the Noise Within (2010) (8 page)

Not before taking care of the second guard, however.

Even though his visor showed the current whereabouts of the wandering red dot, he instinctively checked the bank of security monitors in any case. On one he noted the control centre. Three figures sitting at desks, intent on their own screens. Three, when the visor reported four in the room, so that might indicate another guard, perhaps stationed by the door.

Worth noting, but not his primary concern just then. He turned his attention to one of the other screens, which showed a grey-suited figure strolling down a semi-darkened corridor.

One floor up. Leyton headed for the fire exit and its stairway, ignoring the more convenient elevators.

He came out into an empty passageway ahead of the guard's route, chose a convenient bit of wall to stand against and waited, allowing the shimmer suit to do its thing. Moments later the oblivious guard sauntered past and Leyton stepped forward, reaching out to grasp the man's jaw from behind and repeating the performance of earlier. Then it was back to the monitor room, where he deactivated the alarm, ignoring the blood that now marred the control panel, and opened the door to allow Sergeant Black and the rest of the party to enter.

He watched as one man stayed to cover the front door while another peeled away to cover the building's side entrance. Black, the two techs and the two remaining troopers hurried up the stairs to meet him.

Again foregoing the elevators, Leyton led them to the fire stairs, ascending swiftly but silently and cursing under his breath at the amount of noise from behind him - the scuffing of shoes and slap of feet on uncarpeted concrete stairway sounding all the louder in the enclosed confines of the stairwell. The gun evidently recognised the cursing as not being directed at it and stayed mercifully quiet.

Then, unexpectedly, one of the red dots on the floor above moved their way.

Leyton held out a restraining hand, emphasising the gesture with a hissed "Wait!" He was relieved at how quickly the sound and movement behind him ceased. They were spread out along a stretch of stairs between the second and third floors. On the fifth, the red dot kept coming. The third guard, perhaps, drawn by some slight noise from the stairway?

Ignoring his own instruction, Leyton hurried upward, treading as lightly as he could. He knew he had to be in position before the door on the fifth floor opened, after which movement would be risky, not only because any noise he made would be amplified in the confines of the stairwell but also because the slight distortion of a shimmer suit on the move might be enough to give him away. Particularly to a guard already suspicious enough to come looking. Yet, before he could even reach the small landing to the fourth floor, he heard above him the telltale creak of a door opening. Leyton froze, fully aware that he was still a dozen paces short of where he needed to be and that there was little chance of taking the guard out from here before the man could raise the alarm.

CHAPTER FOUR

A
voice called out from somewhere above, drawing a "Yeah?" from the guard.

In his visor display, Leyton saw that one of the other red dots had moved away from the main group, presumably stepping from the office to the corridor. The door above was only half opened, the man delayed and his attention temporarily elsewhere. Leyton risked moving forward again, hurrying as silently as he could past the door to the fourth floor and onto the stairs to the fifth.

He was still a few paces short of his ideal position when he heard the guard above say, "Will do," followed by the squeak of oil-thirsty hinges as the door opened completely. He stopped moving at once, gun pointed towards the emerging man. He just hoped those below him, the two techs in particular, held their nerve and remembered how effective the shimmer suits were so long as you stayed still.

Thankfully, the guard didn't even look their way beyond a casual glance. Instead, he reached inside his uniform and withdrew a small but bulky pen-shaped object, which he thrust against his stiffened left arm, not bothering to lift his sleeve, and held there for a handful of seconds. Leyton smiled - the man had
not
been alerted by any noise they made at all, but had slipped away to shoot up! A narcotic micro-spray fired through uniform and skin alike; possibly a stimulant, much needed towards the end of a long shift when energy was flagging, but definitely something not allowed in the job description, or he wouldn't have sneaked away in the first place. With a sigh, the guard relaxed his arm and slipped the applicator away again.

He stood for a few seconds, breathing deeply and puffing his cheeks out, before straightening his uniform and turning, obviously preparing to go back to his post. Leyton made a quick calculation. The guard's hands were now empty and there was nothing obviously loose about the uniform, nothing to clatter noisily should he fall. Could Leyton reach him in time to catch the body and prevent it from tumbling down the stairs? Probably.

He squeezed the trigger. Fully silenced, the gun made little more noise than a person spitting. The eyegee was on the move even as the bullet smashed into the guard's skull.

He made up the distance easily, catching the guard's body as it began to wilt towards the stairwell and laying it gently down onto the small landing, being careful not to block the door.

He waved the others forward, exiting the stairwell with Black close at his heels. There were now three red dots left in the control room.

Against all sense the room's door stood open, perhaps left that way by a guard who expected to be returning soon. Leyton, Black and the remaining marine ghosted into the room, each taking station behind one of the three civilians - two men, one woman - intent on their work. One of the men was just finishing a conversation, apparently with somebody aboard one of the two ships parked in orbit around Holt. The trio waited for him to break the connection and then struck. These were civilians, so they applied a non-lethal approach. Three stun guns, weapons using electro-muscular disruption, fired simultaneously. The three Holtans collapsed, to be dragged away and quickly bound and gagged.

Black's remaining marine took station by the door, looking alert and ready for anything, while the two techs came into the room, gratefully pulling back the hoods of their shimmer suits. They both sat at one of the terminals, and the older man sighed. "Oh well, I suppose it was too much to hope for."

"What was?" Leyton wanted to know.

"Oh, nothing. We just hoped that by catching them with screens running it might give us an easy way into their systems, but no such luck." He placed the valise, carried with him throughout, on the workstation and popped it open. "Not a problem, it'll just take us a little longer, is all."

Hardly the most welcome news, but it couldn't be helped. "Quick as you can."

"I know, I know. You do your job, we'll do ours."

"An alarm has been sounded," the gun's placid voice informed him.

"How? We didn't give any of them a chance to touch anything."

"More a case of what has not been done rather than what has. The alarm was caused by inactivity at one of the work terminals."

Really? That was interesting, and seemed remarkably sharp of the locals, which came as something of a surprise given what they'd encountered here so far.

None of which altered the situation they found themselves in. "Look lively," he said to everybody; "an alarm's been triggered, so we can expect company sooner rather than later."

He looked across at Black, who nodded his understanding. At the door, the trooper adjusted the grip on his gun and somehow looked even more alert.

A tense moment passed, with the techs working silently and Black fiddling with something on his suit.

Then came the chatter of automatic gunfire from outside. Leyton was a little surprised at the speed of response, but red dots were suddenly blossoming from two directions. So many that the visor apparently gave up trying to represent them as individual dots and settled for expanding red smudges.

"Shit!" Black said from the window. "There's a small army out there,"

Leyton crossed to join him. The sergeant was right. Where the hell had this lot materialised from? Well-disciplined troops advanced towards their position, covering each other in classic style and utilising the available terrain effectively as they converged on the front door. Difficult to judge numbers, even with the visor, but he estimated half a platoon or more in each direction, perhaps as many as fifty in all.

What was it he'd been told to expect? 'A poorly trained and inadequately equipped militia; slow to respond and unlikely to offer significant resistance.' That was one part of the briefing he
had
listened to.

Where was his fellow eyegee? "Boulton?" He broke radio silence; little point in maintaining it at this stage.

"Not now. I'm busy!"

She had better be. They only had one man guarding each entrance, and neither stood a chance against this many hostiles.

Black seemed to have reached the same conclusion. "Pull back to the first landing," he ordered, presumably speaking to the two soldiers guarding the doors. He then turned to Leyton. "I hope you eyegees are all you're cracked up to be, because at this precise moment we don't have a clear way out of here."

Leyton made no response, but instead looked across to see how the techs were doing. What he saw was far from encouraging. The younger tech had gone white as a sheet; in fact he looked petrified. His colleague just looked resigned. Neither seemed to be doing a great deal except staring at the screen.

"Problems?" He hurried over to them.

The older man nodded, staring at the screen before him as if it had tried to bite him, while his companion looked up to flick a wide-eyed glance towards Leyton. "This has much higher-grade defences than we were told to expect."

The eyegee snorted. He was beginning to sense a pattern here. "Which means?"

"Which means that I can't guarantee we can get inside its safeguards and blocks before every scrap of useful information is erased."

Black chimed in, before Leyton could voice a suitable expletive. "But you can still recover it even then, right? I mean, nothing on a computer's ever irretrievably lost, is it?"

"Don't believe everything you hear," the older tech replied. "Given the right equipment and enough man hours, we
might
be able to get to it, depends on how the erasing was done, but I wouldn't like to bet on it."

"Besides which, we don't
have
either the equipment or the time," the younger man added.

"Right," the first tech confirmed.

There had to be something they could do. Leyton's inherent stubbornness wouldn't allow him to give up on any mission so readily, especially one which was shaping up to be such a total pain in the butt as this. "What would make the difference?" He addressed the more experienced of the two, who at least seemed to know what he was doing.

"Sorry?"

"What would you need to breach the system's defences in time to preserve the info, to prevent it being erased?"

"More computer power than we have here." The man tapped his valise.

If it was computing power they needed... "Could you help?" Leyton sub-vocalised to the gun.

"Perhaps, but it would mean shutting down all higher defensive and offensive capabilities while I did so. I would just be a simple chunk of inanimate weaponry."

Leyton digested that, a little surprised at how vulnerable the prospect made him feel, but he knew that, if the mission were to stand any chance of success, he had no choice.

"I might be able to help you there," he told the tech, and conveyed the gun's offer.

The man looked dubious but said, "We'll give it a go."

"Make sure you're on projectile and do it," he instructed the gun.

"We'll need to hook it up to my gear," the tech said, holding out his hand. Leyton hesitated and then passed the gun over.

His visor went dead. Red and green dots disappeared to leave just the room and its occupants.

The gunfire seemed suddenly louder, closer. The sergeant had crossed from the window to take station with his man by the door. Both were braced with weapons drawn. Leyton felt abruptly lost, impotent. His hand itched to be clutching a gun but he didn't carry a spare - why would he? And he resisted the temptation to ask either of the soldiers if they had one, which would have sounded too much like an admission of weakness.

As he watched, the stance of the two soldiers altered - a subtle readjustment but a telling one, as both sighted along their guns and started firing. Bullets hammered into the door frame above Black's head, causing the sergeant to duck back inside. Only for an instant, then he was leaning out and shooting again, but this time in the opposite direction. So the attack was coming from both sides, the local troops must be emerging from the stairs and the elevators simultaneously, which didn't say much for the chances of the marines designated to guard the building's doors and stairwell.

Leyton looked around the room, futilely searching for a weapon. Then the marine beside Black spun half around, stumbling into the room and clutching his shoulder. Leyton started forward, intent on claiming the injured man's gun and replacing him, but as he went to do so, a voice whispered, "Did you miss me?" and at the same instant the tech declared triumphantly, "Got it!"