Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  Still, I had a flash of memory about the value of drama, and it was true that my own plan, my chosen route into the Hellgate, was deliberately dramatic. Besides, while the Martian Justice system had no need to hear about the Rape of the Banshees, in the final moment of damnation I might be able to confess privately about the Rape and complete the sentence by leaving my victims in peace.

  The Kid had wondered whether his grown-up-self would approve of what he had done. I could now give him an answer. I disapproved, but thought I knew how to satisfy justice.

  That final moment would happen in the Hellgate, and I had a Path to get there. That bothered me, intensely, because there was something wrong with the Path, but I could not remember what. It had been so clear just a few days ago, when we had transferred to the Columbia. Hardly anything had happened since then … except there was a three-day gap in my memory.

  Luciana had told me that a terrible crisis had occurred in that period. Leilani had been hurt and was now scared of me, but she still loved me and we had both survived. Leilani knew from the ESK that the Martian threat was real. It sounded like she was finally ready to walk away from me.

  It hurt, it hurt terribly, but it was a necessary Step. The Path was back, brilliant in my mind, with the churning darkness of the Hellgate at the end. The team would surround her with strength and carry her safely past the Hellgate. After I had completed my Mission, they were better trained to follow-up with their own missions under her guidance, creating a real future that did not end in a hellgate.

  I still could not see the whole Path, but that was true on every mission. I knew some of the Steps along the way and would have to adapt to conditions in between to reach the next Step successfully. I needed to preserve my own life just long enough to ensure that I could complete the Mission. I switched to the next exercise in the sequence and felt an additional source of tension drain away.

  Luciana and Raul had been watching me and the monitor with growing concern. As I reached my accommodation with reality, she looked puzzled and worried.

  Luciana To Raul, Me, “Can you tell me what just happened? You went into a period of rising turmoil, then seemed to come to some conclusion and calmed right down. Can I ask what that conclusion was?”

  I replied, somewhat glibly, “I was considering an incident that happened while I was a Kid that is surprisingly relevant to my current condition. I am more Martian than I thought.”

  “What?!” She was not pleased with that phrasing.

  To Raul, Luciana, “I am sorry, that phrasing was very ambiguous. What I meant is that I better understand my own motivations for some of the decisions I made on Mars. Even as a Kid, I was willing to use violence to settle issues, just as I did on Mars. You learned early to be kind and gentle and have become one of the Earth’s best people. I did not.”

  Luciana, “Flattery does not work with me, Brian. It hurts a bit that you would even try. Can you tell me what triggered this round of philosophy? You must have remembered some event.”

  I was not trying to flatter her – I really meant it. But she had not yet been able to forgive herself, so I passed the issue in silence.

  Instead, I told them about Ramirez and Zoe, omitting any mention of Lucille, focussing on the beating and how the pep-talk from the thugs had been more effective. I drew the connection to the Rape of the Banshees. That the subsequent events had worked to our favour did not excuse what I had done. Justice required that I make restitution. I had been so distracted by the rising crisis that I had never had a chance to even try, and by now it was unclear I ever could. I was a man without honour and had been since I dedicated myself to the Governor’s cause on Mars. But in this one thing, for the sake of the team, I desperately wanted to make restitution.

  She shook her head gently.

  Luciana to Raul, Me, “You are as bad as Leilani. The two of you right now are being wildly melodramatic, and I wish you would both tone down the angst. You were a kid when you beat up Ramirez and you were asleep when you ran a trial run of emojis. I refuse to call that a rape, and Alexander believes there is an easy technical fix for the vulnerability.

  “Still, it seems to be eating at you. If it remains an issue when we get back to the Moon, I will call a meeting of the team to discuss appropriate restitution.”

  Raul had been hovering like the TDF beside an earth station, but now he intervened.

  Raul to Luciana, Me, “Brian, do you remember the advice you accepted before Alexander and Luciana opened your memories?”

  He waited, to force me to do the thinking. I had promised to be gentle with myself and to make no decisions. It was good advice, but it felt wrong.

  But what had Luciana just said about Leilani? Suddenly I was riveted and a spasm of pain ran through my belly. “Doctor, Raul, what is wrong with Leilani?”

  Now she looked vexed.

  Luciana to Raul, Me, “You addressed that question to the ‘Doctor’ and you know I cannot discuss another patient’s details. But you also know Leilani, and you know you are in the infirmary recovering from a near-death experience. Think! How do you imagine she is doing? And, no, you cannot see her. Nor will I pass messages. I have suppressed all your memories of the last three days because of the severe trauma you both suffered. We will try to restore those memories before we arrive at the Moon, but only when I believe you are both stable enough to avoid a recurrence. And, to be clear, it was a mistake I made, so when you are both well again I am the one who needs to grovel before you. Think about that when you are considering your guilt regarding the so-called rape. We make mistakes, we learn what we can from them, and if possible, we move forward.”

  Raul to Luciana, Me, “Brian, be as hard-core rational as you can be. You know you are flying on one reactor right now. Leilani is not here because you cannot deal with her, and neither can she deal with you. Pure reason may help you get past that, panicky emotions will not. Let us deal with the facts as they arise. Can you put yourself back in that mindset?”

  Luciana to Raul, Me, “Are you still the Ghost? Or have you switched to a different persona? Your reactions are becoming wild and not rational at all.”

  That was a good question. And she was right. I was not being rational. Who was I now?

  I thought long and hard about that and realized that I had been acting like several personae. The rational part was still the Ghost, but the emotional aspect, my shame about the Rape and my fear for Leilani, came from the Cripple, and the self-destructive bitterness came from the Assassin who had no respected authorities to give him orders. Was this what I was going to be like when I was integrated? Or was I changing randomly, making me unstable?

  Then I thought seriously about what Raul had just said and put the Ghost back in charge. Recognizing the problem, the Ghost gave an absolute COMMAND to the Assassin to obey every word of the Advice until told to do otherwise. The Cripple was commanded to settle down. Leilani was safe; we had been told so by people we trusted and we could only endanger her by acting irrationally on fragmentary evidence. Besides, she was the wisest person we had ever met and would work out for herself what needed to be done once we stopped causing her grief.

  Raul to Luciana, Me, “Brian, that was freaking weird to watch. Are you back under control now?”

  I nodded, feeling the Ghost in complete control again, so he continued. “You told us about your life as a kid, and Katerina recognized the gang war that started a regional war. The episode is quite famous in her profession. She and Evgenia brushed up on the details and told the rest of us, since it was important for our understanding of who you were and how you got that way. I do not want to interfere with your original memories, but if you insist on raising the episode with Ramirez, Luciana agrees that I should tell you a few more pieces of background that you might not have been aware of in your youth.

  “You seem to have beat him up just a year or two before the regional war. The corruption in your town was bad, but not compared to other cities in the region. When the town request
ed more police, the region was burdened with a rising crime rate everywhere, and other places had priority. Even so, they had provided both more police, and better trained police than before. The gangs were getting wary about provoking them. You imagine that the thugs were gentle with Ramirez because you had already given him the required beating, but their restraint was mostly self-preservation. It was bad when one kid beat up another in a fight, much worse when gangsters killed each other in the streets, but utterly inexcusable for gangsters to attack primary school children. That would have enraged the entire town, and none of the thugs would have dared to show their faces.

  “Nor were they primarily concerned about his attack on Zoe, regardless of what they told Pedro. They were most immediately concerned to prevent their members from being exposed to public scrutiny. Having you identified as a gang member would have brought suspicion on all your friends and acquaintances. You surely cannot imagine that they gave Ramirez a scolding on their own initiative? They would have needed permission from their capo, perhaps even from the don.

  “And the penance they placed upon Ramirez is also suspicious. To beg Zoe’s forgiveness was fine, but to force him and his family to leave town? The correct advice would have been for the whole family to enter therapy. A kid does not go bad that way without something else being wrong. It may not have been his parents but something he was doing without their awareness, perhaps somebody he knew who was leading him into trouble. Most likely, there was trouble in the family that made a convenient excuse, but the reason for the scolding was surely gang-related. I doubt you ever thought to ask who his parents worked for or what they did. Regardless of what Ramirez was like, I will wager that his parents were causing problems for one of the big corporations and somebody engineered the event to force them to leave town.

  “Speaking of which, I will now ask you to clamp down hard on your emotions and consider what I say next as nothing more than an intellectual exercise. Agreed? We often had problems when our smaller suppliers were owned by larger Martian-registered companies because their owners would encourage them to compete even more viciously than if they had been unrelated. The principle seemed to be that the competition kept them on their toes and trained them for the level of confrontation they could expect if they were promoted into the parent company on Mars. With that in mind, I ask you to consider that the two dominant corporations in the conflict, the ones who initially won the fight, were both owned by the Qinghai-Stockholm Holding Corporation. Does that name ring any bells?”

  Did that name ring bells? Dear God in Heaven, I could hardly think for the din... and I clamped down hard. Corporations merged and split constantly. I had never investigated the corporations that started the gang war, but I was deeply interested in the ones that affected my later cases. Qinghai-Stockholm had acquired three smaller holding companies in the years before the Incursion, but had split afterwards into the Qinghai Manufacturing Corporation, registered on the Martian Exchange, and five terrestrial subsidiaries. One of the subsidiaries had been Western Mining, who had developed several mines around Pemberton in Noram Norwes, all which had quickly gone bankrupt. Their properties had been purchased by Pemberton Highway Estates, which had tried to develop the best of them as resorts. Leilani and I had raided the least prosperous of those resorts five years ago and discovered that it housed a massive smuggling operation and sheltered a hidden army. That bothered me badly, but I could not remember why. Regardless, the Martian operations of Qinghai Manufacturing had merged briefly with Tharsis Engineering, then divided into Qinghai Holding and three additional subsidiaries that built heavy mining equipment on Mars and in the Belt. For tax purposes, Qinghai Holding was registered with the Belter Exchange on Mars, but still had extensive operations on the Earth.

  So:

  Qinghai-Stockholm Holding had owned two of the corporations that had ruined my home town.

  Qinghai Manufacturing had owned Western Mining, which had developed a worthless mine site we later discovered was hiding an army.

  Qinghai Holding owned companies that built heavy mining equipment in the Belt, probably including ships, possibly even warships.

  Qinghai Mining was one of the clans that had initiated attacks on us en route to Valhalla.

  I did not know whether the last one was related, but the coincidence in the names was striking. When I got my full memory back, I was going to have to give some serious thought to Qinghai whatever-they-called-themselves. Whoever owned them had laid a heavy hand on my entire life. Were they backing the Imperium, fighting as rivals, or being swept along as helpless pawns in a larger conflict? Raul knew something and thought it important to prime me for what I was going to learn. Meanwhile I was going to have to wait quietly and do everything possible to heal quickly. It was the only rational thing I could do.

  The acceleration alarms sounded, so we all donned our armour in case of a hull breech and clipped onto something solid. I was in the bed, Raul was on the floor beside me. It was a long, hard drive and I could feel an equally long, slow slew. Of course, I had no way of knowing how we had been oriented initially. But I did know that a long, hard drive meant we were in a fearful hurry to get somewhere, and fuel was no concern. Then the engine cut off and we were in zero-G. There was general announcement that we should expect zero-G for another eight hours, which would not take us to the Moon, but also meant that we were not evading enemies. Neither conclusion made much sense, but I was not the one making decisions.

  For the rest of the day I rested, did light exercise, ate small meals as they were provided, and occupied my mind scraping together everything I could remember about Martian corporations and their activities. In our long search for corruption, drugs and weapons moving off the Earth, I had compulsively read every corporate prospectus I could find, every financial report, every analysis of mergers and breakups, noting what each company did (officially and through less savoury channels), and tracing their owners when that was known. Most of those connections had led nowhere, surviving only as raw, undigested data in my memory. Even now they seemed vague and unimportant, but with the stimulation of Raul’s question and spiced from time to time with further conversation on the subject, they gained a significance I had completely missed before.

  Slowly, carefully, I was spinning a web of connections that crystallized into eight large mega-consortiums whose cores always seemed to be registered on Mars or out in the Belt. With every new core I discovered, a thrill of terror ran through me that I did not understand and had to suppress. Each time I found myself as the Cripple, momentarily panicking for Leilani’s safety. Before I could reset myself to be the Ghost I had to remind myself that she was safe, that the team was going to protect her. Only with that assurance was I free become the Ghost again and resume my work.

  Work it was, and I found myself straining harder than was healthy during my brief exercise sessions, developing a headache when I was not exercising, and becoming annoyed when Raul intervened to break my excessive concentration.

  As the web got more elaborate, I began to commit it to a document, link by link, highlighting the core owners. Over half of the web was controlled by the eight largest cores, but there were dozens more that formed smaller and looser alliances.

  I found a small company called Haida-Denendeh Minerals that had apparently organized a group of metallic asteroids into a self-gravitating cluster, a small version of L2 with a fifteen-kilometre M-type in the centre and half a dozen one-kilometre asteroids in very slow orbits around it. They had almost a dozen corporate connections, probably economically appropriate marriages if they followed the Martian model of business. I wondered if this company was related to Clan Skidgate.

  There was another one, even smaller and farther out, called the Namib-Angolan Carbonaceous Supplies that might have been related to Clan Kunene. They only had six connections, all with agricultural and transportation companies.

  I flagged both as being of special interest and continued the search.

  Raul noticed
my preoccupation after I stopped interrupting him for our occasional conversations. He asked to see what made me concentrate so hard. I popped up the document, which occupied the entire wall of the infirmary. He looked rather blankly at it, so I explained that it was a three-dimensional grid of corporations with strong Martian or Belter connections, with time running left to right and ownership indicated by arrows. The other two dimensions were only present to separate clusters of corporations that were closely related. I spun the image so that time ran into the wall, making it easier to pick out the clusters. I pointed out the eight core sets of companies that seemed to form continuous chains of control, with names that changed every few years but always represented the same interests, likely powerful families given the nature of Martian corporations. I also pointed out the smaller clusters that represented Belter families, and my speculation that some of these might be the clans that we had heard of, like Clan Skidgate and Clan Kunene.

  Raul zoomed in on the largest of the cores, then switched to the second largest.

  “The corporate support we know about indicates that this cluster is the Syrtis faction. Singh recognized the Emperor as the former head of the Syrtis faction, so it must control the Imperium. The other big one, over there, must be Clan Qinghai Mining. Qinghai Holding currently sits in the middle tying the faction together. Qinghai Mining commands more economic power, but Syrtis has a significantly wider set of alliances in both the major factions and numerous smaller ones. If Mindy told the truth, Syrtis probably sent the fake Hanuman. They do not yet have an alliance with Clan Kunene, but I wonder if they were trying to curry favour, and if so, why? Economic power versus wide political support: it is no wonder the two factions seem to be rivals.