The Noise Revealed (3 page)

All in all, a highly satisfactory interlude, which held the promise of even greater satisfaction to come.

The rattle of something crockery-based being placed carelessly back onto a shelf reminded him that the shop still had one other customer.

He glanced across at her, to find a hint of amusement in the eyes that looked back. Abandoning all pretence of examining the merchandise, the woman started towards him. The way she advanced brought to mind a predator stalking its prey, and Manny was glad to have Sia or Maisie - whichever one of the twins this was - just a few steps away. Sia, he belatedly realised. She was the one who'd come in that morning with a white-headed zit ready to erupt from the centre of her forehead. The spot was now gone, but a livid red mark bore witness to its recent passing.

The security scans hadn't shown any obvious weapons on the woman, but there was a blank patch where her belt bag sat against her hip that had him worried - something the scans couldn't penetrate.

"Manny Ousaka?" she asked.

"Who wants to know?"

The smile didn't fool him for a second. It never reached her eyes. "The name's Boulton."

"All right, Boulton, I'm guessing you're not really interested in helping our society's forgotten poor by buying any of my stock, so what exactly
do
you want?"

"Information."

"Ah." That word was music to Manny's ears. Perhaps he'd misjudged this ice-cold woman and the day was going to keep getting better after all. Information, was it? Manny's life-blood, what he lived and breathed. The shop was more than just a front, more a hobby he indulged himself. It brought in a few bucks and let him keep his hand in at dealing with the great unwashed. His
real
business was that of listening, finding, enabling, procuring - all for a price, of course. Manny was a fixer, a facilitator, the man with one ear to the ground and the other to the gods. You wanted to know what was going down before it actually went down, you came to Manny. You wanted a particular piece of kit for a particular job which the law said you couldn't have, Manny was your man. If you had a hankering for the latest synthetic narcotic or contraband tech, Manny was your first, your
only
port of call. 'As long as you can pay, I'll find a way,' was his proud motto.

He stood straight, feeling taller and more important in the process. "Information, you say... about what, exactly?"

"An old friend of yours, a mutual acquaintance; one Jim Leyton."

The smile died. He could taste its bitter corpse on his lips. "Leyton? Sorry, never heard of the man." As lies went, this was a poor one. It didn't even convince him.

The woman sighed. "Manny, Manny, I'm disappointed." She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. "You don't want to play that sort of game with me, I promise you."

Manny flicked a quick glance towards the nearby twin, reassured by her presence. This Boulton might think she had the upper hand, but he still had a pair of aces up his sleeve.

"Look, lady..."

"Let's cut the bullshit." The woman actually had the audacity to get bolshie with him, here, in his own place. "You're Leyton's principle contact in this sector, someone he meets with regularly."

'Meet' wasn't exactly the word Manny would have used. The man dropped in from time to time - in the same way that a bomb might drop through the ceiling. An alarm flashed red on Manny's screen. It meant that somebody was mounting a concerted effort to hack his systems. "What the...?" He glared at the woman. "Are you doing this? Get the hell out of my systems!"

Sia started forward, but in the blink of an eye Boulton whipped out a gun - damned hidden compartment. Manny knew that gun. Either this was the same weapon Leyton habitually carried, or his bodyguard wasn't the only twin in the room. Shit! Don't tell him this Boulton was some kind of female equivalent of that bastard Leyton.

Before he could react, before he could think to say anything, there came a muffled
whumpf
. The gun was clearly silenced. The bullet punched into Sia's forehead, right where the zit had been, and exploded from the back of her skull in a shower of shattered bone, blood and gore which smacked against the wall behind her.

The twin's body had not even had a chance to fully crumple to the floor before the gun swivelled towards Manny, centring between his eyes.

"Unless you want your other dolly guard to be the
third
person I kill here today, I suggest you tell her to come out now with her hands raised and empty."

"You heard the woman," Manny called. "Get your ass out here."

The second twin, Maisie, emerged; hands held level with her ears as instructed but eyes burning with defiance. Boulton must have spotted the latter too and decided she didn't need the potential complication, because, after a brief frown as if she were weighing up the options, she brought the gun smartly around and shot the second girl as cleanly and finally as she had the first. Two bloody splatters now decorated the wall.

So much for augmentation.

Manny swallowed on a sand-dry throat as the gun returned to cover him. He made certain to stand very, very still.

"That's better. Just you and me now." Her smile sent a chill sliding down the length of his spine. "You were about to tell me everything you know about Jim Leyton."

"Yeah, sure, anything you say."

"Oh, and while we're having our little chat, you won't mind opening up your systems, will you? Just to confirm there's nothing you've... forgotten."

"Ehm, sure, of course not."

"Good, only that's an impressive security system you've got there, and while I'm sure we could hack it eventually, everything will be so much quicker if you invite us in."

Manny hurried to comply.

"Perfect. Now, for openers, when was the last time you saw our dear friend Leyton?"

Manny took a deep breath. He had a feeling that Boulton wasn't going to like the answer, that he hadn't seen Leyton in a while - never mind that it was the truth; this was one woman that he really
really
didn't want to disappoint.

She woke with a bitter taste at the back of the throat and mucous clogging her mouth. She tried to swallow but was interrupted as somebody grabbed hold of her and attempted to pull her upright. Her eyes shot open and harsh facts tumbled into place: guards, prison, Sheol Station.

"Get up!" Wisely, the man had stood back.

Prisoner 516 did as instructed.

"Arms!" She dutifully brought both behind her back to be cuffed. It was then a case of shuffling out of her cell and trudging between the two guards - one in front and one behind. Neither of them touched her, not now she was awake. They'd learnt that lesson. Besides, the cuffs now securing her wrists were capable of delivering a surge of pain enough to ensure obedience. The guards remained wary though, she could sense it. Small satisfaction perhaps, but that was all they'd left her.

The catcalls and wolf whistles that trailed her passage were irrelevances she barely noticed anymore, as were the shouted promises of what her fellow inmates would do to her given half a chance, and how they'd have her moaning for more. Given that chance, she'd break every bone in their bodies, leaving them even limper than their dicks, but such defiance echoed only in her head these days; she could no longer spare the energy to vocalise it. She knew that elsewhere on the station there were political prisoners, subversives, cybercrime kingpins, industrial fraudsters, and assorted intellectual giants whose genius refused to conform and who, therefore, were too dangerous to remain at large. Not here, not on this landing. She shared this level with the thugs and the psychopaths, the perverted bullies and the sadistic murderers, those whose crimes might embarrass the government and so would never be allowed to come to trial. She was the only woman on the entire corridor.

They had put her here to intimidate her. It didn't.

Her current destination, on the other hand, did. She knew precisely where they were taking her: to the clinic. Such a deceptively innocent-sounding name for such an evil place. It was a bland oblong box, as were all rooms in this facility, which had once been a starship - a vessel which official records cited as decommissioned and broken down for scrap more than a decade ago. The clinic was the modern, civilised face of an institution that reached back into man's darker, cruder past: the torture chamber. The functional angles of the room's walls and ceilings and the clinical brightness of its surfaces presented a misleading veneer. Strip them away and beneath you would find ancient brick walls damp with subterranean moisture and oil-drenched torches that guttered in wall brackets, while the black upholstered chair which formed the room's centrepiece hid within its depths a set of iron wall manacles and the wooden frame of a rack. The attempt at innocence didn't fool her for a second.

The bald-pated round-shouldered Dr Etherington, whose name slipped so readily into 'Deathrington,' looked down his prominent Roman nose as she entered. "Ah, 516. How nice to see you again."

She trusted that her answering glower was eloquence enough. The orderly who hovered behind the good doctor was an inconsequence, but Deathrington she would deal with, somehow, some day.

One guard took station by the door, the other behind the chair. Both had drawn their shockclubs. This was the moment they would expect her to try something, when the manacles came off - she had done so before, but not this time. She wouldn't give them the satisfaction. So the prisoner stood docilely as the cuffs sprang open, flexing her wrists for the all too brief seconds of freedom before a smiling Deathrington motioned her to sit down. She did as instructed, silently vowing that her next attempt at escape would be when they
didn't
expect it, and that she would succeed.

Steel bands closed around her ankles and wrists, holding her firm, and she braced herself for what was to come. Method, that was the only difference between this place and its ancient counterparts. Torture had evolved, although the intentions were certainly the same - to break a person's will and loosen the tongue, to unlock their most guarded secrets. Nor had the chief tool - pain - changed, though the way it was administered certainly had.

What need did the torturer have for flails and forks and thumbscrews when his victim could be primed with a drug that made receptors so sensitive that the movement of air against the skin induced a sharp intake of breath, an involuntary wince of pain? Prisoner 516 felt a telltale tingle at her wrist as the micro-spray permeated her skin.

What need of heated irons or dripping water when the body's nerves could be isolated and stimulated at will and impulses targeted at specific areas of the brain?

No, a medieval torturer might see nothing familiar in the clinic at first glance, but only because he lacked the understanding to interpret the modern world. Once all was explained to him, he'd doubtless feel right at home.

A further tingling, this time in her other wrist, told the prisoner that the second drug had been administered, the one designed to break down resistance. She knew the drill, had been trained to hold out against such things, but training only carried you so far and reserves of strength had their limits. She felt herself relax and tried desperately to cling onto her resolve, even as it slipped inexorably away. After a moment, Deathrington came forward to peer into her eyes. She stared back, trying to focus on one of his brown, flecked orbs and its black-hole centre, imagining herself plunging something sharp into that eye and twisting, rummaging around in the soft tissue beneath.

Evidently satisfied with whatever he saw, Deathrington grunted and stepped back. The rest of the room had lost focus. All she saw was the distorted oval of his face.

"I think we're ready. Do you feel ready, 516?"

No!
she screamed in her head, but, "M - yes," her treacherous mouth mumbled.

"Good. Now, I want you to tell me something; I want you to tell me all you can about a man you know well, a man called Jim Leyton."

Leyton
? That was new. Why did they suddenly want to know about Leyton?

"We'll start with how you met him, shall we?"

Somewhere deep inside, a lingering shadow of the person she'd once been quailed, but it was only a tiny scrap of character, easy to ignore. Prisoner 516 began to speak and knew that once she started there would be no holding back. She prepared to lay bare her soul.

Chapter Three

A figure stood in the shadows, biding his time, waiting for the moment to kill. Sheol Station. Hell in space. The last place Jim Leyton had ever expected to find himself.

When he and several other eyegees had been assigned to hunt down the crew of
The Noise Within
, Leyton questioned the wisdom of devoting so many key resources to deal with a mere pirate, little realising there was nothing 'mere' about this particular vessel. Clearly somebody in authority
had
realised, and while, admittedly, superiors were supposed to be privy to information you weren't, in this particular instance the implications were profoundly disturbing.
The Noise Within
had quite literally changed the world,
all
human worlds. How could anyone have known that was going to happen?

Conspiracy theories had been around forever. Leyton had even helped to fan the flames of one or two in his time - misdirection, smoke and mirrors. Most were preposterous nonsense perpetrated by crazies with a skewed sense of reality but, even granting that, some still held at least a kernel of truth, as he well knew. The perpetrators of such things were currently having a field day, convinced that the 'first contact' represented by
The Noise Within
was anything
but
the first. Leyton had seen smear campaigns, cover-ups and hoaxes, knew how ULAW en-masse and officials individually reacted to given situations, and the longer he watched what was going on right now, the firmer his conviction became that this time the crazies might just be on to something.