Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  “The recovery team reports that there is a bomb-sized device strapped inside the cargo frame. And it says here that if it was not for the probable bomb, they would have entered the Hanuman to look for bodies already. Oh, and they are ignoring the recall order! The frigate can try to defuse the bomb, but then they are still intending to go in, claiming it is their job to rescue spacers, not the military's. Those guys are awesome!”

  She would get no argument from me. They had saved our asses big time when a meteor had shattered the reactor of the Conestoga half ways to L1. Ernie, our cap, was a fanatic on emergency drills and had been running us ragged with exercises that usually started “the reactor has scragged and comms are down, how do we survive?” I thought it was another drill when there was a loud bang, the lights all went out and the air pressure started to drop. But the emergency lights flicked on and we all piled into the air-tight room as the bulkhead doors slammed shut. Most of our air supply vented because shrapnel from the drive had punctured the tanks. Thank God, comm still worked and Raj called for emergency help.

  We lived in that room for three weeks until a recovery team arrived. I was eng on that flight and spent a long time trying to find ways to purify our urine for reuse and to dispose of the solids. Septic systems seem simple until you have one facility with limited storage to share amongst four people. After I got the septic system working satisfactorily, I patched air leaks. The Conestoga was old, and tiny leaks had developed in the air-tight room that no one had noticed during regular refits. After a week, we used the emergency meds in the room to put Raj and Jullietta into a deep coma to conserve our dwindling food and oxygen supplies. Ernie and I stayed alert to maintain the ship and patch leaks.

  We were in bad shape by the time the recovery team arrived. We ran out of food late in the second week. After the emergency batteries ran flat, the air recycling system shut off and carbon dioxide started to build up. For the last few hours, I joined Raj and Jullietta in a coma. Even Ernie passed out before the recovery team arrived. The ports would not open without power, so LR cut a hole through the hull, installed a temporary airlock in the wall of the air-tight room and pulled us out. They had the best hospital systems in space and we all recovered successfully, but it had been close.

  Little kids on the Moon dreamed of being invited to join a Lunar Recovery team when they grew up. When I had started my career in space, I too dreamed occasionally of joining them, but my talents and interests ran in different directions.

  Katerina continued, “While they were waiting for the frigate, the recovery team sent a drone in for a closer look. The object in the cargo frame is leaking neutrinos characteristic of uranium and plutonium. It almost certainly is a bomb. The drone attached itself to the hull on the crew cabin and queried the status of one of the airlocks. It appears that there is light, heat and air inside the cabin, but ship-to-ship communications, direct communications through the external jacks, and tapping codes on the hull have all failed to elicit a response. It seems likely that there are no crew members on the ship, or if there are, they are likely to be dead. The recovery team did not wish to risk the loss of their drone, so they called it back to their ship.

  “During this whole period, queries directed to the autonomous systems continued to report that all was well on a normal flight, using the codes and protocols appropriate for the actual Hanuman. That by itself is reminiscent of the Fairy Dust. We should assume that this ship was sent by Mars.

  “Which raises a different issue. We have assumed up till now that the Hanuman had encountered pirates at Tantalus and that some of the crew had escaped. If that had been true, the reports from Tantalus had to be false. In fact, this ship is not the Hanuman, so Tantalus may be telling the truth. We do not yet have transcripts of the communications with Tantalus, which we clearly need to get ASAP. Can we talk to Tantalus ourselves? What do we know about the crew of the Hanuman? What do we know about the frigate that has apparently stopped communicating?

  “Changing the topic, does anyone know if we are alive or dead right now? I see that the whole crew of the Laika has been declared as dead, not just the captain, although I am pretty sure most of them survived. We were all declared to have been poisoned by toxic substances in the cargo, with the clear intention that we could conveniently die if our cover stories required it. I feel like Schrodinger's cat.”

  That caught my attention. “Katerina, could I ask you to follow up on the Hanuman and Tantalus? Perhaps Sergei can cooperate on the Martian aspects. We are clearly not getting access to the information we need in a timely manner. I will raise this with the captain and our ministerial masters as soon as I can.

  “Meanwhile, the personae that Leilani and I had on the earth stations are officially dead and we were issued new ID's when we transferred to the Mao. If you retain your original names and ID’s, you are probably still officially alive, but do not depend on that continuing. You should be putting in place whatever you can to ease the transition. MI and CI are well structured to make these transitions easy, but I have no idea what support the other services provide.”

  “None for me,” Katerina replied. “I am supposed to be a rock of reliability with a long record of successful negotiations. If I change my ID, I am not sure what happens to my career. This was not part of the deal when I signed up.”

  Her job was not like mine at all. I had carried dozens of different names over the last decade and shed them like soiled clothes. “Let us hope it does not come to that. As a direct Council employee, your case may be different from the rest of ours, perhaps more comparable to the Ministers themselves. I will raise that issue as well.

  “Still, I would ask all of you to consider Katerina's question when we discuss the three scenario's I mentioned earlier. Should our current personae be alive or dead in those scenario's? I suspect Doctor Marin and Toyami are both capable of the necessary reconstructive surgeries, if the local facilities provide appropriate resources. It does take about three days to recover if the meds are available, plus some time in physiotherapy to rework your muscles and a lot of training to regain the precision of your fighting skills.”

  Chandrapati looked up suddenly. “Excuse me, but Sri Atman is available right now. Is there a quiet place we can discuss my dietary and exercise issues with him?”

  “Only the washroom or the exercise room,” I replied. “These three rooms are the only places we are authorized to use. Ask the marines to see which is available.”

  He laughed bleakly. “Katerina feels like a cat. I feel like a goldfish, drinking nothing but water. I hope he has some useful advice.”

  He and Doctor Valentino headed off to the door. Doctors Marin and Toyami closed in on either side of me.

  “Yes,” said Doctor Marin, “we can do the surgeries here, and I expect the surgeons on board are even better than we are at getting people active and ready for battle quickly.

  “But, OLD MAN, I have reviewed your monitors from the interrogation last night and from the nightmare this morning. As your official, if self-appointed, doctors, you are forbidden to even consider battle yourself. Nor will you do any more late-night, stressful work, especially not interrogations of Martian prisoners. Delegate those chores. Your role from now on is to train your successors, not to do any fighting yourself.

  She frowned. “Your heart is already in bad shape, and the strain from last night might have killed you. When did you have heart surgery? It is clear in the monitor record that it happened, but it does not appear in any medical records I can access. And it is equally clear that whoever did it was a bloody amateur. Why was I never told? It affects all the meds you are taking, even for something as simple as ID surgery.”

  “Old man, huh?” I grimaced. “I suppose it is true enough in this room. I hate sending other people to do my dirty work, but it is also true I never want to interrogate Angela again.

  “The heart surgery was done right after I escaped from Mars. Please do not blame the surgeons. They did what they could under extre
mely trying circumstances. At the time, I was grateful I could continue my mission. And please do not try to find them. As with so many things about me in that period, even making the enquiry could place many lives at risk.”

  Toyami was clearly monitoring me. “You have the oddest emotional and hormonal responses. Some of this is PTSD conditioning, but at a level I have never encountered, and some is just dead flat nothing where you should be spiking. It is like some parts of you have become robotic.

  “You were asking if I would work with you to prevent a recurrence of your nightmares. For all our sakes, yes, I am willing to do that. Doctor Marin and I went searching for your medical histories, but found almost nothing. It is like you never existed. I am used to working with agents under deep cover where it requires very high security clearances to access previous records, but as near as we can tell there never were any records made. You are going to have to help us develop a profile if either of us is to be much help, and I especially will be starting from a blank page.”

  I thought for a few moments about what I could safely say. “Doctor Toyami, talk to Leilani about what I was like when we started working together. After the Counterstrike, I knew what I had done and tried to kill myself over a dozen times. I put all the skill and ingenuity I had learned as a field agent into the effort to die. The military would not let me, and the psychs who treated me were wizards, able to guess what I would try before I knew myself. I do not like to think about that time in my life.

  “In the end, they put enough of me back into working order that I could return to society as an almost functional man, but there was a cost. It is not just the security issues that block me from telling you what you need to know. Because of the trauma, I am unwilling, and in some cases unable, to speak of what happened on Mars. Before I speak, I must think through the implications of every word. You cannot know how much it cost me to speak of Asok and Angela. To voice those events requires permission from every level of my being, and I truly fear what would emerge if I gave that permission.

  “I doubt you will ever be allowed to write up my case, and it might even be bad for your health to keep records. Please be very careful. Most of the people I worked with closely on Mars are dead now. We really cannot talk about it here. If we ever get back to a place with privacy, I would really value your assistance.”

  Sergei had watched the discussion. “Old Man, you have been promoted to a teacher. I have already learned a lot from this discussion. Maybe Morris was onto something after all. And he did seem to think the drugs were safe. If my stomach can handle the food, I am going to take him up on the new charge. If nothing else, I get to eat lunch, rather than drink it. So, your duty is now to teach me how to be a successful psychopathic killer, and my task is partly to prevent you from killing yourself before you do. In a very perverted sense, the task appeals to me. Have at it.”

  “And your job is to teach me how to be a decent human being,” I replied. “I think your job will be harder. If you really want to take that on, you and Toyami should work together. Of course, all the warnings I just gave to her will apply equally to you.”

  Chandrapati and Valentino arrived back just before we put in our orders for lunch. Both looked concerned. Chandrapati came over while Valentino headed over to the door to put in a lunch order.

  “This is harder than it looks. I can eat, but hardly anything is on the accepted list. Sri Atman told us which drugs are acceptable and which must be avoided. Much harder is the fact that plant breeders in space have spliced genes from different plants and animals into almost every algae and bacterial crop to improve their nutritional value. For most people, even Sri Atman, this is unimportant, but my temple follows strict vegetarian laws. I cannot even eat mushrooms or flatbreads up here because of the animal content of their genomes. Doctor Valentino thinks I can still eat a healthy diet, but it will be intensely boring. Did you realize that there is not a single purely vegetable spice available on the ship, not even a pepper?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I have known that and regretted it ever since I became a spacer. Nobody has ever found a way to get the spice plants to set seeds reliably and economically. Nor is the population of spacers large enough to justify the development cost. But I would kill for a real vindaloo or thali up here. It would make the meds a lot easier to eat as well. If you want a civilian job after this is all over, you would win the gratitude of generations of spacers if you could find a way to grow pepper or ginger or just about anything savoury in low-G.”

  He smiled wanly, “Not my game, but I may pass the hint to some of my cousins. It may not be possible to make money selling spices to spacers, but the Earth imports an ever-growing fraction of its food from L1. If they can grow anything delicious at L1, the spacer market would still be a nice advertising gimmick.”

  Over lunch we got updates from the erstwhile Hanuman. We asked for and got a data stream from the frigate’s external sensors, popping up several new windows beside the stream from the recovery ship. We watched as the frigate arrived and passed the recovery ship. It deployed several drones to try to cut the bomb out of the cargo hold. The first drone cut through the cargo frame on the side away from the bomb to see how it was fastened to the wall and where there were wires and sensors that could not be disturbed. There were also likely to be proximity sensors and vibration sensors. That drone withdrew and the rest moved in and began to cut gently through the heavy steel hull around the spot where the bomb was fastened to the frame. I would have liked to know how they did it without causing vibration. As entertainment it was numbingly slow, so we posted the live stream to a monitor on the wall while we ate.

  Neither Sergei nor Chandrapati enjoyed their food, but they both looked steadily happier and more energetic as they ate. Before any of us finished, lunch was interrupted by a flash from the monitor.

  The hulk of the false Hanuman was melted on one side and torn, venting gas that fogged briefly before dissipating as it tumbled away from the cluster of drones sent by the frigate. We replayed the last five minutes in a side window to see what had happened. Katerina supplied commentary. “They were saying there was a long cable attaching the bomb to the crew quarters, possibly a trigger mechanism of some kind. They wanted the drones to grab the bomb and pull it out of the hull – ah, there, one of the drones attached itself while the others backed off.”

  We watched as the bomb, still attached to its piece of frame, drifted slowing out of the hull. The drone detached and backed off like the others. I could see that the frigate had deployed a laser. Then there was a bright explosion.

  Raul took up the commentary. “I am guessing the laser severed the cable, which triggered the detonation. The explosion was nuclear, but just barely. Hardly even a kiloton. Yet the debris shows enough uranium and plutonium for a megaton. What a waste of fissile material! Can any of you understand what just happened?”

  He looked around.

  “Same thing that happened to the Fairy Dust.” I growled. “Enough explosion to tell us we could have been in real trouble, without harming much of anything.”

  The hair was standing up on the back of my head, and both Marin and Toyami were moving towards me, but Leilani stopped the crowd. She said, “It is a warning, and possibly a distraction. What are we missing? Let us assume that something ghastly is happening or is about to happen, perhaps on the asteroid mines, perhaps on the earth stations, perhaps on the Earth itself. We know the stations are in turmoil. Do we have any word from the Moon? We have a lot of collective experience here, and it is now time to start stitching this craziness into a quilt. Everyone, think of what you can do and get to work. Assume that we have corruption and political intrigue involving space-based resources. Who benefits, politically or financially? Who do we know has semi-secret dealings with Mars and the Belt? Assume some plan is in motion right now – how can we detect it and how might we respond?”

  Gotta love that girl. She is good at putting pieces together. Clear thinking, positive action. Saved my butt man
y times. But she stayed where she was, watching the monitor like all the rest of us. The recovery ship was driving towards the hulk, defying the increasingly frantic orders from the frigate to keep a safe distance. They replied with a single message, “If there are any survivors, we have five minutes to get them out alive.”

  Then the recovery ship entered the expanding cloud of radioactive gas from the explosion and its visual feed faded to static. From the frigate’s feed, we watched as a pod detached from the front of the rescue ship, just behind the meteor shield, and raced towards the tumbling hulk. It must have been a drone of some kind, a rescue tug of a design never needed near the stations, because no human flesh could stand the acceleration or radiation and still think clearly enough to pilot the tug onto the bow of the hulk. There may or may not have been attachments for tugs left on the old ship; it did not seem to matter. Three giant clamp jaws extended from the rim of the rescue tug. Jets all around the rim of the tug blasted enormous plumes of reaction mass as the tug matched the cartwheeling spin of the bow. The clamps slammed tight on the crew cabin and the jets renewed their firing to slow the spin and stop the tumbling. A second section of the rescue ship detached and sped towards the hulk, attended by three more drones.

  A voice from across the room asked, “We are recording this, aren’t we?” Katerina replied without looking back, “Of course. These guys normally do their heroics in the depth of space, and here we have a ringside seat. We will have to request the recovery team’s close-up data after they exit the explosion.”

  The gas from the explosion now started to blow past the frigate as well. This blocked communications at radio and infrared wavelengths and reduced the data stream to static from many of the external sensors. Military ships are built to fight nuclear wars in space, however, so the visible light cameras and radiation sensors continued to function. I assumed we were getting our data stream via a laser channel that could penetrate the plasma. The recovery team must have had similar technologies to work near damaged reactors on broken spacecraft, but were not sending their stream to us in a form we could receive.