Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  Begum, “Why is he not paralyzed with fear? I would be, if I had to experience that at night. The TDF needs to look at these, to anticipate the kinds of trouble we might face. I do not think Brian ever attended the Tactical School for Space Warfare, or the scenarios would have been even more ghastly. I did and can imagine ten more ways each of those scenarios might have failed, faster and even more violently. I told him when we first saw the invasion plans that I expected to die in battle. If there is any truth in those scenarios, I do not see any way to avoid it.

  “Have you noticed that the core of the trouble is not Mars? It is always out in the Belt. The Imperium started in the Belt, where the money is and the factions have valuable assets to protect. They fight murderously for each vein of ore on Mars. How much worse must it be when whole asteroids are at stake?

  “He is warning us that the Imperium cannot be alone. We always suspected that the pirates came from the Belt, but never pursued the clues. If he is right, there are many bases, one or more for each major faction, and all at war with each other. Is that what the Fairy Dust and the Hanuman were trying to say? Is that why they needed our help?

  Raul, “Yes, remember when he warned us about waves of pirates? The Imperium seems to be a recent development, so most of those fleets must have been constructed by the factions for their own protection. If they built enough ships to subdue the TDF, even more must be devoted to factional warfare. He anticipated that the TDF might be too debilitated, and the Martian fleet too disorganized, to control piracy after the invasion. These visions are even worse, with all the major factions fighting for military supremacy.

  “Oh, he is awake at last.”

  I opened my eyes and looked at a room full of people who were doomed by my failure. It was impossible to save them. I had lost the Path.

  I looked at Leilani, but the love was gone, replaced by horror. I was a monster, and for the first time she saw the truth.

  But who was I now? I did not feel any of my usual personae, only the dead hopelessness of failure. I could not save her, I could not leave her, and somehow, I must. It was impossible.

  Raul, “We need to stop recording and package this file for transmission, Ultra-Secret, Banshee encryption. Send it to Katerina. I believe she has seen enough pain to recognize what to do with it. We will put her at risk sending such a large package, but I believe we must. Morris and Singh need to see this, ASAP. Do NOT send it to Evgenia. I think it might destroy her.”

  Begum, “We cannot send it right now. We will be approaching the next fleet of bogies in a few hours. If we start to send the file now, it will advertise our position and they will be on us like a flight of hornets. I need to know what is happening. I should be on the bridge. Oh, Raul, I do not regret a minute of our love, but how am I going to report this to Admiral Wang? I was not even supposed to know you were on the ship.”

  Raul, “Later. That is personal and we will deal with it together, but later. Right now, we are on a mission, and that mission is critical, far more important that I realized. Molongo thinks that this Pantocrator fellow might be able to heal Brian, and right now he needs healing more than ever before. To think that he has been carrying this alone for so long.”

  Sergei, “He knew from the start that he could not save Leilani by himself. Nor could she save herself, because neither of them was strong enough to endure the required separation. It is our job to give them that strength. He said so several times and now I think I understand why. He needs our help, and we have his orders. How fast can we get to Pantocrator?”

  I said, “Do not bother. It is hopeless. I have lost the way, you see. It is impossible.”

  But Raul came over, clasped my cheeks in both hands and spoke directly to me, “I will not let you betray her.”

  He looked back at Begum, and called, “We must ask the Allfather to heal our hero. Take us across the Bifrost to Valhalla at all speed, or Ragnarok will be upon us. Ride, my Valkyrie!”

  Begum blinked a few times and seemed not to recognize the reference but understood what he meant anyways. Before she left, she came over to me, took my cheeks between her hands, just as Raul had, looked me in the eyes with an expression of gentle pity, and said in a sweet, soft voice, “Last year we read an ancient English poet who was heading off to war. Like you, he needed to protect his lady, and wanted to reassure her that a battle-lust had not replaced her in his heart. Every soldier understands something of your dilemma, so I think his words might help you find your way again.

  Yet this inconstancy is such

  As thou too shalt adore;

  I could not love thee, Dear, so much,

  Loved I not Honour more.”

  Then she turned and headed out the door, calling for an immediate update on the situation as the door closed.

  Before Begum had even had time to reach the bridge, the acceleration alarms began to sound. There was a mad scramble for everyone to get back into their armour. Toyami came alive and clamped my helmet on me again, then slid into her own armour and joined everyone else in clipping into bed. The floor surged up beneath us as the ship slewed into a new heading.

  I could not understand why we were in a hurry. Begum’s poetry meant something, but my mind slipped over the words without gripping them.

  Raul, “I have asked permission from the Wep to monitor the weapons logs. With the permission of our Cap, she has allowed it, and added the stream from Nav to Wep so we can know something of why the weapons are being used. Then she told me to shut up. I will pop them up on the ceiling.”

  Why did he care? One bomb was as good as another. We were all going to die, so sooner was better than later.

  The nav screen showed a display of bogies near our flight path. There was a wall of them, and if I trusted my interpretation of the display we would pass it in an hour at our new speed. Why the rush right now? The bogies were gathered into three clumps and our course ran through the gap between them, clearly a trap. I wondered idly why Begum was flying us into a trap, but it did not matter. Die today or die tomorrow, and today would be faster.

  The ship lurched left and right.

  Raul, “Three chaff missiles, running ahead of us.”

  The ship slewed, and boosted hard, then swung back and boosted again. Zero-G again. Our new course ran right through the densest clump of bogies. A crazy route.

  What did Raul say? About not letting me betray her? But Leilani feared me now and would hate me soon. And then she would die while I watched. I could do nothing to stop it. It was all impossible and I did not care anymore.

  Sergei thought I was romantic. Some romance. It had never worked for me personally and now led to death for every living human. I could no longer muster the energy to feel love, or hate, or even concern. I could manage despair, nothing more. Soon the pain would start and I could not prevent it.

  Toyami thought she had made a mistake. Now they knew the truth. They would all die horribly. So would I, and after that everyone else. When I was dead I would be inanimate matter and would not care. Why should I care now?

  I was in the hellgate already and I did not care about anything anymore. Oddly, I remembered being here once before. Not on the ship. In the hellgate. In the very jaws of death. Where was that? No matter.

  Raul, “Missiles, five, from two bogies. Nav says to target the one that displays as blue, which identified itself as Clan Qinghai Mining first and the Imperium second.”

  The ship slewed but did not boost.

  Raul, “Iron rain coming from the side, targeted on the chaff ahead of us – ah, UV bogies off to the side. That must be how they knew without radar.”

  There was a sharp jerk, then another, but no hull breech alarms. A disconnected thought drifted through my head that fast attack ships were fast and carried thick meteor shields up front, much sturdier than even those on a battleship like the Mao. That must have been why it was even possible for the Mao to brake the Hammerhead by butting the meteor shields together.

  The ship slewed back
to its original orientation, but the course had hardly changed.

  Raul, “Four detonations at the clumps of chaff, roughly one megaton each, poor yield given the amount of uranium. Looks like one failed to explode. I would have recommended charges against any company that sold such poor-quality bombs. Our chaff missiles have blasted out another big burst. Wonder if they will be suckered by it.”

  Other than Raul, everyone in the room was silent. I listened to the low hiss of air from the vents. I rarely even noticed it, because it was so quiet compared to the chatter of our voices. It reminded me of the sands of Mars.

  I remembered each afternoon in the deserts, dumping the white-hot, molten heat core from my armour, recharging the heat dump with fresh, cold sand, and then burying the old core and myself deeply in a sand dune. Amongst our fellow agents we joked about our undead existence, but it was simple self-preservation.

  Powered armour produces a lot of heat and glows like a fire in the cold Martian desert. After we lost control of space, the Martians would launch surveillance satellites looking for heat sources that might be the Governor’s agents in armour. Even before then, an IR camera on a hill could spot the heat from the armour anywhere on the valleys and plains below. On the run, we blew a plume of hot air into the thin Martian atmosphere to carry away the heat and carried a shoulder-mounted parasol that was chilled to the ambient ground temperature. It helped, but the excess heat had to go somewhere, so it was dumped into the sand in the core. Several times each day, it was necessary to eject and bury the hot core and recharge the heat dump with fresh cold sand. Overnight, when I was buried unmoving beneath a metre of sand, a single core sufficed.

  The parasol was a poor disguise by day, useless in the intense cold of a Martian night. It got cold even before the sun set, and stayed cold well after the sun rose, so it was safest to remain buried during the chill of the morning and evening. On a solo mission, I could only work for nine hours of each Martian day and spent the rest of the time deep beneath the sand, sleeping, meditating, and planning.

  I would turn up the microphones to listen to the hiss of sand drifting down the face of the dune, or the footsteps of approaching enemies.

  In the early days, I could remember caring as I lay beneath the sand. Worrying as things went wrong. Crying, sometimes, after I lost a good friend. Hating the traitors who had been friends until they changed sides. Wondering what Governor Ngomo thought he was doing, when so many of his policies seemed designed to cause rebellion. Hardening myself to obey the next set of orders. Slowly dying inside.

  It was under the sand that I first conjured the idea of a path and the image of a hellgate. They had been quite separate concepts at the time. I use to visualize my missions as branching paths. Each brick along the path was an action to complete, one after the other leading to the goal. Contingencies and failures that I could anticipate created branches in the path. A hellgate was the image of a swirling vortex of darkness that I used to mark a disaster at the end of a branch. It was just a planning tool, an icon to flag a branch that I should avoid.

  The longer the war continued, the more arbitrary our orders seemed to become. I found myself killing people who I was sure were innocent of wrong-doing, who I suspected had offended some rival, jilted a lover, or had tried to stop someone’s get-rich-quick scheme.

  Regardless of my suspicions, I trusted my commanders. I believed that Ngomo was better informed about the real issues than I would ever be. I was a weapon in his hand, an assassin ready at his command to kill each noxious weed of treachery that threatened his government.

  During the chaotic fighting, justice for accused traitors was impossible; revenge was the only way to preserve the honour of the government. Martians understood honour and knew that revenge in defense of honour was fully justified. I felt as one with the ordinary, honourable people of Mars. Governor Ngomo was the most honourable, and therefore the most vengeful, man on Mars.

  As the Assassin, I had never cared who I killed or why. I was nobody’s judge. I had my orders and I was good at what I did. That was the only honour I needed. The sound of drifting sand was the sound of not caring, of obedience to orders.

  The people of Mars cared, even when I did not. In secret, they debated their strategies and found ways to counter every new tactic I tried. There were more and more hellgates in my plans, until one night I realized that every single branch of the path led to a hellgate. I was out of viable options. And those hellgates were always personal disasters for me, not just failures for the Martian government or a particular mission. I realized during that terrible night that I was already in one of my hellgates, damned whatever I did.

  I had been staggered. For the first time in years I stopped to think about who I was and how I had reached this ghastly place. I refused to judge other people because I did not know enough about them, but I could judge myself. I had been a spacer, and I had believed passionately in the loving, peaceful life that entailed. On Mars, I had become everything I despised, everything I feared, as passionate in my hatreds as I had ever been in love. I teetered on the edge of despair, wondering if I should just vent my air and stay buried forever under the sand.

  I hated myself for the thought. Suicide would be an honourless admission of my guilt, but also that I was too cowardly to face justice. It would be dereliction of duty at every level. My mission would be left incomplete, but it would not save the cooking club I had been sent to massacre. Someone else would take up the mission.

  As my self-loathing grew, I recognized I had been lying even to myself. I did care, and I wept at night for the helpless innocents I was murdering. That night I had already wept for the cooking club, for the children I had slaughtered the week before, for the old man who had dared to complain that his pension was being stolen. The depth of my evil was measured by the tears I shed for people I still intended to murder.

  I did not deserve an easy death. In my own heart I knew that justice required me to accept the full punishment. I needed to make a public confession, to tell everyone what was wrong. I needed to face the executioner, so that the honest people of Mars could see that justice had been done.

  It was the least I could do, but far more was required. Justice demanded that I make restitution for my crimes, even though I could never restore the dead to life. I could, perhaps, prevent more innocents from dying. I could bring real justice to Mars.

  Too late, I re-evaluated all the orders I had obeyed, using at last the good sense that Legal Intelligence had tried to teach me. I thought about the flow of money, and the web of political influence, who profited from the violence and whether they could ever be brought to justice. It was obvious in retrospect that the trouble started high in the government and corporate leadership. I had thought my mission was to preserve a strong, stable government on Mars for the ultimate benefit of the people, but it seemed that Ngomo did not share that mission and was lurching from crisis to crisis, lashing out at imaginary enemies while his real enemies closed in around him. He needed to know the truth.

  It was unlikely he would even be able to learn from the truth I had to tell him. In the lonely darkness under the sand, I finally understood that Ngomo had betrayed me, and not just me but every agent left on Mars, the people of Mars, and the Terrestrial Government that had sent him.

  I could expect no support from Extraterrestrial Affairs in this self-appointed mission. People I trusted had told me that the senior bureaucrats who ran the Martian branch of ExA were reactionary ideologues who lusted to avenge the Incursion. They seemed to accept Ngomo’s reports uncritically. Most were career bureaucrats who refused to sabotage their prospects for promotion with a multi-year posting to Mars. The few who came were attracted by the high pay and rarely left the Governor’s Compound to meet the angry, hostile citizens.

  To them, the Martians were just faceless enemies. They had never shaken Martian hands over a deal, danced at one of their parties, admired their art and music, laughed at their jokes. They had never wept beside the
memorial for a dear friend killed in the mines. They never understood that Martian education was a bad joke that had taken people bright enough to become spacers and forced their children to grow up as servants and manual labourers. They never cared about the working conditions, about the oppressive justice, or the corruption that stifled Martian life at every corner.

  I had done all those things, knew all about life on Mars, yet had still committed the atrocities. I owed a debt of justice to everyone, on Mars, on the Earth, even in ExA. They needed to know what was happening, why Mars was so angry, and who was responsible.

  To rescue the people of Mars from the hell created by Extraterrestrial Affairs, Governor Ngomo and the Martian aristocracy, I would have to aim higher than I had previously dared. I was already a traitor to the people of Mars and to the Terrestrial Council, just by being obedient to Ngomo. Now I would have to become a traitor to Extraterrestrial Affairs and to Ngomo himself. Neither side would ever forgive my crimes.

  By that time, I was sufficiently senior to be aware the Earth was sending a fleet to end the insurrection. Beyond that I did not know their plans. Almost certainly, they did not intend to install an honest, benevolent government on Mars. My time was running out as the Counterstrike fleet assembled, preparing to sweep across the void separating Mars from the Earth. I had to discover its real purpose. I would have to penetrate the Governor’s Compound and gain access to planning documents far above my security classification. If I did not approve of the plans, I might have to switch sides and join an enemy who I knew would never accept me as an ally.

  The new mission required a path longer and more elaborate than anything I had ever considered. The first step was to convince my commanders that I had slaughtered the cooking club, but without killing anyone. The second step would be to find and execute justice upon the scum who had asked for the murders. After that, there were dozens of intermediate steps that I knew would be necessary, separated by gaps in the plan that I would have to fill in later. I could anticipate hundreds of steps in disconnected segments. It was no longer possible to imagine the path as a simple branching tree of steps. A better visualization was a bricked Path crossing rolling hills of grass, disappearing behind a hill each time there was a gap. Each step within the larger Path required a smaller sub-path, and I mentally distinguished them by painting the bricks in the Path bright gold. At the end of every branch I foresaw the same Hellgate and knew it was more than just a metaphorical entrance to death and damnation.