Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  He continued to compose, but I studiously ignored the rest. He passed the message to Thieu for encryption and asked for it to be sent to every TDF ship in Earth orbit. He composed a similar message and sent it to all six earth stations. He grunted that his second message warned of possible enemy plots to execute political prisoners on the earth stations, a war crime by anybody’s standards. That might spook the traitors on the Kamehameha and the Magellan into thinking we had already read all their messages, and might, just might, discourage them from carrying out the threat implied by the instruction to assemble prisoners in the exposed public parks, away from the airtight rooms.

  Morris nodded, then asked if adding his authority would make the conversation with the Admiral easier or harder, given that he was nominally in an infirmary on the ESK, and whether it would be useful to pretend he was somewhere else than here. Wang thought for a minute and agreed that Morris should probably not be present but needed to be available for advice on short notice because the conversation with the Admiral was likely to become nasty. I volunteered a corner of our room for his use and suggested a dedicated comm stream both ways so he would not have to speak out loud.

  Thieu set up the temporary stream with a random delay on his responses to disguise his location. I could see the sweat spreading as she recognized what she was doing, without the authorization of the Admiral, and even in defiance of his authority, protected only by obedience to her captain and a very senior minister in the Council.

  Raul looked completely impassive, like a block of frozen granite, and I wondered if this was one of his own reactions to stress, with his impulsive passion for Thieu as another. His tale of life on the Moon showed more sensitivity and more sense than I had witnessed today. I suggested he accompany Morris to our office and act as a go-between with the rest of the Banshees. He nodded curtly and the two of them left.

  With just Wang, Thieu and myself remaining, Thieu opened the channel to the Admiralty and Wang asked to speak directly to the Admiral, on an Extremely-Urgent priority, waking him if necessary. There was a pause, much longer than was warranted by the light travel time to the Admiralty office on the Moon. The reply came back as plain text, reading, “The Admiral is indisposed at the moment. Please call again later.”

  2357-03-06 07:00

  Admiralty

  Wang stared at the improbable response. No officer would ever send such a message, under any conditions, to the captain of a TDF battleship in the middle of a crisis.

  This was no coded message, but Thieu read its meaning before either Wang or myself. Very quietly she said, “All the senior officers are demented and the office is being run by the low-ranking administrators who did not merit the latest comm units. The Admiral and his senior staff probably each have a dozen more encrypted streams than we even know about, hammering them with madness.”

  Without asking for permission, I called for Evgenia to come immediately to the MI office. She had more experience than any of the rest of us in handling administrative staff during an emoji attack.

  While we waited for her arrival, Wang issued his own orders to the bridge to commence evasive maneuvers. Within moments, sirens wailed in all the corridors, and the Mao began to accelerate. Down was always vaguely towards the floor, but swung forwards and backwards, and from side to side, as the huge ship began to dance around its nominal position in a random series of motions. Fortunately, the motions were not hard or fast yet; I had never enjoyed the thrill rides at the fair and had not enjoyed acceleration training any better.

  Evgenia did not arrive when expected, and after a few more minutes I called Raul to ask if she had left yet. He replied no, that she was terrified by the sirens and pitching of the ship. More importantly, she would not leave Katerina, whose stomach was still recovering from the gunshot, and who was feeling ill from the irregular motion.

  I called Katerina and asked her to put on a brave face because the Admiralty was full of demented officers and was being run by the administrative staff. We desperately needed Evgenia’s experience in the MI office to help them cope with the crisis. I also called Leilani and Marin to provide her with counsel over the comm, using the new comm stream.

  Raul finally reported that after a few more hugs and kisses, and some extra meds to settle her stomach, she had been ushered to the door by Leilani and Marin and had left in the arms of her marine, pale as a ghost and still trembling with fear. To myself, I thought Raul was being needlessly dismissive of a woman who had no training in combat but had nevertheless performed well on the Deng and on the Manila Bay. Perhaps Thieu had set an overly high standard for him.

  A few moments later, she arrived at the MI office and I helped her clip into a seat. I explained that we believed the Admiralty was being tormented by emojis on streams that we could not see. Only the low-ranking staff were sane enough to run the office, and they desperately needed her help to rescue their officers from madness. I had called her because this was in many ways like what she had done in the Admin offices on the Deng, only this time remotely, in an office on the Moon.

  I watched as she composed herself, listening to gentle messages of encouragement from Katerina, Marin, and Leilani. She finally cut them off and said out loud, “Open a text stream to the Admiralty.” And then I watched a professional at work.

  She identified herself as a Banshee of the Terrestrial Council, addressing the citizens and servants of the Council in the TDF Admiralty. She offered warning and help in addressing the attack that was distressing their superior officers. They replied with a brevity that spoke of desperation, “How did you know? Are you an Angel like we saw on the Deng?”

  She agreed that this was just like on the Deng and asked them to identify amongst their number those who were physically and mentally strong enough to confront their senior officers with a message of peace and some practical advice. She passed them a reference to the news item about the young couple on the Deng, with the incentive that those two were to be awarded medals for their courage and service.

  Thieu told her that the Admiralty Communication Centre already understood the emoji problem but seemed to be unaware of trouble in the Admiral’s office. They had sent a certified hacker to clear the Admiralty streams the previous day. They had considered the task complete when the main stream from the Admiralty had cleared of emojis but had not heard from zim since. Thieu doubted that the ACC technical staff had authorization to enter the top offices of the Admiralty and wondered if ze might have succumbed to emojis on a personal encrypted stream.

  Wang passed Evgenia the necessary authorization codes to turn off the officer’s personal comm units with extreme-urgency, and Morris supplemented them with even higher Council codes. I gave the same advice I had given Leilani about entering the MI office on the Deng: they should call in sailors or even marines to supply force whenever it was needed.

  I also mentioned out loud that Thieu was a candidate for membership in the Banshees. Evgenia asked her to investigate why the ACC was unaware of a major crisis in the rest of the Admiralty. Kicking myself for not having thought of this myself, I passed a request to Wang and Morris to authorize her appointment and begin the investigation. Wang immediately agreed to a temporary assignment while the problems with the ACC were resolved and Morris approved her addition to the team.

  Evgenia explained to the staff in the Admiralty the problem with the comm units, passed them the reference to the Council message that had been distributed on the Deng, and to Leilani’s much more detailed public announcement from MI R&R. She then told them that ACC had already addressed the problem on the main Admiralty message streams but were probably not aware of the most sensitive streams used only by the inner offices of the Admiralty. She also explained that MI could not be trusted in this circumstance and might be the source of the contaminated message streams.

  She then asked them to identify those who could be trusted to carry sensitive messages, regardless of their security clearance. To make it safely to ACC and back, they mig
ht need an escort of sailors. I noticed that she did not mention marines in that part of the message, probably understanding that there were inter-service rivalries at stake. Every large corporation had such rivalries and she had seen the process at work in the Mao.

  Wang interrupted briefly and excused himself. There had just been a faint and diffuse radar detection from what might be a swarm of objects incoming at super-orbital speeds. If there was no lateral motion, the estimated time of arrival was about an hour from now. He needed to be on the bridge to direct the fight and to coordinate what remained of the fleet in orbit. He promised to provide what support he could. I asked him to keep Raul informed as well. He just nodded as he pushed out the exit, springing off walls, ceilings and floors as the ship continued its evasive maneuvers.

  Finding sailors at the Admiralty armed and willing to obey secretaries without orders from their own officers was a problem, but Thieu offered advice on how to phrase the request so that it would not be rejected out of hand. She had listened to the action on the Deng while she had been working on the Excalibur and had seen what had been done to the crew of the Manila Bay. Her words supplied the correct note of urgency and the appropriate level of authority to catch the attention of the guards protecting the Admiral’s headquarters. She also recommended that they be invited in to see for themselves that the issue was real and not just an act of rebellion.

  Evgenia took in all this and rephrased it in the tone of a senior office manager, concerned for the safety and honour of her staff in a crisis. A few minutes later she reported that they had persuaded three of the sailors guarding the office to enter and see for themselves what was wrong. The office staff had barricaded the doors to the inner offices, as they had on the Deng, terrified by the screaming, angry fights, and occasional gunfire. The sailors pushed aside the barricades but went only a few offices in before returning with an officer begging them, “Kill me before the Masters come.”

  Another few moments later, she reported that one of the staff had followed the same process used by the young couple, gripping the officer by her arms, calling her by name and repeating the message from the Council that they had learned from Katerina and Evgenia. They had repeated it until she turned off her comm and collapsed in exhausted relief.

  Marin warned me that Evgenia was spiking with emotion again, and I could see her shoulders shaking. I told her out loud what I had said to Chandrapati, who was now Vishnuram, “Twelve times a day you can change the world for someone, sometimes for everyone.” I added, “It is true that the evil that we do can grow without limit, but it is also true that the blessings we offer can outgrow the evil. You did well.” The shaking lessened, but I noticed that through the whole episode she had continued typing messages of advice and encouragement, individually addressed to various members of the Admiral’s staff.

  Thieu began passing me links to translated texts from the documents we had sent to ACC. These included the larger documents that Morris had collected from within ExA, which had taken much longer to decipher than the first example. We still could not pass them directly over the internal comm, so I popped them into windows around the walls and began to scan down the text. There were plans to subvert individual Council members, plans to infiltrate whole departments, plans for assassinations – including the assassinations of Morris and Singh – and plans to organize a new military dictatorship for the Earth built on factions within the TDF and the regional armies. I felt sick and called Raul and Morris back to the MI office immediately. I also called Molongo and Singh out of bed. This could not wait.

  Marin called again. Evgenia was still highly emotional, but had stabilized, while I was nearing crisis levels. I told her I had called for help but could not tell her more. Inside, I was in turmoil, with the Assassin laying plans for counter-assassinations and insurgencies, the Agent struggling to identify the most critical enemies, and the Ghost gloating with a malignant sense of self-satisfaction.

  Then, mixed amongst the flurry of translated documents, Master Com Tolstoy sent a zinger, politely requesting the status of the Manila Bay, on which he had served and where he still had friends amongst the crew. He was puzzled about almost everything we had said and wondered if we were busy with a major war game that he had not been informed was in progress. Thieu immediately passed the message to me, with the comment “This is as bad as the response from the AHQ. How can ACC be so completely cut off from events?”

  Then, a few minutes later, “He does not know about the Laika or Fairy Dust incidents, either, and thinks the earth stations are reporting completely normal operations. He has not received updates from TDF HQ in the last two weeks, nor anything but routine reports from AHQ for almost three days.”

  I finally replied, “We can do nothing about TDF HQ while we are in battle, but ACC and AHQ are our current projects and we will need to have them fully functioning very soon. The staff in AHQ can access the archived news feeds from the Deng and would probably appreciate a call from ACC right now. We have the instrumental records from the explosion of the Manila Bay showing the radiation spike. That must have been detected on the Moon. See if you can use them to convince him that he has been deliberately isolated, receiving only false reports, then find out if the rest of the officers are similarly isolated.”

  She replied, “Already done. He is alone because none of the other officers showed up for work. When he tried to leave work yesterday, he was hit by a headache, confusion and nausea, so he stumbled back to his office and spent the night in isolation there. That attack may be why the hacker took so long to get from ACC to AHQ yesterday and quit before the job was complete. No one else has arrived in the office this morning.

  “He has now set up a script to complete the basic translations of the documents we requested, to be delivered directly to us when each translation is complete. He will look at the troublesome cases afterwards, but right now is going to try to call some of his colleagues to find out why they did not come in. After that he will try to contact AHQ, but it seems more important to get someone else in the office authorized to handle this crisis. I warned him that AHQ is sending a runner to request help and that reception was indifferent bordering on hostile to Cap Wang.”

  After a moment, she added, “He says the last two weeks have been like a small vacation, things were so quiet, but it seems that trouble was just being swept into a heap that is now dumping on them all at once. Never trust silence.”

  I decided to let her go to it. “Sounds like you are on top of things. Do not let him leave the office without turning off his private comm channels and filtering any that he leaves open. The ACC Eng staff already have the filters we sent yesterday. He should probably contact them next, before he tries to go farther or even looks at the news. Wish him luck. He may be the senior officer in charge of the entire ACC right now.”

  I lost track of what Evgenia and Thieu were doing when Morris and Raul arrived back. I showed them the texts plastered all over the walls. Reading was almost physically sickening as the ship veered from one bearing to the next, but Morris sped through the plans for a military dictatorship, grunted and moved on to the assassinations and subversion.

  He looked over to me, raised his eyebrows and said, “Go ahead, you are free to say it.”

  I blinked a few times and stammered out, “I beg your pardon, Sir?”

  He laughed, a bit grimly, “You can say, ‘I told you so.’ You know you have the right to say it.”

  I shook my head. “No, Sir. I had expected something like this in my rational mind, but in my heart, in my gut, I still believed the Earth would shrug off this attack and go back to its normal life.”

  Then he smiled with real warmth. “Douglas, you are right on both counts! The Earth is strong and will shrug off most of this. These are the plans of enthusiastic amateurs, full of bravado and fire, but weak on organization and resources. They will almost all fail, especially since we now know it is happening.”

  He looked over to Thieu. “Com Thieu, I thank
you for your most timely and capable insights and assistance. The whole Earth owes you a debt of gratitude, although I dare to say that you will receive scant benefit from that.”

  Then he was back with me. “Douglas, have you called Anastasia and Marcus yet? Yes? Good, they need to know about this and can now start the countermeasures they have been discussing. As for myself, I suspect I will need to hide for a while. Most immediately we need to send warnings to the people on the assassination list. We will need to do something for TDF Headquarters on the Earth, who will be dealing with multiple rebellions today, not to mention possible emoji and token attacks. That will be difficult, given the restrictions on our communications, plus the fact that this is intel from a nonstandard source.”

  During the emoji attack, TDF HQ had refused to make any comments. I asked, “Sir, have you heard anything from TDF HQ recently, especially since the emoji attack yesterday? The officer we have been talking to at ACC has heard almost nothing from them for two weeks.”

  “No, now that you mention it, we got no response, even when my office tried to call them directly. But two weeks? We have been at war for two weeks without knowing it? The Laika no longer seems like a terrorist action, nor even like a faction seeking private glory. That may have been the first attempt at assassination, which I note failed because they apparently did not know we had already hardened our shuttle. If we can stay alive, I am confident we can survive the rest as well. Agent San Diego, can you update us on what is incoming?”

  Raul shook his head gently, “Sorry, Sir, although you have a very high rank, you are not military. It is better if you do not know, nor even guess, how we reach our conclusions. Pardon, Cap Wang is calling me to the bridge right now. Forgive me, but I must go.”