Lord Banshee Lunatic (Nightmare Wars Book 3)

by Russell Redman

  “So, my advice is to worry, but to use that worry as a motivation to study as you prepare for the challenges ahead. It is how I faced every project I ever started.”

  Sa’id interrupted, “There is an alert from the Public Office, something about armed people moving our way. Not imperial, not ours. They may also be headed towards the Hope people or even one group of ministers. We all need to be moving, immediately. Did you hear that, Minister...? I should not say anyone’s name anymore, old or new.”

  Singh to Sa’id, Me/private, “I did. We are ready, regardless of my worries. Which group is most at risk?”

  Sa’id/converse, “Warn the people on level Four, sector D19. That may be a targeted attack because there only seem to be one or two armed groups on level Four. Most of our people are in hotels scattered around the outskirts of the city on level Three. The armed groups on level Three aren’t moving towards those hotels.”

  MacFinn/converse, “Tell the people on level Four t’rendezvous at our hospital, level Three b’hind Commerce, easiest access is from Flourishing Square if they come up the D12 lift. The doors’re open agin and power ha been restored. That’s now Imperial territory and heavily defended.”

  Sa’id/private, “We chose those residences carefully. The ones we are using have a hidden overhead access to a power conduit tunnel with a ladder to levels Three and Five. No public lifts for these people in a crisis!

  “Those residences also have backdoors to the service corridor. We have our own security guarding them. I will suggest that the backdoors pop open after everyone is gone to see if an ambush has been arranged.

  “We may be targeted as well. Some of the hostiles are coming past here. We put you here because it was safe and convenient. Is there someplace you would prefer to be?”

  To Sa’id/private, “Where is Mindy? We should move her as well.”

  Sa’id/private, “Safely hidden in a holding cell deep in the TDF Detention – wait, you don’t want to be with her, do you? She must be the most dangerous person... well, after the assassins in the corridor, the two Poloffs, and Father Paul… and right here... Maybe it would be better. Turn on your TDF ID and go for a plain white on your armour. At the next opportunity, we should get you a light power frame with a backpack for the field station.”

  2357-03-28 12:00

  The Battle of WR35-23

  I sat carefully back into my wheelchair while Sa’id loaded the field station. Without a second glance around, we were out the door.

  Our guards from the trip to the Merry Merchant had left to celebrate their medals but had left two new guards outside our door. They were joined by the rest of their squad from a room just down the hall, anonymous in pure white armour. We moved as a unit into the maze of service corridors that laced this part of the city.

  Sa’id/private, “I installed the token that blocks the device interface backchannel. It severely degrades throughput for rapid instrumental control, so I can no longer interface safely with the ship control systems, but after being paralyzed by Father Paul that seems acceptable. I doubt I will be flying warships solo any time soon. Same updates for the wheelchair, so you should not be taking any more unauthorized excursions. LE claims to be working on a version for the guards, but it is a tough problem maintaining performance and will be another few weeks yet.

  “Oh, this is bad... very bad... Lots of reports of armed groups scattered through the whole city, mostly on level Three with us. They must have moved into position under cover before starting the attack. Getting to the base will be harder than I anticipated. There is a firefight near the entrance I was intending to use to get into the base. I asked for transport, but it’s trapped inside the base. If this gets any worse, it might be hours before they can come for us.”

  Me/converse, “Then we don’t go to the TDF right away. Maintenance workers are tough crews and thieves try to steal things from their storerooms. Maintenance rooms are well armoured and often have multiple doors, sometimes even heavy lifts. There should be one close by. When I was here last, it was called MR-3/78/129-52, but no one used the name and the doors were unlabeled.

  “No matter; I know how to get there. At the next junction, head north past two corridors. On the third corridor turn east again. It is the fourth door on the north side.”

  Sa’id/converse, “Is there anywhere you have not been in this city?”

  Me/converse, “I made a point of memorizing every corridor near the TDF facilities because too many of our cases involved stolen TDF arms. Away from the TDF and Commerce facilities, I know the main roads. Large-scale maps of the city all look the same – just a three-dimensional grid of interconnected lines with alphanumerical labels – so I can get myself lost in minutes unless I have a local guide with me. Besides, the room labels never made any sense in Orientale Tereshkova. Everyone finds their way around by the patterns of colours, checks, stripes and swirls on the walls, once they get off the main roads.

  “We are way outside the normal neighbourhoods I memorized, but I know this district because we had a dust-up some years ago with a gang who were stealing TDF ammunition and storing them nearby. It took a long time to set up the sting, so I learned to navigate this neighbourhood as well. In the end, the whole thing went rotten. We were forced to hide in that maintenance room until the real TDF security showed up. It was quite memorable.”

  We raced along the corridors, swinging around the corners at high speed, until we drew to a stop in front of a nondescript door. It had a label, relatively new and still slightly shiny, that read WR35-23, obviously a new name.

  To be polite I knocked, but when no one answered immediately I unlocked the door and opened it. Three maintenance workers faced us carrying rifles, illegal but I was not about to dispute their utility today.

  Happily, I recognized an old friend. “Guy, it has been a few years,” I called, “There is more trouble like that time when Sally, Belkos, Trita and you held the doors closed for Agent Savoy and me. Can we stay here till the current trouble blows over? I promise I won’t shriek. You should call in all the other crews for now.”

  The short, gnarled man in the middle lowered his rifle, “Barney? That was like, six years ago? You got better armour and uglier friends. You sure you won’t shriek?”

  “Pretty sure,” I replied, “Agent Savoy and I worked hard on that, so now I have it mostly under control. Except at night. My dreams are still quite scary. We would like to come in before anyone else notices we are here. Agent Savoy would send her regards, except she is also very busy. Everyone, just point your guns out into the corridor. These people are friends.”

  Guy told the other two to lower their rifles. From the name tags they were wearing, Anna did, but Cindy kept hers at the ready in case we did something untoward. It probably did not help our case that we were all in armour with opaque masks and absolutely no identifying markings, nor that Guy still wore the insignia of an unskilled maintenance worker six years after we last met. Anna, with the insignia of a shift supervisor, told us to enter one at a time. Cindy tracked each of us while we did. As I rolled forward in the wheelchair, Guy almost jumped. “Oh, my saints, I thought you were kneeling. What happened? Ah, but you probably can’t tell us.”

  I laughed, a bit bleakly. “I can tell you a bit. I have a medical monitor to manage a heart condition that I earned through too much running and jumping. Or maybe it was the women, booze and gunfights. Anyways, the monitor failed in an odd way that poisoned almost every muscle in my body. I am only just recovering.

  “This fellow in the white armour, his name is Nasruddin, was escorting me to the hospital in the TDF base when things went crazy outside. Wait, we all have white armour. Nasruddin, maybe you can go green for a moment?”

  Anna interrupted, “That door was locked. I locked it myself. How did you open it?”

  I made the door swing shut and lock again. Our guards holstered their guns when the lock clicked into place, but the maintenance workers all lifted their guns to the ready again. I a
lso made the Banshee logo fade in on my right breast, then fade out again. The three workers backed away a step or two.

  I tried to reassure them, “It is all right. I have worked with Guy before, in this very room in fact. I’m sorry I cannot be more personable, but there are assassins in the halls, quite a few of them. We need to lie low until this section of the city is back under control. Fancy armour doesn’t make us invulnerable to high-caliber bullets and the running and jumping thing is impossible for now.

  “Please, it is important that you warn your coworkers.”

  There was a whole row of small offices down the right wall of the room. The left wall held racks of tools. Partway down on the left side, a stairwell led down, with a heavy steel trapdoor latched open against the wall. Just beyond it, a ladder ran up the wall to a closed hatch. Another maze of offices blocked the view of the far end of the complex, where I recalled doorways that opened into a set of storage rooms. At the far end of a narrow hallway, there was a second airtight door into the next corridor.

  A voice from one of the small offices called, “Chief, there is a party entering the north corridor with guns, big ones, and what look like explosives. What do we do?”

  Anna called back, “Dado, tell everyone to lock themselves immediately into whatever shelter they can reach and pass the warning to anyone they encounter on the way. Then, could you step out here for a mo? I think we are in very big trouble.”

  A minute later, a large man wearing the long, grey-green pants, boots and shoulder belt of a junior maintenance worker stepped into the doorway of the third office, carrying a heavy rifle at the ready. He lowered it when he saw that we had holstered our weapons and that his three coworkers had finally lowered theirs.

  Idly, I noted that Dado and Guy must do the heavy lifting in this crew and needed the leg protection provided by long pants, regardless of the subtropical warmth. A normal knife would not cut their pants, but a bullet could still smash the bone. The rest wore standard shorts with shoulder straps. None had armour where it would be useful.

  Nasruddin bowed low and gracefully, displaying his TDF insignia. “Chief Anna... May I call you that? I need to find out what is currently happening. We may need to defend this complex. Do you have a monitor I can use?”

  She waved him silently into the second office, so he wheeled me into the room and shut the door. He looked at the monitor, an old and beaten unit that the TDF would have replaced a decade before. City maintenance only had that kind of budget for the senior administrators. Nasruddin was mumbling to himself, “Ancient. Standard interface, so, modify config, dah, dah, dah, authorization... Not going to work with TDF codes.”

  He looked around at me, “You might be able to help. Do any of your authorization codes cover communications interfaces?”

  Good question. I opened my authorization again and dug through a long tree of codes that mostly seemed like gibberish. I did not even want to know what a code like

  ENABLE_OVERRIDE_BACKSHIFT_MOBILIZATION

  was supposed to mean in the context of an ion drive control system. That whole set was greyed out so I could not use it anyways. I took a close look at the section on protocols and decided that the numerical value for

  ENABLE_SECURE_COMMUNICATIONS_INTERFACE

  seemed appropriate. I typed it in and watched as a new window opened that Nasruddin immediately started to fill with TDF codes.

  A few minutes later, he was talking to a TDF operator who connected him to the security forces guarding the base. I did not catch much of the profanity-laden conversation, but it seemed like an army was attacking the gates all around the base on our level. At least fifty hit squads were murdering their way through the rest of the city. Other cities were also reporting trouble, but the core of the trouble was Orientale Tereshkova.

  Nasruddin finally got in enough words to say that he was guarding a high-value package and was trapped in maintenance workroom WR35-23, close to Gagarin Road on level Three. Somehow, that broke the standoff. There was a demand, not directed at us, “Where the hell is WR35-23 on level Three?” followed by “Dickhead gets promoted and ‘rationalizes’ the room labels, so now they are crazy in a new way and no one knows where anything is. They reuse the same labels on every level but in different parts of the city.”

  A few authorization codes later, the security officer seemed to understand the importance of the package. I heard a loud “SHIT!” and he got even more abusive as he called for three squads of marines with heavy armour and mobile gun platforms to extract us. A mere security officer does not command regular forces so the exchange continued until Nasruddin spoke directly to the Colonel in charge.

  Colonel Selima Vanderzee sounded ready to spit bullets herself, with the entire base invested on level Three. She finally agreed to send two squads with the requested armour. She was pretty sure the mobile gun platforms would not fit down the corridors in our neighbourhood and would do more harm than good if the guns ever fired. Such heavy weapons were intended for operations on the surface, not in the confines of the city, but she allowed that they might be necessary to break through the enemies attacking the base gate. She said she would check if a laser carriage was available. She told us to keep the window open for updates, but otherwise to wait silently.

  Through the thin divider that separated us from the next office, I heard, “Both corridors are filling with soldiers now. I don’t think we should stay here. Chief, should we go up or down?”

  There was a loud rattling like heavy bullets against the door where we had entered the maintenance room. The workers were prepared to stand off gangs of thieves but this sounded like firepower they could not match. Even our TDF guards would be mashed into hamburger. The armour would distribute the force of an impact over the whole body but human brains slosh like water inside our skulls if the resulting jerk is hard enough.

  I yelled back, “Down has heavy doors and might be defensible but if I recall correctly that room has no other exits. We would be trapped. If they have explosives we would be in mortal peril. Up connects to a power tunnel. Tight enough that I couldn’t use my wheelchair but it connects to other buildings. It has been a few years; could you tell me who uses those other buildings?”

  I spun my wheelchair, moving out the door and into the next office. It was now crowded with workers staring at the displays from the surveillance cameras.

  Cindy outlined the access points, “Across the south corridor is a big transformer facility. Massive walls and doors. I work there on the power conduits sometimes, but they have to escort me in and out. None of us can open those doors. The tunnel turns right there and heads west. Next is a small detachment of the Public Office. They serve the maze of corridors from Stravinsky to Gagarin and from Seurat to Renoir. Officially, like us, they do not carry guns. They must be frantic right now. Beyond that, there are five small workshops under contract to the city, but none of them is directly accessible from the overhead tunnel. The power conduits drop through small tubes into the back of the shops. The tunnel ends there, so the Public Office is the last accessible point. Other way from here, it also turns west over three shops for automotive, electronics and cleaning supplies. They will have closed their doors by now but those doors are designed for convenient access by their customers, not for defence.”

  I thought back to when I had last been here. The gang had chased us into this maintenance room through the same door on the south side and had attacked it because they knew we were here.

  Today was different. The northern and southern corridors were filled with heavily armed soldiers. The Moon must have its own hidden armies, who had chosen now to attack this city. The Imperium would not have sent an army just to find me. The Exterminators wanted to destroy me but would have sent another hit squad, not invaded the whole city. The ministers and Hope University people had all been here since we fled the earth stations. What was special enough to justify such a massive assault today?

  But, of course, it was obvious. The Viceroy Fenghuang
was here in person for the inauguration of the Imperial Directorate of Commerce and the restart of trade. She would be in a well-known location, probably the reception that followed the announcement. This was not a round-up of suspected criminals, it was a coup d’état, an attempt to destroy her government before it even got started.

  That was the single greatest flaw in the entire concept of monarchical government. Killing a minister left a temporary hole in the governing council that would soon be filled; killing a monarch destabilized the entire system. Over the grand sweep of history, monarchs who lacked an established chain of succession spent too much time and too many lives defending their thrones, too little improving their countries.

  The Viceroy would undoubtedly be protected by her trusted circles of security, but they would be new to the city and unfamiliar with its byways and hiding places. In normal times, security was only an issue in a few places in a lunar city, but these were not normal times. Maintenance workers move through dark, quiet corridors that carried all the services that made the city work. They saw far more unauthorized activity than most citizens. I felt safer in this company than the Viceroy would in her cocoon of professional security.

  A red DDoS warning popped up on the central monitor.

  Dado swore, “Shit. Distributed Denial of Service attack. The comm system is being flooded with false messages. Learn what you can quickly because our comm connectivity is degrading severely. The new LE filters remove the false messages but are slowing the system so badly that real messages might not get through fast enough to be useful, if they get through at all.”

  I asked if they could close the airtight doors at each end of the north and south corridors. Soldiers trapped between the doors might be less interested in breaking into a room halfway along. Unfortunately, maintenance workers lacked the authority to close the doors. Someone with civic authority would have to declare an emergency and the DDoS warning told us that the civic emergency centre was now inaccessible. We were on our own.