Lord Banshee- Fugitive Read online

  Nightmare Wars: Book 2

  Lord Banshee

  Fugitive

  by

  Russell O. Redman

  Copyright © 2018 by Russell O. Redman

  Acknowledgment: I would like to thank rebeccacovers for the great cover image.

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Throughout this series, I enthusiastically use surnames and personal names from around the world, every ethnic and national group I could find. None of these names imply endorsement or criticism of real people who share those names.

  Timeline by Chapter

  2357-03-06 02:30 – Mutiny in the Infirmary

  2357-03-06 03:00 – Once upon a Time

  2357-03-06 04:30 – Shuttle Down

  2357-03-06 05:30 – Ultra-Secret

  2357-03-06 07:00 – Admiralty

  2357-03-06 08:00 – Mao Shi Hongdi

  2357-03-06 08:30 – Pantheon

  2357-03-06 09:00 – Forethought

  2357-03-06 09:30 – Plan of Battle

  2357-03-06 10:00 – Promotion

  2357-03-06 21:00 – Confrontation

  2357-03-06 22:00 – A Walk in the Park

  2357-03-07 00:30 – Aristocracy

  2357-03-07 02:30 – Rats from a Sinking Ship

  2357-03-07 05:30 – Hopeless Cases

  2357-03-07 14:00 – Rude Awakenings

  2357-03-08 00:00 – To See Ourselves as Others See Us

  2357-03-08 20:00 – Best Day Ever

  2357-03-09 11:00 – Nightmare Wars

  2357-03-09 20:00 – Crossing the Bifrost

  2357-03-11 03:00 – Blank Slate

  2357-03-11 12:00 – Bookends

  2357-03-11 17:00 – Rapist

  2357-03-12 07:00 – Pirate Attack

  2357-03-12 23:00 – Messenger of Hope

  2357-03-13 00:00 – Gathering

  2357-03-13 01:00 – Pantocrator

  2357-03-13 07:00 – Rescue from Valhalla

  2357-03-13 23:00 – Hai Ba Tru’ng

  2357-03-13 23:30 – Into the Mouth of the Dragon

  2357-03-14 06:00 – Painful Decisions

  2357-03-14 07:00 – LUVN

  2357-03-14 09:00 – The Narrow Path of Justice

  2357-03-14 11:00 – The Inescapable Logic of Madness

  2357-03-14 12:00 – Escape from Hell

  2357-03-14 13:00 – Irresistible Attraction

  2357-03-14 13:30 – Loki is the King of Valhalla

  2357-03-14 22:00 – Antechamber of the Frost Giants

  2357-03-15 06:00 – Homecoming

  2357-03-20 02:00 – Threading a Hellgate

  2357-03-20 03:30 – Riding the Razor Wire

  2357-03-20 07:00 – A Candle in a Dark Wind

  2357-03-06 02:30

  Mutiny in the Infirmary

  I thrashed wildly, locked in a steel frame awaiting execution while the battle raged around me… Except there was no battle. I was in a nearly silent room. Two marines pinned me down – had I been captured?

  “Cool it, Douglas.” Doctor Toyami sounded tired and cranky. “Stop fighting and wake up properly. You are not at war with us. Keep this up and I will put you in a deep coma.”

  I drew a couple of deep breaths as I tried to remember where I was and why.

  I remembered that the Banshees had helped rescue the survivors of the frigate Manila Bay, barely in time before a fifty-megaton explosion had vaporized the stricken ship. They and I were all safely on the battleship Mao. I had been exhausted by the time everyone returned and had fallen asleep almost immediately when Doctor Marin clipped me into a bed in the infirmary. I was wearing an opaque helmet to prevent me from broadcasting insanity to the whole team while I was dreaming and was restrained to prevent me from removing the helmet.

  There was no war, but instead of resting as I slept, I had been fighting through a string of nightmares, vivid, hopeless battles that woke me just long enough to remember the terror. I could barely turn my head inside the helmet, but when Doctor Toyami moved into my field of view she also looked exhausted.

  “Have I been fighting all night? It feels like it.”

  “Only when you were dreaming. Then, it took all three of us to hold you still. The back of your mind, whomever that may be, is getting good at manipulating your internal meds to override the soporific and paralysis. I am surprised you can even do that and will make some changes before we let you sleep again. You have only had the new med monitor for three days, and at this rate we are going to need to refill it within the week. Who were you trying to fight, do you remember?”

  “The Martian army. They are here, on the Earth, maybe even on the earth stations by now. They have been here since before the Incursion. No, I am serious! That is not just a nightmare talking. I have worried for years about why the Martians bombed the Earth at the start of the Incursion, but then left it alone. They must have had a force in place at the time, but never used it.

  “The reason now seems obvious. They were not ready. The timing of the Incursion was driven by opportunity rather than strategy, by the progress of the uprising on Mars, not by the organization of the invasion force on the Earth. The TDF responded too quickly to be stopped, so they left their army in hiding. They are still here, reinforced over the last fifteen years and far better organized. Unlike the chaos of the Incursion, the Imperium may be following a real plan with a schedule, aside from a few fanatics who are jumping the gun.

  “We know they have sent a huge fleet of mysterious spacecraft, which will arrive within days. When they are ready, the professionals will strike all at once across every front. What is happening on the earth stations right now?”

  “Peaceful progress, Brian.” I could hear Raul, but not see him from inside the helmet. “Begum and I woke up when you moaned and fought in your last nightmare. We have been awake with nothing to do for the last hour, so have been watching the news feeds and MI reports. The Deng is almost completely quiet, and DG Eberhardy has been sending teams of advisors to the other earth stations.

  “The Port Authorities on all the stations halted operations during the emoji attack but are slowly restoring service. Interstation shuttles were halted but resumed within a few hours. The pilots were spared the effects of the emojis. Who knows why? Shuttle flights to the Earth were also halted, mostly as a precaution, because it takes so long to get to geostationary orbit. They are reported to be close to resuming service. There is one at the Deng now, waiting to go down, another on the Khrushchev, and a third on the Kamehameha, but nothing scheduled to come up for a few days. Even if we commandeered all the seats, we could not get the ministers and their delegations down before sometime next week.

  It suddenly tweaked what he had just said. “Is Com Thieu still with you? I am surprised Doctor Marin would allow that.”

  There was a moment of quiet, and Thieu’s voice said softly, “She did not. I asked Doctor Toyami to move us after she went off shift, so we woke up beside each other this morning.”

  “Oh good,” I said, “I thought maybe you two were stuck together with glue bugs. But you probably ought to move back to your original places before Doctor Marin returns. I am pretty sure she will be upset to find you together, and you do not want to see her upset.”

  Raul continued, “Ha, ha. It may amuse you that the advisors from the Deng are calling themselves Council missionaries. It will not amuse you that they have already reported five martyrs, killed or badly injured in the violence on the other stations. Some of the people on the other stations have been demented almost as long as the poor souls on the Manila Bay. They do seem to be making progress, however.

  “Shipping was stopped but is also restarting. The Khrushchev and the Kennedy are both hoping to resume outbound departures with
in a few hours. None of the Port Authorities are willing to accept arriving ships until they are confident their own managers are not demented. The Gandhi is still a mess, and we have only scattered reports that do not make much sense from the Magellan and Kamehameha.”

  “Those two are different?” They were not on Mindy’s list of stations to be destroyed, but I doubted she knew the real plan in all its details. “If they were fully functional, they would have volumes to say. That they are issuing only scattered reports tells me that they have serious trouble of their own. It may be that they have mixed allegiances, or perhaps have been targeted with a different set of emojis. What was in the reports you have seen?”

  Raul replied, “Totally bland, business as usual, routine purchase orders, admin notifications, some very long and boring economic reports, but only a fraction of what a normal station produces.”

  “Totally bland reports?” I replied, “Like Singh says the Governor on Mars has been receiving from formerly contentious cities? And like the telemetry from the Fairy Dust? Now I am scared. Those reports may be carrying coded messages. If so, the stations are in much worse trouble than we thought.

  “I really wish you could pass me one of those reports so I could read it while strapped into the helmet. Which is surprisingly comfortable, by the way, despite looking like a medieval instrument of torture. Wait – Marin said she could read part of the data from our medical monitors, not the binary parts, just the parts that could be serialized. Any document can be serialized, so why can we not serialize one of the reports and send it across?”

  Thieu replied, “It would not work. I think she just meant that numbers were encoded in the data structure as decimal or hex strings but were not in binary, not compressed, and not encrypted. The standard serialization libraries can package anything for transport but record the format of the original data so the destination knows how to handle it. If the binary data contains executable code, it is dangerous no matter how it is transported, so the filters we put in would reject serialized binary data the same as they reject binary data itself. I could tweak the filters to allow serialized documents of a few selected types. Encrypted streams are different, of course, because the entire point of the encryption is to hide the contents until it reaches its destination.”

  Raul wondered, “But suppose they did not use the standard libraries? A document could be made to look like almost anything.”

  “Almost everyone uses the standard libraries,” Thieu explained, “because they are fast, efficient and effective. When used correctly with a quantum key, they have been mathematically demonstrated to be unbreakable. Do not forget that we have had four hundred years of practice condensed into those libraries. That effort got started well before the Final War. You can write your own, but most people are amateurs and create encryptions that are trivial to break. If you get a block of text that looks like a mess of numbers, there are standard cracking tools that are the first thing to try. What does that have to do with Agent Douglas reading documents?”

  Raul swore quietly. “Every one of those big, bland economic reports have tables of production figures, costs and quantities, multipage spreadsheets full of data. They may have been sending coded messages in those tables. No one reads the printed versions closely. Even I just grab the attached data files. Begum, if I gave you one of those reports, is there any way to tell if the printed table contains coded messages?”

  “Raul, should I be hearing this? I am just a Com, and this suddenly sounds highly classified. Maybe I better get back to my own bed after all.”

  “Do not worry. I will just tell Haliru that you made an interesting comment about passing documents around...”

  “NO, please! If you tell Haliru that we have had a forbidden conversation about classified work, I will be swimming in shit!”

  Toyami was out of view again, but I could recognize her voice. “I just checked the schedule and Marin is due for rounds in about fifteen minutes. I will catch some of that shit if she finds you here, so it is time to go back to your official bed. We probably do not need to hold Brian down any more since he is awake, so could the two of you carry her across the hall again?”

  She must have meant the two marines. I could hear a clipping followed by the muffled conversation of the marines as they moved Thieu back across the hall. The door to our room clicked shut and everything was quiet.

  I lay there with a cold pit in my stomach. I had imagined myself a master of encrypted, distributed, holographic communications systems. I had baffled the Martian rebels during my period as the Assassin, but as they controlled more of the planet they seemed to anticipate my moves with ever better precision. I had written my own encryptions, avoiding the standard libraries because I had been paranoid enough to believe they produced codes that had already been broken. Maybe it was the other way around; professional cryptographers employed by the rebels had broken my amateur codes and were reading the messages that I had proudly thought were unbreakable. Maybe, if Raul was right, the Martian factions were making the same amateur mistakes right now.

  We had not even been looking. Again.

  Raul had different concerns. “We have caught her in a nasty patch of trouble. What can we do?”

  I left the Ghost to analyze my problems on Mars and turned to the personnel problem Raul had just raised. I had tried to avoid these kinds of issues for a decade, but this was something the Cap and the Agent used to be good at and it did not risk exposing the sensitive parts of the Mission. “Raul, do we have anybody on this team who knows anything about encryption? I know a bit but would still rank as an amateur. It was never important on the freighters, and even on Mars my ego was so big I tried to write my own. A military Com probably knows a lot more than I ever learned. Maybe we can ask Wang to second her to us. Molongo has promised us a fully supported division, but between now and then, we have only the resources of the Mao. Actually, the best way might be to ask for someone with at least modest cryptographic experience and to suggest Thieu as someone who has demonstrated an ability to work well with the team.”

  “You are not matchmaking again, are you?”

  I wished I could see Raul’s face, to see if he was angry about the previous night, but he sounded almost amused. I thought about what I had just said, and recognized the handiwork of the Cap, matching people who seemed compatible to jobs that were of immediate importance. They sometimes ended in spectacular failures, but spacers just moved on to other ships, no harm done.

  “Maybe, just a little. Do you trust her on an issue like this? Before you answer that, who else is in the room. I cannot see anyone.”

  “There were four others originally, but right now there is just you, me and Leilani, who is still asleep on the other side of you. She got a few nicks and bruises on the Deng, and a dose of hard radiation from the Manila Bay. She got more sleep than Doctor Toyami but is still out cold. I think we are safe.

  “Yes, I trust Begum. We worked together exceptionally well in the MI office and over on the Excalibur. I admit, it seemed like we were wearing the same armour on the Manila Bay, but that ship was so horrifying I really appreciated her staying close. We and our two marines moved in a tight little foursome through the closest approximation of hell that I have ever seen. Just as we were getting started, there was one poor sailor in armour, glued to the wall. The faceplate on the armour had been eaten through by the acid bugs. The same bugs had eaten the armour from the inside, so when I tried to see if the sailor was still alive, I tore off one arm and the entire front of the torso. There was a bug factory where her belly used to be and a cloud of bugs and entrails spewed out from the tear. Fortunately, my marine pulled me back before I was covered myself. Begum’s only comment was, ‘Nope, dead’, and she dragged me on down the hall. If she had not, I think I would have vomited inside the mask and fled back to the transports. After that we did not check any more victims and went straight for the MI office.”

  Suddenly, our door banged open and Doctor Marin was shouting
with anger. “WAKE UP, YOU STUPID BASTARDS! I do not care if you are the walking dead. Tipu, wake up! TOYAMI, get back in here too.

  “I will say this one more time, and the next time I will lay charges of treason. YOU WILL NOT HAVE SEX WITH THE CREW OF THE MAO! You will not kiss, you will not embrace, you will not hold hands, you will not have dinner together, you will not share a quiet bulb of coffee. You are walking cesspits of disease. You will continue to be disease vectors for another two weeks at least, maybe more after the radiation we have just experienced gets finished mutating all your bacteria. If any of you willful, self-righteous morons pass a disease to the crew, we could all die and the Earth be enslaved by the Martians. You will not jeopardize everyone else for a few moments of personal gratification. IS THAT CLEAR?

  “You, Toyami, you know what we risk and should have had better sense. I can have you arrested and your medical license suspended. The rest of you are no better, especially not you, Douglas. Are you behind this new wave of fraternization? Have you been assaulting people again?”

  “What?” I sprang to our collective defence, “No, I do not think so. I have been asleep here for the last few hours. Doctor Toyami said it was a very restless sleep and I had to be restrained by the marines a couple of times, but no, I do not think I broadcast anything. Nor would the comm system have passed any messages I sent containing emojis.

  “Doctor Marin, if people want to be together, I am sure it is just the camaraderie of danger successfully faced. I am going to suggest to Cap Wang that we should have a memorial service for those who were injured or killed on the Manila Bay. There were also some good working relationships formed during this action that should be fostered, not condemned. I am sure we all understand the importance of proper hygiene, but we are still in this crisis and need to work together whenever we can.”

  Marin was not mollified. I could just see her at the edge of the view out of the helmet. She glared around the room, snapped at us individually for a few minutes more, then turned and headed out of the room, declaring “I am going to deliver the same message to your equally moronic colleagues on the crew.”