Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  “Quite scary to watch actually. She bounced the first ideas off Sergei and I, which was good for our sanity. As her scenarios got more realistic, Begum assigned a marine to advise her on what the Martian ships are like, to the extent we know, and then an Eng to code some sample tokens. That is the reason the ship is in a bubbling ferment. They are trying out some of the scenarios, both attacking and defending, while Alexander and his teams are trying to fix our comm units and secure our own doors and critical facilities.

  “The marines like to blast their way through every obstacle, but that creates lots of casualties. Leilani has been teaching them sneaky ways to get the same results. The sailors know far more about shipboard operations and vulnerabilities than the marines, so we are all gaining from the experience. It is like our learning to open doors, but with no dancing and five crack teams of marines and sailors fighting as though their lives depend upon it. This will be a different ship when we get back to the Moon, if we do not blow ourselves up first.”

  I smiled happily to myself.

  Me/converse, “This may be the first time you have seen my girl close up when a case has gone rotten. It sounds just like her. You only got a glimpse on the Deng. Put yourself back under her command if you can. It will be quite an experience. Umm, do you still have your Banshee mask?”

  Raul/converse, “Up here we have them on all the time inside our armour, and I wrap myself in voluminous robes outside the armour to disguise my size. Right now, we are not in our rooms, to let Leilani and Doctor Toyami both get some sleep.”

  Sergei/converse, “Aw, Raul gets to have all the fun.”

  Raul/converse, “Ha! Sergei has been up here more than I have. He has real combat experience, which makes his advice more useful than mine. And Sergei, do not get comfortable down there. Some of her most recent scenarios still have us going in as Banshees, healing enemy crew members who are being driven to hatred by emoji attacks. Martian Intelligence probably knows about our self-propagating tokens and may well have defences against them already. We know that Alexander’s ping does not work on older devices, and if they can block the LE tokens, we might still have to wear the ID scraper and get close enough to the victims to take the guns out of their hands. At least we should be wearing armour next time.”

  Me/converse, “Am I allowed to know where we are and what we are doing? When I went to sleep, we were a few hours away from our next acceleration location. That was about five hours ago. What happened?”

  There was a long pause. They might have required permission from Begum to discuss this, possibly from Toyami, who might be asleep.

  Finally, Raul/converse, “You know that objects around L1 are sometimes closer to objects around L2 than they are to the Earth?”

  Of course I did, from Space Navigation 101. I had been amused to learn that L1 and L2 were at similar distances inside and outside the orbit of the Earth, so that stations tracing wide loops around the L1 complex were often much closer to their counterparts in the L2 complex than either of them was to the Earth. As a slightly more experienced spacer, I had been much less amused. Freighter companies maximized their profits; faster trips consumed more fuel, but slower trips consumed more food, water and air. Ships heading for L2 normally boosted away from the Earth just fast enough to reach their destination at the lowest net cost. It was expensive in fuel to move radially away from the Sun, so the cheapest way to travel from L2 to L1 was to slingshot off the Earth, using its gravity to redirect the ship to its new target. It eliminated half the fuel costs on that leg, but also cut the opportunities for private trading by a half and doubled the length of the trip. Making a “short excursion from L2 to L1” was a very bad spacer joke. Companies that wanted to keep their crews always stopped at the Earth or Moon on the way.

  Of course, a military ship on a desperate mission might have different priorities, and fuel would not be one of them.

  He continued, “There is a small farm in L1 called the Langara Unitary Viticultural Nursery, LUVN for short, that specializes in pharmaceutical products. Cute name until you understand that Langara Unitary owns several facilities at L1. It is just coming into production and was about to ship its first samples to Mars. LUVN was hit with a pirate attack just as we were preparing to leave Valhalla. I expect the Imperium is going to be pissed.

  “That is why our departure was delayed so long. We took on even more fuel in external tanks, then went straight to LUVN. It was especially urgent because for the first time in several years the pirates left someone alive on the farm. They were probably in a hurry to escape because this is also the first time they have ever dared to hit L1 instead of some distant asteroid or freighter. The TDF frigate Ashoka stationed at Hotpoint in L1 is on the way, along with three Martian warships, but we got there almost two days ahead of them.

  “Of the fifty people who lived there, five were left alive, hiding in the many nooks and crannies around the algae and bacterial tanks. They were all injured in the attack, three quite seriously, mostly from gunfire and shrapnel. We took them on board for treatment and they are all expected to survive, but it may be months before the facility is back in production.

  “And here is the part you are going to love. The other forty-five bodies have disappeared. It is quite normal for a crew to abandon the site, or, if they do not, for the pirates to kill everyone who remains, but the farm workers seem to have had no warning and were captured. Basically, all the people needed to run a pharmaceutical farm were kidnapped in a single raid. At least, we hope they were kidnapped.”

  I did not love that news. It scared me silly, and I felt my heart acting abnormally. I clamped down as hard as I could, willing myself to be the Ghost, to be calm and dispassionate, but even the Ghost found this news terrifying, and I did not know why. The Ghost was willing to kill hundreds of soldiers in a train, to destroy cities full of helpless people, but was terrified by forty-five people being kidnapped? What could that mean?

  “Nav claims that we have a good fix on where the pirates are going and we will catch up with them in about four hours. I think that may be why the sailors and marines are practicing their new techniques so intensely. They expect to use them when we catch the pirates, and it is true that we want the people on that ship to survive. Most of them will be the farm workers.

  “Sergei suggests that Doctor Toyami might help with the traumatized farm workers. It would give her someone more normal than us to worry about.”

  Toyami to Sergei, Me/urgent/private, “Brian, Sergei, what happened? I just received a critical alarm telling me you are close to cardiac arrest again.”

  Sergei to Toyami, Raul, Me/private, “I think you had better get here, Doctor. He is looking pale and very grim. He knows about the pirate attack at L1 and the missing people. I think we can deal with that fairly easily, but there is something else we need to discuss.”

  Toyami arrived a few minutes later, wearing her mask and armour, displaying TDF white to move unnoticed through the halls. She ignored everything Sergei and I tried to say, dismissing us with, “Shut up, both of you. I understand things now about the witch’s brew the medical monitor gave you that I did not a few hours ago.”

  She opened my armour for better access while she slapped one instrument after another across my chest and belly. If I looked grim, she must have been grimmer behind her mask. She finally said, “Not on my watch,” then turned to Sergei and commanded “Get back into your armour and mask, NOW!

  She turned to me.

  Toyami/local, “Brian, I am going to zip up your armour, as well. You need surgery on your heart right now. Probably more. Set your mask to something opaque. I will need a full medical team for this, and that means I will be asking Begum to call in the ship’s surgeons. They need you to be disguised for their own protection.”

  “Raul tells me you had something else to say. Make it quick and mild because you are within minutes of being dead without this surgery. Can it wait?”

  I shook my head.

  To Toyami, S
ergei, Raul/private, “No, Doctor, I must ask this of you now. Leilani is angry with you, and I have been told that you triggered the episode, but I did something far worse. That something is what has made her angry, but at me, not you, and it keeps giving me terrors. You could not have known the severity of the reaction. Now, we must try to recover. I need you to take her this message, as my Doctor, not as a friend. You are the only member of the team free to take the message.

  “Tell her that I love her and will protect her in the only way that I know will work. She will hate to hear that but will understand what I mean. Tell her that I am passing control of the team to her while I recover.

  “Then talk to her. Resolve your differences. Grovel if you must. Let the abuse wash over you, knowing it is really anger with me that needs a closer target. Leilani is good under pressure and will not hold a grudge, so make the time for that reconciliation, and make her make the time. You are an essential member of our team, more deeply embedded than any of our other doctors, and we cannot allow mistakes made under pressure to break the team.

  “And Doctor Luciana Toyami, please understand that I cannot be your friend any more than I can be Leilani’s husband. There must be distance between us. I will betray you and you must betray me. This is not a prophecy, I was part of the Martian justice system, so I know how it works. Do not deny this, because we must make it happen.

  “I must call you Doctor Toyami to maintain the required distance. We must, each of us, be free to let go. Clinging will only bring us disaster. Raul and Sergei have mentioned dreams, and I assume my dreams were bad ones, but the truth is I have been living a dream for the last ten years and must soon waken to the reality of what I have done. Doctor, you must let me do that. Right now, your job is to keep me alive long enough to complete my own Mission in life. Only when Justice has been done will I be free to awaken to the truth.”

  Sergei arrived back fully suited and masked. The two of them fitted my mask over my face, gave it a generic image, and carried me in my armour to a table in a larger theatre that was crowded with surgeons preparing to open me up. As Sergei retreated down the hall, I heard Toyami take a deep breath to calm her nerves and begin a rapid-fire description of what was wrong and what needed to be done. And then everything faded out again.

  I woke again in the infirmary, still in zero-G. It had been divided by a light partition and Raul faced me, clipped against what had been the ceiling. He smiled, a fleeting expression on his face but I liked it.

  Raul/private, “Glad to see you back on this side of the great divide. I am not allowed to say much to you, since I keep hitting hidden sensitivities, but I will mention that Luciana and Leilani are back in our room. They are talking again, crying in each other’s arms really.

  “We caught up with the pirates and have boarded them, with nicks and cuts on our side, painful but nothing serious. Most of the farmers are still alive and we will be taking some of them back with us to the Moon as soon as Lunar Recovery and another TDF fast attack ship arrive. The frigate and Martian warships are on the way, but we need faster transport to the Moon.

  “It has been an interesting day. I believe there is another ballad coming, although this mission is so heavily classified that it might be a while before anyone dares to sing it.

  “I had better call the surgeon to tell him you are awake.”

  I heard what he said through a haze of pain killers. I could hardly think and faded in and out until the surgeon showed up.

  “Ah, lad, ye’re awake. Good t’see it. Ye ‘ad some real troubles in that heart of yours. Bad surgery that shoulda been corrected years ago. And the wee lass explained about the medmon runnin out and starting to do its own alchemy. Bad, bad, that.

  “She’s a sharp one, she is. Wouldna touch our equipment because she says ye mean more t’her than her own life and she ha never used this stuff before. Very sensible. But she rode herd on us the whole time t’be sure we did it right, and demanded t’know what each device did. Wish I ad her as an intern rather than the ox I got last time.

  “Anyhoo, she ga’e me the paper she had written describin what went wrong wi the medmon and asked me t’get it out. That I will, very generous of her. I ha been looking at the code while we wait for our new guests, and that code could only ha been written by someone workin from hundred year old textbooks wi’out consultin a real doctor, much less a surgeon. Slow-poisoned half your muscles and did some damage to the lungs as well. I will sharpen the text she wrote, considerable.

  “No mention of ye, o’course. Gather ye’re all so highly classified that the paper would never get out. But is just code that needs criticizin, so I should na ha trouble wi that.

  “For y’self, ye’ll na be doin exercise for a week. Ye’ll be as flabby as me old Pa, ye will. But na worry, you’ll be merry as moonshine in a month. Less than that, maybe.”

  Standard, boilerplate bedside enthusiasm, but I gladly took it over grim realism. Interesting accent, definitely lunar, and if I had to guess..., “Tycho Hebrides?”

  “Why, yes! You mus be a travellin man to recognize me accent. Touch o’Scots, bit o’Irish, lots o’Wish-I-Had-A-Dram, and whatever t’is that the Moon peddles these days.

  “Well, f’now ye’re good as can be expected, an maybe better. I’ll check again later.”

  He bounced out the door with the panache that only comes from years of experience. A few moments later, Toyami called and asked how I felt. Light-headed, mostly. Some pain in my chest and abdomen, but I was happy to report that my surgeon thought she was a sharp lass and wished he had her as an intern. She paused a few moments, then admitted that in her tearful apology to Leilani she had tried to resign twice, but Leilani had refused to consider the possibility. If she had, she wondered if the offer was worth pursuing. I told her no, that in my admittedly slender experience, ship’s surgeons spent years waiting for a case worse than a sprained ankle, then were overwhelmed with blood and shattered bodies. On the other hand, they were constantly short of psychiatric care for trauma patients in the major military hospitals. If she needed a place to hide, that might be a good option. She thought about that for a bit, then replied that she had had her fill of trauma in the past few days but would remember the option for the future.

  She was quiet for a while, then called in evident distress that Begum had personally requested her assistance to handle the civilian patients who were coming aboard, many injured and all traumatized. Raul answered for me, just as well considering my foggy thinking. Our first duty was to protect ourselves. Leilani and I needed constant care, except perhaps while we were sleeping. Once I was past the post-operative trauma, the surgeons could take care of me, but she should only consider taking on additional duties when Sergei or himself were attending Leilani. That really worried me. I was about to ask why, when the infirmary medical monitor dosed me with sedatives. I drifted back into a dreamless sleep.

  When I woke again, about an hour later, Sergei was clipped into the spot next to me and Raul was gone. I knew it was Sergei because the armour was the right size, because he was wearing a mask with the golden face of Charles the Great, but mostly because he was wearing the pajamas we had worn to the Soiree so long ago. No one else would have the brass. Was it only eight days? It felt like a lifetime. I admired the banshee logo on the upper right breast. I wondered why he had kept the used pajamas, then realized dully that he was wearing armour displaying the Banshee pattern, without the Council logo. The pajamas from the Soiree had been recycled the next day.

  Toyami appeared in the door. Sergei said hi, but Toyami was only interested in me for some reason. She also had on her armour, displaying TDF whites, but I recognized her body size and voice. She peered at my mask and asked if I was awake. I said yes, but I felt confused. She nodded and said that so soon after a major surgery I would feel confused, but she wished we had done it years ago.

  Sergei/local, “Hey, Oldman, you missed all the fun. Even poor Raul missed it. After all that practice, Begum would not let Leila
ni or him leave the ship, so I had to go. I think they let me go because my banging on the door was driving everyone crazy. We saved all but eight of the farmers, and most of the pirate crew except three; their supreme commander, who was a guy they called the Mandarin, his wife and their concubine. The poor concubine had not even wanted the position, but they dragged him out of the crew and now he is dead. The rest are fine though. It took ages to talk the Cap and his officers into opening the door to the bridge so we could come in.”

  Toyami/converse, “Hush, he is barely into recovery and does not need the whole story right away. And you are addled on pain killers too, so leave him be and tell the story when you are both awake enough to enjoy it.”

  I smiled behind my mask.

  Me/converse “Doctor Toyami, the surgeon said he is going to publish your paper. Good stuff. Sergei, why are you here? Did you get shot? Or was it sliced? Either way, you should keep a scar to impress the girls.”

  Toyami replied, “I am impressed enough as is. He volunteered for that mission. He did get shot, but it is minor and will heal in a few days. No scars though. I refuse to allow it.

  “And thank you. It is important that paper gets out and the algorithm fixed. You will both need more sleep soon, so I am going to start a light show on the walls.”

  I watched star fields, swirling galaxies, puppies and kittens, trees blowing in the wind and waves on a beach until I drifted out again.

  2357-03-12 23:00

  Messenger of Hope

  I woke up much more abruptly and without the haziness of the military pain killers. Toyami and Alexander were watching the monitors again; both wore armour and masks. Sergei was still next to me but had been clipped to the wall to make more room on the nominal floor.

  Toyami/local/private, “Good morning, or whatever it is. You will be happy to know that the TDF still has the best surgeons in existence and your operation has been a complete success. Once you recover, you should be stronger and healthier than you have been in many years. I would dearly like to know who did the first surgery. We could see scarring in your chest that was likely caused by shrapnel, but it looked like they tried to clean up the jagged edges with knives and sewed them together with thread.”