Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  Whoever set her up for that attack wanted Mindy dead. In my gut, I now believed that she was probably not responsible for the terrorist attack, that she had been goaded into it. If so, we needed to protect her, to keep her alive. She might provide a valuable contact with her allies inside the Imperium. If they did not kill her first. If she was not assaulted by another emoji attack the moment she left the shelter of the Mao.

  One virtue of the new filter token is that you could send it to anyone whose address you already knew, or anyone nearby whether you knew them or not. I did not know whether the distance limitation was intrinsic or just a safety precaution. It was worth a try so I set the address to a generic “near-by” and sent the new filter, but as usual got no response. I tried sending a string of kisses to the same address, on the channel we used to open doors, but again got no response. Either the filter had successfully filtered them out, or she did not get them at all.

  Marin and Tran were tightening her restraints, including a neck brace, when she called out “Oldman, what are you doing? I can see a token and a string of empty messages. If you want to talk, talk, but do not waste my time with this harassment.”

  I had indeed been sending sweet nothings to Mindy. The Cripple and the Ghost were delighted to have made contact, but the Assassin (!) felt a pang of guilt because it seemed so sickeningly familiar to what I had done to her on Mars so long ago. I called back, as I clipped myself into a bed on what was about to become the floor, “Thank you Mindy. That is good to know.” But I did not explain anything more and I began to worry that I was leading her into a whole new world of betrayal and death.

  2357-03-07 02:30

  Rats from a Sinking Ship

  We left orbit gently, as would be expected for any ship pulling away from an earth station. After about twenty minutes, just when we would be entering the standard flight lanes, the acceleration jumped to something only a warship could maintain. The Mao was massive, but her engines were powerful and we maintained a full one-G for another twenty minutes. The ship slewed up, down and sideways before settling into a steady drive and finally dropping back to zero-G. I was guessing, but such erratic movements suggested some of the Martian fleet had tried to follow us as an unwelcome escort. There was no weapons fire, so we could presume no missiles were launched on either side. Wang presumably parted company with the Martians on congenial terms, but I wondered how he had justified the maneuver.

  It took almost a week to travel to the Moon in a freighter using the lowest-energy orbits possible and a miserly use of fuel. A fast attack ship like the Stingray could do it in four hours if it did not want to stop as it raced past. I expected that Begum in the Hammerhead would beat us by many hours. Even with its enormous engines, a battleship like the Mao would take half a day, assuming there were no further incidents requiring strange maneuvers.

  No order came allowing us to unclip and move around, nor did I expect one. It was unlikely that Wang would tell anyone outside the bridge if there were warships near our path. The stealth fleet must be in orbit somewhere outside the orbits of the earth stations; the rods they fired were difficult to detect and might arrive without warning. There might be other forms of stealth ships we had not seen, and it would be astonishing if no part of their fleet had been assigned to cover the Moon. There might be any number of surprises waiting for us.

  The prospect of half a day clipped onto the beds anticipating a possible attack was daunting. We could divert ourselves for a while with a snack and dinner. What we did with the rest of our time was up to us.

  Mindy groaned in pain. The heavy acceleration had been hard on her ruined belly. It occurred to me that she had never lived on the Earth, nor any place with gravity stronger than Mars. The climb up from Mars involved similar and even higher accelerations, but she had been healthy and well prepared for that. Many commercial passengers preferred to make the climb from the Earth sedated and even asleep; I remembered similar services had been available when leaving Mars.

  Marin and Tran unclipped and wafted over to tend her. They first put her back to sleep, then quietly discussed what was wrong. The only immediate problem was that a short section of one suture had reopened where one of the belts holding her in place had stressed the skin. There were many more sutures inside that had been stressed, but not apparently torn. Even without additional tears, her entire belly would be filled with pain. They increased her painkillers and reworked the straps to avoid further stress on the sutures.

  Valentino growled, “This is crazy. If we are going to make those kinds of maneuvers, she needs the support of a flotation tank.”

  Marin spat back, “She was in one with all this equipment beside it. She should have stayed in that tank with a surgeon to watch her if no marines were available. If the surgeon was busy, one of us could have gone. What idiot made the decision to bring her here?”

  Tran said, “I protested to Molongo when she arrived, but have heard nothing back. Is there anything more we can do for her now?”

  I listened very carefully as they discussed her internal condition. Having a grenade explode inside her stomach had destroyed most of the stomach, torn her intestines to pieces, and shredded her lower aorta. The half of the grenade that had not exploded had partially sheltered her upper organs. The left side of her diaphragm was a doily of muscle and the left lung had been punctured in a dozen places but her heart and right lung were still functional. The skin on her belly had been shredded and the muscle pulverized but were the easiest parts to regrow.

  From the outside, she was in fair shape, and the massive scarring on her belly would be easy to repair once the internal surgeries were complete. Her liver was regrowing nicely and she still had one functional kidney. It would be over a year before she would be able to eat regular food, but her damaged lung and muscles were healing. With luck, she would be able to start light exercise within the week, using a backpack containing an autofeeder to replace her ruined digestive system and keep her metabolites balanced.

  There was nothing more they could do while she was stuck in our room. Our next stop was the Moon, with excellent hospitals in most major cities and TDF bases. If we made no further sudden maneuvers, she would be fine, but they all agreed that the sooner they could get her into a proper hospital the better. She had a long recovery before she would be able to move around freely.

  They checked on Katerina next, who grimaced but was also well on the mend. One-G is tough on anyone with a belly wound, even worse as the ship swayed with the unexplained maneuvers, but the prospect of a fully equipped hospital on the Moon gave her hope for a smooth and dependable recovery.

  I asked over the comm whether now would be a good time to prepare a joint report on the Fairy Dust and got a surprisingly enthusiastic response. It seemed that everyone else had reached the same conclusion about our prospects for entertainment.

  Better than that, they had spent the time when I had been in the MI office productively digging through everything that was known about the Fairy Dust, the Hanuman, and the exodus of the Belter and Martian freighters. As the stations recovered from the emoji attack, reports had resumed and everyone on the earth stations became more cooperative, except, of course, on the Magellan and the Kamehameha. A fresh dump of files had arrived just before the Martian fleet, as the low-level officers grabbed everything that seemed relevant and sent it, regardless of security rating.

  There were some real zingers in the new reports. Someone had tracked the movements of the stevedores on the ESK who had loaded the Fairy Dust, and who had been released prematurely to help load the Belter ships in their panicky departures. Every one of them had disappeared from the station. They had apparently discarded the insignia that were normally used to track people and were required to open secure doors. The insignia were found in one of three warehouses that were packaging pallets for the Belters. We could presume that the whole team were now outward bound for the Belt. Some of the warehouse staff had also vanished.

  More curiously, the
re were many people on the stations in that period whose IDs did not match their genetic database records from the Earth. From the report, they had shuttled up from the earth using their own ID’s. How they had acquired false ID’s on the station was a mystery, but I was no longer shocked at the shoddy security. Most of the mystery people had been doctors, biologists and pharmaceutical designers on the Earth, attendees at the conference on space medicine. There were increasingly shrill demands from their employers and families for information on their whereabouts. If they had all emigrated to the Belt there were enough of them to start a small university, with enough left over to run the first high-tech factory in the Belt that was not a clandestine arms factory for the Imperium.

  Another report, cross-referencing the shipping containers with the contents listed by the original manufacturers on the Earth, revealed that the nominal cargoes on the Belter ships were nothing like what was on the final manifests. There were large, empty living spaces, which I expected were not actually empty any more. There were perishable foodstuffs far in excess of the needs of the crew. Packages of seeds that would not grow properly in zero-G. Basic kits for the genetic engineering of plants. Spare parts for industrial machines. Firing mechanisms for rifles.

  The last item stopped me cold. I had seen this before, and it was a symptom of much deeper trouble. They were not shipping stocks or barrels, nor even ammunition, just the firing mechanisms. I recognized the model, a simple, reliable gun that was popular amongst the region militias in underdeveloped parts of the Earth. The stocks, barrels and ammunition were all easy to make. Only the firing mechanism requiring precision machining. The Belters had been shipping the precision part without the low-tech bits they could make themselves. Thousands of them. Enough for a mid-sized army, but to a part of the universe where a stray bullet could puncture the vacuum seal around a room and kill everyone inside. Five hundred of them had shipped on the Fairy Dust alone.

  You did not buy that many weapons unless you expected to need them, especially when spare parts for factories and farms were so much more useful. Somebody out there was going to fight a war. Or, since the war was already starting here and it would be at least two years, maybe four, before these ships reached their destinations, they intended to continue fighting a war and did not expect another chance to resupply for a long time.

  I tried to imagine what kind of war they had in mind. If Belters wanted to obliterate an enemy, they could presumably throw rocks at them, big rocks, tens or hundreds of metres, maybe even kilometres across. They must have tons of weapons-grade uranium for bombs. Guns were anti-personnel weapons for one-to-one fighting at a short distance. Perhaps they wanted to occupy an orbital farm or factory without destroying it. Perhaps they wanted to defend such a facility. Perhaps they were pirates, planning an attack on near-Earth space. Morris and Singh had to know about this, soon, although it was no longer clear what use the could make of it.

  There was one report from the Moon, where a Belter ship had loaded and left a few days before the exodus from the earth stations had got under way. It too had a false manifest. The true cargo had been a miniature, self-contained electronic parts factory, which boasted that it could make enough different parts to build another copy of itself. It would be the first such factory in the Belt that we knew about.

  I wondered if they would have competition from whomever in the Belt was making control systems for the Martian ships. Those systems could not all have been built on Mars, unless they had been falsifying the reports from there as well. That thought made me feel foolish the moment it flashed through my head, and I wanted to kick myself. Of course, they were falsifying their reports. Besides, the Martians surely did not need new control system factories. The Belters probably did and had bought one that they imagined could duplicate itself. The factory could make electronic parts, but they probably underestimated just how hard it would be to reproduce the mechanical parts of the factory, which had very precise specifications for both material composition and machining.

  We had intercepted several such orders being shipped to Mars but had not worried too much about them because operating the factory required so much beyond the bare components that the whole project was beyond the capacity of Martian industry. I worried briefly that an unscrupulous merchant had sold the Belters a pretty toy that they could not use.

  Then we found the bio-lab, a big one shipped in many small pieces from every earth station. I remembered the conference on space medicine that had lost so many participants about the time of the Fairy Dust. Were they all heading to the Belt? Why? And especially, why now, when the Imperium seemed to be taking control of everything? There was something wrong that I did not understand. I really, really wanted to talk to Singh about conditions in the Belt.

  Of course, the so-called Fairy Dust we had seen was a Belter ship, presumably returning to its home in the Belt. The actual Fairy Dust had been repainted as the Outer Tramp and was last recognized en route to L1. It may or may not have had its original crew. We could not tell because the crew had been on the Kamehameha and the repainting of the two ships had happened on the Khrushchev. So far, we had no idea when the new Outer Tramp had left the Khrushchev or where in L1 it had gone.

  The report suggested that the ESK Port Authorities had recorded the real Outer Tramp using only its registration number, a common practice for ships that had no names, or had names in the pidgin languages of the Belt that could not be pronounced by anyone else. It was a routine source of trouble for Station Security in the often-abusive relations between the smaller Belter merchants and Earth-based corporate sales reps on the earth stations.

  I recalled one crew who used as their ship’s name a three-verse poem in a Maori-Magyar pidgin written in a script derived from Cyrillic. The Belters had insisted on using the full name of the ship on all official documents; the local sales reps tried to substitute a nickname that implied the ship was a flying lump of excrement. Both names were so unreasonable, brawls erupted in spacer bars across the station. Peace was restored when the Port Authorities demanded that the official name be used so that they could load the ship and clear it out of the berth it was occupying.

  When the nicknames were less offensive, the Belters would boil with resentment but sign the documents so they could leave quickly. So long as the business of the port was not delayed, the Port Authorities would use the registration number internally and refuse to get involved in disputes amongst the merchants. A nickname like “Outer Tramp” skirted the edge of offensiveness but had clearly not delayed loading the ship.

  There was so much more to do, but I had no idea whether we would ever be able to find the answers. By now I was no longer really interested in finding answers to these very local questions. I was far more interested in where the departing ships were going with their bizarre cargoes and, most importantly, why they were going there.

  I brought up the rough draft of the Fairy Dust Incident Report I had been working on and we started a group editing session, adding the bits that everyone else had investigated while I had been otherwise occupied. To avoid waking Mindy, we used the comm for discussion, a circle of people silently staring at the writing on the walls, adding figures, tables and appendices. We worried about station security, then rewrote the text completely because the Imperium had been the source of insecurity and was about to dictate new rules for station security in ways we could not predict. We worried about factions, then discarded the section because even Sergei had no idea which factions had been involved. Very few of the names we had heard matched the factional names in use during his tenure on Mars. Mostly we worried about the Belt and added sections with open questions about their population, economy and social organization. A second section listed the cryptic messages each departing ship had left with the TDF and no one else, with some speculation about their significance.

  The room was full of silent labour, when Marin abruptly cleared her throat and asked, “Mindy, how do you feel?”

  Mindy was awake and
reading the list of messages. The title on the top of the page was “Fairy Dust Incident Report”.

  She ignored Marin’s question and said, “It was not the Fairy Dust, you know. It was called the Outer Tramp for convenience, but the crew called it something unpronounceable in a pidgin language from southern Africa. They called themselves Clan Kunene. They were not supporters of the Imperium – few of the wild Belters are – and mostly wanted to be left in peace.

  “I feel sorry for the bastards. They made the decision to rename the ship here and tried to warn me of something happening but would not tell me what in any language I could understand. I cannot believe they would pull a stunt like that just as the Imperium started to move. When they get home, Clan Vallis will have occupied all their mines, farms and factories, and any of them left alive will have been castrated, mutilated and enslaved. If only they had let Clan Syrtis handle everything. Syrtis volunteered to send a fake freighter in, pretending it had come from one of the near-Earth asteroid mines. They would have put a recorded warning on board and packed it with a small bomb, like they requested. The whole thing could have been handled discreetly and without publicity, yet could have passed the same message. Whatever the hell it was they were trying to say. Damn Belters. They never do anything right.”

  Then she shut up and would not say anything more, no matter how hard or gently we asked. Without displaying it on the screen, I added a recording of what she had said as an appendix. Now I really had to show this to Singh.

  Through the comm I asked Marin whether she thought Morris and Singh would be waking soon, but she felt it unlikely that either would rouse much before we arrived at the Moon, and if they did might still be a bit loopy from the painkillers. I asked Katerina to be certain that Morris and Singh read this report, which went far beyond any of our previous speculations about the significance of the Fairy Dust Incident.