“Not if I tell them to protect you. They won’t be friendly but are disciplined professionals. Do you know if you have any embedded explosives or suicide pills?”
His eyes went wide again. “Yes, inside my chest there is a grenade. I have two false teeth. If I fail to report in twice a day, they will trigger them. I will kill everyone nearby.”
“Killing everyone nearby is a risk I’ve lived with for five years, but so far very few have died. I believe we can remove them in any TDF surgical theatre. If we can get there, you would live even if they activated them. I know someone you might be interested in meeting who has done just that. But we will need to move quickly. Come.”
I spun the chair around and headed for the door.
He stumbled forward and grabbed the back of the wheelchair. “They will take me back if I kill you.” I felt a knife hammering against the body armour on my chest.
“Please, would you try to open the door? If you cannot even get past the door, the assassins will kill you, just because that is the job they were given.”
Distracted in his desperation, he stumbled over to the door, but could not get it to budge. He used the knife to try to lever the door open and then to hammer on it until I was certain it was no longer an effective weapon. “It is no use! They will find us and kill us both. We can’t escape their vengeance.”
I smiled sadly. “The devil always says that. Father Paul, you know you can’t force your way into God’s love. He gives it freely. The hard parts are to believe that His grace is possible and then to accept it for yourself. Now, please stand aside.”
The Ghost had no religion beyond the Mission and no absolution beyond its completion, but the man who had been Father Paul did. Once, long ago, the Kid had, too. I knew how to pull the strings.
I opened the door and led him back along the corridor to the paralyzed guards. I called, “Father Paul is an old acquaintance. He has just escaped from the Exterminators and needs emergency surgery to remove several embedded explosives. Don’t shoot him unless he tries to attack again.”
He looked at the bent knife in his hand and threw it away. One by one the guards slowly staggered to their feet, Sa’id last of all. They stared at Father Paul in rage, sputtering their utter disbelief that I would protect a man who had just tried to murder us and still posed a serious menace. Most Lunatics are pacifists, willing to forgive anyone who apologizes for their mistakes, but not TDF guards.
“Commander, I would really like to escape these sirens. Lead us on, if you would.”
Sa’id said, “Two of you, keep behind this so-called ‘Father Paul’ and shoot him at the first hint of trouble. I will take the lead. To the extent possible, we will stay in the service corridors between here and the bus. Run.”
We set off at a fast pace. I was happy to let the third guard control the chair because I doubted my own skills were good enough to take the corners at the speed we were moving. I opened each air-tight door as we approached until we left the district under lockdown behind. We had to cross several public roads, guns barely concealed. Within the lockdown, the streets were deserted, everyone sheltering in airtight rooms. Beyond it, nervous people watched us race past in a tight clump. No one could mistake us for innocent pedestrians.
Once, we ran down a long ramp between levels. We were clearly not returning to the same bus we had taken to get here, which was probably trapped in the lockdown.
He finally stopped in a hallway, telling us to wait just inside a door until the bus arrived. Everyone but me was breathing heavily, but I suspected my heart was beating as fast as theirs. The minutes ticked away until he told us to move. We exited the tunnel and were ushered into a plain, white van with no windows, the kind of van people rented to move their furniture between houses. Inside, however, it had armour plating that no moving van required.
Father Paul was loaded first, along with a guard who kept his gun trained on him constantly. Sa’id and the other two guards picked up my wheelchair and slid it into the back of the van, then piled in themselves. People walking by looked at us askance, but one glance at the guns discouraged any further interaction. I had no doubt that everyone we encountered would file a report with the Public Office, maybe even Law Enforcement given the size of the guns. But no one stopped us as we slid into traffic.
On the smaller roads like this, traffic meant pedestrians. The van gave us anonymity, but we were moving at no better than a walking pace. Our speed picked up considerably as we moved onto larger roads with dedicated vehicle lanes.
We pulled up to what must have been a gate to the TDF base but were quickly waved through. The guards never swung their guns away from Father Paul. At a second gate, we stopped long enough that Sa’id got out to talk with the guard. Inside the van, the guns never wavered. We moved on, deeper into the complex. We stopped and exited through the rear in a corridor just large enough for the van.
There was a door in the wall just behind the van. The guards ushered us through it into a blank, white room where three guards in unfamiliar TDF uniforms led Father Paul away. I tried to explain that he had a grenade in his chest, but one of the new guards just said that they knew, that they had heard everything.
Feeling stupid, I realized I was still broadcasting and turned it off. Feeling slightly less stupid, it occurred to me that if anything else had happened on the trip it would have been valuable to have that record, but then I felt stupid again because I could have been tracked by a ten-year-old kid with a hand radio the whole way. Regardless, it was off now and I doubted that any signal escaped from the centre of a TDF facility by accident. Then I felt stupid again because MI had allowed exactly that to happen and I suspected that there were agents of the Exterminators scattered throughout the TDF. I wondered if anyone had been tracking where my signal had been picked up, who had resent it and where it had been addressed to go. I had done such an analysis on some of my more complicated cases. Someone probably had, but I would never learn the results, so I finally gave up worrying and waited for something more to happen.
A new set of guards led us down a long, dimly lit corridor and into a complex comprised of small offices and what appeared to be high-security residential units. We were separated for individual debriefing in small, sterile, white offices with soundproof doors.
I was introduced to Psychological Security Officer Baintree. She said, laughingly, “So you are the troublemaker Admiral Wang keeps complaining about. Congratulations, I think you have created more excitement than any other single person since the Ghost was roaming Mars. Three major lockdowns in twenty-four hours! I’ve been told that some of the doors in the first and third refuse to open for anyone with less authority than a Senior Minister on the Lunar Council. I don’t think we dare ask one of them to wander the halls opening doors right now. Maintenance will probably have to dismantle the things and replace the locks. Fortunately, Commerce triggered their own lockdown so they could open their own doors. They are keeping most of the external doors locked, but are securing a route to the hospital to handle the injured.
“And who is the friend you picked up en route? I did a quick review of your conversation and it all sounded like techno-psycho-religious babel to me. Yet, he seemed to understand what you meant. He is apparently being completely cooperative right now… and is being prepped for surgery to remove the embedded explosives and nerve toxins in his teeth.”
It sounded like there were questions in that stream of words, but she did not seem to be interested in an answer, so I interrupted, “Pardon, but I’m far more concerned about the friends we left behind in Prosperity Square. There was an impromptu debate in progress. Can you tell me what happened? Was anyone hurt?”
That stopped her and a huge, slightly false, smile lit her face. I had started talking and revealed a weakness. “Yes, I can bring you up to date. The violence was all over in fifteen minutes but they are still trying to clean up the mess. One of the senior Martian officers was out of uniform, wearing borrowed clothes and walking d
own the road to Tranquility Square. You are wearing a badly fitting Martian uniform so I would guess you exchanged? We will want to know why.
“He was hit five times before the shooters were taken down by a patrol off one of their ships. They were all wearing body armour, so no one was killed, but he lost a lot of blood and is in critical condition in CI. He is being attended, if you please, by one of their Medics and a TDF Surgeon who refuses to leave his side. The surgeon and medic apparently work quite well together, but the CI doctors and orderlies are struggling to understand either of them. Tycho English and classical Mandarin are not common languages in Tereshkova.
“There seem to have been several teams of assassins on the move. The ones we know about have been arrested and their affiliation is being determined. Most of them don’t seem to come from either of the two fleets that are officially here. That is one of the reasons the airtight doors remain closed. Even when someone with appropriate authorization is available to open them, Law Enforcement refuses to let anyone leave until they have been screened by an Officer of Truth.
“There were a lot of illegal weapons confiscated. Some very harsh words have been sent to Forward Command and the Viceregal Fleet about appropriate behaviour for visiting military personnel. Some of those words are going to come our way, I fear.
“As you know, the entire district went into lockdown this afternoon, triggered from somewhere behind the businesses facing Prosperity Square. No one has been able to get in yet to find out what triggered the lockdown, except for the extraordinary video that you broadcast. Unbelievable! You and your friend clearly had something to do with that. We will want a lot of detail.
“Oh, yes, Flourishing Square lost all electrical power right after the lockdown hit. Thank goodness it was not Prosperity that lost power, or the debate could have become very ugly. There were far fewer people in Flourishing, although they had scheduled a whole series of announcements there in the main shift tomorrow. It is being treated as a terrorist attack and disrupting those announcements may have been the purpose. Because of the lockdown, no one can get into the power tunnel where the breakage is thought to have occurred. They will be in the dark for a while longer.
“The people in the debate are all safe due to a warning the Public Officers received. Was that you and your people? Yes, I thought it might be. The debaters have nowhere to go until the airtight doors around the square can be opened again.
“They apparently resumed the debate, but not on the same topics. The subsequent discussion was more political and much angrier. No one could get to the Drunken Peddler for their scheduled debate and the city forbade them to serve alcohol to the angry people trapped in the square. I suspect all the food services around the square will turn a profit feeding the people who are trapped there, but the proprietors are deeply concerned and are demanding better security.
“I don’t know who you meant by the ‘Exterminators’ in the video, but they sound like a group we should have been watching. It seems we now have two of their agents and several of their commandos in custody. Do you want to fill us in a bit more?”
I think she had finally reached the topic she really wanted to discuss, so I gave the same talk I had given at Commerce about the Exterminators, expanding on my interactions with Father Paul. I mentioned that he had just told me he received his comm unit when he became the abbot of a Jesuit monastery. The Exterminators had probably recruited him right after that, although what they were working on at the time I did not know.
She frowned a bit. “I thought the Jesuits were a teaching order and did not have monasteries.”
“I asked him the same question when we first met, many years ago,” I replied. “The Jesuits have always had their own universities. There were periods during the Great Burning when it was too dangerous to be out in the world. To survive, they converted a few of the universities to walled and guarded monasteries. These days, the Jesuit monasteries are again being used as schools for training young Jesuits, but also as retreats for spiritual renewal and as retirement homes when service to the community becomes too difficult. There are only a few of them. Abbot is primarily an administrative position and I suppose that justified the comm unit. He may have been one of the Exterminator’s first test cases for involuntary emoji control.
“If you can find him a priest, I expect he would benefit from a personal confession to help manage his guilt. It might allow him to make a detailed confession of the events in his career that would be most useful for us.”
Returning to the Exterminators, I added that Alexander Pantocrator had also mentioned them when we talked on the Columbia after leaving Valhalla. She looked puzzled. “Alexander? Are you referring to Alexandra Pentapolous? Ace programmer? Works in Valhalla at Thule Station most of the time?”
It was my turn to be puzzled, but the truth finally dawned on me. “When you meet her again, tell her that I concede the contest. She is far and away stranger than me. She will know what I mean.”
It was hard to keep on topic. I recognized the technique – change the subject rapidly to keep the suspect off balance. I had done the same myself and had ground many people into psychological pulps during my interrogations. I was better at keeping my eye on the ball than most and now had my two medical monitors to help manage my emotional responses.
Across the desk, I was facing a Psychological Security Officer, with the same training and equipment as an Officer of Truth in a Lunar court, probably better since I was not required to wear external monitors. However, she was the mailed fist of the military rather than the velvet glove of justice, free to work without polite assumptions of neutrality or the constraints of public approval. I was not worried. Aside from a few of my deepest secrets, I was more than willing to tell her everything she wanted to know. This promised to be an entertaining afternoon and good practice for the confession I hoped to make to the court.
I told her that the political officers I had been meeting in the Merry Merchant had shown me an image, nominally of the Sultan Mustafa, that I had seen in every office and work area when I had been a captive of the Exterminators. The image was apparently centuries old, but they were searching desperately for whoever currently controlled the conspiracy. It was a task we now had in common, although the Imperium was so terrified by the Sultan that they assassinated any suspect they could capture. Real investigations required time and a gentler touch.
We bounced back and forth between the Exterminators and the meeting with the Poloffs, analyzing every word and how they fit into a pattern. I dodged around my Mission, the Nightmares, and my role as the Ghost, but Sa’id apparently had no such inhibitions and must have spent some time on the reason the Medics from the Lansdorf were in such poor shape.
Officer Baintree finally nailed me on the subject, in enough detail that I knew she was monitoring the other debriefings as well. I guffawed and returned her bright smile. We were two skilled professionals playing psychological ping pong. I was enjoying the session as much as the Ghost was able to enjoy anything.
I explained that part of the preparation the Exterminators forced upon their recruits included mental simulations while we slept, along with immunity to torture and psychological instability. I discussed the other agents who were now dead because of the recklessness induced by their immunity to torture.
I mentioned our multiple, unstable persona, forced on us by our embedded medical monitors, which prevented us from trusting our own judgement. Alexandra had been able to stabilize part of my system but could not remove the underlying mechanism. I did NOT mention my continued impulsive changes, formally willful but difficult to bring under control.
I returned to the conversation with the Poloffs, discussing the nightmares I had been suffering, my ability to broadcast them through the comm, and the recorded dreams that had driven the Medics into despair. I warned her of the heavy levels of encryption and the severe warnings of psychological damage that had been applied to the recorded dreams. I mentioned the one dream on record w
here humanity survived the Sultan Mustafa’s attempt to drive us into extinction and the dismal simulations the Imperium had been running that forecast the same disaster.
That sobered her. The smiles vanished and we began again. No banter, no evasions, just a long hard probing to find what I knew, who I used as resources, why I believed those facts. It was a fun afternoon and I successfully preserved my most important secrets.
I diverted her away from a close discussion of what I had done as the Ghost and from the Banshees except as cartoon figures in songs. We talked a lot about Mars, about the role of Martian debates that Lunatics understood easily but the Earth-born often found incomprehensible. We discussed economics and justice, grievances that had waited decades for resolution. We talked about the Belt, what little I knew. We talked about the many ways things could fail. I dwelt on the role of pride, insult and contempt in the Governor’s policies, of their continuing role in cultures shaped by a century of injustice and oppression. We talked in detail about the provocations that the Sultan Mustafa seemed to create constantly.
I saw despair growing on her face as the scale of the crisis became obvious. I could not leave her so hopeless.
I pointed out that trade was bound to restart soon, which would be in everyone’s best interests. The Imperium could easily provide better support for interplanetary trade than ExA. The Moon could help them avoid the factional favouritism that had plagued Mars.
I noted that the TDF and Forward Command enjoyed good relations. The Imperium was trying to reconcile the combatants, even if it was only by threatening them with Martian justice.
The people of the Earth were fundamentally peaceful and did not want to fight. Even the hidden armies had mostly sat silently after they emerged. Neither the regional militias nor the TDF were attacking them. We had long experience in reconciling the kinds of disputes that currently troubled the Imperium.
Lord Banshee Lunatic (Nightmare Wars Book 3) Page 16
