Lord Banshee- Fugitive

by Russell O Redman

  2357-03-14 13:30

  Loki is the King of Valhalla

  I checked the tactical display and realized that we had left our Imperial escort behind some time ago, coasting alone towards a phalanx of TDF ships, with Thule Station in the distance. Our deceleration was very gentle, sparing those of us who were recuperating from unnecessary stress, but also delaying our arrival. I identified each ship, dredging from my memory the class of each vessel. Most were tiny and barely armed, if at all. There were transports, tugs and specialized freighters, a few research vessels that I did not recognize beyond their names in a list. Far in the distance, a frigate was racing to reach the station before some enemy decided to test the illusory defences.

  Apparently, none of our erstwhile friends and enemies cared enough to make that test. Reasons of state might explain the reluctance of the Imperium to annoy a new ally, but the other factions had to have their own reasons. If I felt like being cynical, I would guess that the recent fighting had created problems back on Mars, or even in the Belt, and the participating factions were too occupied elsewhere to be bothered. More charitably, once LR had committed to rescue the people trapped in the air-tight rooms, the entire Martian fleet was powerless to improve their lot. It would be better to let LR do what it did best, and afterwards recover their stranded people. Both reasons might be true.

  Our ETA still gave me five hours of personal time, so I returned to cataloging the people I needed to protect. As I worked back into the period when I had been the Agent, I had another revelation, a detail so familiar I had neglected its significance.

  I had run a pipeline through which people could escape from Mars, assigning each person a new, false ID, handing out money like I was rich, and purchasing tickets on expensive liners if any were available. Each operation nominally required multiple levels of authorization from the Governor’s office, yet I had been far too junior to even request that kind of support. Nor, at that time, did I know enough to have hacked into the Governor’s system. I did not need to.

  I had been using somebody else’s system, set up long before to spirit the Governor’s agents off-planet while bypassing all the scrutiny that normal people required. I had supplemented the existing system with a few more levels of indirection and false accounts, much better concealed than my early efforts as the Kid, but only because the people I was moving were not spooks. The system had not been intended as a route to freedom but was part of the deep cover provided to spies and assassins on top secret missions, and I had known that from the moment I had been told of its existence.

  The Spooks were the Governor’s secret police, a pool of investigators with the authority to kill anyone they suspected of opposition to the government. It had not always been so. The service had been created as the Special Program Organizational Oversight Committee, SPOOC, a high-level committee that had oversight of various clandestine activities within the Governor’s Office. The committee had been created by an officer who enjoyed ancient American and English spy novels, so he had pronounced the acronym as ‘spook’. Secret police had nicknames with the same supernatural sense in every language used on both Mars and the Earth, so the people they supervised became known generally as spooks. Fifty years before Ngomo arrived, all those clandestine activities had been reorganized into a single department, still with the same name and acronym.

  The department ran in parallel with Legal Intelligence, divided mostly by the legality of their operations. LE tried to enforce existing laws, the Spooks walked around them to achieve goals that lay outside the nominal authority of the government. Such a system would never have been tolerated on the Earth, but Mars in its undeveloped state had gaps in its legal system that no one bothered to fill, and the Spooks lived and worked in those gaps. At its best, the Spooks could fill roles like the Ministry for Negotiators in the Ministry for Regional Affairs, convincing people to reach amicable agreements in cases where no existing law applied, or where rigid enforcement would lead to injustice. Under Ngomo, the Spooks spent much of their time finding and neutralizing political opposition, and had turned to threats, extortion and murder to achieve their ends.

  Their agents needed to move on and off Mars without being detected. They had set up a relocation program to disperse new IDs, money and travel documents completely outside the scrutiny of any other department. A spook sent to assassinate a terrestrial politician would vanish completely from the Martian records, but at some time later might need to return home. This vital link was provided by a set of passphrases, a set of challenges and responses that verified the identity of the spook and requested permission to re-enter the system.

  As the Agent, before I learned of the relocation program, I had sometimes provided cover stories and false documents to people I believed were being unjustly prosecuted for crimes they had not committed. In most cases the only reason for the false charges had been to move someone who was inconvenient out of the way. A false conviction followed by a public execution would achieve that end, but it was just as effective to give them the means to move to a different city under a new name and take a different job. So long as they left and remained silent, no one would follow them or object to their sudden change of name.

  One of the people I assisted had worked as a clerk for the Spooks, running the relocation program in his department. He had caught the fancy of a girl who was being pursued by a senior spook and had been falsely charged with corruption for a romance that he did not realize could cause offence. I help him move to Marineris Chopra, but the fool tried to move his bank account with him, making it easy to track him down and finish the execution. I was grateful that he never told anyone who had helped him in his escape attempt.

  He had paid for my assistance by telling me about the relocation program, including the importance of the passphrases. He gave me detailed instructions on how to run the program. Later in my career, I had been authorized to use the system myself to fulfill the Governor’s orders. By the time I became the Ghost, the war was going so badly that relocation off planet was no longer possible and I had lost interest in the whole process. During the years that I used the relocation service, I treated the system as a black box: punch the buttons correctly and out would pop money, tickets, ID’s, and passphrases.

  If Ngomo had been a competent governor managing an effective intelligence service, I would have been arrested the first time I made unauthorized use of the relocation program. Instead, responsible oversight had been replaced by short-term, personal benefit as the driving force within the Spooks, so no one noticed or cared about my abuse. Most of my relocations amounted to little more than cleaning up troublesome loose ends created by my superiors; if the trouble could not be traced back to them, they were content to ignore me.

  Having resurrected this tidbit of almost irrelevant information, I rolled it around in my mind trying to decide whether it was useful or just another fact to be suppressed before it cluttered my timeline.

  I had not sent many real spooks off planet. So far as I knew, all but one had either been killed in action or had returned to die in the Counterstrike. The one that stuck in my memory was a spook who had disappeared without a trace and who I knew for a fact had never made it off Mars.

  I had been ordered to infiltrate Syrtis London and provide a list of all the rebel leaders who were gathering in the city. By that time in the war, such orders normally meant to kill the lot of them and grab the IDs from their corpses, because few living rebels would cooperate in making the list. I and the Death Squad I directed for the mission, DS277, were deep in enemy territory and could expect no support. My top suspect turned out to be Mindy’s father, a local commander who had organized a meeting that had drawn in the other rebel leaders. I reported the meeting and our intended response, then passed my instructions to DS277-1, who commanded the squad.

  I had also been ordered to provide tickets and documents for DS277-5, the most experienced assassin in the squad, who was being sent to the Earth under deep cover right after this m
ission. I gave the squad guidance on how to disperse after their mission was complete, creating enough distraction that DS277-5 could escape from the city. He would join me in a safe house dug into the wall of a lava tube on the flanks of Meroe Patera, not far from the Meroe spaceport. There, I would give him his new documents. My role finished, I would immediately leave on my next assignment. DS277-5 would rest overnight, proceeding to the spaceport the next day.

  Having given these instructions to DS277, I ran in powered armour from Syrtis London across the desert to the safe house, where I issued the documents, money, ID, and passphrases. DS277-5 never showed up because the Governor (more realistically, one of his lieutenants) ordered a nuclear bunker buster that vaporized the entire meeting, along with DS277 as they closed in for the kill. The bomb murdered everyone else in the neighbourhood as unimportant collateral damage.

  I never learned who authorized a nuclear attack on a civilian target, much less who had made the suggestion. Most likely, the intent was to kill myself and the entire squad along with the rebels. DS277 had killed hundreds of factional operatives, and I had plenty of bitter rivals. Our enemies must have celebrated a triple victory, dampened only when it became clear that I had survived. When I heard that the squad had perished, I indulged in a screaming fit of rage and swore to take revenge against anyone I found to be responsible.

  I never took that revenge. Each time I made such an oath, I forswore it within hours. As the Assassin, my mission was to earn the trust and approval of my superiors by strict obedience to their orders. Killing them was not part of that mission, unless a still more senior officer made the request. Publicly, I questioned nothing that they ordered, keeping my temper tantrums to myself. Shortly after I became the Ghost, I was promoted and gained access to the records that would have told me who to kill, but the Ghost had no interest in anything that would distract him from the Mission.

  A few weeks after the bombing, I used the money, ID and ticket to spirit someone else off Mars, an innocent who merely wanted to escape. Such delays were normal and raised no suspicion, given the erratic schedules of ships willing to risk the run between Mars and the Earth. I never cancelled the passphrases to preserve the illusion that DS277-5 had successfully taken up his assignment and might want to return some day. So far as Martian Intelligence was concerned, if they retained the records at all, DS277-5 was still working under deep cover.

  Now, though, I wondered if I could put the unfortunate death of DS277-5 to a different use. I made it a point to research the people on my teams, so I knew a great deal about the life and career of DS277-5. His wife and children had been murdered in one of the early rebel atrocities. Lusting for revenge, he became one of the Governor’s most fanatical and vicious assassins. I had never bothered to discover what his mission off-planet had been, but so few records survived on Mars that I could make a plausible guess without much fear of contradiction. There were several powerful pacifists on the Earth who opposed Governor Ngomo and wanted him removed from office, men and women who later became my heroes. Several of them had been assassinated, almost certainly on the orders of Ngomo or his immediate superiors in Extraterrestrial Affairs, and it would be plausible to assume that DS277-5 had been part of that campaign. By the time the last of them died, it would have been impossible to return to Mars.

  If I were an unemployed former spook, perhaps someone who had reformed when he discovered how everything he had believed about the Earth was wrong, where would I turn for a job after the war? Legal Intelligence or one of its successors? However difficult it would have been to construct a suitable background story, DS277-5 had been clever enough that I could not reject the possibility. It might distract the suspicion of an intelligence officer if I could impersonate DS277-5. I only had to hold the illusion for a few days. It was also the kind of story that I did not want anyone else to hear. A very cute puzzle indeed.

  I was about to continue adding people to my list when MacFinn and the surgeon returned. They had to prepare me for transport because the ward was about to fill with people dredged out of the airtight rooms on Valhalla. We were still accelerating, but the surgeon explained this was to be a very quick turn around without stopping. We would take only the most grievously injured people in two LR transports, plus a third transport that had been assigned to collect additional reaction mass for our depleted drives. Our transports had been given extraordinary permission to dock directly in the service bays of the TDF and had already loaded the new patients and cargo. They would make an accelerating rendezvous with the Quetzalcoatl within half an hour, after which we would return directly to the site of the battle to pick up a second batch of injured. The approaching frigate would stay at Thule Station while the Quetzalcoatl transported everyone back to the Moon, escorted by the five Imperial ships of our official escort and three ships with other factional allegiances.

  To MacFinn’s great relief, none of the LUVN meds had been brought onto the Quetzalcoatl. They remained in the pirate ship’s freezers but might be available for testing on the Moon. Both surgeons wanted to delay those trials until LUVN could supply its own doctors in a properly equipped Lunar hospital. The Imperial response, filtered through the captains, expressed interest and a desire to start as soon as possible, but revealed a deep ignorance of current medical technologies.

  To myself, I wondered whether ExA had forbidden medical textbooks along with meds and medical technologies, all justified by a spurious concern for gruesome executions. If I were still free to do the investigation, I would like to inquire whether they had also forbidden copies of the Terrestrial and Lunar Constitutions, or comic books about brave Martian heroes fighting the Ghost.

  I was put back into my armour, which MacFinn adjusted to be plain white with no other insignia. They clipped a TDF field station into the back of the armour. It carried an enormous reservoir of medications, which they quickly explained would be a reservoir for several additional field stations intended to treat any patients from the Martian fleet. It also contained the LR meds that made my recovery so much faster on the Quetzalcoatl than it would have been on the Columbia. My LR surgeon would continue to supervise their use.

  They requested that I be very silent until we were on the transport, when I would have half an hour to firm up my story with the CI agent before both of us were put to sleep to board the Imperial ships. All five TDF and Commerce employees were to transfer at the same time, to free up five more beds for injured warriors.

  They had decided to place the injured from Valhalla close to my room to create an ambiguity about when I had arrived. They wanted to use the depletion of my med monitor as an example of what might fail, and my recuperation as an example of what the portable field stations could handle. Since my cover suggested I had been injured in an explosion, the fact that there had been an explosion at Valhalla might reduce the number of awkward questions the TDF had to answer. Left unsaid was always the possibility that the traitors in MI had tortured me in some unspecified way that the TDF did not want to turn into an accusation and the Imperium would not want to clarify.

  They hoped I would agree to being asleep for much of the trip with the Martians, which would speed my recovery and reduce the time available in which I might have to answer awkward questions. They particularly wanted me to be asleep while entering and leaving the Martian ships, since that would be when the most penetrating questions would be raised; better that I not have to answer them. I was quite agreeable, but reminded them that I needed to dream, that the dreams needed to be recorded if I was broadcasting, and that someone needed to supervise my dreams to ensure they did not become destructive.

  They finished and closed my door as the first of the new patients arrived. I immediately turned up the microphones and was frustrated to discover that LR ships had better soundproofing than any other vessel I had been on. I could just hear people in the hallway, but once in their rooms with the door closed they became inaudible. They mostly spoke dialects of Mandarin, Hindi or English, with unfami
liar accents. Still, what I could understand was informative.

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  [1] Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Please, don’t hurt me...

  [2] Sir, you are safe with us. Is there someone you would like to see?

  [1] I will never talk. Ohhh! Don’t hurt me.

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  [3] Traitors! When the Sultan comes, you will be punished for this assault!

  [4] Sir, please stop waving your arms. You will tear the dressing on the wounds.

  [3] Release me in the name of the true Emperor!

  [4] Sir, you are disturbing our other patients. Would you prefer to move to a different room?

  [5] Kill that traitor or I will kill him myself! Set me free and I will execute justice on the bastard!

  [6] I think we need to move him immediately.

  [3] Why have you trapped me with these Qinghai shitheads? Enemies of the Sultan! Scum!...

  [4] Agreed. Perhaps in 12-5?

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  [7] Where am I? Mommy, why can’t I see anything? It hurts. It hurts.

  [8] Sir, you are safe here, and your eyes will heal. We will supply pain medicine as soon as you are in your room. Would you like to sleep now?

  [7] I am blind! I am nothing but meat now! I promise I will be a good girl. I will wash the walls. I can sing for you. I do not want to be sold as meat. Please, do not sell me!? Owww.

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  [9] Why can’t I feel my arms? Am I dead? What is this place?

  [10] Sir, you are aboard the Lunar Recovery hospital ship Quetzalcoatl. You are alive and we anticipate a full recovery. Your arms have been anesthetized because they were injured.