Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation

by Tom Kratman

  He laid down his binoculars with a sigh, and called down to the deck. “All right, that’s it. Cast off that fishing boat. We can’t take it with us. Everyone get below!” He turned to the helmsman. “Full ahead, hard a-starboard. Let’s go home.”

  As the freighter began to turn away, he cast a last, long look at the slope, and the bodies that lay there. Quietly he murmured, “God rest your soul, Padre. You surely were a shepherd to your flock this day. I hope they appreciate it, and remember you. You deserve that much at least.”

  INTERLUDE:

  From Jimenez’s History of the Wars of Liberation

  Indeed, in the wars on the borders of Terra Novan Islam, it was very often the Spanish-speakers who proved just why their mother country, España, had once been called, “The nation with the bloody footprint.” It was there, where Spanish culture was strongest, too, that the more fanatical branch of Catholicism arose, rather, re-emerged, in answer to Islamic jihadism. This was especially so once the New Pope canonized Father Francisco Matamoros.

  Not only were there UN personnel of admirable ability and even honor fighting against us, we would be remiss, indeed, if we neglected to give due regard to those UN personnel who, looking at our people, seeing out plight, changed sides or helped us until, driven by the threat of prosecution, actively changed sides.

  In the early days, in particular, before open war even broke out, while the UN was jockeying for position and our soon to be rebellious ancestors were, as well, it was often the good offices of someone in the UN who spelt the difference between defense and massacre, who stood by the people he’d been sent to govern or help, even unto the last extremity . . .

  Secordia is said to resemble very deeply its antecedent nation on Old Earth, Canada. How far this goes back is impossible to say. Certainly, there were several centuries when Secordia was culturally almost indistinguishable from the Federates States of (Southern) Columbia. We can also surmise that very early on in the colonization program, Secordia was nothing like what became the Federated States. For one thing, the early settlers were essentially disarmed, where the Federates came to the planet armed to take on dinosaurs, should any have been found. For another, the area that was to become the Federated States was at no time under UN governance, where Secordia seems to have insisted on it. For a third, while the original Secordians were someone conservative, the people to their north were extremely so.

  It should not have been a shock to anyone, however, that certain essentially tribal entities came to Terra Nova with their hearts firmly in the more distant past, and a determination to recreate that past life and culture anew . . .

  4.

  Doing Well

  by Doing Good

  Chris Nuttall5

  [The following letter was recovered from the archives in UN FOB #34, after it was overrun and occupied by coalition troops during the later stages of the war and subsequently buried in the files until it was recovered and verified during the post-war assessment of UN operations within the region. As far as can be determined, the letter is actually genuine—it is unclear if it actually reached its destination. Accordingly, it has been annotated by a team of experienced historians and published for public consumption.]

  My Lady Marchioness of Amnesty,

  I do not write this letter to beg for mercy. I have no doubt that my death warrant has already been written and—one hopes regretfully—signed. Given the nature of my conduct, which you will no doubt consider treason, I have no reason to expect anything beyond a quick march in front of a firing squad. Instead, I write this letter to explain precisely what happened and why. It is my hope that many of my former comrades will learn from my experience and come to realize, perhaps, that our system is broken. It needs to be fixed.

  My appointment as Political Commissioner (New Manitoba) came as the culmination of my career, of thirty years of working my way up the ranks through good service and the occasional piece of favor-trading. I have no doubt that you have already started to cover your ass by claiming that you knew I was a weak candidate all along, but you—and many others—were quite happy to support my promotion at the time. And I myself was enthusiastic. Five years spent wrestling with the bureaucracy in the Terra Nova Settlement Commission had dulled my enthusiasm for political infighting. It was extremely difficult to get anything done. I boarded the flight to New Manitoba with a certain amount of relief, mixed with concern. It didn’t give me any pleasure to hear that my predecessor had become one of the richest men on Terra Nova. UN bureaucrats exploiting the people they are meant to help is a major cause of social disharmony.

  New Manitoba was settled twenty-two years prior to my arrival. Like many other such settlements on the mainland, the population was primarily drawn from groups that resented UN hegemony on Earth. In this case, the vast majority of the original settlers and their successors were North American farmers, specifically Canadians, men and women who had resisted our encroachments back home until finally agreeing to be transported to Terra Nova and resettled there. They hadn’t received anything like the level of support they had been promised—a major cause of resentment—but they successfully broke the ground and tamed the land. By the time I arrived in ’forty-two, New Manitoba was a thriving community spread out over three hundred square miles. It was genuinely important. A good third of its produce was shipped out to the rest of the world.

  It was also nothing like Earth. Instead of concentrated population centers, the settlers were spread out over the entire region, which was dotted with small towns, villages and farms. The sole city within my area of responsibility—officially called Ingalls, but unofficially referred to as New Manitoba City—was tiny. It would have vanished without a trace in any major conurbation on Earth. Indeed, despite UN regulations insisting on population registration and centralised schooling, it was difficult to say for sure just how many people were under my jurisdiction. A significant number of births were never recorded.

  [The UN used the birth registry as a way of determining a settlement’s obligations (tax and suchlike) to the planetary government. It wasn’t uncommon for settlers in the more self-sufficient communities to deliberately hide births to escape increasingly resented demands.]

  The settlers—the Manitobans, as they called themselves—were tough, hardy stock. They were very self-reliant, often reluctant to spend money on importing goods and services from the remainder of the planet, let alone Earth itself. The debts many of them had incurred were greatly resented by the Manitobans, particularly as they believed (rightly) that the debts were manipulated in an attempt to keep them under control. They certainly didn’t seem too interested in the offers I extended to provide UN services to help the settlement. I think, by the time I arrived, they had come to think of such offers as poisoned chalices.

  [All such debts were formally renounced in the aftermath of the war of independence.]

  I came to love them. I admit that freely. There was something about their “can-do” attitude that I admired. They never waited for government assistance to get the job done. Nor did they waste time pushing the decision further and further up the chain until it reached Earth itself. It was an attitude I found refreshing, after spending so long in the bureaucracy. And I like to think they responded well to my lack of corruption. I certainly had no intention of copying my predecessor and trying to turn the settlement into a money farm. That man put UN-Manitoban relationships back decades.

  [Unsurprisingly, Commissioner Rawls went on to a long and successful career in the UN bureaucracy and retired a very wealthy man. His children (through seven different women) form part of the UN’s aristocracy, save for a lone illegitimate child who ended up joining the resistance in Balboa.]

  It started seven months after I took up my post.

  There had been reports, vague reports, of people vanishing along the edge of the district, near the Badlands. I didn’t take them too seriously at the time. It wasn’t uncommon for indebted farmers to disappear, trusting in the bureaucracy�
��s incompetence to save them from having to sell their children to pay their debts. After discovering that my predecessor had tried to run such a racket, I had taken to quietly ignoring all such reports. (Indeed, I purchased the contract of an enslaved daughter so she could live near her family.) Perhaps I should have paid more attention. But I didn’t, right up until the moment the Alstead Homestead was attacked.

  [Mr. Lamprey is being surprisingly blunt here. Slavery existed within UN-controlled territories for decades, both on Earth and Terra Nova, but it was rarely called slavery. It was far more common for the slaves to be called “indentured servants,” providing both a fig-leaf of political justification and the possibility, however remote, for eventually earning one’s way out of servitude. It is likely that Lamprey was influenced by Sarah, as he clearly had strong feelings for her. He would eventually marry her.]

  The homestead was seventy miles, as the crow flies, from Ingalls. The report reached me within a day—radio transmitters were rare outside the towns—and I flew there at once, accompanied by Sarah Olson (my secretary) and Jasper Olson (her father). I recall shuddering in horror as I saw the smoke, rising up from the remains of the homestead. There was no sign of any attackers, so we landed and started to look around.

  I cannot tell you, my lady, of the horrors I saw that day. Mr. Alstead and his sons had been tortured, scalped and killed; his wife and older daughters had been systematically raped and then killed. His younger children—he had a boy and two girls under ten—were missing. The farm had been looted and the animals had been taken into the Badlands. We searched the entire homestead, once more settlers had arrived, but we found no trace of the missing children. It was clear that the attackers had carried out a brutal raid and then escaped without punishment.

  We had no doubt who was responsible. It was the Apaches.

  Officially, the Apaches are descendants of the real Apaches, a Native American tribe that was almost completely destroyed during the colonization of North America. In reality, they were a pastiche of half-remembered traditions that had been transported to Terra Nova along with a substantial quantity of supplies and settled on the far side of the Badlands. (The fact that the Apaches had received more assistance from the UN than the Manitobans was yet another source of resentment in New Manitoba.) Unfortunately for the myth of the noble savage in touch with the land, Terra Nova’s generally hostile environment made it hard for them to establish themselves. By the time they came to my attention, they had scattered into the Badlands and were eking out an existence there. The Manitoban homesteads—on one hand, crammed with food and women; on the other, utterly undefended—were a very tempting target. They couldn’t resist the urge to start raiding the settlements.

  [Precisely why the Apaches, who had few official ties to Canada, were established so close to a Canadian-ethnic settlement has never been satisfactorily explained. Sarah Olson’s best-selling book about the war, for example, asserted that it was a deliberate attempt to limit the Manitoban expansion out of the original settlement. A more likely explanation, however, is that the UN simply didn’t care. Their attempts to get Terra Nova to mirror Earth were often half-hearted.]

  And raid they did. Three more raids followed in quick succession, destroying farms, raping and killing adults, kidnapping children . . . the entire western border seemed to be catching fire. Something had to be done. But what?

  “We need weapons,” Jasper told me, after the second homestead went up in flames. “We have to fight.”

  I believed him. Jasper was the only farmer who was more than minimally polite to me. I’d bought out his daughter’s contract and given her gainful employment and he was, I think, silently grateful. And he was right. I’d contacted my superiors and requested military support, but none was forthcoming. The war was heating up in other parts of Terra Nova and our resources were being pushed to the limit. Even if troops had been available, the Manitobans might not have been thankful. UN troops had a nasty reputation for brutalizing the settlers they were meant to protect.

  [This was unfortunately true. It was often said, correctly, that a hundred rebels within one territory would become a thousand after the troops arrived. If anything, this was an understatement.]

  But I couldn’t get them weapons. The laws against private ownership of weapons—even simple pistols—were unbreakable. I was sure there were some illegal weapons in the district, but nothing I could afford to acknowledge. I fretted backwards and forwards for days, trying to find a way to protect my people. And yes, they had become my people. I was more attached to them, perhaps, than my superiors would have preferred. How could I help them?

  [Although weapons were technically forbidden within the Manitoban region, it wasn’t uncommon for the settlers to have some access to primitive weapons. Mr. Lamprey might well have been unaware of any privately-owned weapons, as their owners would have gone to some trouble to make sure they were concealed from UN inspections. They would have believed, not without reason, that even something as primitive as a black-powder musket would have been confiscated.]

  The situation got further and further out of hand. Hundreds of farms were being abandoned as the Apaches grew bolder. Countless refugees were making their way towards Ingalls, hoping to find a safe place . . . they were disappointed, of course. My heart broke as I watched them, pretending not to hear the angry mutterings. We—the UN—were being blamed for the disaster. And you know what, my lady? They were right. It was our fault. We had dumped the Apaches on Terra Nova.

  [This marks the one and only admission of any UN operative that the UN bore some responsibility for the social unrest that eventually led to the war of independence.]

  And then I had my brilliant idea.

  You will know, of course, that a Political Commissioner has wide authority. Indeed, the regulations are suspiciously vague on just how much authority a commissioner actually has, particularly in a state of emergency. A commissioner could, for example, draft settlers to assist with . . . well, anything. If I wanted a mansion, I could force the locals to stop working and build one for me. And if I needed a posse of fighting men, I could raise one. Maybe I couldn’t arrange for weapons to be sent to the farmers—that was strictly forbidden—but I could raise a small militia of my own. There was even precedent. The policing units deployed in Anglia and Jagelonia were largely composed of settlers.

  Jasper was happy to help, once he got the idea. I spent the next two weeks battling paperwork and requisitioning weapons—and tactical manuals—while he raised an army of fit young men. Once we had the weapons, we started training. The farm boys—all raised in a disciplined household—responded very well. Indeed, man for man, I believe they were vastly superior to UN-trained forces. It helped, I suspect, that we had less to unlearn.

  [Sarah Olson’s book makes it clear that Jasper actually served in the Canadian military until he was dishonorably discharged for refusing to kowtow to the latest set of politically-correct requirements. It seems Lamprey was unaware of his service.]

  We were the blind leading the blind. None of us had any real military experience. The tactical manuals hindered as often as they helped. We didn’t need advice on watching the environmental impact of our footsteps, let alone treating POWs honorably. The manuals were long on detailed lectures and short on practical advice. I’ll spare you a blow-by-blow description of the training process, of the problems caused by shooting off thousands of rounds of ammunition just to make sure our troops knew which end of the gun fired the bullets. Suffice it to say that I received a number of sharply worded questions about our ammunition expenditure, even before we had engaged the enemy. It turned out that we had fired more bullets, during training, than the average UN battalion fired in a year on active service.

  But Jasper was insistent that we had to train and train and train until we knew what we were doing. And he was right.

  My farmers, once they realized that they were being backed, came up with dozens of ideas for making our army more lethal. We obtained
radio transmitters as we moved small forces out to the border, as well as makeshift drones and other surprises. The Apaches didn’t seem to be aware that the frontier was becoming more dangerous. They kept pushing towards Ingalls, darting in to raid and then darting back before we could organize a counterattack. It was a constant frustration, all the more so as we were establishing garrisons. But the next time, we told ourselves, was going to be different.

  [The UN did not encourage its troops to show initiative. Indeed, part of the reason they lost the war of independence was because troops would often continue with a plan even after it was blindingly obvious that the plan had gone off the rails. The troops on the ground, even the officers in command, might know what had happened, but they didn’t have the authority to alter their tactics.]

  And it was. The Apaches moved out of the Badlands—again—and headed west, directly towards the Ramirez Homestead. It wasn’t really a surprise. The Ramirez family had taken in a number of refugees over the last couple of months, helping them to rebuild their lives. But it also made their homestead a very tempting target for the Apaches. We watched them coming through a drone and quietly moved troops into position to intercept them. Jasper commanded on the ground while I watched from a helicopter. It was hard, so hard, to keep track of what was actually going on.

  But, in the end, it didn’t matter. The Apaches suspected nothing. They came on, fat and happy, right into our gunsights. Jasper held his fire until the last possible moment, then barked a command. The militia opened fire . . . and slaughtered them. I saw dozens of bodies falling from horses and hitting the ground, crushed like bugs. Jasper’s men advanced, striking down the handful of survivors. Only a couple of men were spared. We wanted—we needed to find their camps.

  Jasper took charge of the interrogations. I don’t care to know what he did to make them talk.