Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  At four minutes forty seconds from Raul’s desperate warning, the Manila Bay became a nuclear fireball. We lost the camera immediately, but the radiation sensors recorded when the X-ray flash occurred, when the shock wave passed, and when the hot gas arrived that was all that remained of the ship. We would be in the cooling fireball for several more minutes, and in a radioactive cloud for some time after that, but the first radiation-toughened telescopes were deployed to see what was left of the transports.

  There was no hint of exhaust from the drives, no sign of gas from the maneuvering jets. Transports were hardened against EMP, but nothing could survive that close to the detonation. The radiation would have blasted electrons out of one side of the transports, momentarily creating a voltage difference of tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of volts from one side of each tiny ship to the other. Their control systems would have fried. The outer hulls would be slag, the airlocks welded shut on the side facing the explosion. No comm, no controls, no life support. Dead ships. If anyone was alive inside they were mute, blind and helpless, doomed to asphyxiation when their air supplies ran out.

  We could not call for help, even if rescue was possible. Radio communications were impossible inside the fireball, of course. The Deng was silent and would remain shut down for another hour until conditions improved. The other earth stations were much farther away, but all of them would be offline until their systems had been rebooted and repaired.

  Distantly, I heard Wang ordering the recovery crew into action. One remaining transport to track down six others and bring them home before their speed carried them so far away it would be pointless to try.

  As soon as the transport left, acceleration alarms rang throughout the ship. The Mao itself was going to chase one of the transports, a battleship chasing a dead transport through a radiation storm.

  Wang announced that the Excalibur has launched its own three transports and would be pursuing the last transport in person, as we were.

  It all seemed so hopeless.

  Inside, I called myself the Cripple, an empty shell, too broken to fight, to help, or even to talk. Never had I felt so helpless and useless, that name so appropriate. Even hiding alone beneath the sands of Mars, I had a purpose that would carry me through the nighttime despair.

  [TOYAMI] Brian, do you need to talk?

  [DOUGLAS] No. Yes. Doctor Toyami, I cannot leave the MI office. Can you come here?

  [TOYAMI] Am I permitted?

  [DOUGLAS] No, but I can let you in.

  The record of the dialog on the monitor looked as disconnected as I felt.

  [MOLONGO] Agent Douglas, are you still in the MI office?

  [DOUGLAS] Yes.

  [MOLONGO] I am coming over. Call Doctor Toyami and have her come too. Everyone else seems to be away.

  Away. That was a polite way to phrase being battered and helpless, trapped on a dead transport, waiting for the air to run out. Or maybe just dead already.

  Molongo arrived, then Toyami in quick order. Molongo looked surprised when she requested entry so soon after his own arrival, but I just opened the door and let her in.

  “Agent Douglas, they are probably all alive and will arrive home safe and well. That looks terrible out there, but it is a standard battle scenario, something we practice all the time. The TDF used to abandon such transports as beyond salvation, but now we can recover them easily. You will see.”

  “Brian,” Toyami continued, “they will be back. The mission was a success. You got them to talk to each other, made them think as a team, and sent them out. I have been permitted to watch the transmissions. They performed brilliantly together. We arrived as a bunch of egotistical superstars, but today they welded together. The Banshees are a fully functional team. You are the weirdest son of a bitch I have ever met, but you did it.”

  I disagreed. “They already were brilliant. Experts at the top of their game. I sat here and watched.”

  Molongo smiled gently. “Agent Douglas, welcome to my world. I never get to play the game anymore. I spend my time setting policies and giving motivational speeches. I often feel like a fifth wheel at politics and a spent cartridge at war. My whole purpose is to select people at the top of their game, train them for the next game, and send them off to see what they can do.”

  He tried to change the subject. “Did you know the maneuver we are about to do is called the Martian capture? It apparently was devised to help you escape from Mars, but I have never read any report that explains why. There is a story there I hope to live long enough to hear you tell. Do not worry, I am not asking for it now. I know what happened at the Soiree.

  “We are going to match trajectories with a transport, somewhat like a landslide nudging up against a seashell. We then blow on it with our maneuvering jets to stop any spin. Finally, we move the whole Mao close enough that the docking clamps can mate mechanically. Someone usually goes outside briefly to engage the clamps, which are often damaged after an accident, then we force the airlocks open and haul everyone out. In the worst case, if the clamps cannot engage, we hold everything in position in a foam cocoon, then haul people out of the transport one at a time in body bags and pass them through our airlocks.”

  I listened to him in silence. I remembered – the Cap, the Assassin, and the Ghost remembered – that command was often lonely, especially when you sent people out to die. It never felt good. But in the few days I had known them, I had begun to love these people. The Cap understood. They were wonderful, and they were locked in six steel coffins while I sat here and watched.

  Toyami was monitoring me, seeing my despair. “Brian, tell me a story, a safe story, anything you can remember.”

  I sat quietly for a moment. “I remember Diego and Pedro. Diego was my best buddy in school. We lived in a rough neighbourhood, the only place my Mom and Dad could afford. Diego and I would play hide and seek, heroes and cops in the old, boarded-up buildings, or football in the flat concrete basements of buildings that had burned down. My next-door neighbour kept chickens, and one day she hired me to watch the chickens while she went to the store. I was to be paid with a soda pop for the work. Big money for a five-year-old!

  “The chickens were running around in a big, dusty yard, pecking for bugs and seeds. I got scared when I saw a rattlesnake on the other side of the yard, so I tried to shoo the chickens back into their coop. They would not go, just ran around faster. I got super-scared when I saw another snake at the end of the yard. The snakes got mad because I was running past them so often. I nearly wet myself when they started rattling. And I started to cry when the shadows of some hawks drifted across the yard. I was all alone, and I could hear the snakes, and I knew the hawks were overhead, and I could not get my chickens to come home.”

  I could feel the tears welling up, blobbing on my face, when the acceleration alarms started to warble, warning everyone to buckle in for hard maneuvering. I kept my eyes closed while I fumbled with the clips. The Mao slewed harder than any freighter could manage, then accelerated again even harder, 2.5-G for two minutes, three, four, five. There was a weird sensation as the entire ship spun on it axis, throwing us gently sideways. Then a few short, sharp lurches and a drift.

  I wiped the water off my face, as a new set of commands spooled down the screen. Someone was outside, attaching lines to a stricken transport, pulling it close to the docking bay. The airlocks no longer matched perfectly, but they filled the gaps with foam.

  “Senior Agent Douglas, Doctor Toyami, I believe the first of your soldiers has returned from the battle. You should be there to meet them. It is what commanders do for returning heroes.”

  It was not what I had done on Mars, not at the end. I unclipped, put on my mask and joined Molongo and Toyami as they moved down to the docking bay. I had to be carried by my guardian marine. I waited beside the airlock, wearing my stupid banshee costume, my mask darkened nearly black. As they emerged, I thanked the sailors and marines for their service, and nearly embraced Raul and Thieu when they came out. R
aul had a broken arm and Thieu had a twisted ankle from the frantic departure from the Manila Bay when 2-G of thrust had hit before they were properly clipped in. Doctor Toyami held me back and escorted them off to the surgical theatres.

  Then the first of the crew of the Manila Bay emerged. Much worse would follow later, but these were bad enough. Their clothes, torn, soaked with glue and acid, had been removed, and with them the little of their dignity that remained. There were acid burns over their bodies, bruises and cuts from two days of meaningless fights, scrapes where they had torn their own skin in self-loathing. Their eyes were haunted, spittle drooled out of their mouths in long, slimy tendrils. These people had been the pride of the TDF, but were no longer fit for service. They would need months of dedicated psychiatric care to recover. Every one of my parts wept for them. I switched my mask to something kindly and tried to bless them, dredging up everything that any priest, pastor, monk or guru had ever taught me in a moment of grief, in languages they probably did not understand, crying quietly inside my mask. One or two heard the sorrow in my voice and tried to caress my face before being led away to the infirmary.

  One by one the broken transports were brought in. Three of them came to the Mao, the others were collected by the Excalibur. I had to wait four more anxious hours for Chandrapati and Marin to arrive from the Excalibur, the last of my chickens safely home. Then I collapsed and they carried me down to the surgical theatre that Marin had reserved so many hours before.

  2357-03-05 17:00

  Sleepy Bye

  “You, my friend, are in desperate need of sleep, and so are we.” Marin did not look vengeful, nor even angry. “I am going to strap you onto this surgical table, and place on your head the opaque helmet we used on Mindy to prevent you from communicating with anyone else. In case you get feisty, I have asked Doctor Toyami to watch over you, along with some big, strong marines who can hold you in place. So, sweet dreams, old man, to you and me both.”

  Why didn’t I think of that? They could not turn off my comm unit because I knew how to turn it back on, but I did not even know how the helmet worked and had no credentials that would allow me to query it, much less control it. They strapped me onto the table, fitted the helmet and gave me a light sedative to settle my emotions.

  As I drifted off, my last coherent thought was that I had failed to erase us from history. After the healing of the Deng and the rescue of the Manila Bay, everyone would remember this day. We were Banshees, whether we liked it or not.

  Coming soon!

  Nightmare Wars: Book 2

  Lord Banshee

  Fugitive

  The Imperium has arrived in force and the hunt for the Ghost is on. The Earth and Moon are threatened with Imperial occupation, and pirates rampage throughout near-Earth space. Time is desperately short as factional rivalry tears apart the Imperial fleet. What compromise is possible between all-encompassing revenge and honest justice? Is it possible to avoid a cataclysmic war?

  My team of Banshees has barely gelled, yet already we must disperse to seek shelter. Is there anywhere in human space we can hide? Is there anyone they will not torture or kill to find us?

  If the Imperial fleet is divided against itself, I am no better. My internal rivalries threaten the entire team, and no one more than Leilani, who will be executed as the Ghost Wife if I fail. To save her, I must first save myself.

  Appendix A

  Gendered Pronouns

  English provides only three basic genders, he, she, and it, for male, female and non-human subjects. We have need of a simpler distinction – human versus nonhuman, where the human gender is deliberately unspecified. This handles several cases of interest:

  a role that can only be filled by a human (e.g. president, CEO, marine)

  a single human of unknown gender

  a single human of non-binary gender, i.e. not properly described as either male or female

  For simplicity, I will use the term “non-binary” for any case where specifying a human person as male or female would be inappropriate. Within this story, spacers (including Lunatics, Martians, and Belters) include a greater percentage of non-binary people than would be normal on the earth, for both biological and social reasons.

  The author has personally encountered a situation where the bylaws of an organization described a member as “he or it”, to the annoyance of female members. The usage was technically correct, because in a legal context the pronoun “he” can refer to any human, not just males. Regardless, people without legal training have routinely interpreted this usage as excluding women. In this case, the use of “it” was necessary because corporations could also be members. The problem was solved by alternating “he” and “she” throughout the bylaws wherever a human member was implied, explaining this very peculiar usage in the definitions at the end of the bylaws.

  It seems cleaner to use a non-binary pronoun to handle these cases. There is no generally accepted convention for these pronouns, so I have adopted the following:

  gender

  male

  female

  non-binary

  personal

  he

  she

  ze

  sentence object

  him

  her

  zim

  possessive adjective

  his

  her

  zer

  possessive

  his

  hers

  zers

  reflexive/intensive

  himself

  herself

  zimself

  Honorifics

  It is customary to address senior people with an honorific based on their occupation, such as President, Professor, or Minister. This is often impossible or inappropriate. Although derived from the medieval title “Sire”, a term that was unmistakably male, the informality of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first allows “Sir” to be used as a term of respect regardless of the gender or occupation of the person being addressed. The author has dined in up-scale restaurants where everyone was addressed as Sir, and expects the usage to spread.

  Reflecting the customs of previous centuries, many positions that can only be filled by a human are labelled with the suffix “man”, as though every office holder is necessarily male. Examples were chairman, foreman, doorman, and delivery man. In defiance of reality, critics of modern society sometimes insist that only men can legitimately fill such positions. In the story, spacer communities will create non-gendered versions of these positions with the substitution of “zim” for “man”, or “sir” if more respect is implied. Examples are chairsir, foresir, doorzim and deliveryzim. Usage of such terms will not be universal, especially on the Earth where the older terms of respect will be considered part of a region’s cultural heritage.

  Appendix B

  A Short History of the Final War

  After a long prelude that allowed tensions to rise, the Final War is conventionally divided into three phases:

  Exchange: nuclear exchange in which most of the actual fighting occurred

  Fimbulwinter: “nuclear winter” during which smoke in the upper atmosphere blocked sunlight, destroying agriculture and causing mass famine

  Great Burning: decades of severe global warming from carbon dioxide released by fires running through dead vegetation, and methane released by melting permafrost.

  Prelude

  Through the early half of the twenty first century, four large nations came to dominate the Earth: The United States of America (USA), the Russian Federation (RF), the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Unified India (IN). All four were nuclear powers. Arms limitation talks reduced the size of the nuclear arsenals of the four powers, but never eliminated them, and did not prevent regular upgrades. Most other nations retained only minor nuclear arsenals, or deliberately rejected their possession.

  International relations were managed through large, multinational bodies, the most significant of which was the United Nations (UN)
. The UN was crippled by agreements dating from its inception that allowed a few nations to veto vital agreements. Its legitimacy was further degraded by numerous small nations whose tiny populations held the same voting power as the large nations, and who tended to vote in blocks as puppets of their powerful patrons. The UN also did not have any form of coercive power, an international army loyal to the UN itself. Notwithstanding these flaws, it was the only comprehensive international body and served for over a century as the model for global representative government.

  The peace and prosperity of the Earth were also preserved through a collection of smaller organizations, trading communities and quasi-governmental bodies. Prominent examples were the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU), which survived their turbulent formation to become models of good transnational governments, able to keep their member states in line without the need for excessive force. Similarly, the nations of South America evolved an informal system of negotiations that effectively prevented international wars despite the tremendous differences in the national governments and their numerous overlapping claims on resources. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) never became as cohesive as the EU or AU, but was sufficiently effective to prevent large conflicts and the spread of nuclear weapons amongst its member states.

  Notwithstanding the presence and effectiveness of these bodies, there continued to be tension amongst the governments of the world. Internal conflicts often spilled across international borders. Numerous smaller conflicts broke out, each of which required quick diplomacy, targeted economic intervention, and careful applications of military power.