Chapter Eleven

 

Philip still felt something of a novice when it came to Virtuality, but at least he was beginning to think of it as home rather than an exotic place he'd come to visit while on holiday. Tanya had turned up again. The meeting had been predictably awkward, at least for him; she seemed to take everything in her stride. She was as flirtatious as ever but he didn't feel able to respond, not now that he knew her real interest in him was business rather than pleasure. In fact, wounded pride made him positively frosty to begin with.

"Lighten up," had been her advice. "Who says we can't combine the two? It's not as if I'm going to fall pregnant... though that might be fun come to think of it. In Virtuality, I mean; wouldn't want a baby out there, far too much hassle."

Yet he remained resolutely formal in her presence, determined to treat her as a business associate rather than the sassy woman he fancied like mad; the only stiffness he now wanted in their relationship was in his attitude.

Their small cabal had gained another member. They'd been able to confirm straight away that the Byrzaen-inspired alcoves at Bubbles were not a recent addition to the nightclub. The relevant coding predated first contact at New Paris by at least a year, even if it wasn't part of the initial construct. The fact that the alcoves weren't an original feature wasn't significant in itself either, since add-ons and facelifts were frequent for establishments in Virtuality - such tinkering being a great deal swifter and cheaper than they would be in reality. Nor could they see anything strikingly unusual about the program written for the alcoves; there was nothing obvious to delineate it from the code sequences used to build everything else, but then neither Philip nor Malcolm were programming experts. They desperately needed the help of someone who was.

Catherine Chzyski came to their rescue. Lara Chinen was one of the best programmers Philip had ever worked with, and when the Kaufman Industry's CEO placed her expertise at their disposal he could not have been happier. Philip felt certain that if anyone could spot whatever he and Malcolm were missing, it would be Lara.

He remembered her as a quiet, petite young woman, an efficient worker who got on with the job with a minimum of fuss. What he'd forgotten, or perhaps had never before noticed, was how pretty she was - a delicate beauty courtesy of almond eyes and Asiatic features, a genetic trait that was rare on Home and so lent her an air of the exotic.

Lara had made a vital contribution to the Kaufman Industries 'project' which Philip had pursued relentlessly for so many years. That project resulted in the process of gestalt between human and AI minds enjoyed by the pilots of the needle ships that had defeated The Noise Within. Philip vaguely recalled that Lara had been involved with one of the potential pilots... Ah yes, Jenner, the cream of the crop. He wondered whether that emotional link persisted and, if so, how she was coping with her beau's protracted absence now that the needle ship squadron was seeing active service and found itself constantly in demand.

The logic chain his mind had constructed in the split second it took him to associate Lara to Jenner also intrigued him. This had been no intuitive leap instantly linking the pair, but instead a clear chain of connection leading from one to the other. Was that how all thinking worked for him now? Had he just caught a first glimpse of one of the fundamental differences between his past life and this new one - rigidity of thought?

He filed the matter away for further consideration later.

Lara produced results almost immediately. Tanya wasn't present at the meeting, evidently manifesting only for the virtual side of things. Philip still had no idea how closely her avatar mirrored her corporeal self's actual appearance, if at all, and determined to find out once this was all over.

"Of course, there are no telltale differences between the code underpinning your alcoves and anything else in Virtuality," Lara explained to them.

"Of course," Malcolm agreed, after they'd spent an age searching for just such differences.

"So what I've done is make a couple of assumptions. The first being that the date the alcoves were introduced is significant, that it represents the point where alien influence began to permeate Home's Virtuality."

Which made sense. Why hadn't they thought of that?

"The second is that any other objects showing Byrzaen influence would contain some similarities in the coding sequences to these alcoves of yours. To track that down, I've instigated multiple iterative searches running in parallel, beginning with one which looked for coding that's identical to the alcoves and then spawning search-trees from there, each dedicated to finding wider variation from the original than its predecessor."

"Told you she was good," Philip said to Malcolm.

"So this gives me two lists, one linked to the alcoves by date of origin and the other by some shared coding sequences." She gestured and two columns of numerical series appeared in the air. "I can't guarantee that either of these contains what you're looking for, but a comparison shows that two of the sequences appear in both sets." Another gesture and two lines of numbers in each column started to pulse, while a pair of red cords crossed the gap between columns, linking the identical sequences.

"Thanks, Lara," Philip said and meant it. "At least this gives us a good place to start."

"Two, to be precise," Malcolm said, "and this certainly beats the hell out of searching every nook and cranny in Virtuality."

"Let's go."

"Sure," Malcolm agreed. "As soon as Tanya can join us."

Great; that was all Philip wanted to hear.

 

It looked like any street in a well-to-do part of some rural town. The only unusual aspect was its brevity - seven houses, three to either side with a sprawling manse at the far end; a cul-de-sac, giving the impression that the six smaller properties were attending on their more significant neighbour. Set against a background of gently sloping fields ripe with corn, and a small copse of tall trees at the crown of a low hill, this could easily have been many people's idyll. Not hers, though.

"Four hostiles in the first building to the left, three to the right," the gun informed her. At the same instant, red dots appeared in her visor.

Both houses looked quiet to the naked eye - the one to her right even boasted a low white picket fence. The two could have been mirror images of each other, with grand porches and a broad window to either side. Those windows were not smashed as yet and no one was shooting at her, but that would undoubtedly change as soon as she stepped between them and put herself in the crossfire. Boulton gathered herself. Had this been a holo-drama, she'd doubtless have strolled down the centre of the street, a gun in each hand, pumping bullets into the windows to either side as she went, taking out enemies with every stride. The whole set against a soundtrack of adrenaline-pumping music - something heavy, fast and edgy. What she was about to attempt seemed like hard work in comparison, and she bet holo-drama performers earned a hell of a lot more than she did as well.

"Sonic."

She lifted the gun's nozzle, squeezed the trigger and played the beam of high-frequency sound across the front of the building to her right. The two ground floor windows shattered spectacularly, razor-edged glass shards imploding into the building.

"Grenade." Already she was sprinting towards the opposite building, raising the gun and firing. One of the two explosive shells moulded to the gun's barrel flipped up and away, crashing through the nearest window.

"Projectile." Bullets tore past her and she could see shapes moving within the building. The grenade exploded. Heat buffeted her and somebody inside screamed, and then she was leaping through the shattered window. Snatched impressions: a body sprawled on the floor by the window, another nearby, moving feebly; a settee on fire against the far wall, a table overturned, figures in motion to her right. She was firing even as she landed. One gunman went down, a second leapt to take cover behind the table. Bad move - he might as well have tried to hide behind a sheet of paper; the table was far too insubstantial to deter the bullets her gun fired. She held the trigger down and peppered the flimsy barrier, watching the wood as it was chewed to pieces and knowing that the man beyond would be faring no better. Her visor showed his red light wink out. She blinked away nascent tears - not for any sentimental reasons but because smoke from the burning settee was making her eyes water.

Movement at the periphery of her vision. Boulton whipped the gun around. The injured man, the one on the floor she'd discounted as being all-but-dead, had raised himself onto his elbows and produced a weapon from somewhere. His dot flared abruptly from dull orange to bright red. The two of them fired at virtually the same time, the sound of their twinned shots overlapping. Something struck her gun hand with jarring force - his bullet - no, not her hand but the gun itself; a glancing blow that reverberated through her wrist and forearm, almost pushing the weapon from her hand. Thankfully that was all his shot struck. The man's red dot had disappeared. Her own aim had been better, taking him in the chest and most likely the heart. No question of his rising from the dead a second time.

The fire from the settee was spreading. A curtain of flame crawled along the back wall, blistering floral wallpaper at its fringes as it was sucked upwards by the stairwell. Tendrils of fire crept along the ceiling, smoke filled the room despite the shattered windows and it was getting unbearably hot.

"Gun, are you damaged?"

Silence. Great, the impact had knocked out communications. But had it done any more damage? "Energy." She fired at the dead man. A bullet made a bloody mess of his right eye and everything beneath. Shit! The gun's AI was out of commission, which meant the weapon's various offensive options had just been kicked out of her reach. It was locked into 'projectile.' Nor did the bad news end there. Her visor was also dead; hardly a surprise since it relied on information supplied by the gun's AI, but still a handicap she could have done without while in the middle of hostile territory.

A shadow moved at the window she'd entered by. Boulton swivelled and squeezed off two rounds. A grunt of pain confirmed that she'd hit someone and she was on the move immediately, racing to press herself against the front wall. Her eyes stung and her lungs were filling with smoke. If these goons had any sense at all they'd simply stand back, make sure all the exits were covered and wait for the smoke and the flames to drive her out, but apparently they didn't. A snub-nosed machine pistol jabbed through the window and squirted a stream of bullets at the space where she'd been; presumably the weapon was fired blind. The flames lapped closer. Caution was no longer an option. Boulton ejected the nearly spent ammo clip, loaded a fresh one, and then stepped away from the wall. She thought about trying something clever - picking up a corpse and tossing it through one window before diving out the other, but there wasn't really the time. Besides, she'd always been an advocate of the simple approach. So she ran at the other window, the one through which no bullets had come as yet, lifted her arms to shield her face and dived.

Most of the glass had already gone, probably smashed so that the occupants could take pot-shots at her when she first approached the building, but shards still clung to the frame like teeth around a maw, tearing at her arms as she sailed through. The gun was clasped in her left hand and she had the trigger jammed down from the instant she felt the glassy daggers bite, firing back along the front of the building. No great surprise that she hadn't hit anything, but at least it kept them sufficiently occupied ducking bullets that they didn't have a chance to zero in on her. She rolled on landing, coming to her feet in a crouch. There were two of them. Whether these were from the other building - the one whose windows she'd blown in with the sonics - or newcomers to the party was hard to say. Her appearance, spitting bullets, had clearly startled them and they were slow to recover, one picking himself up from the ground where he'd dropped to, the other firing erratically and inaccurately. She dispatched them both clinically and efficiently - one bullet for each.

Behind her the fire still crackled as it greedily consumed the house, but other than that all was ominously quiet. Decisions: should she secure her back trail by checking out the opposite building - the gun had reported three gunmen in there, after all - or continue forward and get this over with as quickly as possible?

Onward; the sooner she was out of here the better. She ran, almost glad when the fragile silence was shattered by renewed gunfire. Bullets peppered the ground behind her and tore into the wall of the building she was running past. She fired back, at the windows of the second house opposite.

The throaty roar of a souped-up engine heralded the arrival of an outlandish vehicle, an armoured car sporting a rear-mounted machine gun. A trail of bullets churned up her footmarks as she dived behind the brick wall around the small front garden of the next house, death snapping at her heels. She raised her head and tried to shoot out the car's tires but to no avail. It tore down the street, turned and came back for another pass. The gun's AI brain might have been inactive but she still carried a spare clip of the barrel-mounted grenade shells. She clawed at her belt, freeing the clip even as she hunkered down, feeling shards of shattered brick sting her back as the machine gun chattered and chewed away at her hiding place. Somebody was laughing, enjoying himself - the bastard manning the gun.

As the jeep skidded around and leapt back for a third pass, she tossed the spare grenade clip into the road, directly into its path. She then slithered on her stomach so that when she popped her head up a few seconds later it was at a different spot, a little further along the wall. The car was almost on top of the clip. The machine gun chattered away but she ignored it, steadying her arm, focussing on the clip to the exclusion of all else. She gently squeezed the trigger, once, twice. The grenades exploded just as the car arrived, bouncing the vehicle into the air like some ungainly fish freshly landed and desperately seeking water, ripping open its front - the hood flying off in one sturdy sheet while the engine beneath flew apart in myriad fragments. Boulton ducked back behind her wall, hearing shrapnel ping against the outside, feeling the impact of a few heavier pieces through the bricks. So much for armour.

As soon as it stopped Boulton vaulted the wall and strode up to the smouldering wreck even as it rolled to a halt. The two men in the drivers' compartment looked dead, but she put a bullet in each of them to make sure. The pillock in the back - the one who'd taken such glee in shooting at her - had been thrown clear in the explosion and was crawling feebly along the ground; dazed and most likely injured. The two bullets she pumped into his head doubtless stopped the pain.

Boulton moved on, her target - the big house - directly ahead.

The gun's silence was uncanny, a prickling void, but not really a distraction. She was still new enough at being an eyegee to feel comfortable in its absence. In fact, she was almost glad to be free of the gun's presence for a while, that sense of something always watching over her shoulder. This was like getting her privacy back.

Something caught her attention, a sliding of detail in the corner of her eye, a bush and a flowerbed that seemed to flow fractionally to one side, as if viewed through a heat haze... Shimmer suit. On the other hand, the gun and visor combo could be fucking useful sometimes, especially when there were enemies around which the naked eye might not be able to see. She dropped to one knee and brought the gun up to spray a fan of bullets, centring on where she'd seen that patch of shimmer. Her reward was to hear a cry of surprise and pain and to watch an armed man collapse to the floor, his suit deactivating as its wearer died.

She was up and running immediately, crouching low, gun at the ready. Were there more of them? She cast her gaze about, not seeing any further tell-tale flicker of warped light, but then she wouldn't; not unless they moved. A single shot rang out and she felt a shaft of agony lance through her left arm. Drops of warm blood speckled her face as the bullet punched through her forearm. The shooter was behind her somewhere. Screw the idea of crouching low, the gunman clearly had her in his sights. She straightened and sprinted, ignoring her wound - that could wait - and using the pain as a goad. She ran at an angle, heading for the shimmer suited body, hoping walls and gardens might provide her with some protection, and even threw in a tight zigzag for good measure. A second shot rang out and she fancied she could feel the bullet's passage as it flew past her ear, but no fresh blossoming of pain resulted.

Then she was around the corner, at the side of the big house, with solid brick between her and the sniper. Her wound pulsed with pain and blood flowed freely down her left arm, its sticky warmth coating the back of her hand and running around to work into the creases of her palm, but she couldn't stop to patch the wound, not yet. A window. She fired three shots on the run and then leapt through the shower of shattering glass, bringing renewed agony to her already throbbing arm.

Beyond was a formal dining room which might have been lifted straight from some stately home. Very retro-classical - high ceilings and everything crafted out of polished rosewood, from the ornate round-cornered table that took centre stage to its attendant twelve disciples - the matching high-backed chairs that clustered around it - and the twin sideboards that stood against the walls. If that didn't provide enough of a clue, then the large heavy framed canvases above, depicting hunting scenes and the portrait of a regal-looking man, told you instantly that this was not your average slice of suburbia.

Boulton loaded a fresh clip of ammo and headed for the room's open doorway. Neither of the gun-toting goons beyond stood a chance, mown down in the hail of bullets that heralded her arrival. The sweeping stairway and the high-ceilinged entrance hall itself might have been impressive if she'd had the time to consider them properly. Instead her attention focussed unerringly on the solid wooden front door, which stood to her right as she burst from the dining room. Somebody yelled from behind her, words she didn't catch as she lunged at the door, her hands closing around its gleaming brass handle.

The instant her hand clasped the cold metal the simulation faded, winking out as if it had never been, to leave her standing in the vast warehouse-like space of the honeycomb's sim room. She was breathing heavily, having pushed her body hard in this one, but at least the agony of her injured arm faded with the rest.

Somebody clapped and a tall figure stepped forward from the shadows: Pavel Benson. "Very clever," he said, "coming at the door from the inside like that."

She shrugged. "You told me that reaching the door was the goal; nobody said anything about which side I had to reach. It struck me that you'd probably have some nasty surprises lying in wait if I'd gone for the direct approach."

"We did."

"Well" - now came the moment of truth - "did I pass?"

She had been exonerated of any blame for what went down at the habitat, at least officially, and nobody was referring to the operation as a fiasco, not in public. After all, the principle objective had been to eliminate the habitat as a threat, and they'd achieved that, no question. Yet when the specialists moved in to pick over the corpse of their enemy, they'd found hundreds of dead in a facility that was clearly capable of accommodating thousands, just as her gun had suggested, and the bald facts were that ULAW had lost one of its precious eyegees, while of the one hundred and eighty marines she and Case had led between them, only four had come back alive. Those four owed their survival not to any brilliance on her part but to the lightning-quick response of the retrieval drones, much as she herself did. No, nobody was calling this a debacle in public.

She'd gone through the mission a hundred times in her head, wondering if she could have done anything differently. The only thing she might have changed was the automated weapon placements. If she'd stopped to take them out when the gun first identified them, lives might have been saved there if not in the long run, but she'd counted on the gun's assurance that they weren't a threat. That was what this latest exercise was all about, she suddenly realised, to gauge just how dependant on the weapon and its guiding AI she'd become.

Benson was nodding and smiling. That had to be a good sign. "You did okay."

Coming from him, that was high praise indeed, and Boulton was amazed at quite how relieved she felt on hearing those words.

"Well enough that I'm sending you out again."

"Oh?" She hadn't expected a full reprieve that quickly.

"We've got a potential lead on Jim Leyton."

She stared into Benson's eyes, saw him smile and knew that her reaction had given her away. He now knew beyond any doubt how much she wanted this.

"The needle ship squadron recently engaged a habitat ship - the one we've identified as being responsible for the raid on Sheol, the one that Leyton is almost certainly on. After careful study of the intel gathered during the attack, we're confident that the rebel's engines took substantial damage. There was also a deal of collateral damage to the sections of the ship adjacent to the drive. Our best guess is that we've crippled her engines and taken out most if not all her engineering personnel."

"That's a heck of an assumption," Boulton couldn't help but comment.

"Taken on its own, perhaps, but hear me out. One of our monitoring stations picked up a hack into ULAW security systems. An apparently trivial thing that would normally have been noted and added to a list of thousands of things 'to be looked at later,' but some bright spark made a connection. The hack was designed to ferret out information on a particular individual, an ex-navy engineer by the name of Kyle, who happens to have been the first human recruited by The Noise Within and is, as far as we know, the only human to have ever worked with Byrzaen engines.

"Knowing my connection to the Byrzaen operation at New Paris, our friendly bright spark made sure the information was passed up the line to me.

"We're pretty sure that this hack was carried out by the habitat, and why else would they be interested in an engineer unless they needed someone who might just be able to fix their ship?"

Boulton frowned. There was a gaping hole at the heart of Benson's argument, and as far as she could see only one thing could fill it; something that made no sense at all. "All right," she said carefully, "but why? Are you trying to tell me that the habitat have Byrzaen technology?"

He shrugged. "Habitat ships can jump without using wormholes. So can the Byrzaens. Now somebody is trying to track down the only man in ULAW space with firsthand knowledge of alien engine systems at a time when we know the habitat needs a mechanic. You tell me."

The bastard knew far more than he was saying. Benson had one of those faces that might as well have been carved from granite. He never gave anything away, but right now she knew he was holding out on her, despite his deadpan expression. He was also her boss, though, and after recent events she was walking on eggshells, which meant her options were pretty limited at present, so she turned her attention back to what he had said rather than what he'd so studiously left out.

"So if Leyton is on that ship, if its engines were sufficiently damaged, if enough of their specialists were killed and if they have a means of tracking down this engineer... they might be going after him."

Benson's smile had grown markedly thin-lipped. "I did stress that this was only a potential lead."

Sod the eggshells. She felt them grind to dust beneath her feet as she said, "Sounds like a long shot to me."

"Which is better than no shot at all."

Barely, in Boulton's opinion.

Benson was still speaking. "We've tracked down this 'Kyle.' He recently signed on as crew to an old trader-cum-smuggler called The Peridon. The ship's currently bound for a backwater planet called Arcadia. We've diverted a courier ship and have it waiting to take you directly there. If you leave now you should arrive a little ahead of The Peridon, and will have full authority to co-opt whatever local support you require."

Boulton knew she ought to feel delighted. After all, up until a few moments ago her very future as an eyegee had been in doubt, and now here she was being handed an assignment. Yet she couldn't escape the feeling that this was a wild goose chase, and that while she was dispatched to some forgotten corner of the galaxy on a pointless waste of time, a genuine lead would come in and be handed to somebody else. That was her greatest concern, that somebody other than her would be granted the pleasure of taking down that bastard Leyton. The prospect gnawed at her innards like a festering ulcer.

Not that she had a choice here, and the sooner she left the sooner she could be back. So Boulton made no further complaint but instead simply nodded and said, "Sir!" with only a hint of irony, before hurrying away to prepare for her imminent trip.