Several of the unrepentant officers tried to start an argument that Martian independence was necessary. Leilani told them that was a valid position to discuss, referred them to our earlier Council statement, and asked them to contact their Council members. She then had to leave, to continue the effort in Law Enforcement, relieving Manager Troong.
Marin finished her report by saying that we were all stark, raving mad, but at least she was grateful that people were no longer shooting each other.
The Duty Eng on the Mao called to say that one of his team had been investigating the glue used by the glue bugs. It was a standard industrial glue, well understood and easily removed with appropriate solvent, which unfortunately we did not carry on the Mao. If you really wanted to protect a surface from the glue, there was a fluorinated oil that prevented it from sticking. It was normally used as a coolant fluid, with large stocks already on board. He had ordered fifty clean suits impregnated with the oil and their face masks coated with it so that clean-up crews did not get covered with the vermin.
Evgenia had resumed her push through Admin as soon as the Com with the communicators had arrived. She never complained, but I imagined that each new hallway and office they passed was a fresh terror. The end was almost anticlimactic. The Admin comm centre also functioned as an answering service and coordination centre, so had far more staff than the MI comm centre. Most of them were low-level office workers, and budgetary constraints had prevented most of the senior people from receiving new implants yet, so only a few officers had become demented. Those few had managed to prevent anyone in the office from speaking to the outside world, but could not stop the news feeds from coming in. After the Council statement, and the bruised young couple, the office staff had corralled their demented leaders in a large office. When Evgenia arrived, they were led out one by one to be healed. The sight of this bizarre woman drove one of them into a frenzy, but the office staff held zim tightly. Evgenia asked each person’s name and began each healing in a soft voice filled with compassion, “Mustapha Khan, dear friend, be free.”
Evgenia had taken time to listen to Leilani’s pronouncement. She gathered the formerly demented officers along with all the other staff in a conference room and gave them the explanation that Leilani had outlined. Her voice was no longer soft or compassionate. This was a lawyer speaking to the station’s lawyers, accountants and support staff, instructing them on what to guard against, what to do in response, where to assign responsibilities. Hers was a voice of dispassionate authority.
It occurred to me that I still had not read my briefing notes on the team, that I really knew next to nothing about any of them beyond the stories we had told at the campfire. With one crisis following another, there had never been time. Chandrapati continued to discuss tactics, but I allowed myself to become distracted by flipping mentally through the cases he had handled that were listed in his brief. I had looked at them and could remember each page, but had never taken time to understand them. As I did, I began to introduce his cases into the discussion to illustrate each point. Chandrapati was described as specializing in corporate fraud, but what that meant was that he had dealt with violations of environmental law, of labour law, of slander and public defamation. He had wide connections through the community, was respected by most of the activist movements, had investigated corporations defrauding student groups, religious communities, and community choirs. The more I read, the more he reminded me of Gandhi and Kong Zi, always working on the side of honesty, benevolence and propriety, with a very south-Indian twist.
The key, always, was to find a fulcrum for your lever, a soft spot for your pick, a dam that would collapse if a single pebble was removed. If you knew where to look, there were dozens of these every day. They were often in places that attracted no attention and seemed unimportant. Kong Zi had organized China using music, ritual, and filial devotion. The battle to end slavery started when a divinity student named Thomas Clarkson at Cambridge University wrote an essay addressing the question “Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?”
Sometimes it was necessary to arrange a spectacular demonstration, as when Gandhi organized the march to the Dharasana Salt Works. More often, large demonstrations were ineffective. They allowed activists to feel they were doing something important, while in practice they were being ignored by the people with the power to change the laws, policies and opinions that mattered. In many cases, it was small people who mattered, individual police officers rather than politicians, nurses rather than hospital boards, teachers rather than news editors. Chandrapati knew those police officers, nurses and teachers, and in many cases also knew the politicians, board members and news editors.
We finally wound down. I finished off with the assessment, “Chandrapati, you are exactly who I want in this job. I only wish you could take my place as head of this team.”
He shook his head, “But Brian, you have a breadth of vision that I would never have glimpsed. Just stop kissing me, OK?”
After Chandrapati left, I began to read through Evgenia’s cases. I would have fallen over if I had not been floating in zero-G. I was busting to tell Leilani who it was we had turning off comm units in Admin, but she was still working her way through Law Enforcement. Evgenia had finished with Admin as Leilani turned off the comm centre in Law Enforcement, deputized several officers and doctors to continue the healing, and headed down to Commerce. The two of them worked through Commerce, with Evgenia handling the many offices filled with lawyers and accountants while Leilani broke into CI and restored mass sanity to the service.
I wished I could have joined her, having many friends and former colleagues in that office. She reported it was a real trial having to ask some junior office worker for the name of zer friends before they could be healed, when she really wanted to embrace them and kiss them back to reality. She had carefully kept her voice distorted, using one of the synthesized voices provided by the mask. Even so, a few of them seemed to recognize her. It was difficult to fool a trained agent used to the identity changes we all made as part of the job.
Sergei made fast work of Station Security. Although their comm centre had been one of the first and loudest sources of emoji attacks, the personnel had hardly been affected. There may have been a logic here, if the Imperium wanted to take over the stations intact it would make sense to preserve the station personnel. However, the chaos we had seen elsewhere reinforced my impression that this was the work of amateurs. I wondered what the difference was between StaSec on the Deng and on the ESK, where many officers had seemed to be working against us.
One of the Coms commented that it looked like a distributed denial of service attack, organized by someone who had pilfered a set of high-level access codes but had no real idea of the power of the weapon they were using. There were good tools to deal with DDoS attacks, to trace the messages back to their origin and block them in the future. He suggested we should set MI, CI and LE to work on the case together, since the attack affected so many departments. I passed that suggestion directly to Molongo with a copy to his office manager, setting a priority high enough to wake them up. The sooner such an investigation started, the better chance it had for success. I got back two very snarky replies, but they both agreed to start the investigation, to coordinate with CI and LE, and to assign it a very high urgency.
Sergei also dropped the alleged thieves into the StaSec brig, for their own safety on the street as much as anything. It would be hard to make a case that they had intended to break into the DG’s office, but they had clearly engaged in public fighting, so StaSec agreed to review the security camera records to see if there was enough evidence to lay charges. Even that would be legally difficult, since most of the people they had assaulted were themselves fighting and could not remember who had hit them or even where they were at the time. It seemed most likely that the thieves were pickpockets and identity snatchers. The video record would be ambiguous, but the fighting gave an excuse to hold them long enough to check.
> Sergei returned to the DG’s office. Their communications ran through Admin, so as soon as Evgenia had corrected the Admin comm centre, the DG’s office was restored to some level of sanity. Most of the crowd outside dispersed, having never had a real reason to be there. The remainder were mostly employees, desperate to find out what had happened to their friends inside.
A receptionist opened the door to let Sergei and a few marines in, but there did not seem to be much need for the rest of his squad, who remained outside in the square. There were a few injured people, mostly managers who had become demented. There was broken furniture that would be hard to repair or replace, as well as blood spatters from cuts, and scrapes on the walls. Sergei reported that there were still people cursing quietly, or sobbing. Some were clinging to each other for consolation, but others tried to hide their faces against the wall.
At the start of the attack, angry managers from nearby offices had converged on the DG’s office, forcing their way in and shouting incoherently at the staff. By the height of the attack, as we were arriving on the Deng, the whole office had become a melee. Small groups of angry people fought each other, following one demented manager or trying to subdue another. The demented might not even remember that they had been fighting, but the lower ranking staff had not been demented and knew they had entered the fight voluntarily. They would be tormented by guilt and grudges that would be harder to heal.
The commander of his squad took over the report as Sergei went to work. He addressed the room and began the slow process of turning off individual comm units and installing the required filters. He began each healing with a few words of comfort, “Citizen, your offence has been erased. Forgive yourself as you forgive your neighbour.” Doors started to open down the short hall leading to the private office of the DG herself. Dazed, frightened people crept out to watch, then fell in line themselves to receive absolution. After a few minutes, even the ones who did not have comm units joined the line. Some tried to kneel before Sergei, but he lifted them up and gave them the same blessing.
DG Eberhardy herself knelt and refused to rise back up. She kept repeating, “Forgive me. Forgive me. I have failed you all.”
Sergei responded by kneeling before her. Over the audio feed, I heard him say softly, “Duchess Eberhardy, you were the victim of a kind of attack that none of us even knew was possible twenty-four hours ago. The earth station Deng, whose people have learned from your care and example, has weathered this storm better than any of the other stations we know about. You should be proud of your work, proud of your staff, proud of your citizens. They turn to you now for wisdom, guidance and leadership. With your permission, I will install in your comm unit a new channel that will let you speak with the heads of the other government services on this station and with the officers on the TDF Mao.
The commander added, “She just replied that he must be from the Earth, because no one up here ever calls her Duchess Eberhardy. She still looks pretty dazed.”
The commander paused in his commentary, then restarted, “Sirs, this is like a weird fairy tale. He has asked us to clear the office ready to resume operations, and to bring up several news feeds. Then, he asked everyone who feels they might have caused offence to seek out the ones they offended for a reconciliation dance. He bowed low before Eberhardy, took her hand, kissed her fingers like he was some Westrus aristocrat, and asked her for the honour of the first dance. Right now, they are doing a slow waltz around the broken furniture and he is singing to her in Russian. This is surreal.”
The commander resumed his more prosaic commentary. The dance continued, a few couples at a time, as the office was brought back to rights. The news feeds showed activity resuming across the station. Calls came in from Admin, from Commerce, Law Enforcement and a growing number of corporate offices inquiring when the DG would be prepared to make a public statement, which everyone intended to broadcast live to reassure their employees.
After another few turns around the office, Eberhardy stopped, curtsied to Sergei in a move that made no sense without a flowing dress but matched the deliberately archaic gesture he had made. She sighed and said, “That was like a drink of clean, cold water from the stream behind the house where I grew up. I thank you, My Lord Banshee. But I must get back to my duties. I have a station to run.”
Things were winding down and it was clear everyone would be returning soon to the Mao. A perfectly impish idea occurred to me, that set the Kid and the Cap clapping their mental hands. I rolled it around for a moment. The Assassin thought it was stupid, but the Ghost withheld judgement, so I passed it to the whole team for comment.
“This whole operation has become far more visible than I had intended. We were, after all, supposed be undercover agents, spooks moving through the shadows. I hope you all kept your masks opaque to preserve your anonymity. I would like us to disappear from the official record from this moment on. We need to recapture our cover and never use these costumes again.
“I have an idea that is crazy, but I would like your opinion on whether it is theatrical crazy or just plain stupid. We have been seen entering the Deng and moving into the thick of the trouble. Now I want us to disappear without being seen to leave. Like spooks, vanishing into thin air. Today will be remembered as either a victory or as an embarrassing stunt, but vanishing would add an element of mystery to the bizarreness of the event and perhaps distract people from our real identities.
“This should be easy. Every one of you right now is in a location where people have been badly hurt. We have already set a precedent of evacuating people to the Mao in opaque body bags. I would like every one of you to leave your current positions in an opaque body bag, carried by the marines as though you were injured and in need of urgent medical attention. Come straight back to the dock and board the transport before emerging.
“Sergei, Evgenia and Leilani, please ask the head of each department to offer thanks as they see fit to the Council and to the crew of the Mao, but to completely omit any reference to us. No mention of banshees, no reference to angels. Praise goes to the management and people of the earth station Deng, who need to pick up the pieces and carry on by themselves. If they need a liaison, we can send somebody official from the Mao to fill the role, but looking at the news feeds, I think they are ready to stand on their own.
“I think Katerina would approve of this notion. How about the rest of you?”
Chandrapati asked, “Is this one of those fulcrum moments you mentioned?”
“What are you talking about?” Leilani replied, “I think we missed that conversation.”
“Oh, sorry, you did. We have been talking about finding moments when giving people a small nudge can have disproportionately large results. Like you five bringing the entire ESDENG back to sanity. Our disappearing might focus people’s attention on this event, making it memorable and thereby enhancing its effectiveness.”
Raul, still on the Excalibur, had been following the discussion. “You five gave them a small nudge that more closely resembled a giant smack in the face.”
Leilani sounded thoughtful, “Marin mostly stayed in R&R, and I replaced Katerina, so there were actually only three of us moving around at any given time. And disappearing would make it memorable, even if it is a transparent trick. I worry a little bit about what they will remember.”
“Which is why I want the official record to ignore us and focus on the achievements the citizens on the Deng have accomplished since then,” I pointed out. “The folk memory will always be tied to the official record, so we might as well polish both.”
Sergei interjected, “I am not sure about the body bags, but erasing our continued presence seems sensible to me. I have already asked DG Eberhardy to drop any reference to us and to pass the suggestion on to everyone else.”
Marin summarized a widely held opinion when she said, “If it means I never have to wear this ridiculous clown suit again, I am for it. Bag us.”
2357-03-05 11:00
Manila Bay
>
I jumped when a very high urgency message popped in from Wang. “We have an emergency transmission from the Manila Bay. It arrived by laser, but from a handheld unit off the crew cabin, not the normal unit near the bow. The text is, ‘Mayday. No control. Flies everywhere. All dying. Life support off.’ It sounds like a major glue bug infection with a token attack on the control system. Worse, the main drive just came on and is slowly pushing the ship out of orbit, but without any stabilizers. The orientation jets are firing randomly, making the ship wobble.
“There are thirty-one crew aboard the Manila Bay, less however many are now dead. Our first priority will be to evacuate as many crew as possible, then try to bring the ship back under control and cleanse it of bugs. We will need all our transports and will have to borrow three more from the pool on the Deng. Commander Liu, stop at MI and make the transport requisition. Each transport will need nav and com, no one else. Come here first to pick up the new bug-proof clean suits, then proceed to the Manila Bay.”
Leilani cried, “Bags, everyone. Now. You too, Doctor Marin. If they have dead on the Manila Bay, they also have injured.”
Doctor Marin was the last to arrive because she had to hand control of MI R&R back to responsible authorities amongst their own staff. The first transport had left the Deng and was well on its way with a bag of donated medications to treat glue poisoning and radiation exposure. She was passed into the transport in her bag and barely waited for the door to shut before unzipping the bag and clipping into the acceleration frame.
In principle, each transport was crewed by a Com and a Nav and could carry ten marines. If the Manila Bay had been fully functional, the entire crew could have been carried in four transports with empty space left over. In practice, the Manila Bay was likely to be filled with glue bugs and non-functional machines. Captain Wang warned us that it had been a favoured development platform for advanced weaponry, so many of the crew had received the new implants and were probably demented. Each transport would be carrying a Banshee to unlock doors and minds, two engs to clean glue bugs from critical places, and two marines for security. We were also sending two surgeons. Marin and the surgeons would each replace one of the engs on three different transports. Even if some of her crew were dead it would take six transports to evacuate the Manila Bay.
Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust Page 43