Lord Banshee Lunatic (Nightmare Wars Book 3)

by Russell Redman

  [Emigrant1] Out in the Belt those laws do not apply. Many of the people there are desperate for help with genetic problems induced by cosmic rays, radioactive ores and chemical contamination of their food and water. We can help them and they want our help. That was the first good reason we wanted to emigrate.

  [Emigrant2] There is another. Our group consists of geneticists who refused to abide by the unjust laws. We offered counselling for relatives of people who had suffered genetically related diseases. With a small sample of hair or blood, we could tell people whether they were at risk of passing on the disease. Some of us did more. It was dangerous but well worth the risk.

  Of course, it could not last. We realized some time ago that Environmental Intelligence was searching for a conspiracy of genetic criminals, so we started making the necessary financial and social arrangements to leave. When we all showed up at the conference and applied en masse to emigrate, Environmental Intelligence realized that we were about to escape their grasp and began preparing charges against the whole group. We have been told that the formal charges were finalized last week. If we had skipped the conference and emigrated on a different liner, we might be en route to the Belt by now, safe and free. Unfortunately, we would have had to abandon much of our equipment. Heaven only knows what would have happened to the Belter ships we had hired to move it. It is all a terrible mess. The legal charges were the second good reason to emigrate.

  [Me] What were your plans when you arrived in the Belt? Can you speak of them without compromising yourselves?

  [Emigrant2] We brought many of our staff, who believe in the cause as much as we do. We were going to start a teaching hospital, three of them ultimately, on asteroids owned by some of the smaller clans who do not threaten anybody. We were going to start first with Clan Kunene, then Clan Sghiidagits and Clan Hangzhou. We have already incorporated in the Belt as Hope University. We have arranged for office space and hired an office manager and secretary, who are still on Mars handling the initial organization.

  Our intent is to treat people and train the next generation of physicians so that the Belt, at last, can heal their diseases. We intended to add faculties for space agriculture and engineering once we became established. Our Faculty of Agriculture would focus on meds. We were hoping to hire some of the people from LUVN.

  All of this would have to be surreptitious, but we were assured that larger projects than ours have been successfully hidden in the Belt. We can see the truth of that all around us.

  We had tentative support from Syrtis, from Qinghai Mining and from Ceres Salt and Chemicals. They promised to protect our facility and have started signing up students.

  The new university is our third good reason to leave. There is a desperate need for higher education in the Belt, institutions free from the corruption on Mars.

  [Emigrant1] The violence around us illustrates the fourth reason we wanted to go. We have friends and supporters throughout the community, including several in sociology with connections in Extraterrestrial Affairs. They got wind of some very disturbing developments, which we guess now were the stirrings of the Imperium. In any case, they started developing social models, interviewing people who had recently returned from Mars and crews visiting from the Belt. It became clear to them that another war was brewing and that Mars would have learned enough from their mistakes during the Incursion to overwhelm the TDF. Extraterrestrial Affairs suppressed their report and threatened legal action if they spoke of it, but we already had copies. We wanted to escape before the war started. We are too late, of course.

  [Emigrant2] Even that gets worse. Based on the recent history of factional strife on Mars, the same models suggested a cycle of atrocity and revenge would start as soon as one faction tried to claim hegemony over the others. It would rapidly degenerate into military chaos similar to the early European Middle Ages but fought through the whole of human space with modern weapons from the Earth.

  We estimated that we had somewhere between fifty and a thousand years to escape the Solar System entirely, to set off for one of the nearby stars, or all of humanity would die. Humans are poorly adapted for long trips in the confined spaces of a ship, but small changes engineered into our genome would provide us with protection against mutation, the ability to hibernate or estivate, any number of things that would improve our chances of success. We hoped we could get enough of a head start that some of us could escape into the Kuiper Belt before the disaster struck. That was only half a reason, but it was the one we all dreamed about. Call it a fifth reason, maybe.

  [Emigrant1] Except we are trapped here. The Earth is hunting for us and will find us soon. The criminal charges are real and I doubt Viceroy Fenghuang will try to defend us. I almost pray she does not, to forestall that war. Our only hope was to escape to the Belt but that hope was vaporized when the Fairy Dust blew its bomb.

  [Me] My job was to investigate the Fairy Dust Incident. If we had been given just another week, I would have been on your trail with all the powers of the government. I am puzzled that you have turned to me for help.

  [Emigrant1] But that was then. If we had an extra week we would have been on our way to the Belt by now. The Fairy Dust would not have used its bomb. You would not even be looking.

  Instead, we are stuck in the Moon. When we arrived, we had a lot of contacts here, in the medical community, amongst the Martian sympathizers, and even in the tiny community of Belter merchants. The Belter community is ten times larger now and growing rapidly, but the friends we trust to protect our secrets are dwindling equally rapidly. We can no longer talk to anyone directly. It was very difficult to contact you, but we know people who know people, if you know what I mean.

  We heard some very strange rumours of a team of top agents who have been struggling to maintain the peace while everyone else was screaming for war or hiding in fear. We saw what the Banshees did on the Deng. We have heard that the Banshees are struggling to extend legal protection to Martians and Belters. We were hoping to use meds from LUVN in our hospitals and have heard absolutely unbelievable stories from the Belter merchants about your efforts to save that institution. Our only lead was that you were working with the TDF.

  [Emigrant2] Hush! Hush! We must not expose those poor people! They are our last friends anywhere.

  [Emigrant1] Forgive me. Sir, even people who were personal friends have become so desperate that we fear they would turn us in. My Lord Banshee, you are the only hope we have left. Help us, I beg you.

  [Wang] You are not alone, nor undefended. I disapprove of what you are doing, but I will not tolerate arbitrary executions. The TDF still defends you. The Moon can shelter you, for a while at least, and a Lunar reformatory would be better than a Martian execution.

  [Me] I can make no promises except that we will seek justice. It is almost the only thing we have time to do in the current crisis. And Admiral Wang is right that you are not alone. There are many refugees on the Moon right now. Since the Final War, every child of the Earth and Moon knows that refugees deserve special consideration.

  I doubt we will ever have a chance to examine the Fairy Dust Incident in any detail. As a legal case, it is not worth pursuing. May I ask what really happened with the Fairy Dust? It seemed so dangerous, without actually harming anyone.

  [Emigrant3] May I try to answer that? I am the former CEO of Connaught Freight Enterprises. My company used to own the Fairy Dust. My son died in his twenties from one of those genetic diseases, a slow, agonized wasting. Once the disease manifested, he was tested to see what treatment options might be available. We learned that he had inherited a defective X chromosome, which for a boy could only have come from my wife. We could slow the progression of the disease, but not stop it. We could ease his pain only by drugging him senseless. Mentally, he never aged past twelve and as the disease progressed he regressed back to an infant. The last three years, he may as well have been dead.

  My dear wife spent hours each day tending his body, singing to him and trying to ea
se his pain. She was tormented with horror and guilt, as though our collective ignorance and bad laws had made that X chromosome her fault. Therapy to ease her distress felt like a betrayal as he lay groaning in front of her every day, so she finally refused even that. My poor sweetheart committed suicide a year after our son died.

  We had a sample of hair from his first haircut and I kept a lock of hers. When I found this group, I had both samples tested, along with another lock from our daughter.

  [Emigrant2] We traced the poor woman’s ancestry and discovered that she had been born using an egg from a well-loved aunt who had died young in a skiing accident. The aunt had been pregnant with a son at the time, a family tragedy for everyone. Of course, we now suspect that the accident was really a suicide when she realized her child was a boy. That branch of the family had attempted to have only daughters for as far back as we could check, which kept the gene hidden but did nothing to remove it. Neither his wife nor her mother had ever been told the family secret.

  [Emigrant3] I learned that I could have saved my beautiful son and my beloved wife with any of three different genetic treatments that cost less than a bottle of good wine, less than I have spent on breakfast in some hotels. If we had been cows or pigs, no one would have questioned the treatment. If it had been a recent mutation, the treatment would have been given immediately. It was forbidden because he was human and it would have removed an ancient curse from our gene line.

  As soon as I recovered from the shock, I volunteered my services to help them move their people and equipment to the Belt. We were going to replace the Fairy Dust soon anyways, so I bought the ship from the company and donated it to help move their equipment. I and some of my closest staff volunteered to join them as administrators in the new university and hospitals.

  Those locks of hair are all that survive of my wife and son. I paid big bribes to have my wife’s genetic deposits destroyed, joining the rest of this team in criminality.

  My daughter carries the same defect and has received the treatment. If she remains on the Earth, she will also be charged as a criminal. Her genetic deposits were all made after the treatment and would be destroyed, leaving her sterile. She is coming with us to ensure that she and her children do not suffer as her mother did. We are bringing our own repository. If only we can escape the Moon, no one on the Earth will have power over our lives from this time on.

  [Wang] I am finding this whole issue very disturbing. Sir, I pity you and your daughter and I mourn for your wife and son, but I have no sympathy for your cause. It is morally repulsive and your chosen solution is despicable.

  [Me] Forgive me Admiral, but I spent time on Mars and have met a few Belters in person over the last weeks. I have seen the wasting diseases on Mars and the numerous cancers that torment the crews on the Belter ships. If these people can bring succour to those helpless innocents, I would support their effort. I am also unsure about the more drastic changes, especially for the longer term, but preventative medicine seems to me to be purely beneficial.

  As for their methods, I might have done the same thing under the circumstances. I know that does not excuse what they did, but I find myself unable to criticize.

  [Emigrant3] Admiral, I used to share your opinion before my wife and son died. Tragedy changes a person. It made me think again about what was important during the Great Burning and whether it is still important today. I decided that times have changed. This part of the Constitution needs to be reinterpreted, if not completely rewritten. The Constitution already provides an amending process for when the Earth is ready to use it. The Belt is ready now.

  [Me] I understand your motives but am still baffled by what happened. Can you continue?

  [Emigrant1] We have a lot of equipment. For just one lab, the equipment filled two ships the size of the Fairy Dust. It will be much more compact when it is fully assembled without the protective packaging.

  We hired a ship from Clan Kunene – oh, I suppose the secrecy does not matter much since you have been investigating us anyways. We gave it the nickname Outer Tramp because we could not pronounce the real name and did not want to draw attention by giving a Belter ship a nickname that was completely innocuous. It is registered with their main carbonaceous shipping company, Kalahari Organics. Everything would have been simple if we could have followed our original plan.

  The crew, who intended to come with us and join a transport company between the Earth and the Belt, were given a surprise vacation for three weeks because it was the last time they would see the earth stations for many years. We would load both ships with the equipment, disguised as refined metals, food, and equipment for L1 and the Moon. I know I am confessing to smuggling, but there was no other way to get such high-end equipment onto the ships. After the conference was over, we would have a couple of weeks to finalize our arrangements. When the crew returned, we would send off the two ships to Clan Kunene and come to the Moon to board the liner.

  Did you notice how many Belter ships were at the earth stations? They were the best their clans could afford but were still small and could not take much cargo once the food and fuel were loaded. We hired almost all of them to move our equipment and people to our three destinations. It seemed so simple, but then everything disintegrated.

  [Emigrant2] At this point the story gets very complicated, so I will try to take it slowly. It helps to have a framework of the warnings that the Clan Kunene received but did not pass on to us. I have had to put together this interpretation from some very difficult interviews I have had with the crews of the other Belter ships here on the Moon.

  Clan Kunene had apparently been aware for several years that Clans Syrtis and Qinghai Mining were collaborating to create the Imperium. Knowing that the attack was imminent, they equipped the Outer Tramp with some ‘extraordinary facilities’ to signal unmistakably to the other Belter ships when it was time to leave. That awareness counts as the first warning.

  The second happened about a week before the conference, when an unrelated Belter ship was attacked and boarded by unidentified warships. I was surprised to learn that a freighter between Mars and the Earth keeps its meteor shield forward and a few communications antennae and navigation cameras deployed, but otherwise ignores the surrounding universe. There is nothing to see except the same star fields day after day. Consequently, they had no warning of the approaching warships. In the few minutes before their airlocks were forced open, they got a short emergency message away. It was picked up by their contacts on the Moon, who passed it to other Belter ships nearby, but with delays required by the many translations that had to be done. Our Belter captains demanded that we load and leave immediately but neglected to explain their sudden urgency.

  In retrospect, the ship had been impounded by the Viceregal fleet, not Forward Command, so the captains still thought we had an extra week before the Imperium arrived.

  The third warning was the abrupt departure of all the remaining Martian-registered ships into parking orbits just outside the normal radar range of the port authorities, something that would only happen in the final days before the invasion force arrived. Little did we realize those ships were Forward Command, already here and resupplied from the earth stations. That warning was already two weeks late.

  That was what triggered the spectacular departure of the false Fairy Dust, which was the fourth and final warning for all our Belter associates. They neglected to mention any of this to us, so we are going to have some harsh words with our new hosts if we ever get that far.

  [Emigrant1] Since we had originally expected to have two weeks to load our people and equipment quietly and discreetly, the panicky departure meant that only the first ships were able to load their nominal cargo with enough food and fuel for the whole trip. Even the Fairy Dust did not manage that. The rest rammed whatever they could into their holds with just enough food and fuel to run for L1, L2 or the Moon.

  By the time the ships arrived here at the Moon, it was too late to leave again. We expect the s
ame is true at L1 and L2, but have not heard. We have had to unload everything and move it into storage to hide it from inspectors who are swarming around; from the Earth, the Moon, the Imperium, everyone who thinks it is their job to inspect someone else’s cargo.

  We cannot let them see the original manifests, of course, because they are complete nonsense. Our phony manifests are a code for the actual cargoes, but after the panic-stricken loading, even we do not know what containers each ship was carrying. We are trying to organize it so it can be reloaded for the correct destinations if we ever get permission to move.

  The lab equipment that was supposed to be loaded onto the Fairy Dust and Outer Tramp was a typical case of confusion. When the Clan Kunene captains became adamant that we had to leave, we had to make some very hurried decisions. It would be much faster to load the Fairy Dust than the Outer Tramp. The outer hulls are almost identical, both built by Space Transport Construction in L2, but the Fairy Dust is a standard near-Earth freighter. The interior of the Outer Tramp has been extensively modified with control systems and holds designed for use in the Belt. We decided to dispatch the Fairy Dust first, but it already had a scheduled departure date that left enough time to load the Outer Tramp.