Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  The recovery drones attached onto the crew cabin just behind the clamps and joined the tug in stabilizing the hulk. One of them evidently had a portable airlock, because the rescue team docked against it. They must have cut through the hull, as they had done for us on the Conestoga, and I was astonished at how quickly the cut had been completed. Crew cabins are small and easily searched, so after an eternity that might have taken two minutes, the recovery team detached and started back to the main ship. Their tug detached and started back as well, leaving just the drones attached to the hulk.

  At last, the frigate signalled back to its base, “One crew member from the derelict, dead, in custody of Lunar Recovery Tycho.”

  2357-03-03 23:40

  Never

  A few minutes later the recovery crew reached their own ship. The static was clearing as the explosion thinned and we got a garbled message, “... logs recovered... elderly woman... last log entry attached.” After a long pause for the transmission to be received intact, the log entry popped up in an adjacent window.

  An elderly woman’s face appeared, disfigured by a cancerous growth and by spots and lines that no one on Earth had suffered in a hundred years. She spoke a language that made the auto-translator stumble and retry several times, a mix that it identified as Russian, Haida and Dene. I would have to look up the latter two, which I had never heard of in all my years in space. The final transcript read, “Clan Skidgate gives (thanks/gratitude) for occasion to bring help. The Belt sends you warning of (storm/wind/anger) coming bad. This you recognize. This you (deal/work/understand) well. The Belt is faithful. Remember us when you come to your home kingdom.”

  I looked over at Sergei. “Can you make anything much of that?”

  He frowned and appeared to be running through the message again. “The word it translates as ‘Belt’ is from Russian and seems to be translated correctly. The last sentence is also mostly from Russian and sounds like a religious phrase. The rest seems to be a warning of impending disaster, which she somehow thinks we will understand.”

  I looked at the ravaged face, which seemed peaceful and concerned rather than fearful or desperate. “The whole message is a warning, in all of its parts. The tiny bomb that could have been much more powerful was clearly designed to avoid killing anyone. She knew we could handle it, that the rescue teams were familiar with unstable reactor explosions. Just like the bomb on the Fairy Dust. Raul, can we get an isotopic signature of the uranium and plutonium in that bomb? It might help us determine where it was made. Sergei, anyone, was that word ‘faithful’ properly translated? Could it mean ‘loyal’, ‘law-abiding’ or ‘obedient’? Does anybody recognize ‘Clan Skidgate’?”

  Evgenia responded. “I spent some time on the northwest coast of Noram. Haida is the language used by the people of a large island off the coast. I just did a check in the translator’s database for Haida, and the translation that appears as ‘faithful’ seems to mean they are loyal to a higher principle or order, not to a political or cultural leader. She is not likely claiming loyalty to the Terrestrial Council, and probably not to the Martian Imperium. The last sentence paraphrases a passage from the New Testament in which the thief dying on the cross next to Jesus asks Him for help when He recovers his true, divine status. I would guess that she is warning the people of the Earth of an impending disaster, but expects us to survive the time of trouble and is hoping we will remember her warning and send help when we recover.”

  That was pretty much the gist of what I had got, too, but only left me more puzzled. “Sergei, it is possible that the Belt has factions like Mars? Clan Skidgate sounds like one of the Martian family-based factions, but I do not recognize the name. Could this be some bizarre message from a Belter faction unrelated to the Imperium? Or, for that matter, from the Imperium itself, trying to confuse us?”

  Sergei looked at me like he did not understand the question. “There were a lot of Belters on Mars when I was there. Almost a third of the population were former Belters and they grouped into their own factions just like all the other Martians. Belter corporations backed their factions just like Martian corporations backed Martian factions. There were regular fights between Belter factions and the other Martians. They seemed to have a finger in everything and were no more helpful that the Martians themselves. Weirder if anything. I did not speak to them any more than I spoke to the Martians. They seemed to have lots of money, but were always desperate for new sources of food and medicine. Are you saying that in all the time you spent on Mars, you never met Belters? They were everywhere.”

  Now it was my turn to be puzzled. “I only met a few Belters, and most of those worked for the Governor or were students at the Martian Academy. So far as I was aware, the families of the Belter students I met all worked for normal Martian-registered companies. I do not recall ever meeting one of the wild Belters.

  “But I am also bothered by your estimate that they comprise a third of the population. The Counterstrike knocked the population from forty million down to a little more than twenty-five million. I had assumed the population of Mars had rebound back to thirty million as people had more children. If you are right in that estimate, the pre-existing population of Mars has dropped to twenty million and they are making up the loss through immigration from the Belt. Ten million is far more people than I ever imagined were living in the Belt.”

  Sergei shook his head, “I spoke in round numbers, but, yes, the Belters form a large fraction of the current population. As best I could tell, among the native-born Martians only the young ones are still having children, people who themselves were children during the Incursion. The Counterstrike destroyed most of the Gene Repositories in major cities, so the older population cannot have children any more. I am not sure what was happening out on the farms and remote factories where people did not have access to those repositories.”

  I thought silently for a while. Prior to the Counterstrike, almost a million people had died in the violence, which I had exacerbated during my career as the Assassin. Almost fourteen million died in the Counterstrike itself and another five million since then, probably from lingering radiation and food shortages. Now I learned that, however inadvertently, I had effectively castrated any survivor who was old enough to work on the surface. It was hardly a wonder that the Ghost was hated so violently by everyone on Mars.

  Evgenia tried to answer my original question. “Skidgate is a town on Haida Gwai, the big islands that are the home of the Haida people. However, Skidgate is just an English misspelling of the original Haida name, which is what she used in the log entry. Those people were far enough from the battle zones of the Final War that they survived and were thriving when I was in the area. I would guess that some of them emigrated to the Belt and carried their language and family history with them. If they call themselves a clan, there may be quite a few of them.

  “I wonder how old she was. That cancer should have been treated years ago. With proper meds, it would never have happened.”

  I thought silently for a while more. People aged quickly on Mars. Diseases like cancer were easy to treat and easier still to prevent, but Mars was too small to support the kind of pharmaceutical industries that flourished on the Earth, and the Belt must be even more primitive. The wealth pouring into the great corporations could easily have paid for shipments of basic meds from the Earth, but every proposal to raise taxes for such obvious public benefits had been vetoed by successive governors or voted down by the corporate lobby in the Martian Council. I had seen applications to build pharmaceutical plants on Mars itself, but every one that I was aware of had been rejected.

  Sergei interrupted my thoughts. “Very Senior Minister Morris engaged in trade negotiations with some delegations of Belters a few years ago, and organizing a company to ship pharmaceutical supplies to the Belt was one of the big issues. The companies that run the liners out to Mars have a monopoly on that service, because only their ships can move the drugs fast enough to deliver them to patients before the
y expire. One of the delegations wanted to build a small factory in the Belt itself to bypass the monopoly for the simple meds that people need every day. The final trade agreements were quite long and detailed, but I do not believe pharmaceuticals were covered.”

  Mars and the Belt. There was another layer in the puzzle. I had been assuming that Mars controlled the Belt, except maybe for the wild Belters, who I had always thought were just a fringe of ungovernable families working tiny asteroids. There were a lot of tiny asteroids, and a two-kilometre asteroid could keep a family working profitably for generations. The very few wild Belters I had seen interviewed always seemed excessively proud of themselves and their independence, but were even stranger than the Martians and always quite young. This woman was the only Belter I had ever seen who appeared to be old.

  Everyone stared at each other for a while, then turned back to finish our lunch. Leilani interrupted, “I have some answers about the ships that are rescheduling their departures. It is relevant and you will not like the result.

  “The Port Authorities will not reply to any of my queries, and I am guessing they are too busy, so I asked StaSec who they had been detaining at the checkpoints. They are also too busy to format a proper report, but sent me some of the raw interviews. The people were very angry and abusive. Some of the epithets they used I have never heard before and can only guess must be insults. What was clear was that the most excitable people, and the ones most desperate to leave, were all Belters.

  “I checked the public docking assignments, which is currently being updated every half hour, and almost all of the ships being granted early departure are Belter ships. These are small traders, wild Belters. None of their ships have home ports on Ceres, Vesta or Psyche. I am assuming they are smaller asteroids. Nor are they affiliated with the big companies. None of them is owned by companies listed on the Terrestrial, Martian or Belter exchanges.

  “It is the same on every station. Belter ships are escaping as fast as they can load their cargoes.”

  Rats leaving a doomed ship. I doubted many Belters would even recognize the old sailor’s superstition. The Belters knew something that we did not, and were trying to warn us in their own mysterious ways. The Fairy Dust and the false Hanuman were both plain warnings that things were seriously wrong. We were spending fabulous amounts of money on security that had failed to detect either incident before it happened, even with nuclear weapons on board both ships. The many Belter ships that were all scrambling to leave the earth stations told me not only that something was wrong, but that every Belter in port knew about it, while we sat in ignorance, wrapped in a delusion of safety.

  Mindy/Angela was another warning that our security had failed drastically, with drugs moving in volume into TDF warships using facilities supplied by major corporations on the Earth. We already knew that many corrupt corporations enjoyed support and protection from the regional governments. Now I wondered how widespread the rot really was, whether anyone even knew.

  The fake monitor signals from the Fairy Dust and the Hanuman told me that we could not trust even the most basic records about the shipment of goods and people. Although I had spent the last five years tracking drugs and weapons moving into space, I had completely missed a conspiracy that was seemed to be huge. Falsified records had to be part of that, a screen of lies covering what was really happening. I wondered again what we were missing. The Fairy Dust and Hanuman were sufficiently distracting that any number of weapons could be leaving the Earth on those Belter ships.

  Of course, it was only habit that made me worry about weapons leaving the Earth. The real issue was the other weapons that were coming. We had seen one of them. Mindy had told us we were on the brink of war. The woman on the false Hanuman brought the same warning, although she seemed confident that we would survive.

  And all the while, we sat here, trapped in a steel box that felt more and more like a coffin as I ruminated. In my inner heart, I could feel the Assassin struggling to escape, to strike back at our enemies, to take revenge. The Ghost waited grimly to complete his mission. I kept them locked up. I did not even know who our enemy was any more. The Martian Imperium, surely, but who was a member of the Imperium, who was a sympathizer? With the turmoil on the stations, it was possible that important parts of our staff had already been suborned, obeying orders that were relayed through their managers on the Earth, but which originated somewhere else entirely.

  I had tried obeying orders on Mars, not realizing where the orders came from or what they were intended to achieve. Most of my colleagues had done the same, and the result had almost been the extermination of the entire population of Mars. Sensible-seeming people like Sergei still thought that should have been the military purpose of the Counterstrike. By the time I and my fellow agents on Mars realized our mistake, recognizing our own culpability in the on-rushing catastrophe, it was almost too late. We had stopped it only by the most drastic treachery any of us had ever contemplated.

  Treachery and a loss of self-respect were small prices to pay for the survival of twenty five million people. The death of fifteen million of my Martian neighbours, however, was a bigger price than I could bear. I only wish I could have died at the time. Never again. I would never again let anger, revenge or self-preservation justify killing so many people. Never.

  I asked the pale shadow of my spacer self, and he answered NEVER. I asked the undercover agent who investigated the violence in the mines of Angyric Mumbai, and he answered NEVER. I asked the assassin who had served the Governor, and he answered that those policies had failed and should never be repeated. I asked the Ghost and he answered NEVER. It had been necessary, the least damaging way to fulfil his mission, but was still an unforgivable abomination. I asked the broken man, the cripple, who worked in CI, and he answered NEVER. There would be a better way and I would find it. I was none of these men, but they were all parts of me. For the first time in ten years, I felt like a whole human being. For the first time in a decade, I trusted myself.

  It was time to loosen the chains and let the Ghost fulfill his mission. It should be safe provided all my parts were working on the same plan.

  I woke up from my reverie and looked around. I was in the officer’s quarters on the Mao. I had managers whose motives I did not understand yet, but whose judgement seemed sound. I would accept their orders until I saw strong reasons to do otherwise. I had a team of like-minded colleagues who were all looking to me for guidance. We lacked mobility, but that could be arranged. We lacked good communications, but had good tools to start with. We lacked the small army of agents needed to investigate problems and effect changes, but I knew where to get them.

  Toyami and Marin had gathered around me, looking concerned. Leilani and Sergei were right behind them. Leilani asked, “What are you thinking? You look different. The whole set of your face looks different.”

  I smiled, perhaps a little grimly. “I do not know how we are going to do it, but I think I know what we have to do.”

  2357-03-04 00:00

  Proposal

  My face might have been clear and purposeful, but my mind was furiously trying to review all the things I was supposed to be doing:

  Huddle with Leilani over lunch (rats, already past)

  Interrogate Sailor Matma Krishnamurti – probably in the brig on the ESDENG already

  Discuss operational procedures

  Flesh out the list of issues

  Find the true identity of Mindy

  Follow-up on the maintenance workers who repaired the Fairy Dust

  Follow-up on the cargo handlers

  Identify the origin of the nuclear weapons on both the Fairy Dust and the false Hanuman

  The list spun on and on, getting more detailed as it went, but much of it was grunt work that I no longer had the time to do. I needed to focus on immediate priorities and to delegate responsibilities. First, apologize to Leilani, then address the group about operational procedures – strike that – about deep cover and procedures for cla
ndestine operations.

  “Doctor Toyami, Agent Chou, you both are charged with keeping me sane and humane. I fear I am going to need your services more than I had anticipated over the next few months. Leilani, we were supposed to have a private discussion over lunch and I am afraid it got pre-empted by the Hanuman.”

  She still was watching me somewhat warily. Even in my own ears, I did not sound like me, not even the me who managed to escape from Mars. She nodded and replied, “Yeah, but I forgive you. I knew what we had to do as soon as we recognized the ship’s model, but still could not tear myself away. And probably just as well. Who was that woman, and was she the body they found on the derelict? Why was anyone on the derelict, knowing it contained a bomb that would certainly be triggered when the ship reached its destination, and why then did she die en route? Did that ship even swing past Tantalus? Why is everything so bloody weird?”

  “Welcome to Mars,” Sergei interjected. “Nothing ever makes sense in isolation with Martians. There are always five different factions with conflicting motives cooperating on each detail, and I was rarely able to find an overall plan. It was always a wonder to me that they could buy food, flush their sewers, or build homes, yet somehow it seemed to happen. Maybe the Imperium will bring some rationality to Mars. At least there will only be one madman on top.”