the Noise Within (2010) (24 page)

In the long period of unrelenting tedium following his arrival on
The Noise Within
, Kyle kept himself busy by taking apart, inspecting, cleaning, and then reassembling each and every unit the ship boasted, piece by piece, ensuring that they were all operating at optimum efficiency.

Evidently, his proclivity for such things had not gone unnoticed.

When the hulking form of Zombie Number One loomed over Drevers and himself, both assumed this signalled another raid, despite it coming so soon after the last one. However, the suited figure soon made it clear that on this occasion only Kyle's presence was wanted.

"You have technical expertise which is needed," was the anonymous figure's sole effort at explanation.

Kyle had no idea whether this was the genuine reason he was being singled out or not; his imagination went into overdrive and started painting sinister alternatives. Perhaps he had said too much in his criticism of the situation, perhaps he was being summoned to be punished, condemned to the brig or jettisoned from an airlock... In the absence of any explanation from his blank-faced escort, paranoia born of bizarre circumstance ran riot.

To compensate for his nervousness, he talked. "So, did you always want to be a pirate? Bet you did. I reckon your mum was a pirate before you - a lady corsair of the spaceways - and you grew up thinking: 'One day I want to be just like my mum'; though wearing different underwear, obviously."

Kyle was babbling, spouting nonsense, and he knew it. In truth, he didn't expect a response from the zombie, so could hardly claim to be disappointed when none was forthcoming. He read stoicism into the resultant silence, on the part of those guiding the suit if nothing else.

At first Kyle was hoping to be taken to the bridge. He'd been itching to have a look at the control systems ever since he first caught a glimpse of
The Noise Within's
weird adaptations and weapon arrays from the bridge of
The Lady J
. However, it soon became clear that he was being directed towards the lower decks rather than the more central areas where the bridge would be.

So, assuming he was not about to be thrown into some previously unsuspected dungeon room hidden deep within the ship's bowels, it had to be the engines. That prospect intrigued him only marginally less than being able to tinker around on the bridge itself.

At least he was being led to a bulkhead door and not an airlock, so, on the plus side, he wasn't about to be forced to 'walk the plank' without a suit.

Being around the silent, inhuman-seeming zombies was an unsettling experience, and Kyle had quickly come to view his original separation from them as a blessing. The mechanic in him was hoping to be let loose on one of those suits at some stage to see what made it tick, but at the same time he was grateful that his current guide walked ahead of him, so that he didn't have to continually stare into that opaque faceplate, which he was increasingly convinced hid only emptiness.

They finally arrived at the engine room; the ship's internal layout familiar enough that Kyle could happily have found it on his own had he been trusted to.

The sense of familiarity ended the instant he stepped through the door. Not that the Kaufman Drive units were anything other than he had expected; it was everything else.

The business end of the engines lay in shielded compartments beyond this room, where titanic energies were generated, clashing to produce the violent forces needed to power a starship; where those same energies were channelled and harnessed and regulated into useful form. What confronted Kyle was the control element of the process, the governing systems which kept those furies tame and prevented them from ripping the fragile ship apart.

The familiar sleek banks of moulded metal which housed the monitoring arrays and adjustment interfaces sat upon their plinth towards the centre of the room as usual, but on their far side was... something else. Kyle struggled to identify the thing that stood there, even in the most general terms. It was unlike anything he had encountered before and his mind baulked at trying to allocate any label to what his eyes reported.

Dark, pulsating pillars which rippled with energy and on which he was finding it impossible to fully focus - their edges ill-defined and blurred. It literally hurt to stare at them for too long, causing his eyes to water, but the afterimage when he blinked the tears away left him with a sense of deepest purple shading into onyx black, of scarlet sparks glimpsed at the very periphery of vision and hints of other colours he couldn't even begin to identify. Beyond the pillars sat something else, sensed as a bulk but so dark that it was beyond his capacity to identify any details of form. He had the impression that whatever he was seeing was not wholly there, that by merely trying to look at this thing he was gaining a glimpse of somewhere else, of a place other than normal reality.

The Kaufman Drive console was linked to this outlandish object by several veils; which was the only way Kyle could describe them. He was uncertain whether these shifting, inconsistent curtains had any substance at all or whether they were composed purely of energy.

"What the hell...?"

"The engines have been augmented to enhance performance."

Augmented?
Not in any way Kyle had ever come across. He stared at the zombie in disbelief. "You don't honestly expect me to go near that, do you?"

"It is necessary. Drive systems are marginally out of synch, enough to drop engine performance to little more than ninety per cent of optimum. Due to the nature of the engines' augmentations, recalibration cannot be accurately achieved from the bridge, only from here. You have the skills to do this."

True - at least as far as the Kaufmans were concerned. Kyle looked back at the pillars and the hidden bulk of the mechanism beyond and licked his upper lip, feeling less than thrilled at the prospect.

What about radiation? "Is it safe even being in here?"

"Brief exposure will produce no discernable detrimental effect," the zombie responded.

Kyle grunted. As reassurances went, this fell a long way short of ideal. Not that he had much choice in the matter. He briefly considered refusing to do as asked and wondered what would happen if he simply turned around and walked out of here. Would the zombie move to stop him? And what then; thrown off the ship, perhaps? He wasn't prepared to find out. Besides, the sooner he was done here the 'briefer' his exposure would be.

"The necessary equipment has been provided," the zombie said.

Sure enough, a standard set of diagnostics and repair tools sat at the foot of the console. With a sigh and a muttered, "I must be mad," Kyle stepped forward.

Ignoring the shifting, almost seductive lure of whatever occupied the room's far side, he concentrated on the familiar Kaufman units before him, initially running through a series of diagnostics so that he could get a feel for these particular chunks of hardware and judge exactly how well they were running. As ever, he could not help but admire the sheer beauty of these machines which, presumably, had not been properly maintained or supervised in a fair old while, yet still they performed with quiet efficiency.

The zombie was right; they were slightly out, but not by anything like the margin suggested. He was relieved to see that it would be a comparatively simple task to recalibrate and correct. As Kyle worked, he was careful not to touch the enigmatic, veil-like intrusions which were fused to the console's far side. Those apart, it was easy to become absorbed in the job at hand and forget about the surreal aspects of the situation.

After a gratifyingly short period of time he was done, but he didn't give any indication of that fact just yet. A vaguely rebellious thought had occurred to him. In the early days, before mass production made the custom impractical, each and every Kaufman Drive console had two pieces of apparently trivial information coded into their registration signature: the date the unit was completed, and the name of the ship it was destined for. This was not a practice that had lasted long, as the engines proved their worth and demand for them grew exponentially, but seeing as these were Mark Twos, it seemed worth the effort to check.

As Kyle gave the system one final run-through, he brought up the registration details, without any real expectation of learning much. He made sure to keep his features impassive as first the completion date and then the ship's name appeared on the display. The latter sent a chill running down his spine; it was a name which nobody with a serious interest in anything to do with starships could fail to recognise:
The Sun Seeker
.

He had no idea whether he managed to prevent the shock of this particular revelation from showing or not. He was too stunned to think about it for a second.

Suddenly, a lot of things fell into place -
The Noise Within's
odd variance from the classic military vessel she was clearly based upon, the unfinished nature of many of the fittings, the vessel's uninhabited feel, and the mystery of the zombies. No question in his mind now that the 'original crew' were simple husks, operated by the controlling AI. From everything he had heard, there was little chance anyone unfortunate enough to be on
The Sun Seeker
when she went rogue could have survived the breakneck multi-g acceleration of her escape.

Remembering himself, he banished the display and made a big show of stepping back with a relieved, "There."

"A job well done," the zombie said. Praise indeed, but only after brief hesitation, as if it were consulting with someone or confirming something.

If the animated suit realised what he had discovered it gave no sign, but instead turned and led the way out of the engine room. Kyle could not get away quickly enough and was convinced that what he had seen and felt in that room would haunt his dreams for many a night to come. Not to mention what he had learned.

He recalled the stoicism he had attributed to his escort's silence on the way down here, and smiled to himself, realising that this could only have been a product of his own imagination, since it seemed unlikely that either the zombies or the intelligence guiding them were capable of anything that flirted so closely with emotion.

The walk gave him time to think, to take stock of the situation. He was on board arguably the most infamous ship in the history of space flight. That fact almost overshadowed the awe he felt on discovering the unfathomable and extensive modifications that had been made to the ship's engines. The realisation that these were not the product of any technology he was familiar with - and he was, after all, something of an expert on the subject - was a particularly sobering one, the implications of which he shied away from grappling with at first, as if unwilling to face them until the shock of recent experience had grown a little less immediate.

Yet his curiosity started to win over his disquiet, and he began to wonder exactly what those bizarre 'augmentations' were and what they were supposed to achieve. Clearly they were revolutionary in concept. The thing that puzzled him most was exactly how
The Sun Seeker
had become
The Noise Within
, and, perhaps most intriguingly of all, why. If this was an example of what an AI could achieve when left to its own devices for a few decades, what did
that
mean for the future of poor little organics like him?

The brief visit to the engine room had one further unforeseen consequence. As Zombie Number One led him back to the unrestricted sections of the ship, Kyle found himself reaching a newfound resolve, one which surprised even him.

His growing sense of regret at joining
The Noise Within
had now been swept away, and any thoughts of jumping ship should the opportunity arise were completely banished. Irrespective of what lay ahead, this was history in the making, and he was at the very heart of it. Sure, he had taken part in the War, but so had a few billion others. This was different, more concentrated and more personal. The return of
The Sun Seeker
, and
he
was there to see it, to live it. His rashness had just gifted him a once in a lifetime opportunity to witness momentous events which were bound to reverberate throughout human civilisation, and there was no way he was going to miss out on something like that.

Drevers was nowhere to be seen on his return, nor were either Hammond or Blaine, for which he was grateful. He determined to keep what he had learned to himself for the moment, and at that particular point preferred the company of his own thoughts. One thing above all else was troubling him, and, perhaps because it was the most mundane issue as well as the one which most directly concerned him, this was the mystery he concentrated on. Why would an AI be so determined to recruit a human crew? All right, to perform the occasional awkward duty such as had just been required of him, but was that really enough to justify so much effort and trouble?

He was still contemplating that question when Drevers found him.

"What are you daydreaming about?" Drevers asked. "And is she blonde, brunette or redhead?"

"I wasn't daydreaming," Kyle responded. "I was thinking."

"That's one of the things I liked about you from the start. You're always so willing to try new experiences."

"Funny."

"So what were you thinking about?"

"Nothing much really; I was just wondering... Do you think computers ever get lonely?"