Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  Checking the logs, I realized that Molongo had blocked the MI operator’s accounts by disabling them completely. The poor sods could not login to the system, open doors, nor even order food from the kitchen. I was impressed that a general and council member even knew how to do that, until I recalled that Molongo had risen through the ranks. The story was that he had been a Captain in Military Internal Affairs, equivalent to Leilani’s position of Inspector, when MIA was a branch within Legal Intelligence. When Legal Intelligence was broken up after the Incursion, he had remained with Military Intelligence, working most closely with the marines, which explained why he was a general rather than the admiral. He must have overseen the early versions of ship security as the TDF expanded its newly acquired fleet. Still, he would need a good memory to recall the complex procedure needed to disable a live account while the user was still active.

  Seconds after the operator’s account went dead, the marines had forced open the door. I amused myself for a few moments, picturing zer confusion when zer screen suddenly became unresponsive with the editing session still apparently live, after which the door burst open behind zim and the marines swarmed in to make the arrest. I had made those kinds of arrests myself from time to time. It was hard to muster much sympathy, until I remembered that I still did not know what had been revealed during the interrogation. Ze might have been innocently at work and a victim of circumstances. There would be time for judgement when I knew more of the truth.

  Breaking my reverie, I started reviewing the existing filters. There were quite a few, and many of them were blocking messages to and from the Ministers. Molongo had put several new ones in place right after the agents were arrested, so I decided to leave them all and discuss with him which ones he felt might be still be useful. After the huge apology that I owed him and Singh.

  I then started checking to see who had been sending lots of messages. Me, of course. During the night, I had sent thousands of messages, mostly very personal and explicit. I added a filter to embargo all messages with attached emojis. This was surely overkill, but until I had time to learn how to configure the filter more precisely it would at least block any further nocturnal sexual assaults using the comm. Unless, of course, there was some way I could turn it off without being in the MI office.

  Disturbingly, I had also been sending much smaller messages giving my location every few minutes to an address outside the ship. I did a search for similar messages, and found that everyone on the team was broadcasting them. I embargoed all of them, but realized that we had to shut the messages down at the source. Just watching for that type of message would allow a clever opponent to track the whole team, without needing to read the contents. MI would never make such an elementary mistake, so these messages had been created by someone who was clever but inexperienced.

  Then I went looking for other people on board who were doing a lot of talking over the comm. There were only two who did not seem to be coordinating clean-up activities. One was in the kitchen, which seemed natural on a busy ship. The other was a marine whose name I did not recognize, but who had corresponded frequently with MI over the previous week. I made a mental note to look up Marine Mateo Osterburger, to see what else he might be doing.

  And then I hit the motherlode: hundreds of messages that MI had embargoed to my team members from people who appeared to be in their former units. Several dozen were to Leilani and myself from our former teams of agents, before we had been declared dead. They included reports on the maintenance workers who were supposed to have repaired the Fairy Dust, as well as on the stevedores who had loaded the ship prior to departure. I did not want to drop that lot on a bunch of sleeping people, so I created an action to release them while we were having lunch.

  Finally, I sat back and began looking at the normal operating procedures for the ship. Some queues were set up to block low priority messages while people slept, others redirected messages to on-duty personnel, others handled high priority messages that needed to bypass the low priority queues. It would take a couple of days to understand how they all fitted together, but most seemed to be running automatically.

  I could not see a better way to handle so much high-speed traffic, but it still gave me the willies, reminded me too much of the histories of the start of the Final War, when the AI’s defending the major powers had decided to launch pre-emptive nuclear strikes while no human eyes were even looking. Somewhere in this complexity, something nefarious was happening, but I doubted I would have time to find it.

  “Raul, are you still awake?”

  A bit of a pause, but I had forced that one through, overriding the flags that said he had drifted off to sleep.

  “Yes, I am awake. What of it?”

  “I am going to send you a message that has been embargoed by the local MI operators since we boarded the Mao. It purports to be from your home office and is marked urgent. When you read it, remember that you are supposed to be critically injured on the ESK, possibly dead. We need to think before you respond.”

  I then sent him one of several urgent messages. It was useful to give him a reason to stay awake that was not just me being obnoxious, but it also served as a test of whether I really understood what I was doing. A few minutes later, he called back.

  “Can I wake the ministers? I should have responded to this days ago. Military Procurement is going berserk.”

  I replied, “They should be awake right now, but wait until I send you the rest, in sequence. The problem may have resolved itself, or gotten much worse.”

  I sent the remaining messages labeled as urgent, plus a few more that seemed to be part of the same threads. There was another long pause, then a string of blasphemies in three different languages.

  “Worse, much worse, and oh-my-god-we-are-all-going-to-die worse. What is happening down there? It looks like it may be impossible to resupply us with critical missile components for at least the next week. Shipments are being delayed by strikes, bandits have hit a supposedly secure warehouse, three regional governments have launched lawsuits against our most reliable suppliers. It goes on and on.”

  I sent back, “There is quite a bit more, but not marked as urgent. I was thinking of releasing it at our nominal lunch time, so people have time to wake up and eat before they have to deal with the crises.”

  Another pause. “I am barely able to think right now. Do you suppose we could get some breakfast for ourselves up here? I want some stims to keep me awake. This afternoon I will need a nap. If the others have reports like this, we are in shit up to our eyebrows. I was wondering what you meant about the battle for the Earth having been fought and lost already. How did you know?”

  I could not take credit for that. “It was a sensible guess, nothing more. Sabotaging an enemy while they are not looking is one of the oldest and most successful kinds of treachery in all of warfare. And we have been blinded by the divisions in our intelligence services, not even looking for larger patterns in the corruption. I am slightly surprised that Molongo, Singh and Morris managed to start this team before the disaster hit. Given the number of links to activity in the Belt, I wonder if we have Belters to thank for our getting any warning at all. I will have to ask Singh about that later.”

  “Umm,” he answered, “So not psychic intuition. You seem to be using a deeper level of paranoia than even I normally need. Also, you seem quite sane right now, but last night was not even crazy it was so weird. Am I authorized to hear why?”

  “Sorry, probably no, even if I knew myself. As you say, I need to talk to Toyami. We also need all of us thinking about how to stop these late-night comm-serenades. I have put a filter on all messages with emojis, but I suspect that whatever part of me takes control when I am nominally asleep will figure out how to remove the filter. That will be one to think about after breakfast. Perhaps after everyone had taken their turn thumping me.”

  I put a request into the kitchen for some food, with extra stims for Raul. The kitchen staff must have been in full productio
n, because our breakfast arrived within five minutes.

  As I ate, I watched activity moving about the ship by the messages being logged. A tank of water was delivered, clamped to the outside of the hull and fed through some portable hydrolysis units that pumped the oxygen and hydrogen into smaller tanks. Sailors carried these around on the outer hull, then passed them into the interior where engineers and marines blasted all the metal surfaces with hot gas to vaporize the glue bugs. Another large team was digging through the waste disposal system, finding new factory blocks that were churning out glue bugs. Sometimes they found other kinds of factories that were making different kinds of bugs, which were added to our shipboard database of threats. The work list for the clean-up crews grew and shrank, and I watched a new order for water go in to the ESDENG. If we needed this much, I wondered what was happening aboard the earth stations.

  I had always been one of the agents sending these kinds of messages. It gave me an odd sense of omniscience to know everything that was happening on the ship. I could watch crises developing and being resolved. I saw reports of corrosion on some of the moving parts that removing the glue bugs did not repair. That may have been the purpose of one of the other kinds of bugs they had found. By lunch it was clear that we were winning the fight, but it had been close. We could probably get half the missile racks back into operation, most of the lasers, but only a quarter of the rail gun mounts. The missiles, lasers and rail guns themselves were largely clean, which I found strange, but deploying the missiles would require un-racking them and moving them by hand within the missile bay. That would not be fun in combat. I wondered if that was part of their combat simulation training, and decided that it probably was. Broken missile racks must be normal in combat and could not always be moved out of the way during a battle.

  I also had an increasing sense of distress, knowing that traitors within MI had been monitoring our movements ever since we had come aboard. We had thought ourselves well hidden, but the unknown recipients of the tracking messages knew we were here, alive and moving about the ship. Officially being declared dead on the ESK would not change that. Cutting off the flow of messages warned the unknown agents that we had found the signal, but the moment we left the confines of the Mao the embargo would no longer apply and the messages would start to flow again. Regardless, we had to leave the Mao to do any kind of useful job. And I had to find which of our implants was sending the signals.

  Sitting quietly for the first time in days, I remembered that I had a larger team working for me than just the official set of agents on the Fairy Dust team. On the Earth, I had recruited an extensive network of contacts and informants. They also had to disappear, but at least I was prepared for that eventuality.

  I sent a coded message to one of my private accounts on the ESK, a simple text message with the three words “scatter scatter scatter”. Every word meant something different and the double space after the second scatter was also part of the code. The first word translated roughly as “broadcast a message cluster to my set of secret accounts”. The second “scatter ”, including the extra space, specified the level of encryption, very, very high for this message. Amongst other things, it triggered an action in CI’s message repository that deleted a small hidden file. A second process monitored that file once an hour; after it had disappeared for three hours without being replaced, it would start the encryption, fragmentation and distribution of a set of messages fetched from a personal holographic storage system I had built using memory scattered all over the ESK. The third word specified which set of messages to send, in this case telling everyone in my team of informants to cut their ties to me, head for cover, and await developments, with the assurance that I would contact them again only if I was sure we were not being watched. It was slow, but after the initial message it was about as secure as I could make such a transmission. By dinner time, none of them would admit to ever having known me.

  Of course, none of the informants would recognize me if I walked up and introduced myself. I had always been an anonymous contact accessible through a custom app. I sent requests that the app would decode, delivered money through couriers and drop boxes, and accepted reports through the same app. They never saw my face or even knew me as a code name. Other people who I trusted more than my informants would introduce them to my service, and most of the informants believed they were sending reports directly to their contact. Most of the better organized criminals I had chased were at least as careful. I had learned as much from the factions and gangs as they had ever learned from me, with the difference that I was still alive and free to benefit from the knowledge.

  The contacts would receive a set of messages similar to those I had sent to the informants, telling them to head for even deeper cover. Mostly they were crooks, thieves, and frauds, useful people when chasing drugs and weapons, but only a few would still be useful in my new line of work. You could trust such people for certain purposes, and their loyalty could be fanatical if managed correctly. You could also trust them to make a terrible mess if you sent them into a polite, well-informed society too far outside their normal milieu. It might not be possible to re-establish contact with those people, and I would probably be happier living without their services.

  For the next few hours, I fielded requests from people scattered around the ship for MI resources and assistance with the still somewhat crippled interface. When I had time to spare, I read a few of my own incoming reports, struggling to keep my temper and not to pass the messages along to Leilani and the rest of the team.

  There were a short series of reports summarizing the questioning of the stevedores who had loaded the Fairy Dust. The last report from my own team of agents showed several anomalies that should have been followed up vigorously, but the case had been passed to station security and their reports contained the kind of bland, business-as-usual nothingness that I was coming to recognize as deep trouble. The series ended when the entire crew was released to help load the swarm of Belter ships that all wanted to leave ASAP, overloading the port services.

  I then turned to the report on the follow-up questioning of the crew of the Fairy Dust by StaSec on the Kamehameha. We already knew that these people had attended a few soirees, trying to arrange transfers onto ships heading for L1. They claimed not have seen any of the sensational reports about the destruction of the Fairy Dust itself. They had never reported their changing plans to the corporate managers in Connaught Freight Enterprises, nor to the Spacers Guild. After the initial report, a new investigator had taken over, but zer report was whitewash without a single interesting detail. There was no follow-up with the organizers of the soirees, nor with the companies that were trying to recruit new crew members at the soirees. The investigator could find nothing unusual or unacceptable in their behaviour, and had set them free after just one session.

  I boggled at the last report, wondering when the crew had first been contacted about this extraordinary change in their plans. If they were not on the Fairy Dust when it left, someone else had been, but there was not even a hint of curiosity about who that might have been. Nor was there any follow-up to see if the crew had eventually departed to L1, taken ship to some other destination, or dropped down to the Earth. They could have all morphed into spiders, and the writer of this report would not have noticed anything unusual.

  I deeply suspected the ESK StaSec for what they had done with the stevedores, but I could almost forgive the overworked administrators on the ESK for rushing them back to work when the questioning revealed nothing out of the ordinary. The interrogators on the ESKAM were another story, since the crew of the Fairy Dust sat at the very heart of an incident that the Terrestrial Government had flagged as an interplanetary act of terrorism. At the very least, they should have warehoused the crew until it was more convenient to deal with their case, but the screaming priority that we felt had been ignored completely. It was almost impossible to avoid the conclusion that the ESKAM StaSec were part of the same conspiracy that had infect
ed MI. And Mindy had not described either the Kamehameha or the Magellan as targeted for destruction.

  Then there was the mass movement of security personnel amongst the earth stations. Was that concentrating political support for the Imperium in stations not targeted for destruction, while actual patriots were moved into extremely hazardous locations?

  On an impulse, I sent an anonymous request from MI on the Mao to the Director General of the ESK, Xiaowang MacKenzie, asking for an update on the station’s security status. I received a terse reply from his office that DG MacKenzie was attending a meeting on the Magellan and could be contacted there for urgent matters, but that Director Borodin was acting DG in his absence and would send the report as soon as possible.

  I had other routes to find that information, of course. I sent similar requests to CI and LE on the ESK and received status reports within minutes. Things were bad. Ships continued to load and leave the ESK, but the port facilities were so overloaded that incoming vessels were told to wait indefinitely for a berth or reroute their cargoes through other earth stations. Nor were the other earth stations more accommodating, busily trying to divert their incoming ships to the ESK. Even shuttles from the Earth were being delayed or denied docking. Within the station, angry confrontations were breaking out everywhere. Station security was normally a minor part of the administration, dealing mostly with delinquent payment of docking fees and an occasional drug-related argument, but now were being overwhelmed with personal violence on an astonishing scale. It was as though the meds encouraging agreeability and gentle debate that were a normal part of everyone’s diet had been replaced with stims for anger and confusion. Both reports included a list of incidents that included more violence in the hour before the report had been compiled than would have occurred in a whole week normally.