Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  “I now consider both of you to be members of my team – let me emphasize, MY team. I will exert such discipline as I consider appropriate, and I must warn you that in the past, under wartime conditions, I have not hesitated to execute those I considered to be security risks. Few, if any, of the Banshees know about that part of my past, and I would prefer to keep it that way.

  “I am supportive of friendships and even romantic relations within my teams, provided they do not interfere with our mission. My judgement is that you worked well together yesterday, but you have known each other for such a short time that we cannot know whether your relationship will be stable or will degenerate into a power struggle that jeopardizes everyone.

  “I therefore need to know what happened yesterday that motivated two intelligent people to engage in such egregious violations of military conduct. I would prefer to ask these questions of you individually, but I fear this is the best privacy we are going to get. I am certain that Cap Wang will insist on starting disciplinary proceedings against you both if we cannot provide him with a valid alternative. If I do not hear satisfactory answers, I will start those proceedings, even if he does not.

  “Com Thieu, why did you insist on accompanying Agent San Diego on the Manila Bay when you knew someone else had been assigned that position? Agent San Diego, why did you support her violation of simple and direct orders?

  “Agent San Diego, since you are more directly under my authority, do you wish to start?”

  Raul flushed slightly as I spoke, frowning at the criticism, but was firm in his reply. “When we heard the call to go to the Manila Bay, we both knew what had to be done and how to do it. We had just helped adjust the comm system on the Excalibur and knew how to disable the incoming streams and install the filters. We had even practiced cleaning surfaces of glue bugs on the Excalibur, so if the controls were coated, or the doors glued shut, we had the right tools and skills. We were on a frigate and going to the assistance of a frigate, so before we left the Excalibur we requested permission to review the layout of the ship. We memorized the path from the transport bays to the MI office and all the way to the weapons bays. That is why we volunteered to handle the job of shutting down the MI comm centre. We could get there and complete the job faster than any of the other teams.”

  “Com Thieu,” I looked over, “What do you have to say?”

  “Sir, I cannot apologize for what we did on the Manila Bay. As Agent San Diego said, we were in a unique place at a critical time that allowed us to prepare for that mission better than anyone else. I was highly motivated, because the Manila Bay and the Mao have worked together quite often. I knew most of their crew.” Her face contorted with the painful memory, but she resumed, “I have served on frigates, of course, but it was important to refresh my memory. It was unfortunate that we did not have a chance to let the commander in charge of the operation know of our preparations, so we arrived at the transport to find we had been assigned different roles on different transports. I had to carry that argument because I had rank and standing within the crew of the Mao, despite being a sailor and not a marine.

  “If Cap Wang had not already ordered sailors and marines to work together, I know I would have been ignored. I was prepared to defy my orders, if I had to, and I am still willing to accept the consequences.

  “I believe we did that mission as well as it could have been done. We anticipated that the lights might be out. No one knew we would face clouds of glue bugs blocking our headlights and coating all the room and hall numbers. Had anyone less prepared attempted that mission, they would have taken much longer to reach the MI office, longer to block the input streams, and longer to reach the weapons bay where the captain had rigged the warheads. We would all have perished, even the people on transports that had already left, if we had not been able to send the warning when we did.”

  “I was wrong in one thing. I am sorry, Raul, but when they introduced you as an agent from procurement, I thought they meant you were you were a senior purchasing agent. I thought you were daft to go into such danger and needed protection. And when we were there, it was your courage that carried me forward. If you could face such horror and keep moving, I had to. Otherwise I would have turned and fled back to the transports when that suit tore open, and poor Esmerelda...” She paused and struggled to control her stomach at the memory.

  “I should have recognized your skill immediately. I was in the mess having a late breakfast this morning when Marine Sa’id told me that you were counterespionage. I was such a fool; can you forgive me?”

  “Keep working,” I said. “And, yes, he can. He told me much the same story this morning with you as the pillar of strength and courage. I believe with what you have told me that I can fend off the Cap regarding the deployment to the Manila Bay. That leaves the bed arrangements in the infirmary, where you defied both Doctor Marin and the Cap. Do you have any excuse for that?”

  For the first time since I met him, Raul looked ashamed. “I am sorry, Sir. I have never met anyone like Begum. We talked a lot on the Excalibur. About what we were doing, mostly, but also about where we came from, what we hoped to do after we retired. I have met plenty of women on the Earth and in space, but no one whose dreams so closely matched my own.

  “When we returned to the Mao, I wanted to hold her and kiss her and dance the rest of the night, but of course we had to go directly to the infirmary because of our injuries and radiation exposure. I begged her to come to me after Marin had left for the night. I was not aware that the Cap had laid the same prohibition on the crew against mixing, but that is not an excuse since I already knew it was forbidden. I am ashamed of my weakness, Sir.”

  Thieu had stopped work and was gazing longingly at Raul. “It is true, Sir. I knew he was beautiful from the moment we met here yesterday, but over the afternoon I discovered he was wise, thoughtful, considerate, sensible, and courageous. We loved the same things, dreamed the same dreams, laughed at the same jokes. Hidden inside his calm exterior, he is witty and kind. I still thought his courage was ignorant bravado, but, watching the other Banshees in the transport bay, I realized you were all like that. And on the Manila Bay I found it was not bravado. It was real. Raul is a hero, my hero if he will have me. When we headed down to the infirmary, he took off his mask and I recognized the man I have been searching for my whole life. I never want to leave him again. If the Cap cannot accept that, I will quit my commission now and follow him to the ends of the universe.”

  “Whoa, slow down!” I cried, “No one is getting married yet. You two will need to spend a month together on a leaky freighter before you make that commitment! You have not seen each other bad tempered, whiney and sick!”

  But neither of them was looking at me. They were staring into each other’s eyes, starting to move together, reaching out for an embrace – so I reached between and pushed them apart.

  “Stop! Do you want Cap Wang to lock you in brigs on different ships? Listen to me! This is marriage-counsellor Brian speaking. You are both high-performance commanders who expect other people to obey you. You need to work out how to cooperate, how to negotiate your inevitable conflicts. Otherwise, you will be fighting by next week and one of you will be dead within the year. Are you even listening?

  “If you cannot control yourselves, I will lay the charges of disobedience myself. I am sorry I asked the question, and sorrier still that you are both going to face the wrath of the entire medical team, with Doctor Marin as the prosecuting attorney. Raul, how much longer do you have on your meds before you are safe?”

  He finally looked back to me, breaking free of the spell between them. “Oh, not too long. Unlike the rest of you, I spent most of the last month on the Moon and only returned to the Earth for a two-day meeting before coming up on the Laika. I was very careful about what I ate and drank. I am sorry, Begum, but Brian is quite right. I will not be safe to kiss for another four days. I do not know how, but we will have to wait until then.”

  “Do not know ho
w, be damned,” I snorted, “The pair of you are going on full strength sex suppressors starting immediately, regardless of whether Com Thieu is on the team. Raul, how is the search for hidden messages coming?”

  Raul shook his head as though to clear it of love dust. “I have read a lot of financial statements and weekly reports. This one is the worst I have ever encountered. The text seems to have been written by a machine, just jargon-laden nonsense once you get past the first page. That would convince me of hidden messages if nothing else did. However, I think I have finally found a simple approach that has revealed an oddness in the data tables. Here is the largest of the data tables in this report. It runs over five pages, and I am alternating between the text and printed binary versions. Notice how most of the numbers in the table have one to six digits to the left of the decimal, with a block of five digits to the right.”

  He had superimposed both versions of the table in a single screen so that the characters aligned, blinking between the two versions. On the first page and on the last, both tables were identical, but on the second, third and fourth pages the least significant three digits to the right of the decimal were different for each entry. The hidden message was there in front of us, if only we could read it.

  I had doubted it would be so easy to find, but this confirmed my guess that the people who had designed this system were bright amateurs, like I had been on Mars, with access to several good textbooks on cryptography. They had fooled us for months, perhaps even years, but now we knew their secret and would surely crack the code within days. If we had days left to us.

  Thieu looked at the display and swore quietly. “Today has been a nightmare since the moment Doctor Marin caught us in the infirmary. For the first time, I believe we are at war and not just victims of terrorist attacks. I had really hoped there would be nothing there, that I could take a demotion and go back to chasing pirates, or maybe just quit and retire to the Moon. Even knowing how the Manila Bay was destroyed, I still had the illusion of hope. Now I understand that we will die in battle.”

  I turned to Thieu. “Not if I can help it. Com Sailor Begum Thieu, welcome to the Banshees. We will have to wait for formal confirmation from our superiors, but for the duration of this crisis I believe that I am your commander, and Raul is your colleague. We have our filters and we have our hidden message. It is urgent that we make contact with the Admiralty. Now, move to opposite sides of the room and try to look professional. I am going to call the Cap.”

  I called Wang and asked him to come to the MI office to oversee our opening of the Admiralty streams, adding that we had something that he and Singh would be interested in seeing.

  A few minutes later Wang arrived, but not with Singh. The continuous stress of the night had finally forced her to sleep. In her place came Morris, who had spent the previous hour searching the Extraterrestrial Affairs internal publications for unusually boring and impenetrable economic reports containing large data tables. He had found ten in the last week, which he brought for our appraisal.

  He shook his head, “This would normally be secretarial work, and assigned to the junior-most secretary in the office. In this case I would not dare to entrust the work even to my own hand-selected staff, and I would no longer trust sending messages to the security staff who would be authorized to handle it.”

  That might be an issue we could deal with. “Sir, we can probably enable a channel to your security staff if they have their own encrypted stream in the system. We have already seen that tokens and emojis pass through the MI system on an encrypted stream without being detected, so I expect the messages would be uninterpreted as well. Perhaps we should look at that after we get finished with the Admiralty. Meanwhile, Raul can show you what we have found.”

  Morris just shook his head. “I expect we can get the message through, but that is not the real issue, is it? What does Agent San Diego have?”

  Raul explained briefly his method and presented the blinking display of the two versions of the table. The altered digits stood out like a toxic chemical label. Morris began swearing quietly in Hindi, Arabic and Mandarin. He then presented Raul with his ten files and asked him to check them. Raul noted that it took several minutes to format the data properly for comparison, but he started on one of the mid-sized files with the title, “A Comparison of Smelter Purity Samples from L2 and L1 for Metals of Economic Significance”. Morris commented that this report had been sent to an officer working to develop a video exchange program for linguistics students on the Moon and Mars.

  Wang, Thieu and I huddled on the other side of the room. It would have been polite to open the stream to the Admiral first, but Wang insisted that we contact the Admiralty Communications Centre first, to get them started on decoding the messages. He anticipated a long, awkward conversation with the Admiral once we opened his stream and did not want to delay the work with ACC unnecessarily.

  There was, in fact, a long and awkward conversation with ACC about whether Thieu was requesting to register for the next ACC course on Battlefield Communications at this singularly inappropriate moment, what we wanted to do, why we did not have clearance from the Admiral for this project, why we did not pass the request to MI who were better prepared to handle such issues, why we had been out of communications over the past day, and why none of the other ships in Earth orbit had made contact.

  Wang finally ran out of patience and told the ACC operator that if we were not passed through to an actual officer immediately he would bring charges for obstructing a project of urgent and critical importance to the entire TDF. The operator relented in a huff and connected us to a junior officer in Secure Communications. Wang presented the Council code authorizing Ultra-Secret data transfers, which immediately frightened the officer into connecting us to a senior officer named Master Com Naranbaatar Tolstoy, who was authorized to receive the request and the data. We explained the issue of possible messages hidden in the economic reports. We briefly mentioned the problems with tokens and emojis, and our concerns about the loyalty of MI, then asked him to decode our sample file. He accepted the file, and a few minutes later chided,

  “Com Thieu, you were always one of our better students. This is a very primitive encryption, quite amateurish. The message was not in the binary version of the table, nor in the text version, but in the difference between them, which you could see with your own eyes. After that, decryption was trivial. Even with the resources on the Mao this should not have taken you more than an hour. Let us see, Classical Mandarin except for some identification codes in Latin characters and a date-time in Martian Global Time that corresponds to... two hours five minutes from now. As for the text, is this some kind of joke? Well, here is the so-called hidden message.”

  The first few lines read, “operation iron rain at <2357-03-06 08:20:00 UTC> all personnel wear combat armour critical personnel assemble in wind-proof houses assemble prisoners in public areas NR2L3 and SR3L3.” It continued with a few personnel deployments and an admonition to minimize civilian casualties.

  Morris had joined us. When the message appeared, he and Wang cursed sharply. Thieu replied, “Com Tolstoy, this is no joke. We have been extremely busy with glue bugs, emoji attacks and the Manila Bay. We will pass you more files to translate, all Ultra-Secret, all rated Extremely-Urgent. Reply directly to this office.”

  Morris handed her his ten files, and Raul began to pass over the sixty files he had collected from the Magellan and Kamehameha. After a few minutes, the agent at ACC commented, “In the file you first gave me, there seems to be a second message encrypted in the text that accompanies the table, but it uses a much more sophisticated technique and I cannot immediately decrypt it. Even for an economic report, the text is singularly impenetrable, bordering on meaningless. That is what drew my attention. I suspect it was constructed using a predictive text scrambler to hide the binary buzz of the encrypted text. It appears to have been composed using the standard library, so to translate it we will need to find the key, which is probably i
n a different document.”

  Raul raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  I had dealt with factions before, so interjected, “Suppose the poorly encrypted message is a subset of the original in the gibberish text. Would that allow you to deduce something about the key? This might be an original message and a local translation. Remember, the local people are amateurs in the art.”

  Thieu considered what I had said, translated it into a real query and passed it on to ACC. Even understanding that the intelligence game required both social and technical knowledge, I understood that Thieu was in a class of cryptographers that I would never enter, and she was still only a beginner in that opaque art. I felt humbled.

  Minutes later, the ACC agent replied, “Bloody amateurs indeed. With that clue, I found the key in plain sight in the file. The original message is twice as long and appears to coordinate activities on two different sites. The same start time, though, a little less than two hours from now.”

  He passed the longer message. It used code names for two sites, which we could guess were the Kamehameha and the Magellan.

  Wang suddenly took the time seriously. “We have to contact the Admiral and warn the fleet and the earth stations. Iron rain sounds like ordinance to me, and in two hours it is likely to commence. We must not be stationary targets when it happens, whatever it means. Do we have the streams for inter-ship or the Admiralty yet?”

  “Yes, Sir, that is why we called,” Thieu replied. “I am opening the stream to the Admiralty now.”

  Wang reconsidered, “Open inter-ship. We must pass a fragment of that decrypt. The captains of ships near the Earth understand the level of threat we face, but the Admiralty may not. We cannot risk a long argument.”

  He was hammering out a message. I glanced over, then looked away again, not wanting to carry an indelible image of another ultra-secret in my memory. Too late. The first part of the message read, “All ships. Defensive posture. Attack possible in less than two hours. Evasive maneuvers around nominal stations. Prepare to assist earth stations...”