That night, facing Justice in the hellgate under the sand, I accepted the Mission. It was my only reason to continue to exist. I would live for it, work for it, and ultimately die for it. With that acceptance, the Path and my personal Hellgate became real to me.
With a jerk, I returned to the present. I knew my Path ended at a Hellgate, but it was not this hellgate, and the whisper I heard was not sand, it was an air vent. The fear came crashing back and I tried to curl into a fetal position but could not budge inside my armour. With the fear came the screaming, and I found myself broadcasting terror to everyone.
Sergei, “Honey, I am home.”
Raul, to everyone over the comm, “Do not accept that transmission, whatever you do.”
Toyami, “Brian, forgive me! I made a terrible mistake.”
Sergei again, “Brian, my commander, you are not alone. We are your team and will help you get through this. Could you turn off your transmission?”
To my own surprise, I did. I was still quivering with fear and wanted to curl my paralyzed body into a ball, but I was aware again, if not rational. Leilani hated me and my world was burning around me. She would leave me and I would face Martian justice alone. No, not alone. Raul was here, and Toyami and Sergei. And Begum, who hardly knew me but had given words of solace. I was in a ship racing through the ranks of our enemies to rescue a man who might help me or might leave me dead. I was no longer in the hellgate, but was still paralyzed, unable to tell which direction I could turn. Unable to see the Path.
The ship lurched sideways and back, then slewed, boosted for a few seconds, slewed back and boosted some more.
Raul, “Cute, that is a new one. Needle chaff. Stops radar but hardly affects lasers. And not just one, but seven clusters. We are hiding behind one of them, but they left a real missile behind the middle cluster. And there it goes, off to the Clan Qinghai Mining ship. Oh, that is a nice missile. They will have a hell of a time targeting it even with lasers. It looks totally out of control yet is still closing on its target. And bang, it detonated about half a kilometre from the ship. They will have no casualties, but I bet they were just hauling in the sensor arrays.”
A message from Begum, “If you want to send that file, you might as well do it now. They know we are coming, so radio silence serves no purpose any more. We will have to refuel at Thule Station, but I think we can be there this time tomorrow. Tell Brian that we will do everything possible to help him recover.”
Then I started crying like a very young Kid. I was a traitor, a criminal, the enemy of everything alive in the Solar System. I deserved to die. I did not deserve friends.
Begum, “Stay clipped in. It will be exciting for another hour or so.”
We were in one of the TDF’s newest, fastest and most deadly warships, screaming straight towards the heart of one of the clumps of bogies. The rational part of me knew the clump was very loose. L2 was a huge region, almost eight million kilometres from the leading to the trailing edge. Guarding it was hard. There were tens or hundreds of kilometres between each ship in that clump, and even that was widening as the Martian ships bolted out of our way. I wondered what surprises they had left in the middle, then realized that we had an experienced crew who knew far better than I what was likely to be in the middle.
My tears settled down to a whimpering. I could remember being brave but could not manage it any more. I could remember being calm but was too scared of everything to even try. I could remember prayer and meditation but focussed instead on every passing detail around me. I could remember the warmth of love but now felt mostly desperation and loss.
Toyami, “Brian, please try to relax. We would like you to sleep for most of the next day, and I know how to keep it dreamless. I cannot do it until we can unclip, so if you need to talk, we are here. Please do not talk to Leilani, who is as fragile as you are. Raul will take care of her. Talk to Sergei and me. Use the comm.”
I replied, “I think my medical monitor is out of meds.”
She answered, “I am sure it is. You burned through every drop while you were dreaming. You should have had a complete refill at the Moon, but we did not have time to even fetch the meds. I did a partial refill from the ship’s stocks, but it will all be gone after last night. They need to keep some in reserve for the rest of the crew. I will try again at Thule.
“The meds are part of the problem, but only part. I will try to get you into the infirmary here when we can move again. I am really sorry, Brian. I cannot believe I did such a stupid thing.”
Raul, out loud again, “I have holographically encrypted the whole video, which took quite a while. I am going to send parts of it to ten different people I know with instructions to pass them to Admiral Wang’s office. I will tell them to send the parts to Katerina, and NOT to Evgenia.”
I had nothing to say. I could never have said it anyways. Now it was impossible. Just like it had been before, but for different reasons.
But it was weird. I did say it. In my dreams, through the comm. I wanted to say it out loud. But I could say it. What did that mean?
I asked Sergei and Toyami, “Why can I say things in dreams that I cannot say out loud?”
Sergei laughed, slightly bitterly, “That is the way it is with dreams. Mostly random, but sometimes you work things out in your dreams that you cannot even think about awake. The ones we saw last night were spectacular.”
I felt really scared again. “Were they all bad dreams? I only remember one of them where everybody died, and then Leilani and I were on a spaceship going to the Belt. She is a nice lady, but she is scared of me. Was I a bad boy?”
They did not answer for a moment. Toyami sounded scared too when she asked, “Who are we talking to?”
I thought about it. “I do not know. I am just a Kid. Was I bad?”
Sergei asked very gently, “Can you tell us your name?”
“No. I cannot say it. They will not let me.”
Toyami asked, “Can we speak to the Student?”
I thought about that one for a while, too. “No, he does not want to talk, and I do not want to let him. I am scared. Are you scared too?”
Toyami said, “Yes, sometimes. Not so much right now. Would you like to hear a story?”
I nodded, but I did not think they could see me. “Yes. Are you a Kid sometimes, too?”
She replied, “Sometimes. Not for quite a while. Shall I tell you about what it was like for me as a kid growing up?”
She told me about growing up in one of the New Cities in the region of Japan Hokkaido. Her voice caught a few times, but she seemed to calm down as her story progressed. She spoke of her mother and father who were strict and quiet but very nice. She had rice for breakfast with egg on top all wrapped in seaweed, which I thought sounded yucky, but she said tamago was really good and I would like it.
She told me about going with her mother to a great, big temple, all painted red with a big Buddha inside. I remembered Buddha. He was a nice man. I had learned a lot from him. Or I thought I had. He had bumpy hair and never hurt anyone. I remembered he took his brother to hell when he had been bad, but he brought him back again and they were still friends. She said, yes, the Buddha was like that.
She told me about another temple, high, high up on a mountainside, so high the clouds blew slowly by below it. The temple was very quiet, surrounded by mist and trees. She was not allowed to run or play but had to sit quietly while the grownups meditated. Meditation was sitting quietly and she did not like it. There were monkeys near the temple, and they came when they thought people would give them fruit to eat. You could not play with the monkeys because they would bite you and steal things out of your clothes. But they were more fun to watch than her mother and father in meditation.
She said she had gone back to that mountainside temple just before she left for space, and had prayed hard then, real prayer. The temple had still been peaceful, and the chanting of the monks very restful, but her own heart had been pounding with excitement. It was hard
to meditate when you were scared or excited. She was going to space, to work on the big earth stations, and wanted to say a final goodbye to her favourite temples with a prayer or meditation in each place. She had tried so hard to sit still, so hard to pray, but was too excited and fed the monkeys instead.
She sounded sad then and said she was not a very good Buddhist.
I remembered prayer too, with my Mom or with Diego’s Mom, sometimes even with our Dads, but they had to work too much and only came on Sundays. We went to the big church with the cross on top and all the statues of saints. They had a nice statue of Mary, who looked a little like Leilani, but with different clothes and hair and face. Not much like her at all, I guess, except kind and sad. I remember that Jesus was sort of like Buddha too, kind and gentle and he went to hell and came back. He had promised that even bad boys could be forgiven if they said they were sorry and promised to be good.
I wanted to ask again if I had been a bad boy, but they had not answered the first times and I was scared that meant I had been a very bad boy. I did not know whether Jesus would forgive very bad boys. I hoped so but was too scared to ask.
She told me about getting dressed in her first kimono for a tea ceremony. I asked what a kimono was, but as soon as she started to tell me I remembered lots of different kimonos that I had seen. They were very pretty, and I was a little jealous of her pretty clothes. She told me not to be, that kimonos were hard to walk in and you could not play at all.
The ship started to bounce and jerk, slewing back and forth. There was a bang and a hull breech alarm started to sound, but it stopped quite quickly. Then we felt the lurch of missile launches and the sharp jerk of lasers, four, six, ten firings. The ship slewed hard and there was another missile launch.
Raul, “Five pirates, claiming the glory for Clan Qinghai Mining, failed to withdraw and tried to close in as we slipped through. They launched full attacks with missiles, lasers and rail guns of some kind. We got hit in the side from one of the rail guns, but the breech seems to have been small and has been sealed already. Damn handy having marines and engs in the halls with patching kits. All the incoming missiles were destroyed by our lasers. We outran one of the pirates entirely, and if I understand the codes, we had permission to kill the other four. We launched two light missiles for each pirate. Three of the pirates are disabled, but the fourth got hit with three missiles. One of the missiles for the third ship retargeted when that ship was disabled; it slipped in while the fourth ship was blind from the first two detonations. They had their missile bays open, ready to launch as soon as they could see again and took the hit in one of the open missile bays. Multiple explosions, several megatons together, so that ship is hot vapour. Pity, it was almost a clean run.”
I wanted to cry for the dead crew, but they would not let me. The Ghost and the Assassin were very bad boys, but they both said it was well done and would not let me cry.
I wondered a bit at that. The Kid was normally a twelve-year-old smart aleck, but now I felt like I was four and just getting ready to go to school. The Kid almost never cried, not since I started school. Maybe it was the Cripple who wanted to cry, but they would not let him either. I was very confused.
Begum called to us, saying that we were in the clear and had negotiated a free passage to Thule, where she had arranged to refuel.
I heard Toyami unclip and come over. Even in her armour, she was a pretty lady. I would have liked to see her kimono, but if it was uncomfortable she probably did not wear one very often. She asked me if I was ready to sleep. I asked if there would be bad dreams, but she promised no, there would not be any bad dreams.
She was nice. I liked her. I said, “Yes, please.”
Good boys say please.
Don’t they?
2357-03-11 03:00
Blank Slate
I woke up in an infirmary, clipped with light straps into a bed but otherwise unrestrained. I had not slept without restraints since we started using the opaque helmet, nor was I was wearing the helmet. No pajamas, no sheets, no covers of any kind. I felt strangely free, not frightened, not worried, not desperate, not committed to do anything. That sensation had been rare over the last twenty years and did not last long.
I looked around the room. Doctor Toyami was there with Sergei and a strange man who looked at me like I was a lab animal that might bite. Toyami was watching a monitor on the wall and Sergei was watching the strange man.
“Hello, Brian. My name is Alexander. I am told you are even stranger and more disturbing than I am. I doubt that is true, but if so, I will tip the hat I am not wearing to you. As you can tell, I have added myself to your Banshee group. Rest easy that your communications have been secure but be warned that the group itself was not originally. As soon as I became aware of its existence, I added myself and moved the whole group to a new and vastly more secure part of the database.
“That means, by the way, that I have recorded all the communications you have been making and have ensured that they are not part of the normal record, not even the logs. If anyone cares to dig so deeply, they will notice a discrepancy in the volume of traffic versus what was recorded in the logs. The very big transmission yesterday was hard to cover, so I disguised it as a transfer from my own office. I do large transmissions from time to time, so I doubt anyone will challenge the record, but I will not be able to provide that service in the future since I have joined you in death. Try to keep your transmissions within reasonable bounds or pass them through other channels.
“If there are any messages you think I need to read, please tell me. Otherwise I have too much to do to be bothered.”
I replied, “So you are Pantocrator? I feel strange right now, like I have forgotten my entire purpose and am drifting. Doctor Toyami, last night I was four years old. Why am I not scared now?”
She looked over at me. “Welcome back, Brian. Please call me Luciana. I am hoping we are past the Doctor Toyami stage. We have recharged all your medical monitors. The old one was the same model that has been in use for forty years, but Alexander updated the operating system to the latest version. That allows biochemical stabilization from both units, although the new one is much easier to access and will be used by default. You should be emotionally and physically much more stable now.
“We did not dare to mess with the application code, which shows the signs of at least five programmers, one of whom Alexander says was pretty amateur. It will require some study to know what we can safely change.
“Oh, and Brian? Please be careful to use the comm with the Banshee encryption while we are on this ship. It is the only way to talk without leaving an easily read record. Our cover on this mission is so deep that the crew are forbidden to see us or hear us and must vacate the halls when we pass. Even Begum, although that is a foolish restriction now.”
Alexander added, “I did make one small change in your code. There was an array that clearly partitioned your memory into age-based segments. There is code that allows you to choose which segment you want to remember best, which persona you want to be out of your past existence. That code allows conflicting priorities with multiple personae contributing at once. I do not think that was intentional, because it was in the amateur section.
“Did you write that section yourself? I believe I met the psychs who handled your case. They were popping heads themselves but fanatics on keeping their code clean. I am sure those twits would never have written such bad code.
“Anyways, we can talk about that later. Right now, what is important is that I extended the array to add one more persona who has very little access to your memory and is only a summary of your most recent persona. That is the only one allowed to run right now. You will be yourself, but we will have to allow access to your memories and open your access to the other personae carefully over the next few days to prevent you from becoming unstable. Luciana was quite upset about your physical condition and for some reason feels personally responsible for almost killing you. I would like the story
, but not now.”
Toyami (should I really call her Luciana?) said, “Right now we want you to do some supervised exercise while we monitor your physical state. Your heart was weak before and nearly failed under the stress of the last two days. Even being in a coma was bad for you. I am really sorry for what I did, but I suppose you cannot remember it. Later we will need to talk about it, and I will need to monitor you while we do.
“It may surprise you, but I have personae too, and I think everyone does. Just not as pronounced as yours, and not enforced by a medical monitor. I would really appreciate it if you would call me Doctor when you need me to be a doctor, and Luciana the rest of the time. You may not remember what this means right now, but I want to be the doctor to the Banshees. I want to be one of you. Would you let me be a Banshee? You do not need to answer until you understand the question, but I would like you to remember the question. We can talk about it later too.
“Do you feel steady enough to move? We have some pajamas ready when you are and have reserved an exercise room.”
Steady in zero-G has nothing to do with falling over, but if you are not steady you are at risk of crashing into things as you move and some of your bodily functions might not be normal. It is always hard to tell how steady you are while you were clipped into a bed, so I reached over and unclipped the strap holding my left shoulder. So far, so good. I had reached directly with my right hand and no tremor. I used my left hand to undo the strap on my right shoulder. Still OK. I tried to bend at the waist to reach my ankle straps and nearly puked. Not ready yet.
Lord Banshee- Fugitive Page 29
