Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  Marin laughed, the first time I had managed to get real amusement. “I do formally forbid you to engage in combat, Sir. Now get to work. You missed your morning exercise, but need to do more than just exercise your jaws!”

  “Sir! Yes, Sir! Right after I use the facilities next door, Sir,” I replied. By that time, I was getting desperate for the washroom.

  Evgenia followed me. As soon as we entered, she closed the door and asked, “Brian, did you mean what you said last night?”

  No man in the universe wants to hear that question from a woman he respects, but in this case, I was baffled. “Evgenia, what did I say? At the soiree?”

  “No,” she replied, and stopped, flushing red.

  “Evgenia, please, imagine I am in the Chair of Pain and am required to answer you as honestly as I can. Which is becoming painfully close to the truth right now. Tell me what is troubling you, please?”

  “Oh, I am sorry.” She turned away, “Please, continue what you must do.”

  Earth girls are not easy. They are one of the most opaque and mysterious creatures ever created. Especially when you are not sure which cultural traditions they learned as children. Any spacer woman would have asked the question and received my answer. I attached the urinary hose, and prompted her again. “Please, Evgenia, ask and I will try to answer.”

  “I have never been good at this. You know, I went into law because it seemed so clean, so logical. Then I discovered that lawyers must work with angry, dishonest clients and in court need to argue with abusive lawyers before sceptical judges. I switched to accounting because it was clean and precise. If the numbers do not add up, there is something wrong. Forensic accounting seemed the best of both worlds. Most accountants are cool, honest and dispassionate, at least regarding their accounts, so violent emotion is a sure sign that an offence has been committed.”

  I had discovered the same truth, but she was still trying to duck her own question. “Evgenia, I said a lot of things last night that were intended to provoke strong emotions. What did I say that troubles you so, and when did I say it?”

  “Last night, after we went to sleep...” She trailed off into silence.

  “Evgenia, I was asleep myself then. I do not recall what I said to anyone. I suppose I could check the logs, but what did you hear?”

  She flushed again, the red spreading over her neck.

  Very quietly, “You told me that Katerina and I would be good together, and then smothered us in kisses and...”

  And licking, and sucking, and... Ohhh boy.

  “I had to fly over three other people to reach her, and the first time it was good. I did not even notice when the others woke up. But after that she got angry, and each time I tried to touch her she got angrier. I offended her. I think she hates me.”

  I could see her shoulders shaking as she tried to suppress her tears.

  “Evgenia, she does not hate you. She is angry at me, not at you. I offended her, and I deserve her anger. I deserve your anger. I caused a lot of trouble last night. So far, you seem to be the only one who is not angry at me, although it sounds like I hurt you worse than any of the others. I am sorry, so sorry.

  “Evgenia, I do not understand why I told you in my sleep that Katerina would be a good match, but when I was a Cap I was good at making those matches, and while I was on Mars I had a lot of practice putting together teams of people who would get along under very difficult circumstances. I do not know if I was drawing on that talent, but it is possible that I saw something in the way the two of you interacted that gave me reason to believe you would like each other. If there is really something good between you, she may come around. Give Katerina time, and blame me for anything that goes wrong.”

  She turned around and tried to shake away the tears that were blobbing in her eyes. “I see why Leilani loves you, and I do not understand why you have not married her already.”

  She moved to the far wall, facing away from me, used the urinary hose herself, and left without looking back.

  When I came out, Molongo and Wang were impatiently waiting. They were probably puzzled about what team issue would warrant closing the washroom door, but I did not enlighten them.

  2357-03-05 03:20

  Dark Developments

  At the door to the MI office, Wang introduced us to Com Sailor Begum Thieu. She was short, but like most crew members appeared to be fit and very strong. She also wore armour while I was still in our basic white pajamas. I felt distinctly underdressed and regretted breaking my own rule about leaving our quarters without my armour. Wang told her that her new assignment was to be a temporary MI officer, spelling me every twelve hours. Together we would make two shifts instead of the normal three, but he hoped to minimize the actual work because MI development and external liaison duties were to be curtailed. He still expected her to work part time on the bridge, and for me to continue to manage the Fairy Dust team. The latter duty had been assigned by the Council and he had no authority to change it, even with Molongo’s permission. This arrangement would only last until replacement officers could be brought in.

  Wang and Molongo left us to our work. She said, “Join the TDF and see the inside of a metal box,” to which I replied, “Mao be obeyed.”

  “So,” she said, “It has been a while since I was in here. Let us see what has changed. Ummm, you have stopped all external communications except this one outgoing message on a five-minute repeat. Also, internally, the only emojis that are permitted in a message are these three for the basic levels of urgency.

  “From the Captain’s message, I gather the current problem happens because the emojis affect our brains neurotransmitters and hormones directly. I expect the same kind of malfunctions might occur if the emoji is replaced with an executable blob that interacts with the communications equipment. That might send executable instructions to any of the ship’s systems capable of receiving external communications. So, we should also block all executable code blocks...”

  She went quiet for a few minutes, flipping through a series of interfaces until she found an engineering-level interface that I could barely understand. “Here. Emojis were originally just tokens that triggered a display on a monitor, but the new interface allows them to interact with devices like the comm units...” She went quiet again. The “token” interface allowed control of a surprisingly large number of devices. The MI filters could be set to pass or reject any of them, and could dynamically classify unrecognized tokens as hostile. “This is much more comprehensive than when I last looked. If the control systems were not isolated, you could run the whole ship using these things. Look – tokens to adjust the reactor control rods, to trim the drive stabilizers, to deploy the missile racks, sweet Buddha, this one looks like it can reassign controls from the bridge to any console in the ship! Why would anyone want such a set of tokens in the ship’s comm system? They should be confined to isolated control channels. Oh… Sir, may I call in our Chief Eng to look at this? I greatly fear that some recent refit may have installed controls that would allow an enemy to seize control of the ship.

  “It is possible that the frigate that fired on us – Wep says it was the Manila Bay – was not in control of their own systems. That missile probably only worked because it was the last one left that the glue bugs had not disabled, but the Mao still has most of its missile racks operational. If you had not disabled all external communications, it might have been us firing our missiles at every TDF ship in orbit, while we sat helpless to stop the attack. We might have launched attacks against the Earth itself.”

  I remembered what Wang had said about the messages that were attacking him, and my stomach twisted. “Yes, call in the Eng, but while we are waiting, let us rewrite the message I was broadcasting to include this new threat. We need to broadcast it to the entire fleet, to the earth stations, to the Moon. Can we generate enough power to broadcast directly to L1 and L2? Or even the fleet at Mars? I suspect that only the Earth and Moon have enough power for that.

 
“Also, we have to tell the Captain. Every ship in Earth orbit might be disabled by glue bugs and primed for self-destruction by these perfidious messages. It is possible that their crews are trapped inside, unable to control their ships, nor even to call for help. Is it possible to undo the damage these things cause?”

  She stared for a few more moments at the coded names for the tokens, but was so deep in thought I do not believe she saw them. “Probably. You would have to shut down the communications systems completely, starting here in MI, followed with a system-by-system reboot, and an emergency restart of only the most basic communications. It would take several hours on a ship this large, and would still leave us with crippled communications. I do not think we have been badly affected yet, so a total restart is not warranted, but there are probably some systems we will need to reboot.”

  “The Captain received a message from the Excalibur using a naval laser system...”

  “Yes, I was Com when it arrived and passed the message directly to him.”

  “Does it go through here at all?”

  “No, it is deliberately designed as a redundant system, an independent means of communication when all else has failed. Admiralty communications do go through MI, but have their own encryption, which is over here, see? We should be careful not to affect those messages.”

  “No, I disagree. Captain Wang was being driven mad by hate messages routed through the Admiralty. I gather that includes cap-to-cap messages across the entire fleet. We had to talk him into turning off his own comm system before he would calm down. You will need his permission, and you will have to send a runner to get it because his own comm should stay off until we halt the flow of hate from the admiralty. I fear that the old laser system is the only safe means of communications between ships in the fleet. Let us write down the instructions you just mentioned and send them to every ship we can reach with the laser.”

  She was now looking as stricken as I felt. “On top of the glue bugs and the madness, would they even bother with destroying our ships remotely?”

  “Yes, they would,” I said, “The Martian Imperium would have assigned a different faction to each mode of attack, with the Imperium itself controlling the timing. Mounting multiple, simultaneous attacks on the same target is entirely in the Martian character.”

  I remembered mines near Angyric Mumbai that had been abandoned after the entrance was dynamited, the tunnels filled with corrosive gases, each drift and each shaft separately booby trapped. The dynamite, the gases and the booby traps would each be the contribution of a small faction allied to one of the large factions involved in a serious dispute. On both sides of the fight, faction members would be outraged by the treachery of their rivals. Much as I had loved and honoured Asok, he had joined in these dangerous games of power as eagerly as everyone else, restrained only by his unwillingness to kill his opponents. I had joined the games, too, but without the same restraint.

  “The Imperium is coming,” I felt the sickening certainty rolling through my gut. “The faction that planned and implemented these bugs will use the rest of the TDF against us while the Imperium struggles to seize control of the Earth, and later will use us as private weapons as they strive to place their own leaders in control of the Imperium. We must not allow them to succeed.”

  “Who?” she asked, “the Imperium or the faction.”

  “I suspect the Imperium has already won. Regardless, the Imperium would be better than factional warfare on the Earth. Have you ever read the histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?”

  “No, why?”

  “Factional warfare on a global scale. Families and tribes organized into regional kingdoms. Primitive technologies, but the suffering was global and terrible. Now imagine modern technologies with the wealth and power of the Earth pitted against itself in a civil war filling all of human space.”

  “Ooh, you are a cheerful fellow. I would be happier if neither of them won. But I take your point. We are in a war, even if we do not know which faction is the real enemy.”

  “All of them are our enemies. Every single one. The factional system is our enemy. I believe that they consider us to be just another set of factions within their own violent power structure. That is the only form of government that the Earth has ever supplied to Mars. When I was there, all the factions on Mars were consumed with a mad scramble for power. Peace, prosperity, and justice are next to impossible when winning power is the only goal. I gather it has become even worse since then.”

  She had been writing industriously as we talked. “I have some text. Want to look at it?”

  I looked, but most of it was technical beyond my training. Probably suitable for another com officer, though. “We need to send this to the rest of the fleet. Are there TDF centres on the earth stations that could receive the laser signals?”

  “No, or at least no laser systems. We could add it to the message you are already broadcasting.”

  “What are we missing? We need to get your Chief Eng in here. Oh, damn, and we need to get Raul. Military Procurement needs to know about this. That means we need to get Wang and Molongo back. I do not have authority to allow anyone else in here, and we clearly need help from some outside experts. Perhaps you should call the Com on watch and ask for permission to broadcast your message to the fleet over the laser, as well as to block admiralty signals.”

  She made the call. Apparently, Wang and Molongo had gone to the Captain’s office just off the bridge. Instead of sending a runner through the ship, a shouted call got Wang’s immediate attention. We received permission to embargo admiralty communications, and confirmation that the warning would be broadcast by laser to anyone capable of listening.

  We turned back to the problem of supplying external communications to the ministers. It appeared that public broadcasts like the news feeds did not normally use the token system, having their own long-established protocols. We connected those streams through to the monitors in the ministers’ rooms, as well as the team’s quarters, with a filter to strip out any tokens in the transmission. I notified both groups, who immediately began scouring the news feeds for information about the state of affairs on the Earth.

  We watched them flip from one channel to the next for a while, then began to probe the message from Pantocrator. It seemed that we had all received the same message, which I found suspicious. However, it had no emojis and appeared to be formatted as plain text. The message headers were completely innocuous. It had nothing but ordinary Greek characters in the body, not even numbers, so I passed it through a Greek dictionary and then a grammar checker to search for nonstandard blocks of characters. Nothing. If this was some form of malicious code, it was like nothing I had ever encountered.

  I relayed a brief report through the comm to Molongo, who sent back a reply within moments, “I have read the message from Pantocrator, who does appear to be the man I thought it might be. I will be there in a few minutes. Call Agent San Diego, and tell him to come in his armour.”

  I called Raul, asking him to come to the MI office in his armour, and to bring my armour as well. I was getting tired of being the only person in the ship wearing white pajamas when everyone else was in armour. At least my armour was a professional grey.

  We watched the news feeds for a few minutes while we waited. I was astonished that none of the feeds reported anything seriously abnormal happening in orbit, nor on the Earth. There were a few meetings of the regional governments that were cancelled, and today’s session of the Terrestrial Council was also cancelled. A new disease was the nominal cause, which distressed the Terrestrial Disease Control Centre, but lead to cartoons and rude commentary about the terrible sickness brought on by working in plush offices. A few shuttles to the earth stations had been delayed for unspecified technical causes. Otherwise, the Earth seemed to be enjoying a perfectly normal business day.

  Wang arrived with Chief Eng Cyrus Haliru. Molongo and Raul arrived a few moments later, so Molongo keyed everyone in. Haliru immediat
ely started digging through the token code with Thieu, while Raul watched over their shoulders.

  Molongo, Wang and I huddled together in what remained of the cramped office. I struggled into my armour as Molongo asked if the office was properly shielded for basic comm messages. I assured him it was, and I disabled recording of urgent messages sent amongst the three of us. I asked permission to read the text, but it appeared to be a nonsense blurb about flowers and rhubarb on a spring walk through a park. Molongo explained that the whole message was an elaborate code, most of which identified the sender. The man who sent it was calling for help, for an immediate extraction from immanent attack.

  Molongo, “The problem is that Pantocrator is our best software engineer at Valhalla and we cannot go there yet.”

  Wang, “We could be there in four days if we left now. I would have to make arrangements for the marines on the Deng, but we could be back within another four days.”

  Molongo shook his head, “No, we need to get the ministers back to the Earth, and that will take all the berths available on the shuttle for the next few days. We will have to move people carefully and slowly. I do not want to attract hostile attention to the flow of senior politicians through the station.”

  Wang asked, “Can he wait that long? Three days would let me get another two ships ready to fight, assuming nothing more goes wrong. Speaking of which, what did that techno-babel mean that you asked to have sent? It meant almost nothing to me.”

  I answered, “I am sorry, Sirs, but this is the next thing that is going wrong. The emojis are just one aspect of our communications troubles. They are part of a more general token system that seems to be widely used. In principle, an external agent could control the ship, trapping all of us helplessly inside. We fear that may be why the Manila Bay fired the missile at us, and why they failed to detonate the warhead when it was close enough to do us damage.”

  Wang and Molongo turned to look at Haliru, who had started to curse quietly but with great vehemence. He finally turned and spoke out loud.