Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust Read online

  Nightmare Wars: Book 1

  Lord Banshee

  Fairy Dust

  by

  Russell O. Redman

  Copyright © 2018 by Russell O. Redman

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

  Disclaimer: 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

  2357-02-28 10:30 – The Fairy Dust Incident

  2357-02-28 11:25 – Chief of Forensic Accounting

  2357-02-28 12:00 – T&A

  2357-02-28 16:30 – R&R

  2357-03-01 03:00 – Recovery

  2357-03-02 08:00 – Political Analyst

  2357-03-02 10:00 – News and Views

  2357-03-02 15:00 – TDF Mao Awakening

  2357-03-02 17:50 – Briefing

  2357-03-02 19:30 – Meet and Greet

  2357-03-02 21:00 – Beer for Breakfast

  2357-03-02 22:00 – Mao be Obeyed

  2357-03-03 04:00 – Campfire Stories

  2357-03-03 09:00 – The Crew of the Fairy Dust

  2357-03-03 11:00 – Fresh Air and Exercise

  2357-03-03 15:00 – Waking Dreams

  2357-03-03 18:00 – Dream Analysis

  2357-03-03 20:00 – Subterranean Rumbling

  2357-03-03 22:00 – Wash-up

  2357-03-03 23:00 – Monkey Business

  2357-03-03 23:40 – Never

  2357-03-04 00:00 – Proposal

  2357-03-04 00:10 – Treason

  2357-03-04 02:00 – Blocks and Walls

  2357-03-04 03:00 – Party Planning

  2357-03-04 04:00 – Spacer Soiree

  2357-03-04 19:00 – The Rape

  2357-03-04 19:30 – Maintenance

  2357-03-05 02:00 – Factional Debate

  2357-03-05 03:00 – New Orders

  2357-03-05 03:20 – Dark Developments

  2357-03-05 04:30 – Mandate

  2357-03-05 05:00 – Plan of Attack

  2357-03-05 08:00 – Banshees

  2357-03-05 11:00 – Manila Bay

  2357-03-05 17:00 – Sleepy Bye

  Appendix A: Gendered Pronouns

  Appendix B: A Short History of the Final War

  2357-02-28 10:30

  The Fairy Dust Incident

  I hated Martians, every single one of them. Far below me, the peaceful people of the Earth slept and woke, laughed and fell in love, blissfully unaware of the nightmare I was watching. Far away, I knew the Martian people burned to avenge the Counterstrike that had crushed their dreams of freedom. Everything about the Fairy Dust stank of Martian conspiracies, of treachery, and of war.

  I was giving a briefing on the Fairy Dust incident in our most secure conference room on the earth station Khrushchev, the oldest and busiest of the six geosynchronous space stations that served as transfer points for trade between the Earth and the rest of human space. My audience was virtual, so I was alone in the room except for a camera and a bank of monitors. All we knew for certain about the Fairy Dust was in the video I was presenting at ten times real-time speed. On this first pass, I turned the audio off, feeling it was important they see for themselves what had happened.

  A local freighter, registered as CFE 1066 but with the name FAIRY DUST painted on its side, slid backwards out of its docking bay. As soon as it was clear, it rolled fifty degrees clockwise using its forward jets. A tug, approaching to push it out of port, blew all its jets to stop in time. Two minutes after it left the dock, the Fairy Dust pitched rapidly upwards ninety degrees. Four and a half minutes into the event, scarcely clear of the end of the bay, it fired its main engines. The ship boosted at high acceleration straight north out of the ecliptic, ignoring the designated taxi lanes and flight paths. The usual glow of an ion drive was missing; in its place was a thin, flickering line, barely visible behind the ship. At six minutes, when the Fairy Dust was far enough away that its engine could be safely disabled with laser gunnery, it started to eject a thick haze of fine chaff that sparkled in the sunlight and blocked our view of what it was doing. The station's defensive lasers tried to fire at the ship, but the few that could target the ship were confused by the chaff and failed to hit it. Only one military ship was nearby, the Terrestrial Defence Force battleship Mao, which was waiting to take on supplies with its engines off and most of its crew on shore leave. Ten minutes into the event, it was still powering up its terminal defence guns when the Fairy Dust appeared to explode. The blast had a nuclear component; the resulting electromagnetic pulse blanked the station's sensors and communications for almost ten minutes. The tracking telescope was destroyed, but the station deployed another when they regained control of the external sensors. By then, the largest surviving chunk of the ship was racing into the distance. The video ended twenty minutes after it had started.

  I had been assigned the portfolio to investigate the Fairy Dust incident because of my familiarity with spacers and especially freighter crews, in most peoples’ opinions the most headstrong and unreliable people on or off the Earth. When it came to their ships, however, they were almost worshipful in their care and dedication. You would be too if a grain of sand hitting a defective part of your ship could kill you. Spacers had a well-deserved reputation as druggies, perverts, and liars, but they never abused their ships and never broke procedures when docking or undocking. The craziness on the Fairy Dust was not the work of spacers, I was sure of it.

  Martians were my best guess, although that is like saying that mosquitoes carry disease without telling you which one to slap. It seemed obvious to me, because I had fought on Mars during the Incursion and knew how they thought. I had been dreading something like this for years.

  My audience was anonymous, presenting me with neither an image nor even a computer-generated voice, communicating only through a text feed. I might have been talking to a single agent, or the Amalgamated Chiefs of Staff for the Terrestrial Defence Forces. My replies seemed to go back with full bandwidth, so the restricted communications were to protect the identity and location of the visitors, who might have been elsewhere on the station, on the Earth, or with the fleet defending the stations in L2. Earth was a good bet, but the Khrushchev served the immensely prosperous Euro-African sector and enjoyed direct communications all the way from the Twoams to central Asia. With a relay, they could have been anywhere.

  Bigwigs often were unfamiliar with commercial space operations, so I gave a quick introduction to the ship as the video ran. The Fairy Dust had been a standard near-Earth freighter, a cylindrical steel tube ten meters across and thirty meters long, with the main drive in the stern and rings of orientation jets around the rim at the bow and stern. The bow was a thick disk of consolidated rubble that served as a meteor shield. The crew compartment was mounted just behind the meteor shield, as far from the reactor and engine as possible. The space between the engine and the crew compartment was used for cargo. It was possible to attach additional cargo to the exterior but that had not been done for this part of the trip.

  The main engine was supposed to be an ion drive. Ion drives are extremely cheap and reliable, but only push in one direction: forward. The drive can be steered magnetically by small amounts in real time to accommodate the changing centre of mass as the crew moves around, but large changes in direction require the ship to reorient using the fore and aft jets, then fire the main engine in the new direction. Unlike the military, freight companies are very cost-conscious. They save fuel by firing the jets briefly to start the ship rotating, and once again to stop the rotation when the ship reach
es its proper orientation. It can take hours to reorient a fully loaded freighter, but time is abundant and fuel is expensive in space. Running out of fuel can be catastrophic, especially in deep space, far from rescue.

  Every ship has standardized docking ports for freight and people. These standards had been universal since we returned to space after the Final War. The docking ports are by definition on the “port” side of a ship. “Starboard” is the opposite side, where standard navigation instruments are mounted. Up and down are flexible words in space. Under acceleration, up means towards the bow and down towards the stern. For navigators in zero-G, when the engine is off, up and down are nominally perpendicular to the port-starboard axis. For someone looking towards the bow with port to their left, their head would be up and their feet down. When reorienting the ship, pitch moves the bow of the ship up and down, yaw moves it port and starboard, just like in an airplane for those familiar with Earthbound transportation.

  Every ship can also rotate around its long axis to handle difficulties during docking at isolated facilities, but in routine operation no crew will ever do so. In flight, it would be completely pointless and near a station or major asteroid mine, docking is handled by the tugs that latch onto standard clamping posts around the rim at the bow and stern. Freighter crews pay out of their own salaries for wasted fuel, so they let the station tugs rotate the ship into the proper orientation for the dock.

  The nominal flight plan for the Fairy Dust was a straightforward run to the Moon and a couple of asteroid mines in L2. They were carrying electronics and replacement parts from the Earth. At the Moon, they would exchange the electronics for specialized zero-G mining machinery and would pick up food that had been shipped from the farms in L1. At L2, they would exchange the machinery and food for ice and carbonaceous rock, which they would bring back to the Moon for new farms being built deep underground at Tycho Hebrides. Returning to the Khrushchev from the Moon, they would bring a load of He-3 for the fusion reactors that powered our most energy-intensive industries on the Earth.

  The ship had carried almost identical cargoes a dozen times before, except that this time the goods that the crew would trade on their own accounts were durable products that spacers did not use in-flight. They would be hard to sell if they did not have contact with new colonists heading for the Belt. That was the only anomaly in a run that should have occupied them for six months.

  Instead, it was all over in twenty minutes. Maybe less for them.

  I started to replay the episode for my invisible audience, this time at normal speed including the audio record of communications between the port controllers and the crew. A side panel showed the telemetry from the internal operations of the ship. I paused the video to discuss each significant event in the sequence.

  The initial communications were perfectly normal, as the crew requested and received clearance to leave. Telemetry from the ship confirmed that the magnetic impellers in the bay were pushing the ship out of the dock. As it exited the bay, the tug should have slid in, clamped onto the hull at the bow and pushed the ship with gas jets far enough from the station that the ion drive could be ignited without damaging anything.

  Instead, the ship rolled, preventing the tug from clamping on. The crew on the tug started yelling at the Fairy Dust, babbled an incoherent call for help to the port controllers. The port controllers, incredulous, demanded to know what the crew of the Fairy Dust thought they were doing and why they were reorienting so close to the bay, but the crew never replied. For all I knew, they might have been dead. The ship continued to send a stream of apparently normal telemetry that did not report anything out of the ordinary. Especially, the telemetry did not report the roll. The roll, all by itself, was so bizarre, so pointless, that it reeked of a Martian conspiracy.

  Then the ship began to pitch up. Reorienting a ship this massive can normally be described as glacial, although spacers had ruder expressions. Not this time. A freighter of this class and mass could never move that fast, and the word “military” struck my mind every time I watched this part of the video. The Fairy Dust was clearly not carrying its nominal cargo and had been outfitted with technologies unrelated to its commercial purpose. The telemetry stream must have been simulated because there continued to be no hint of the roll, nor of the change in pitch; instead it reported a normal connection to the tug and the gentle push that should have been moving it into the flight lanes. There were at least ten different autonomous systems that should have been reporting the non-standard operation, but they had all been compromised to report a completely normal exit from the bay.

  The port controllers were startled into momentary silence, then one of them cursed loudly, and they all started talking at once. On the display, this appeared as separated lines of text, since the audio was almost useless as a record for those critical seconds. Some demanded that the ship stop immediately, some ordered it to resume its course and follow its flight plan. One controller, thinking slightly faster than the others, called on the Port Safety Officer to disable the ship. It was clearly malfunctioning and had become a hazard to navigation. The PSO replied that she had already tried, but that the ship was not responding to the port override signals.

  The main engine ignited, although I use the word loosely because this was not a standard ion drive. I had analyzed the video with great care, examining the faint flickering thread that extended out of the back, as well as the port defensive radars that were nominally watching for incoming meteoroids along the path of the thread. My conclusion was that the Fairy Dust was being propelled by some form of rail gun, firing small pellets at enormous speeds and with great efficiency. I had heard rumours of such drives, but they were top secret and only found on a few experimental military craft; such an engine could double as a cannon and was far too dangerous for commercial use.

  Every ship was plated with armour designed to stop pebble-sized meteoroids moving at tens of kilometres per second. The pellets from the Fairy Dust’s new drive were moving so fast they could punch through a normal hull like a bullet through paper. My instincts screamed out “Martians”, “weapons” and “war” in quick succession.

  Fortunately, none of the slugs hit anything local. At that speed, none would ever return to the solar system. It was as though they were deliberately trying to avoid casualties. But why would an enemy deploy such a weapon without hitting anything?

  Chaff, of course, is a normal military tool designed to confuse targeting systems. Chaff is useless against weapons that can fire hundreds or thousands of times at each target. The military could afford terminal defences that filled a volume of space with a wall of slugs. By contrast, an earth station threatened by an incoming meteoroid had to target the rock and vaporize it with a single shot. They had to avoid filling near-Earth space with fragments that would shut down commerce for the years required to clean up the mess. Even military ships powered off their terminal defence systems while in port. The station bristled with over a hundred anti-meteoroid lasers, but each one had a limited field of fire and only a few could be targeted on the misbehaving ship. The chaff successfully confused the targeting systems so they did not lock onto the ship itself. Worse, the guns were programmed to target objects moving towards the station. Targeting objects moving away required a manual override, which took time. Only three fired, and all three missed. The chaff, timing and trajectory of the Fairy Dust seemed to have been designed to minimize the risk from the station’s defensive system.

  Recognizing that the station guns were ineffective against such a threat, the PSO sent an emergency request to the TDF Mao to target and destroy the Fairy Dust. Attacking a commercial vessel would exceed any captain's discretionary powers, especially so close to an earth station, but the captain of the Mao took the risk and began an emergency boot of his own terminal defence systems. After a few minutes, the video showed the deadly rail guns swivelling towards the Fairy Dust.

  Too late of course. The stern of the Fairy Dust, still hidden behind the cha
ff, detonated in a huge explosion. This was a small nuclear explosion, less than a kiloton. The radiation damage to the station was less than would have been sustained in a hard solar storm, but the electromagnetic pulse was enormous, enhanced as the chaff vaporized and added to the shock wave. Had the chaff remained, it might have been a hazard for incoming ships for months or even years, but it all blew away in a puff of hot gas. Again, it seemed like the conspirators had engineered the incident to minimize actual damage while terrifying everyone.

  The nuclear blast should have shattered the Fairy Dust, but somehow the bulk of the ship survived and was kicked forward like a football. If the crew were not already dead, the blast would have killed them, and any unfortunate who still survived would perish in the vacuum of interplanetary space with a ruptured hull and no way to return home.

  The hulk might have been a continuing hazard to navigation except that it would pass far north of the transportation corridors. Its current orbit would take it halfway to Mars, and the Earth would be in a different part of its orbit when it returned. It would be decades before a clean-up would be practical.

  Since then, the Port Authorities had been overwhelmed by requests for early departures, and StaSec, the Station Security, had their hands full with distraught spacers desperate to leave. After such an act of terrorism, I could hardly blame them.

  My own investigations were just getting properly started. Station Security had, of course, detained all the baggage handlers who had loaded the Fairy Dust. I had interviewed several of them already. For most, the load was just a set of large containers. They checked that the container ID matched the manifest, that the mass was correct, whether anything seemed loose inside, that its heat and radiation signatures were appropriate, and that nothing illicit appeared in X-ray scans of a randomly selected few. With those checks complete, they pushed them into the cargo hold and locked them into their designated places in the container frame. Nobody seemed aware of anything amiss, which meant that someone was a good liar.