He casually mentioned that the Chou family with its many influential contacts east and west in Eurasia might easily ally itself with Clan Mofokeng within the Qinghai Mining faction. They had many similar interests.
He looked sad for a moment, then added, “The only one of their children who has recently been to Mars was an irresponsible, self-righteous trollop before he left and come back a spiteful, fanatical fool who embarrassed the family with every decision he made. He was perfectly placed to lead a mighty alliance, uniting one of the strongest military families on the Earth with a powerful faction in the Belt. After all the decades of preparation, how could things have gone so badly wrong?”
Rags shook his head but refused to follow up that thought. Instead, he claimed that every great innovation over the last hundred years had emerged from the hundred families. They had been a fountain of organizational skill, brimming with ideas and producing one brilliant leader after another.
Finally, I pressed him on the term “hundred families”. Was this just an expression reflecting the fact that our economic society passed on wealth through inheritance? Every such society could identify the top one hundred families who controlled much of the wealth. There was a constant churn in the hierarchy as new families rose to prominence. This distinguished them from landed aristocracies, who inherited land and power instead of wealth. They could often list their ancestors through all the centuries since they had been ennobled. Were the hundred families an aristocracy or just the top of a meritocracy?
He thought for a moment, got a glassy-eyed look of concentration, and finally replied, “I believe that right after the Great Burning, they were just the top of the economic meritocracy. Now, they are much more, true purveyors of civilization, even if they prefer to hide their great nobility. Ever since the Mustafa family...”.
He gasped, turned beet red, then ashen white, and ran from the room, not returning to speak with us for the rest of the day.
I had never heard of the hundred families before I met Rags. I had never mingled with their social circle, aside from a few black sheep on Mars, possibly including Sergei, and now Rags himself. Regardless of their actual number, he clearly thought of them as a social unit, with Hundred Families as their unofficial name. Who were they and what role did they play in our society? The Scindia family was one of them, with its sub-family Morris, as were the Chou family of Manchuria and Westrus. Who were the Mustafa family and how had they elevated the Hundred Families into true purveyors of civilization? I wrote that discussion up exactly as I heard it and sent it to the team, which provoked another reply from Sergei.
Our three Banshees had disembarked from the Rapunzel at Waypoint Station in L2, along with three crew members from the Anaconda who wanted to transfer to ships not affiliated with the Earth or Moon. Both Viceroys expressed outrage, but the Anaconda crew promised to complete their bio-cleansing at Waypoint and stated their intention to remain in near-Earth space until their colleague’s cases could be resolved. The Rapunzel was returning to follow the Anaconda into the distance. The captain, still on the Anaconda, was slowly recovering. His status seemed to be the final issue preventing a resolution, although Sergei would not supply any of the details.
Equally enigmatically, Sergei thought he knew who some of the Hundred Families were and who he could ask about the Mustafa family. He suspected that Minister Morris knew, but also believed he would never tell, for his own protection if no better reason. He added that it would be very dangerous to contact his other source. He was also wondering if there was any way to discourage a link-up between the Chou family and Clan Mofokeng.
He also asked if I had given any thought to the three questions. I had, but only in the background. Now I took the time.
The first question was whether my dreams were terrible because I had constantly introduced new tactics and new atrocities during my service on Mars. Would my dreams have been less catastrophic if I had stopped sooner? The answer had to be an unequivocal yes and no, followed by a string of unanswerable questions.
In the fighting, I had trained a large cadre of skilled commanders. Many of them defected as the war turned against us; some of them must still serve in the factional forces. I had no idea how many now served in the Belter forces. If we could have delayed everything for thirty years, those people would retire or die of old age. Only the written accounts of their exploits would survive, allowing the fighting skills of the Martian forces to decay back to their former levels. Instead, we faced seasoned commanders leading dedicated troops. So far, we had not seen much evidence of them in the chaos around us. Perhaps they were still on Mars. For or against the Emperor, I could not guess; perhaps both. So, yes, I had made things worse and that was captured in my nightmares. Focusing on my early years would make them less violent but much less realistic.
My experience on Mars had sharpened my understanding of when the factions would or would not escalate a conflict. In that sense, what I did was less important than how they reacted. The simulations were as realistic as I could imagine and would be less so if I ignored the later campaigns.
Martians often had a gullible faith in their leadership but chose to obey their orders or defy them out of rational self-interest. Their vengefulness always served a selfish purpose. Ordinary Martian people prided themselves on their businesslike rationality, carefully planning each step of their campaigns. In its own way, it was an endearing trait and made their behaviour more predictable.
What worried me increasingly was the irrational behaviour we had witnessed. I had dismissed this as “Martian behaviour”, but as I thought about it, no one I met in person on Mars committed random acts of self-destructive violence. Even the atrocities I had committed that justified my Hellgate had been creative solutions to atrocious orders. I had never been intentionally self-destructive. Spectacularly irrational decisions always came from above, starting with the savagery of assassination as a political tool.
We had seen that irrationality within MI, in the bizarre attacks by renegades in the fleets, and in the erratic behaviour of the VPF officers. It was linked to the comm units and emoji attacks. Father Paul’s history showed that the Exterminators had been experimenting with emoji control before I went to Mars. Recently, the most effective use of the technique had been made by the Sultan Mustafa.
I had speculated that the chaos was driven by the ever-changing configuration of the asteroids, creating provocations and opportunities as hostile factions were forced into proximity in their unconditional fight for power. Probably, but now I had to wonder.
Someone, somewhere, had initiated a plague of random violence while I was raising hell on Mars, a plague that had not yet subsided. Was it me? Or were the Exterminators already at work, trying to start the war for unfathomable reasons of their own?
I tried to ask Rags about what he thought had started the war. His reticence suggested that this was the period he had worked on Mars. I did not want to probe too deeply. The few crumbs he dropped suggested that the labour problems had been instigated by the Hundred Families to improve the Martian economy. Even Earth-bound Families might have profited from a redistribution of wealth that gave the masses enough money to buy consumer goods, starting with housing and clothes.
It had not worked. Ngomo suppressed all forms of dissent. I understood now that the First War for Liberation had started before I set foot on Mars. Most of the so-called labour troubles were quite rational outbursts against unreasonable edicts from the Governor. As he made one mistake after another, the violence escalated faster than anyone seemed able to control. Had the Exterminators deliberately send to Mars the most incompetent Governor they could find?
Ngomo never directed the Spooks to investigate who controlled the rebel movement or how they operated. Our mission had been to deter political opposition through savage punishment. The rebels had responded in kind. That vengefulness was a fundamental part of my dreams and apparently part of the simulations both Poloff Badami and the Hope University people had
mentioned.
If the Hundred Families had triggered the troubles and the Exterminators had encouraged Ngomo to suppress them violently, were both parts of a longer plan by the Sultan Mustafa?
The Imperium had invaded the Earth to suppress the Sultan Mustafa. Rags believed the Mustafa family resided as a hidden progressive element in the core of the Hundred Families. Progressiveness that mixed with casual brutality was a brew that I had rarely heard of outside histories of the slave trade, totalitarian dictatorships, and politically active religious movements. There had to be a connection. Unfortunately, knitting it together would have to be someone else’s chore. I was running out of time.
For the second question, I did not believe the missions the Exterminators set for me coloured my dreams. I would not dream obsessively about a goal that I could achieve by sitting quietly drinking tea. They had wanted me to start the war that was already crackling around us. Work was required to stop that war, not to start it.
The Exterminators might still have affected my dreams even if it was not through the missions they had tried to assign me. Perhaps the violence of the Nightmares reflected my pessimistic recognition that they would continue working to provoke a genocidal war until they succeeded. I had been having the Nightmares before I knew that the Exterminators were still active, but that only meant I did not know then who was instigating the violence.
The third question returned to the Sultan Mustafa again, whether Mars and the Belt would return to rationality if that organization could be neutralized. It was a complete imponderable.
My gut feeling was that I had helped to create the crisis we faced, but the violence had escalated both before I started and after I had withdrawn from active provocation. Something else was happening, whether it was through the scheming of the Exterminators, the whispered treacheries of the Sultan Mustafa, or the natural fractures of Belter and Martian societies.
The Hundred Families had existed before the corruption of the Governors broke Mars into warring factions, before the Exterminators started to plot their war. If the Mustafa family was the organizing body in the heart of the Hundred Families, if they had steered us into this disaster, they might be the key to the puzzle.
It was part of the larger mission but not directly my job. I could help to heal Mars. Someone else would have to deal with the rest.
It took a while to write up that incoherent mass of supposition and guesswork, encrypt it, and send it back to Sergei.
2357-04-04 04:00
Hope in Hell
I could not handle talking with Rags every day, Hotstuff remained hostile, and Mindy vacillated between an almost Lunatic optimism and deep depression. I needed a distraction, something else to think about. Casting randomly back, I asked Sa’id how the attempted rescue of the people in the airtight room off Gagarin had ended.
He seemed reluctant but allowed that he knew the outcome. He asked how stable I felt. Rags had given me practice holding myself as the Ghost, so I told him I could accept any outcome. It had been a desperate attempt and bad results were to be expected.
They had extracted the airtight room intact, hosing it with water to cool its exterior as it was pulled out to Gagarin Road. When external power was connected, the interior still reported temperatures on the upper limit of human endurance. They redoubled their efforts. The outer panels had warped, jamming the door so it would not open. After five minutes of frantic effort, they decided the fastest approach was to cut the bolts holding the floor to the walls and lift the entire room off its base. While the bolt-cutters were busy, the rest of the crew drilled a hole through the wall and blew in fresh, cool oxygen. No one replied when they called through the hole. Cutting the bolts took another twenty minutes. When they finally lifted the walls off the base, they found an entire maintenance crew inside, twenty-five people. Ten were unconscious but still alive. Two of those had permanent brain damage and would require care for the rest of their lives. The other fifteen had died of heat and asphyxiation as the oxygen ran low. Had we delayed another ten minutes, everyone inside would have been dead. If we had been ten minutes earlier, five more might have lived.
That was not the whole story. As soon as they extracted the airtight room, Chief Anna led the maintenance and power workers back into to the hallway to open the other doors. There were nine other rooms off that hallway, all locked. As they laboured to disassemble every lock, they had grumbled about my abandoning them so abruptly. All the work had to be done in pressure suits borrowed from the TDF. Oxygen could not be restored to the hallway until the fires in the maintenance room were extinguished.
They found another thirty-five people, twenty civilians and fifteen soldiers who had been holding them at gunpoint when the airtight doors at the ends of the hallway had closed, the explosive dump had detonated, and the power failed. In the ensuing panic, seven civilians and five soldiers had died of gunshot wounds. Another eight had died of asphyxiation when the corridor become quiet and soldiers opened the door to see what had happened. The oxygen in their rooms escaped before they became aware of the danger. Some of the dead in the hallway had no injuries. They may have succumbed when they came out to assist their fallen companions.
In some rooms, the remaining occupants had closed and relocked the hallway doors, hoping the air vent would replenish their oxygen. There was no power, so no fresh oxygen came from the vents. The doors were simply barriers to human passage and were not themselves airtight; anyone who did not take refuge in the airtight rooms died as the oxygen leaked out to burn in the maintenance room fires.
Of the thirty-five, only eighteen survived.
In the room across the hall from WR87-19, the civilians had retreated into their airtight room when the soldiers first arrived. They locked the door and refused to admit anyone else. They were rescued, but suffered paroxysms of guilt when they recognized the dead outside their airtight room as their neighbours.
The victims had been herded in when the soldiers were called across the hall to help assemble the explosive dump. After the power failed, the people in the airtight room could hear only muffled demands and occasional shouting. They had assumed the people outside were soldiers who had left when their voices fell quiet. The monitors that could have told them the truth were too power-hungry to run off the emergency battery. Those outside had died pounding on the door, begging to be admitted to the airtight room.
Our bodies cannot detect oxygen. In a pure nitrogen atmosphere, we continue to breathe normally until we pass out. It is rising levels of carbon dioxide in our lungs that force us to gasp for air. People do not pass out quietly when the oxygen is slowly replaced by carbon dioxide. They pant and gasp and struggle desperately. It is cleaner to die of a gunshot.
After the first two rooms, our workers had become so traumatized that they called in the TDF to extract the bodies, limiting their own effort to opening the doors as quickly as they could, cleaning the corridor of debris, and transporting the body bags carrying the survivors and corpses to the make-shift hospital on Renoir. The VPF soldiers volunteered to assist, under the command of Acting Sergeant Mirza (formerly Corporal, promoted twice in one day for lack of anyone else willing to take charge). The splinter in his rib prevented him from lifting, but he was the only figure of authority the VPF privates all accepted.
Everyone had been granted a month of stress leave and counselling as soon as it could be arranged. Sergeant Mirza insisted that he needed training for his new rank far more than vacation time. His newly promoted corporals Yang and Karishma would be joining him in a program that mixed healing, therapy and training.
Our maintenance and power workers were all nominated for Exceptional Service Awards for courage and dedication far beyond their expected duties.
I listened to all this silently. When I had committed similar atrocities on Mars, no one had survived. Unless, of course, I selected one victim to spread the warning of what defiance of the Governor would cost.
Sa’id watched me quietly for a while after
he finished, but the story was still not done.
Sa’id/private, “Cindy is working through her therapy by composing a Lunar operetta about our trek along the corridor. The theatre group she sings with organized the project under the guidance of her therapist to support her during her time of trouble. They have cancelled all their gigs and gone into closed sessions, calling in the other participants one by one but otherwise hardly seeing their families.
“This is generating a LOT of buzz in the cultural community, especially since they invited Bobo, his aunt and parents to one of their sessions. So far only Bobo is willing to perform any part of the new operetta in public, happily marching around in armour made of thin white pillows, loudly and tunelessly singing, ‘Sodders and Offices, Heroes and Friends.’ The video is utterly charming and has gone viral around the Moon.”
Heroes and friends. I wondered if the VPF soldiers would be able to accept the phrase as an ideal they could aspire to or would burn with shame at the artful criticism.
Sa’id/converse, “They tried to invite us through TDF Security, extending an open invitation at the very start of the project. I received the invitation from One but replied that a man in a wheelchair who could open any door in the city would attract the kind of audience they did not want, so it was better to omit our role entirely. Security was also unhappy to be noticed but recognized that the guards had a visible presence they couldn’t deny. In the end, they decided to make a virtue of a necessity and sent Two with a Public Interface Officer.”
Me/converse, “I suppose it was a mistake to show them my Banshee colours when we first met the maintenance workers and a second mistake in the Security parking lot. The Imperial security people surely don’t understand that we are trying to erase ourselves from history. On Mars, they are just as enthusiastic about epic songs and poetry as any other spacer culture. I doubt anyone will make a ballad about the evacuation of the Viceroy, since the political sensitivities are so delicate, but if they do, the Poloffs from the Lansdorf might recognize a man with hidden talents in a wheelchair. I wonder if anyone will ever stitch together the stories?”
Lord Banshee Lunatic (Nightmare Wars Book 3) Page 39