by Ian Whates
As the other needle ship adjusted his attack to comply, Jenner sensed a change. The accumulation of energy at the alien ship's prow - he could only think of this intruder as alien - had lasted no more than a few seconds, though it had seemed far longer. Now it stopped.
The ship fired on New Paris.
12,860 people: the station's current population according to official records. If Jenner could have redoubled his efforts he would have, but he was already throwing everything he had at the intruder. His secondary weapons were now exhausted and his primary was already firing at maximum - something he could let continue for a while yet, but not indefinitely without exhausting his ship's power.
All he could do was watch with a growing sense of frustration and impotence as the intruder struck. The alien didn't release the tight knot of gathered energies in one shot as the needle ship pilot anticipated, but instead bled it into a stream of energy which bridged the gap between aggressor and victim. Jenner's instruments recorded the energy ball's depletion and he felt more than a little awed by the forces brought into play. He also studied New Paris, waiting to see the beam's effect. If he was anticipating a violent explosion, or anything else dramatic for that matter, he was disappointed. In fact, initial observations suggested the alien energy was doing nothing whatsoever. Jenner immediately accessed recent observations, analysing the space station as it appeared to him then and as it had previously, taking into account current position, trajectories, and anticipated orbital course. Having set those parameters, the effect of the intervention became immediately clear.
"Muller, cease firing!"
Wherever this strange, unsettling craft originated from, she was not attacking New Paris at all, but was rather saving it.
The general populace of New Paris remained oblivious to the approaching disaster. Sam knew that the inevitable public announcement could not be put off for much longer, but this was one thing he was determined to leave to the mayor, when and if the bastard ever put in an appearance. The man had promised to come straight back to the office, but, as yet, no sign.
"Any more word from the boss?" he asked, knowing full well that Denni would have said if there had been.
"Are you kidding? He's probably halfway to the dock by now."
Sam smiled thinly. "I doubt that very much. He wouldn't dare. It would mean having to explain to people why he wasn't here with us when the emergency broke. Mrs Mayor would be especially interested."
"True," Denni agreed. He then produced a startled, "Whoa!"
"Care to expand on 'whoa'?"
"Check your screens."
Sam cleared away local contact details and returned his screen to the default monitoring display. What he saw there made no sense at all. According to this, New Paris was adjusting orbit again, her course slowly but surely veering away from the projected decay curve and creeping back towards stability.
"This day just gets weirder by the minute," Denni muttered.
Sam would have had to agree but was too busy searching for an explanation. He was getting the oddest readings from all over the station, readings which spoke of gentle stress, of something pulling the station in a very specific direction, almost as if New Paris were suddenly being subjected to gravitational pull from a planetary body or moon which couldn't possibly be there. He pushed the sensors outward, seeking an explanation, and froze.
"Denni, patch your screen into mine and take a look at this."
"Will do." Denni's fingers danced across his screen. Then, "What in mercy's name is that?"
"No idea, but whatever it is, I'm not complaining. Somehow, that thing is pulling us back into a stable orbit."
"It has to be some sort of ULAW secret weapon; a super ship or something."
"Maybe," Sam said, far from convinced.
"Well what else could it be?"
He didn't even want to think about that.
The pair watched spellbound as, with agonising slowness, proper orbit was restored. Sam sat and watched the final alignment with a huge grin on his face. He had rarely if ever felt so relieved, so excited and so drained, all at the same time.
"Shit!" Denni suddenly exclaimed.
"What now?" Sam's anxiety came flooding back. He suffered a moment of déjà-vu and feared some new calamity - perhaps the station's structural frame, weakened by the initial hit, was showing signs of buckling under the strain of all this unaccustomed manoeuvring.
"The evac won't be happening now, right?"
"Hopefully not," Sam replied, wondering what he was missing.
"That's what I thought. Have you any idea how much time and effort I put into those frigging calculations?" Denni complained. "All for nothing."
Sam stared at his friend in astonishment. "You are kidding me, right?"
Denni stared back for long seconds, deadpan, as if wondering what the hell Sam was on about. Then he broke into a broad grin. "Yeah, I'm kidding you. Well spotted."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As the man on the spot, Leyton was kept ridiculously busy, even after the cavalry arrived. When ULAW did eventually turn up they did so in force, and New Paris quickly took on the semblance of a territory under occupation. Suddenly the place was crowded and there were officials, experts and uniforms everywhere.
Leyton did not hold back when making his report, and was scathing about the part that the station's mayor had played in events, or rather the lack of one. Local gossip, which had it that the man was busy rutting with some married woman when he should have been taking charge, did nothing to improve the eyegee's opinion. The fact that these rumours had even reached an outsider such as himself suggested to Leyton that just about everyone else on New Paris had probably heard them as well. He was not in the least surprised when it was announced that the mayor had decided to step down due to 'the stress of recent events'.
If the eyegee had hoped that officialdom's arrival would mark an end to his own responsibilities, he was sadly mistaken. Rather than simply being debriefed and then spirited away ready for the next assignment, he found himself frequently at Benson's side. His boss seemed to be in charge of things here, which caused Leyton to seriously re-evaluate the man's importance within ULAW.
It also made him uneasy. Benson had always shunned the limelight and been content to operate from behind the scenes. This sudden stepping forward from the shadows suggested big changes, presumably triggered by the arrival of the Byrzaens. One thing Leyton knew well was that such an obvious public persona could be a very handy distraction for those who chose to remain out of sight. When he examined the shadows Benson had left behind, it was invariably the same face he saw skulking there - the man Benson had been so chummy with during the original mission briefing prior to Frysworld. Leyton had subsequently learnt that his name was Beck but had been able to uncover little beyond that.
A spook, almost certainly. The eyegee had taken an instant dislike the first time he saw the man, and had seen nothing since to cause him to revise that opinion. Fortunately, he had little cause to deal with Beck directly.
It was Benson who introduced him to the hastily appointed 'acting' mayor, who insisted on simply being called 'Sam' and was evidently one of the people left to cope with the actual work during the crisis while his predecessor was screwing around. Sam at least threatened to be competent, which was the very minimum New Paris would need with all that was going on around her.
Leyton was intrigued to hear that two humans had been found aboard The Noise Within, each safely sealed within individual compartments. Typically, he learnt of this first via a news report. No names were given.
Two. Even assuming Hammond hadn't returned with the shuttle before ULAW attacked, that still left three on board which meant that one of the crew hadn't made it. He wondered who.
The report went on to say that ULAW had taken the two men into custody with a view to prosecuting them for acts of piracy. Hardly surprising, though the Byrzaens' intervention, pleading the pair's case, was a little more so. The aliens were evident
ly requesting leniency on the basis that the presence of humans aboard The Noise Within had been a key factor in the ship regaining mental equilibrium and, belatedly, resuming its intended mission.
Knowing the way that ULAW officials were falling over themselves to curry favour with their new allies, the eyegee strongly suspected the Byrzaens would get their way.
Someone else who remained at the forefront of things was Philip Kaufman. Leyton had half expected him to vanish off to the land of privilege and luxury now that the big revelations were out the way, but Kaufman was having none of it. His general expertise and specific knowledge of The Noise Within made him invaluable to Benson, who kept him on as a consultant, which meant that he and the eyegee saw a fair bit of each other. Leyton's respect for Kaufman rose as he watched him work and went up a notch higher still when he discovered that the businessman was responsible for developing the human/AI melding which drove the ULAW needle ships.
As for the three surviving needle ship pilots, they were the darlings of the hour as far as the media were concerned. Their titanic struggle against the 'alien pirate vessel' made them instant celebrities. This turnaround demonstrated perfectly just how fickle the media could be. Mere days ago they had been enthusiastically championing The Noise Within, painting her as daring and dashing, thumbing defiance at the authorities. Now they fêted her conquerors with equal zeal.
Leyton found the whole media circus repulsive, and habitually avoided the reporters who had swarmed to New Paris like flies to freshly dropped dung.
He hadn't actually seen a Byrzaen in the flesh as yet; few people had. The aliens were keeping themselves pretty much to themselves. Not that he could blame them for that. Given the crowded condition of New Paris since ULAW and the battalions of reporters that had arrived, he'd be doing much the same himself given half a chance.
He had seen images of them, of course. You couldn't check a news feed without seeing them. Bipedal and ostensibly humanoid in appearance the Byrzaens might be, but nobody could mistake them for human as such. Longer limbed and more compact of torso, with no neck to speak of and a broader, flatter head than Homo sapiens. Most experts agreed that this spoke volumes about the nature of the world the aliens had evolved on; but unfortunately none of them seemed able to agree on exactly what it said.
The professional part of Leyton couldn't help but study the images from a different perspective. The compact bodies presumably meant that vital organs were more concentrated than in a human, so a body shot stood a greater chance of doing serious damage. He'd still like to know more about their anatomy before attempting one though. As for the head, it was afforded a degree of protection both by being so close to the prominent shoulders, and by what seemed to be a hood of external bone which rose from between the shoulder blades to cover the back and crown of the head. There was no evidence of any hair.
He would still favour the head shot, at least until he knew more about them. Either of the two dark and slit-like eyes had to provide access to the brain.
Their limbs were long and slender and didn't promise much by way of strength, but the feature Leyton found most fascinating was their hands; six digit - four fingers with two opposable thumbs, one either side of the fingers. He imagined this must give them far greater dexterity than humans and wondered exactly what such a hand was capable of doing - manipulating two entirely different objects or mechanisms simultaneously, perhaps?
If the needle ship pilots were being talked up by the media, the Byrzaens had been all but deified. After all, the 'unusual' and 'majestic' (both of which sounded a whole lot more friendly than 'ugly') alien ship had appeared out of nowhere to save fifteen thousand human lives for no reason other than pure altruism. All right, so the official population of New Paris was only 12,800 - this was what the media termed 'rounding up', to allow for visitors and those who might be unregistered - and the majority would likely have been saved anyway, but 15,000 sounded so much more impressive than 2,000, and why let mere facts interfere with a good headline?
Once Leyton set his knee jerk cynicism of all things media to one side, even he had to admit that what the aliens had done was impressive. Not only saving so many human lives but also keeping New Paris itself intact. Without their timely intervention, many of the station's citizens may well have continued living, but their homes, their society, and the lives they'd known would have been gone forever.
So, what was the Byrzaens' angle? Leyton was convinced there had to be one, they simply hadn't chosen to reveal it yet, but they would.
The alien ship, which had no name - evidently the Byrzaens were baffled by mankind's tradition of giving personalised names to inanimate objects - had been lurking just beyond the fringes of human space awaiting a summons. On board was the Byrzaen's first diplomatic mission, intended to follow up on The Noise Within's initial contact.
The Noise Within itself proved to hold one further surprise. The intelligence guiding the craft was not, as everyone had assumed, an AI alone. The intelligence which The Sun Seeker had originally been built to house had been paired with a Byrzaen, in an organic/non-organic mental fusion similar to those controlling ULAW's needle ships. The Byrzaens claimed this had been necessary to fully cure the deeply disturbed AI, but that it was also responsible for much of the subsequent trouble. The theory went that the two minds had not fused as thoroughly as the aliens had believed. The ship's return to human space provoked anxieties within the AI which made this division more acute, polarising the two parts of the ship's mind, so that in effect there were two minds working in consort rather than one fused intelligence. The AI's concerns resonated with the organic part of the pairing, since the Byrzaen was naturally nervous about first contact with an alien race, and the respective fears began to feed off each other in a disastrous loop, unbalancing both.
The aliens' attempt to initiate gentle contact between their two races by sending a ship of human origin ahead as their herald had therefore come close to backfiring spectacularly. Nice to see that mankind didn't hold a monopoly on plans going awry.
ULAW decided to hold back the revelation that an actual Byrzaen had helped to orchestrate The Noise Within's piratical dabblings from the media, wisely judging it to be a PR nightmare in the making.
Having heard nothing from The Noise Within, the Byrzaens began to probe human space, starting with New Paris where contact was supposed to be initiated. Discovering both The Noise Within and evidence of conflict, they came through into the system, arriving in the nick of time to save the day, establishing themselves as instant heroes and making the grandest entrance anyone could possibly wish for.
All very neat; which, in Leyton's experience, was something life rarely succeeded in being.
At that particular moment, he seemed to be the only one in the whole of human space to harbour the remotest suspicion about these Byrzaens, but he had every confidence in the fickleness of media-driven public opinion. He was willing to bide his time.
Benson and Beck were not the only two familiar faces he encountered on New Paris. ULAW had commandeered a multi-deck stack of interconnecting office units in the station's commercial district as their base of operations. It became universally referred to as simply 'the building'. One time, as Leyton left Benson's office on the building's top floor, he bumped into another old friend.
"Hello, Ed, so they've roped you in on this, have they?"
"Yeah, for my sins."
The tech, whom he remembered with a degree of respect and even fondness from the Holt mission, looked anxious. "We need to talk," the man said, "but not here."
Intriguing, and Leyton knew better than to pass such things by. "You know Gino's?" The tech nodded. "I'll be grabbing a coffee there in half an hour. I hate the vending machine crap they serve here."
Thirty minutes later found the eyegee sitting as promised on a high stool at the bar-style counter that ran around the perimeter of the small coffeehouse. He didn't look around as Ed took the seat next to him; if furtive was what the tech wan
ted, furtive he would be.
"I've been hoping to bump into you," Ed said quietly.
"Well, now you have; so what's this all about?"
"Holt. We've had a chance to go through all the data and records that we recovered from the mission with a fine-tooth comb, and, as expected, no evidence of any connection with a certain pirate vessel. However..."
"Go on."
Ed was either genuinely nervous about what he'd discovered or he had a fine sense of the melodramatic. He took a deep breath and glanced around, as if to check no one was watching them. "There's no question they were warned about our raid in advance. Nothing concrete in anything we brought back, but plenty of peripheral communication recorded there, which makes it pretty clear. Among all this, a name cropped up. As I say, there's no proof this is the source of the tip-off, but..."
"But you think it is."
"I'm certain of it. The context left little other option, and it was in a message which had been ostensibly deleted from the system and took a lot of effort to recover."
In a gesture fully in keeping with Ed's behaviour so far, he slapped a folded piece of paper down on the counter and slid it towards the eyegee. Paper; easy to dispose of and no electronic imprint. Leyton dropped a hand onto the now abandoned note, lifting his coffee mug with the other and draining it.
"Thanks; leave this with me."
With that he stood up, casually collecting the note as he drew his hand from the counter, before strolling out of the coffeehouse and returning to work.
Philip was having a ball. The only slightly sour note was caused by the media. He was used to a certain amount of attention, had been all his life, but nothing like this. As soon as his presence on New Paris became public knowledge he found himself pursued by journos and a flock of hovering fly cams, besieged with requests for interviews and sound bites. His trip to the Byrzaen ship only saw the pressure intensify tenfold.