Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation

by Tom Kratman

  Later that afternoon I met Rashid again.

  I was reading to Hope a hand-drawn book about space ships. I wasn’t a great reader, with having slightly blurred vision, and the story wasn’t great either, but she was an appreciative audience. Toddlers generally are, in my experience. She snuggled down in my lap, and pointed at the wobbly stars and comets, going “Spa . . . Spa . . . ”

  What a beauty salon had to do with space travel escapes me (ha!), but you’ve got to make your entertainment somewhere—especially when you’re seventeen months old.

  Suddenly, I hear voices shouting in the reception area, not clearly, but I recognize Rashid and Lizzie’s voices. He’s telling her to give him bandages and the triage nurse, a petite lady, to check up his injured cronies and the pregnant women. Lizzie is telling him, she’ll treat anyone, but he’ll have to bring his injured cronies to MedLab.

  By the time I get out the ward, Hope tucked under my arm like a rugby ball (it’s an ex-dad thing), Rashid and his five goons are menacing the nurses with sharpened metal bars. They’ve backed them into the corner of the reception area. Lizzie has her head up, defiant, and her body blocking the doorway to the nurses’ office. The other nurse is still behind her corner desk, looking uncertain, but not terrified.

  I can’t help but admire their guts.

  “What’s going on here?” I ask.

  Lizzie gives me a look of relief. “He wants bandages, and for Maryam to come with him,” she says, nodding at the triage nurse, a petite, Eritrean lady with a shy smile and large, wide eyes.

  Rashid waves his metal rod at me. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Ach, he was concussed . . . by your lot,” says Lizzie.

  Rashid blinks at me. “You’ve got to get them to help me. I’ve got people dying,” he says, gesturing with the rod.

  “You shouldn’t have kidnapped those girls then,” I said.

  He frowns. “I was trying to protect them, Mr. Martin.” His voice is that shrill you hear when you attend a domestic. His eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot, and he’s got blood trickling from a wound on his forehead. “My sister was with a European boy, Mr. Martin. Now she is dead. My father is dead.” He spat on the floor. “I was taking them away for their own safety.”

  Shame they didn’t agree with you, I thought.

  “You’ve been out there, Mr. Martin. You know I can’t bring the injured here. The Europeans would kill them. They want us dead.”

  I couldn’t exactly disagree with him. They all looked like the typical patrons of accident and emergency in the early hours of a Saturday morning . . . or, maybe, as they were sober, the walking wounded in a World War I documentary. They were covered in cuts and bruises. One guy had a makeshift bandage wrapped around his forehead. Another had the blooded sleeve of his sweatshirt pinned to his chest.

  Not that I could talk. I had more bruises than an unsuccessful parachute jumper and, right then, Hope was kicking me in the back. I put her down. She ran to Lizzie with her arms outstretched, saying, “Mamma.” Rashid looked at her, silently, and I had to feel for him. Hope was his dead sister’s kid.

  “I’ll go,” said the triage nurse, Maryam, quietly.

  “Ach, you don’t need to,” said Lizzie, picking up Hope.

  Maryam got up from her desk. “They trust me. I became a nurse to save lives. It’s my job.”

  “Just come back, okay?” Lizzie said.

  She nodded. “I’ll come back.” Then she glanced at me and added. “I’d feel safer with Tony along.”

  And that’s how I came to walk across B Deck in the company of five Arab thugs and a small nurse. The only sign of fighting was the occasional dented pipe where someone had got carried away with a blunt weapon. They could’ve hacked straight through the life support systems. This was among the sane reasons security weren’t issued with firearms on the Cheng Ho.

  Halfway down the corridor to the Middle Eastern section, we came to a makeshift barricade made out of cabin doors and broken chairs. A couple of youths crouched behind it with spears made out of sharpened pipes. Rashid acknowledged them in Arabic, and we climbed over a chair and went on into a cabin with a youth with a leg wound and a broken arm. Maryam set the broken bone, put some stitches into the leg wound, and gave out some painkillers.

  In the next cabin was a youth with a head injury sat with a woman who said she was his mother. Maryam checked him over, but said she couldn’t do more without the brain scanner. The mother nodded slowly and looked upset.

  The third cabin had two older guys sitting with the woman I’d seen being kidnapped. Maryam checked her over, asked if she was pregnant, and reassured her the baby was okay. I asked if she was happy where she was. She said “yes,” but kept looking to the older guys for reassurance, and I didn’t believe a word of it.

  At the fourth cabin, Maryam told me that she wanted to stay with the son with the head injury. She was worried he might slip into a coma. She assured me that she’d return to MedLab once her work was over. I wasn’t happy, but I let it go.

  I was shit-scared walking the long, empty corridors back to MedLab. The slowly spinning tubes with their bright white lighting at cross-junctions reminded me of every SF horror movie I’ve ever seen . . . aliens loping down corridors, and all that.

  It was a bit stupid of me, to be honest. All the cabins on the corridor were occupied, and I could hear people talking, but you do worry about aliens on a mission like this. Terra Nova is a planet the scientists are pretty sure was seeded by ETs. We all gossiped about it, back on Earth, even when the boffins at HQ assured us there was no sign of them. Seems a bit crazy, thinking back, that I was worried about aliens, and not rioters and crooks.

  Turns out I’m too idealistic for a cop.

  Anyway, as I gets to MedLab, I see my favorite Polish cleaverman, Dennis, standing guard outside the door. He’s got a kitchen knife and is a crazy nutter when pissed, so I’m not keen on wading in, but then I hear a crashing sound and a woman screaming. So it turns out I’ve got two choices—stand there like a wet towel or let the Phalange terrorize a bunch of mostly-female nurses, none of whom are over five foot five inches.

  My heart’s pounding, but I walk straight up past him, like I’m going into MedLab.

  “What you doing?” he asks. Luckily, he sounds sober.

  “I could ask you the same question,” I say.

  He glares at me. “Fuck off. It not your business.”

  I know he’s not a trained killer, so I go for the knife, and he’s not prepared at all. There’s a fight lasting a couple of minutes, in which he yells like a maniac, before I manage to knock him out (not standard procedure) and cuff him on the floor. I’m sure, if I’d been back on Earth, I’d have been kicked off the force for excessive violence, no questions—but I was billions of miles from the Big Smoke, so who cares.

  No one’s heard Dennis go down.

  So I’m on my own.

  Looking back, I couldn’t have forgiven myself if I’d walked away. So I picked up Dennis’ kitchen knife, and pushed open the double doors to MedLab. I was humming the music from an old western. I really felt like I was pushing open the saloon doors, and taking on the bad guys.

  The reception area of MedLab looked like a bomb had gone off . . . smashed chairs, broken AV screen, the works. There’s a nurse sobbing behind the triage desk, but I don’t have time to check she’s okay, because I can hear crashing and tinkling glass from inside the main medical suite. I burst through the doors, and run straight into a group of three European guys, all shouting in Spanish as they smash the equipment with heavy piping.

  “Security! Drop the pipes!” I shout, and they completely ignore me. By then, I’m looking right and left like a maniac. I can’t see the nurses, and don’t know whether to save them or the life-saving kit that we need on Terra Nova.

  I go for the nurses.

  I’m sure I can hear voices on the ward, so I fling open the door, and it’s like a hostage movie in there. Lizzie cuddling Hope tight
against her chest, about twenty women either pregnant or with babies, a handful of walking wounded, and several nurses, are huddled into the corner of the ward. They’re guarded by five European guys, armed with makeshift weapons, a couple of whom I remember from the riot, and Dr. Schwerz in his clean, pressed suit.

  Several babies are crying. I’m guessing the Phalange arrived at the same time as Lizzie’s weekly post/antenatal class.

  Schwerz turns around and stares at Dennis’ knife.

  “Are you crazy? Stop smashing up MedLab,” I shout at him.

  “You’re not in charge here,” he shouts back.

  “I don’t care who’s in charge. Are you bloody nuts?” I say.

  I’d have taken on all five of them, but I’m not James Bond—even with a knife. My training didn’t stretch that far.

  So I walk up to them, and they point weapons at me. My heart’s thudding with terror, at this point, and my mouth’s like parchment, and I’m certain I’m going to die. I’m literally counting on my natural authority to stay alive, and my belief the Phalange were sorted enough to know that one bloke with a knife, even a cop, wasn’t a threat.

  “You had Rashid visit you this morning,” Dr. Schwerz says to me. “You accompanied Rashid and a nurse, to his sector.”

  “He threatened us. Tony offered to protect us,” shouts Lizzie. “We provide medical services to everyone.”

  Hope starts to cry.

  “You provide medical services to the Arabs so they can carry on killing us and we’ll never get to Terra Nova alive.” He shouts at her, “You’re a traitor to your people.”

  “She’s a nurse,” I say, quietly.

  “Be quiet,” he says. “You’ve been sympathetic to the Arabs all along. You’ve favored Dr. al Damer, believed him, when it was obvious he was responsible for my son’s death. My only child, Mr. Martin, I have no other.”

  I can feel the adrenaline pounding. “So you murdered him?”

  He raises his eyebrows. “No, sadly, I did not.”

  I don’t dwell on that. Instead, I say, quietly, “You should let these people go. They’re just medical staff, pregnant women and babies, and wounded people on your own side.”

  He stares at me. “My side?”

  “I’m on the side of the law,” I say.

  He stares at me again, and I can feel him weighing up whether to shiv me, and I’m wondering if I’m done for. After what feels like forever, he says, “Very well, you’re right. Take these women and children, and go.”

  Lizzie looks up at me, hopefully. I realized she’d expected to die too. So I think for a second, knowing that I can’t take these ladies back to the European quarter, back to anywhere on B Deck, in fact.

  Where to go?

  We did training on “hostile action” back at HQ (aka aliens—they didn’t admit to that). In the case of hostiles, there was a secure corridor between MedLab and the bridge. Reinforced sides, own oxygen supply. Inaccessible from anywhere else on the ship, and protected in the event of a hull breach.

  “We’re going to the bridge,” I say.

  I start helping up the injured people, trying to get them moving before this loony and his friends change their mind. Lizzie and I get the women and babies to their feet, and we guide them through the medical suite, to the secure lift. I can’t help looking at the broken screens and scattered syringes and medicines—we’ve got two weeks to Terra Nova and I know people are going to die.

  As we get into the lift, my legs start quivering and I’m freezing cold. Maybe we’re all going to die. After all, you’ve got to be pretty crazy to destroy the only hospital for a billion miles.

  Crazy . . . or desperate.

  I start thinking of my dreams. My daughter running through flames. And I wish I could cry like a babe.

  How do you imagine the bridge of a spaceship? I’d bet you’re thinking an open space with a wide view into space, glossy screens, holograms and a big leather captain’s chair . . . like in Star Trek.

  I certainly did. Or I did until I went onto the bridge of the Cheng Ho.

  Spaceship bridges that aren’t on TV are more like aircraft cockpits, or the bridge of a cargo ship. Loads of consoles packed in, bundles of hanging wires, and a low ceiling, with a couple of bolted-down chairs for the first mate and captain, and four doors leading to crew cabins, auxiliary offices, wardroom and officers’ kitchen.

  With twenty-eight pregnant women, wounded colonists, nurses and kids camped on the bridge and in the crew cabins, the air felt hot and stagnant. Hope and the babies were in makeshift nappies and, within a couple of hours, the wardroom area began to smell of poo. The captain got me to promise to take the women off the bridge once B Deck was secured, but—as the afternoon wore on—I realized it wouldn’t be. About 15:00hrs ship’s time, we finally got hold of Jamal and Larry. They were still trapped on the reactor deck. The Phalange and Rashid’s lot were fighting to take control of the lifts on C Deck, and several dead bodies had traveled down to the decks below.

  The master at arms and I went to the captain’s cabin for an urgent meeting. Aarav was a tall, stocky bloke, joined the mission from the Indian Army, and didn’t scare easily. I’d never seen him look terrified before. The colonists were in full-scale mutiny, he told me. Every ethnic or religious group was holed up in their own sector, and neither A or B Deck was safe.

  “How many crew do we have left?” I asked.

  “Not as many as the captain would like,” he said, looking despondent. “We’ve got one hundred crew members unaccounted for across all the decks, and half the crew upon the bridge have joined with the colonists.”

  “Jamal and Larry are with the maintenance and engineering crews,” I said. “There can’t be more than a hundred mutineers. It’s possible we could make a coordinated attack, kettle the troublemakers and space them. It would help if we had the guns.”

  Aarav gave a throaty laugh. “Dominic-Rubin Frick will not sign off on the guns, even if he had not joined the Phalange for his own self-protection.”

  My eyes widened at that.

  “Luckily, he’d need the captain to give them the guns.” Then he added, “You will need to speak to Jamal and Larry. I was in OpSec when the Arabs attacked it. Now Jamal thinks I deserted my post.”

  I called Jamal who went off to speak to the maintenance and engineering crews. Then I went back to the bridge to stare out of the square windows with their thick, bottletop glass. It felt like being at the bottom of an aquarium. We were within Terra Nova’s star system now, and—off to the left of the bridge—I could see the yellow ball of another sun. A bright star was straight ahead and the captain told me that was Terra Nova.

  A shiver went down my spine. I remember thinking this was an alien world, and I would be one of the first people to step onto it, not a bad achievement for an ordinary London copper . . . if we made it out alive.

  Jamal buzzed me back. My heart sunk the moment I heard his voice. “I’ve spoken to the crew downstairs,” he said. “Sorry, Tony, but they are all in agreement that it’s too risky. They have already lost crew to the mutiny and none of them have military training. They tell me they are loyal to the ship, not the colonists, and have enough food stores for a fortnight. They intend to barricade off the reactor deck and life support systems, reach Terra Nova, and let the mutineers disappear into the jungle and kill themselves there.”

  I told Aarav and we both did a walk around the bridge and cabins. There were thirty people squeezed into quarters made for ten. We went to stand back at the windows. Terra Nova looked a long way away.

  Two weeks later . . .

  I’ve never thought about dying on the job. You hear cases of coppers getting killed and, when you’re in a sticky situation, that’s closest to your mind. But, ultimately, I’d always imagined myself dying in bed, with a cupper in my hands, and my wife and kids weeping by my bedside. Or, at least, that’s how I’d imagined it early in my career. Then my daughter died and my wife left, and all bets were off.

>   We did do the whole death spiel during training. Medical disclaimers, next of kin, video statements that’ll get released on your death. So, yeah, you think about it, your nieces reading how you crashed into the sun, or spent your last moments sucking in vacuum.

  But you never believe it, not really. And you certainly don’t think you’re going to die in a scene from a movie—fighting your way off a ship.

  A fortnight after the Phalange smashed up MedLab, we arrived at Terra Nova. We had thirty people bunked in the cabin area, squeezed four to a room, with babies crying 24/7. Aarav and I kipped on the bridge, rolled up in spare blankets.

  We did eight-hour shifts for twelve days. Riding in the secure lift, keeping an eye on MedLab and the C and D Deck corridors. Before the lift doors opened, I’d patch into shipboard security, but you never knew if you were going to get jumped. The time I did get jumped, I’d got complacent. I think I’d slept three hours that day. I got the lift doors shut, and the colonists couldn’t call the lift back down. I took a knife and a padded jacket after that—didn’t want to risk the colonists getting past me.

  We’d cordoned off part of B Deck with the blast doors, but, from shipboard security, I knew the colonists were still fighting for control of the upper decks. We could see dead bodies in the Ban Kai Moon canteen and I’d started smelling decay when I opened the blast doors. That’s a smell you never forget, as a cop, and you can’t describe it either. . . . Maybe the stench of garbage left in the sun for a week. You’re dry heaving with it and, even when the doors close, you can’t get it out your nose and throat.

  The day we entered orbit around Terra Nova, I was on shift on the bridge. I remember seeing the planet below us and thinking it was Earth, except—when you looked closely—the continents were different. Otherwise, you could almost think the UN/NASA were playing a cruel joke on us, and the Cheng Ho been going around in circles for years.

  I told the captain not to say anything until we’d got a plan for getting off this old boat, but—even then—he was an optimist. He believed the colonists would pull together to get everyone down to the surface. Within an hour, the ship was in uproar, colonists fighting on B Deck, trying to get to the shuttles. The Phalange attacked the long-term storage area on D Deck where they stowed the food and weapons.