the Noise Within (2010) (38 page)

He had seen images of them, of course. You couldn't check a news feed without seeing them. Bipedal and ostensibly humanoid in appearance the Byrzaens might be, but nobody could mistake them for human as such. Longer limbed and more compact of torso, with no neck to speak of and a broader, flatter head than Homo sapiens. Most experts agreed that this spoke volumes about the nature of the world the aliens had evolved on; but unfortunately none of them seemed able to agree on exactly
what
it said.

The professional part of Leyton couldn't help but study the images from a different perspective. The compact bodies presumably meant that vital organs were more concentrated than in a human, so a body shot stood a greater chance of doing serious damage. He'd still like to know more about their anatomy before attempting one though. As for the head, it was afforded a degree of protection both by being so close to the prominent shoulders, and by what seemed to be a hood of external bone which rose from between the shoulder blades to cover the back and crown of the head. There was no evidence of any hair.

He would still favour the head shot, at least until he knew more about them. Either of the two dark and slit-like eyes
had
to provide access to the brain.

Their limbs were long and slender and didn't promise much by way of strength, but the feature Leyton found most fascinating was their hands; six digit - four fingers with two opposable thumbs, one either side of the fingers. He imagined this must give them far greater dexterity than humans and wondered exactly what such a hand was capable of doing - manipulating two entirely different objects or mechanisms simultaneously, perhaps?

If the needle ship pilots were being talked up by the media, the Byrzaens had been all but deified. After all, the 'unusual' and 'majestic' (both of which sounded a whole lot more friendly than 'ugly') alien ship had appeared out of nowhere to save fifteen thousand human lives for no reason other than pure altruism. All right, so the official population of New Paris was only 12,800 - this was what the media termed 'rounding up', to allow for visitors and those who might be unregistered - and the majority would likely have been saved anyway, but 15,000 sounded so much more impressive than 2,000, and why let mere facts interfere with a good headline?

Once Leyton set his knee jerk cynicism of all things media to one side, even he had to admit that what the aliens had done was impressive. Not only saving so many human lives but also keeping New Paris itself intact. Without their timely intervention, many of the station's citizens may well have continued living, but their homes, their society, and the lives they'd known would have been gone forever.

So, what was the Byrzaens' angle? Leyton was convinced there had to be one, they simply hadn't chosen to reveal it yet, but they would.

The alien ship, which had no name - evidently the Byrzaens were baffled by mankind's tradition of giving personalised names to inanimate objects - had been lurking just beyond the fringes of human space awaiting a summons
.
On board was the Byrzaen's first diplomatic mission, intended to follow up on
The Noise Within's
initial contact.

The Noise Within
itself proved to hold one further surprise. The intelligence guiding the craft was not, as everyone had assumed, an AI alone. The intelligence which
The Sun Seeker
had originally been built to house had been paired with a Byrzaen, in an organic/non-organic mental fusion similar to those controlling ULAW's needle ships. The Byrzaens claimed this had been necessary to fully cure the deeply disturbed AI, but that it was also responsible for much of the subsequent trouble. The theory went that the two minds had not fused as thoroughly as the aliens had believed. The ship's return to human space provoked anxieties within the AI which made this division more acute, polarising the two parts of the ship's mind, so that in effect there were two minds working in consort rather than one fused intelligence. The AI's concerns resonated with the organic part of the pairing, since the Byrzaen was naturally nervous about first contact with an alien race, and the respective fears began to feed off each other in a disastrous loop, unbalancing both.

The aliens' attempt to initiate gentle contact between their two races by sending a ship of human origin ahead as their herald had therefore come close to backfiring spectacularly. Nice to see that mankind didn't hold a monopoly on plans going awry.

ULAW decided to hold back the revelation that an actual Byrzaen had helped to orchestrate
The Noise Within's
piratical dabblings from the media, wisely judging it to be a PR nightmare in the making.

Having heard nothing from
The Noise Within
, the Byrzaens began to probe human space, starting with New Paris where contact was supposed to be initiated. Discovering both
The Noise Within
and evidence of conflict, they came through into the system, arriving in the nick of time to save the day, establishing themselves as instant heroes and making the grandest entrance anyone could possibly wish for.

All very neat; which, in Leyton's experience, was something life rarely succeeded in being.

At that particular moment, he seemed to be the only one in the whole of human space to harbour the remotest suspicion about these Byrzaens, but he had every confidence in the fickleness of media-driven public opinion. He was willing to bide his time.

Benson and Beck were not the only two familiar faces he encountered on New Paris. ULAW had commandeered a multi-deck stack of interconnecting office units in the station's commercial district as their base of operations. It became universally referred to as simply 'the building'. One time, as Leyton left Benson's office on the building's top floor, he bumped into another old friend.

"Hello, Ed, so they've roped you in on this, have they?"

"Yeah, for my sins."

The tech, whom he remembered with a degree of respect and even fondness from the Holt mission, looked anxious. "We need to talk," the man said, "but not here."

Intriguing, and Leyton knew better than to pass such things by. "You know Gino's?" The tech nodded. "I'll be grabbing a coffee there in half an hour. I hate the vending machine crap they serve here."

Thirty minutes later found the eyegee sitting as promised on a high stool at the bar-style counter that ran around the perimeter of the small coffeehouse. He didn't look around as Ed took the seat next to him; if furtive was what the tech wanted, furtive he would be.

"I've been hoping to bump into you," Ed said quietly.

"Well, now you have; so what's this all about?"

"Holt. We've had a chance to go through all the data and records that we recovered from the mission with a fine-tooth comb, and, as expected, no evidence of any connection with a certain pirate vessel. However..."

"Go on."

Ed was either genuinely nervous about what he'd discovered or he had a fine sense of the melodramatic. He took a deep breath and glanced around, as if to check no one was watching them. "There's no question they were warned about our raid in advance. Nothing concrete in anything we brought back, but plenty of peripheral communication recorded there, which makes it pretty clear. Among all this, a name cropped up. As I say, there's no proof this is the source of the tip-off, but..."

"But you think it is."

"I'm certain of it. The context left little other option, and it was in a message which had been ostensibly deleted from the system and took a lot of effort to recover."

In a gesture fully in keeping with Ed's behaviour so far, he slapped a folded piece of paper down on the counter and slid it towards the eyegee. Paper; easy to dispose of and no electronic imprint. Leyton dropped a hand onto the now abandoned note, lifting his coffee mug with the other and draining it.

"Thanks; leave this with me."

With that he stood up, casually collecting the note as he drew his hand from the counter, before strolling out of the coffeehouse and returning to work.

Philip was having a ball. The only slightly sour note was caused by the media. He was used to a certain amount of attention, had been all his life, but nothing like this. As soon as his presence on New Paris became public knowledge he found himself pursued by journos and a flock of hovering fly cams, besieged with requests for interviews and sound bites. His trip to the Byrzaen ship only saw the pressure intensify tenfold.

Philip had brought an up-to-date version of Phil with him from Homeworld, but had deliberately not called upon the partial until this point. After all, he'd been on holiday; why would a tourist need a partial? No question, though, that had changed. He was now desperate for a buffer, a secretary; and who better than Phil? The partial was activated and hastily brought up to speed, so that he could provide a much needed filter between Philip and the insatiable newshounds.

Other than this excessive media attention, things could not have been better. To actually
see
the culmination of his lifetime's work - all right, an exaggeration, but not much of one - to be able to talk to Jenner and Muller after they had been in gestalt with the needle ship's AIs, to witness them being brought out of their gelsuits after flying genuine missions and experiencing actual combat, was the realisation of so much. The experience had a surreal quality for Philip, as if this couldn't possibly be happening. It also brought him a strange sense of closure. Despite all the glitz of Frysworld and the thrills of Dendra, Velamore and the other exotic places he had visited, despite having set foot aboard
The Sun Seeker/Noise Within
, he suspected deep down that a part of him would always have felt unfulfilled without this, because he hadn't been there to oversee the final stages of the project as he'd always anticipated.

Yet now, while Catherine Chzyski, David Benn and everyone else involved, even Susan Tan, were stuck light years away on Homeworld, having to scour the news feeds for scraps of information, he was here, a part of it. Of all of them, he was the only one privileged to see the culmination of the project firsthand.

Another thing he drew great satisfaction from, not to mention relief, was that even the sight of Jenner hooked into the needle ship produced only the faintest stirrings of Syntheaven craving, allowing him to hope that his relationship with the drug was something other than addiction after all.

One of Philip's responsibilities in the aftermath of everything was to supervise the health of the needle ship pilots. This was the first time the human-AI pairings had seen active service and there was a great deal of interest in how the pilots had coped with the ramped-up mental and physical demands placed upon them. Philip was quietly impressed with the equipment ULAW provided him with. It might not have matched the specialist gear which Kaufman Industries had been forced to develop as the project progressed, but it was still more than adequate for the job, as were the small team of techs assigned to assist him.

The loss of two pilots, two people he'd known throughout their training, was a blow, but everyone involved knew that what they were developing was going to be used in the front line and that lives were bound to be at risk. No one, however, had anticipated reality would strike so soon after the project's completion.

On a more positive note, Philip was delighted to see how well the three surviving needle ship pilots - Jenner, Muller and Fina - had coped. Jenner was displaying hardly any symptoms of stress at all. The other two both showed minor reactions but no more than any normal combatant might be expected to suffer and certainly well within acceptable parameters. All in all, this was a wonderful result, and Philip could only applaud the work that Susan Tan and the team had completed so effectively in his absence. The new Syntheaven variant clearly worked a treat.

The sense of elation that Philip experienced was hard to express. His dogged pursuit of the project, in the face of harsh criticism and near ridicule in some quarters, had been fully justified. Human-AI pairings
worked
and were bound to become an integral part of human society - not merely in a military context - in generations to come. If he achieved nothing else in his life, he had at least done this much.

If this wasn't more than enough for any one man to be dealing with there was also, of course, the small matter of the Byrzaens. Mankind's first encounter with a recognisably sentient alien species, and
he
was involved. Life simply didn't get any better than this, surely.

Philip was even privileged enough to be among the first people to visit the alien ship; only the once, but it was an experience he would never forget for as long as he lived.

He tried to describe it to Leyton over lunch on one of the rare occasions both of them were able to get away, but was failing dismally.

"You mean everything on board is shifting curtains of energy?" the big man asked as his attempted description faltered into frustrated hesitation.

"No, not really, it's just that..." How could he possibly do justice to something that clearly hadn't developed within a human framework, when all he had at his disposal were words that inevitably
had
? "Those veils we saw on
The Noise Within
, the drive mechanisms, would have looked perfectly at home there, whereas they seemed so out of place on a human starship. They wouldn't have seemed remotely
alien
aboard the Byrzaen ship."

Leyton nodded.