Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  She filled in, “He began to pick up the small cases that more ambitious agents refused to consider, bringing justice to unimportant, helpless people who found themselves being abused by wealth and power. He has become an Agent in a class of his own. His quiet, persistent humility, backed by the full authority of Law Enforcement, is sufficient to intimidate even the most arrogant landowner, business leader or politician. Explaining what the law dictates, what justice requires, what compassion recommends, and what good business sense can make of favourable publicity, is enough to start the creative juices flowing until compromises appear that usually leave everyone happy. He can still recognize when compromise is impossible and it is necessary to prepare the case for prosecution.

  “His list of solved cases grew quickly, his cases grew larger and more challenging, and his ability to uncover the truth and reach just conclusions impressed his new supervisors. The hero we know as Chandrapati was born from that one, unbelievable event.”

  She concluded, “He is everything that I wish I could be but am not. I am absolutely delighted meet him in person and to hear from his own lips this amazing tale.”

  For myself, I was awestruck. The event had happened shortly after the Incursion, but even that atrocity had not broken his compassion and good sense. If Chandrapati had held authority on Mars thirty years before, the Incursion might never have happened. I had made equally stupid mistakes as the fighting ramped up on Mars, but the horror of the Incursion had blasted away all the loving platitudes of my spacer philosophy. Most of my mistakes had triggered fits of outraged fury until the Assassin had learned proper self-control, after which they ended in blood-thirsty acts of murder.

  Doctor Marin interrupted our stories to start another round of exercise, with a lot more physiotherapy for Leilani and I as we grew stronger. It felt good to be moving again, less good to be moving bones and muscles that were still only partly healed. Sergei tried to flirt with Marin again, and with Doctor Toyami when she arrived back halfway through the session, but was too grumpy with hunger to make a favourable impression.

  After wash-up, we broke for dinner. We redecorated our room with images that promised to show Japan during the Cherry Blossom Festival. It might have been a romantic choice, except the sight of so much colour after the grey gloom of the past day was shocking to the eye. It was also difficult to appreciate the meal while Chandrapati and Sergei suffered through their bulbs of water in silence.

  2357-03-03 09:00

  The Crew of the Fairy Dust

  Just after dinner, I got a call from the shipboard MI agent, telling me about the promised comm channel. I passed this on to the others, and we all went quiet as we made contact with the outside world again.

  Working with the MI agent, who remained scrupulously anonymous, I cloned the messages from my former identity in MI and started the formal process to access my CI accounts. Messages from my former team of agents had been cross-posted – that had taken two weeks to arrange when I was first seconded to CI – so I was missing primarily the reports I had filed exclusively for CI. I also requested an external storage unit to hold records for which even the activity logs on the MI servers might compromise our security. There was a pause, undoubtedly as the agent checked my clearance and history on handling sensitive material, but the request was granted and a unit promised in an hour or so.

  As I settled down to peruse my backlog of messages, Leilani flashed a question, “Have you heard from your former team since yesterday? My last message was over twenty-four hours ago from Agent Macky, and it’s a doozy.”

  I did a quick sort and realized that I also had not heard from any of them since Macky's message. I popped it open. It was a brief goodbye, a personal note of appreciation for our support and guidance over the previous years. He explained that we would undoubtedly be receiving copies of his reports from Station Security who had assumed control of the investigation, but he felt he owed us a debt of gratitude beyond the formal courtesies of the office. I scanned back into the earlier messages, but could find nothing to suggest a surrender of control of the Fairy Dust Investigation to ESK StaSec. My medical monitor started complaining about my stress levels again.

  I flashed a message over to Sergei, “Have you had contact from any members of the ExA delegation in the last day?”

  “No, should I?”

  “ESK StaSec has taken control of the Fairy Dust investigation, including all of the members of my former team. I do not trust them and am worried about the safety of the delegates.”

  There was a pause before he replied, “I know one of the delegates well enough that a casual inquiry about their welfare would not raise suspicions. He reports that they are well but very bored. The phrasing, however, suggests that something is very wrong.”

  I thought for a moment, “They have recently been herded together and surrounded by security. It is reasonable to assume that something is very wrong. As carefully as you can, could you check whether security has their weapons pointed inwards or outwards? Are they being protected or imprisoned?”

  He replied, “I am not sure they would even know the difference. I will try to maintain a regular conversation in case anything changes.”

  Then I scanned through the rest of their messages, starting with one marked URGENT from a few hours before Macky's goodbye. As I read it, my adrenaline levels spiked again, so badly that Marin came over to see what was wrong. You cannot keep anything from a doctor, especially one who is monitoring your medical condition.

  I waved Marin away for the moment and flashed a message to Leilani, “Have you read the report from Keiko marked urgent?”

  “No, I do not have anything from Keiko, nor anything marked urgent,” she replied. “What happened?”

  My meds were going crazy and this time I did not wave Marin away. Out loud, I said, for all to hear, “We are in serious trouble. The crew of the Fairy Dust has been found, alive and well on the earth station Kamehameha. They have been taken into custody by ESKAM StaSec, who sent our former team a report. That report has been deleted from Leilani's records in CI, but not from my records in MI. Someone has cracked CI security.”

  “What do we do about it?” Katerina asked.

  I pondered for a minute, then said, “I will warn the MI agent on the Mao about the breach. They have opened a pair of holes in MI security to allow us and the Ministers to communicate with the outside world. We are vulnerable to a cyber-attack through those channels. I am going to try to fetch a copy of my files onto local storage, but that storage will have to be sandbagged and scrutinized to death to check for contamination. I will try to arrange additional storage for each of you, if you want it, but be prepared for some extremely intrusive questioning from MI.”

  Raul looked unconvinced. “Why should we trust your interpretation of what might have been a simple accident, somebody cleaning up messages that had been canceled, for example? Why should any of us trust you or MI with our secrets?”

  “Are you really that new to intelligence? Never trust me. Never trust MI. Never trust anybody. I make the offer of external storage, but I cannot promise MI will give it to you. They hesitated before they gave it to me. I am going to trust MI because without their support I am a dead man anyways. Your issues will be different. Pray that I am being paranoid, but there have been so many inexplicable events in the last few days that I am afraid of what we will hear next.”

  I waited quietly for a few minutes, composing a brief summary of the suspected security breach, which I sent to the MI agent, CC'ed to Captain Wang, General Molongo, and Senior Minister Singh. Raul came around a few minutes later, apologized, and requested external storage if he could get some. He had passed my warning on to Advanced Systems Development, who confirmed that their systems were being probed. For the sake of an independent record, they would send a sanitized version of his files that were encrypted so that MI could inspect them. Sergei came by with a similar request. Katerina said that she would not need the external storage, but had passe
d on the warning to the sysadmins for the Council. Evgenia also asked for a storage unit, but mentioned that she was having trouble accessing any of her records concerning political corruption.

  We all subsided glumly and went back to reading several days of messages. I read the report on the crew of the Fairy Dust much more closely. They claimed that they had arrived at the Khrushchev on schedule and had been granted an unexpected three weeks leave while the ship was refurbished. They decided together to swing around to ESKAM to play in Gardens and Grottoes, an amusement park and restaurant complex that ESKAM had built to attract spacer business, lacking much regular trade from the western Pacific region below them. That might have been plausible if the CEO had mentioned it during his tearful interview. ESKAM StaSec had checked what it could of the story, verifying that they had been in G&G during that period, stayed in local hotels, ate in local restaurants, partied like spacers at all hours of the day and night, done some local trade deals, and scouted positions on other ships. These were all things that a normal spacer crew would do on leave and nothing that would have raised suspicions.

  It made my skin crawl. They had apparently not watched any news, being too preoccupied with partying. Nor had anyone mentioned to them that they were all dead in a spectacular explosion and that the rest of the company was mourning their loss. It was too neat and clean, like the telemetry from the Fairy Dust. Sanitized to show nothing out of the normal while the real events spun wildly off in a different direction.

  I checked the companies that they had scouted for positions. Mostly they delivered cargo to L1 and L2, with a few ships on long-term contracts delivering goods to the Belt. If I trusted the reports, the ships they had inquired about were owned by a single corporation that worked the very lucrative L1 routes and employed almost half of the cowboy crews that worked out of L1.

  The L1 and L2 regions had very different business models. They were named after the Lagrangian points L1 and L2, places where the combined gravitational fields of the Sun and the Earth allowed objects to orbit the Sun with the same period as the Earth. Nominally, there were five of them, but L3 was on the opposite side of the Sun and L4 and L5 sat on the corners of equilateral triangles before and behind the Earth in its orbit. All three of those were too far away to be of much interest commercially.

  L2 sat just outside the earth's orbit, several times farther away than the Moon. Much of their business was related to small-scale metal extraction and large-scale steel fabrication. Several near-earth asteroids had been captured and placed in orbits that circled the L2 point, where they could be mined for minerals without posing an unacceptable risk to the Earth itself. The metals were mostly used in for manufacturing in L2.

  Heavy construction and precision machining was concentrated in the L2. Ships hulls, and the modular components that fitted inside them, largely came from the factories at L2. They built the enormous, high-tech agristations, farms that grew algae and bacteria from which food was extracted. The largest engineering firms built the jack-in-the-boxes that were the core of most large stations. Long past were the days when such structures were built from girders and plates on-site. The core of each earth station was an enormous jack-in-the-box that had been built as a single component at L2, as had the north and south rotating rings.

  The attack on the Earth at the start of the Incursion had left L2 unscathed. Without their advanced manufacturing facilities, it would have been impossible to build the Counterstrike fleet before the Martians had brought their own fleet into full battle readiness. That mistake would not be repeated. If the Martians were returning, the factories in L2 would be targets.

  L1 was similar, but sat just inside the Earth's orbit. Since the Sun shone more brightly there, it had become the favoured location for heavy solar smelters that refined ore brought in from the Belt. In addition to the metals, carbonaceous rock was separated and used for agricultural development on the Moon and in the big agristations at L1 itself. With endless sunshine and as much carbon and water as they could refine, they now supplied a quarter of the food consumed on the Earth, and much of what was eaten in space.

  To feed the refineries, long-haul ore carriers from the Belt would arrive at L1 on auto-pilot after trips that might last ten to fifteen years. Crews would board the carriers and guide them in to the refineries. The carriers usually required major repairs before launching back to the Belt with much lighter cargoes that often included outbound colonists. There had been fewer carriers recently, and more damage to those that arrived, since they would have loaded during the heaviest fighting during the Incursion.

  Cowboys were a feature of the L1 economy. Each year a few ore carriers would arrive having suffered damage to their autopilots that prevented capture. These “wild” carriers would sail silently past L1 and disappear into the distance. One of the highest paid, most glamorous careers in space was to crew the salvage ships that chased the wild carriers. When they caught the carrier, they would repair whatever was broken and ride it back to L1. We called them cowboys and the whole process was called lassoing the wild ship, but each such venture could keep the crew in space for one or two years. The work was glamorous and well-paid, but not popular. Stress levels were high, the isolation was severe, and cowboy crews sometimes disappeared in mid-flight without even being able to report what had gone wrong.

  There were perennial worries that cowboys who disappeared might have been attacked by pirates. Only two of the missing ships had ever been recovered, empty and abandoned. Each cowboy ship that left L1 carried a wealth of parts and tools, enough to rebuild the entire ore carrier. It was a rich target that until the last decade had not needed defensive weapons.

  Recruiting cowboy crewmembers was difficult. Suitable candidates often had personal issues that encouraged them to disappear from normal society, somewhat like the “Foreign Legion” that ancient France had run in Noafr. If the crew of the Fairy Dust were on the run, if they had been forewarned that the Fairy Dust would be destroyed, they might have been trying to join the cowboys.

  In MI, we worried that some of the pirates who attacked the outer asteroid mines and plundered freighters might be rogue cowboys. There was circumstantial evidence that Martian corporations were attempting to recruit cowboy crews, for unknown purposes but with the cover excuse that long trips and dangerous working conditions were typical in Martian service.

  If the crew were trying to join the cowboys, were they running away from the Imperium, or towards it? As so often in this case, it was impossible to put your finger an anything that implicated them of malfeasance, except that none of the stories matched reality. I could construct an elaborate plot in which the crew were attempting to jump ship and hire on to a Martian corporation, but I could not think of any reason they would do it in such an attention-grabbing way. If they wanted to go to the Belt, it would have been easy to hire on as colonists when their contracts were finished, as so many others had done before. Nobody seemed to benefit from this plan in any way that I could see. Something hidden was happening, and if the Martians were involved, there were likely to be three or four hidden things happening at the same time.

  2357-03-03 11:00

  Fresh Air and Exercise

  I was pondering the significance of the report when the sirens in the hall started warbling, and I heard bulkhead doors slamming shut throughout the ship. I knew that sound, which was the same on every freighter, shuttle, liner and warship in space. For those who did not, I said out loud, “Hull breach. Everyone, sit down and wait! That is an order under military discipline.”

  Then the flow of air through the vents stopped. It is funny how you never notice the air vents until they stop working. Someone behind me asked, “What kind of hell have we stepped into?” I understood the feeling. We still had lights, so the power had not failed. I did not hear screaming outside, nor smell smoke. So far, no one looked sick. Waiting might feel like the worst, but when all else remains calm, running around in a panic usually is the worst that anyone can do.
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  A marine stepped through the door in full armour and helmet. “Pardon, Honoured Sirs, but we are switching your air supply to an independent system. It should be back on in a few moments. Please be patient.”

  The marine stepped back outside just as a message from the Captain popped up for Leilani and I. “I believe both of you have experience interrogating prisoners suspected of major drug and weapons offences. As members of MI, would you be willing to assist in extracting information from the prisoners who just attacked the ship?”

  “Yes,” we chorused together.

  I looked at her. “Sounds like they have more than one. You want to start with good cop? We can switch later.” She nodded. Simple plans are often the best when you have nothing else to go with.

  The marine came back in. “Honoured Sirs, would you accompany me to assist the Captain?”

  I called, “Sergei, would you be the acting head until we get back from assisting the Captain?” I did not wait for an answer, but stepped out into the hallway.

  Our marine attendants were in their own armour, helmets in place, carrying a pair of adjustable vacuum suits. Vacuum suits would not stop bullets like the armour could, but would let us move through airless corridors and were proof against most forms of chemical and biological attack. I scanned the suit they gave me and found a tracker on the back. I pointed it out to the marine, who confirmed that they had put it there in case I got lost. Leilani had to squeeze a bit to fit into her suit and I could imagine her cursing the MI R&R dork who had “enhanced” her attributes in non-functional ways. Having worked with her for the past six years, I could imagine just what words she was thinking.

  My arms were starting to feel normal again, but my legs were still anaesthetized. I suspected walking around in the suit was going to irritate them, and Marin would probably scold both of us when we got back. Mao be obeyed, I thought with a small smirk.