent events'.

If the eyegee had hoped that officialdom's arrival would mark an end to his own responsibilities, he was sadly mistaken. Rather than simply being debriefed and then spirited away ready for the next assignment, he found himself frequently at Benson's side. His boss seemed to be in charge of things here, which caused Leyton to seriously re-evaluate the man's importance within ULAW.

It also made him uneasy. Benson had always shunned the limelight and been content to operate from behind the scenes. This sudden stepping forward from the shadows suggested big changes, presumably triggered by the arrival of the Byrzaens. One thing Leyton knew well was that such an obvious public persona could be a very handy distraction for those who chose to remain out of sight. When he examined the shadows Benson had left behind, it was invariably the same face he saw skulking there - the man Benson had been so chummy with during the original mission briefing prior to Frysworld. Leyton had subsequently learnt that his name was Beck but had been able to uncover little beyond that.

A spook, almost certainly. The eyegee had taken an instant dislike the first time he saw the man, and had seen nothing since to cause him to revise that opinion. Fortunately, he had little cause to deal with Beck directly.

It was Benson who introduced him to the hastily appointed 'acting' mayor, who insisted on simply being called 'Sam' and was evidently one of the people left to cope with the actual work during the crisis while his predecessor was screwing around. Sam at least threatened to be competent, which was the very minimum New Paris would need with all that was going on around her.

Leyton was intrigued to hear that two humans had been found aboard
The Noise Within
, each safely sealed within individual compartments. Typically, he learnt of this first via a news report. No names were given.

Two. Even assuming Hammond hadn't returned with the shuttle before ULAW attacked, that still left three on board which meant that one of the crew hadn't made it. He wondered who.

The report went on to say that ULAW had taken the two men into custody with a view to prosecuting them for acts of piracy. Hardly surprising, though the Byrzaens' intervention, pleading the pair's case, was a little more so. The aliens were evidently requesting leniency on the basis that the presence of humans aboard
The Noise Within
had been a key factor in the ship regaining mental equilibrium and, belatedly, resuming its intended mission.

Knowing the way that ULAW officials were falling over themselves to curry favour with their new allies, the eyegee strongly suspected the Byrzaens would get their way.

Someone else who remained at the forefront of things was Philip Kaufman. Leyton had half expected him to vanish off to the land of privilege and luxury now that the big revelations were out the way, but Kaufman was having none of it. His general expertise and specific knowledge of
The Noise Within
made him invaluable to Benson, who kept him on as a consultant, which meant that he and the eyegee saw a fair bit of each other. Leyton's respect for Kaufman rose as he watched him work and went up a notch higher still when he discovered that the businessman was responsible for developing the human/AI melding which drove the ULAW needle ships.

As for the three surviving needle ship pilots, they were the darlings of the hour as far as the media were concerned. Their titanic struggle against the 'alien pirate vessel' made them instant celebrities. This turnaround demonstrated perfectly just how fickle the media could be. Mere days ago they had been enthusiastically championing
The Noise Within
, painting her as daring and dashing, thumbing defiance at the authorities. Now they fêted her conquerors with equal zeal.

Leyton found the whole media circus repulsive, and habitually avoided the reporters who had swarmed to New Paris like flies to freshly dropped dung.

He hadn't actually seen a Byrzaen in the flesh as yet; few people had. The aliens were keeping themselves pretty much to themselves. Not that he could blame them for that. Given the crowded condition of New Paris since ULAW and the battalions of reporters that had arrived, he'd be doing much the same himself given half a chance.