the Noise Within (2010) (18 page)

"Armament?"

"Impossible to evaluate with any accuracy, it's too well insulated; but a cutting laser for certain, and I would imagine at least one high-calibre gun and a blade or two. That would be standard for this type of modified unit."

"They have standards, do they? That's reassuring." The almost comical-looking machine was now flying into the room and towards the hall, managing in the process to neatly avoid the smart carpet strips which would have glued to the floor anything that actually walked or rolled across them.

Philip frowned. "It's a survey drone, isn't it?"

"Originally, yes. Designed for extreme environments and now modified in some pretty extreme ways as well." One huge advantage a partial had over a physical original was instant access to information.

The intruder had reached the door, which stood temptingly open.

"It's a sneaky so and so, that's for sure; the doorframe isn't even detecting it," the partial observed. "Luckily, I am." The drone drifted through the door, to be met by a curtain of energy which lanced in from three sides as Phil triggered the frame's defences - an electrical discharge which danced across the thing's shell, so that for a brief second it was limned in light. The unit didn't even slow down.

"Tough little bastard, isn't it?" Philip murmured.

"Very - designed to be; that's what makes survey drones ideal for this sort of assignment."

"Thanks, you're filling me with so much confidence. Have you got the frequency pinned down yet?"

"Almost. It's not that simple. The carrier wave is switching frequencies constantly, not oscillating to a set pattern. Key codes carried within the transmission itself alert the receiver in the shell to the shifts, causing a microsecond delay in the unit's response time, and it's that microsecond I'll have to try and take advantage of in order to jam the transmissions. First, of course, I have to break the codes."

Whoever was directing this thing knew what they were doing. For the first time, Philip began to worry. There was no emergency exit, no other way out of this room. His hopes of surviving the next few minutes rested entirely with the partial. Phil had
his
knowledge and the not-inconsiderable computing power of the building to call on - all of it if need be - but even so... Would it be enough?

"How sophisticated is this, Phil?"

"It's pretty impressive, but we're not talking military-grade tech here."

"Can you crack it?"

"No sweat."

"Not for you, perhaps. After all, you don't." He glanced uneasily towards the door, which was firmly shut and had been securely bolted since the intrusion first began.

"How long is this likely to take, Phil?"

"Another minute or so."

"That's fine, take your time. I mean there's a whole door standing between me and imminent death."

"Patience."

There were times when he wondered whether Phil contained a little too many of his own less desirable traits: arrogance, for example. Perhaps the partial was overdue for a serious overhaul.

His attention returned to the image still being projected in front of him, which showed the mechanism's progress along the short hallway as it approached the bedroom. It was a little weird seeing the same door simultaneously from both sides.

The drone came to the end of the hall and stopped. Once again its laser came into play. The bedroom door was bolted in three places - top, bottom and middle. Rather than make three separate assaults, the drone went for the very centre of the door, apparently intent on cutting out another disc, as it had with the window. Built of multiple layers of carbon-fibre nanotubes sandwiching a steel alloy centre, the door was of the same type they installed as the innermost barrier to the bridge on starships, and a lot tougher than the reinforced window. Presumably this shell was packing a good supply of power, but it would need to be in order to cut through this. Which would give out first: door or power? The analytical part of Philip's mind was fascinated to see the outcome of the contest, while the rest of him began to edge from concern towards fear, especially when a spot on his side of the door started to smoulder and smoke. The spot slowly developed into a curve.

Now ignoring the projected image, Philip stared at the black curve, seeing it creep steadily towards a crescent. He knew there was nothing in the bedroom capable of stopping something like this, but he couldn't just stand around and wait, so he started opening drawers in search of anything that could be press-ganged into service as a weapon. He examined the comms unit and scrutinised the crystal statuette beside it, hoping for a flash of inspiration. Pointless, all of it, but at least this beat simply watching the scorch line spread.

When he dared to check again, the circle was a little over half complete.

"Come on, Phil!"

"I'm there."

"About time!" Now that he knew the primary danger could be contained, Philip's thought turned to potential secondary threats. "What if they've set up a reserve frequency to fall back on?"

"That's possible, but it won't be as complicated as this sequence and, besides, I intend to throw them enough feedback to make their ears and eyes bleed!"

Philip nodded, his mind accepting this but still examining other implications.

"They could have programmed the shell to act independently if transmissions are interrupted."

"True, but these things are designed to be operated remotely, on the slightly questionable basis that only the human mind is flexible enough to deal with the unexpected conditions and situations a survey drone is likely to encounter. So any back-up program would have to be pretty basic and would offer a greatly reduced chance of a successful hit." The charred disc had progressed to the three-quarters stage. "Far more likely they'd program it to simply explode and hope to take out the target that way."

"Oh well, that's all right then." An
explosion
? Philip was pretty certain the containment field which the door boasted as a final defence would not have been enough to hold the drone, but it might just be able to blunt the force of an explosion. "Might be an idea to hold off from jamming the transmission until the drone is in the containment field, then."

"Why do you think I haven't done so already?"

"Can you send whoever's directing the shell a message, telling them they're too late, that the contract's been cancelled?" Transmission had to be going both ways, since whoever was directing the drone needed to see what was going on.

"Already taken care of," Phil assured him, with a hint of impatience. "If the feedback I've lined up doesn't fry whatever equipment they're using entirely, a message to that effect will be recorded there when they pick up the pieces."

Sometimes it was easy to forget that the partial was designed to think like him, and to act independently.

"Now," Phil continued, "in case this thing
does
decide to explode, perhaps you might want to step back a little."

Or a lot, for that matter. Philip moved away, heading for the en-suite, which, reassuringly, was not directly in line with the door and so seemed unlikely to feel the full force of any blast. There was no telling what type or quantity of explosive the shell might be packing. For a bizarre second he entertained the thought that it could be carrying a small nuke, which would make his current retreat pointless, but that seemed a bit over the top for the assassination of one man,
any
man. He paused on the threshold, watching in fascination as the cutting laser completed its task and the disc of door fell away. He peered through the resulting space despite himself, but ducked fully into the side room as soon as there was a hint of movement.

Philip crouched down, bracing himself, glad that David Benn couldn't see him now, nor anyone else for that matter. Seconds ticked past with no sound, nothing at all to disturb the silence. Impatience began to win out over caution and he was just reaching the conclusion that nothing was going to happen, that Phil had cut the transmissions guiding the drone and it had simply gone dormant, when there came a deafening bang and the floor beneath his feet seemed to buck, to ripple, while the whole room shook. Something tumbled off a shelf to smash on the floor close by, but he was too preoccupied to notice what.

Then it was over.

The world was as it should be once more - silent and unmoving. Even as Philip registered the stillness it was interrupted by what could only be sprinklers coming on. He stood up and stepped back into the bedroom. The smell of burning and of chemical retardants filled the air. A corner of his mind noted with numb regret the shattered remnants of a Leiarian figurine, one of the few 'frivolous touches' he allowed in his bedroom, as a fondly remembered ex, Annalise, had noted one dreamy, long ago morning. Yet the sight that greeted him wasn't nearly as bad as he'd feared. The door was completely destroyed, the wall to either side charred and streaked with burn marks. A widening strip of carpet, fanning out from the door to the centre of the room, had likewise been blasted away, and this was the part of the room which the sprinklers were dousing, the few bits of carpet and wrecked machine that still smouldered quickly submerged in a frothing foam of chemicals and water.

"So, a bomb after all."

"Yes," Phil confirmed, "But pretty much contained as anticipated. There's no structural damage and, let's be honest, you never much cared for that carpet in any case."

Philip laughed. "True."

"Oh, and security are on the way up."

"Better late than never."

Security; the implications were nearly as daunting as what he had just been through: red tape, repetitive statements and interminable bureaucracy. Again. But Philip was resigned to that. What concerned him now was the dawning realisation that he had done all he could, succeeded in getting the Death Wish lifted, yet it still hadn't stopped the assassins. He looked at the shattered shell of the survey drone, or at least the largest surviving chunk of its dull metal carcass, which rested just inside the door where it lay half-buried beneath a mound of still-bubbling foam. He had been lucky this time, but sooner or later his luck was bound to run out.

Now there was a cheery thought to cuddle up to when he was eventually allowed to return to his bed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

K
yle was more than a little confused by
The Noise Within
and had to admit that in volunteering to join the ship he had probably made the biggest mistake of his life. To date, at least; he would never rule out the possibility of making an even bigger cock-up at some stage, but this would do to be getting on with.

He began to regret this impetuous leap into the dark almost as soon as he came on board, and started missing
The Lady J
at once, not least because nothing about his new ship was remotely what he had expected. In fact, it made no sense at all.

Bizarrely,
The Noise Within
brought back memories of his childhood and of his Aunt Tamzin, whose home he had been required to visit as a kid once or twice a year in order to play with two cousins who were a few years younger than him, whom he had never really liked and whom he had barely spoken to since the onset of puberty. Except that it had never been the
same
home. Aunt Tamzin and Uncle Andrew moved a lot, for reasons he hadn't thought to question at the time, so each visit was to a new address, or so childhood memories insisted. Little about those visits stayed with him, but two things definitely did.

The first was his aunt's disapproving glower. She never told him to stop fiddling with this or asked him to leave that alone. She didn't need to. She would sit there in a high-backed chair, which remained unchanging even though the house around it had morphed so frequently. Rigidly upright in her elegant yet austere dress, she simply turned towards him. One glare and his hands stopped moving of their own volition, while all energy and the will to fidget would drain away from him as though sucked out by a leech.

The worst glower he ever received had come as a result of his dismembering one of the cousins' toys - a remote-control starfighter which wobbled erratically when asked to hover. All it needed was a slight adjustment to the gyroscopic sensor and everything would have been fine, but would anyone listen to him?

No, of course not. He was taken home in disgrace that day, leaving behind the disconsolate wails of cousins and the dismantled parts of a toy which he could easily have fixed and made as good as new - better, in fact - if they had only given him another ten minutes.

The second thing that lodged firmly in his memory was the fact that none of Aunt Tamzin's homes seemed complete; he didn't mean this in terms of the buildings as such but rather in terms of their function as homes. There may have been no unfinished walls or gaping holes where a roof ought to have been, but there
was
a sense that the family had not yet fully moved in, that they hadn't completely unpacked either their belongings or their emotions and that before they did so it would be time to put everything away again, ready for the next move. His own childhood home had a solid presence, a comforting sense that it would never fail him; whereas, by contrast, Aunt Tamzin's always reeked of impermanence, as if they were transient pauses in some ongoing journey rather than genuine homes. They never benefited from the care and attention that a real home deserves.