My own question led to evasion. “Captain Wang, my intent, had I remained on the ESK, was to conduct a review of security on the station itself. The Fairy Dust and Laika incidents highlighted severe breaches in station security. How much do you believe we can trust of what StaSec tells us, and do you believe the situation will be better on the other earth stations?”
“Ah, Agent Douglas, those questions are too big for me to address today. MI on the ESK reports that most business is proceeding as usual, but with a higher visibility of security personnel in the corridors. I, of course, was mostly concerned with the state of our supplies and the loyalty of our crew, so I have not had a chance to consider the implications of the other incidents. Perhaps tomorrow, while we continue our resupply at the ESDENG, we can meet to review the Fairy Dust incident and discuss these larger issues?”
“Yes,” I agreed, “tomorrow would be fine.”
In the meantime, we were all under military law and confined to the three rooms off this short corridor, except for the three doctors tending the Ministers who were carried back to their charges. We still knew next to nothing that we had not already when we arrived. We still had no means to start our assigned investigations, talk to persons of interest, to follow leads, or even to inspect ship's manifests.
We discussed our situation for the rest of the morning, trying to sort out organizational details and flesh out the agenda that Katerina had started. Without adequate information, this lead to many minor disagreements, which Katerina could usually resolve with generous applications of good humour and a record of the issue as one for future discussion. As a professional negotiator, she was clearly going to be a key member keeping this prickly team functioning.
Lunch arrived, with Chou and Chandrapati consuming nothing but water.
2357-03-03 04:00
Campfire Stories
After lunch, no one wanted to restart our fruitless discussion. Meals usually let people relax, especially when laced with stims and mood stabilizers, but we were all feeling frustrated, trapped, and annoyed. We had been summoned into this committee to complete a critical investigation of a few extraordinary events, only to discover that our real assignment was vastly more important, and then left isolated in a steel grey room that would make most prisons seem interesting.
We tried playing a few quick rounds of Fleet Maneuvers, which helped people learn the comm interface, but suffered the usual problem of war games. The doctors refused to participate in simulated violence. Katerina and Evgenia played but did not enjoy the theme, dropping out after the first round. Sergei, Chandrapati, Leilani, Raul and I had fun, but did not build as much camaraderie as we needed.
“We are getting nowhere,” observed Leilani, “except maybe to annoy each other. Let us get some light refreshments, try to find something interesting to display on these walls, and then get to know each other better. I propose we each tell a story on the theme ‘the most fun thing I ever did’. Spacers are forbidden to mention ‘my first time’”.
Katerina looked puzzled. “Why forbid first times? They are often funny and make great stories.”
I replied, “Because every spacer will tell you exactly the same story. The phrase ‘my first time’ to a spacer always means the time you shipped as fifth wheel on a freighter and they introduced you to space sex. Everyone thinks it is going to be a great party with lots of sex, a real orgy like they show in the theatres. Instead you get a three-hour practical course in the use and abuse of the human body for mutual entertainment, with a verbal exam every half hour. The first thirty seconds of each person’s experience can be amusing, but after that every spacer knows what will happen next and it is like watching a show for the twenty-fifth time. Besides, if any of the non-spacers want to take the course and try it yourself, we should not cheat you of the excitement. It is very intense.”
Sergei laughed bitterly, “When I am not so hungry, I am going to have to force all the spacers to tell me the first thirty seconds of their first times. Right now, just make damn sure you do not tell me about your favourite food.”
“I second that,” came from Chandrapati.
“OK,” I agreed, “Story time. Leilani, you and I probably have the best chance of finding the controls for these wall monitors. Perhaps you can get started on that while I will ask the marines to fetch us some beverages. Doctor Marin, I will probably need your advice on that. Water for Sergei and Chandrapati, something agreeable and stimulating for the rest of us. We need to stay awake until dinner time or a bit after, and should schedule another round of exercise just before dinner.
“Before we get started, everyone should get through the washroom. We finished lunch a while ago and will be drinking more as we talk, so you will want to make some room.”
Slightly to my surprise, everybody followed that suggestion, although I noted that the spacers, men from the Earth, and women from the Earth went as three separate groups.
Marine Sa’id brought us the beverages while Leilani and I were still searching through the interface to the wall monitor behind the podium, looking for large backgrounds. He noticed our confusion and quickly guided us to the appropriate section, recommending the nighttime campfire on a beach in the Pacific Maori region with the southern Milky Way blazing overhead. He also showed us how to extend it to the rest of the walls, although he ran through the sequence so fast I missed most of it. That would never have happened when I was an agent on Mars.
The change of scenery started to work its magic. I have always loved campfires. To me, an image of a campfire had three great defects: I could see the light and hear the crackle, but the fake fire gave no heat; the ventilators provided the illusion of a breeze, but lacked the smell of wood smoke or the sea; it was impossible to poke at the fire or feed it more wood, my favourite things to do at a campfire. Regardless, we flattened our chairs into cots, lay back under the imaginary sky, and relaxed for the first time since we had arrived. Even Doctor Marin stretched out on a cot, although I think she was still monitoring us.
As Katerina and Sergei were the only team members not directly involved in policing the illicit drug and weapons trades, I asked Katerina to go first. She mused that it seemed so peaceful, even though she knew we were on a warship in a security crisis facing a possible interplanetary invasion. There are times when things are just not what they seem. One of the absurdities of her job was that so many conflicts were about people laying claim to places they were forbidden to go to. Of these, her favourite was the Spiral Cat Conflict amongst the regional governments of Noram Prairie, Canont and Usamiss.
In this case, the place no one was supposed to go was the Dakota radzone running from what used to be military bases in Colorado and the Dakotas eastward through the ruins of ancient Chicago and on to the dead cities of old New England. The bombs and fallout of the Final War had exterminated most of the population of that great region, especially the urban population of the cities, but many refugees fled north into ancient Canada and ultimately into the fertile lands of what were formerly the prairie provinces, now known as the region Noram Prairie. So many citizens of Prairie derived from that migration that they now claimed the ruins of Chicago as their ancestral capital, although it would be ten thousand years before that heavily irradiated city could be reoccupied. Many other refugees had fled into ancient Ontario, the southern part of which had become the region Noram Canont. Usamiss had been the destination of those refugees who had fled south, a strip of barely habitable land between the Dakota radzone and the Sunbelt radzone, which stretched from the dead cities of San Diego and Phoenix across the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico to the flooded ruins of Miami. All three regions made the same hopeless claim on Chicago.
The Terrestrial Council had ruled many times that the radzones, irradiated land that could not be inhabited by people, lay outside the legitimate claims of any region. The worst of the radzones were the deadzones like New York, Chicago and Seattle. The least affected areas were called tempzones, where people could work f
or a few weeks each year without serious problems. The legalities of what was habitable kept lawyers wealthy in many parts of the world. Ignoring the risk, adventurous or desperate people continued to explore places that would surely kill them if they stayed more than a few months.
The real issue driving the claims on Chicago had nothing to do with historic ties or future hopes of resettlement. It was a simple financial disagreement amongst criminal gangs, in this case poachers who had organized companies to trap spiral cats for their furs. People could not live in the radzone, nor even travel through without seriously shortening their life expectancy, but weeds, trees, insects and animals had returned after the Fimbulwinter gave way to the Great Burning and the climate chaos had settled into a kind of equilibrium.
Most animals in the radzones lived short lives and died riddled with cancers, but those who survived left descendants more tolerant of nuclear radiation. Generally, the new species that were emerging could not compete with established populations outside the radzones, but inside that area they reigned supreme.
Spiral cats were descendants of feral house cats with orange fur and dark brown, spiral-shaped spots, living in a few of the less-heavily irradiated strips within the Dakota radzone. Larger than house cats but smaller than cougars, they were the top carnivores in a long belt that stretched from the Rockies to Chicago. The pelts were extremely expensive in a market that only existed because biologists could not decide whether the spiral cats were still the established species of house cats, felix domesticus, to be preserved at almost any cost, an unrecognized species that was highly endangered and required protection, or simply mutants, rogue animals to be exterminated.
The war was not even about hunting the cats in the radzone. It was about a single farm in a small strip of land deep within the radzone that had somehow avoided the worst of the contamination. Adventurers had found the pocket and built a farm outside the control of any government but their own. Looking for cats who could protect their crops from mutated pests, they had discovered that spiral cats could be domesticated just like regular house cats. They had raised large numbers of spiral cats for their pelts, flooding the market and making fabulous amounts of money, which unfortunately drew the attention of criminal gangs. By the time the war started, the farm workers were no longer freedom-loving adventurers, but slaves captured by one of the gangs in Prairie. All the profits they earned in their short, miserable lives went to the corporation that ran the gang, who in turn passed part of the money on to their political supporters in Prairie.
It had taken years for Environmental Intelligence to track the flow of pelts to the farm. By then, the three regions were fighting each other, ostensibly for control of Chicago, but always on the ground a bit farther west, trying to locate the farm that produced the pelts. The farm itself was hidden underground in a tunnel network that partly protected the farm workers from the radiation at the surface. The Terrestrial Defence Force had been called in to stop the fighting, and the case was handed over to the agents, detectives and lawyers for prosecution. Ultimately, charges for a long string of offences were laid against the gang members, the corporate executives, and even several of the most corrupt politicians, which shut down the trade for a while.
Katerina had negotiated the final settlement amongst the three regions, shuttling from one capital to the next for six months. She had flown over the radzone so many times that her own risk of cancer had been elevated and after the successful conclusion she had been granted a three month break to cleanse her body.
None of the regions could claim a resource so deep in the radzone, but the captive cats had been domesticated and were unable to hunt for themselves; public outcry prevented them from being released to starve in the wilderness. In the end, the cats were extracted to a research facility in Dar es Salaam on the east coast of Africa, where they were being studied to see what adaptations they had made to survive elevated levels of radiation. They were being bred to see if their health could be restored without losing the beautiful fur.
The cats absorbed very little of the radioactive contamination in their food. What little they did absorb was rapidly excreted in their urine. Their flesh and fur were almost completely clear of radioactive contaminants. They could detect dangerous patches of enhanced radiation through sensors in their paws. Other animal breeders trying to develop livestock for the fringes of the radzones were fascinated by these traits, although adding animals with these adaptations to the human diet was hugely controversial.
Katerina hardly cared about any of these technical details. She escorted the cats to Dar es Salaam and spent her break swimming in the Indian Ocean on a beach very much like the one we had on the walls, drinking oceans of fresh water and meds to flush out radioactive isotopes and cancerous cells, and playing with the cats.
The lonely slaves at the farm had loved their charges far more than their masters, so the cats were tame and very affectionate. Like every cat, they loved to chase balls, pounce on sticks and bat at dangling strings. Of course, they needed bigger balls, heavier sticks and longer strings than regular cats, and their human playmates could not allow them to nibble playfully on fingers or toes.
Katerina, like the other handlers, wore light body armour when playing with the cats. If one of them started to stalk their ankles, all the handlers vacated the enclosure as quickly as they could. The cats purred like heavy trucks and had surprisingly squeaky meows. They loved to sleep curled up beside their favourite people, with their heads pillowed in a warm lap. She carried thick, tough cushions for moments of affection when the very large cats began kneading with three-centimetre-long claws.
They also suffered from a distressing number of disorders and required constant care, including bladder and intestinal cancers. This seemed to be an genetic problem that continued even after their food was no longer radioactive. Cancer treatments for human patients were well understood, but were difficult to adapt for the feline patients. Cats are fussy eaters, so bitter meds that humans ate without comment could not be added to their diets. A trusted and beloved handler could give injections or could squirt shots of meds into the back of the cat’s throats, but other people risked being clawed or bitten.
Katerina helped the vets install a subcutaneous drug delivery system, calming her furry friends who buried their faces in her lap while the systems were inserted. After a few days, she could call each cat by name when it was time to refill the reservoirs.
Katerina concluded that, as was so often the case when people had trouble with cats, the people were savage beasts and the cats were cuddly and adorable.
Sergei looked wistful. “My mother wrapped me in one of those pelts when I was a baby,” he said, “and I used it as a comforter on cold nights for years until it wore out and I outgrew it. I never even thought about where it came from. How long was that slave farm operating?”
“Only about ten years,” she replied, “so your pelt was almost surely trapped from the wild. I am not sure if that is any comfort.
“For what it is worth, the farm is part of why I am here. All three corporations fighting to control the farm were owned by a single holding corporation whose other major asset was a mining corporation registered in the Belt, which might well be controlled by the Martian Imperium. Most of the executives in all the companies were legitimate business people, but there was a subset who had strong political connections. They were the ones who managed the gangs and were laundering the pelt money straight out into the Belt. The executives in the holding company declared publicly that competition was good and privately encouraged the three corporations and their gangs to fight. I have routinely wondered what benefit they gained from the combat. It was one of about a dozen cases that I dealt with that all had unsavoury off-world connections. After the first couple, I started to look for those connections, with the result that I am now more closely tied to Environmental Intelligence and to Extraterrestrial Affairs than I am to Regional Affairs.”
“How closely were you involve
d in the criminal investigations?” Leilani asked.
“Hardly at all. My job is to get people to talk instead of shooting at each other. Sometimes I have had to stand literally between two angry men with guns drawn to prevent them from killing each other. Of course, I did not try that alone. I would only enter those kinds of negotiations with an escort of TDF regular army at my back.
“The less exciting part of the job was to talk the honest people into allowing proper forensics to be done on their accounts. Once it became clear who was leading a company into disaster, regular policing could take over. It was often possible to salvage large parts of a company by lopping of the corrupted bits.
“That is the role I expected to play in this investigation. If we are really looking at an interplanetary war, they will need someone with more diplomatic punch than I have to stop it.”
In the darkness, watching the campfire, I shook my head. “Katerina, it was diplomats with more diplomatic punch than you who got us into this mess. Mars should have been rebuilt and enlightened after the Incursion, not just brought under control. Personally, I think our role is to give our superiors options beyond what the existing diplomats have provided. We must find ways to tell them the unpalatable truths that more status conscious advisors prefer to leave unsaid.”
“Be careful, Brian,” she replied. “It takes a prophet to get away with telling truth to power, and they often become martyrs.”
Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust Page 11