The lighter accordianed a gangway to the shiny new Mao and we were escorted across into a private room close to the infirmary. Sa’id said we had six hours before things started to move, waiting for our ugly, boxy steel transports to return with supplies. I locked the torso of my armour, unclipped and joined him in scanning for bugs. We found only the ones we expected from MI and carefully disposed of those. Built into the walls, we found microphones, cameras, vibration detectors, and motion sensors, which we turned off. Some of the devices pretended to be off and had to be disabled by physically blocking their inputs. I wondered how many we had missed at the Soiree because they were still functioning while pretending to be off.
We settled back on our wheelchair beds, ready to eat the med-laced breakfast that was brought from the Mao’s kitchens. The meals for Sa’id and I came with a set of bugs designed to pass through our intestines: trackers and miniature microphones. Sa’id, ever diligent, filed a warning that the kitchen workers might have been infiltrated. He did a deeper scan for drugs in all our food, including the cartridges of intravenous nutrition for Mindy. He found nothing more but rejected all of it on principle, demanding unadulterated food.
Twenty minutes later, he received a reply thanking him for the warning. Half of the rest of the crew were now carrying trackers and several officers had microphones. Someone named Bertrand Dinh had died from a nerve toxin. Several more bugs carrying nerve toxins had been intercepted before their targets had eaten them; those people all had the initials “B. D.” or a name including the string “oldman”.
To Sa’id/private, “How stupid do they think we are, that we would use names with the same initials or aliases containing our current nicknames? Ten seconds of thought would tell them that no professional agent would be so sloppy. I feel insulted, even beyond the murder of that poor man.”
Right now, I was officially Gilles Suez but would have to change my ID soon. I would keep these threats in mind as I constructed a new ID. I was done with the cutesy Scottish theme.
Sa’id/converse, “We are not the only ones in a hurry. This convoy was originally scheduled for two days from now. We would still be in the detention centre if we had not captured Wolong’s agents when they bombed the substation beside Flourishing Square. Tracing their communications told us who gave them their orders. That is how we received warning of the raid this morning. We are missing four ships that are still loading and will have to join the next convoy. Whoever organized this attack was obviously caught by surprise as well.
“Rags was extracted right after us and five more people from the VPF moved into the empty rooms. Just in time! The new VPF inmates are all complaining bitterly about the invasion of their privacy during what was supposed to be a long session of quiet therapy. Hotstuff was supposed to move to another ward later today but is still there. She is organizing a protest directly to the senior officers in MI and the Admiralty. I’m so glad that Wang became Admiral and not me.
“Aside from being captured, it would almost be worth being in our old ward, just to see Hotstuff in action. They may have to replace the glass to remove the profanity stains. I hope the upshot is that she gets some decent therapy in a group setting.
“Also, the kitchen claims the food was contaminated at the supplier’s, who in turn claims it was clean when they received it and was held in bonded warehouses until delivery. Perhaps. Contaminated supplies are common enough. Regardless, the offender is likely to be an agent of the Sultan Mustafa so some of the raid may be diverted to that search. I wouldn’t mention anything about it to Mindy.”
Me/converse, “Just curious, where are you getting these tidbits? They are not being sent directly to you, are they?”
Sa’id/converse, “Various sources that send fragmented, holographic messages with a private encryption to a rebroadcasting service. When I receive enough fragments, I can reassemble the message. I learned that trick from you via the other Banshees. The whole fleet is getting the fragments as a low-bandwidth binary buzz. ACC estimates that there are at least fifty similar message streams. I suspect that some of them are being used by the Sultan Mustafa and other factions within MI that we have not identified yet. I have asked ACC to turn them all off after we reach the Earth, just to see who panics.”
I really wished I could be a Lunatic, that I could honestly believe my neighbours were decent, kind and honest. That I was not so perverted that Sa’id’s answer made sense.
Sa’id/converse, “Kitchen says they are sending replacement meals, which they promise are free of contamination. Every ship in the feet is reporting contaminated food and two more people with initials ‘B. D.’ are alive because they received the antidote in time. That attack might have been directed at us, but not at this ship.”
When our replacement meals arrived, he and I scanned the replacement meals even more closely than the originals. Only when we were convinced they were clean did we relax. He popped Mindy’s nutrition cartridge into her field station. We munched the bland TDF field rations, probably the only quickly available alternative. They were almost as boring as Mindy’s intravenous meals.
2357-04-05 23:00
Launch
Nuts/local, “Skyrockets! Look at them go!”
He opened a tactical display with a scale large enough to show the convoy as well as the construction facilities at Leading. Zooming into that part of space, we could see coloured dots for the Hope University ANGEL and the Lonely Watch at the LR and TDF repair facilities, suddenly active and moving. The Hammerhead had been renamed Mjölnir but sat dead and silent at Oaxaca Construction. Instead, two FAS named the Didgeridoo and the Kangaroo fired up their engines and moved out of the facility. Their status showed them as incomplete, weeks of work remaining before commissioning.
None of the four ships were following standard flight plans. They rose almost vertically out of the ecliptic. The ANGEL and Lonely Watch drove north, hard and fast. The two partially built FAS headed south but soon veered sunwards. I expected they were heading for Hotpoint Station in L1.
Nuts/converse, “I thought you asked for the Hammerhead? I can see it has been renamed as the Mjölnir but what are these other two FAS doing? They are not scheduled to be ready for almost a month... But I bet it was faster to rework ships that were still under construction with all new parts, than to clean, repair and rebuild the hulk of the Mjölnir. They just might beat the ANGEL to the Belt, even with another month of construction at Hotpoint.”
The ANGEL and Lonely Watch drew slowly closer together. Only a handful of Imperial warships were nearby and they held their nominal stations, calling for instructions. Several Martian freighters at other stations in Leading began a pursuit. The display reported a missile launch from one of the false freighters. Laser fire from the Lonely Watch detonated the missile’s warhead close enough to the attacking ship that it went dark in the display. For several minutes, there was a laser duel between the next nearest freighter and the Lonely Watch, until that ship also began calling for assistance.
Sa’id/private, “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy... Wang did not tell anyone that we were doing this already. This has gone from being two new services, which could take months to organize, to being a battleship en route to the Belt and two fast new warships heading for L1. The translator cannot keep up with the different languages. Some of them must be code. Every Imperial ship in near-Earth space that has enough transmitter power is blasting warnings to the outer solar system.
“No wait, Viceroy Fenghuang just issued a prepared statement congratulating Hope University as they depart to open the new centre of learning. She is officially announcing the Imperial Armed Delivery Service and Imperial Secure Facility Service. That too is being broadcast to Mars and the Belt.
“The messages of warning seem to be changing, at least the ones the translator can handle. Some of them join in congratulating Hope University with a very lukewarm acknowledgement that it will be well defended. The earlier ones assumed that two battleships were en route to rep
eat the Counterstrike. Hopefully, no one will take that threat seriously.
“Two battleships, even fully armed, couldn’t do anything against the fleets we have seen. We already had one battleship in the Belt. If I understood the boasting that I overheard in Germano-Tamil on the Lansdorf, it was destroyed after it ran out of missiles. They were sly about it and may have been trying to see what reaction they could get out of me. I just smiled and jabbered in Mandarin as though I had not heard a word.”
As we watched, the ANGEL put on power and pulled ahead of the Lonely Watch. A spray of chaff blossomed behind the two ships. Abruptly, the Mao shut off the display and a radiation warning sounded but a minute later everything was back online. Where the chaff had been, a brilliant fireball of hot gases expanded rapidly. Both ships were soon lost inside the cloud. Regardless, the tactical display plotted their positions as they changed direction and poured on power. That had to be a flight plan registered with the Admiralty; I doubted any non-TDF ship would know about the course change. We watched the cloud clear over the next few minutes. IR cameras soon showed the ANGEL and Lonely Watch, powerless and apparently lifeless, receding into the distance.
From the Earth, Wolong made a pronouncement sneering at their failure to escape the Earth-Moon system, claiming his own ships had destroyed the traitors as they ran in fear. No one repeated the claim, even amongst his own fleet.
Right after lunch (bland field rations again), the convoy began to power up its engines. We crawled away from Outer on the three-day run to the earth stations. Forty-five freighters would not be a burden on the earth stations, which would normally handle three times as many every week. From the size of the escort, we would need much better control over the pirates before that many freighters would dare to make a weekly run from L1 and L2. Regardless, food, refined metals and zero-G manufactured goods were moving again.
The Moon was behind me, lost in the past. I would cherish the memory like a book that had inflamed my soul as I read it but no longer possessed.
Ahead lay the earth stations. They had gone almost silent after the Viceregal Fleet arrived. That might just be a consequence of the blockade stopping all trade and the new regime of censorship. Regardless, it was a bad sign. The stations would be guarded, infested with Imperial intelligence operatives. Shuttles to the Earth would be even more tightly controlled.
Sa’id admitted that he knew little more than I did about conditions on the stations. Crews returning on TDF ships were debriefed by the Admiralty. They were sworn to silence to avoid inflaming the extremely tense diplomatic relations with Wolong’s forces. It was deeply worrisome that no one was willing to breach that oath. Even the Banshees had been unable to penetrate the silence.
Passing the earth stations was an utterly necessary Step along the Path. In spite of his concern, Sa’id thought we could avoid close scrutiny. Knowing the many ways that criminals had tried to bypass our relatively light security, I was unconvinced. Martian security would be harsher and more thorough then we had ever been. They would be desperate to stop me. Not since I fled Mars in a broken fighter had I faced such peril, and all of humanity with me.
I did a quick check of my own state and saw the Path winding golden over a grassy rise, with the dark galaxy of the Hellgate swirling just beyond. For the moment my Path was clear but short, not extending past the earth stations. On each side, towering waves of innocent blood crashed against the shores of the small, grassy knoll. A moaning wind that I had never previously heard rose in gusts to scream like the dying. I could not tell what the rise in front of me concealed and almost faltered in fear, but the Ghost felt an irrational joy at being so close to the end of the Mission and held me steady.
Coming soon!
Nightmare Wars Book 4
Lord Banshee: Subversive
The Earth is guarded by criminals
Viceroy Wolong and his advisors are destroying the Earth through incompetence and brutality. To help correct the problems, I must pass through the earth stations to reach the Earth. I must evade their intelligence services, ride a shuttle to the surface, and walk past the immigration control officers without being recognized.
I must travel invisibly
Simple, if I were still the Ghost on Mars with all the power of the Spooks at my disposal. Not so simple for a fugitive barely able to walk. Not simple while the Exterminators are trying to force me to ignite a war that will kill everyone on Mars. Not simple at all when the conspiracy that calls itself the Sultan Mustafa is committing atrocities at random, enraging the factions into an unstoppable cycle of violence and revenge that will be fought with nuclear weapons.
The Martian Imperium believes that I command the Sultan Mustafa conspiracy. They have issued a kill-on-capture order to stop me at any cost. Dying would be simple, but disastrous.
The Imperium is an unstable tyranny
The Succession War to replace the current Emperor will drive humanity into extinction. I know how to prevent that war, how to heal the factional hatreds. I must survive long enough to complete that Mission.
I must get past the earth stations alive
Titles in the Nightmare Wars series:
1.Lord Banshee: Fairy Dust
2.Lord Banshee: Fugitive
3.Lord Banshee: Lunatic
4.Lord Banshee: Subversive (coming soon)
These are available as e-books and paperbacks through Amazon Kindle.
For more background on the world of the Nightmare Wars, see my blog at:
http://roredman.ca/blog/author
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[1] Colour figures are expensive in printed books, and many e-readers display only greyscale images. A full colour version of this image can be found online in the author’s blog at http://roredman.ca/blog/index.php/author/buried-cities-1
Lord Banshee Lunatic (Nightmare Wars Book 3) Page 42