the Noise Within (2010) (10 page)

So all this had been for nothing. No, not strictly speaking true. The powers-that-be would doubtless claim that a negative told them something, that it ruled out a possibility; but that seemed small return for all that they had been through.

As they slumped into seats against either wall of the shuttle, it became apparent that the dynamics in their little group had shifted. Black chose the seat immediately next to Leyton, the two techs sitting opposite - the younger of whom looked to be teetering on the edge of shock, even though his wound had been cleaned and gel-skin sealed. The injured marine was strapped into a seat between the other remaining soldier and Black. He was at best semi-conscious and dosed up to his eyeballs with pain killers, while his shoulder boasted a fresh white dressing.

The older tech caught Leyton's eye and, at this late stage, chose to introduce himself, as if the eyegee had passed some sort of test which qualified him as worth knowing. "Name's Ed, by the way. Thanks for getting us out of there." The comment pointedly excluded Boulton, who sat apart, several seats removed from the rest of them. Nobody spoke to her or seemed keen to even look in her direction.

The journey was conducted in almost total silence. Leyton suspected each one of them to be preoccupied in reliving what they had just been through, remembering the fallen and reflecting on the fact that it could very easily have been them lying there dead on a grim little world called Holt.

For his part, the eyegee's thoughts had already moved on from there.

He kept thinking about how quickly the local troops had reacted to their incursion and in what force; about the clever alarm setup which was triggered by a computer terminal's inactivity, and about that alarm not prompting an initial enquiry to see if everything was all right but bringing an immediate armed response. Then there were those orange visors - not standard issue anywhere as far as he was aware; a very specific piece of kit designed to counteract shimmer suits. He was just grateful that the centre's security guards hadn't been equipped with them, or things might have gone very differently. No matter how he added all this up, it amounted to just one thing.

"They were ready for us," Black murmured beside him, too quietly for anyone else to hear.

The pair exchanged grim, knowing glances. The sergeant's thoughts were obviously following similar lines to his own. Holt might not have known
when
an attack was due, but there seemed little doubt they knew one was coming. Someone had tipped them off.

Leyton promised himself that one day soon he would take the trouble to find out precisely who.

The debriefing had been fractious, with no one about to take responsibility for the flawed intelligence or even willing to admit that it was flawed in the first place. Seething during the process and frustrated afterwards, Leyton returned to his cabin in a foul mood. All of which meant that he was spoiling for an argument even before someone knocked sharply on the door. When he opened it to see who stood there, he was almost too surprised to be angry.

Fortunately, he remembered himself in time. "If you've come to apologise, forget it!" he told the startled woman.

"
Me
apologise?" Boulton replied, looking as furious as he felt. "I'm here to ask what the hell you thought you were playing at, leaving me stuck out there facing a whole fucking army on my own while you minced around in that little building with your soldier buddies dealing with a couple of security guards!"

"It was never a competition," Leyton told her, his anger hardening to cold menace. "The mission had nothing to do with counting how many locals each of us killed, but it had everything to do with getting information, and you were supposed to cover our backs while we did so."

"And that's what I did; without any help from any of you."

"
Help?
You're an eyegee for God's sake. You shouldn't
need
any help!"

"Exactly! An eyegee, not a wet nurse for a bunch of incompetent arseholes who can't look out for themselves."

He came close to losing it then, close to hitting her, but he kept control and instead forced the anger down. "Face it, Boulton, you screwed up. You weren't where you were supposed to be and you could have got us all killed as a result," he said.

"
I
could have got us killed?" She was clearly on the edge herself, perhaps pushed there by a sense of guilt, or perhaps it was frustration at the fact that she
had
done all she could yet nobody seemed to believe her. "I took out one patrol, then scooted over and pinned down a second. What were you doing at the time, chatting to your new buddy the sergeant?"

"Ensuring the mission proceeded.
You
were supposed to secure our perimeter. You're a fucking liability." But he said this with less conviction than he'd felt earlier. Perhaps part of him was starting to believe her, or at least wanted to.

Without warning her hand shot out, striking before he could react, stinging his cheek with an open-palmed slap. His own hand moved almost of its own volition to deliver a similar blow to her face. She jerked her head back but at the same time clasped the top of his shoulders and pulled herself to him, her lips clamping onto his, tongue thrusting into his mouth.

He hooked his fingers into the neckline of her top and tugged, ripping it away. Her tongue withdrew and she bit his lip, drawing blood; her fingernails dug into his back through the thin material of the shirt and raked downward, before finding their way under his shirt, claws stripping flesh as they descended towards his waist. Clinging, grasping, biting, their limbs and bodies entwined, the two of them tumbled towards the sofa, him twisting around so that he would land on top, his hands clasping her to him as they fell, his mind aware of how taut and unyielding her body felt beneath his fingers and how hot her skin.

More of her top tore away, revealing a small, firm breast, which he bent to kiss, biting the prominent nipple before encircling it with his tongue. Her hands forced themselves between their bodies, reaching for and undoing the front of his trousers. He lifted his hips to accommodate her, taking the opportunity to pull the remnants of her top away to reveal her other breast.

When he entered her it was brutal, fast and uncompromising, with her teeth biting into his shoulder, his back stinging beneath her nails. She screamed obscenities at him, squirming beneath his body and jabbing her heels against his buttocks, while he reached for her arms, pinning them down with bruising strength to hold her still, and drove into her for all he was worth, conscious of her thrusting back at him, the jarring impact as he rammed against the thinly cushioned bones of her pelvis. Making love never came into it. This was an explosion of pent-up energy and lust that burned fiercely to leave both of them bruised, bleeding and drained once it was spent.

He woke to find his back stiff with a multitude of stinging scratches and the bed sheets bearing the occasional small smear of blood, though not as much as expected given the violence he remembered. The bed was empty. Boulton had left while he slept. Her shredded top lay on the floor and he allowed himself a smile, wondering what she might have worn to cover her modesty as she scooted back to her own cabin. He pictured her scurrying down the corridor, clutching a strip of cloth to her breasts and furtively peering round corners to ensure the coast was clear, but dismissed the image as absurd; mere wishful thinking. Truth to tell, he couldn't imagine her scurrying anywhere.

Then he saw the note. Hand written on a sheet of paper, how quaint; presumably to avoid disturbing him by making a voice recording.

He picked up the flimsy white sheet and read the brief text. Two lines; no signature.

Mya was right about you. Next time I see her, we can compare notes.

She knew Mya?
She knew Mya?
He balled his fist, screwing up the sheet in the process, and punched one of the metal poles supporting the bed's headboard.

That hurt; but not enough.

CHAPTER FIVE

P
hilip breezed into his apartment, still riding high on an adrenalin buzz that had carried him through the morning and resurged during the board meeting, which could not have gone any better had he scripted the whole thing himself. At that particular moment he felt as if he could take on the world. Thankfully, all those present seemed to have been caught up in his enthusiasm and swept along. By the close of the meeting, every single one of them was fully behind him. Nor did he have cause to doubt their sincerity, since the deceptively old-fashioned chairs they were seated on had recorded the physical responses of each board member throughout the meeting. Subsequent biometric analysis confirmed the honesty of their responses within an acceptable degree of certainty.

Despite lip-service to the contrary, it was a long time since he had enjoyed the whole-hearted support of the entire board. The prime reason for his little show had been to ensure that there would be no more dragging of heels. In recent weeks Philip and his team had been thwarted by minutiae. The exasperating thing was that he knew they were close; for months the project had teetered on the verge of a major breakthrough, yet it had been stalled by niggling issues which could have been readily solved if only everyone had remained committed and focused. Now, barring some unforeseen disaster, all the frustrations should disappear overnight. Given a clear run he was confident they could finally deliver a triumphant conclusion. The example of
The Noise Within
was exactly the impetus needed to push them over the finishing line.

Perfecting the long sought after human/AI interface would be an achievement which history itself would take note of; one to rival even the wondrous Kaufman Drive.

As important as anything his father had ever achieved.

Philip needed to calm down. Doing his best to ignore the black box sitting on a shelf - reminiscent of the sort of flat oblong jewellery case which might house an expensive necklace, if a little too large for that purpose - he poured himself some chilled water from the fridge, closing his eyes at the first sip in order to savour the coolness as it spread through his body. He forced himself to pause, to breathe deeply and to relax. He continued to drink the water steadily while glancing in distracted fashion at the list of calls Phil had handled during his absence. Most seemed to be from those wishing to congratulate him on the Gügenhall speech: platitudes delivered because duty required them to be - all hail the great God of Etiquette. None of them had been flagged by Phil as requiring his personal attention, so he dismissed the list without bothering to review any of the individual messages.

No calls from Mal; though in fairness he would have been disappointed if there had been. The real Malcolm Kaufman would have been patient, waiting for Philip to call
him
, confident that he had provided sufficiently impressive a revelation to ensure that such a call would come, as indeed it might... eventually. Evidently there was enough of the man in the partial to elicit at least that much behavioural accuracy.

Last night's lecture had passed in a blur, his mind preoccupied with the implications of
The Sun Seeker's
possible return, with planning what he would do to the images in the morning. Perversely, the talk had gone all the better as a result, at least to judge by reactions immediately afterwards. When people had sought him out to press the flesh and congratulate him they seemed genuinely impressed, if, in some cases, a little surprised. He made a mental note: should a similarly daunting engagement ever arise in the future, arrange a momentous revelation immediately beforehand so that he would be too distracted to get nervous.

Philip's gaze kept being drawn back towards the black box. Going to watch Jenner's run in the simulator had been a mistake. Oh, he'd needed the distraction, but the visit had awoken an old itch, an irritation he had been struggling not to scratch for days. Leaving the box in such a prominent position was deliberate: a calculated challenge to his resolve, one which he had been confident of resisting at the time. Perhaps a little overconfident, or so it now seemed, as the itch threatened to develop into full-blown hunger.

If asked, Philip would have denied vehemently that he envied the trainee pilots as such. Yet, despite the inconvenience of having software grafted into their skulls, there was a part of him deep down which hankered to sample the incredible expansion of consciousness that each of the subjects experienced when linked to their AIs, but which they all struggled to describe.

Therein lay Philip's greatest disappointment. He was desperate to know what that super-human communion felt like, wanted it so badly that at times the desire screwed his insides up into knots and turned every bit of progress they made with the project into incremental torture. Only at times, thank God. On the whole he had learned to live with his frustration, and certainly it hadn't prevented him from throwing all his efforts behind the project; which was just as well, since he was very much the driving force behind the whole thing. Yet he knew that when they finally achieved their goal - when, not
if
- the sweet taste of success would arrive with a hint of bitterness on the side. Sometimes, Philip entertained the suspicion that his desire to experience the human/AI commune was so strong precisely
because
it was denied him when so few things were, but he had analysed that argument and rejected it. The plain truth was that he saw this communion with another form of advanced intelligence as the pinnacle of intellectual achievement, possibly even of human existence, and he seemed doomed to merely watch while others experienced it, to bask only in the reflected glory of facilitating the process.