Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  “I do not think any of them knew that the Earth had been bombed,” I replied. “I only knew because I was an agent and was being kept informed of events to help anticipate how the factions would react. The official news channels showed cartoons for kids, cooking shows and endless discussion amongst Martian Council members about how the Governor's wise rule was benefiting everyone. Martian Justice was the closest they came to real news, and it was mostly filled with phony confessions. Real news on Mars traveled along hidden pathways through a network of information brokers. News from the Earth, however, could only come through the corporations or the Governor, and neither saw any profit in telling the factions that the Earth had lost a battle.

  “As I recall, the actual topic for debate was how to react to a law recently circulated that forbade assemblies of more than five people. It was so vaguely phrased that it would have forbidden people from reporting to work or going shopping in the markets. No one was going to obey it, so the debate was about how to disobey such a law without getting arrested or shot. Discussion had been going on in the privacy of the factions for a week already, starting well before the bombing, as they tried to decide amongst themselves what positions to take. This was the first public debate on the subject in Argyric Mumbai. If I had not been so desperate for revenge, I would have joined the assembly and maybe learned some lessons that could have saved the Governor a lot of trouble later.”

  Chou shook his head. “But that is crazy. The Incursion was such a large effort, people everywhere must have known it was happening.”

  I shook my head. “Not on Mars. Remember that the warships leading the attack against the Earth were all built in the Belt and crewed by people educated on Mars but with a very mixed origin. Most of their fleet was still in the Belt, and nowhere near ready for battle. On Mars, I suspect that only a few insiders knew the whole plan, if there even was one. Global coordination was not a virtue that the factions espoused. They got better at it as the war progressed. At the start of the war, people within each faction rarely spoke with outsiders except in the markets or in a public debate, so far as I ever knew. Socially, they did not mix outside their immediate neighbourhood.

  “I remember the shock when one of the local kids returned on vacation after his first term at the Martian Academy. He had been forced to meet people from all over Mars, to eat with strangers, and take part in sports and conversation with the children from every faction on the planet. He came back with a girlfriend from the Olympus region, a beautiful and fabulously exotic creature who drove all the girls mad with envy and all the boys with lust, while their parents engaged in furious debates about how to preserve their allegiances, their culture, and their moral values. When I last heard, the two had become engaged, but the Incursion broke out before they could get married. It would have been a good match and probably very lucrative at both ends, but I have no idea what ultimately happened to them.”

  “Do you remember their names? I could probably find out if they survived.”

  “Sorry, Sergei, no names. Nor can I confirm where the girl came from. It would be dangerous for too many people.”

  “Typical bloody Martian! You start a great story, then tell me half of it is a lie because of the war. Well, I suppose it is no worse than my uncle's stories from his service in the Westrus Regional Militia. It was amazing how many battles he won single-handed, even when I knew Westrus lost the fight.”

  I checked the time and remembered I had to meet the Captain.

  “The Captain has asked me to meet with him this morning. While I am away, I would like you to consider some scenarios of how our mission might play out. We got a good start on outlining our issues yesterday, but without more information it is hard to be very explicit. I would like to consider a different aspect of the problem, which is how we will organize ourselves if faced with different kinds of operational challenges.

  “Senior Minister Singh yesterday indicated that we are intended to be the core of a new department. We must assume the plans for that department are already partly in place and will be made known to us as events unfold. We can accept that as the default plan if everything goes well. I would like us to consider a few less optimistic possibilities, starting with the assumption that we are already at war with the Martian Imperium.”

  I flashed three scenarios over the comm:

  Crisis: The Imperium overthrows the Governor and attacks the Earth. They are driven from the Earth, Moon, L1 and L2 by the TDF, but access to Mars and the Belt is cut off.

  Disaster: As above, but the fleet can hold only the Earth and Moon.

  Catastrophe: The fleet is destroyed and the earth stations occupied, with only the Mao remaining loyal to the Terrestrial Council.

  “Note that these scenarios are graded by the degree of economic and political turmoil that would result. I think we need to consider where we would base our operations, how we would communicate, and what sources of information we can realistically expect to have available.”

  I flashed the Captain a quick message that I was available whenever it was convenient, and was surprised to get an immediate message back. It said to meet him immediately, and to bring Agent Chou as well. The marines outside our door knew where to take us. I glanced at Chou, who looked a bit surprised. For the benefit of everyone else in the room, I stated out loud, “It seems that Sergei and I are to speak with Captain Wang right now. Doctor Marin, I will need to arrange time to have the anaesthetics removed from my legs when I get back. If fact, everyone needs medical care and exercise. Can I leave you in charge of that? Afterwards, perhaps Chandrapati could get everyone working on the scenarios.”

  I also flashed a private message to Leilani, “I do owe you a few more explanations. We do not have much private time these days. Let's see if we can huddle together at lunch?”

  “It’s a date. What a time and place to have our first honest date. Maybe we can pretend we are having our first party as a couple, which we also never did.”

  She finished the message with an emoticon for kissing. To my astonishment, I felt like I had received a real kiss. I copied it and sent half a dozen back. “You have got to show me more about this comm unit. I keep being surprised at what it can do.”

  She sassed me back, “And you will need to be more careful about your dreams, or you will be blowing kisses to the whole team. Maybe more. They have some really interesting emojis in here.”

  2357-03-03 20:00

  Subterranean Rumbling

  As Sergei and I stepped out the door, we were presented with a pair of basic armour suits, without weapons or the attachments that the marines carried. They were a dull, dark grey, somewhat splotchy, and the helmets merged almost seamlessly with the body. It would be possible to disappear into the shadows with such a suit. Marine Sa'id explained that similar suits were being made for each of us on the orders of General Molongo and Senior Minister Singh. The captain had placed priority on the suits that Chou and I were to use. Suits for the doctors should be ready by this afternoon, and the rest sometime tomorrow. There were a bunch of functions that could be added later as time and resources were available, like context-specific camouflage, extended air, water and food supplies, device interfaces and weapon systems. Doctor Marin would have fits.

  I worried about the implications of custom suits for our expected length of stay on board the Mao. Sergei and Chandrapati had had nothing to eat or drink but water, and were in growing distress. By tomorrow, they would be in a level of pain that nice, new armour would not soothe. A glance at his face told me that Sergei had reached the same dismal conclusion. We had to get them something they could eat, or better still get them over to the Deng.

  In principle, we could move through the ship on our own in the suits, but the marines were under orders to take us directly to the Captain, so as soon as we slipped into our suits they scooped us up and headed off through the corridors, using air jets from the vents in the parts of the ship that had air, and magnetic wands built into the suits everywh
ere else.

  One virtue of an eidetic memory is that I could retrace every passage I travelled through while conscious, so I was starting to get the feel for the layout of the Mao. Being in MI, I knew the basic specs. Besides, I had seen the Mao from the outside and knew what to look for. Most people just saw a big grey brick with frilly bits sticking out around the front.

  The ship was a hundred metres long and twenty metres wide on each side, more like a flower box than a tube. The engines were in the back, as always, but were much larger than any freighter could boast and vastly more powerful. The Mao could maintain a one-G acceleration for ten hours if it had enough reaction mass. The crew’s quarters sat just in front of the reactors. I was uncomfortable thinking about the power produced by the reactors, so close behind our rooms. The weapons bay comprised the bulk of the ship ahead of the crew’s quarters, filled with missiles, rail guns, and huge capacitors for the lasers. As with every ship in deep space, it was capped at the very front with a meteor shield, made of broken rubble in a soft metal matrix.

  Early in the Incursion it had been possible to destroy one of the converted freighters that served as warships by hitting it with a rock scarcely larger than a tennis ball. At interplanetary speeds, the impact of the rock would tear completely through any standard hull, killing the crew. For a freighter, this was an acceptable risk because tennis-ball-sized rocks are scarce as hen’s teeth in space and more shielding would raise the fuel costs prohibitively. The shield on the Mao was designed to absorb bigger rocks than that with little more than a spray of dust and a splash of molten metal. The TDF could easily afford the extra fuel.

  There were, of course, no windows, which would simply have been a weakness in the hull, but there were dozens of cameras, antennae and sensors mounted around the ship, with dozens more of each kind stored inside, waiting to be deployed when the originals took a hit.

  Inside the ship, I could make reasonable guesses about the structure knowing that the ship carried fifty marines and fifty sailors, including the captain. The sailors were divided into the standard three shifts, with officers for com, nav, eng, and wep on each shift. Sailors and marines lived separately and fraternization across ranks was severely discouraged, so there were separate quarters for each rank of both services. On our trip to the interrogation room, we had passed levels that were colour coded and numbered in ways that I was sure distinguished service, rank, and operational levels. This time we were going forward, what had been “up” under acceleration, into the Captain's quarters. I noticed that promotion to captain gave you bigger quarters, but not prettier ones, with the same light grey walls livened only by the TDF logo above the numbers on the doorways. Since we were living in the officer's quarters, we did not have far to go.

  Four fully armed marines waited outside the door where we stopped and dismounted. They conducted the full identification drill on both of us, taking swabs from inside our mouths, images of our irises, samples of air from our lungs, and full scans of our vital organs. They ran a thorough scan for bugs. I was surprised and impressed. As an agent, my security rating was high enough that I was normally recognized by the scanners and automatically passed, except in those few places like CI T&A or MI R&R that do comprehensive checks for bugs.

  I returned the favour, since my own list of bugs was likely to be different from theirs. Sergei had one of the new bugs attached to the back of his heel. I was getting annoyed that my internal scanner was not picking up those devices when they were first attached, and made a mental note to find out why. The marine doing the bug check, however, smiled and popped the bug into a box. I suspected that he had planted the device himself to test me. We cycled through an airlock to enter the room and I silently repeated the search for bugs. Not surprisingly, the room was clean.

  Captain Wang respectfully watched me do the search, as did his two guests. On the Earth, I have met officials who considered the check to be an insult to the quality of their own security, at least until I started finding bugs scattered around that they had been unaware were present, and told them who likely planted them. Amongst agents, putting in the time and diligence required for a proper check is simply considered a professional service, and sharing information about any new devices that are found is a basic courtesy.

  Only when my search was complete did I turn and bow my head to the Captain and his guests, Senior Minister Singh and Very Senior Minister Morris. All three were in their full-dress uniforms, and I felt underdressed for the occasion, even in the new armour.

  Very Senior Minister Morris started, “Senior Agent Douglas, I must apologize for my outburst when I woke up on the Mao. Your response was measured, correct and appropriate. I was completely out of line, and,” he smiled, “do not ever expect to hear those words out of my mouth again.”

  I was flabbergasted. “I am sorry I ever caused offence Very Senior Minister. I, I...” But what can you say when the second most powerful Council Member in the entire Terrestrial Government apologizes? I glanced sideways at Sergei, whose mouth was open without making a sound. We both closed our mouths. “Thank you, Sir.”

  Senior Minister Singh followed, “I too must apologize, for missing the discussion of your earlier reports that we had intended for yesterday evening, and for failing to notify you of what was happening to those reports. The Captain tells me that you had other duties last night, which proved very fruitful.

  “What we have to say now is on behalf of the full Council, even if they do not know we are alive and working. We are all in dress uniforms to try to remind each other of our ranks and responsibilities. There is considerable dissention amongst the ministries. They just will not listen to each other, even with an impending war as motivation. The whole situation is insane, and we have to rejoin the madhouse in half an hour.”

  She shook her head in disbelief.

  “Mahatma and I have been discussing for some time whether to send your entire team under deep cover, and when I mentioned to him the existence of records I had not previously been able to access, we decided it was safer for everyone that we should complete the job. The existence of this entire team is being erased from the official records of every department. You will have access to the entire set of records within the team, with the permission of the record owners, of course. Be very cautious in giving that permission even amongst yourselves. The pair of you should discuss the implications of this with the rest of the team when you return.

  “Mahatma, Marcus, myself and our successors will be the only people in the Terrestrial government authorized to access those records.

  “For the moment, you are still officially alive and you have been left in the genetic database, without which it would be impossible for you to open doors, but otherwise we are endeavouring to make you invisible, to turn you into the ghosts that legend already says you agents are.”

  I stammered out, “Thank you, Sirs. When can we expect access to those records?”

  Inside I felt cold, numb. Deep cover normally just meant a new ID and a new name, often with a new face and occasionally a modified body. This time we were vanishing, as though we had never existed. I had not felt so completely alone, so anonymous, since I ran the deserts of Mars killing people for the Governor. I greatly feared to learn what had precipitated such an action.

  She replied, “The first sets will become available this afternoon, perhaps 04:00 UTC. The complete set may require a considerable time. It is complicated getting multiple ministries to give us deep copies of their records, then edit the originals to remove all evidence that you ever existed. Taxation is especially troubled about having to modify official financial records that require changes to the budgets of entire regional governments.”

  Sergei almost spluttered, “Do my parents have to disown me? My school teachers deny that I was ever a student? If we are not on record as having ever paid taxes, how will we be able to retire?”

  Singh sighed, “Good questions, all. It is hard to know when to stop in such an exercise. As for reti
rement, we must first survive long enough to be able to do it.”

  And then she stopped, looking significantly at both the Captain and Very Senior Minister Morris.

  Morris took up the thread. “We will discuss this further, but we are concerned that the events of the past few days are just the opening salvoes of the next Martian war. We are trying to bring our forces into readiness faster than we had ever thought was needed.

  “I have been in combat before, you know. Even as a diplomat, wars can be deadly. Early in my career, before I switched to Extraterrestrial Affairs, I worked as a negotiator in the regional conflicts. I was captured one time, held naked in a cell by a breakaway faction in the Westoz rebellion. When I woke up here, I had a flashback to that cell. I was not actually calling for my delegation on the ESK, but for the rest of the delegates in the Westoz negotiating team. It was strange, because none of you look anything like the people I was working with at the time, and we were never weightless in Australia, but the terror of that cell flooded back. Even realizing where I was and who I was with did not wash it away.”

  Singh added gently, “I gather, Agent Douglas, that you had a similar flashback a few hours ago?”

  I flushed from my head to my toes. “I am most humbly sorry, Sir. It was bad enough to have woken the whole team. I had not realized that you and General Molongo would also have received that cry. I had a most intense and vivid nightmare of my time on Mars. It was triggered I am sure by the interrogation of the stowaway.” I glanced at Captain Wang, who nodded. “I suspect I know who she is, someone I met when she was a girl, whose entire family died when the Governor bombed a meeting near their home. I am sure she did not recognize me as her Ghost during the interrogation, but if we meet again she might, even after all my surgeries. She has sworn to kill the Ghost and all his followers, with much better motivation than most terrorists. She is suicidal and cannot be controlled with threats to her personal safety.”