Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  “We had a few agents on the ground at the time the rebellion broke out. Agent Douglas was one of them, giving him an unusually complete and detailed understanding of how the rebellion progressed. We are lucky he survived, being one of the last agents rescued from Mars before the Counterstrike.

  “As I am sure you are all aware, the Counterstrike was a nuclear attack on the rebel military bases that obliterated all organized resistance on Mars, allowing us to reinstate the Martian Government. The Martian Council was, of course, disbanded and several of its former members executed for treason. The Governor now rules with the assistance of the Terrestrial Defence Force, which maintains garrisons and recruiting centres in every urban centre.”

  In the silence of my head, I filled in a few details. For the last century, the Governors has been unbiased only in the sense that they robbed and abused everyone on Mars with equal indifference. It had taken me far too long to realize that truth.

  I was the very last agent to escape from Mars, carrying with me the targeting information used during the Counterstrike to destroy every major military installation on Mars. Most of those were in or near urban centres with large civilian populations. The population of Mars dropped by a third during the Counterstrike. Almost every family on Mars lost one or more relatives during that attack and the subsequent invasion.

  The rebels never knew who I was, referring to me only by the code name “Ghost”. I was probably the only person in the room who knew that the Ghost had been a single, real person. That part of my career had been expunged from the record, for my protection and for the protection of everyone who ever worked with me. The official cover was that many agents had worked on Mars, and that the Ghost was an amalgam of them, a superstitious tale invented by the losing side.

  On Mars, there had never been any doubt about the reality of the Ghost. Just before the Counterstrike, one of the Muslim factions had issued a fatwa declaring that the Ghost and all his followers were to be exterminated wherever and whenever they could be found. The fatwa had been adopted by almost everyone on Mars as an almost religious duty, regardless of their chosen faith. I would never dare to return to Mars even in disguise, nor to any site controlled by Martians. Even members of the Governor's staff who returned to the Earth came back hating the Ghost and wanting him dead. Assassins with Martian sympathies occasionally attacked political and commercial leaders, crying “Death to the Ghost”. I feared the Martians and hated them, even if I understood why they hated me.

  Singh continued, “Mars, as I have said, manufactured most of the goods needed by the Belt, but the Belters supplied most of the resources that made this the richest colonial enterprise of all time. Many of the metals used on the Earth, and almost all the carbonaceous material used for agriculture on Mars and the Moon, came from the Belt, as it still does. To service this sector of their economy, the Martian Government had allowed two shipyards to be constructed in the Belt near Ceres and Psyche. Unbeknownst to us, those shipyards were producing warships along with freighters and ore carriers. There were also weapons labs secreted on smaller asteroids throughout the Belt. They produced the nuclear bombs used to destroy every spaceport on the Earth at the outbreak of the Incursion.”

  I knew to my horror that there had been twenty-five spaceports on the Earth before the Incursion. The Martians had twelve warships in orbit around the Earth, disguised as freighters. They began with a cyber-attack that scrambled communications for the orbital wing of the Terrestrial Defence Force, then without further warning, had fired salvo after salvo of missiles at every city supporting a launch facility, each missile carrying several nuclear warheads. They had intended to obliterate the spaceports, along with the expertise needed to rebuild them, to ground us for a generation. I had lost my Mom and Dad during those attacks.

  My sister Lucille had nearly gone mad when she was informed that I had been killed heroically defending loyal Martian citizens from the rebels. In the more innocent days before the Incursion, I had been free to tell her that I was joining the Military and being posted to Mars as a recruiter in Argyric Mumbai, a major city in the Argyre Basin. That was a cover story, of course. In fact, I had joined Legal Intelligence. I had been sent to infiltrate the gangs who controlled the labour movement in several of the mines near Argyric Mumbai. After the Incursion started, I had an urgent need to disappear, so they invented the tale of my death.

  Even today, the Fatwa against the Ghost meant any communication between me and Lucille would have placed her and her family at risk of assassination, so I chose to leave her ignorant of my survival. I made my home office on ES Kennedy because I could look down on the city where she lived and draw comfort knowing she was there. God, I hated Martians.

  No one in this room would know about Lucille. Everyone would believe without the need for further question that I hated the Martians because my parents had been killed in the Incursion. Although it was a crock, I was grateful to have a cover that was sufficiently plausible to discourage people from probing further.

  Singh was still talking and I had missed a few points in my reverie. “As a social phenomenon, the rebellion began with a labour organization that called itself the Mumbai Labour Cooperative. They organized the workers in the nearby nickel and zinc mines, one of the few profitable metal ore bodies on Mars itself. They lead a wildcat strike that spread to other cities and attracted the attention of a few members of the Martian Council. The council members were permitted to employ armed bodyguards, who were deployed to assist the rebels in their battles with the police. That triggered a massive flow of small arms onto Mars from the secret factories in the Belt. The other factions wanted to be on the winning side. As the rebels claimed more victories, they became more popular and better armed. By the end of the rebellion, they were strong enough to overwhelm the police and government forces.

  “The Council had been plotting their own rebellion for some years and had already constructed a fleet of warships from converted freighters. They had hundreds in the Belt undergoing testing, with raw crews still in training, but had already deployed twelve to the Earth under the guise of freighters carrying small but valuable cargoes. When the labour revolt began to look like it would succeed, they made a decision to advance their own schedule. The purpose was to prevent the Earth from sending reinforcements by destroying every spaceport.

  “They very nearly succeeded. All the official spaceports on the Earth were destroyed, as well as most of the docking facilities in orbit – recall that this was before the earth stations were built. If an Earth-based spaceport had been one of the high-tech monstrosities that are required on Mars, we would have been grounded for over a decade. Instead, they were just the corner of a large airfield with maintenance facilities for shuttles. The Earth had hundreds of airfields big enough for the carriers that lifted shuttles through the lower atmosphere, and maintenance could be done at the surviving orbital docking platforms.

  “We drafted all of the available freighters into a war fleet, rebuilt many of them with missile racks and laser cannon, others as troop transports. The Counterstrike fleet left for Mars three years later. I am told the hardest part of the transition was teaching military discipline to freighter crews, at least to the extent that they would respect the authority of rank and obey orders during battle.”

  I remembered my old crews, the people who had taught me the ways of space. Ernie, Raj and Jullietta on the Conestoga who taught me to think clearly and fast when things went critical; Blaise, Lester and Miriame on the Templar who taught me commerce and accounting; Lingling, Alicia, John and Alex on the Moonchild – them most of all – who taught me how to love. All of them died at Mars against the huge fleet that the Martians had prepared out in the Belt.

  We beat them back because our missiles were smaller, faster, more accurate and more powerful than theirs, the best that the Earth's industry could produce. We were also desperate and outraged, fighting a perfidious enemy who had attacked us without warning. We were far better organized, some
thing that always caused the Martians trouble. We never fought among ourselves, as the Martians sometimes did even as our fleets closed in battle.

  Especially, we had better commanders and better soldiers, trained in the small wars that still occurred between the regional governments. There were no longer any “great powers” capable of global war on the earth. The Final War of the late twenty first century had pitted the powers of the time, Russia, USA, China and India, in a four-way nuclear slugfest that had destroyed them and ultimately killed three quarters of the population of the Earth. Famine and radioactive fallout had killed or sterilized many of the rest. To prevent the re-emergence of great powers capable of such destruction, the survivors reorganized the world into small regions, each following its local traditions of government. The regions were permitted to raise militias to suppress banditry and supply disaster relief. Some regions remained quite lawless, with rebellions, bandits and border skirmishes that occasionally grew into serious fights.

  On top of this bubbling mixture, the Terrestrial Council provided the necessary degree of global government, with representatives in two houses from each region and each sector of the economy. The Council controlled the sole remaining global military, the Terrestrial Defence Force, whose nominal purpose was to keep the regional militias under control.

  Before the Incursion, the TDF been primarily a ground-based organization, but had maintained a small fleet in space to protect the asteroid mines from occasional pirates. They had an even smaller force on Mars to support the Governor. No one had fought an interplanetary war before the Incursion, nor even believed it possible, but the ground forces provided us with loyal, trained and battle-hardened troops and capable commanders. During the Incursion, they trained frantically to adapt their tactics to space warfare.

  But the crews of the new warships were of necessity drawn from the pool of existing spacers. They were trained to love and respect each other, to discuss issues with clarity and enthusiasm, to settle arguments by debate. They referred hard cases up the chain to the captain, to the Spacers Guild, or even to the universities of the Earth for truly esoteric issues. To send such people into battle was worse than a slaughter.

  The TDF had managed the space-based arm of Legal Intelligence, primarily because they had fast, secure ships to move people around. After the Incursion, that branch of the service became Military Intelligence, and I stayed with them until I was seconded to CI. I had used my high-level access to trace what had happened to my friends. Blaise had been shot as a coward for refusing to fire on a ship containing crew he had known personally. Lingling had killed herself to escape the endless drills that tried to force her to murder people she had never met. Jullietta had gone mad and had been terminated because they could neither confine her nor spare the effort to treat her insanity during combat. By the end, all the crews I had worked with were dead. The spacers who survived had returned warped, fearful, suspicious of everyone, racked with guilt – like me. The war had been necessary, forced upon us, but it had tormented and corrupted us. The spacer community had rebuilt itself after the Incursion, but nothing was ever the same.

  Personally, it had required more than a year for the psychs to nurse me back to the point I could work with other people. They had suppressed the pain of my memories without removing them. I had almost no emotional reaction to the murders I had committed, to the families I had watched helplessly as they burned in the Governor's reprisal against Argyric Mumbai, to the endless treacheries of guerrilla war. Interrogation largely works by exciting our emotions until we need to confess, or by causing such pain that we will do anything to escape it. Neither worked for me anymore, at least with respect to my duties on Mars. I would never reveal what I had not already told unless I chose to do it. There were many things I had never reported, never told even the psychs.

  Singh was still talking. I needed to focus. I had not drifted this badly in years.

  “Recently, we have noticed renewed activity in the Belt, not around the old factories which are supervised by TDF personnel, nor in the old weapons labs that we had destroyed. This is political activity.

  “A new faction has arisen that seems to have gathered widespread support. They call themselves the Imperium. Politically, they seem to advocate a largely egalitarian society with a light administration controlled by their new emperor. They permit the factions to exist provided they swear allegiance to the emperor. Of greater concern, they seem to control the source of illegal small arms that continue to flow into Mars from somewhere in the Belt. They are using that to win support amongst the disaffected factions of Mars. Factions that refuse to swear allegiance find themselves surrounded by well-armed rivals, while their own supply is cut off. The Martian government has been unable to interdict the flow of weapons, nor has any branch of Intelligence succeeded in penetrating the organization. Unusually for Mars, their internal discipline seems to be rigid and effective.

  “The head of the organization is hidden somewhere in the Belt and styles himself to be an emperor following an old Chinese tradition. I know several of you are enjoy history, so this might amuse you. The first emperor of China was the king of Qin, the western-most state in the period of Chinese history known as the Warring States. The first emperor created a new title for himself by combining the character 皇 (Huang) meaning shining, an epithet of heaven, with the character 帝 (Di) a high god of the Shang, especially the legendary Yellow Emperor who created humanity. Huangdi became the title for all subsequent emperors, and he styled himself Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor. The Martians, of course, have selected red as their colour, and are not pleased with the Yellow Emperor as a model for their rule. Making a small play on words, their new emperor has named himself Shi Hongdi.

  “As best we can tell, this man was formerly known as Wei Marcus, one of the few surviving members of the last Martian Council. He had close connections to many of the corporations operating on Mars, but argued often and bitterly with the Governor about taxation and the restrictions under which the corporations were forced to operate. We suspect that his corporate connections whisked him to safety in the Belt as soon as the Council decided to throw their lot in with the rebels. It is reasonable to assume those corporations are now using him as a front man. Regrettably, most of the records of the Martian Council were destroyed during the Counterstrike, so we do not know which corporations would have supported his ascendency to the new throne. His stated policies are to remove the current Governor and revive a new Council whose members will be appointed based on merit by the emperor himself. Undoubtedly, one of the primary qualifications for office will be unquestioning obedience to the emperor.

  “Agent Douglas, you are looking increasingly perturbed. Do you have something to add?”

  I sat up as best my protesting body would allow. “Thank you, Senior Minister Singh, for that excellent background statement. It has, unfortunately, brought back a lot of very unpleasant memories. I can add maybe one or two small details.

  “The flow of small arms to the factions on Mars began long before the labour problems emerged, and was promoted by a number of the less scrupulous corporations. My original assignment on Mars was to investigate that flow of weapons, as I had learned to do in my first assignments with Legal Intelligence. It introduced me immediately to factional politics and corporate raiding.

  “Unlike the gangs and corporations that we are used to on the Earth, the factions on Mars are primarily organized by family, as are the local branches of most corporations. The mines near Argyric Mumbai follow veins of ore that were precipitated when the Argyre basin was a freshly blasted meteor crater, filled with a deep lake and sealed by an icecap. Water circulated through the hot, fractured rock, creating many rich veins close together. Mining claims are small, usually just one vein, and there are frequent disputes about ownership, especially when two veins near the surface merge into one vein farther down. The unscrupulous corporations I mentioned would encourage miners to resolve those disputes by force and would supp
ly them with the necessary weapons. In the city, the families comprising a faction would fight for political and social supremacy in passionate debates about religion, art, politics, law and just about everything else. Below ground, they would fight with guns, knives, gas, and bombs. A victory on either field of combat could change the ownership of a mine. The people were fighting not just to win an argument, but for the prosperity or even the survival of their families. I was caught up in several of those subterranean battles. When the Council began importing large numbers of weapons, they were merely using channels that the corporate sector had developed decades before.

  “As a second point, I now follow the mergers and fissions of corporations dealing with Mars and the Belt in some detail. I have no idea whether they were involved with members of the Martian Council, but many of the Martian corporations that I had found to be involved with illegal arms imports at that time were the predecessors of corporations that routinely give us trouble today. Many of their modern offspring give generously to political causes and so are supported and protected by senior people within the regional governments of the Earth. It does not seem to matter what their normal business involves. The arms trade, and the suffering it causes, is always a means to some economic or political end. This seems very relevant to our current purpose. I interrupted you, so I expect you were about to raise that point.”

  She paused reflectively, “Yes, that is a major point that I was about to raise. I must confess that I was unaware of the earlier arms trade on Mars, nor of the connections to modern corporations. Did you make these points in your original reports?”