Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  Acting Admiral Wang presented each crew member with a distinguished service medal for prominent courage in battle and promised them the best possible care during their recovery. Those from the Mao who had volunteered for the trip were given an extra bar to attach below the medal for exemplary service. They all knew what had happened to the Manila Bay, yet volunteered for this dangerous service. (I watched the reporter franticly texting questions to her office, probably asking what the hell happened to the Manila Bay, and why had they not heard about it already? It was impossible to hide the loss of the ship, but I expected they would get a bland report of an accidental detonation that was under investigation.)

  Then they were passed on to the Martian officers, who congratulated them on a remarkable display of courage, skill and wisdom in the best traditions of spacefarers everywhere. It had been an honour to fight beside them. (More text questions, leading me to wonder how many people were yet aware that a fleet of Martian warships had arrived, let alone that the TDF and Martian fleet had fought the pirates together.)

  The officer from the Port Authority welcomed them to the Moon on behalf of the entire Lunar Council and people. He omitted any mention of the Terrestrial Council.

  As the last crew member passed down the line, Begum herself stepped out to join their procession. All the crew had been wearing plain white pajamas, bearing only the insignia of their former service, and Begum herself had chosen the same plain whites in solidarity with her crew. Wang had apparently decided not to wait for the completion of her next command but removed the temporary captain’s insignia and personally replaced them with those for a full captain.

  Astropolitan to perfection, I could not have done better myself in my short time as Cap. That woman had a great career ahead of her if she survived long enough to enjoy it. I hoped Raul was ready for her because I thought he might be marrying a hurricane.

  She climbed aboard the hospital bus with the rest of her crew, but we knew she would be diverted at the hospital and sent on to the Columbia for immediate departure. As the bus door closed, I heard Raul say one awestruck word, “Wow.” Maybe he understood.

  The reporter then read a prepared statement issued from the Admiralty celebrating this new era of cooperation between the TDF and the Imperium that promised to end piracy in space forever. The words sounded fine, but the poor woman looked completely baffled. So far as most people knew, the Imperium had not even existed twenty-four hours ago, yet the TDF was swearing eternal friendship.

  We watched the prattle of news as the Earth slowly woke to the fact that the Universe was different from everything they had been taught, and far more perilous. We felt totally cut off in our tiny room, without even the hope of an update from Morris, Singh, Molongo or Wang. All we could tell from the public news feeds was that things were changing rapidly and in ways that had caught almost everyone unprepared.

  I was not surprised that the Moon was reacting more adroitly than the Earth. The news reports left me with the impression that the Moon had been almost completely untouched by the emoji attacks outside a few offices of the Terrestrial government like the Admiralty. The Lunar Council was therefore able to understand that the Martian Imperium had arrived with sufficient force to obliterate their entire population. Regardless of what Earth-bound politicians believed, the Moon had to come to terms with the Imperium and had to do it quickly.

  Of course, I also sensed advice from Morris and Singh, who had surely provided an additional few hours of warning and advice to the Lunar Council. I expected that they had been updating the Lunar Council since they woke up on the Mao. I wondered whether anyone would listen to them in the future, without the authority and influence they had commanded as senior ministers.

  Two hours later, we lost the news feeds and the acceleration alarms started to sound. The Columbia was a FAS, a fast attack ship, almost all engine and fuel with a minimal crew and light but deadly weapons. It carried a large complement of small missiles, twice the usual number of lasers, but no rail guns.

  Everything about the design of a FAS spoke of speed and power. The ion drive extended in a big tube along most of the axis of the ship. The drive in a freighter was ten metres long; in a FAS it was forty, reaching almost to the extra-thick meteor shield. The reactors in a freighter could sustain life in the ship for two years, four years for ships destined for Mars or the Belt. The reactors in a FAS could power the drive at two-G acceleration for hours and could recharge the laser capacitors in a few minutes. A fully loaded FAS could run out of reaction mass for the drives and continue fighting for days with its lasers before it depleted its reactors. In such a ship, life support was a trivial extra load that could be turned off during combat for the incremental increase in power that might prove critical.

  We tracked ion drives using the glow of ionized mercury, but most of what spewed out the back was plain old rock or water that had been roasted into plasma. At the head of the engine, an injector fed a small flow of mercury into an electromagnetic mixer that heated the mercury into a vapour and spun it into a tight donut of plasma. The reaction mass was fed in a stream down the centre of the mercury plasma donut, where it was vaporized, ionized, and magnetically guided into the acceleration tube. A complex and dynamic magnetic dance hammered the plasma and flung it backwards, pushing the ship forward in response. What emerged from the magnetic nozzle at the stern was a blast of plasma so hot and moving so fast it would have classed as soft cosmic rays had it been natural.

  It was hair raising to think that just across the hall from our room there was a tube containing plasma hotter than the core of the Sun. I had a hard time deciding whether that was worse than the reactors supplying all that power, working a few metres behind our room and feeding that power up plasma conduits along the walls of the tube.

  I had seen a picture once of the exhaust, taken by a radiation-hardened camera mounted on the stern to study the dynamics of the plasma. A slow leak of mercury ions formed a low-speed sheath around the core of the exhaust, and it was the emission lines from the mercury that we normally looked for as evidence of an ion drive in operation. The exhaust from a warship under power extended as a slowly expanding cone for over a hundred kilometers before its internal turbulence and magnetic instabilities twisted it into a tangled bubble of hot gas that ultimately blew away in the solar wind. Looking directly down the beam, the mercury glow would have appeared to human eyes as a fuzzy dot in the distance behind the ship. Unfortunately, the magnetic nozzle leaked high-energy particles that fried the camera in a few hours. No human could perch where the camera had been mounted and live to tell of it.

  Unlike our departure from the Earth, our acceleration ramped up from zero to two-G in less than a minute. In its prime, the Hammerhead could have done the same thing. The push continued for fifteen minutes, and I could just detect a long gentle slew that set in about the time we would be dropping off the radars of ships in lunar orbit. Then everything went quiet and we dropped back to zero-G.

  In principle, L2 is only four times farther from the Earth than the Moon, and if all the objects in the L2 complex sat at L2 itself the trip could be completed in a few days without hurrying. In practice, the factories and asteroid mines occupy orbits that trace loops around L2. Those orbits had been chosen so that the asteroids would leave the vicinity of the Earth and not return for tens of thousands of years if a disaster prevented regular station keeping. Although I approved of this policy completely, it did prolong our trip by a large factor.

  As its name implied, Thule Station was in one of the outer orbits, almost five million kilometres from the Earth. Running flat out, a FAS could travel the quarter million kilometres from the Earth to the Moon in about four hours, eight hours if it had to stop when it got there. It could make a one-way trip to Thule Station in two days but would need to refuel before it returned. Even the TDF rarely wasted fuel so extravagantly. More realistically, it could reach Thule Station in less than a week with enough reserves to fight a battle and return. Of co
urse, we would probably not travel in a straight line towards a destination that was supposed to be a secret, so even pushing for higher speeds we might take most of a week each way.

  I did not believe in time estimates with so many uncertainties, especially when we knew that pirates were infesting even the space inside the orbit of the Moon, and that Martian Intelligence agents were searching for Leilani and myself while we lay helplessly in the Columbia. This trip might take anywhere from four days to a year to complete.

  Regardless, it had been a long, stressful day, leaving us in need of far more sleep than the brief coma during the transfer had provided. I thought briefly that it was good we did not have to live on any particular shift, since I no longer knew which one I should be on. Toyami took the risk to pass around some ration bulbs. When we were done, she collected them equally quickly and dumped them back in the bin by the door. She fitted my opaque helmet around my head and we all drifted off to sleep.

  2357-03-08 00:00

  To See Ourselves as Others See Us

  I did not remember any of my dreams, but my neck was sore again when I woke up. I waited for everyone else to start stirring, meditating with the same peace I had felt while buried overnight in the Martian sand. Which is to say, not peacefully at all, an intense mental struggle to fight past the uncertainties we faced, to find a way forward that would end the war before it escalated into something unstoppable.

  Raul, when he woke, released me from my captivity and brought up the internal log of the ship’s activities. I had not known that was even possible for anyone outside the crew, but Raul was an intelligence agent within military procurement and knew the kinds of attacks that criminals had used to break into TDF equipment in the past. Some had been fixed, some were fixed in the latest equipment but were still waiting for deployment to older machines, and some were still awaiting consideration. Considering that MI was responsible for making the fixes, I felt totally insecure regardless of whether flaws like this had been addressed or not.

  No one else had yet stirred, so I passed on the warning from the ACC operator on the Mao that Raul had better treat Begum well or he would be answering to the whole crew. He laughed quietly and told me not to be ridiculous; the crew of the Hammerhead would have beaten him to hamburger long before anyone on the Mao had a chance.

  He then looked serious and pointed to the acceleration traces and the laser records. Twice in the previous six hours we had undergone sharp maneuvers, and once the lasers had fired. We had taken off our armour when we woke in zero-G, but we both put it on again.

  Our moving around woke everyone else, so we checked and discovered a new set of ration bulbs had been supplied while we slept. They were all identical, standard field rations with generic meds. That worried me until I saw Toyami pick up a bulb, inject it with a custom mixture of meds, and mark it with an individual, but meaningless, glyph before handing it to Sergei. She repeated the process for each of us.

  We ate silently until Sergei suddenly put his bulb down and said, “You know that with the new filter we can pass images over our comm units? Did you realize that these are generalized images that include time? We can watch videos. In fact, I bet we can connect these to our visual cortex and see through each other’s eyes. Anyone else want to try?”

  I asked, “Do you mean we can project to other people, or could someone be spying on us through our eyes right now? That would probably require a new token, so I think we should turn off any channel that still allows tokens, like the one we used to open doors.”

  We all looked studious for a moment, then Sergei announced, “Yes, it is not a top-level option, but if you drill down I think it is in the same interface we used to send the audio signal. And it is not just visual data that are available. Practically anything we can sense can be included in the stream. They must be using heavy compression, so it would be a low-res signal, but... I am willing to give it a try if anyone is willing to receive.”

  I rejected that experiment. “First, let us try to send it to one of the monitors, then record to a file, and only if the file looks safe will one of us try to read the file. If this place is like the Mao, the controls for the wall monitors should be over here – no? – or over there? Yes, other side of the door. Gotta love the military for almost standardizing things, hey Raul? I have opened a channel, so try sending now.”

  A slightly hazy view of the world appeared on the wall, moving as Sergei looked around. He murmured, “Let us try this...” and his voice emerged from the speakers.

  I said, “Oh no. This could be as bad as the emojis,” and my voice was repeated with rapid echoes that blended into a hiss.

  Sergei winced and turned off the audio. “We probably do not want audio when we are in the same room as a speaker, and I should have known that already. Sorry. Did you save that to a file?”

  I had, and I dearly wished I had the tools that were available in the ACC offices to scan the file for emojis and tokens. We brought the file up in a text viewer to see its formal structure. Toyami scrolled it up and down, then pronounced, “This looks like a standard medical monitor file, only with big blocks of data from the visual and auditory cortex that we normally suppress. Now that I think about it, the medical monitors have probably been using a completely standard video format, the same one used in a theatre, customized only in the sense that it transfers medically interesting data instead of the sensory data. I do not see anything obviously wrong with it.

  “I am curious to see how it plays, the world according to Sergei.”

  “No way!” I exclaimed, “we need you to give us our meds, and I need you to keep me stable. Same with all of you. There is no one in this room who we can safely lose to a silly experiment.”

  But it was too late. Sergei was already playing his own file to himself.

  “Hmm. Weird,” he explained, “it is hazier than I remember, but it feels and sounds the same, only muted enough that I can still see all of you when I have my eyes open. If I close my eyes, it is almost real.”

  “Sergei, you are our guinea pig,” Toyami said, “so I am going to try sending to you now.”

  “NO,” I cried, but they were not listening. Sergei closed his eyes and got a bemused smile on his face. Toyami gazed around the room, then pinched her own hand, hard.

  “Oww,” Sergei said, popping his eyes open. “Not excruciating pain, but enough to know that something happened.

  Toyami got a completely mischievous look and announced, “For the sake of the experiment, I would like to broadcast to you all. I will go into the exercise room and try a few things. Tell me how they feel.”

  She went into the other room and closed the door, but we all knew exactly what she was doing because we could see it, hear it, smell it and feel it. She removed her armour, which mostly felt familiar because human bodies are almost identical except for size, and of course except for the guy and girl bits that did not translate completely naturally as the suit came off. She then cleaned out the septic system, taking a good whiff of the contents, and then

  “NO!” the whole room chorused together. She ignored us, stuck her finger in the liquid contents and licked it, commenting “Salty, acrid, a bit pungent, reminds me of our coffee substitute.”

  I had the unpleasant sensation of smiling when my own mouth wanted to retch. Then she pinched her nipple and turned off the transmission. A few minutes later, she returned with the same mischievous smile.

  I did not return the smile. “I seriously wish I did not know about this facility. You had bloody better keep that opaque helmet tightened on my head at night, or you are going to find out why I have been waking up with a sore neck. I do not remember my dreams, but I doubt they were anywhere near as pleasant as the Rape of the Banshees.”

  That sobered everyone for a while, so we went into the little exercise room and took turns exercising on the two machines. While we were waiting, Leilani came beside me and privately asked, “Why do you still call it the rape of the banshees? You know we have all
forgiven you. You tried out a new part of our communications system, and if you had not we would all have been driven mad when the real emoji attack happened. I almost wish you would do it again, only awake and as a participant.”

  I shrank within myself. “My Love, I have not forgiven myself. I used a weapon against you without knowing what it did, and without permission from anyone. And I did it to get my own way, not for your benefit. I still do not even know why I made the choices I did in my sleep, although the Ghost seems pleased with the result. You should fear that. It was a rape and the rest of me burns with shame.”

  She reached over and tried to take my hand, glove in glove. “I wish you would at least hold me. After that Martian Intelligence officer, I have never been free of fear, and I could really, really use a good hug right now.”

  But the screaming started in the back of my head and I could only grate out, “Leilani, please stop. If I held you now, I could not let go, and you cannot be with me when I do what I know must be done. The Ghost can look the Martian officers in the eye and banter, but when I remember the risk I put you through my soul turns to dust.”

  And then I had to stop before I collapsed into a fetal position again. Even Leilani’s arms around me would not have broken that fit. Having her in this secluded room, and therefore far away from prying Martian eyes, still seemed right even to the Ghost, but I could feel a hellgate close by and still did not know how to start my trial without destroying everyone else. I pulled my hand away and retreated to the other side of the room, knowing the hurt that I was causing.

  Sergei and Toyami were here to learn what they could about me, and boredom soon set in again, so I tried telling everyone about my life as a Student.

  “I lost all my status as a big shot when we entered the witness protection program, but I did not lose my ambition to be a spacer. I had to learn a new language, fast, but I accepted the work because real spacers had to master multiple languages. The schools in the new region were more advanced than even the enriched program in our old place. I was glad in one way that I no longer had the distraction of the gangs, because the work required to catch up with my peers was overwhelming.