Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  I shook my head, very slowly, so he finished, “Got nothin but respect for those people. I help one or two people stay alive, they help millions. An growin meds! Can ye imagine bein able t’hang Farmer after y’name? T’would make me old Pa proud. Call when ye’re ready to talk.”

  I could almost hear the Kid and the Student laughing. The Kid remembered the kind of meds the gangs grew up in the mountains. Farming in space required an entirely different level of education than farming on the Earth and commanded a level of respect that the Earth-bound almost never understood.

  He stepped through the door, leaving me to eat. When I could open my jaw wide enough, I slipped the mask slowly off my face and very carefully began to sip the beverage and push nibbles of thankfully flavourless jell into my mouth. As I ate, the pain eased but never completely went away. Proof of life, but even better, evidence that my mind was clear of the worst effects of the pain killers.

  I went back to the message, reread it to be sure that my drug-addled mind had not distorted its meaning, and began to consider what had happened at Valhalla. Sergei’s little jest at the entrance to Valhalla might have been intended to sow confusion, but it had also triggered a mini-war within the facility. Alexander had warned us that there were three or four factions at work within MI at Valhalla. It sounded like the Syrtis faction was the Imperium, but both Qinghai Mining and Sultan Mustafa had substantial support. At least one of the rival factions felt strong enough risk a pitched battle, behaviour I was only too familiar with from my time as the Assassin.

  To my mind, that meant Mao Shi Hongdi had moved too soon, without properly consolidating his support. He was probably trying to create military and political facts where none existed, racing to claim authority before the other factions were ready to make their moves. Some of the other factions, notably Clan Qinghai Mining, were strong enough to create a few facts of their own, confident of ultimate victory. Even if the two could manage their differences, the rest could overpower them in any kind of confrontation, if only briefly for that one purpose. The obvious conclusion was that the Imperium was a brittle, artificial structure, doomed to shatter into civil war if it could not find or create a solid foundation on which to base its claim for legitimacy.

  I would have been happier if the Terrestrial Council had moved to assert its own legitimacy throughout all human space when they had the chance ten, twenty or a hundred years before. It would have been easy to provide the same kind of honest and responsible government that prevailed on the Earth and Moon. But they had not, and the oppression that the Governors had used to control the angry people of Mars had led directly to this crisis.

  If the Imperium was to become a long-term solution to the problems that we faced, it was going to require assistance. Some of that assistance had to come from the Terrestrial Government, but not much from the senior bureaucracy of Extraterrestrial Affairs, who had created the problem and refused to correct their mistakes. They had persisted with their destructive policies even when change was pushed by reform-minded people like Morris and Singh.

  I had helped create this disaster and owed everyone my best efforts to correct my mistakes. My original Mission had been limited to finding out what Ngomo intended to do with the Counterstrike fleet. When I discovered that he intended to exterminate the entire population of Mars, I extended the Mission to create an alternative. I succeeded, but in the process outraged all of Mars, since they had never understood the real threat. Having survived the Counterstrike myself, I extended the Mission again to warn the Earth about the consequences of the policies they were following. That Mission had been blocked when the fanatics that Alexander referred to as the Exterminators had tried to turn me against the very people I had sacrificed so much to save.

  Now it seemed I might have to extend the Mission to include rescuing the Imperium while they were seeking to execute me. Neither the scale nor the irony of the thought were lost on me. I remembered the woman on the Hai Ba Tru’ng telling her sister she could not punch out the Emperor. But it fit naturally into my Mission and easily received the approval of the Cripple.

  The Assassin complained that we were now collaborating with the enemy he had worked so hard to defeat. Not out loud, of course, but I knew what he would say because I was his older self.

  The Assassin had been an expert on surviving a factional battlefield, even if the missions assigned by Governor Ngomo were self-defeating. The Ghost had focused ever more tightly on the Governor and his minions. To swim in the larger factional environment of the Imperium, I was going to have to re-engage with the Assassin, but this time I had to ensure that he had a competent authority to obey. My own authority was the Mission. To refine the Mission, I relied on advice from the Cripple. For tactics, I would now have to rely on advice from the Assassin.

  As I thought about how the Assassin would react to this assignment, I remembered that he was currently obeying the Advice given by Toyami, but I knew he would be increasingly restive as the clauses became obsolete or in need of reinterpretation. I re-engaged the Cripple as a partner and took a quick review:

  1. Let your body recover enough to survive the shocks that will come.

  Clearly still necessary. I might never fully recover, even if I survived long enough to complete the Mission.

  2. Rest and do light exercise.

  A good, basic recovery plan. If things went as I intended, I would never need to be an athlete again not even at the level I had maintained in CI. Light exercise would be sufficient to maintain my health.

  3. Play with your memories if you like but be gentle and forgiving with yourself and others.

  She had meant the memories of the dreams and my near disaster in loving Leilani too obsessively to let her go. I had already modified those memories for my own protection, mostly by suppressing the most disturbing parts of their content.

  There were other things that would need to be considered carefully before I faced an Officer of Truth in a Lunar court. I had promised to protect a lot of people, forgiving them for crimes they had often committed at my instigation. To be gentle with them, I might have to lie to the Lunar Court about what they had done. I was the Ghost, the most accomplished liar of all time, and I had a hidden med monitor to cover my biochemical responses, but even that might not be enough.

  The easiest way to tell a falsehood is to believe it to be true. Perhaps I could think of alternate versions of events and then ‘forget’ the original. That was not what Toyami had meant, but I felt it preserved the spirit of her advice in a context where even half-truths would be detected.

  4. You will never be alone as you recover, so if anything bothers you, tell us.

  Still true, even in our drastically changed circumstances. For the moment, there were only four of us on the Quetzalcoatl, and no one else from my team. We were a Lost Patrol, far behind enemy lines. Yet at the same time, there were four of us, three of whom were watching for my safety. I was recuperating with the best medical care in space, protected by Lunar Recovery’s reputation for neutrality. My team was well on the way to being re-united on the Moon. There they would support and be supported by the former ministers and their delegations. Even the TDF was providing clandestine support. So long as we did not abuse our privileges, we had a small army on our side. Talking to them was going to be difficult, but I would do what I could as the need arose.

  5. Wait patiently for Alexander to fix the code in your monitors and comm units.

  DONE! I wanted no further changes. This item could be dropped.

  6. Make no hard decisions. The time for decisions will come after you are well again.

  Here, I had to admit that the Assassin had a point. The time for hard decisions was now upon us. We could not wait for a full recovery. In fact, making decisions was almost all I could do, whether they were easy or hard. This item as well had to be dropped or, more exactly, replaced.

  I recognized that under unanticipated conditions, the Advice as it stood would leave the Assassin with an ope
n-ended permission to do whatever he felt like. To replace the last two items, I had two new ones to add.

  New 5. On ethical issues, consult the Ghost and the Cripple subject to new item 6.

  New 6. Successful completion of the Mission takes precedence over all other concerns.

  All agreed? One at a time, I enabled each persona. The Cripple agreed, who longed to save Leilani above all else, but understood that the Mission was the only way to do it. The Kid, who was often rebellious and suspicious of authority, wanted to stick it to the Governor/Emperor/Ghost and knew the Mission was the only way to do it. The Agent worried that I had replaced Ngomo with myself as the only authority guiding the most irresponsible of my personae, a concern echoed by the Student and Spacer. The Assassin ignored the Agent and agreed to the changes with a tumbling waterfall of gratitude; at last, he had guidance from the Cripple through the Mission, authorities worthy of his trust. The Cripple, he insisted, even more clearly than the Ghost, remembered the night I had accepted the Mission and had another decade of experience to clarify what it required. With that, the Student, Spacer and Agent finally gave their agreement.

  2357-03-14 07:00

  LUVN

  Having dealt with the most urgent issues arising from the message, I wanted light entertainment of the ghostly variety, so I dug through the financial feeds until I found some documents about Langara Unitary and began to read. I really did want to know whether LUVN would be rebuilt, and why the Sultan Mustafa and the pirates had both considered it worth attacking.

  I remembered an introductory text on pharmaceuticals that I had skimmed while learning the drug and weapons trade. In the prehistory of pharmaceuticals, before the Final War, suppliers would search for single chemicals that had a beneficial effect. These often mimicked biochemicals that were produced by our bodies in tiny quantities and at specific times and places. Similar biochemicals, often even the same ones, were reused for different purposes throughout the body. When delivered as a medicine, doctors would flood the body with that chemical in the hope that the beneficial effect would justify the unwanted side effects throughout the rest of the body.

  Modern meds were quite different, constructed with a three-dimensional molecular cage around the beneficial chemicals. The cage ensured that the beneficial chemical was delivered only to the required target and in the minute quantities required for its intended purpose.

  The cages often had to be customized for each patient’s genetic profile. It was often forgotten that the Genetic Database had been invented as a medical tool, not just as a service that provided unique ID’s. Pharmaceutical suppliers delivered generic cages that could be customized for each by adding marker molecules that attached to the cages. It was an effective approach but made the molecules of the cage quite reactive and the cages themselves unstable.

  Our medical monitors were themselves quite small and could hold enough of the customized meds to last up to a year for a normal human. I had run through my supply in less than two weeks, but I was unusual and the last two weeks had been stressful beyond anything even I could recall. They did not make the reservoirs any bigger because the meds would start to lose potency and specificity after six months and needed to be replaced after a year.

  Everybody’s favourite way to preserve biochemicals was to freeze them in liquid nitrogen, but the molecular cages always shattered when the water that permeated them froze into ice. This was the fundamental conundrum that had stymied shipments of meds to Mars and the Belt, where the transit times were typically one to five years. The passenger liners that ran between the Earth and Mars could reduce transit times by a factor of three, but at a crippling cost, and had been granted a monopoly that they defended with a ferocity to match their profits. Only a few liners ventured into the Belt, and only to Ceres, Vesta and Psyche.

  Without supplying details, Langara Unitary claimed to have found a combination of solvents and organic salts to replace the water. These stabilized a whole class of cancer fighting meds when stored in liquid nitrogen for transit times up to five years, and when stored in liquid helium for up to ten years. The meds could be distributed not just more cheaply to Mars, but to the entire Belt, where people had been forced to live their entire lives without proper medication. Langara Unitary Viticultural Nursery would produce meds in a form that could be delivered on normal freighters. If the process worked as intended, the market was huge and would be desperate for the service.

  I could instantly see how this product would create security issues for LUVN, since all the companies owning the monopolies would view the new process as an intolerable attack on their profits. No wonder CI had placed an agent in the facility, and I wished that they had done so a year earlier. The TDF should have had a warship standing by constantly. Like so many things that could have been done sooner and better. I would lay almost any odds that Supervisor Rouseth had been placed there by one of the factions involved in the shipping monopolies, whatever her relation with the Sultan Mustafa.

  Trying to find who owned Langara Unitary was easy, but not helpful. The Langara family owned the entire business. They had never issued public shares on any exchange, nor a prospectus for potential investors. My best information came from the advertising they had recently started to produce in anticipation of a successful delivery of their first batch of meds to Mars, scheduled to be shipped on a liner in compliance with the monopolies. Of course, after the pirate attack they could not make that shipment.

  It was almost inconceivable that the family was self-financing. The cost of operating a facility in L1 was enormous. They had extensive operations around the Earth and already ran several small facilities in L1, renting space in the larger stations, so they understood the financial challenges they faced. Their existing operations turned regular profits but nothing on the scale required to build the farm and operate it for the three years needed to bring their first batch of meds to market. LUVN was by far their most ambitious project to date, venturing far beyond reliable profitability into a realm that was normally inhabited by speculative investors with enormous capital reserves. Given the nature of their product I would have expected any of the great Martian or Belter corporations to have an interest in this kind of service, or even some of the major venture capital firms from the Earth, but there was no suggestion of any outside investment.

  On the other hand, the barriers between corporate, factional, and family life were often hazy to nonexistent on Mars. I skipped from the financial pages to the social feeds to see who had been marrying into the Langara family over the last decade. The founder, Garcia Langara, had been a business man a hundred years ago from Soam Inca who had married Adaeze Okore from Africa Igbo, a daughter of one of the most successful and sophisticated families in the pharmaceutical business. Langara had never prospered like other branches of the Okore family but had apparently brought valuable new contacts into their orbit. His descendants, now in the fourth generation, continued to foster innovative and unusual ventures. Or so I gathered from three enthusiastic amateurs who had written family histories.

  In the last decade, most marriages were within the business communities of Soam and Africa, but there were three that seemed unusual. Two had ties to corporations registered on the Belter Exchange that we had tentatively assigned to Syrtis within the Imperium, but the third was between Reishi Langara, a young woman fresh out of university with a degree in economics, and a middle-aged man named Aragon Wheland who was a Vice President for Purchasing in the terrestrial office of the Hellas Water Excavation Corporation. Whether Langara realized it or not, this was an entirely Martian way to do business and I expected the two families had pooled their resources.

  Corporate names on Mars often lasted much longer than their original purpose, but I remembered Hellas Water Excavation as a significant company when I first arrived on Mars, mining buried glaciers in several craters in the Hellas Basin for ice that was shipped to markets over the whole planet. The business was reliably profitable, but the company was mos
tly known on the Earth as a source of fabulously expensive Martian Sandstone slabs.

  The slabs were a beautiful by-product of the ice mining. They were incredibly delicate. Many were pulverized into rusty sand during launch from Mars or re-entry at the Earth. Contracts for HWE to supply a set of slabs always required payment in advance, with shipping to be arranged by the buyer. The shipping companies were required to certify that the slabs were intact and met specification before the buyer would release the payment to HWE. The shipper would be given a down payment, with the remainder to be paid on delivery of the slabs to the Earth, intact and still meeting the buyer’s specifications. If the buyer refused for any reason to pay, the shipper kept the slabs, or what was left of them.

  Insurance companies would not touch such a product, so the whole enterprise was a high-stakes crap shoot, with no refunds and a high likelihood of failure. Panelling a boardroom, high-end restaurant, or theatre in Martian Sandstone brought great prestige to the companies that could afford it but had bankrupted more than a few who had not anticipated the risks correctly.

  Aragon Wheland had been a key member of the HWE office, suave, elegant, and brilliantly successful. It had been a sensational match, the marriage of a dynamic Martian prince to the most beautiful and intelligent princess of the Earth’s most important pharmaceutical kingdom. Or so the gossip columns had rhapsodized.

  Unfortunately, the marriage between Reishi and Aragon had lasted only five years before ending in divorce a year ago. The scandal sheets wailed that the couple had seemed completely happy and were preparing a nursery in anticipation of children before the sudden breakup. The misery peaked two months after the divorce when Aragon was murdered. It had been a contract killing, but the murderer was sloppy and easily traced until he headed north from Vancouver in Noram Norwes and disappeared into the wilderness.