Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  I had to assume that the Ministers who shared our fate on the Mao knew something we did not. My growing feeling was that we were a weapon of a different sort, aimed at an unknown target. We might be aimed at Mars, but we might just as easily be aimed at the Council, or at a cartel of corporations challenging the private interests of our ministers.

  I told them what Morris had told me, that my real charge (and presumably theirs) was to prevent the infiltration of the Earth by Martian agents. As my summary to this point suggested, we might already be too late to achieve that goal.

  Sergei was getting angry and clearly wanted to interrupt, but I plowed ahead.

  It was my personal guess that the battle for the Earth had already been fought, and won by the Martian Imperium. At some point in the next few days, I expected to receive orders to do something atrocious, something none of us could stomach outside of an active war. It would come packaged as a reasonable response to a terrible crime. I had faced many such decisions in my career as an agent on Mars. Making the obvious choice over and over had come close to destroying me and nearly caused the extermination of all human life on the planet.

  I refused to face those choices again unprepared. This time, I would not make panicky decisions by myself, when wiser, cooler minds were all around me.

  We needed to think seriously about the disaster scenarios I outlined at the start of the morning. I had just given the background that justified Scenario 3, in which the Mao was the only surviving ship loyal to the old Council. How should we advise our leaders? Would it be better to surrender to the Imperium if we were truly alone? Would it be better to fight, hoping to draw others to our cause? If the Imperium is preparing a Counterstrike of their own, should we try desperate measures to stop them, or would it be better to accept the loss of a billion people and move on?

  “Sergei, you are desperate to say something. Please do.”

  “Brian, you do know you are crazy, don’t you? We know almost nothing, and all your so-called evidence might easily be isolated events and small misunderstandings. We saw one strange craft moving towards an indeterminate destination, and you are conjuring an entire fleet. The MI threat levels for a few bugs have not been updated and you are worried that all of MI has turned against us. The Earth has been boiling with corruption and power hungry regional governments for the last five millennia, and you conclude they have all been mind-slaved to the Imperium. The only worry we have on the Mao is the survival of some of these small, harmless bugs in the one place that they are hardest to find, the air ducts. We are fine, and next week we are going to be interrogating the crew of the Fairy Dust, who probably just wanted to emigrate to Mars and got caught up in the Belter madness. Everyone knows the Belters are crazy, and now you are getting as crazy as they are.”

  Chandrapati interjected, “Another one of the bugs just crawled into the room through the air vent opposite the door. We cleaned that vent thoroughly just a short while ago. For a bug that oozes, it must have been doing cartwheels the whole way to get from the depth of the duct out to the vent so quickly.”

  Leilani added, “I have never seen Belter freighters do anything that was not clearly and unmistakably in their own vital interest. Especially in their economic interest. They shave pennies harder than any Earth-based freight company. Yet now they are cutting their losses and booking the earliest possible departure times. From the few minutes that I have had to check their manifests, they are loading food and bulky cultural commodities, all from a few of the largest and best equipped warehouses on each earth station. They would be leaving even faster if they could load those cargoes any faster.

  “If fact, the first ship should be leaving from ESKEN in just a few minutes. Can we break our isolation long enough to look at that bug and check the visuals on the departing freighter? I want to see if it leaves the way the Fairy Dust did.”

  A murmur of assent ran through the room. Leilani popped up a view of the ESKEN on a wall, while Sergei, Raul and I opened the air vent and found a column of bugs emerging from the depths of the duct. Similar columns of bugs hid behind all four vents. In one case the bugs were so thick that they had started to pile up. Raul stared at the neat lines and squares of stacked up bugs and explained his concern with the concise phrase, “Shit. We are screwed every way from Monday.” He stared a while more, and added, “I need the assistance of an eng to do an analysis of these bugs. They seem too simple to be significant individually, but they may be self-assembling components of something bigger and much more dangerous. Also, Brian, I know something I have not yet had a chance to share with the team, and you sound completely sane to me despite Sergei’s doubts.”

  “There it goes,” Leilani called from across the room. We turned and watched the Belter freighter as it drifted out of its bay. The tug attached normally and began the slow push out to the flight lanes. I told Raul he should request engineering help from the Captain, so we spent a few minutes composing a request far too technical for my understanding of the technologies involved. I could remember every diagram of computer and robotic design I had ever seen, but had never enjoyed the subjects well enough to learn what they meant. The tug finally detached from the freighter, which wheeled abruptly in a direction contrary to its flight plan, far faster than any freighter should be able to move, then ignited its ion drive and launched itself far to the south of the normal flight lanes. The crew apologized to the port controllers and begged them not to shoot, but provided no explanation for their behaviour. There was a brief flash from the front of the crew cabin, like a sun glint, and they stopped talking.

  A few minutes later Captain Wang called to grant Raul’s request for assistance in analyzing the bug, but explained that the current shift was nearly ready to finish their work. Could Raul wait until the next shift started? It sounded like the analysis could be done while we were occupied with the soiree, with the results available shortly afterwards. That sounded reasonable and Raul nodded, so we agreed and arranged with the marines at our door that we would transfer the package containing our latest crop of bugs to the engineers just before we started our exercise period.

  Captain Wang called again. “You seem to attract a whole new class of oddness. The bright flash as the Belter freighter departed was a poorly focussed laser communication that seems to have been broadcast to all the TDF ships near the earth stations. It was a very short message, which I present to you in its entirety: ‘Clan Marcus is faithful and loves the Council.’ Can you make any sense of that? Why would such a message be sent to TDF warships, and not apparently to anyone else?”

  I replied with my own question, “Captain, did you receive the log message from the derelict that called itself the Hanuman? It had a very similar message. We can look at it together while you are here, since the Ministers would probably also be interested. Oh, and could you have someone pass me the radar observations of the Fairy Dust about the time it exploded. We were going to discuss that part of the episode, but there has never been enough time.”

  He agreed, “Certainly. I have just passed the request to my comm officer, who will be joining us in the soiree. We can bring it then. Do you want to do that before or after the soiree?”

  I did not want to spoil the party, but I wanted face time with the Captain to pass on my concerns about MI, and I was getting used to events pre-empting our plans, so we arranged to meet in the exercise room for ten minutes while everyone was washing up, half an hour before the official start of the soiree. Then I made my excuses, turned off all the microphones again, and reconvened the meeting.

  Raul wanted to present his new information, so I gave him the floor first. “MI passed this image to me just after lunch. Everyone was engrossed with the Hanuman at the time, including me, but it suddenly seems relevant to the discussion. For those missing the background, a slender, tapered object about the size of a missile was picked up by a satellite just beyond L2, moving towards either the Earth or perhaps L1. It is too small to be manned, makes no sense as a missile, but
just might house a rail gun. It is also covered with a reflective surface that makes it beastly difficult to detect from the front or sides at any wavelength, but it must radiate heat if it has any active components, perhaps out of a cowled radiator in the stern. We only saw one, but a request was made to override the sun limits for the infrared camera, to see if we could detect any others. This is what it showed on the right, with the same field on the left showing only natural objects.

  To me both images looked like lots of little dots. Raul continued, “If we subtract the natural sources and increase the gain we get this third image.”

  The third image showed an almost regular array of small dots, hundreds of them, along with one very bright dot near the edge. Raul confirmed, “This image shows what appear to be radiators from over two hundred of the vessels. The bright dot is likely a sun glint from one of the vessels. It is still too faint to be a direct sun glint, but it could be explained as a secondary reflection, a sun glint from one vessel reflecting off a second. The dots fade out towards the edge of the image, so there may be more that we cannot see because of their orientation.

  “We still cannot tell where they are going or their true purpose, but this does confirm the reasonable assumption that whomever went to the expense of designing and building the first one would build a whole fleet of them before sending them into the fray. It would be naive to assume they are friendly cargo haulers. Moreover, it seems highly unlikely that they packed their entire fleet into this one image. There may well be several armadas, timed to arrive simultaneously at their targets.

  “If we assume they are in fact armed with rail guns, they could throw anything from pebbles to paintballs with enormous accuracy from great distances. We would be unaware of the incoming ordnance until it started to hit the targets. Individual pebbles cannot do very much, but in large numbers they could fog or even shatter the glass in the greenhouses at L1. Concentrated fire from large numbers of them could damage even most hardened targets. They could make a considerable mess of any docking facility. They may not be murderous offensive weapons like bombs, but they could still wreak serious economic damage. They could also blackmail freighter captains, since it would be easy to strip all the external sensors off a freighter with a continual barrage of such projectiles. If they could afford the losses of their own ships, I suppose they could even blind a battleship like this one.”

  I waited for further comment, then asked, “Does Molongo know about this yet, or the Captain?”

  “I do not think so. I just did a quick processing on the image myself. For what it is worth, I think this is evidence that most of MI is functioning normally, even if the threat from the bugs is being suppressed. Is it possible that MI itself planted those bugs?”

  “Possible, but unlikely,” I said. “MI produces a vast range of bugs for its own purposes, but usually assigns them threat levels of ‘internal’. I have never seen them suppress the threat level of their own bugs when everyone else is considering them a serious risk.

  “So, Belters are giving us warnings and are strange rather than crazy, the bugs seem to be a more serious threat than they appeared at first, and an entire fleet of weapons is approaching, due to arrive within a few days at an uncertain destination. Can we return to the scenarios that I presented to you, oh dear God, was it only this morning? It seems like a week ago.

  “I am grateful that Sergei called Scenario 3 crazy, because it still seems crazy to me, a worst possible case that just cannot happen. But unfortunately, it looks more likely now than I thought it was before the break.

  “How many of you have worked under deep cover in a battle zone?”

  As expected I was the only one, although deep cover in an industrial context was normal for all agents in our line of work. Marin, Toyami and Katerina had worked in battle zones, but had gone out of their way to remain highly visible so no one would shoot them by accident. If Scenario 3 happened, they would not have the privilege of remaining visible, especially if their current identities had to die in the next few days.

  In all three scenarios, secure communications were going to be critical. The comm units were nifty, but could surely be monitored by MI and any number of other players in this nasty game. I knew enough tricks to layer on another set of random encryption keys, if someone could help me implement it in these comm units. We agreed to look at that after dinner, but no one in the group knew enough about the comm units to do the job properly.

  Setting that aside, I explained my use of distributed, line-of-sight transmission systems in the deserts of Mars. We broadened the discussion to include event analysis as a means of breaking codes, piggybacking signals on other system’s internal communications, how and when to use unbreakable quantum cyphers, and the circumstances that made it necessary to rely on wads of paper stuffed into cracks in a brick wall.

  Transportation was another tough issue, at least as dangerous on the Earth as it had ever been on Mars. You could breathe the air on the Earth and did not have to carry it with you, but water was troublesome everywhere. People still glowed in the infrared at night, even if it was often hard to see the glow from orbit. Surveillance cameras were everywhere, security guards were proliferating, fences, ditches and walls were so common that they did not even appear on maps. There were plenty of places where it was possible to disappear into a crowd, or into the bush, but most of those places were hostile in other ways.

  Many parts of the former USA, Russia, India and China were radzones, radioactive wastelands, especially around and downwind of the great cities where most of their population had lived. There were fringe lands around the wastelands that were habitable if you did not stay long. There were rough cities where it was possible to live without ID’s. Cash-only economies where no one cared how you got your money and no one kept track of who purchased what. Religious communities that did not use names, or which assigned new names to anyone who entered their gates. I had been in all these places in the last ten years, even the edge of the Los Angeles radzone in a massively shielded vehicle, and most of the other agents had similar levels of experience.

  Katerina found it odd and intimidating, being used to travelling with heavy protection from the TDF, speaking openly and using silence instead of lies when the truth could not be told.

  It was a good discussion, a fun discussion, and we learned much more about what we might have to do with different levels of support, but I still felt people were holding back. We were not yet a team. Too many of us still felt it was more important to protect the secrets of our respective services than to get the job done, even with the fate of the Earth hanging in the balance. As we wound down, I began to appreciate Leilani’s genius in organizing the party as a spacer soiree. Aside from the visiting ministers, it was exactly what we needed to break the barriers.

  Before we broke for exercise, before events forced us to make impossible ethical choices, there was one more issue we had to discuss.

  “I would like to introduce another idea, which is how to recognize success. What are we trying to achieve? I have spent the last ten years trying to understand why we failed so badly during the Incursion. The outcome of that war was almost the worst possible case. When we evaluate our possible scenarios, I would like us to evaluate our success by how closely we achieve the following criteria:

  A) The Earth survives with minimal losses to its ecology, population, culture, and economy.

  B) Mars survives with minimal losses to its ecology, population, culture, and economy.

  C) Spacers (including the Moon) survive with minimal losses to their population, culture and economy.

  D) The Belt survives with minimal losses to its population, culture and economy.

  E) All these communities achieve just, responsible, representative governments.

  “I note that all five criteria were violated during the Incursion. The Earth suffered a nuclear attack that killed two hundred million people. Mars was devastated and nearly exterminated. The spacer community was simila
rly devastated and corrupted, even on the Moon. We do not even know how the Belt survived because no one ever asked them, but Sergei tells us they are being recruited onto Mars in numbers that cannot be entirely voluntary. Mars today still suffers under an oppressive government that has nurtured a lust for revenge that seems to get worse every year.

  “I have no idea what the Ministers consider to be ideal outcomes. I fear it does not look anything like this list. I suspect they feel they have almost no choices left. If we are to play a constructive role, we need to provide our political masters with advice and choices that lead to better outcomes than the last time.

  “To do this we are going to have to disobey some orders, or interpret them so loosely that our implementations would be considered treasonable.”

  Sergei still looked unimpressed. “That is very idealistic, Brian, but the Council has a many-layered government employing millions of people, all of whom are working to achieve these kinds of goals. They also have the TDF, which is heavily armed, and employs skilled, professional marines. We have seven agents stuck in a metal box with four doctors for company. Realistically, what do you think we can do?”

  I smiled, feeling very tired. “For now, I will leave you with that question. But remember Archimedes, ‘Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.’ We clearly cannot push the world from here, so we need to find a lever, a fulcrum and a place to stand.”

  I did not tell them about the lever and fulcrum I found on Mars.

  2357-03-04 02:00

  Blocks and Walls

  As we broke up, Doctor Tran came over. “Hello, Agent Douglas. We have not spoken much but Agent Chou mentioned that Agent San Diego found some of your new bugs building themselves into stacks in the air duct. I have heard of such things before, on Mars as it turns out. Very small insect-like devices would cluster together in the water systems. Individually, they were harmless and most people in the Governor’s compound assumed that a real insect has survived shipment from the Earth. However, when the clusters reached a certain size, they started to pollute the water with an anthrax-like toxin. Several people died before the devices were identified and cleaned out of the water system. We may have something similar here.