Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  I asked Raul if he had anything to say, and he sent me a text file, asking if I thought it was acceptable. It was the most stiffly formal message I had ever read, the kind of thing you sent to a commanding officer in reply to an invitation to a mess dinner. I sent it back telling him to put some effort into it. He needed to encode a big hug and kiss in language that would pass a military censor. It was a challenge, but I was sure that he was up to it and that Begum could translate what he was saying.

  He set to work and fifteen minutes later passed me a much longer message that read very strangely but still seemed to be conventional well-wishing with lots of repetitions. He told me to format it with seventy-nine columns instead of the usual one hundred, and when I did the letters aligned to make a pair of smooching lips inside a big outline of a heart. I told him this was much better and would give her a pleasant diversion while she figured it out. I passed the message over our new channel with a note that it was from Raul and she should postpone reading it until she had lots of spare time.

  I was the Cap for a moment, happily matchmaking, and did not feel the slightest bit like apologizing.

  Regretfully I had to resume the discussion with Evgenia and Katerina. We now had four clean cases in which jurisdictional disputes would surely arise. We had:

  Mindy, an Imperial operative in an unknown service, who would want to return to Imperial service with her honour intact.

  The pirate crews, who had committed crimes against a TDF ship under friendly Imperial escort. The pirates would be taken into custody by Lunar Recovery, who made no judgements and would release their patients to whatever authorities they chose. Since neither the TDF nor the Imperials were likely to feel forgiving, requesting asylum on the Moon might be their best option. Evgenia and Katerina would have to scramble to get a system in place fast enough.

  The Fairy Dust team, who had committed no crimes at all, but would be condemned as Ghost Followers and executed if captured by Martian Intelligence. It was reassuring that we had established good relations with the Martian fleet so soon, but Leilani and I both remembered with fear the Martian Intelligence officers on the Khrushchev.

  Myself, a notorious criminal on Mars who would never be spared their justice, but who urgently wanted the trial to be held on the Moon regardless of where I was arrested.

  I ordered Evgenia to review the provisions of Martian Law at her earliest opportunity, to see why it was imperative that it apply only on Mars or through well-defined interfaces for criminal activities that crossed planetary borders.

  I pointed out that my case was special because I knew it was unavoidable, regardless of what anyone else believed. I knew I was asking her to reconcile a circle of impossibilities, a list of contradictory requirements. The intellectual and legal challenges were enormous, but she would be starting with a blank book, writing new law codes for a new era.

  Far more than the people of other planets, citizens of Mars needed to see that the crimes committed by the Ghost had been punished to the full extent demanded by Martian justice. Their outrage was real and fully justified. No prosecutor from the Earth or Moon would tolerate that judgement, so the trial had to be conducted and sentence passed by Martian prosecutors.

  I could not surrender to the Martian authorities. They would execute me on the spot or transport me to Mars. The trip to Mars was suicidally risky, given that we were already being attacked by pirates. I would also risk assassins, vengeful crewmembers, and summary justice on arrival. If I died prematurely, the whole value of the trial would be lost.

  Nor could I surrender to Terrestrial authorities. The Earth would never deliver a sentence that the Martian people would accept as just. Worse, it had its own grievances that might prevent the Martian case from even being heard. I could expect assassination, and the Earth would be punished for such a travesty of (Martian) justice.

  The Moon was equally impossible. They would not arrest me at all since I had committed no offences under their jurisdiction.

  Regardless, the Moon had the legal system necessary for my confession to be heard and believed. The Lunar Justice system would preserve my life long enough for the complete confession that Mars demanded but so rarely got at home. More critically, they employed Officers of Truth to monitor the minds of those giving testimony. The Officers would verify that I believed everything I said. They were not a substitute for physical and documentary evidence; testimony could still be wrong if the witness honestly believed it was true. Their purpose was to guard against con artists, fanatics, and cynics, who were often skilled at telling lies. I had regularly recommended that the Earth should set up a similar system, to no avail.

  The Martian people believed in personal testimony and confessions. The Officers would help me convince them that the horrors I described were real. I was guilty of every crime I committed, but I was not alone in committing them. Many were part of a systemic pattern of injustice that required reforms that the Governors would never permit, but the Imperium might.

  The great conundrum I faced was the absence of a precedent for a legal case to be prosecuted and sentence to be carried out under Martian Justice for offences committed on Mars, but heard in a Lunar court using Lunar procedures, after an arrest that might be made anywhere in near-Earth space.

  As I wound down, I realized that all four doctors had left their beds. Marin and Toyami were trying to console Leilani, who held her face in her hands and sobbed silently with wracking shudders. Tran and Valentino were trying to calm Evgenia, while Katerina held her hand and glared at me. Sergei hovered outside the protective circle of doctors, trying to confirm what I said about Martian law without making Leilani’s and Evgenia’s distress worse. I apologized and kept apologizing until they all told me to shut up. But I did not take back a single word.

  Against every fibre of her being, Evgenia finally accepted that the Martian Justice system had not been integrated with Law Enforcement and its predecessors for over one hundred fifty years and now ran on principles contrary to everything that the Earth held dear. She agreed to read the Martian legal code and consider ways to create the requested interfaces. But it made her sick.

  Marin finally arrived back, having successfully extracted the detonator and stored it in a bomb-proof, hygienic casing, awaiting forensic analysis on the Moon. Once their experiential and jurisdictional issues had been clarified, the surgeon had become quite cooperative and eagerly acted as her assistant. Ze was new and had never met that kind of improvised device before. Marin had extracted explosives both on the battlefield and from inside wounded or even hostile agents, a wealth of experience that ze was eager to learn and Marin was eager to put behind her.

  She was deflated to discover that she was now officially dead and all her career plans canceled. She tried to contact Molongo, but he was slow to respond and finally informed us that it was almost time for the Mao and the Hammerhead to break their kiss. We would disembark shortly, so it was time to bring out the opaque bags, enough for us and all our fellow fugitives. As we assembled the racks, Marin demanded to know what kind of kiss two warships could manage. We explained as best we could, wondering if the TDF would supply a video of the maneuver. We gathered the few belongings we carried with us, mostly our armour, external storage and the doctor’s medical kits, and bagged them for transport.

  The doctors would stay awake during this transfer but deemed it less risky to put the rest of us to sleep until we arrived at our destinations. We hugged and kissed as though we would never meet again, although the separation was less than three weeks. A huge wave of nostalgia swept over me for this cramped and angst-ridden place and the companionship that was blossoming within it. The last I saw of the inside of the Mao was images flowing over the walls of the soaring towers and winding walkways of Johannesburg, the enthusiastically multi-ethnic capital of Africa Highveld and reputed to be the most peaceful, graceful, civilized city on the Earth.

  2357-03-07 14:00

  Rude Awakenings

  We awoke in
a much smaller room. Dull grey walls, like our old room on the Mao, but with two doors. One was locked and presumably opened into a hallway. The other opened to a combined exercise/wash room.

  Toyami was the only one of us who was fully functional. She had turned on the wall monitors and brought up a set of news feeds, a luxury we would lose as we boosted away from the Moon. In one, there was a collection of talking heads on the Earth who were baffled by the events in space and mystified by the apparent lack of response from the Terrestrial Council.

  There were rumours of numerous dead from an unanticipated meteor shower that had hit some of the earth stations, although there were no reports of meteors on the Earth itself, nor on the Moon. Real meteoroid streams were big enough to encompass both worlds and did not target tiny objects like the earth stations. Scientific experts were openly dismissive of the possibility of such an event but refused to speculate about non-scientific alternatives.

  More interesting were the lunar feeds. One reporter was trying to investigate the people who had arrived in opaque bags and had been whisked to the big hospitals deep underground. The poor man was having no success, not even in finding how many had arrived.

  The spectacular rescue of the TDF Hammerhead was sensational news, especially among the many families with spacer and TDF affiliations on the Moon. Videos of the strange maneuver in which the mighty battleship Mao helped slow the Hammerhead as it approached the Moon were being flagged as the “kiss of life” and circulated widely.

  I looked long and hard at those videos. The Hammerhead was in terrible shape. The jammed laser pod stuck out and had apparently been hit by the pirates. It was torn into pieces on one side, and the weapons bay behind it had bent and partly collapsed as the Mao pushed hard against the front of the ship. The hull was half covered with black mats of bugs, obliterating the insignia and connection labels. One of the transports had been torn away, exposing the only airlock available to enter or leave the ship, but leaving ripped and bent metal that had been patched with foam to make temporary seals. The ignorant might believe that the visible damage on the Hammerhead was the result of a space battle, but no one in the TDF or the Martian fleet would be deceived.

  The Hammerhead reminded me forcibly of the Manila Bay, and my heart sank as I thought of poor Begum approaching that nightmare as her first command, knowing the remaining crew were half mad from the emoji attacks.

  Upon arrival at Inner, the main lunar station for ships from the Earth, the crew had transferred to a lighter for their initial decontamination. Leaving the Hammerhead, they had been forced to jump in their armour from the broken airlock into opaque bags held by the crew of the lighter. In the privacy of the bags, they were stripped, cleaned and issued new uniforms. The contaminated armour had been tossed back towards the Hammerhead. The suits clung to the hull by their magnetic boots, a ghostly army that rocked limply for a few moments before going still.

  The lighter had swung around the Moon and was now approaching the TDF launch facility at Orientale Tereshkova. I expected most of the crew would be quarantined for some weeks to be sure they were not carrying a new kind of bug within their bodies.

  The arrival of Martian ambassadors from a mysterious new political entity called the Imperium startled almost everyone and sent dozens of teams of reporters scurrying to their expert advisors looking for information.

  Some investigators, faster on the uptake and better connected than the rest, found the video of the trial of Governor Kigali. They made copies and aired them. The video had been classified, so their illegal feeds were shut down rapidly, but of course it was too late and the stolen secret began to circulate freely amongst the underground servers. The goodwill earned by the Martian assistance on the earth stations evaporated in the horror of the trial, and the coincidence of an inexplicable meteor shower with the arrival of a menacing fleet of warships began a new train of worry and suspicion amongst the commentators.

  Bizarrely, the Lunar Council issued an official note of congratulations to the Emperor Mao Shi Hongdi on his elevation to power and invited him to visit the Moon at his earliest convenience. Political leaders on the Earth were outraged and scandalized that the Lunar Council would usurp the proper functions of the Terrestrial Council and the Ministry for Extraterrestrial Affairs. Everyone was baffled by the silence from both institutions. None of the reporters had the faintest idea who the new Emperor was, or where he ruled. Several thought he must be a new singer or fashion tycoon, perhaps someone who rose to prominence on Mars but had been ignored in the larger world of terrestrial culture.

  The news from the Earth became more interesting with the shocking announcement that the Ministers who had been injured in the crash of the Laika had all died. They had seemed to be recovering nicely. Some had recovered from their coma, making reports and announcements that suggested they would return soon to the Earth. There had been great hope when a shuttle had returned from the Earth Station Deng with several ministers and their senior aides, but an equipment failure during the meteor shower had proven fatal to the rest.

  The deceased included Very Senior Minister for Extraterrestrial Affairs, Mahatma Morris, Senior Minister for Extraterrestrial Commerce, Anastasia Singh, and the Deputy Minister for Military Intelligence, Marcus Molongo. The bodies of the dead would be recycled in space, following the long-established practice of the stations. Their personal effects would be returned to their grieving families as soon as transportation could be arranged.

  Most poignantly, the office of Very Senior Minister Morris had organized a request for assistant from the incoming Imperial fleet, but they had arrived too late to save his life. Since then, there had been almost no word from the earth station Khrushchev, which was just recovering from the inexplicable meteor shower.

  The Ministers had ascended to the earth station Khrushchev intending to hold a meeting on Martian independence. Most of the other delegates at the meeting had survived the meteor shower but were trapped aboard the Earth Station Khrushchev until regular shuttle service resumed to bring them home. The blow to the Terrestrial Council was grievous, and the timing most unfortunate, since it coincided with the mysterious new illness that had incapacitated so many members of the Council.

  As a footnote, it was mentioned that several senior investigators from across the Terrestrial government had also perished during the meteor shower and would be greatly missed by their families and colleagues.

  The Earth-bound commentators were incredulous. Like too many things on this perplexing day, it was unbelievable that so many prominent people should die simultaneously from an unspecified equipment failure caused by an impossible meteor shower. No alternative explanation was forthcoming, however.

  Our attention swung back to the Moon when a live feed reported that the crew of the Hammerhead would be disembarking momentarily from the lighter. The dramatic rescue of the Hammerhead had prompted the TDF to allow a select handful of news channels access to the surveillance cameras in the docking bay. The reporter announced that the ship had been extensively damaged during a pirate attack en route to the Moon but had defended itself skillfully until the pirates had been driven off by the TDF Mao with the assistance of ships carrying the Imperial Ambassadors. There was a flatness in her tone that suggested to my practiced ear that she had been coached to speak of “Imperial Ambassadors” without expressing surprise.

  The reporter occupied a small box in the upper left corner of a screen showing the walk from the airlock door to a bus that would take the crew for debriefing and medical care. An honour guard formed up in a line along one side of the walk, splendid in their full-dress uniforms. A second party of officials lined the other side of the walk. I recognized Acting Admiral Wang, but there were also representatives from the Admiralty and from ACC, perhaps even from Port Authority. There were six officers in unfamiliar uniforms, who I guessed must be the Marshal and Captains of the Imperial ships who had escorted the Mao. They left one empty space beside the airlock.

  The air
lock door opened, and the reporter gushed over the heroic Cap Thieu who had volunteered to bring the stricken ship from the Earth to the Moon for repairs, despite the massive damage that had occurred in an accident near the earth station Gandhi. The entire crew, in fact, were volunteers, the survivors of the accident plus a few officers from the Mao. They had successfully fought off two pirate attacks without inflicting any casualties on their adversaries in the highest ethical traditions of the Terrestrial Defence Force.

  I almost gagged on that, remembering too well the ethical standards of the Counterstrike fleet. I could imagine TDF parents on the Moon embracing their children protectively as they heard for the first time about pirate attacks inside Lunar orbit, and an additional unexplained “accident” that had incapacitated a TDF ship and killed part of the crew.

  The camera focused on Thieu as she stepped through the door and swung immediately into the vacant space in the welcome line. She had spent fifteen hours with that crew with a thousand things to distract her, yet as each crew member emerged she greeted zim by name. She thanked zim loudly, clearly, and warmly for zer service, summarizing quickly the ways in which ze had been courageous, strong, and wise, working with zer team to save the ship. She welcomed each of them to a well-earned rest break on the Moon.