“They have just enough centrifuges to prepare a batch of vindaloo once a week. I was phenomenally lucky to have arrived when I did or I would have missed the opportunity completely. You can hide anything on the Moon, even the one kind of food that everybody in space wants with all their souls.
“You have never seen me cry and I hope you never do, but that day I cried like a baby, caught between the pain and the bliss of real food with real flavour in the company of friends I could trust. Best day ever!
“Oh, and Brian? I do not claim that I have identified the city correctly, nor the description of how I got to the restaurant, nor the identity of the pepper.”
That, at last, got us to laugh properly.
We looked at Raul, but he demurred. “The happiest day for me was the day I spent with Begum on the Excalibur, and it finished as one of the most terrible days ever. I will wait until that one comes out as a ballad before I repeat any part of it. Second happiest? Most of those involve trying out highly classified weapons with the developers. Let me think about what I can safely say.”
Toyami laughed, “So, it is my turn, then. Easy. It was my Repository Party, but maybe not for the reason you imagine. My parents were very devout Buddhists and had raised me as a prim and proper little girl. They were unhappy about my even making deposits in the Repository, but they also knew I chafed at the restrictions they imposed and felt this was a small measure of insurance in case I did anything outrageous, like going into space or joining the Banshees.
“My actual party was supposed to be a very low-key, late afternoon tea and prayer session but they had also purchased tickets for me and one of my closest girlfriends to take a guided tour through the marshlands just outside the city. It was my first venture outside the protective shell of the city and I felt very brave risking the radiation left from the Final War with my unprotected skin and lungs. We left really early, promising not to get into trouble, and spent the first couple of hours roaming the city together. We went up to the observation deck on top of the highest tower, ate a snack at a wildly overpriced restaurant so we could keep the paper napkin, looked straight down through one of the glass walkways at the people so far below.
“Mom never let me go onto glass walkways in case someone looked up and saw my underwear. Or at least that is what she said. I think she was just scared to look down. No one could have seen anything from that distance, but on top of that we were dressed to visit a marsh with sensible pants and footwear. It still felt brave and rebellious.
“We went on the tour, which was interesting and mucky. We fed some perfectly adorable ducks. Have you ever met a duck up close? Beautiful creatures! There were frogs, fishes, turtles and birds. We fed a lot of mosquitoes. We had at least one endangered species of mosquito in the marsh, so we consoled ourselves that we had done our duty to the Environment. I liked the life sciences, but that tour taught me not to major in environmental biology.
“We had a cheap lunch, having blown our money on the snack. And then we did the first truly rebellious thing I had ever done in my life. We went down to the bottom of the tower, snuck past a ‘do not enter’ sign into a service corridor and went exploring. We crept past a couple of cleaning crews and went down even further. There were pipes all over, and rooms full of heavy equipment. It was all dark and mysterious. We ran and ran through the empty corridors, down every flight of stairs we could find.
“And we got caught. We ran around a corner straight into a crew of maintenance workers, who were joining a second crew for a coffee break. We were trapped between the two crews and they grabbed us as we tried to dodge past. The two of us were marched into their crew room and given a dressing down in language that I hope my Mom and Dad never realized was directed at me. They were all set to call security, who would have turned us over to the police, when my friend mentioned that I was hosting my Repository Party that afternoon and we were just having a bit of harmless fun.
“That got them. Harmless? Did we know what harmless even meant? Harmless was shopping in the cheap stores to save money. Harmless was obeying your parents. Harmless was staying home. This was not harmless. And then they all got funny looks on their faces. I think they were remembering their own repository parties and the stupid things they did as kids.
“They marched us from one room to the other all through the basements of the tower. We saw the treatment plants for incoming water and outgoing grey water. We saw the sewage pre-treatment plant. We saw the electrical distribution system for the tower. We saw the hydraulic systems that ran the elevators, and the steam plants that moved heat around.
“At every stop we got a detailed, gory, horrifying description of what could happen if we had touched the wrong thing, or slipped on some muck, or stuck a hand into the fluid circulating through a vat, or breathed the vapours coming out of a pipe. They spoke of friends who had lost fingers, or had died, or had gone insane from pain. It was a tour and a half, much more memorable than the marsh, and we both came away scared spitless of what we had done.
“We arrived home two hours late. Mom and Dad were seriously worried, because I was never late. The party was not due to start for another half hour, but most of my aunts, uncles, cousins and even some of my parent’s friends were already there when we stepped through the door, covered with slime and crud, stinking of sewage.
“Mine was the only tea ceremony that had fireworks, just not the kind that goes bang in the sky. I washed in a hurry and changed into my kimono, but I still stank like an unflushed toilet. I had to greet all my own friends that way as they arrived.
“What a party! No one could taste their tea, and as for the prayers, the chanting? Let us just say I convinced several people that youth and beauty were illusions and that clinging to this world was not worth the suffering.
“What a day. Mom and Dad never really forgave me, but after that day I knew what it felt like to be a rebel. To run down forbidden hallways. To sneak past the guards. I think that is part of why I was attracted to LI and later stayed with CI, to work with the agents who lived that life. I did not see Leilani or Brian very often, because you were too good to get shot up like some of the others, but you were all my heroes. I never dreamt that I would be part of the same team on an assignment. It scares me silly and I really feel I deserve danger pay, but I feel more alive now than ever.
“More importantly, that day I realized my city was almost like a living thing. Oh, I liked the ducks, I liked the restaurants and shops, I liked the high observation deck, but they were just the pretty skin and flashing eyes wrapped around something mysterious and dangerous. I learned how our towers really worked, how the city lived and died. That day I had been allowed to see past the first veil of illusion. Everyone else wrinkled their noses during our prayers, but it was the first time I ever really meant them.
“I do not think I can ever thank the maintenance workers, who were probably breaking important rules by taking us into those places, but they changed my life. That was the day I decided to find out how to heal all the people who touched, or slipped, or breathed the wrong things and got hurt. That was the day I decided to go into medicine, so I could find out how I really worked inside my own skin, in the dark places people do not want to look.
“It was my Best Day Ever!”
She looked straight at Leilani, “So, hero of mine, what was your best day ever? Or is it something we are permitted to hear about?”
Leilani had relaxed some and no longer looked brittle, but still radiated hopeless sadness. “If I tell you about my best day, it will make me cry again and I hate crying. Before the Fairy Dust I might have hit Brian and laughed it off, but not now.”
I looked at her face and thought about the best times we had shared. “Vancouver?”
She nodded. It had been a good day, a wonderful day, and it had led nowhere. More honestly, it ended with a disaster that had scared me back into reality. In retrospect, it was the day that I had come closest to killing her.
Sergei asked, “You we
re together that day, without having to work?”
She nodded again, “Until just after dinner, when the whole thing crashed and burned. I cherish the memory of that day, but we were never able to recapture it.”
I tried hard not to remember the reality of that day, how wonderful it had felt to be hopeful, to be confident that I could make plans, to dream of a future with the woman I loved beyond all measure. She was right that it burned. The temptation was almost irresistible.
“Peace, calm,” Toyami was suddenly behind me, rubbing my taut, sore neck muscles. “That day must mean even more to you than it does to her. Are you willing to explore it?”
I said no, but Leilani said yes, and we both broke into tears. But then I was astonished. Raul came forward to Leilani, and pulled her back, away from me. Sergei grabbed me in a bear hug and pushed Toyami and I the other way.
I sent to Sergei, Raul and Toyami “Do not let me betray her!”
He replied, “My commander, tell us what we need to know and we will do what must be done.”
Strangely, that did calm me, more even than Toyami’s massage that I finally started to feel was loosening the tight muscles.
To Raul, I sent, “Please, keep her safe from me.”
Out loud, Raul replied, “I think we need to hear this, to know why both of you are so upset. Start with something simple and neutral. Where is Vancouver? It sounds English or maybe German, but I have never heard of the place.”
A simple question. I liked simple questions. “It is a small port city in central Noram Norwes. The capital of Norwes is Victoria, on Vancouver Island. Vancouver itself used to be a major port city, just north of ancient Seattle. The island and the city are both named after the same man, an English explorer with Dutch ancestry from almost five hundred years ago.
“During the Exchange that started the Final War, Seattle was bombed into radioactive glass. After the New York to Washington, and Los Angeles to San Diego mega zones, it is one of the worst deadzones in Noram, and the enemy AI’s seem to have worried that the American fleet would move north to Vancouver, so they dropped a small nuke to destroy the port. That killed half the population of Vancouver by itself. In the shifting winds of the Fimbulwinter, the rest were driven off by fallout from Seattle, so the whole area was abandoned for almost a hundred years. Fortunately, it did not get badly contaminated and people returned eventually to rebuild a small city of high towers along the north shore of Burrard Inlet. About a hundred years ago, they refurbished the old bridge abutments and rebuilt the Lions Gate Bridge to Stanley Island, with a causeway to the mainland, giving the city access to the huge parkland along the banks of the Fraser River. Nobody lives there because it is growing trees to draw the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Nobody lives up the Fraser Valley anymore, either, but mostly because the fallout contaminated the valley more than the delta, leaving it a weak radzone.
“Transportation in and out mostly runs up a highway along Howe Sound past Squamish, through a town called Pemberton and on to an even bigger town called Lillooet. The country is very mountainous, but well-watered and makes good farmland in the wider valleys, especially farther inland. The whole prosperity of the northern part of Norwes runs up and down that highway and through the port at Vancouver. They keep hoping to reopen the routes that used to run along the Fraser Valley, but cannot easily tunnel through the radzone because of the risk of earthquakes.
“For a month, we had been working on finishing a case just south of Pemberton. We were tracking the flow of precision, high powered rifle parts that had been deliberately mislabelled as low-G farm equipment. They were being smuggled from factories up past Lillooet through the port in Vancouver. In principle, the so-called farm equipment was destined for somewhere out in the Belt, shipping on freighters owned by several Martian-registered companies. We still do not know where they were really going, but we are pretty sure it was not to the destinations listed on the manifests. I believed that most of them would end up on Mars. Now, I am not so sure.
“That kind of rifle is not needed for any legitimate purpose outside the ground-based TDF. It is forbidden even to the regional militias. Our job was to trace where the shipments came from, and we had succeeded in doing that. In the process, we had made a thorough examination of the highway and all the towns, villages and mansions that had been built along it.
“I really mean mansions. There was money growing up those valleys, from mines, from forestry amongst trees that had never been contaminated with significant amounts of radiation, even from tourism amongst the lush valleys and pristine lakes. A lot of people from other parts of the world built resorts or retreats in hidden valleys off the main road. Just out of sight of the highway, there were dachas, mansions and even a few palaces. Quite a few of them had bankrupted their owners in the boom and bust of an unstable agriculture and mining economy, so amongst the fabulously expensive mansions were ghost halls, abandoned and derelict. Some of the biggest had been reworked from old mining sites and used the tunnels for storage and accommodation.
“We discovered that one large complex had been converted into warehouses, maintenance facilities for trucks disguised as farm equipment, and even assembly plants. It was a very complex operation, coordinated amongst five different corporations that all had Martian connections.
“It was no surprise to find Martian connections, of course. We had known all along that there was a market for small arms on Mars, and that they preferred Earth-quality guns over their own products. In my first four years, before I was assigned to Leilani, I had uncovered half a dozen cases of arms shipments, usually with drugs as part of the payment and incentive scheme. This was bigger and more complex, but otherwise not disturbing.
“We had finished up our reports, identifying the main structures involved in the operation and highlighting the use of a former mansion as an informal headquarters and hotel for the executives who ran it. Leilani and I had been working separately, coordinating our activities by our old hand comms and keeping as far under cover as the country permitted. We passed the reports over to Law Enforcement with a warning that the guards at the facilities were heavily armed and dangerous, so they should be prepared to bring in the Norwes militia and should keep the TDF on call in case things got rough.”
I paused with a faint smile. “Doctor Marin would have chastised me severely for the intensity of the exercise required to hike up and down the mountains, but in fact I mostly deployed drones that slipped under the trees into vantage points I could never have reached on foot.
“We spent one last night in the wilderness, roughing it in sleeping bags in our surveillance camps, then had three days off that we planned to spend in Vancouver before flying back for our next job.”
I stopped and did not want to continue. Every time I thought of that day, it seemed like the Mission wavered and turned grey. I slowly became aware that Sergei and Toyami were holding my hands, one on each side, and rubbing my back. But I was staring at Leilani through a long tunnel of years.
Finally, I continued, “At the time, the reports from Mars suggested that the Governors were slowly pacifying the population, and that we were maintaining control over the pirate attacks by steadily improving the capabilities of the TDF in space. The smuggled shipments of small arms we found were never large enough to affect the power balance, so they did not worry me. I knew that I was supposed to be a weapon directed against Mars, but I was becoming hopeful that the political situation was resolving itself and that someday I might be allowed to retire.
“And then I met Leilani, who nursed me back to some kind of mental health, which neither my supervisors nor my psychiatrists had been able to do before. The more I came to know her, the more convinced I became that she was the most perfect human being who had ever been born. Our relationship is complicated, to be sure. She is my only confidant, my girlfriend, my wet fantasy, my doctor and my boss, all in one beautiful package. I know I am still broken. I think of myself as the Cripple, barely able to walk do
wn the street without help, and only able to solve cases because someone wanted me to return to the war as a killing machine. But in that first wonderful year that we worked together, everything seemed to be healing, and I allowed myself for the first time since I left Mars to hope for a future, for a home, a wife, and maybe a family.”
I shook my head and had to stop before the screaming and the darkness returned. I closed my eyes and tried breathing slowly and very carefully. Finally, I heard Leilani pick up the tale.
“That morning, we took very early flights down the coast to Vancouver, arriving just as the sun rose. We rendezvoused at a great little restaurant where we had both eaten on the way up. Our official plans said we were returning separately to the big airport in Regina en route to the spaceport in Havana, but we had decided to defy the rules and have a forty-eight-hour date in Vancouver before we flew to Havana through Noram Baja. I was his boss so we were officially forbidden to socialize, but I already knew he was a treasure I would never find again, the most extraordinarily wonderful man on or off the planet.
“After breakfast, we left our bags with the people in the restaurant and took a boat tour of Burrard Inlet. The water was so clear, we could see the old seawall around the edge of Stanley Island below the boat. We drifted over the foundations of buildings drowned by the rising sea level and wondered what it had been like to walk those streets so long ago. Our guide told us that the original airport could still be recognized south of the old city, not actually seen because it was silted over beneath the water, but because nothing big could grow where the concrete runways survived beneath the mud.
“There were whales in the inlet, seals, porpoises and otters. We watched people fishing, catching cod and crab, then motored up past the old port, so much bigger than the small modern port on the north shore. At the head of the inlet there was a marsh with great blue herons, seagulls and crows, so many gulls and crows!
Lord Banshee- Fugitive Page 25