Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  “Certainly, there is little we can do about them right now. The resources of the Mao are very limited, even if supplemented with those on the earth stations. With things as they are, we cannot depend upon support from all the earth stations, nor even from other TDF ships. It is essential that we not pick sides, nor provoke fights. Our role for the moment is limited by our resources to being peacemakers, negotiators, and advisors, offering limited assistance where we can.

  “As a temporary expedient pending further developments, does this seem satisfactory to everyone? We may need to clean up the legal language in the declaration, but it will not change much. Nor do we believe that anyone in the Council will object to it, except for being mealy mouthed and inadequate. But having debated these issues with great passion, I do not think we have anything more to offer until we resume our seats on the Council.”

  It said what I wanted said, almost word for word. Morris looked at me and commented, “Agent Douglas, you puzzle me greatly. There are times like last night when you seem entirely scatter-brained and irresponsible, and there are other times when you seem entirely rational and well-informed, almost preternaturally so. You were not monitoring our debates while you were in the MI office, were you?”

  “No, Sir, I was not. I have had a long time to think about what we did wrong on Mars, and what the consequences were likely to be. I also know a fair amount about the weak points in the Earth’s government and commercial systems. But I would warn you, when I am scatter-brained I am usually self-destructive. Beware of me when I become rational, because my conclusions will often get other people killed.”

  Marin looked like she wanted to say something, but closed her mouth and remained silent. Inside my own head, I told the Ghost to be quiet. It was true, and anyone could verify that who knew me well enough. Especially Leilani.

  2357-03-05 05:00

  Plan of Attack

  New pajamas for all of us, including the doctors, arrived in a great stack. They were copies of the ones we had worn during the soiree, except for a large Council logo splashed entirely across the centre of the shirt. A second logo appeared on the back. It was garish and bizarre, but no one would shoot us accidentally because they did not see the logo. Some clever costumer had realized that we also needed grey gloves and matching footwear. It would not do to be leaving finger or foot prints everywhere when we were supposed to be in disguise.

  Raul, Thieu and a squad of marines moved off to join the engineers going to the Excalibur. I watched them go, remembering the teams I had dispatched on Mars on missions of sabotage, terror and murder. Just for a moment, I flashed back to the darkened rooms, deep under the Martian rock, where we had formed up for each mission, and afterwards held long self-criticisms to try to understand why we met so often with failure. But our missions of angry vengeance then were nothing like the rescue we were attempting today, and the moment passed quickly.

  The Excalibur had moved closer to the Mao in preparation for this expedition. It still took over half an hour for them to form up, embark on the transport and move over to the Excalibur.

  Within that ship there were a few doors that seemed to be inexplicably locked, a few systems that failed to respond to controls, and a few weapons that did not deploy even after cleaning. Raul intended to check those systems for evidence of token attacks, which seemed to have started well before the emoji assault. If they did not respond, Thieu would look for interface problems in the macros, and only if both of their efforts failed would the systems be disassembled to check for glue bugs.

  The Excalibur’s crew had full access to their weapon bays, even if many of the weapons could not be used. The bays were open to space, to allow the weapons to be inspected and deployed. Teams of engs and marines swarmed over the outer hull, cleaning off bugs wherever they found them. A frigate was bigger than a freighter, forty metres long, fifteen metres square, and the glue bugs were only a few millimetres across, so this was harder than it appeared.

  The engs reported that one of their transport bays was unusable. They were sure that the passenger airlock had been cleaned both inside and out, but it still refused to open. It would make an interesting test case.

  The transport clamped onto the Excalibur, extended an airtight accordion tube to seal around the airlock frame, and pressurized it so that Raul could approach the door. He was flanked by marines in mechanized armour, ready to haul him back at the first sign of trouble, and was wearing a breathing apparatus in case there was a vacuum breech anywhere in the system. Somewhat anticlimactically, the airlock had been deactivated by a token attack. Raul reactivated the airlock with the macro Thieu and Haliru had provided, after which the marines opened the airlock in the normal way and entered the Excalibur. Raul reported that he was hugely relieved, and the crew inside the airlock cheered lustily.

  After that, it was a cake walk. No one on the Excalibur has suffered for more than a few moments from the emoji attack, because they had turned off their external comm before the attack had really begun. Raul and Thieu went around disabling the comm units of anyone with the newer models, installing the encrypted channel, and re-enabled their comm units. The Com for the Excalibur brought their own programming unit and copied the macros. Raul and Thieu accompanied the Excalibur’s Com and Eng staff as they swept through the ship, quickly and efficiently re-enabling the devices that the token attack had disabled. There were a few new versions of the comm interface that the macro could not handle, so Thieu rewrote the macros to handle those cases.

  With little to do himself, Raul spent an hour chatting with the crew. We also tried out the audio feed, which allowed us to hear the conversation and even participate, prompting Raul to ask questions that he had not thought of on his own.

  The engineers from the Mao had a much more productive time. Rather than burning off the glue bugs with superheated oxygen and hydrogen, the crew of the Excalibur had removed a small ion drive from a long-range missile on one of the damaged racks. The plasma from the drive vaporized glue bugs even more effectively than the oxygen and hydrogen, and consumed more electricity than fuel. So long as the ship’s reactor continued to function, they could continue to burn bugs.

  The major drawback was that the surface had to be electrically conductive with a high melting temperature. Ceramic and glass surfaces required chemical treatments like the oxygen and hydrogen jets that we had developed. Both approaches incinerated paint, plastic, cloth and paper, so a lot of rooms had lost their door labels and the painted markings inside for furniture attachments. Raul commented that life on the Excalibur was going to be dull and confusing until these details could be restored, and he was happy that we had stopped the infestation on the Mao before it reached this extremity. He wondered how bad things were on the other ships, but we could not say because no other ship had responded to our latest attempt at laser communications.

  A more serious issue was that they had extreme difficulty moving the bulky ion drive into the bio-waste recycling system, which was barely large enough for a human maintenance worker. They had made very little progress trying to clean the muck, so swarms of new glue bugs continued to migrate out of the recycler to re-infest the ship as quickly as it could be cleaned. Raul took one look and told them to freeze and eject the entire contents of the recycling system in an airtight bag. They would cause little trouble in orbit and would even make a useful target for laser weapons practice. The organic material could be replaced from the stores on the Deng. He reported happily that the Eng on the Excalibur had smacked his head for not having thought of it himself. He consoled them with the thought that they could not have done it before, because they could not talk to the Deng to ask for resupply of the organics, could not launch a transport to fetch the goods, and even if they had would have been quarantined by the Deng’s port authorities while they remained so badly infected with glue bugs. Our own transport had detached as soon as the team had gone aboard, but was still going to require a severe cleaning before anyone could return to the Mao. />
  Leilani asked Katerina, Evgenia and Sergei if they knew where they were supposed to be going on the Deng. Sergei had been through the stations going to and from Mars, but had not had time to explore. Neither Evgenia nor Katerina had been mobile in the few hours between their arrival on the Laika and the transfer to the Mao.

  She brought up a basic image of a generic earth station to outline where they needed to go. “There are not the beautiful pictures from public relations, just ones we keep handy to help orient agents who have just arrived from the Earth.

  “The zero-G part of the station is the central square box with six arms sticking out, shown in red. The six long arms hold the docking berths. The axis of the station comprises the north and south arms, which are normally used for maintenance. Ships can be hauled all the way through the station along that axis. Most of the berths are in the other four arms. Because it looks a bit like the children’s toy, the six arms are called the jack.

  “The whole structure is supposed to maintain a fixed orientation in space. Each arm is named by the direction in which it points: North, South, Aquarius, Taurus, Leo and Virgo. The latter four were the ancient astrological names for the zodiacal houses, roughly aligned along the ecliptic equator at 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees ecliptic longitude. They were chosen in part as a deliberate archaism to remind people of the pre-scientific traditions of astronomy, in part because the First Point of Aries, which defines 0 degrees ecliptic longitude, was in Aquarius when the system was invented, and in part because their names were easy to distinguish over a noisy comm link.

  “We use the letters N, S, A, T, L, and V to label directions, and to identify rooms and corridors. If someone tells you to go Leo two blocks, and turn Taurus for three, look for L and T labeling the corridors leading out of each junction.

  “Each arm is a hollow tube open to space, so ships can enter and leave without long waits. There are pressurized corridors along the walls to allow people and delicate cargoes access to the berths.

  “The big square box in the centre is called, wait for it – the box! The whole zero-G structure is built as a unit and is called – drum roll please, to build the tension – a jack-in-the-box!

  “Unlike the jack, the box is filled with air. It supplies storage and working space. The TDF uses almost ten percent of the box on the ESK. Most of the rest it is filled with warehouses, machine shops and offices. Brian and I know every nook and cranny of the box on every station, because that is where most crooks do their business.

  “Those two things that look like bicycle wheels are the North and South Rings. There is a non-rotating axle that attaches directly to the box, with airlocks into the jack. The innermost rotating part of each ring is called the hub, which attaches to the axle with some remarkable, air-tight, shock-absorbing bearings that I never understood. You will, I am sure, be impressed by now that the engineers who put such careful thought into the design of the hardware were also gifted poets when it came to assigning names to the components!”

  There was a bit of a giggle, which I am sure was mostly the release of nervous tension.

  “In the absence of the fictional ‘gravity plating’ so beloved by videographers, everyone’s favourite way to make artificial gravity is through centrifugal force, by spinning the two rings. That is trickier than it sounds, because spinning a structure as large as an earth station fast enough to generate Earth-normal gravity would be bloody dangerous and would make everyone inside sick from the Coriolis forces. We compromise by spinning the two rings just fast enough to generate Lunar-normal gravity at the outer rim, and adding motion sickness meds to the mix for people fresh from the Earth. It takes about two minutes for each of the rings to complete its rotation, and the speed of the outer rim is well over one hundred kilometres per hour. They rotate in opposite directions to ensure that the station has a net angular momentum of zero.

  “In another fifty years or so, when the stations are completed, the ‘rings’ will become disks and the whole area will be filled in. For now, there are just two sections that are serviceable, the high-G ring and a low-G ring close to the hub.

  “Lunar gravity is only seventeen percent of Earth gravity, but it is enough that most permanent residents prefer to live and work in the ‘high-G’ part of the station at the outer rim. In the North Ring, you will find the DG’s office, all the Admin Offices, Station Security, Law Enforcement, and the TDF offices, so that is where you are going. The Port Authorities, Commerce, and large corporate offices are in the South Ring, on the Deng at least. It varies from station to station.

  “Spacers, along with the merchants and hotels serving their community, are more often found in the low-G ring. They like enough gravity that things will stay where you put them, but are more interested in getting to and from their ships quickly. The low-G ring was another part of our regular beat, and I personally prefer it. If you stumble on the Earth, you hit the ground in about half a second. In the low-G ring, it takes about five seconds to hit the floor, and you will rarely even get a bruise.

  “Those large tubes running between the high-G and low-G rings are called Drops. They are filled with elevators, cargo lifts, pipes, cables and ladders. They start numbering the levels at the top, just outside the Hub, with Level-Zero. The rim of the high-G ring is six hundred metres below the axis and most levels are three metres high, so there are somewhat less than 200 “stories” in the elevators. The actual spacing between levels is variable, so they restart the numbering at the outer rim of the high-G ring with Level 200 and count down as you go up towards the centre. When they finally fill in the whole disk, there is going to be a mess in the middle where the two sets of numbers do not match.

  “In between the two rings are smaller cables that are called the rigging. They are strong enough to hold the high-G ring in place, along with rest of the disk when it gets built. The cables vibrate like plucked violin strings when micro-meteors hit them. If you get a chance, ask the maintenance workers to play you a sped-up recording of the rigging in a meteor shower.

  “Be grateful that your job does not require that you work on the rigging. Fall off and you will die when you hit the high-G ring. Brian and I have spent far too much of our time catching idiots who imagine that the rigging is a clever place to hide contraband.

  “Anyways, your plan is to arrive at the station through the North Arm, enter through the airlocks in the North Axle, and proceed down the slip rings to the Tokyo Drop.”

  Sergei interrupted, “Slip rings?”

  Leilani smiled, “I expect you remember them, but did not learn the term. I doubt Evgenia and Katerina even saw them after the crash of the Laika. They will be obvious once you get there. Level Zero of the low-G ring is only twenty meters from the axis, and has about 0.5%-G. Level Zero moves at a brisk walking pace relative to the zero-G deck, which is fixed to the non-rotating Axle. You can take elevators to move between them, but most people run up and down the slip rings, a set of cylindrical stairs that run all the way around the Axle and move with graduated speeds so stepping from one to the next is like moving on or off a slidewalk on the Earth.

  “You cannot feel such a low acceleration, so it is tempting to take multiple steps in each stride. Resist that temptation! You can jump all the way down in a single bound, but are likely to bruise yourself. If you hit anyone else as you tumble along, they will be very angry. Wear your magnetic boots or slippers and take one step at a time.

  “Anyways, wait until the Tokyo Drop comes into view, skip down the slip rings, and take one of the elevators in the Drop to Level 195. You will exit into Emeishan Thoroughfare, but do NOT stay on that road, which will be filled with people. Who knows how many of them will be crazed from the emoji attack?

  “The best routes will be through the service corridors. If the passage is blocked, go up or down a Ladder until you get past it. The marines will know what to look for, although very few of them will have spent much time in that part of the station.”

  After that she got into t
he details, which corridors were usually clear, which roads to avoid, where the best entrances were for each of the office complexes.

  While we watched the progress on the Excalibur, Katerina started telling everyone the value of theatre. She had often walked into camps full of angry men with a few TDF soldiers for muscle, delivering proposals or ultimatums. She added that it was almost always angry men in the camps, looking directly at me, although she admitted there were crowds of equally angry women pushing their men into the confrontation. She conceded that she had been shot a few times, but usually got away unscathed, and it was theatre that allowed her that success.

  She felt that the most useful classes she had ever taken were in the performing arts. She had learned how to act brave when she was terrified, how to sneer so that the proud would be humbled, and to laugh when she wanted to cry in frustration. Performance before live audiences had taught her to project her voice, a necessary skill in a confrontation to ensure that the real commander, hiding for zer own security in the crowd, could hear what she had to say.

  This was not idle boasting. She got to the point as Raul and Thieu started installing the first sets of macros in the Excalibur’s officers.

  “When we go to the Deng, we cannot just dance by an emoji victim and turn off their comm unit. They are likely to turn it right back on because they believe they need it to do their job. We must convince each person individually to leave the comm units off. That will require a little theatre, to catch their attention. We need to address them with something they desperately want to believe, so that they listen to the Council’s message. It must be simple and convincing. Unlike the gangs of bandits that I usually talk to, these people are decent, honest, hard-working citizens. They mostly want to live peacefully with their neighbours, but are being goaded into violence and rage by the emojis.

  “I suggest we each decide on a simple phrase that we can use to catch their attention. We will grab them by the shoulders, turn off their comm units, speak into their faces while looking directly into their eyes, and deliver the message. If the people on the Deng are like Morris, Wang and Molongo, it will all be over in a minute. We might get punched a few times, but that heals, doesn’t it Doctor Marin?”