Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  “Sergei has a point – actually several points – but Leilani I really do need to talk with you. You know bits and fragments of what I was, things that were tearing me apart when we first met, things that Toyami and Sergei will need to understand. I also owe you some deeper explanations, so you will know when to stop talking.

  “And – I would really like to have that party.”

  Now the wariness was replaced by real concern. At least I think it was concern; Toyami and Marin were both staring at her and ignoring me. “OK,” she said slowly. “You want to tell everyone what that means?”

  “Yes,” said Sergei, “What party? Here in prison? With the crappy food and no booze? When? This is going to be the weirdest party I ever attended.”

  Leilani ignored him and might have been drilling holes through my head with her laser eyes.

  Toyami looked around at me. “I have been reading through what little I can find of your history. Not much of it makes any sense, but the little sense I could find makes you a bad risk in a relationship. Are you absolutely certain this is an appropriate time and place? Leilani, Brian, I counsel against it.”

  I ignored everyone but Leilani. I was ME for the first time since Mars, a real me, and there was only one person whose opinion mattered a fig at that moment. “Yes,” I spoke up to address the growing group of people around us, “Yes! I have been working with Leilani for six years and this is the first time that our social circumstances have permitted us to hold a party together. In defiance of the weirdness and the threats we face, I feel a focus and purpose that pulls me together in ways that I have not felt in over a decade. The spacer in me wants to have a party, perhaps the only one we will ever participate in as a team. Let us hold it right after our exercise time this afternoon. And I would really like Leilani Pinter, the most beautiful and wonderful woman I have ever known, to be my date for this party!”

  She burst into tears, and I stopped, stunned. Nothing I had ever said to a woman before had had that effect. Especially not with Leilani, who never cried. Marin and Toyami swung around and reached out to hug her, but she pushed them off, waved herself over to me, and grabbed me in a bear hug that left me gasping. In another moment, we were both bawling our eyes out in front of the whole room. It was several minutes before we settled down and she fired a message at me, “Brian Douglas, you are the most impossible man I have ever met. Turn on your damn sex stims.”

  I wanted to say, wait until you hear what I say to the team this afternoon before you say yes, but it was too late for that. Besides, sex stims were discretionary within some limits and for short times. I had orders from someone I loved and trusted. I had to obey.

  2357-03-04 00:10

  Treason

  When I glanced over to Sergei, he was red as a beet and staring at everything but us. “Sergei, your colour reminds me of your dress uniform. Do you still have it handy? You should wear it to the party.”

  Maybe not my most politic joke; I could almost hear him grind his teeth as he turned even redder. Katerina, who was not looking at him, said, “That is a great idea. These whites are very egalitarian, but dreadfully boring. How many of us have dress uniforms available? We have so many ministries here, this could be spectacular. I am getting tired of steel grey walls and white clothes. I liked our campfire. Could we do something similar for decor?”

  That gave me pause. We already knew that all six walls were big monitors with tough, transparent surfaces. I would bet we could display any scene we wanted, not just the canned packages. I wondered if we had any real artists in the team.

  Sergei seemed to choke for a minute, then grated out, “Old satyr, you are a total pervert to even think of that bloody uniform while kissing her. I think the uniform is with the ministers. Maybe I will just ask Very Senior Minister Morris to bring it over. I am sure he will not mind being a delivery boy.”

  Chandrapati and Evgenia undoubtedly had LE dress uniforms, and Katerina would have a spectacular uniform, as dazzling as Sergei’s, for the Ministry of Negotiators. Leilani was not looking at Sergei either, nor listening very carefully. She suggested that if we had to ask the Ministers for existing uniforms, we should also invite them. This was turning what I had originally thought of as a private cuddle with Leilani into a diplomatic event. I looked back at her, nose to nose because neither of us had loosened our grip. “I am sorry, I really wanted a quiet corner in a small restaurant in old Seville...”

  “Shut up and stop apologizing,” she said, and kissed me again to make sure I did. When we finally parted lips, she turned to Sergei without letting go. “Sergei, you have the closest contact with the most senior ministers. I hereby request that you send a formal invitation through them to all the ministers, the Captain, and the senior officers of the Mao, to attend a Spacer Soiree hosted by Brian and myself. Use those words with capital letters, ‘Spacer Soiree.’ General Molongo and Minister Singh will be able to explain what to expect to the other ministers. Brian, if we are going to come out as a couple in a party, we are going to do it properly! Oh, and Sergei, I can promise this will indeed be the weirdest party you have ever attended.”

  Katerina was looking around the room, “Even if you do not have a dress uniform available, this is a TDF battleship. I will bet they can generate dress uniforms on demand if you want one. We did this all the time when we managed to arrange a ceasefire or peace treaty in what was previously a war zone. We would suddenly need to hold a formal ceremony in a shell-battered bunker and had to make new uniforms on the spot.”

  The MI dress uniform was dull to the point of invisibility. I think that was true of most of the intelligence services. “If we are not going to be completely outclassed, I think the team needs a new uniform. It needs to be sufficiently subtle that we can disappear in a crowd, but sufficiently distinctive that we will enjoy wearing it in a reception.”

  Katerina laughed. “Leave that to me, Old Man. Does anyone here want to help me design an appropriate dress uniform for a bunch of spooks hunting a Martian fairy?”

  “Ooh, ooh, me!” That was Doctor Valentino. “My granddad was a costume designer in Milan. I have not done costume design in years.”

  Wow. Last person I would have expected. You can never tell. I told them to ask the marines for help in customizing our walls. Katerina and Valentino headed off together, and soon dragged Chandrapati and Marin into their plans.

  Then, at last, Leilani wormed out of my unwilling arms and headed off to give Katerina and Valentino her orders as hostess on how the event should transpire.

  Raul and Evgenia looked at each other. “Wow,” Raul said. “Wow,” Evgenia responded, “What just happened? I feel like space just cracked open and aliens from another universe stepped into the room.”

  “Working with you guys is good for us,” I evaded. “We have to clean this place up, and I do not mean picking up the loose bits of stuff. We are going to have senior ministers of the Terrestrial Council here in a few hours. We need to scour this room, individually and together, to be certain that there are no bugs of any kind. We need to remove or disable everything that can monitor this space, including all the microphones and cameras, as well as everything that MI has placed here for our nominal security. MI has no rights to listen in on ministerial discussions, and truths will be revealed this afternoon that would normally be kept carefully hidden.”

  For the next half hour, we worked over the room and everyone in it. Then we moved out into the hall, scanned it and all the marines on duty, then moved on to the washroom and the exercise room. We would not have time to clean them properly and would have to depend upon the ministers’ own staff to do the sweep, but we could ensure that nothing in the hall, washroom or exercise room migrated back into the party room before our guests arrived. I asked the marines when they were due to go off shift, and sent a request their commander to ensure that no one else came or went until after the party was over. I passed that request to Captain Wang as well, because there were two other shifts who used these faciliti
es. The Captain might trust them with his life, but I did not trust them with Council secrets, much less ours.

  Then we went back into the main room, closed the door, locked it from the inside, and repeated a basic sweep. We still found one of the new bugs in the room, but by now it was quickly detected just inside the door below one of the air vents. We opened the air vent and found five more. I passed that directly to MI and the Captain with an URGENT priority. Whatever the bugs did, they were spreading through the air supply.

  There were four vents scattered around the room. We had already turned off most of the microphones scattered around the room, but the oldest trick in espionage was to listen to conversations in another room through the air vents. We could not close the vents, since we needed fresh air. We would have to fill the vents with pink noise to cover our voices. Something like the noise of a waterfall or shower. For that I would need small portable speakers.

  I went out to the marines and explained that we were setting up for a diplomatic reception later in the afternoon and needed half a dozen portable speakers that we could stick to the walls. I was sure they had them on the Mao because they were standard equipment for any large meeting room. The marine commander agreed and dispatched a runner to fetch the speakers. While we waited, he explained that Captain Wang had overridden my request that they remain on duty outside our door during the reception. That duty would be assumed by the Captain’s honour guard, but they would still be guarding us in full armour just outside the bulkhead door.

  He also mentioned that they had found several more of the small black bugs outside their air vents, and had caught one of them moving. Unlike more conventional bugs, they did not fly but instead oozed along the wall, hopping rapidly across obstructions. Inside the air vents they were hard to detect. Even while hopping to a new surface, they had not been assigned a threat level and were treated as bits of lint or dust, of interest only to the cleaning staff.

  My head snapped around and I explained my concern with the extremely informative, “What!?” I checked the bug database and verified that the new bugs still had not been assigned a threat level. No wonder they were moving invisibly and it was so hard to tell when they first appeared. I knew several people including myself who had requested that the devices be assigned a significant threat level over the past several days, yet they were still being treated as harmless fluff. I could now find them easily, because I had set my internal database to treat them as potentially lethal, but only if I was actively looking. Mostly, my internal system just accepted signals from the much more capable scanners in the hallways and major doors. I advised the commander to set the threat level in his personal database to:

  origin: unknown

  habitat: air ducts, walls, clothes

  locomotion: crawling, hopping

  threat: severe

  purpose: espionage/probable, weapon/possible

  I also advised him to pass those codes to his squad and to encourage them to spread the codes to all their colleagues, personally, not through the ship’s systems. I was beginning to feel paranoid, and fended off a question from Toyami about why my stress levels were rising. Try as I might to be calm and rational, I could not shake the sense that the ship was still not secure.

  The commander was starting to fuss about the length of time we were waiting to get a few speakers out of stores when the runner returned with a second marine, both towing bags containing new armour. There were four suits for the doctors, plus one for Leilani. Apparently, someone had noticed her problems getting into the pressure suit last night and had boosted the priority for her armour. We deposited all five suits just inside the door, next to the two that Sergei and I had received that morning.

  I always admired the clever design that went into modern armour suits. When not in use, the bodies seemed like single-piece clothes made of very heavy material, but if anything struck them when they were being worn they stiffed into a tough exoskeleton that could stop bullets and block most radiation. Only the helmet was hard and bulky. The full unit when we got it would include an external titanium frame slaved to the motion of the user’s body, capable of running for days while carrying a power supply, weapons, ammunition, food, water and air. Fully decked out armour was a miniature fighting spacecraft, a small tank, a personal submarine, and a tunnel boring mole. I had regularly wanted these features on Mars, but this model had only come out five years ago. On the other hand, it had probably been just as well that the Governor’s soldiers could not dig him out of the pit where I had left him. Our new suits, of course, lacked all the external toys, so the pile looked like a bunch of very heavy, grey long johns with helmets. We would have to stash them somewhere during the soiree.

  I was sufficiently bothered about the misclassification of the bug that I asked everyone to check what threat level it had been assigned, routing the request by proxy through their home offices and bypassing the shipboard system. Law Enforcement, Commercial Intelligence, and Council Security all reported the bug as a hostile or serious threat, but none of the services managed by MI had yet assigned a threat level. Raul refused to say what Advanced Systems Development had done, but looked worried. MI had left the entire military vulnerable to whatever these things did. Now I was seriously concerned, and I could not even send a message to the Captain. MI would inspect any such message and I did not want to forewarn an enemy agent on the MI staff. I would have to wait until the party to tell him of the newly perceived threat.

  I deployed the speakers inside all the air vents, with the two spares set next to spots where I suspected microphones were built into the wall monitors. I dug through the interface until I could play an endless cycle of water noises, dripping, splashing and showering down, especially the latter in the air ducts.

  Then I held my breath for a minute, called the active MI agent on duty, and ordered him with the full authority of the Terrestrial Council to turn off all microphones, cameras, heat detectors, vibration sensors, and all other forms of monitoring equipment within our conference room, the exercise room, the washroom, and the hallway outside our door. Agents Pinter and myself were both senior MI agents and would re-enable any communications if they were required. General Molongo and Captain Wang should also be authorized to enable or disable communications. The devices would remain off until one of us signalled that the soiree was over.

  The agent objected, as I had anticipated, that MI had an absolute duty to monitor all communications within the ship. This was almost true, except that MI’s authority had been delegated by the Terrestrial Council, and ministers of the Council would be in attendance discussing Council secrets that MI had absolutely no authorization to hear. It was a tricky issue, but in the end, I threatened, coaxed and commanded the agent into turning off all the devices I could detect. I was willing to bet that there were one or two passive devices left operating, but to the extent that I could manage, the room was secure from prying ears and eyes.

  At last, I told everyone to stop their party planning and gather together. We had work to do while I was reasonably sure no one outside was listening. I began by warning everyone that what I was about to say amounted to treason, and that anyone who failed to report my treason could themselves be arrested for treason. As always with these warnings, they looked bored and wanted me to get to the point.

  I began with my growing concerns about security on the earth stations, about nuclear bombs and dangerous drives that evaded detection for weeks, about warnings from the Belt that every Belter seemed to know but we were just learning, and about my new concern that MI itself might have been compromised. I gave my personal estimate of a 50:50 chance that the Mao itself could be cleared of hazards before events became critical.

  I then ran through the larger issues as I saw them, especially the massive corruption on the Earth affecting many large corporations and regional governments. I considered the resources the Earth requires, especially food, strategic metals, and fusion fuels that powered so many reactors. All these came to an incr
easing degree from space, passing through the earth stations.

  The TDF was powerful and well dispersed, able to strike with devastating force against any enemy ships that approached the Earth, but had failed to prevent the turmoil that currently affected the earth stations, and was almost helpless against infiltration by agents like Mindy. We had evidence that many sailors and marines were addicted to drugs supplied by gangs affiliated with the most unstable regional governments and well financed by wealthy corporations. It was unclear to me whether the TDF would be an effective fighting force when the expected showdown arrived.

  I then considered the Terrestrial Council, probably our proudest achievement since the Final War. It had brought almost three centuries of peaceful development to the Earth. Even the regional wars we worried about so much were hardly more than bandit gangs in comparison with what had happened before. Yet, the Council was elected by regions and by interest groups, both susceptible to influence from corrupt corporations and regional governments. Disregarding the corruption for the sake of the discussion, economic threats were valid reasons to choose one course of action over another. Even a suggestion that the flow of food and metals to the Earth might be interrupted was enough to sway votes in the Council. It was unclear whether the Terrestrial Council had the internal resilience to stand up to the Martian Imperium. Until we understood the goals and methods of the Imperium, that question would not be resolved.

  Then we had to consider our own improbable situation. If our true purpose had been to investigate the Fairy Dust, the Laika, and the Hanuman, the sensible approach would have been to deploy us along with our existing teams of agents, investigators and informants, coordinating our efforts through our existing management. Instead, a tiny group of agents had been assigned this impossible task. We were isolated in three rooms on board a TDF battleship. We had been stripped of our teams. To the outside world, we were all in comas, on the verge of death. Basically, we had been left to pickle ourselves in a steel can.