Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust Read online

  Similarly, a quick trace of the manifests for the contents of the containers showed nothing odd. Given the phony telemetry from the Fairy Dust, I already knew that somebody in the conspiracy was a good at faking reports, so that gave me no comfort at all.

  The Fairy Dust had just finished a maintenance refit. This was the obvious time to swap the ion drive for something more exotic, although the refit was minor and very brief. Everyone involved in the refit had been detained. So far, this had given me my only real lead, since one of the technicians had been on a two-day medical leave due to an accident the day before the refit started, but was still listed as present on the job for the whole refit. I did not recognize the form of the name, so did not know whether the accident victim was male, female or something else. The doctor who treated zim[1] was certain that ze was who ze said ze was, which meant someone else had been called in to fill zer job during the refit. I had been about to interview zer supervisor when I was called to give this briefing.

  The whole incident seemed baffling, but if this was an experimental test of a weapon, it failed spectacularly. Nobody died, nothing significant on the earth station Khrushchev had been damaged, and no physical evidence remained in the inner solar system that the Fairy Dust had ever existed, except the last, broken chunk of the freighter.

  I truly hated Martians, but this seemed bizarre even for them. Somebody was trying to do something, and the Martians had to be involved, but who, and why, and how? None of it made sense. Unless that was the whole, incomprehensible point, a spectacular ruse to distract us while something more important happened.

  I mentioned to my absent audience that I had filed a request through my supervisor for additional support to investigate what had happened, and for permission to liaise with our Earth-based colleagues in counter-terrorism. Although it was unlikely he had much to add, we probably also needed to contact the Governor on Mars.

  After I finished talking, my anonymous visitor paused a few moments. A message popped up, “Thank you for the clarity of that presentation and analysis.” I blinked a few times, wondering if this was some form of sarcasm, until the next message appeared. “Could you summarize briefly the issues that you feel are most important for the investigation?”

  I proceeded:

  A fully functional nuclear bomb had been imported clandestinely into the earth station Khrushchev, stored for an unknown length of time on or near the station without being discovered, and loaded onto a freighter where it exploded. Station security had been hopelessly compromised and needed to be tightened immediately.

  An extremely dangerous experimental drive had been installed into a commercial freighter, a drive which I only recognized from rumours as a secret military development. Military procurement might also be compromised and should be investigated, starting with the Earth-based contractors for that system and the regional governments that hosted those corporations.

  The conspirators who organized the incident were apparently aware of all our protocols and procedures. Up until the ship exploded, they had evaded every part of our operational defence system. If this had been a conventional attack, such weapons had the potential to cut the Earth off from all space-based industry and supplies for years. This indicated a level of technical espionage far beyond the capabilities of any normal smuggling ring and even of most regional governments on the Earth. The Martian Incursion began with a cyber-attack, but that attack had nowhere near the sophistication that this incident displayed.

  None of our electronic records could be trusted. The conspirators had apparently erased all traces of their presence throughout the system, hiding behind a bland facade that reported only “business as usual”. It seemed likely that they were monitoring our reactions and had anticipated much of what we would do next, a level of preparation that warned of much larger events in progress. I highlight this as the single most troublesome development.

  There was another pause, then,

  “Thank you for that assessment. Our independent assessments agree on the scale and nature of the threats. Your personal efforts are appreciated, but are clearly insufficient to handle a crisis of this magnitude. However, your skills and background give you a unique perspective.

  “Agent Little, you have been underemployed for the last few years. If you agree to accept the responsibility, you will be re-assigned as head of a team of agents with significantly increased resources to follow up this investigation. Your request to liaise with Earth-based agencies will be granted. Your team will include representatives from the departments of Extraterrestrial Affairs, Military Intelligence and Procurement, Commerce, and the Agency in Law Enforcement. Please report to your supervisor for details of your new assignment.

  “Should it be needed, you have been re-activated as a field agent with sufficient rank to command this force and with enhanced clearance and special discretionary powers. You must find who is behind this. It seems we are again at war, and we do not even know who the enemy is.”

  2357-02-28 11:25

  Chief of Forensic Accounting

  My name was Dan Little, former field agent of Legal Intelligence during the Martian Incursion, currently seconded as a Senior Agent to Commercial Intelligence (CI) in charge of investigations into smuggling operations with military significance, chiefly drugs and weapons. Within CI, I reported to Inspector Marya Esposito on the earth station Khrushchev, although my home office, for personal reasons, was on earth station Kennedy. I and the small team of agents I commanded moved freely amongst all six earth stations, and I maintained local offices on all of them. My name was flexible, of course, as was my face, changing to suit the needs of the current operation. In the intelligence services, identity changes are just part of the job.

  Marya and I spent roughly half our time on the earth stations, a quarter on the Earth itself, and the remainder on the Moon. The earth stations sat in geostationary orbits spaced every sixty degrees around the equator. The Khrushchev sat above the prime meridian. After much lobbying, the European regions had convinced their African counterparts to name the station after the Russian leader who had instigated the first successful space program. The Kennedy sat sixty degrees west and was named for the American leader of the first space program in the Twoams. Still farther west the Kamehameha and Magellan served the eastern and western Pacific.

  We often used acronyms for the stations because “earth station Khrushchev” was too much of a mouthful. ESK was easier to say when pronounced “es-kay”. The Khrushchev had been the first of the stations built after the Martian Incursion, serving the immensely prosperous Euro-African sector. The Kennedy, Kamehameha and Magellan came much later, and had to settle for ESKEN, ESKAM and ESMAG.

  Going east, the central Asian sector was served by the Gandhi, the Austral-Asian sector by the Deng. They were also sometimes referred to by their acronyms, mostly within the TDF who liked the illusion of formality, but to spacers ESGAN and ESDENG did not offer much over their proper names.

  My former experience as a field agent on Mars during the Incursion had shattered my nerves and destroyed my health. At the start, I had worked for Legal Intelligence, later for Governor Ngomo. I had barely escaped Mars, badly injured and barely alive.

  Legal Intelligence had been functioning well on the Earth, but was utterly unsuited for the much more combative society of Mars. It had been infiltrated before the Incursion, which was why we had no warning that a hostile Martian fleet had taken position around the Earth, disguised as peaceful freighters. Two hundred million had died in the initial salvoes of the Martian Incursion.

  To prevent a recurrence of that single-point failure, Legal Intelligence had been divided into separate divisions as the Terrestrial Government rebuilt itself. After the trauma of Mars, I stayed in space with Military Intelligence (MI) while my health recovered and the psychs worked on my rehabilitation. Even now, my heart was so badly damaged that most field work was out of the question. Usually I was restricted to surveillance, interrogations, and office wo
rk. That was fine by me; I enjoyed the intellectual puzzles required to find and stop arms and drug smugglers far more than the firefight required to arrest them.

  I was seconded to CI because every drug runner and arms smuggler had powerful commercial backers. I retained many military contacts, mostly in MI of course, and a security classification that allowed contact with even senior officers when it was relevant to a case. That was all in my MI records, but was so highly classified that even Marya knew only a sanitized version.

  It scared the shit out of me, but I would take the new assignment. They had formally offered me the opportunity to turn it down, but the Fairy Dust incident left me with no real choice. My summary of the threats we faced did not exaggerate. I had been intending to pass a full report to my superiors, and pull whatever strings I could to ensure it was taken seriously. Instead, they had presented the cause directly to me. I would fight for this cause and if necessary would die for it.

  Something was wildly out of control and it was aimed at the Earth, at my home, my family, at every spacer I had ever known and loved, at everything I valued in life. I had understood for years that the Martians were coming, and they would be much better prepared this time. I could almost hear the screams of dying innocents.

  I would willingly stand before a thousand firing squads if it would stop that war. There would be firing squads, or worse, in my future if I failed. The Martians were coming for me as the last and most notorious of Governor Ngomo’s hated spooks. It was part of why everything from that period in my life was so highly classified.

  Then a warning sounded in my head. My adrenaline was surging and my heart was racing, so my medical monitor triggered the alarm. Because my heart had been damaged in my final escape from Mars, the surgeons had installed the monitor. If I had had such a device as an agent on Mars, it might have saved me from a lot of trouble. Or left me as a useless, passive observer of the worst rebellion the Earth had ever faced. Either way, I was not going to die today, so I doused myself in a mental bucket of ice water and tried to think of what to do next.

  First, of course, was to see Marya about the details of my new assignment. I called her office to arrange the meeting. Her assistant said she was busy, but was expecting my call, so we arranged a time to meet after lunch. No doubt she was busy starting the arrangements to transfer me to the new post.

  I sat still for a few minutes in the briefing room to try to piece together the larger implications of the so-called briefing. I was now certain that my audience had been a committee of very senior officials. They had just committed to support my investigation with personnel from four major branches of the terrestrial government: Military, Commerce, Extraterrestrial Affairs, and Law Enforcement. No individual has the authority to make such a commitment, so officials from at least these four branches must have agreed to the plan before I was even contacted. They had not asked me to help organize the team, so this was a top-down decision from the political levels of each branch.

  Far from a briefing, this had been more like a candidate interview, to assess whether I was politically and temperamentally suited for the position. That they wanted to be anonymous told me that they were not sure of my response and needed to be able to back out gracefully. Also, that they were very highly placed and could be compromised if their identities were leaked. If I had sounded too fanatical, too disinterested, too political, too certain I already had the case solved, or too narrowly focused on a few details, someone else would have been asked to lead the team. I understood why they might be worried, but there were few people with my combination of experience with Martians, weapons, and smuggling.

  I started a slow and very detailed search for bugs in and around the meeting room. I had scanned the room before the briefing, of course; standard procedure even in a secure location. The implications of the meeting were so disturbing that I worried whether our unknown enemies knew of it and had monitored the room surreptitiously. Nothing showed up, but I was only slightly reassured. I had lived through the Incursion by double checking everything and trusting no one.

  I was not concerned just with our unknown conspirators. I knew the efforts MI made internally to verify the loyalty and sanity of our agents. I was mildly offended that they had not checked on me for several months. Or perhaps reassured that they were getting better at being discreet. CI was every bit as careful. Commerce managed the economies of the entire Earth, the Moon, all near-Earth space, and officially, if not in practice, of Mars and the Belt. Especially in Commerce, the opportunities for corruption were legion and lucrative beyond my imagination. CI monitored their agents (including myself) as closely as MI. I knew far less about Extraterrestrial Affairs and Law Enforcement, but was confident they would have their own issues with internal security. I expected all of them would have had motivation to monitor this meeting outside the normal channels. Then, there were the gangs moving drugs and weapons, the regional governments of the more turbulent parts of the Earth, and even some of the cults that flourished amongst the spacers. In the end, however, the only bugs I could find were the ones our people installed to watch for other people installing bugs. I knew about them already. The room was clean to the extent I could tell, so I headed off for an early lunch.

  Lunch was something called “mac and cheese”, but I ate real macaroni and cheese when my duties took me to the Earth and this was nothing like it. Everything tasted funny in space and mostly I was used to that. Cows do not live in zero-G and wheat does not germinate. Nor could cheese and flour be lifted profitably off the Earth, so they had developed strains of bacteria that produced wheat-like lumps and algae that excreted something vaguely milky after filtering. I never really wanted to know how it worked, but I did know it required a pressure cooker to prepare space macaroni. Water boils at temperatures far too cool to cook food in the low air pressure of stations and ships. I gave the Agricultural teams credit for creating a good substitute. This stuff was tasty and so exotic that on the Earth it sold for phenomenal prices in very trendy restaurants. But it was not mac and cheese.

  Still, the real reason everything tasted funny was the cocktail of drugs I took to remain alive and healthy. There were drugs to control radiation damage from cosmic rays, drugs to help me maintain muscle mass in zero-G, drugs for high blood pressure (employment related) and for my heart condition (ditto), vitamin and mineral supplements, mood stabilizers, and my sexual suppressor. All this was added in the appropriate proportions to every meal. The meds were palatable in small doses, but definitely changed the flavour.

  As I ate, I considered what I would have been doing if I had not been reassigned. I would have to pass these chores to my successor.

  I would probably have interviewed the captain of the TDF Mao, a man named Wang Dapeng, or more likely, I would have given him a briefing. Maybe I still would. Since the incident with the Fairy Dust, the Mao had powered on all its weapons. Captain Wang had left them on at the request of the port authorities, with the approval of the Admiral of the Terrestrial Defence Force. The captain needed to understand the threat assessment he was receiving, within the limits of his own security classification. In return, I wanted to know what the military cameras and radars has seen during and after the explosion. The Mao had seen the event from a different viewpoint, and military systems recovered from EMP faster than civilian systems. They might add some interesting details.

  (I had snickered a bit at the captain’s personal name. Dapeng was written大鹏, which literally meant a mythical giant bird, like a roc or thunderbird. It was just too appropriate for the captain of a battleship, but people are sometimes motivated by such things. It worked both ways. I had met two wealthy and popular business leaders in Africa who were enormously proud of names that translated as ‘sickly’ and ‘born in jail.’)

  I seriously needed to interview the entire team involved in the refit of the Fairy Dust, especially the one who had not participated because of the accident. I was curious about zer gender. There were lots of choices, even
more for spacers than on the Earth, and it often affected people's choices for social contacts, cultural commitments and political philosophies. Mostly, I wanted to know who had replaced the injured worker, although that looked like a major piece of detective work and would probably require the cooperation of the Station Security. If I trusted them.

  Understanding who had tampered with the telemetry from the Fairy Dust, and how, was clearly outside my expertise. That would have to be delegated, possibly to Law Enforcement. I expected we would have to call in someone from Cyber Intelligence within MI, but I expected Law Enforcement had already thought of that.

  The nuclear bomb, the military-grade attitude control system, and the bizarrely dangerous drive were also outside my expertise. That investigation would involve the highest levels of MI and Military Procurement. I doubted they would report to my new team, regardless of my enhanced security clearance.

  I did not even want to speak to those people directly. I still cherished a dream of retiring incognito to someplace that had beaches and mountains. I was already too hot for normal employment on the Earth; knowing even more would force me to spend my final days hiding deep underground on the Moon. If not in a prison cell. Assuming I was that lucky. I had nightmares of a Martian execution, being tortured to death with my enemies screaming hate at my face. God, I hate Martians.

  There were dozens of other things to think about and I was sorting them by priority when a junior agent from Marya's office arrived to tell me I was needed urgently in a meeting. Mac and cheese was sticky enough to eat from a bowl, even in zero-G. The bowl was almost empty, so I tossed it with a practiced hand across the dining room into the recycling unit, then followed it to pick up the stray bits of macaroni that had flown out of the bowl and splattered against the wall. The agent snickered, but she helped me clean the mess, then led me back into the secure wing of CI.