Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  My terror spiked again. I was the Cripple being carried helplessly through space in a ship that was targeted by enemies on all sides, and it took a terrible effort of will to push myself back to the persona of the Ghost.

  Luciana to Raul, Me/urgent, “What in all of Yama’s hells just happened. He was calm with just occasional spikes for hours and suddenly he is close to cardiac arrest. Is he becoming unstable again? Should I call Alexander?”

  “No,” Raul replied. “I just made a comment I should not have. It triggered a bad memory, but he seems to be rational again. Send Sergei if you can spare him.”

  He then turned back to me. “I am sorry, Brian. Qinghai Mining is a name from the last three days, and I should not have mentioned it. I mentioned Qinghai-Stockholm because one of their former subsidiaries, Stockholm Technical, is still active in arms manufacturing for the TDF and attracted my attention a few years ago when they attempted to sabotage their rival’s supply chain. I thought it would give us something in common to discuss from so long ago that it would not trigger security alarms. Besides, I thought it might help you understand your own troubled childhood. I did not realize that Qinghai Mining was anything more than a coincidence in the names.

  “Since I raised the topic, I should also add that Begum has reached an agreement with the local Qinghai Mining commanders. For now, they are not a threat.

  “Can I ask how complete this diagram is?”

  Back under rigid control, I answered, “About as complete as I can do here. If I had access to the Martian and Terrestrial Exchanges I could do a much better job. If you care, Stockholm Technical is the red dot near the top of the Qinghai Mining cluster but note that since last year Syrtis has partial ownership as well.”

  A few minutes later, Sergei appeared, asking what the fuss was about. Being as careful as I could, I explained the document and the nature of the eight cores. Raul pointed to the two rival cores, mentioning that one was likely the controlling faction within the Imperium. I also pointed again to the small cores I had flagged for Clan Skidgate and Clan Kunene. Mindy had spoken of a genocidal threat against Clan Kunene.

  Sergei stared at the diagram for a few more minutes and swore audibly in several languages, blistering curses directed at the cosmos. He turned to me and said, “This is a very dangerous diagram. It provides us with the economic and probably the political skeleton of the Imperium. I would like to show this to Begum if she can spare the time, then fire it directly to Morris and Singh.”

  He pointed to the fourth largest core. “This one is personally interesting. I recognize many of its largest corporations. Look at them. Mines, heavy construction, chemical processing, transportation – Melpomene Escort Services cannot be a brothel. I wonder what they are escorting, and how much protection they provide? Elysium Management Services currently sits in the centre, but its closest and oldest subsidiaries are this string of fashion houses. On Mars they were known for quality textiles, but it has been a long time since that faction earned its wealth from clothes. Remember that the Elysium Weaver’s Guild was the faction the Pearly King and Oysterboy reported to when they tried to murder Mindy and the Ministers.”

  I nodded but remained silent. It was not just the effort that had forced me to concentrate so hard. I remembered those fashion houses, although I could never afford to buy their clothes. At the time, I had not realized they were related to armed escort services like Melpomene and SafePassage. Nor had I appreciated the extent of their investment in hazardous cargo transport, reactor construction and uranium processing. Fifteen years too late, I finally understood some of the earliest murders I had committed as the Assassin.

  Sergei concluded, “You know, every time you get smacked, something new pops out of that head of yours. It is no wonder they thought you could be used as a weapon. I am getting really worried that whoever did this to you is going to show up one day and set you in motion against your will. I sure as hell hope it is not Alexander, because he might be your only defence against that possibility.”

  Before I let him take the file, I added a preamble to explain what the diagram meant and an appendix to explain how I had constructed it. I did not even ask how he intended to get the file through so that Imperial forces could not decipher it. They were my team, they were the best, and they would take care of it.

  It had not been a particularly long day, but I was exhausted. My muscles had started to ache, probably because I had overdone the exercise. After Sergei left, Luciana came by to check me over, spoke guardedly of improvement, and sent Raul away to sleep. My stomach had developed a low ache again, which I also attributed to stress. We talked for a while, nothing important and deliberately avoided discussion of Leilani.

  Alexander broadcast a report that he was close to having a major patch for our comm units but needed a few hours of sleep himself and wanted to run some automated unit tests while he was resting. If they ran successfully, he would be ready to install the new software in about six hours.

  I could not stay awake any longer and Luciana promised to guard my dreams. She fitted my opaque helmet to protect everyone else from my nocturnal ramblings, then sang me a lullaby in a language I did not understand. I felt like a fully rational jellyfish floating in the primordial seas as I drifted off to sleep.

  2357-03-12 07:00

  Pirate Attack

  I woke feeling quite normal. Which meant I was the Cripple. I reset myself to be the Ghost and lay quietly listening for anything happening around me. It was a good habit, especially when buried under a meter of sand. Of course, I was in the infirmary of the Columbia, outbound from Valhalla in the Thule Station complex. It was still a good habit to be awake before anyone nearby knew you were.

  “Well, my Lord Banshee, you are finally awake.” Sergei’s voice and sense of humour, routinely off key. “We thought you might sleep until we reached the Moon. You will be happy to know that your work yesterday has already borne fruit. Begum is finding your economic map of the factional alliances within the Imperium useful in understanding the often-prickly relations amongst the different parts of the Imperial fleet. We got a slightly testy thank you from Admiral Wang, wondering why we had started talking with Begum, but Alexander promised to deal with it as soon as the new OS was installed. We have also passed the file to our ministers, who promise to complete the map as quickly as possible. Why did no one think to do this before?”

  “I suspect they did,” I replied, reluctantly admitting I was awake, “but with the intent of making sound investments, not to understand the political structures within an empire that did not yet exist. If you dig through the recent economic reports on Martian commerce, you may find political gold, at least if you can find the ones not written in code.”

  Sergei laughed, and I opened my eyes to see him and Alexander waiting beside my bed, watching the monitors on the walls.

  Alexander was mostly focused on a monitor that was too awkwardly placed for me to see. He replied in an off-hand tone.

  Alexander/private, “Agent Chou has been echoing your words to me. Not wise to speak with your eyes closed. But economic reports in code? I assume you mean coded messages, not real economic reports. If I had any time, that sounds like fun, but something of a distraction right now. I do not see anything else wrong with the recent comm unit, but the older one never even saw the requested changes. I will have to think about whether that is a security flaw or a security feature.

  Alexander/local, “Chou, say something else.”

  Sergei/local, “How do you feel? Luciana and Alexander have installed a major security update on all our comm units, and Alexander wants to go on to the rest of the crew if we check out. Try sending an emoji.”

  I sent him a kiss.

  Sergei/local, “Got it. Try again.”

  I quickly ran through the list of available emojis, which was much shorter and no longer included depression, despair or hatred. The rudest thing I could find was a mild slap on the face, so I sent that.

  Sergei/local,
“Blocked as requested. Hey, that slap was not called for!”

  We laughed together, a wonderful sensation after such a stressful period. And I realized that I had slipped back into being the Cripple, who had a sense of humour, rather than the Ghost who was resolutely logical.

  As a Student, I had been slapped on the face quite regularly, sometimes in jest and sometimes with real intent. The last time anyone had slapped me was Leilani, up on Grouse Mountain above Vancouver, when I had made a crude suggestion about rushing through the most romantic dinner in town so we could get to the real romance. Since that evening, I had been too frightened of what the Martians were going to do to let her get close enough to try. Damn, I hated Martians.

  Something about that thought nagged at me, but I could not remember why.

  Alexander/local, “Stress levels rising. Stop whatever thought you were thinking. It probably has something to do with the three days that have been suppressed, and Luciana will berate me without ceasing if I let you get sucked back into whatever happened.”

  I commented on the reduced set of emojis. Alexander explained that he had included by default only those emojis that were useful in normal, social conversation. We could reduce the set even further when on duty, and wider selections were available for applications that needed them. Changing the selection required a conscious act, and unrecognized emojis would be logged and stripped out of any message without any further action.

  There were similar protections built into the token handling system. The user was required to authorize the execution of any new tokens and had to specify the source from which tokens would be accepted. There was a related patch for our armour. He mentioned in passing that he might have been able to direct a token attack against our medical monitors; since they now allowed the adjustment of our meds, he might have been able to paralyze or even kill us, with that mechanism alone. The casual way he mentioned the possibility left me chilled, but the Ghost agreed that the vulnerability had existed and was now blocked.

  We had used self-propagating tokens to block emoji attacks in the last round of development from LE. However expedient at the time, these were far too dangerous to be permitted and would be blocked by this patch. Thinking about the events at the earth stations, I wondered if Admiral Wang had really injected the emoji-blocking token into his communications with the Martian commander, and if so whether this had made their subsequent relations easier to manage. It would not work against us anymore.

  He added that the very complicated antenna we had used to read the comm unit IDs was silly, since it was easy to send a message to everyone nearby and sort the replies by distance and approximate direction. He had added a simple ping for that purpose, so in principle we could just ping for an ID. The antenna might still be needed for older model comm units, or for the stripped-down versions used in cheap devices, but for demented people under emoji attacks the ping would be completely adequate.

  Alexander said there were dozens of other changes he had been working on, all described in an engineering report that he passed to us. We should call him if anything seemed to be wrong. Then he left, presumably to work on the comm units for the marines.

  A few minutes later, Raul called. “Brian, Sergei, are you alone?”

  I noted that the call was flagged as /private, /no_echo, /no_log. Checking, I had a new interface that allowed me to set no_echo and no_log by default for private messages, so I did. There was also a local option that confined a message to a single room or repeater, whichever was smaller, as well as the promised converse option. It explained the mysterious flags on Sergei’s messages.

  Sergei replied yes for both of us.

  Raul to Sergei, Me/private, “Brian, are you feeling stable? Especially, are you feeling like your normal self from a week ago? You will need emotions for this.”

  I set myself back to the Cripple and asked myself how normal that felt. I checked the time and realized that I had a gap of three days when I could remember nothing, but then remembered that Luciana and Alexander had suppressed my memories of the period. I thought about the Imperium and about Ramirez, neither of which felt unreal anymore. Not a deep test, but it would have to do.

  Me/converse, “Yes, I think I am fairly normal. Why?”

  Raul/converse, “I am very glad to have you back. We have a personnel problem that is about to go nuclear. Have you been told anything about what happened to put you in the infirmary?”

  Me/converse, “Not directly, although it seems to have been traumatic.”

  Raul/converse, “For all of us, Brian. That is what we need to discuss. There is much more, but I hope you will have the patience to wait until Doctor Toyami chooses to give it to you. She is still our best counsel on when that might be.”

  Me/converse, “You are making me nervous. Why did you call her Doctor Toyami?”

  Raul/converse, “That is the issue. Doctor Toyami made a mistake, an honest one that neither Sergei nor I caught until it was too late. One result was that you spent a night working through one ghastly nightmare after another, broadcasting them to all of us. Doctor Toyami recorded them and we are all agreed that they are documents of supreme political importance, warnings that the situation is much worse than the rest of us had recognized. You have been trying to tell us so ever since we arrived on the Mao, but it was too easy to assume you were just pessimistic. Without taking any of them literally, these warnings are much more graphic and cannot be ignored.

  “The recordings are of such intensity that they would drive any normal person insane. I am not exaggerating, and I cannot imagine what they must have been like for you. It is no wonder your medical monitors ran dry, trying to control the terror and despair. We all tried to sample them for a few minutes and became traumatized to the point of physical illness.

  “Doctor Toyami was the only one awake when the dreams started and I suspect toughed it out longest. She said it scared the living shit out of her, and I no longer think she was being euphemistic. She was in the exercise room with the door locked when I woke up and I think she was trying to clean herself and her pajamas in the shower, because they were wet when she came out. We are all going to need therapy when we get to the Moon, and she may need more than anyone else.

  “But the problem is that she remains scared half to death, and Leilani is mad as hell at her. They barely talk. I think Doctor Toyami is terrified that the Martians are coming to kill her, however lightly she tries to express it. She has been trying to distract herself with work, racing between you and Leilani, but not getting support from either. Not criticism, neither of you has been able to, and Sergei and I are only a bit better. She wants to become fully one of us, to be a part of the team, because she only feels safe in our presence. She has no one else to turn to, because no one else will understand the terror. And she told me that she is sure Leilani hates her and wants to have her fired. I am sure Leilani wants nothing of the sort, but Doctor Toyami is not willing to take my word on such a life-threatening issue.

  “I believe that Doctor Toyami asked you to call her Luciana to make it seem we are all friends on an equal footing, but she has never dared to tell Leilani that she did it.

  “Leilani herself was also traumatized, worse than the rest of us, almost as badly as yourself. Right now, she is angry at Toyami for her mistake, but it is not hatred. She is, however, very fragile, so imagine how she will react when she discovers that our doctor is getting personally friendly with the man she loves more than anyone else in creation.”

  Me/converse, “Raul, stop. I think I understand. We need to make Doctor Toyami feel essential to the team and at the same time revert to calling her Doctor Toyami. I also need to reassure Leilani that she has no rivals, but without speaking to her directly. Are you willing to be a go-between?”

  Raul/converse, “No, nor should Sergei. It would seem like we were taking sides, and there is only one side in this. Begum might but is frightfully busy. In fact, the whole crew is short of sleep and frantic with work right now. From
the outside, I am sure this ship appears to be pure TDF strength – solid, confident, implacable menace – but inside it is an anthill with people scurrying in every direction. They are not supposed to be in the hallways when we pass through, but they are unable to avoid us as they careen from one assignment to the next. Begum might be able to spare us a surgeon, but T I switched to the next exercise in the sequence and felt an additional source of tension drain away. I was ready.

  DF surgeons are not often recommended as marriage counsellors, which is what we really need.”

  Me/converse, “I am back to being rational. Only one person is available to talk to Leilani, to remind her that she is the only woman who exists in my world. That person is Doctor Toyami, so she must carry the message, and I will make it part of her job. There must be separation between me and Leilani, and she is the only one competent to fill that gap. Besides, to be a member of this team, she really needs to be a doctor. We do not need an amateur agent, nor a helpless waif that we would have to protect. Her role is Doctor and she needs to be proud of it. Do we have any other resources you can think of, perhaps activities only she can do?”

  Sergei/converse, “Is Leilani still working with the Eng and marines?”

  Raul/converse, “Yes, quite actively. Brian, you probably do not know about this. While you were constructing economic diagrams yesterday, we kept Leilani busy devising clandestine attacks upon naive enemy ships using tokens and emojis. She was angry enough to want violent revenge, so we added the stipulation that everyone on board was a valuable resource whom we had to keep alive. She just barely accepted that, but it seemed to help settle her back into a more normal frame of mind, if still extremely intense.