Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  [9] Are you demons? I must be dead. I cannot feel anything. I am not cold and nothing hurts. I am not even hungry. Is Lunar Recovery the gate to oblivion? I thought I would face judgement before being condemned into oblivion.

  There were perhaps a dozen I could hear, if I included a few who only groaned or keened with fear as they went by. A small sample, and not representative, but the only evidence I had for what was happening in the rotting core of Valhalla. What could I learn? Not much with any certainty, but a few things stood out.

  The new patients were delirious, angry, and in pain. These people were either victims who had been held and tortured in the Interrogation Centre, or the guards and officers who had held them there and inflicted the torture.

  No one was grateful for the assistance the LR was providing, nor even seemed to recognize who Lunar Recovery were. No one expected Lunar Recovery to be anything better than salvagers who enslaved and sold their captives. They could not have lived for any length of time in near-Earth space. Even most Martians were aware of the reputation of Lunar Recovery, if only because recent immigrants brought the stories of their exploits. Most of these people must have come from isolated populations out in the Belt, clans or factions that had forgotten the cultures of the inner worlds.

  Nor did they appeal to their own authorities for succour or justice, except in the limited sense of vengeance. None appealed to the Imperium for protection, although the officers in the Imperial fleet had clearly expressed concern for their factional colleagues. If they were typical of crews on the factional ships, it was not surprising that some fired at TDF ships on sight, and that severe discipline was needed to prevent them from firing upon Lunar Recovery ships.

  Whatever purpose Alexander believed MI had intended the Interrogation Centre to serve, the inmates I had overheard were clearly not captured agents from MI, CI or any other Terrestrial service. The Interrogation Centre was apparently run by factional intelligence services predating the Imperium, only recently brought under “new management” and still serving factional interests.

  That was disturbing on several levels. I had imagined the Imperium to be a monolithic autocracy leading the Martian independence movement. Perhaps it was just a temporary alliance cobbled together amongst the leaders of a few of the largest factions. Military alliances are even more fragile than aristocracies and are prone to disintegrate when their leaders disagree or die.

  We had had very little warning of the rise of the Imperium, perhaps because it was nothing more than an agreement sealed with a handshake amongst five or ten aristocrats. The Imperium might be like the TDF, strong enough to intimidate the other factions, but weak enough to be overwhelmed by a motivated opposition or internal treachery. If the Imperium could not develop a better reason to exist, it would go the way of every military empire in history, torn apart by rebellion and civil war.

  The independence movement was clearly much older than the Imperium. The new empire would have inherited the military assets of the factions, repainting them with new logos, as had been done to the Fairy Dust and Outer Tramp. Underneath the paint, the original rivalries would still fester.

  I had imagined a succession war when the Emperor died, but that war might be in progress already. Toyami and Sergei had warned me that my dream fantasy of cannibalism was an existing custom, and I had heard the evidence with my own ears. We were in worse trouble than I had thought. Still, it only affected the timing. It was the same trouble I had already imagined and begun to plan for.

  We were watching that process in Valhalla. In principle, Valhalla had been the major development centre for space-based weaponry within the TDF. In practice, my growing impression was that MI had over the last few years become the de facto rulers of Valhalla, and they were liars and tricksters, traitors working openly within the heart of the most highly classified facility in space.

  Recent governors had delegated management of the Belt to the corporations. My economic map had sketched several long-standing factions, significantly older than the Martian Incursion but always turbulent, reorganizing their corporate structures every few years. On Mars, the factions had similarly formed and fractured, without apparent cause. On the Martian model, every one of those corporate factions would be controlled by powerful families.

  I knew from my time as the Ghost that those families did not live on Mars. The obvious conclusion, illustrated by the Nightmares, was that they ruled from their palace-fortresses in the frozen darkness of the Belt. During the Incursion, many members of the Martian Council had fled to the Belt. I had thought of them as refugees, but it now seemed more likely they were regrouping in the safety of their fortresses. The rising turmoil on Mars would have been mirrored in a tournament of frost giants in the Belt, each factional lord fighting to establish zimself as the new master of human space.

  That contest had not been resolved when the Counterstrike fleet arrived. Our commanders had been astonished and contemptuous when the rebel forces fought each other on the eve of battle with the TDF. They should have been terrified. The factional leaders had sacrificed just enough of their military strength that the TDF could boast they had crushed the rebellion. Their forces must have known they were being sacrificed and were fighting for factional honour, not to defeat the TDF. Unseen in the darkness, the factions had continued their bitter, clandestine struggle while building ever-larger fleets.

  Judging from the unfortunate inmates, the major factions had not taken the Imperium seriously until it began to move in force. They might still expect to overpower it, or just outlast it. The rot was here already, surely on the Earth as well.

  Before the Fairy Dust, I had believed that the Belt held a small population of miners, families isolated by distance and poverty, organized by large corporations with headquarters on Mars. I had personally guessed there were a few hundred thousand people, at most a million, scattered throughout that vast, empty region. Their numbers could have been maintained indefinitely with two or three thousand emigrants each year from the Earth. I had been astonished when Sergei told us that Mars was pulling immigrants by the millions from the Belt. The Belter population was clearly much larger than I had imagined, but by how much? We clearly had not received an honest census of the Belt in over a century.

  Outside the corporations, I could only speculate on their social and political structures. Territorial governments like the regions on the Earth would be impossible to organize in a realm where each asteroid orbited the Sun independently and every few months found itself surrounded by a new set of neighbours. The larger factional alliances somehow survived the ever changing asteroidal configuration. However, I knew that large factions comprised many smaller factions in a cascading, endlessly mutating structure. I had often thought that factional alliances and break-ups on Mars were as erratic as the dust devils that blew across the Martian plains. Perhaps the alliances were instead being driven by opportunistic trading and raiding amongst the ever-moving communities of the Belt?

  The fear and outrage of the inmates spoke volumes about their expectations of the Earth. When I had first gone to Mars, the crews on many of the ships in the Martian merchant fleet had been recent immigrants from the Earth. The declining numbers of adventurers willing to emigrate to a place as dangerous as Mars must have required a shift to native Martians and Belters on those ships. Only crews with personal experience on the trade routes to the Earth would be aware that life could be anything but a constant struggle for survival. These few mostly saw the Earth from the earth stations, where they were forced to deal with greedy and contemptuous middle merchants, who fleeced them at every opportunity.

  From what Sergei and Mindy told us, the people of Mars believed we were vicious murderers bent on repeating the Genocide. Emigrants heading to Mars had told me we were intolerant bigots, sometimes emphasizing the charge with spit. Working in CI, I knew that Martian merchants complained constantly and with some justice that we were frauds and liars. I knew that we had systematically deprived them of m
edical care, leaving them to die in agony from easily treated diseases, as a matter of deliberate policy. It was hardly a wonder they hated us.

  The toxic hatred of the Earth that the Governors had instilled could easily have spread to the Belt. It would not have been diluted by the dribble of recent emigrants, so disgusted with terrestrial cultures that they fled to the most distant part of human space they could reach. Could this explain the ferocity of pirates who left no survivors from their attacks? The only mercy they requested from the TDF was a gentle death. What were they like amongst their own neighbours?

  I knew that was a worst-possible analysis. Most people befriend their neighbours, and eagerly extend hospitality to strangers. I had seen it everywhere, even on Mars at the height of the conflict. The Fairy Dust itself had gone out of its way to avoid harming anyone. Similarly, the fake Hanuman had been dangerous without causing significant damage. The final statements from the departing Belter ships were all gentle affirmations of faith, hope, and trust. They suggested a respectful, considerate society, waiting patiently for better times to come. The Fairy Dust and Hanuman were wake-up calls, not obviously part of the Imperial attack.

  Yet, in my dreams, I believed that the major Belter factions had enough wealth, military power, and pent-up anger to continue fighting long after the Earth, Moon and Mars had all died. I had always thought that Mars controlled the Belt, but was it the other way around?

  I remained convinced that the timing of the Fairy Dust and Hanuman incidents was not coincidental. Both events occurred immediately before the arrival of an Imperial fleet built in the Belt that was powerful enough to erase the TDF from space and bombard the Earth without opposition. The Imperium would not have sent them to warn us that they were coming. I still had the strong feeling that the Fairy Dust and Hanuman were T&A distracting us from some other event. Was it an infiltration, a theft or an act of sabotage? Something else entirely? No one, not even wild Belters, would go to that much trouble just to warn us about a disaster we had brought upon ourselves. Something else was happening.

  We knew so little about the Belt, so little about the Imperium, so little that was reliable about the current state of Mars. It would be an interesting trip to the Moon. While I waited for the Quetzalcoatl to pick up the survivors of the battle we had flown through, I wrote my questions and speculations into a document that I would pass to the team at the earliest opportunity.

  I could not resist a final jibe. The duplicity, lies and violence at Valhalla reminded me of the Norse god Loki, a trickster who often sided with the frost giants for the sheer joy of stirring up trouble. Perhaps Odin, the king of the gods, was dead, or was running some deep, hidden stratagem. Either way, he had left Loki as the king of Valhalla.

  I left unwritten my deepest personal worry. Would I be able to speak effectively to the Belt during my trial? I desperately needed to know whether my Mission could fail if the major factions chose to ignore my testimony. I knew my situation was unique, but was I uniquely useless?

  2357-03-14 22:00

  Antechamber of the Frost Giants

  After I finished the report, I turned on the tactical display that MacFinn had showed me. As we returned to the scene of the battle, I could follow at least part of the comm conversation. Lunar Recovery had a reputation for making difficult rescues but had never had to attempt them in actual combat. There was some urgency because all the ships involved had been moving at considerable speeds and in almost random directions. They were now dispersing, making it increasingly difficult and expensive to reach all the vessels before their occupants died. One was on an unbound orbit, doomed to leave the solar system entirely.

  Once LR made a firm offer to pick up the survivors, the Imperial fleet organized the rescue. The process was neither simple nor gentle because each faction was fearful its crews would be massacred when their rebellious ships were seized. After some negotiation, three ships including an Imperial ship and two different factions set out in pursuit of each derelict. Representatives of all three would gather on the Imperial vessel as it approached the hulk. A squad of Imperial soldiers would break through the airlock or cut through the hull and storm the ship. Even faced with inevitable death through suffocation or thirst, many of the dying crews were still belligerent, preferring to die with honour in battle. Disarming them created many more casualties, but LR promised that most of them could be healed if treated quickly enough. Under the watchful eyes of the factional representatives, the Imperial soldiers arrested any who refused to surrender, and gathered the rest into their own ships for triage.

  We had completed our collection of patients from Valhalla by the time the Imperium had finished subduing the derelicts and begun to gather back into the fleet. The Quetzalcoatl now had to stop and rendezvous with each returning Imperial ship to collect the injured. Some people could be patched and sent back to their comrades immediately, but many suffered from gunshots, radiation burns, broken bones and mutilation from shrapnel. The space available filled, and rooms were doubly occupied with a kind of removable bunk bed. Even the halls started to fill with patients.

  I received periodic updates on the new arrivals from MacFinn and my LR surgeon as they came on their rounds. They were careful to open only one door at a time up and down the hall to prevent confidential discussions from being overheard, so I clung to each visit as a lifeline to sanity.

  In my five years as a spacer, I would never have considered such a bizarre and technically demanding set of rendezvous, especially when the cargo consisted of badly injured people who could not be bumped or subjected to high-G corrections. The surgeon did not even blink when I mentioned this, just commented that evacuation would be much more difficult from a ship whose engine and orientation jets could no longer be controlled. It had been hugely impressive when the TDF had rescued all the living crew from the Manila Bay, except for the captain who had deliberately destroyed himself along with the ship. I considered the implications of that, especially how he had learned the details of an operation so deeply classified.

  They mentioned with grim amusement that the Hai Ba Tru’ng had arrived at the Moon just ahead of the preparatory team for the new viceroy. It had disgorged a highly excited group of farmers, plus one exhausted lawyer with two equally exhausted legal assistants. Charges and countercharges had flown faster than the FAS for the whole trip, with many of the most serious laid against Superintendent Nizhoni Rouseth.

  MacFinn reported that the situation on the Columbia had been less excited but more intense. The lawyer had required help from our Doctor to calm the desperate, terrified pirates, who had hoped for an immediate execution and dreaded the torment implied by their continued existence. Ze had needed advice from a Banshee known as the King to understand the complex cultural issues. The more ze learned, the more confusing the legal situation became, until another Banshee known as the Flower put them in contact with legal experts on the Moon. MacFinn whispered each report with growing awe, but my LR Surgeon just nodded approvingly.

  Not surprisingly, Superintendent Rouseth had been held in protective isolation, in a coma in the infirmary all the way to the Moon. She was despised by the pirates and most of the crew of the Columbia, passionately hated by most of the farmers on the Hai Ba Tru’ng, and would require careful handling for years to come. Surgeon MacFinn spared not a whit of sympathy for the terrorist who had tried to destroy his ship and kill his patients.

  For myself, I reserved judgement, knowing nothing about the woman but hearsay. Despite having been the ostensible target of her attack, I was still puzzled that she had even tried. On the Columbia, she should not have been vulnerable to an emoji attack, and drugs should have been impossible to acquire, yet her actions did not seem rational. Why would a superintendent working on LUVN, even one serving the Sultan Mustafa, have cared at all about the Banshees? I had the uncomfortable feeling she was still in communication with her masters, and possibly still demented in the Banshee sense of the term. Doctor Toyami had tried to heal her and
offer hope, just before she launched the attack. I wanted to know what had really happened.

  On their final visit, the LR surgeon mentioned that something similar was now happening on the Quetzalcoatl. We still had on board one lawyer and two legal assistants. They had been busy taking statements from the confused and suspicious inmates of the Interrogation Centre, but were not overwhelmed until the patients from the factional warships came aboard. However carefully LR attempted to keep the farmers, pirates and soldiers apart, many of the factional warriors knew about LUVN and the pirate attack. As rumours of the Hai Ba Tru’ng and the legal options being explored on the Columbia leaked into the crowd, there were suddenly requests for legal assistance from farmers, pirates, imperial soldiers and factional warriors, to the consternation of the officers who accompanied their injured troops.

  Several soldiers chose to make a new kind of request, for asylum on the Moon. LR tried to gather such people together away from their astonished and often outraged companions, with the warning that nothing had yet been finalized. Even if the negotiations were completed soon, some alleged crimes were so serious that the request for asylum would be denied. Final determinations would have to be made on the Moon. In the meantime, bunking arrangements on the Quetzalcoatl were becoming steadily more difficult.

  I was very grateful that I did not have to participate in the negotiations, but also desperately curious about the outcome and overwhelmingly grateful that they were even trying. My LR surgeon assured me that although the lawyer and assistants were exhausted, they too were receiving the best possible care. He reported that they were suffering mostly from an overdose of adrenaline as the scale and importance of their cases became clear. They were only able to rest during the regular legal consultations they made with their colleagues on the Moon, some of which he said with a smile were explicitly scheduled without any topics for discussion.