by Tom Kratman
[Given the UN’s later willingness to order the use of drugs, torture and even direct brain stimulation to compel prisoners to talk, this line seems rather odd. But there is no evidence that Lamprey was ever part of the UN’s intelligence service.]
I landed and we conferred. The tactical manuals stated that we should wait to see if the enemy was interested in negotiating, but Jasper insisted—firmly—that we should take the offensive. We’d killed over seventy Apaches. There was no way to know how many were left, but it was clear that we had an opportunity to end the war in one fell swoop. Jasper pushed—and I agreed. We rallied the troops, stripped the dead bodies of anything useful and then marched on, into the Badlands.
The Apaches saw us coming. They tried to stop us. The Badlands were practically designed to frustrate an army. A strange mixture of mountains and swamps, rivers and ravines . . . it was a hellish engagement. They sniped at us constantly. We lost thirty men pushing through the trees towards their camp. Thankfully, they didn’t have time to establish a few more booby traps or it might have gone differently. They honestly hadn’t expected us to launch an actual counterattack. (They probably read the same manuals too.) In the end, we broke through their defenses and stormed their camp.
And Jasper gave the order to kill them. All of them.
I was shocked, utterly horrified. Forces under my command had carried out what was, unquestionably, a war crime. The death of nearly two hundred men, women and children was unforgivable. And yet, I knew there could be no peace. I had learnt that the hard way. The Apaches weren’t interested in anything, but looting, raping and burning. Jasper pointed out, coolly, that nits bred lice. And—God help me—he was right. The Apaches had committed hundreds of little atrocities. They had long since forfeited any claim to legal protection.
[There are actually several different versions of what happened here. One version insists that the only people killed were Apaches, born and bred; another insists that the dead included Manitobans (and others) who’d been kidnapped when they were very young and brought up as Apaches. A third even insists that some of the former prisoners were rescued, only to discover that they no longer fitted into Manitoban society.]
But I knew my superiors wouldn’t see it that way.
We burned the camp to the ground, then returned to Ingalls. The soldiers were warmly greeted—of course. I don’t think a single one of them escaped getting laid that night. But I had another duty. I went back to the UN building and composed a message for my superiors, explaining what had happened. I hoped—perhaps naively—that the UN High Commission would turn a blind eye. The farmers of New Manitoba were important. The food they produced fed thousands of UN troops, spacers and bureaucrats. But it was not to be. The orders I received, two days later, stated that I was to assemble the former militiamen for deportation. UN troops would take them into custody. Jasper and the other leaders would be executed; the ordinary soldiers would be banished somewhere far from New Manitoba . . .
[The Manitobans believed, at the time, that the UN was punishing them, either for daring to defend themselves or for turning against the UN-backed Apaches. However, post-war research suggests that the UN was simply too detached from the situation on the ground to have any real understanding of what was going on. A war crime deserved punishment, they thought; they didn’t bother to consider that it might be justified, necessary or both.]
It wasn’t fair. They hadn’t taken up arms against the UN. They deserved so much better.
I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at the instructions. I’d believed in the system. I’d believed the UN meant well, even though it was often clumsy. And yet, the UN was prepared to betray men who’d fought to defend themselves. It was prepared to betray men who had secured the food supply for an entire continent. It was prepared to betray its loyal servants . . .
The UN had gone mad. And my faith in the system snapped.
And I, reluctantly, came to a decision. I called for Sarah and issued orders.
Two days later, three helicopters flew over Ingalls from the north and descended towards the landing strip. As per orders, I had lined up the militiamen to greet the UN troops—informing the newcomers that the militiamen were unarmed. I waited, beside Jasper and the others, as the helicopters touched down . . .
. . . And then we opened fire.
The helicopters and their passengers never stood a chance. They were torn to shreds before they could disembark, let alone take cover. Two of the helicopters exploded, knocking the third over. We watched long enough to make sure that everyone was dead, then hurried to leave the city. The majority of the population had already left. The irony of setting up camps of our own, in the Badlands, did not escape me. I was sure that retaliation would be on the way soon enough.
[Ingalls was fire-bombed two weeks after the brief engagement. The town would later be rebuilt after the war of independence.]
I write these words, my lady, as we prepare to leave Ingalls for the final time. I make no apologies for my actions, either for arming the locals or opening a new front in the ever-expanding war. Like I said, I do not expect mercy. But I ask you to understand why I chose to betray you. The system is broken.
We should have offered protection to the Manitobans. Instead, we preyed on them. We taxed them, claiming half their produce . . . and we expected them to be grateful that we hadn’t taken everything. And when they were attacked—by tribesmen we imported from Earth—we refused to defend them. Why should they be loyal to us, my lady, when we show no loyalty to them? Their reward for serving us was more demands for service. I can no longer, in good conscience, serve the UN.
[This cri de coeur is perhaps the most honest statement ever issued by a UN bureaucrat.]
You will say, perhaps, that I grew too close to my subjects. Perhaps I did. But I believe that I understood what was actually going on, while my superiors—thousands of miles away—did not.
We are fighting to control a world. And yet, our tactics are merely turning the population against us.
I do not expect to see you—or Earth—again.
Farewell.
Roger Lamprey, UN Political Commissioner New Manitoba (Retired).
[Roger Lamprey vanishes from the history records at this point. Research carried out after the war of independence makes it clear that he married Sarah Olson and had four children, all of whom took their mother’s name. (They apparently believed that the UN would hunt Lamprey and anyone who appeared to be related to him, although it seems fairly clear that the UN didn’t bother to do more than put a small reward on his head.)
[Jasper Olson would go on to become the first leader of the Combined Canadian Militia, but was unfortunately killed in action during the Battle of Berger’s Bluff. His name was later immortalized in both a regiment (Olson’s Offenders) and his daughter’s account of the Manitoban-Apache Conflict.
[Sarah Olson remained a farmwife and mother until she started to write late in life, but her first work—an account of the Manitoban-Apache Conflict—was very well received and put the family finances on a secure footing. Her later works, ranging from a biography of her father to a call for more local independence for Manitoba, remain popular today (and banned on Earth.) Despite that, a number of revisionist historians have attempted to pick holes in her work, including suggestions that she wrote subjective history or suffered from Stockholm Syndrome. Professor Dandridge’s Manitoban Girl—her first true biography—goes to some lengths to disprove such claims.]
INTERLUDE:
From Jimenez’s History of the Wars of Liberation
Twenty-seven different modern countries claim the honor of having fired “the shots heard across two worlds.” Record keeping of the day being what it was, and propaganda being what it has always been, no one really knows. It’s not entirely clear that anyone at the time, to include the Earthers, knew, either.
For Balboans, at least, the first shots were fired by poorly armed and untrained villagers under the command of Belisari
o Carrera, in the course of ambushing a slave raiding party led by the UN’s High Admiral, Kotek Annan.
If we cannot say for certain exactly who began the wars of liberation on our planet, it is much easier to track the progress, or lack of progress, of the various independent liberation movements, from Northern Uhuru to Wellington to Secordia to Balboa . . .
From Primer Grito: The Memoirs of the Liberator,
Belisario Carrera
What did I know of soldiering? No more than might be gleaned from one of the war films emanating from Hollywood, in the United States, back on old Earth. And if there was any correct guidance in those, it must have been inadvertent.
No, I knew farming, raising cattle, horsemanship, all the things I’d learned as a boy at my father’s, uncles’, and grandfathers’ knees back in our home in Panama before it was stolen from us. Those, and I knew how to shoot, too. I learned back home before the UN came and took our guns away, along with our land and liberty.
Still, there were things that came with having been a farmer. I understood the lay of the land and how, not wanting to tire out men and horses, to use it to conserve strength. I understood something of camouflage from the animals I’d hunted, especially when we first arrived on Terra Nova, before we got our first harvest in.
It was from hunting animals, actually, that I recognized that the new high admiral, Kotek Annan, was leading a hunting party, hunting us. I never did know if it was mere sport the high admiral was after, or if he’d gone back into his family’s old business of hunting slaves. I didn’t know but, then again, it really didn’t matter, either.
I did know that, before the damned pirates would get at my wife and children, or those of the others, it would be only over the dead bodies of myself and my men.
The helicopter that brought the hunters dropped them in two groups, one south, one north of the village. Which were the beaters and which the net? It wasn’t clear to me until I heard the shots; those to the north were many and moving toward us. The ones from the south were stationary and relatively few.
The people of our little town clustered around me. We’d never had an election but I’d been fairly well-to-do back on Earth and the mannerisms, and the habit of command; they stuck.
“What’s wrong, Patron?” asked Pedro, called “el Cholo.” Pedro held one of the flintlocks I’d brought from Earth. His son, Little Pedro, stood beside him, clutching a bow in one hand and a quiver with a dozen or so arrows in the other.
I thought I knew why the UN had come.
Pedro asked the question but I spoke up to answer the several hundred people in what passed for our town square. I sensed that with the support of the women we had a chance; without it we were just rabbits.
“We have nothing material for them,” I said. Then I looked from one woman or girl to another. “They’re here for other rewards.”
That got me a collective gasp. I’d been exiled here specifically for defending my daughter, but any decent Latin man defends his women and girls. And our men and boys were all decent.
Little Pedro’s hand whitened around the grip of his bow. “We must fight them,” he said, in a high voice. He was just turned twelve.
Again, I looked around, but this time at the men. Yes, I saw; they agreed. Fight them we must. The boys would follow their fathers.
There was a river close by the town, between us and where I thought the net was. It ran from the west to the east. I pointed to my dear wife and said, “Queridisima, that way. Lead the rest of our people to the river, then descend to the water and follow it to the caves. Move quickly. Keep your heads down below the river’s banks. Head for the caves. If we win here I will send someone for you. If we lose . . . run. Run deep into the jungle and wait until you know the helicopter has gone away.” She had her shotgun in her hands. With a nod, she began to move off, women, girls, and younger boys following her.
I’d always thought my wife was braver and tougher, both, than I was. Nor did she disappoint that day. She bit her lip, nodded, and led the rest of the crowd away with only a gesture and a few steps to take the lead.
For the rest I had seventy-three men and older boys, having among them a dozen bows and the rest old fashioned flintlocks. It was easy to count the bows with a glance; less so the ammunition, little of which would fit any rifle but its owner’s.
“Show of fingers; how many shots?” I asked. None of the men held up more than ten digits. Most were several fewer. One made what used to be called, on Old Earth, the “peace sign.”
I thought, Shit. And I’ve only a dozen, myself.
Still, we had the numbers; we had a chance.
I divided the men—yes, some were boys but they did a man’s job that day, so you will pardon me my generalizations, yes?—into three groups. The oldest and youngest dozen and a half—less Pedro’s boy who stuck with his father—I left at the village, with orders to, in the first place, engage the raiders as they showed themselves, and, in the second, buy us a little time in case it turned out I was wrong and the southern group were the more dangerous. Another dozen and a half I sent to the river, but in the opposite direction from my wife’s, to a ford we all knew well. The rest, about three dozen, received the benefit of the one decent bit of advice I’d ever seen in all those gringo movies; I told them, “Follow me.”
There was an open field—mostly open, anyway; it did have a few scattered palms and a couple of mangos—between our little settlement and the direction in which I could still hear their helicopter whining. Keeping low and out of sight behind the thick brush and reeds growing at the edge of the treeline, I led them and placed them more or less evenly spaced out.
When I finished that I went back to the center of the line, where they’d be better able to hear me, got on my belly and crawled forward. When I looked up I found Little Pedro grinning down at me from a tree, bow in hand, arrow knocked, and the quiver slung. I grinned back.
It was a game for a boy, but I don’t mind saying I was scared shitless.
Then I saw them on the ground, nine men wearing body armor, on line, ahead of one brightly dressed dandy behind. They began firing at the village, without having too much effect initially. The men I’d left there returned fire, but with each shot announcing the position of the shooter and inviting a hail of fire in return, our shots were not too effective.
It didn’t matter, I figured, since I didn’t want them to be effective so much as enticing.
Oh, it was hard, HARD, waiting for them to advance on our little town. I waited . . . waited . . . waited. Each moment seemed longer than any hour. I thought my heart was going to pound its way right out of my chest. And then, finally, their line of skirmishers was parallel to the center of my line of ambushers. I lifted my own rifle to my shoulder.
“READY . . . Fire!”
5.
No Hypocritical Oath
Robert E. Hampson6
It wasn’t bad enough that medical school was harder than any other class or schooling that Anthony Nuné had attended, but he had to put up with the putito “elites” like Lucas Carvalho. The United Nations/Duke Medical School should have been a respite from the constant struggle for “status” and power that Anthony had endured in the Panama schools—after all, the United States was supposed to be the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” where a poor but smart student could succeed no matter his family ties. It had even once been true—just not so much anymore.
UN/Duke had its roots in the “Duke Brazil Initiative” to promote research partnerships between Duke University and several universities (and medical schools) in Brazil at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As the partnership grew and started a medical student exchange program, the UN had taken over and directed Duke Medical School to exclusively provide American-style medical education to top university graduates through Central and South America. Unfortunately, “top graduate” didn’t always mean grades, thus Lucas S. Carvalho the Third terrorized his tutors (like Anthony, despite being two years
ahead of him) who were necessary to his continued presence in the school, all while lording his status over them. The fact that Carvalho’s father was a doctor with the World Health Organization, his uncle was the Brazilian ambassador to the UN, and his great-grandfather was the neuroscience professor who first established the Duke Brazil Initiative, gave Lucas leverage over faculty and staff of the university that his fellow students could never hope to achieve.
Thus Anthony found himself struggling to complete not only his own Infectious Diseases case study for Friday’s Grand Rounds, but also Carvalho’s. The tutoring job paid real money, and The Sainted Hammarskjold knew that Anthony needed it; his scholarship paid tuition and board, but little else. He just had to hang on another month until the Licensing Board exams and Graduation. Unlike Carvalho, with his new Porsche-Benz, tailored white doctor coats, and uptown apartment, Anthony had to suffice with public transportation, used academic supplies with thrift-store clothing and sharing a flat with five other students who were just as poor as he was.
Lucas had told Anthony to forget “tutoring” and just write up the presentation for the Grand Rounds; it was worth an extra fifty UD’s or university-dollars that Anthony could use at the hospital cafeteria or any campus shop. As long as Anthony handed over the presentation before it was due, Lucas could read it for the first time and still give a masterful performance. In fact, he usually did—to the commendations of the faculty supervisors. It just proved that you didn’t have to be smart as long as you could follow a script and had the right family connections.
Anthony was struggling with the case. The patient history and physical had been taken by another of Carvalho’s “tutors,” and were nearly illegible. Technically, the notes were supposed to be recorded in the computer systems, as part of the patient digital record, but most physicians only put what the insurance companies demanded in the patient file. Grand Rounds insisted on real details, which were often excluded from official records to ensure that the patient met the WHO treatment quotas. Fortunately, the unlucky scribe was one of Anthony’s roommates.